The hype around the coronavirus is starting to become a parody of itself.
China far and away has most of the Coronavirus cases. It is a largely impoverished nation with people living in overcrowded, squalid conditions. Ripe for a virus to spread.
Only .002% are infected.
UK papers are predicting 80% of infection rates in Britain. Italy has only 655 cases. It hardly makes it an ‘explosion’ but from Washington Post, NY Times and The Daily Beast, birdcage carpet, it’s to be expected. As a note, Italian patients that are being treated and are recovering from the virus in less than 48 hours.
While the regular Flu silently killed almost 60,000 during the 2018-19 season, the coronavirus is interesting in its own way.
According to new research from China and France, it is becoming increasingly clear that the new coronavirus did not develop naturally, but is man-made. The virus has an ‘HIV-like mutation’ which allows it to bind with human cells up to 1,000 times stronger than the Sars virus. This according to a story in SCMP by Stephen Chen.
This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.
According to the study by Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein.
Last month, researchers from India released a now-retracted paper noting that the coronavirus may have been genetically engineered to incorporate parts of the HIV genome, “This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.” These researchers said it was unlikely the virus occurred naturally.
“Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body.” — SCMP
The team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola. –SCMP
“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed. — Professor Ruan Jishou
A report from a Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhn confirmed Nankai University’s findings. That is, the mutation is not found in SARS or Bat-CoVRaTG13, a bat coronavirus that was considered the original source of the new coronavirus with 96 percent similarity in genes.
A French scientist Etienne Decroly at Aix-Marseille University published in the scientific journal Antiviral Research on February 10, also found the “furin-like cleavage site” that is absent in similar coronaviruses.
The odds of such a “random” mutation taking place naturally are extremely small, yet the running narrative is still that the coronavirus lie dormant in bats somewhere between 20 and 70 years, then ‘crossed over’ to humans through and unknown species before it emerged at a Wuhan, China meat market roughly 900 feet from a level-4 bioweapons lab.
At the time, the lab was researching why Ebola and HIV can lie dormant in bats without causing diseases.