Help the Fight Against COVID-19

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What setting do you guys use? The options for me are
  • Any Disease
  • Alsheimer's
  • Parkinson's
  • Cancer
  • Huntington's

Where is the COVID-19 option?

Looks like if you set it to “Any Disease”, it can work on the SARS/Coronavirus protein structures, which are homologous to COVID-19. Here’s their link that explains some of this.

Fold@home Info
 
i just want the real information, all facts. don't sugar coat anything or make stuff up. if we have a case, tell us. tell us where it is so we can avoid it if possible. it's clear some people are trying to keep the numbers as low as possible to avoid panic.

but not being prepared is worse than an initial panic. correct information can let everyone prepare to beat it or minimize it as best as possible.

I've been trying to warn people for at least a month but no one would listen.

This virus is bad. It's more contagious than the flu and much more deadly. The 2018-2019 flu season had a fatality rate of 0.01%. COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 3.4%. That's 340 times more lethal. You have a 1-in-30 chance of dying from it. Those are really bad odds.

There could be upwards of 100 million deaths before this is all over. Maybe more.

The other big problem that no one is talking about is that about 20% of cases are serious and require intensive care. This does not happen with the flu. This will overwhelm the hospitals as there simply aren't enough ICU beds. Spare ICU capacity is a tiny fraction of what will be required. People that could be saved will die because of lack of resources.
 
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Is there a definitive test for it that's available from, say, your local HMO?

Is there any treatment that's very effective?

Avoiding getting it doesn't seem super realistic, especially for those of us commuting on public transit.
 
Is there a definitive test for it that's available from, say, your local HMO?

Is there any treatment that's very effective?

Avoiding getting it doesn't seem super realistic, especially for those of us commuting on public transit.
Short answer, there is a test, but there are limited quantities and it's not something that you can pick up over the counter. If you think you have it or have been exposed, call your doctor and follow their instructions.

There isn't a treatment for a typical case of coronavirus. If you end up getting severely sick, you should go to the hospital, obviously.
 
I've been trying to warn people for at least a month but no one would listen.

This virus is bad. It's more contagious than the flu and much more deadly. The 2018-2019 flu season had a fatality rate of 0.01%. COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 3.4%. That's 340 times more lethal. You have a 1-in-30 chance of dying from it. Those are really bad odds.

There could be upwards of 100 million deaths before this is all over. Maybe more.

The other big problem that no one is talking about is that about 20% of cases are serious and require intensive care. This does not happen with the flu. This will overwhelm the hospitals as there simply aren't enough ICU beds. Spare ICU capacity is a tiny fraction of what will be required. People that could be saved will die because of lack of resources.

Not to mention the very real possibility of it mutating into a far more deadly strain. The first wave of the Spanish Flu wasn't particularly deadly. Then it mutated into genuine murder flu.
 
The 2018-2019 flu season had a fatality rate of 0.01%. COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 3.4%. That's 340 times more lethal. You have a 1-in-30 chance of dying from it. Those are really bad odds.
Best data we have right now is South Korea and mortality rate for them has been around 0.3-0.6%. The JH data above is in line with that. Still very bad. And the WHO put their global infection rate estimate at 40-70% of the population. Also bad. If California has 40MM people and you assume a 40% infection rate that means in CA alone there’ll be some 48,000 deaths due to this. That’s a big number. :|

South Korea’s response has been hyper-vigilant. Maybe that helped? Gets tricky to correlate.

Controlling the infection rate is the best we can do right now. It’s still pretty low. Sub-2% in South Korea, Italy. Need to do that here. Encouraging people to go to work and push through it is unhelpful IMHO.

I don’t feel like the work from home edicts have been over reacting and I’m annoyed my kid’s school board hasn’t done the same. They're always the most likely vector into our house.
 
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Is there any treatment that's very effective?

We don't have an specific treatment yet, this covid-19 is so new. Reposition drugs are being tested (treatments previously applied against other diseases)
The best hope at this moment is Chloroquine (Resochin), during the 20th century it was used extensively to prevent and treat malaria.
Fortunately its cost is low and it has good availability

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300662?via=ihub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine

Other candidates are remdesivir and lopinavir/ritonavir (kaletra).

With the first SARS coronavirus, it was observed that some of the most serious complications were due to an excessive activation of the immune system that triggered fatal immune reaction. Drugs such as baricitinib, already approved for rheumatoid arthritis, have been proposed to reduce inflammation without impairing the ability of lymphocytes to attack the coronavirus.
 
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Install this on your computer and help researchers develop a vaccine by using your spare computer power:
https://foldingathome.org/
This is why I still have some faith left in humanity.
Folding@Home has been a thing since 15 years no?

I remember using my PS3 to run Folding@Home more than 10 years ago...
Yes. Same. I thought the project had disappeared.
Last week a doctor from Harvard Medical School said 70% of the population will have it in their systems within a year. Many however will be passive carriers.

https://news.yahoo.com/harvard-scientist-predicts-coronavirus-infect-195800282.html

Yep that's how it works. This version of SARS is a lot slower but just as dangerous to the three big segments of the population that concern us the most: the very young, the very old and the immunocompromised. SARS and MERS were too fast and so it was contained rather quickly. This version is slower so it's can hide out and therefore spread more widely through the global population. This is what my virology professor called the NBO (the Next Big One). We all thought it would be Zika. Not that Zika isn't bad but it's background noise compared this.

Ok, team # 236174 is team Fractal Forumites. If using the Fractal name turns out to be an issue, I'll change it- just let me know, @Admin M@ or @FractalAudio . I just used my forum name as my username. To join the team, simply input 236174 into the client after it installs under team number.

I'm in.
 
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Ok so here's a little primer on why this is important.

  1. Proteins are the nuts and bolts of everything that happens in every aspect of every life form that exists. Here's an analogy: Imagine taking your car and stripping it down to every last individual part - every nut, bolt, washer, piece of plastic that has a shape, wire, cable, circuit board, everything.
  2. If that car was an organism of any kind, every one of those parts would be a protein or a phospholipid bilayer or chemical compound of some kind.
  3. Proteins can be, generally - structural in function or chemical in function (these are called enzymes).
  4. All those proteins have primary structures - chains of amino acids
  5. Those chains of amino acids go on to form a secondary structure - alpha helices and beta pleated sheets (proline rich regions form goofy squiggly lines).
  6. Those secondary structures fold together like origami to form 3D tertiary structures that give each protein a unique shape and chemical characteristic around its structure due to the positive or negative charges on the functional groups of each amino acid.
  7. Mapping these tertiary structures allows us to formulate chemical compounds that can fit to these unique structures and either activate them or deactivate them.
  8. We have roughly 25,000 genes which encode for as-yet untold hundreds of thousands of proteins since each of the RNA products of DNA genes can be spliced and segmented into many splice variants.
  9. Deactivating a protein encoded by a virus prevents the virus from self-replicating its nucleic acid (sing or double stranded plus-sense or minus-sense DNA or RNA depending on what of the several major classifications of virus it is) or synthesizing its own structural proteins - thus stopping the virus from co-opting the normal mechanisms of the infected cell.
  10. The cell then self-identifies as being infect and expresses it's own proteins on its surface. These are the COME KILL ME flags that tell the immune system to destroy that cell so that it can't infect surrounding cells - and eventually harm the host organism.
  11. The effort to determine the tertiary structure and by extension the chemical properties of each significant domain requires enormous computational power, which is why folding@home exists.
 
I've been trying to warn people for at least a month but no one would listen.

This virus is bad. It's more contagious than the flu and much more deadly. The 2018-2019 flu season had a fatality rate of 0.01%. COVID-19 has a fatality rate of 3.4%. That's 340 times more lethal. You have a 1-in-30 chance of dying from it. Those are really bad odds.

There could be upwards of 100 million deaths before this is all over. Maybe more.

The other big problem that no one is talking about is that about 20% of cases are serious and require intensive care. This does not happen with the flu. This will overwhelm the hospitals as there simply aren't enough ICU beds. Spare ICU capacity is a tiny fraction of what will be required. People that could be saved will die because of lack of resources.
I dunno, the stuff I’ve read is saying it’s a little more complicated than that. The numbers you site are confirmed case stats, not total infected stats cus that’s still unknown. Comparing it to flu stats which I think is of total infected gives it a skewed view. And I thought flu fatality rate was 0.1%? Some experts are saying that the coronavirus fatality might be below 1% if you factor in total infected.

Still very concerning is that the number of confirmed cases are growing exponentially, but if the number of infected is great, there could be a ceiling sooner than expected to that exponential growth.
Best data we have right now is South Korea and mortality rate for them has been around 0.03-0.06%. The JH data above is in line with that. Still very bad. And the WHO put their global infection rate estimate at 40-70% of the population. Also bad. If California has 40MM people and you assume a 40% infection rate that means in CA alone there’ll be some 48,000 deaths due to this. That’s a very big number. :|

South Korea’s response has been hyper-vigilant. Maybe that helped? Gets tricky to correlate.

Controlling the infection rate is the best we can do right now. It’s still pretty low. Sub-2% in South Korea, Italy. Need to do that here. Encouraging people to go to work and push through it is unhelpful IMHO.

I don’t feel like the work from home edicts have been over reacting and I’m annoyed my kid’s school board hasn’t done the same. They're always the most likely vector into our house.
If it’s 0.03-0.06%, I think your 48,000 deaths is off? 40M * 0.4 * 0.0003 = 4,800. I think you meant 0.3%?
 
Where exactly do you select "Any disease?"

Also, I'm not showing up under the team info. Is there something I need to do other than input the team number?

Screen Shot 2020-03-06 at 11.38.34 AM.png
 
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I dunno, the stuff I’ve read is saying it’s a little more complicated than that. The numbers you site are confirmed case stats, not total infected stats cus that’s still unknown. Comparing it to flu stats which I think is of total infected gives it a skewed view. And I thought flu fatality rate was 0.1%? Some experts are saying that the coronavirus fatality might be below 1% if you factor in total infected.

Still very concerning is that the number of confirmed cases are growing exponentially, but if the number of infected is great, there could be a ceiling sooner than expected to that exponential growth.

If it’s 0.03-0.06%, I think your 48,000 deaths is off? 40M * 0.4 * 0.0003 = 4,800. I think you meant 0.3%?

Yea. I’m off by a factor of ten. Fixed.

Wait. No. My big number is correct. I misstated the death rates. It is in fact 0.1% for the flu. And 0.3% for COVID-19.
 
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