welcome to another MedCram lecture on the SARS cough to virus causing the
kovat 19 disease this update is for the 25th of February 2020 and we're gonna
talk about Italy and China and then vaccines this is gonna be kind of
interesting when we get into that and again here are the numbers that they are
reporting so I'm simply reporting what they are reporting and we've hit 80
thousand proper total deaths at almost 2700 total recovered 27,000 and so we're
up to a differential there of 10 times I remember when that was almost on par in
fact when it was even less than the number of total deaths so whereas total
deaths have leveled off we still have an increasing amount of total recovery
which is always a good thing let's look at the nucleus wealth site which I've
found to have some interesting graphs that are unique to it I'm gonna scroll
all the way down here to the bottom where they talk about the mortality rate
or the case fatality rate and as we've talked about there is a bit of a delay
in measuring what the total cases are right now compared to what the total
deaths are right now there's been a question about whether or not you should
delay the mortality accounts and look back four days eight days or 12 days
depending on how long it takes somebody an average to die from the onset and in
looking at those it's interesting that if you look at all of the cases outside
of Wuhan in the rest of China you can see here that if you look at a full 12
days out that the mortality rate or case fatality rate reaches around the same
asymptote as if you look at eight days versus if you look at four days and
that's just under 1% if you look at who Bay province which is where who Han is
and you do the same sort of analysis it all settles out again but not at just
below 1% but just below 5% this kind of makes sense if you think about the fact
that inside who Bay where most of the cases were their health care industry is
going to be more overwhelmed and therefore perhaps have a higher case
fatality rate so you can take a look at this site we'll put the link
to it in the description below we go over to the world ometer as we have done
in the past you can see similar numbers here where I like to look as the active
cases and the close cases of the closed cases that we have 91% of recovered and
been discharged and 9% deaths if we look further on down we come to the latest
updates for February 25th we can see here that there's one new death in South
Korea another death on the diamond princess two new cases in Italy and 60
new cases in South Korea possibly some good news here in South Korea is that
the 60 new cases that were seen today in South Korea is a sharp decline in new
cases compared to 161 and so this may be that there might be a cluster in fact
that's what they're saying that there's two clusters and that has to do with
this church where they had met and this may be the reason for the spreading and
this accounts for over 50% of the cases within South Korea let's go over to
another site this is my Reuters title battle against coronavirus turns to
Italy Wall Street falls on pandemic fares over a thousand point loss on the
Dow Jones on the 24th a couple of interesting things here at kind of
contrast what they did in China and what's going on in Italy of course in
China things seem to be not rising as fast and in Italy things seem to be
climbing pretty rapidly and so they talked here about China putting cities
in lockdown Italian authorities are also doing similar things sealing off the
worst-affected towns closing schools halting the carnival in Venice what they
say here interestingly this is from Reuters China's actions especially in
Wuhan the epicenter of the outbreak probably prevented hundreds of thousands
of cases said the head of the w-h-o delegation in China Bruce Aylward the
rest of the world to learn from the lesson of acting fast they're at a point
now where the number of cure people coming out of the hospitals each day is
more than the sick going in he said the surge of cases outside of mainland China
triggered sharp falls in global markets specifically in Italy as investors fled
to safe havens and they talks about the European equities markets
he goes on to talk about the epidemic in China peaking between January 23rd and
February 2nd and they say has been declining since dr. Mike Ryan the head
of the w-h-o emergencies program told reporters it is still possible to
contain the virus and that it might appear each year like the flu quote the
virus may settle down into an endemic pattern of transmission into a seasonal
pattern of transmission or it could accelerate into a full-blown global
pandemic he said in Geneva on Monday and at this point it's not possible to say
which of these realities is going to happen goes on to talk about how the
Trump administration is requesting a billion dollars to deal with the corona
virus now specifically what it is that's going on in China we've got China's
National Health Commission said that while the rapid rise had been halted the
situation was still grim he said over 3,000 medical staff have become infected
most in hebei province surrounding Wuhan probably due to the lack of protective
gear and fatigue and we talked about the fact that they a case fatality rate in
Wuhan was higher than it is in the rest of China we also talked previously about
the fact that there was no protective gear but we also talked about the need
for sleep and the ability to sleep and get rest and of course if there are a
number of professional colleagues of yours who are infected in quarantine
that's going to increase the load on you that's gonna make you more fatigued and
hence we see videos of health care providers in China collapsing and we
hear a number of these physicians are actually Sur coming to the virus so at
this point excluding obaid mainland China reported 11 new cases that's the
lowest since they started actually taking figures On January 20th overall
China reported 409 new cases on the mainland down from 648 a day earlier
there was a measure of relief it says for the world's second largest economy
has more than 20 province level jurisdictions including Beijing and
Shanghai here we go reported zero new infections whereas
what's going on outside of China while things are taking off
we've got 29 countries and territories with a death toll of about two dozen
according to the Reuters tally South Korea 231 new cases making its total to
833 we see a couple of new countries that have come to the table here Kuwait
Bahrain Oman and Afghanistan they are believed to be cases that have been to
Iran in the past so a lot of things going on it's almost like a Tale of Two
Cities it seems as though China has had a huge hit but things may be on the
verge of something different potentially we'll have to see and then we have Italy
and South Korea which are taking off want to talk briefly about another
interesting article this is in the Wall Street Journal we'll put a copy of this
link as well on the description below this fascinating article which you will
probably need to have a log in to read it talks about this drugmaker moderna
incorporated which has shipped its first batch of its rapidly developed
coronavirus vaccine to US government researchers who will launch the first
human tests of whether the experiment could help suppress the epidemic
originating in China now why is this experimental well I encourage you to
actually watch the video that is on this site and you'll see what I'm talking
about but very briefly let me explain to you what it is that's going on there
okay so normally what happens is a virus here's the virus goes in and infects a
cell and what happens is these proteins go on the surface of the cell when this
virus infects the cell these proteins here are very important because it tells
the body that this is an infected cell or that this for instance is a virus and
what they normally do is they will normally take the virus and they will
inactivate it or kill it and they will inject it in and what will happen here
is that these proteins will induce an antibody response in the body that
allows the body to have many of these antibodies already
ready to fight so this is the normal situation up here and the problem is it
takes many months to create this type of model where you can inject these
proteins into the body so that you can have these antibodies form against these
proteins what they're planning on doing from what I'm getting from this article
is something completely different in terms of a vaccine what they're really
doing here is they're having a cell and because they have the genome of this
virus they're able to inject in this case the RNA somehow into the body and
this RNA will then go into the cells which will tell the cells to produce the
antigens which will then cause the antibodies to form against it so in
other words instead of having the virus or the lab produce these antigens to
inject into the human so that the human can make antibodies what they're instead
of doing is isolating the genomic sequences themselves having them tell
your own cells to produce these antigens and then these antigens are going to
cause antibodies to be formed and that is how they can do this much faster
because they don't have to go through all the sequences of having this be done
in other words making this they can have your cells make the vaccine for you and
then have you self immunized against the virus and it seems as though this really
hasn't been done before and so according to that Wall Street Journal article it
looks as though they're going to be starting clinical trials in April and so
that would be three months from the time that they learned about the genome to
the point where they can actually get a vaccine for human clinical trials now
this is a new technology and for some people this may sound really cool for
others it may be well what are the side effects of this what's going to happen
when you're starting to put DNA or RNA and
structions messenger RNA in most cases in this case into your cells and tell
them to make proteins that are foreign to your body to cause an immune response
it almost sounds like an autoimmune condition so it's gonna be interesting
to see what happens and what are the side effects of this to get a better
understanding of this you're going to need to know about molecular biology and
as it just so happens we have a video that's a primer on molecular biology
because what we're about to do is get into the details of the corona virus
life cycle and what it actually does in the cell and how it's different from
other viruses thanks for joining us