Questions for 4/20

Questions for 4/20

by Megumi Shirasaki -

1. According to the video, all the coronaviruses originated from bats and mutated in other animals. Is this a coincidence?

2. I have heard about a case where someone had been infected with the virus, gotten treatment, and then been reinfected. A reporter asked Dr. Fauci about that in a press briefing, where he responded that it's unlikely the person was actually reinfected, and more likely that they were never cured in the first place. What do you think?

3. The Japanese encephalitis epidemic occurred in 2017, which is pretty recent, and it breaks the virus naming rules. Were these rules created after 2017? Why were they created?

4. Is there such thing as too much "flattening the curve"? To my understanding the idea is to keep the maximum people who have the disease within the limits of medical resources. If the population is extremely good at isolating and the curve flattens very far below the limit, is that a good thing? 

5. Which countries had the best response to the pandemic?

6. According to the graph in assignment 1B, the cases not linked to Huanan Market grew at a much faster rate than the static Huanan market linked cases, but what does it mean to be linked to the market? Is that someone who attended the market? Is the idea of the graph to estimate who got the virus from an animal as opposed to other people? Or does "linked" mean they could have gotten it from someone who went to the market?

7. Do you think it's useful to be very liberal with the classification of a coronavirus death like the US has been doing? If someone dies from heart failure and test positive for covid, it's counted as a covid death. Is this to counter the possible undercounting of people not going to hospitals? Doesn't this just make the count less accurate and make the virus seem more deadly than it actually is? Maybe it helps to make people scared so they adhere to quarantine?

Re: Questions for 4/20

by Barbara Christie-Pope -

1.  Bats have the largest selection of coronaviruses but we will talk about this further.

2. Probably never got rid of the virus in the first place by not mounting enough of a defense.  If someone does not form antibodies, the virus could resurface.

3.  The naming rules have been in place since 2015.  And, yes, this does break the naming rules but the virus and disease were named in the early 2000's, I think around 2003, before the naming rules were in place.  The virus itself called Japanese Encephalitis Virus probably originated in the 1600's, so this is not a new disease.  It just caused a notable epidemic in 2017 and is still a major cause of encephalitis in Asia and western Pacific.  There is a vaccine for it.

4. We will discuss this today.

5. That is debatable.  

6. Linked means some connection to the market, someone could have just walked through the market.  They then could have exposed someone else to the virus

7. Excellent questions.  It is sometimes very difficult to assign a cause of death; most of the time a death certificate refers to the most probable cause of death.  What is interesting is that people with other problems are not going to hospitals.  Are they dying at home?  No one knows.  But it can be determined if having COVID-19 caused an exacerbation of a previous condition that then killed the person.  That exacerbation would be counted as a COVID-19 related death.