So a little more than two months ago, I tried to sound the alarm on SARS-CoV-2 … many friends, family and neighbors paid heed, but a few doubted my predictions … almost universally, comments were positive and grateful - thank you … after a few thousand comments, questions and “reactions”, I’ll tell you we’re at an inflection point … for those of you still paying attention, listen up
Lets talk about the rapidly declining “reported” rates of infection in China (I'll compare that to what’s happening elsewhere at a later date) … The Chinese government (and some respectable news media) are reporting that rates of incidence (“new infections”) are plummeting, to the point that the R0 of SARS-CoV-2 are below 1 … that is superficially good news since a R0 of less than 1 means that the pandemic will die out in short order ... I don't believe the Chinese stats, but lets assume they're true for the time being
This is where I veer away from the science and into informed conjecture … Fauci and others, far more serious than I (cited below), are not seeing R0s of less than 2.2 … there are only a few reasonable explanations for this … I think there is a real possibility that the lower rates of incidence in Wuhan and Hubei are due to the possibility of “cryptic spread” … I propose that the vast majority of residents in the native area of this virus may have been exposed to a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that was benign or asymptomatic – a v1.0 if you will … this infection spread silently and inoculated most of the exposed residents against the v2.0 that we’re all familiar with now … in other words, V1.0 had “cryptic spread” and v2.0 only sickened those few residents who hadn’t developed immunity to the earlier v1.0 strain … as China loosens internal travel restrictions, you’re going to see new hotspots emerge there … China will blame those new flareups on foreign interaction, but they are coming from non-immune residents being exposed to v2.0 virus
The good news/bad news for the US and Cos Cob/Springdale is that the strain circulating in our area right now is v2.0 and not the v4.0 from Italy … the SARS-CoV-2 v2.0 CFR is between 2-3, R0 is about 2.2 … the v4.0 (in Italy and Spain) R0 is 2.8 and the CFR is 9!! … Sad news, they’re about 3 weeks away from peak mortality if they stay in lock down
FYI - I’ll talk about Germany later and how you can make sterilizing solution easily at home using stuff we almost all have on hand
Stay indoors - PLEASE!!
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387