US passengers from hantavirus-hit ship quarantined in Nebraska and Georgia

You can amplify at such high cycle numbers that it would indicate a false positive or presence of non target dna.

A "tentative positive" makes way more sense than "mildly positive."

Me, or the BBC calling it "mildly positive?"

If Plague Inc taught me anything about Epidemiology and the spread of diseases, it's that the more lethal a disease is the less likely it will spread.

30-50% of people who have symptoms bad enough to go to the hospital. It's an important distinction. Still bad though, obviously.

If it doesn't spread easily person to person there should be nothing to worry about. For example you don't need a hazmat suit to go into a room full of people with HIV. Clearly it spreads in a manner more similar to the flu than not.

I think you misunderstood me. I think the media reporting that the disease is not easily spread is bullshit when the ships doctor became infected, the experts they sent to the ship wore hazmat suits, and the science says the variant of the disease is known to spread human to human via respiratory droplets.

Patient Zero and One were apparently able to infect at least 6 others between them before dying so let’s not rule anything out

Most virus get less lethal as their infection rate rise. The exception for high lethality virus is asymptomatic propagation combine with long incubation rate and/or strong survavibility outside of an host. For exemple, it was what make small pox such a plague until we were able to create a vaccine for it.

Yeah... I live near a Kroger. We get mixed together sometimes since I eat food and they sell food.

I was under the impression the CDC & Emory are pretty incestuous (e.g., secondary appointments for CDC at Emory and Emory students can do their PhD at CDC labs) , but my memory might be fuzzy b/c my interview there was ~10 years ago. Also immunology and infectious disease are outside of my research interests so I just tuned it out.

Oh wow, thanks I didn't know! Now I have to go down a rabbit hole. Just to know is it govmt funded or private?

I'm in NJ. It was really bad up here and in NY. Everyone know someone who died. I remember the refrigeration trucks outside of NYC hospitals because all of the dead bodies wouldn't fit in the morgue. By me, I'm sure people will be masking up soon. We're assholes but we care about our families and community. "Don't be a d***" should be the Jersey state motto. Edit: Or "Get your head outta your ass."

At least we have Big Pharma with our best interests at heart.

Ah. Sorry I was a bit slow.

Oh definitely. Hearing Trump say "just don't worry, it'll work itself out soon" or whatever, *again,* definitely doesn't instill confidence.

>I’d say it’s worrisome enough that we’ve already got it in the States, we are in arguably a much worse position now than we were when COVID started. Only reported cases are those who were on the cruise and are already contact-traced and in isolation. The few who came back early from the cruise are not symptomatic. From the NYC Dept of Health: >The Andes strain has shown limited person-to-person transmission in prolonged and close-contact settings. Secondary infections among healthcare workers have previously been documented in healthcare facilities. No other hantavirus strains, including those circulating in North America, have demonstrated person-to-person transmission. People with the disease typically develop symptoms 4–42 days after exposure and are considered infectious only while symptomatic. E.g., if you're not symptomatic, you're not contagious. Anyone who *might* become symptomatic is being monitored. There have been zero in-the-wild cases in the US so I don't know what you're talking about when you say "we've already got it in the US." We brought American citizens and residents abroad home and put them into isolation. That's it. To put a finer point on all of this, human-to-human transmission is much lower rate than Covid. The two aren't comparable. From CNN: >“Probably we are having less than – I don’t know, I’m giving you a number, just for a ballpark number – 300 cases in history” of human to human transmission of Andes virus and about 3,000 Andes cases overall, Palacios said. He is also part of a group of experts advising on the ongoing cruise ship outbreak. >Based on their investigation of the Epuyen outbreak, which involved three separate superspreader events – where a single person passed the infection to several others – Palacios said the window for transmission of the Andes virus appears to be short, about a day. People are at their peak of infectiousness on the day they develop a fever. >\[...\] >In the Epuyen outbreak, more than 80 healthcare workers were exposed to patients with symptoms, but none was directly infected themselves, though very few used any personal protective equipment. There were two infected healthcare workers at the local rural hospital, a smaller facility, which may have been the first to see sick patients. >The limited spread among healthcare workers in the Epuyen outbreak speaks to the short window of time that a person may be infectious, experts said. >“This is not Covid. This is really not Covid. It’s not even influenza. It’s an unusual person-to-person event, and it might have happened because, perhaps, of a closed environment on a ship,” said Dr. Lucille Blumberg, an infectious disease specialist who is the former deputy director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, of the cruise ship outbreak. I say all of this while acknowledging your point that the CDC has been hamstrung, but there's absolutely nothing right now that suggests any reason for broad concern. The media is hyping this up as clickbait but that's empirically disproportionate to the actual risk to the public at large here.

No evidence exists to suggest is spreads asymptomatically

Of course a YouTube link.

a joke