Dear KAG: 20200310 Open Thread

Remember AND logic here – what you are saying could be 90% true – but hold that thought…..
I can almost agree with this theory EXCEPT that we have new evidence of some disease which can cause MASSIVE RAPID DEATH in a nursing home. This is NEW – and it gets around all possibilities of Chinese disinformation. Unless the Washington (state) government is FAKING THE DEATHS, then we now have real data. The numbers coming out of the Washington nursing home are not something that was around in the past. Also, the sequencing of the “potentially new” (being skeptical) virus actually IS new – and bears (according to many scientists) changes toward HIV which cannot be explained by self-intelligent mutations from self-intelligent evolutionary processes. Those processes have intelligence, but the HIV changes in the spike proteins show a LEAP in intelligence – meaning something more intelligent than the algorithm of random mutation and survival selection – most likely the Chinese who openly published similar research – did the changes.
Now the fact that coronaviruses have been floating around forever, labeled as the common cold (really just PART of the set of common cold viruses), and we never differentiated the “brand” from rhinoviruses and others, doesn’t mean we could not do so – and I now have a pretty good idea what a “benign” coronavirus feels like, by paying attention to a recent cold which almost certainly was one. Based on my experience, and the scientific data, all of it is pointing me toward a real disease UPGRADE. So I can’t go along with “no new disease”. But I can go along with a new one being mixed into an extraordinary amount of hype, disinformation, fear-mongering, and other junk.
Illustration:
Let’s say a 25 year-old gets COVID-19 and is either asymptomatic or survives easily with minor symptoms. Then, for all practical purposes, what has happened is INDISTINGUISHABLE from the scenario you are saying of no new disease, except for a test which shows that he or she has that particular man-altered strain of coronavirus. That’s it. Looks like no new virus.
Same thing, in a nursing home. 20 oldsters die. Same test, same results. THAT is where this damn thing shows up. Something new, and highly deadly, because we don’t have a vaccine.
ALL of this goes back to that first graph I saw, from the China data, of the death rates as a function of age. My immediate reaction was that it was engineered to kill off old people. Very “Stalinesque”.
Now, here is something interesting. I have heard through the grapevine that the Wuhan bio facility was POORLY CONSTRUCTED.
I’m starting to think that was a real possibility in not only this case, but others, and that prior outbreaks (SARS) in China may be related to a BAD FACILITY.
However, a deliberate release easily hides behind that excuse with almost 100% protection.
NASTY.