Can I catch the coronavirus by eating food handled or prepared by others?
We are still learning about transmission of the new coronavirus. It's not clear if it can be spread by an infected person through food they have handled or prepared, but if so it would more likely be the exception than the rule.
That said, the new coronavirus is a respiratory virus known to spread by upper respiratory secretions, including airborne droplets after coughing or sneezing. The virus that causes COVID-19 has also been detected in the stool of certain people. So we currently cannot rule out the possibility of the infection being transmitted through food by an infected person who has not thoroughly washed their hands. In the case of hot food, the virus would likely be killed by cooking. This may not be the case with uncooked foods like salads or sandwiches.
March 15, 2020
Can we get the coronavirus from eating food that contains the virus?
I wondered, as I was reading about people who are dealing with the social distancing by avoiding restaurants — whether they might inhale the virus — but getting food made in restaurants delivered to their house? I found this answer at the Harvard Medical School website:
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I’d like a cheeseburger with everything except ketchup and the shit the Cook didn’t wash off his fingers.
One way to get around the person who serves up your food container coughing on it is to stick it in the microwave at home and heat it up to piping hot. Germs and viruses get zapped too.
Although warming food to piping hot won’t work with cold dishes or sandwiches, desserts, etc,
Coronavirus is a dish best served piping hot.
Make sure your food contains no more than a minimum of stool of certain people.
Yes of course it could be transmitted on your food. If it can survive for several days on paper and plastic, I'm sure it could ride your mashed potatoes from the sneezy kitchen worker right into your throat. In Hunan a bus passenger infected 13 people and 1 person who got on 30 minutes after they got off. It spreads through the air and lands on everything. Everything outside your house is covered with the virus. You want to live, live like that.
At this point, I believe that getting the virus is inevitable. The key is to maximize your ability to fight it off.
We are occasionally getting takeout and heating it in the oven before eating it.
I stay away from restaurant Cold Sandwiches and salads no matter what. Maybe the cook/waiter sneezed on it, or handled it.
COVID-19 has also been detected in the stool of certain people
"Certain people", eh? That sounds racist.
You should patron those stools to show your solidarity with the oppressed, and if you don't have any "certain people" in your neighborhood, drive across town to some dive bar where "certain people" hang out, and sit on those stools. You'll thank me later, after you get out of the hospital.
If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant you know the answer.
Even if the virus doesn't come with your food, lots of other stuff can.
If we cannot be taken prisoner by... (take your pick)
Wuhan Flu
COVID-19 (China originating viral infectious disease - 19)
Kung Flu
Kung Fu Flu
Winnie the Flu (in honor of Xi)
...then what can we be taken prisoner by?
I mean let's all disrupt ALL THE THINGS!
This is an excellent explanation of the perils of testing everybody without regard to symptoms.
https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-dreaded-red-squamish.html
The upshot is that if the test is 95% accurate and 5% of the population is actually infected, the odds that you have the virus if tested positive in a case of mass testing without regards to symptoms is around 50%. That’s higher than chance, which would be 5%, but it’s not what you would think, which would be 95%. Intuition does not work with false positives, and as there has been a study published that suggests that false positives are an issue.
But there is political hay to be made for Democrats by second guessing the professionals on mass testing.
Order everything deep fried. If that doesn't kill the virus, then we should all just give up. Of course, we will all have clogged arteries...so there is that.
To be serious. I feel that eating in restaurants is a fairly chancy thing to do right now.
I think that the answer is the question of how these viruses cross the species barrier in the first place? For the most part, it is through humans eating meat containing the virus. Eating food with the viruses on the outside is probably not all different from eating food that has the viruses on the inside, except that viruses on the outside of food probably have the additional route of infection in the mucus tissues in the mouth and maybe stomach before the digestion process gets really started.
One of the theories of the initial epidemic was the "live food" market in Wuhan so it is obviously a likely source.
When I wake up in the morning, I just can't get started until I've had that first, piping hot pot of coffee.
Oh, I've tried other enemas.
- Emo Philips
I've wondered about this as well...as I contemplate ordering a pizza sometime over the next week. Will the pizza shop allow customers to come in? Or will they do delivery only- and set it by my front door. Or will they do drive up pizza- you order ahead and pay ahead, then call them when you arrive and they set it out front. I'd do that if I were them.
Most restaurants operate on a very thin margin. Cash flow from week to week keeps them operating. There are many independents who simply will not make it through two weeks or more of little to no sales. Employees would have to be let go. Few hourly employees and those who rely on tipped income? It's not there.
If I were a small pizza shop, I'd keep operating with me and a couple of key employees that I'd take care of. We'd take orders and produce pizza, but not allow outsiders into the shop until this was done. It's lives and livelihood.
China's CGTN, or China Global Television Network, is pretty much the RT News of China. It's the state propaganda and disinformation operation most aggressively active, and watched, by spies, of any nation that pays attention to China. Last February 2019, it was forced to register as a foreign agent. So what weird stuff it is to read that one of its reporters has been caught at the White House gate with a high fever, which is a symptom of the highly contagious coronavirus. The fever was in the 100-degree range. You'd know if you had such a fever. Yet the person was clamoring to get into a closed-quarters press briefing
Hmmm....
Nuke it if it's cold. This is yet another blow for Chipotle and similar healthier fast/fresh or salad oriented takeout places, which is where all the bacteria-borne outbreaks have arisen. Salad: it can kill you worse than a cheeseburger, although it's usually good for you.
Once you've had the virus you can go anywhere, do anything, without waiting in line. The world could be your oyster.
Assuming businesses still exist.
Like the food you eat somehow by-passes your throat?
We had to put our little Cairn Terrier “Spot” down yesterday. He’d been crazily chasing squirrels all last week with much too much enthusiasm and, suspecting he had contracted the coronavirus, we had no other choice... we had to be sure.
Our local starbucks is still open but they've gotten rid of half their seating. Local Gym operates but only X number of people can be in the weight room or the pool or the exercise equipment room at the same time. Mandatory spacing - I like it.
Don’t fly. Just don’t fly.
https://twitter.com/breakingavnews/status/1239102590719332354
People, people who love people,
Need to isolate till further notice.
Once you've had the virus you can go anywhere, do anything, without waiting in line. The world could be your oyster.
But only in months ending with an “r”.
In a year, when the surge is past, we can treat this like the flu, and use normal precautions, because we will have the ICU backstop we count on for the flu right now. I doubt life will ever go back to what we consider normal right now though.
I realize coronavirus is old news by now, but this figure is a very good summary of how things have gone to date.
Most countries are performing similarly with three clear outliers Hong-Kong, Singapore and Japan. The first two are too small to make useful comparisons, and Singapore is pretty much a totalitarian state/hive mind. Japan really does appear to be different, assuming the numbers are correct.
At the top end of the scale, once things got really bad, China and Iran managed to bend the curve somewhat and S. Korea managed a lot. The US is at the point where it has to decide whether it is S. Korea or Italy. I would guess we will be more like Italy but hard to tell.
Aunty Trump, excellent link, but the guy is pissing into the wind, I am afraid. I have tried explaining this problem in other contexts in the past, and it is futile. The people designing and running test protocols, of course, understand this, and try to replicate positive results. You should never waste a test on a non-symptomatic person unless your goal is to establish some baseline numbers for virus penetration. It is even worse in this case, though, because the tests themselves were slapped together without any controlled studies being run that can even establish that a truly positive person will be identified 95% of the time- they don't actually have a good estimate of this accuracy.
This is not our finest hour.
"Would you like virus with that?"
"On the side, please."
Fauci is trying hard to explain why testing people with no symptoms is inadvisable, to a journalist on CNN, but it's not working well.
"Once you've had the virus you can go anywhere, do anything, without waiting in line. "
The common cold does not confer acquired immunity (if only). Perhaps if you've had this coronavirus you won't get sick again, but, I don't see any hard evidence that this is necessarily so.
Although I'd guess there are more than a few researchers who intend to find out.
We were having breakfast at a local spot we like a couple weeks ago. Linda came back from the ladies room and said she was at the sink when our waitress came out of a stall and walked past her, leaving the restroom without washing her hands.
I said, maybe, because you were using the sink, she washed her hands in the kitchen somewhere.
Hopefully.
Canada demands that we keep our borders open, and doesn’t close its borders to China.
Not saying this is happening, but if there was a country out there that wanted the demise of the Western world, particularly the US, and wanted to see how we would handle a bio-agent attack, this flu-like pandemic would be a good starting point. Our daily TSA operations are questionable in most locations during normal operating circumstances. With a sudden bio-attack, we are seeing thousands herded together for hours at a time. If you planted one diseased foreign agent into that crowd, they would pretty much guarantee to spread it to each other over the next 5-7 hours, then go hurtling into cities and across the landscape to their respective neighborhoods and homes. Multiply that times 20 or so major airports.
Things would crawl to a stop very quickly.
This coronavirus should not do it to that level. But it is showing how all of the countries are prepared (or not) to handle it. Will we in the US learn? Let me ask it this way- has our TSA security improved since 9/11? When you watch the screening operation and the people working it in airports around the country, do you feel safe? I travel a lot. For me it's interesting to see that the smaller airports seem to do a more professional job, and the TSA people at these airports seem to take it more seriously than their counterparts in the major airports where the goal seems to be....just keep them moving through. But even in the smaller airports, they can only do what they are taught to do.
For this we are depending on government agencies. So my question becomes, would you feel safer with a government agency or a private company in charge of this? I suspect the reaction by most would be to defer to the government. Personally I like our government to handle the actual military and the judicial system, but not much more than that.
"Japan really does appear to be different, assuming the numbers are correct. “
Japan is culturally monolithic and cultural differences tell in the spread of a virus. the others used police state tactics that would be illegal here.
Right now I am faced with the funeral of a friend’s father, who passed this morning. I feel compelled to go, because I am thinking he might be alone. It’s nearby, so no flights involved. I won’t fly.
(... and he tries them ...)
SAY! I LIKE green snot and phlegm!
I DO! I like them, SAM-I-AM!
People here are talking about ordering food for takeout or delivery. Don't forget the packaging it all comes in. Paper bags, foam, whatever. So if the delivery person or prep person has it and then it can be transmitted on to the packaging.
We are all Doomed, I say Doomed!
My link above may not work if you don't have a subscription but you can get there through the Google, I think. Should be the second figure, first graph.
daskol said: This is yet another blow for Chipotle and similar healthier fast/fresh or salad oriented takeout places,..."
How is it possible that a national chain that has poisoned as many people as many times as Chipotle has can still be considered a 'healthier' option? I still eat there from time to time, but I am always mindful that it's a crapshoot as to whether or not I'll get sick.
Think about this: their track record is worse than Taco Bell. They are obviously still popular, but they should NOT be regarded as a healthy choice.
The only test you should offer people without symptoms is one that identifies COVID-19 specific antibodies- that is a test that can tell you if you have had the disease already. This is actually an important test to develop and start deploying in random screening right now- it would help to understand how many people have already encountered the virus and developed an immune response to it.
People are stupid, that much is clear- if you take the RT-PCR test for COVID-19 and are negative, the result really means nothing at all by the next day, you are right back to where you were before the test, not knowing if you have been exposed in the last 24 hours.
I have avoided restaurants over the past several weeks. But it is not from fear of contaminated food, but just not wanting to be in an enclosed area with lots of people, breathing the same air.
And actually, I haven't completely avoided restaurants because I have gotten take-out and drive-through several times and wasn't really worried about it.
"The common cold does not confer acquired immunity (if only)."
I may have been misinformed, but I was taught that there are around 200 distinctly different common cold viruses and each DOES confer immunity to itself. In other words, we never get the exactly same cold twice; we just get another variety of it.
As a vintage teacher, I rarely (knock on wood) catch colds now, but early in my career, I caught at least two doozies a school year. FWIW, I take Zicam rapid melts at the first symptom and I throw off those symptoms quickly.
Goddess of the Classroom is correct- you develop a specific immunity against every unique cold virus, but these viruses mutate all the time and for the newer strains you won't have specific immunity. However, if you have specific immunity against several of the closer relatives, you will probably have some resistance to the newer strains- the older antibodies will provide some barrier to the new strains' spread in your system, buying your immune system a bit of time to respond with a better antibody response.
Yancy, that's exactly right- we don't know the false(+) rate for the covid19 test(s) we are using.
mockturtle said...
Is it really part of Agenda 21?
No.
Thanks BC ARM.
OK, the Coronavirus is far more significant than I've given it credit for. Mayor DeBlasio was just on CNN explaining why he's trying hard to keep schools open and more generally explaining NYC's response to the virus: he sounds sane and intelligent, more or less (until he got to the bitching about the Feds and testing). But wow, DeBlasio has never sounded less stupid and inept than the first half of this interview. Second half he went nuts with nationalizing industries.
Think about this: their track record is worse than Taco Bell.
I suspect Chipotle's problem was their relatively quick push to go all organic with their foodstuffs. There is a finite supply of Organic Lettuce, and other things and my guess is lots of farms recently switched over to Organic to meet the new demand from Chipotle. These farms probably took some time to get up to best practices and Chipotle probably had to fudge stuff in sourcing to meet their supply demands. As I have a friend in the agricultural industry he assures me that there are hired farm workers who are not above shitting somewhere in a field.
Now Taco Bell on the other hand has the benefit of not needing Organic anything. They are fine with regular old mass-produced, factory farm raised, whatever. And we have gotten pretty good at doing that over the last century or so.
Yeah, and I agree Chipotle is not healthy. I think people just falsely equate Organic with healthy.
It's almost made a leader out of him, or at least helped him better to play one on TV.
The healthful aspect of Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Chop't, etc. does not revolve around the organic sourcing, although that may be a factor in the very unhealthful tendency these places have to kick off bacterial infections in their customers. The healthful aspect is raw, salad, lower carb options, etc. And in that respect, they are more healthful than places that don't offer lower carb options in particular. It's just a roll of the dice when you're eating raw food, something obvious to a lot of people who understand the history of why we cook stuff, but there are lots of people who don't know that cooking is mainly sterilization.
First the mayor in Illinois giving herself draconian powers, then de Blasio wanting to nationalize industries and now Cuomo demanding that Trump call in the military. Now I'm beginning to believe my younger daughter is right about there being more behind this pandemic than just the virus. Will widespread martial law ensue? Is it really part of Agenda 21?
Sorry I had removed previous item because I thought perhaps it was off-topic but then daskol opened the same issue so I reposted it. ;-)
DeBlasio was actually a sane-sounding big city mayor for about 3 minutes, explaining how we're trying to keep schools open so that kids have places to be where they get decent food and aren't malingering in the streets, and their parents can still get essential work done. Then he reverted to form upon being prompted by the interviewer on the Federal response. But for a few minutes, we had a mayor, a real mayor, or at least a guy who could credibly play one on TV. Thank God for the entrenched city bureaucracy's leadership, our own deep city if you will, because our elected office holders are a particularly grim joke in NYC.
I've been giving some thought to the question of eating and/or taking out food from restaurants. We've seen panic buying at the supermarkets here in suburban Portland, and if I'm short on supplies this week, I may have to use that option. I would be inclined to get the food to go and re-heat it at home.
We don't have any reported cases locally, but since there seem to be quite a few cases where there is no known vector, my presumption is that it has been around for a bit longer than originally suggested (see also Dr. Chu). As more people are getting tested, the numbers are climbing, but (to my eye) linearly, not exponentially.
According to Bourdain, the incidence of burns and cuts in the food biz are astronomical. Hopefully Larry the chef and his husband are not promiscuous and practice safe sex.
Hey, anybody can sneeze!
Have you ever had norovirus?
Yancey, I always comforted myself in the misery of a stuffy nose with the thought I'd never get that exact cold again!
Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago: sounds like she's whining at her press conference. Governor Cuomo also sounded whiney at his presser, and also desirous of a coordinated federal response like they had in China. The emerging theme of these folks' current message: don't blame us when this goes to shit, it's the Feds. They're laying out the case for blaming anyone other than themselves when shit goes wrong. It's funny to hear them, when they bother, at the end of their speeches revert to the message that we must all come together in a crisis, after they've just spent the rest of their speeches laying blame all over. Sounds like a real shitshow at O'Hare. The upshot is I hope people stop flying for a while, because that's just a terrible idea right now.
If you've ever tried to take a call from an airport, this presser at O'Hare is amusing: every 30 seconds they have to pause while the airport PA blares out something unintelligible for 10-15 seconds.
BCARM: My link above may not work if you don't have a subscription but you can get there through the Google, I think. Should be the second figure, first graph.
Thanks, BCARM, nice chart. And thanks for thoughtfully providing the alternate link for those without FT subs.
As a vintage teacher, I rarely (knock on wood) catch colds now, but early in my career, I caught at least two doozies a school year. FWIW, I take Zicam rapid melts at the first symptom and I throw off those symptoms quickly.
Yes and that is why pediatricians were always getting the croup their first ten years in practice.
I haven't had a cold in years.
Per Tomcc: As more people are getting tested, the numbers are climbing, but (to my eye) linearly, not exponentially. .
The charts I see for global cases looks linear but the US cases are exponential, probably at least partly due to the increased testing.
Are we ready not just to cancel residential college, but to call in the Army Corps of Engineers to start turning dorms into hospitals? Gov. Cuomo is ready for that, and highly critical of the Feds for delaying on that.
I hope that Forbes piece is more correct than the alarmist WaPo piece regarding our healthcare capacity in the US.
Coronaviruses are very temperature sensitive. 5-11 degrees centigrade.
I wonder if the sheep will follow it north for the summer.
"Once you've had the virus you can go anywhere, do anything, without waiting in line. "
The common cold does not confer acquired immunity (if only). Perhaps if you've had this coronavirus you won't get sick again, but, I don't see any hard evidence that this is necessarily so.
Yeah, people are making way way too many unfounded assumptions about this virus. We don't know if infection/recovery confers long-term immunity, or how strong is that immunity. What if it's like Dengue fever and it's the second infection that kills you? We don't know what, if any, are the long term effects of this virus. It's novel. It's not like there have been extensive peer-reviewed studies of people who have recovered. What if six months from now we find out that half of those who recover suffer from some kind of permanent damage? If we don't know, it's dumb to assume the best case scenarios.
Also, I assume Taco Bell is "safer" than Chipotle because they nuke their meat in a microwave. Their supplies probably come from centralized distribution and food safety is checked there.
You can do all kinds of stuff in the more sparsely settled areas that would be catastrophic in the big cities. It's scary to see some of the big city leaders out there: on a day to day basis, these cities have administrators who make sure things run more or less OK, often despite the political appointees at the top. The crisis is empowering many of these mostly faceless people (the political hacks, not their deputies who actually run shit), who are giving press conferences and, more terrifyingly, starting to take an interest in the day to day running of their organizations. It will be truly catastrophic to life in our largest cities for these political hacks to do more than press conferences. I hope they just stick to pressers and media appearances. Hypothesis: their panic, and their attempts to seize opportunity for themselves amidst the panic, will have both sooner acting and longer lasting consequences than this virus.
" As I have a friend in the agricultural industry he assures me that there are hired farm workers who are not above shitting somewhere in a field."
Can't get more organic than shit.
" As I have a friend in the agricultural industry he assures me that there are hired farm workers who are not above shitting somewhere in a field."
Probably where the Yuma romaine lettuce got E coli.
Daskol: ...start turning dorms into hospitals?
The next step is to convert all the unemployed food servers and retail employees into doctors and nurses. Instant capacity!
Most of the infected cheeseburger goes into the stomach where acid destroys it, I imagine. But the don't touch your face rule implies you'd better wash it down with something uninfected afterwards.
Wasn't food preparation what was initially considered a major cause for the spread in Wuhon? I know there was speculation that it came from the animal food products, but that's been discounted a bit now. Still food prepared for public consumption seemed to be part of the problem.
The heating rule seems to make sense but we’re trying to avoid all restaurant or take out food. Hope that those who are partaking will patronize local small businesses over chains.
Once this virus has dissipated, will the mayor of Champaign, IL, announce that she is retracting her executive order that gives her virtually unlimited power over her city? Has any official ever been known to relinquish power once acquired?
At least most of us don't have to give up eating bats. Well done steaks might not be so bad after all. Sushi is probably out altogether. The idea of people handling bats and raw fish in the same vicinity, what could go wrong?
As I understand it, the 'wet market' theory of origin has been debunked. The bio-labs are suspected as being the source. If you have recent information to the contrary, I'm willing to listen.
It’s possible that a janitor from the biolab sold an infected bat to the wet market that he was supposed to destroy. So I am not sure you can say it is “debunked.”
The Wuhan lab was fucking with CRISPR, coronavirus, and bats. It’s also possible that the proximity to the lab makes it impossible to know either way.
Michael K said...
" As I have a friend in the agricultural industry he assures me that there are hired farm workers who are not above shitting somewhere in a field."
Probably where the Yuma romaine lettuce got E coli.
Do you all know how they fertilize Organic produce?
Just curious.
Don't eat Organic if you are worried about animal feces.
Have you ever had norovirus?
I think that is a good analogy. Noroviruses mutate, just as coronaviruses. Also -- have you gotten food poisoning from takeout before? (I know -- that's usually bacterial but it says something about food prep)
Do you have open sores in your mouth? That might be something to consider as well, but the human digestive tract did evolve to keep viruses at bay. Eating after all is pretty important for survival.
"Do you all know how they fertilize Organic produce?
Just curious."
Manure tea (pardon my french.)
Is it possible to get the coronavirus from a communion wafer? Presumably it trans-substantiates. Maybe Vickie from Pasadena knows.
“Wasn't food preparation what was initially considered a major cause for the spread in Wuhon? I know there was speculation that it came from the animal food products, but that's been discounted a bit now. Still food prepared for public consumption seemed to be part of the problem.”
Not food preparation, per se, but rather the food itself. The “wet” market is where (to us) exotic food is sold in China, presumably live, at least until taken home. We aren’t talking fresh lettuce here, but fresh monkey, dog etc. This has happened before - Infected meat is sold in one of these fresh markets, people eat the meat, an epidemic starts the government shuts sown the market, and eventually, afterwords, the market starts up again. The Chinese are entrepreneurs - if someone wants something and is willing to pay for it, someone will figure out how to provide it. And the Chinese love their exotic meats. One theory is that people in the BSL-4 Wuhan virology lab were selling lab animals that should have been destroyed, and one of them was infected, probably intentionally by researchers. Purportedly one person at the lab had made over $1m doing this.
My reading of the data suggests that there was one, or a very small number of people together who was/were Patient Zero in Nov or Dec last year somewhere in Wuhan. This from mutation rates and tracking variants. So far, all of the sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses are very very close together genetically. The reason for the suspicion of involvement by the BSL-4 Wuhan virology lab is that they apparently had acquired close genetic relatives of this virus, apparent descendants of the Coronavirus first separated by an Egyptian researcher from a Saudi a decade ago, and first sequenced in Rotterdam. They also, very likely have other contagious viruses, like MERS, SARS(-1), etc.
This whole thing has bee embarrassing to the Chinese government. Not only were they allowing the open sale of exotic meats that much of the world foods questionable, esp since they are sold regardless of whether or not their consumption by the Chinese is driving their extinction as a species. Moreover, it still looks like some lapses, somewhere, in biosafety allowed the escape of the virus into the general population. They have recently changed from tacitly admitting this, to loudly claiming that it was the US, presumably the CIA, that started the outbreak, in order to discredit the Chinese around the world. And it seems to be working, with our MSM happily buying into the fable, and trying to prevent attaching anything Chinese (including the city it was discovered in) to the virus. They are furiously sowing FUD around the world in order to dodge blame for the pandemic. Too late though. This is three months late, and obviously mandated from the top. Too much information got out before they started their disinformation campaign.
If you've ever had to visit a restroom in central China you wouldn't be surprised that fecal-oral transmission of disease is common. Even large corporations and fancy office buildings have disgusting bathrooms which often don't appear to have been cleaned for weeks. Soap dispensers, even when installed, are frequently empty.
rcocean said, "People, people who love people, "
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeere the boys are
A virus waits for me.
A hacking cough
That won't turn off
And maybe some VD."
The origins of the Wuhan corona virus is wherever a lib says it is. Anything else is a conspiracy theory.
and media matters comes along to punctuate the point, how does one leave out the Wuhan institute of virology out of this story, if there was an outbreak around ft. Dietrich, what would one first conclude?
Achilles said...
Probably where the Yuma romaine lettuce got E coli.
I believe it was.
Do you all know how they fertilize Organic produce?
Just curious.
Don't eat Organic if you are worried about animal feces.
Federal guidelines for Organics specify composted manure, the composting process kills off any bacteria harmful to humans. Chipotle's main problem was that some of their suppliers were fertilizing with "fresh" (non composted) manure.
Reminds me of an old joke. Possibly from Steven Wright.
I was at a restaurant. I used the restroom. There was a sign "Employees Must Wash Hands".
I waited 15 minutes, but nobody came, so I washed them myself....
Was there a run on fresh Pangolin balls in Wuhan?
“ Was there a run on fresh Pangolin balls in Wuhan?”
I think that that rumor has been debunked. Bats, pangolins, and (more remotely) civets are the major animal sources of closely related Coronaviruses. There are Pangolin derived Coronaviruses fairly close genetically to the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (and closer than the SARS-CoV(-1) Coronavirus), but there are bat derived Coronaviruses even closer genetically.
Meade said...
"Do you all know how they fertilize Organic produce?
Just curious."
Manure tea (pardon my french.)
***************
The Japanese euphemism translates as "night soil".
Probably where the Yuma romaine lettuce got E coli.
I believe it was.
We were told it was from feed lots in California contaminating the irrigation canals.
Bruce,
I'm not saying they were the cause. But it appears they will no longer be for sale.
Hard (or perhaps flaccid) times for jinbu.
Temujin ... I posed that very "dry run" theory days ago. That data could come in very handy some day. BTW what else does that Laboratory do? Have they shared any research with the world. Sounds very area 51-ish. Anyway, I did not kill myself. :)
BC ARM's graph is good.
This is the best site I have found for current data:
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/
Global cases 164,175 and 6,473 deaths. I thought we would cross the ROW tops China bridge Monday, but by this morning we were there already.
I do want to say that much of the apparent rises are the result of more testing = more detection than actual increasing infections.
Basically countries have a choice early on - they can try to cover the field and find most the early cases with very aggressive testing, followed by contact tracing and testing, or they can try the shutdown route. But SK has tested over 260K people so far to find the less-than-9000 positives, quarantine and contain them. It's pretty obvious that the US does not have the ability to do that, so we are moving into the shutdown phase.
NY has over 700 cases detected. They are testing more than most states, but it is certainly not "covered".
It's really more of a four week lock-down to stop most of the local transmission, and I am not sure how feasible that is.
M.O.M. The site I use has 169,356 cases and 6500 deaths. Worldometer
NY has 732 confirmed cases and 6 deaths as of today.
As I posted a couple of days ago, one Chinese scientist postulated that the four added amino acids on the COVID-19 virus means that it did not likely mutate from the bat form of coronavirus because mutation usually happens in increments and this large a modification was probably engineered.
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