When world health experts believe it meets the criteria?  Which they obviously don’t at the moment. That should be determined by medical evidence not press coverage or public fear.

That page is now 404.

I always default to an Occam's Razor explanation - so your point about accidental release is fair enough, bledur. I recall my father in law - in olden days - worrying that their privy might be polluting the well that provided the water supply.  They stopped using the offending privy and the well ran dry. You can never be sure what happens with waste on its way to the sea!

I have tried to air a number of epidemiological concepts on this and the other thread - but folks don't seem to have got the point that the whole risk package needs to be considered, the host that catches the disease, the agent that causes the disease, the environmental factors which  determine the means and effectiveness of transmission and any vectors or co-hosts which may be involved. Human-animal interactions may be a significant issue, as you point out.

Roger

No, it’s not, there is just an extra bit of code in the URL. The page is still there https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels-new-coronavirus.html 

Incidentally here is a direct link to the CDC report from last year which is referred to in the above article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/5/18-0220_article 

Remove the crap off the end and it works!

https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels-new-coronavirus.html

It's getting one's head around that scale of the current measures that is so difficult, Four.  As you imply - it can't just be cosmetic so the Chinese  government can say they did everything possible - can it? No doubt we will soon find out.

Good piece here: China coronavirus - The lessons learned from the Sars outbreak

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51221394

Roger

The website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology  is here

http://english.whiov.cas.cn/

Well worth a read. Dr M - thanks. That's the kind of development work going on behind the scenes in such research labs. They will know more than anyone the nature of the risks involved and the possible consequences of an accident or error. I've never worked with this kind of "heavy duty" pathogen, but I know folks who have and have been to a couple of active labs. Important stuff.

R.

Very interesting indeed, Ulric - well worth a read. 

I've been looking at their newsletters. I can't get at English versions of some of the stuff - mainly personnel related. I am curious to know if I recognise any names.

R

or maybe those who are more vulnerable to infection are those that are mainly infected?

Your statement needs a bit of expanding for me, please, EC.

I have the following information to compare: 

"CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010."

Disease Burden of Influenza

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Thanks.

Roger

If Priti Patel finds out it preferentially disposes of the young, the old, the sick and the poor, it'll be government policy within weeks.

Indeed. One of my main criticisms of Corbyn is his comparative silence on this issue and indeed on Burma, yet he keeps banging on about the middle east

Some appalling images on social media from the "meat" market where this is supposed to have originated

Live animals being treated appallingly. At risk of doing a Laurence Fox, I've always found the Chinese a very unfriendly and cruel people, so perhaps this is nature's revenge