Covid 19 virus  - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: cleanworkbench
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2020, 07:28:53 pm
content: Just had a thought , do you think the labs are using scanning electron microscopes to take a tour inside the virus as virtual reality and tinker with it to view an outcome in real time ie accelerated graphics , i,m no expert but anyone reckon its feasible .

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 21, 2020, 09:20:23 pm
content: No.The labs that are doing the analyses have much better and more important things to do than to tinker with Hollywood style gadgets that wouldn't bring any benefit for their jobs.Also, the fact that you can view a virus using a microscope and that there is a virtual reality helmet available doesn't mean that can just feed video from a microscope into a VR helmet and expect it to "work". You would get only a blurry low resolution mess that would make you nauseous and you wouldn't see anything more than what you can see on the screen of the microscope already anyway.If you really wanted to do this, you would need to know how to:a) Model the behavior of the virus (extremely complex task, notabene when it is something as new as this one where the knowledge is still very limited) so that it can be meaningfully simulated.b) Make such simulations real-time. They aren't, not even close. We are talking typically hours and days of simulation time, and that is for chemical reactions, not a living system which is order of magnitudes more complex than a simple chemical reaction between molecules. In biology it is faster (and more accurate!) to do it in a petri dish than to simulate, especially when we don't even know how to simulate behaviour of anything of this complexity yet!c) To develop an VR application that would interface with such simulation. We are talking enormous amounts of data which you can't simply load into a GPU and let the helmet display it. I did a visualization of chemical reactions in Li-ion batteries last year and about million particles (atoms/molecules) was pushing it already.Even the simplest virus has orders of magnitude larger complexity if you want to simulate effects of e.g. a new drug on it. That would require a lot of very fancy and complex technology to manage such visualization, not to mention the costs of the hardware to run it on.E.g. this paper speaks about 6.5 millions of atoms in a capsid (shell) of a polio virus, which has been simulated for 200ns (!) using a supercomputer (only the capsid, without the virus) :https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.7117/full/(develops VR applications for living)

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2020, 12:48:21 am
content: Doing biological simulations is what the Folding@Home project (and cryptocurrency that uses it for mining, as in Curecoin and Foldingcoin) does.https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=32124

author: cleanworkbench
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2020, 11:46:01 am
content: Well i learnt something there , very interesting many thanks . So its down to good old fashion common sense and today,s technology to save us then .

author: Rerouter
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2020, 12:15:25 pm
content: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13510&postid=91696#91696There is a lot of computing resources being thrown at the problem, and even then it will not be fast to discover its base structure, let alone then using that to attempt simulating how it interacts with everything, Its more a case of searching for what might be a chink in the armor that could them be used to damage it, or interrupt its replication.Re the scanning electron mircoscope, viruses are just a bundle of DNA packaged in the shell, if the shell is closed, they look like popcorn chicken, if open, it is usually too well packaged to be able to take a 3D model of the interior structures.

author: cleanworkbench
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 22, 2020, 08:55:22 pm
content: It sounds like a very weird world inner space ,lets hope they can crack the code .

author: angrybird
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 24, 2020, 11:08:54 pm
content: I wish they would put this much work into figuring out why nuthatch are so damn cute and distracting.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 25, 2020, 12:22:32 am
content: You don't do molecular dynamics simulations to find out how to stop viruses from replicating. You work on the 1) the outer envelope of lipids to see how to get immune systems to recognize and attack the virus particles, 2) on the capsid or shell protecting the genetic information, for the same reason, or 3) on the DNA or RNA strands to find a way to stop the virus from replicating.None of them are flashy research where one brilliant mind can solve the thing in hours like in movies.We have a lot of data on how viruses work, but because living cells are so complex and varied, it is extremely hard work to find out how particular strains of a virus work, and how they can be disrupted. It's much more like trying to find commonalities between the books from a couple of dozen authors, than people trying to think of creative ways to attack it directly.Vaccines are essentially just ways of teaching immune cells what to track and attack. Some antiviral treatments only reduce the replication enough for the body to keep up -- it's like the difference between nuclear fission in a reactor keeping it hot (requiring constant medication) and in a nuclear bomb. Some antiviral treatments stop the replication, so that when the infected cells eventually die, the person is fully cured.Viruses also mutate constantly. When two (different!) viruses infect the same cell, they exchange DNA/RNA. This is why it is extremely scary when a patient with a deadly virus infection gets infected with a more infectitious virus: the new combined one can be both deadly and infectitous. We should also be more careful about the medication we use, because if you don't kill all of a virus, only most of it (to bring the viral load down to levels the body can manage on its own), the virus variants that survived the medication can spread. This is exactly how superbugs came to be.That is also why finding the "root" of the virus is sometimes important: you can find the commonalities before the mutations, so you can target the entire "descendant" set. As an example, there are four influenza virus variants, three of which cause flu, but vaccination only protects for a year or so, and only for the chosen variant -- but since we don't know which of the three will be the major one next flu season, it's always a bit of a guess work.For corvid-19, the reports that a person could have been reinfected very soon after recovery are the most alarming, because if so, we really have no hope for developing effective antiviral treatments for it; they all depend on the human immune system to do the heavy work, and if the human immune system doesn't develop any kind of immunity (for at least a couple of months), it means the immune system does not have a reliable way of recognizing the virus, and none of our antiviral treatments have much hope of working at all.The most important thing here is thatcorvid-19 is not that special. We know influenza becomes a worldwide epidemic killing millions about three times a century; and now it looks like coronaviruses can cause similar epidemics. Corvid-19 is just a bit less infectitious and a bit more deadly.What we should do, is to not stock food and resources until this epidemic passes, but to try and find ways of combating the spread of these viruses in the first place. It may mean things like no more flights or public transport when you have a cold/flu/whatever; that wearing gloves becomes the norm for everybody throughout the year (that helps avoid flu already); and that sneezing, coughing, or spitting towards someone becomes bigger faux pas than saying a racial slur.You see, while this too will pass, there will always be the next, and the next, and so on. And since humans mix more than ever before, considering the ways viruses share genetic data, at least some of the future ones will be even worse. This is not the end of the world (because 90% of the people who have gotten infected recover; so even if every human being on this planet were to be infected, 90% would still survive), so no need to panic; but this would be the optimum time to look at how we deal with epidemics and the spread of infectitious diseases as a planet-wide species.

author: cleanworkbench
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 26, 2020, 08:32:08 pm
content: So does it matter which part of the planet a human is from as to whether the mutation would be a different type . In simplistic terms someone from China develops covid 19 and as it works its way around the world does it end up as something else but still covid 19 , is this the mutation that they appear to be chasing. ?.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 26, 2020, 08:48:05 pm
content: Quote from: cleanworkbench on February 26, 2020, 08:32:08 pmNo, we are all one species in this regard.There are differences in how human bodies deal with the virus, though. As an example, people withsickle cell anemiaare much less likely to get malaria. For coronaviruses, I am not aware of any regional differences in immunity or otherwise. There could be some, we just don't know yet. If there are any, it is probably related to inherited immunity from previous generations' encounters with the same family of viruses, coronaviruses, and not differences in humans per se.Quote from: cleanworkbench on February 26, 2020, 08:32:08 pmEach virus has its own typical mutation rate. It does not matter whether it travels around the world, or slowly infects new people in the same region, they just tend to mutate at the same rate. That is not the issue here.The risk is that if it is true that the same person can get infected within weeks of recovering from the virus, the mutation rate is such that human immune system can't keep up. The virus looks completely new to the immune system, so it doesn't recognise it as something it needs to fight/eat. Fortunately, it now looks that this report was not that, but something like a misdiagnosis in the first place.Secondary risk is that people with other viruses in their system, more dangerous but less virulent ones like a hemorrhagic fever, get infected. In those cases, the two viruses may exchange genetic material, with completely new variants being "created" as a result. It is not common, but it is known to happen. If this virus came to be without human intervention, this is likely how it developed in some animal (a "mix" of two different coronaviruses, I mean; I've heard of similarities to some coronaviruses endemic/typical in bats and some other species), then jumped to a human being, and started to spread.For now, the problem in treating covid-19 is that we have no way to tag the virus for the human immune system to detect it early. It will detect it when you're already sick -- could be two to four weeks after initial infection, and you'll be spreading the virus during all that time. We have no medicine that can help the body combat the virus; we can just treat the symptoms (pain, kidney failure) and keep the patients hydrated and so on. If we could describe it to our immune cells -- that's what the flu vaccine does; the body remembers that particular description for a year or so, but as there are three different variants, it's always a bit of a guesswork which one to get/give -- they could attack it immediately, and prevent the virus from getting a foothold.If the "native change rate", mutation rate, in the virus were so fast that the same person could be reinfected within weeks, there would be about zero hope of finding a way to tag the virus, as it changes faster than we could manufacture the tagging stuff. Again, it does not look that way, although for a couple of days, I wasquitealarmed about that. (I'm a materials scientist, a physicist, not a doctor, though.)The reason it is important to keep track of the path of the virus, is that two to four week incubation period. If we know how the virus is passed on, we can prepare the medical facilities accordingly; basically make better guesses as to where resources are needed. When "untraceable" infections pop up, it means there are carriers we don't know about, and when they get sick, there could be many of them in the same area; and then it can be very hard to get them help in time. (Covid-19 seems to be particularly hard to the kidneys in the severe cases; many in intensive care are in dialysis, to reduce the stress on their kidneys. Otherwise its symptoms are comparable to the flu.)

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 04:16:57 pm
content: Interestingly there is none child below 2-3 years of age infected. Why?

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 04:23:21 pm
content: Do you have a statistics from 5days to 3years of age?

author: cleanworkbench
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 06:56:27 pm
content: Oh well folks thanks for the insight , i just hope there's a very clever and highly skilled team out there in a lab somewhere .

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 07:28:08 pm
content: Quote from: cleanworkbench on February 27, 2020, 06:56:27 pmIt's actually more like "hope there is enough people working on this and coordinating with each other, because the 'haystack' they need to comb through is so vast".The haystack being the genetic information in covid-19, and the "needle" being either some way of tagging it for immune system to attack, or a way to weaken the virus from infecting new cells or slowing or stopping the replication. Lots of possibilities, but only very, very few of them actually work, and all need to be tested to find the ones that do work.

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 08:03:22 pm
content: While all of this becomes somewhat terrifying admittedly, it's important to keep the numbers in perspective. E.g. in Germany there are currently < 50 confirmed cases (numbers of the tracking sites are still quite old and vary around 26 but there were 20 new cases recently), thankfully still without any fatality. The number of confirmed influenza cases for this season is around 100k though with 161 fatalities and nobody really cares.In the influenza season 2017/18, 25k (!) people died (about 0.03% of the population) in Germany and nobody panicked about that. And still lots of people don't even care about influenza vaccination.So, yes. it's a serious thing, maybe a bit more serious than influenza if it really spreads worldwide but it's not the apocalypse. Just as with influenza, most people that die of it are either old or suffer from a serious pre-existing illness.

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 08:09:45 pm
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on February 27, 2020, 08:03:22 pmAlso, let's not forget about ~40,000 traffic fatalities each year (USA) that we are completely OK with...

author: donotdespisethesnake
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 27, 2020, 08:19:45 pm
content: "One person's death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic".I hope it stays purely a statistic for you.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 01:54:03 am
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on February 27, 2020, 08:03:22 pmGermany today is China two months ago. How is that for perspective?The public and the govenments in the US, Europe and the rest of the world should have already realized what is happening in China today is something that we're going to have to deal with in theverynear future.If you need a reminder of how quickly this can spread and at what the medical and economic effects are just look at Italy or at South Korea over the last two weeks. And this virus is just getting started!Think is this as being December 1917 and the 1918 Spanish flu is just beginning to be noticed.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 02:03:53 am
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on February 27, 2020, 08:03:22 pmCall us when coronavirus Death will knock Your door and let is know if ignorance and denial helped scare her away.

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 10:07:24 am
content: You guys really know how to turn a calm and rational statement into something coldhearted and misanthropic. Please try to read whole sentences or even paragraphs before trying to blame other people of a horrible attitude.

author: donotdespisethesnake
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 10:30:01 am
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on February 28, 2020, 10:07:24 amWell, you said "it's nothing to worry about, and anyway mostly old and sick people will die". Neither statements is factual. Since no one has a crystal ball, the rational statement is "we don't know how bad it will get".If you said "I'm not worried about it", that would be a valid opinion. But you tried to dress it up as "you should not be worried because <made up reasons>". Not rational at all.

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 11:30:32 am
content: Quote from: donotdespisethesnake on February 28, 2020, 10:30:01 amNo, that's not what I said. That's what you decided to read into it. Which says a lot about your perception of yourself and other people but nothing about what you falsely quoted.

author: donotdespisethesnake
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 01:01:41 pm
content: Quote from: 0xdeadbeef on February 28, 2020, 11:30:32 amIf you really think that is not what you said, you really need to bea lotmore careful about how you write things. But no need to get your panties in a bunch, it's not the apocalypse, right?Anyway, at least you agree it is something serious which needs people's attention, and will affect people of all ages.

author: 0xdeadbeef
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 03:57:56 pm
content: Quote from: donotdespisethesnake on February 28, 2020, 01:01:41 pmWell, I simply didn't say would you apparently like to think I did. After all you felt the need to forge the quote just to be sure. It's quite obvious how you interpreted the worst by reading only a part here and a part there and filling the gaps with your worst expectations. It's probably easy to feel righteous and be angry about others at the same time with this approach. Not my cup of tea though, so please don't put words in my mouth.Quote from: donotdespisethesnake on February 28, 2020, 01:01:41 pmSorry, I kinda mistook this for a serious discussion. Guess I was wrong. So I'm outta here and leave this to the prophets of the apocalypse.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 28, 2020, 06:57:07 pm
content: For what it is worth (less than two cents, really), here's my opinion:No reason to panic. Coronaviruses cause flu-like symptoms, and the main reason it is more dangerous than influenza viruses is that it is harder on the kidneys.We ordinary people should adopt behavioural patterns that discourage the spread of viruses, influenza and coronaviruses in particular, as our current behavioural patterns lead to rather dangerous pandemics every couple of decades.The proper time to react is when the first signs of possible pandemic are seen. At the point where lots of people are showing symptoms already, the infection has already spread, and can only really be endured, not prevented anymore.The proper early reaction is quarantine. Stop unnecessary travel (holiday travels and such), and quarantine the hotspots. If it means throwing people who ignore the rules into jail, so be it. Better alive in jail than risking the lives of who knows many others.Quarantine to stop pandemics should be seen as a good, positive thing. We should think of ways of providing food and water to people who have quarantined themselves voluntarily, and see that kind of action as commendable (in the early stages of infection spreading especially). Think of help after a natural catastrophe, except this time the help helps everyone, not just those suffering. It is courageous and considerate.Being sick, coughing (especially coughing towards someone else, or into your hand, instead of your elbow), and spitting, should be treated as worse than yelling racial slurs, even outside pandemics. Traveling while possibly infected should be a cultural no-no; something people are taught at school to not do, even shown what happens when people ignore that and think "well I'm not sick, I can go home" and spead the illness to their friends and loved ones.Media and celebrities should show an example, and politicians should be encouraging self-imposed quarantine and travel restrictions, and bring forth epidemiologists and doctors' suggestions and reports on how much that would help. If sufficient cultural movement gets going, it will be possible for politicians to set up laws and procedures,to prepare for the next time.The next time will come. And the next. We cannot eradicate viruses. Attempting to do so, or pre-medicating and over-medicating people, just leads to superbugs that ignore even our most powerful medicine. The medical community concentrates on vaccines and antivirals that can combat these viruses (but note that we only have vaccinations for the three main types of influenza virus, and no antivirals that help combat an existing infection), so it is up to the rest of the humanity to work out how to behave in ways that reduces the spread of these viruses.I think most humans are too stupid to work this out, until a pandemic that actually kills a major fraction of humans on this planet comes along. We just do not seem to be able to look at history, see what actions lead to, and avoid those disastrous actions.Even if nothing is done, you are more likely to die from cancer than from an influenza or coronavirus infection.