Covid-19: a non-linear and systemic tale over the past and the future of this crazy epidemic

I'm reading and writing many stuff about, during this epidemic and if I don't know it so well is just because I hadn't the "chance" to meet it directly but I guess I'm happy anyway of this miss encounter!

I tried to imagine the story of this epidemic and their so many facets of the fact, not in direct biological terms related to the virus genome, but as a travel of our "visitor": this SARS CoV-2.
So here my tale!

The story as I imagine

I can just make some hypothesis or just some fun on the true story of the virus or better of the viruses: in those days we were so used to speak about VIRUS that we all (virologists included) start to think to virus as it is a huge ball with a sort of strange ambulacral pedicels that are just able to grasp on a human cellular membrane to open a way to itself to enter and wreck out that cellule and the host's body at a whole.
I know no one virologist think that way but the way they communicate to the folk produces this result!

As I said in a previous post over a strange way to imagine a possible general immunization we can imagine that the dangerous virus could start being just the one that in a past sad morning of October or November (someone says that was maybe December or September, the dawn it's not perfectly clear) found itself out of a cellule (impossible to say if it was human or batman cellule) with a strange desire: "mommy I want to be diverse!" ("mommy" is the cellule that hosted the replication of the previous virus-stamp!). As the weather outside was turning toward a cold Fall or Winter our JohnCV Sr (CV stays for CoronaVirus: this is the name - seems to be - of our vHero) decided to stay very warm in the buffers of some animal/human, giving back to its new host a little bit of hitch in the bronchia and meanwhile never forgetting to multiply itself as much as it could as its ancestors were usual, together with its brothers and sisters (it is not clear if we can think about them as male of female!) cousins and afar relatives: those who gave just a little bit of disturb to the host, maybe just a stupid sneezing. 

They therefore became some hundreds with the same desire: to hitch the host bronchia! 

... and the bronchia reacted: the host coughed!

... and after a short fly in open sky - some here and some others there and there and there - they landed hundreds on a new host! 

It was a mess: a bunch of cousins, relatives and unknown afar kinfolks flew together all with their own specializations: sneezing, coughing, do-nothing, alerting, catch-me-soon and so on! So a new adventure was coming, a new unknown host was reached!

As in every group of individuals there is a sort of emulation and defy, sooner or later among the many flying and consequent hosts reached and coughing, there was again a virus JamesCV Sr - coming from the same strain of our first vHero, JohnCV Sr - who again was tired of that stupid game: just making the host coughing finally was boring! 

And all those stupid third-to-n-power cousins that just produce some fever or sneeze! That was what was done for centuries ("centuries" in terms of virus time and life!) by its parents, grand parents and ancestors for generations and generations - not to speak about stupid sneezers and similar - so: "enough with it! I have to invent something new! I've seen that my uncle and my cousins here have produced more hitch than what I've ever seen by others and that is the reason why we were projected more afar than any other cousin we have! Geeee! Sneezers (viruses sneezers) also can be effective, they project a lot of us around!!! So let join our forces let have strong cough and some powerful sneezes in order to fly around!

But now the hosts are trying to get rid of us using drugs, vapors and other remedia! Better to learn how to stay more quiet than others as are the sneezers!" 

So for some generations those viruses tried to remain calm and concealed for longer than usual, with the passion anyway for hitching the host until he/she finally: few coughs, short flies and new hosts and unknown bronchia! Yeeha! Disguised yet powerful!!!

The new generation, a vampire story!

So that game played for long - concealed yet alive and invading - was going to take a turn! Bored again for having done what ancestors and parents have done for so long and distilled in some hosts to be distanced from the stupid just sneezers, once again one new vHero GlimpherCV Sr (some hundreds of generations have passed meanwhile and now it is the great, great,...., great grandson of the previous one JamesCV Sr and the name style was changed also, but Sr and/or Jr still remain: tradition!!!) decides to change the rules of the game: "Now I want to dig more and instead of just hitching the bronchia I would like to thinker with those nice oily balls (epithelial cellules of vacuole and their blood vessels) a little bit deeper in the buffers and then tickle them on the surface and maybe entering that membrane (cellular membrane) leaving my capsyd on the surface to be recognizable (a sort of graffito) by those damn lymphocytes, just to see how they react: do they either hit me or stupidly they hit my host cellule!

Meanwhile I leave all my brother to continue with the bronchia up there, they do not know other job than what they have done so far, no innovation, no challenge, no future!!!
I know Lymphocytes are stupid enough to kill the host cellule but for me its's sufficient to leave before, just to go around with my new sons to spread their future breeds.
I'm more amused in disturbing that stupid host more than hitching the bronchia; to succed in it I enjoy the chance of traveling with my stupid cousins that still are amusing themselves with that boring hitching to the bronchia. Anyway, if I need to be projected around, me and my breed, I'll happily accept a ride with their group: when they make the cough happen I will fly with them! Meanwhile some of my breed will stay here to thinker with membranes and those stupid Lymphocytes!

What's going on?

Having learned how to stay quiet for a while my breed has become really prolific and they learned how to take a lazy pace toward the vacuoles. Their laziness had no any relationship with the damage they did and still do to the host they are dwelling, but I'm proud of them by the fact that they are projected around only after they become numerous, more numerous than choughers.

As much the hitch becomes strong - doesn't matter what breed is producing it: I just scoffed at them because they are different than "us" but it's not said, we all cooperate to that! - as much the spread increases its efficiency! Production, production production!!!

Some generation have passed meanwhile when recently a new vHero BrosGerbCV Jr had bad news about hosts coughing alone in a white room!!! (now Jr also is going to be used, but their names are becoming more and more strange, I don't know why, maybe just to sport a sort of differentiation?).  No other new and unvisited bronchia and vacuoles or lymphocytes to trigger beside or in front? It's sad, we spent so many generations to specialize ourselves that is now a pity that our evolution doesn't make us victorious and effective as it was foreseen long time ago when we started to increase our efficiency! We are now stopped here - I dare to say lockedown - with nothing to do!!! What about my breed!!! Do I have to risk extinction and to finish here my breed and my life seeing my poor children lingering here and die in a crematorium?

More bad news now, what an envy!!! Naaaahhh, don't tell me that all those stupid of our afar-kinds are going better than us (we are not racists but we cannot call them anymore cousins, we have forgotten our kinship long time ago, with that stupid hitchers and sneezers!). But how can they amuse with just hitching od sneezing with the host! They are cought immediately, lymphocytes are catching them soon and from then on, no more chances to make an easy job! Lymphocytes react soon and well aimed, not anymore on vessels and vacuoles! 

Traitors!!!

So when Glooster-the-GreatCV JrJr, the Magnificent (a sort of megalomany got them all! It didn't know yet that it was going to become a sort of general George A. Custer) discovered that things were going worse because its strain was no more able to mock of Lymphocytes and reach capillar vessels to attack them (time had passed since they were just playing/thinkering: they actually started to move a true war against hosts even though they were so gently accepted in a warm and humid place to have good reproduction rate and strong help by their marchingeni: Ribosomes, Golgi's apparatus and so on)!!! 

They are now catched very soon!!! Before they were able to defeat the host once on 5 and now the percentage of success was lowering down and down and down!!! It's a real drama: the Magnificent is astonished, it doesn't understand why now the reaction of hosts are so strong and sudden! WHO (without any implication with the human meaning of it even if involved!!!) is the guilty!!!
Aren't they maybe - those stupid pre-JohnCV Sr cousins' breeds from our far ancestors - becoming traitors and, warning our all possible hosts around with a pityful and puny war, they teach them how to fight and easily defeat us too? Us!!! The breed of the Magnificent!!!

How do our hosts call it? Immunization? What a hell of word!!! it only annoys me to hear that spoken!

I'm really upset!!! That risks to evenctually become our end!!! That means that soon only some sneezing and coughing will fly around by the cause of our "... cousins...", no more chances for us - the fighters - no more mortal wars!!!

Is that the END of JohnCV Sr's better and stronger lineage!!!

Moral of the story?

All epidemics in our history have finished because the dangerous strains were segregated with quarantine; thus only weak strains could go around the environment and the hosts, making weaker attacks so spreading immunization instead!

Only the arrogance of low quality scholars - that I don't dare to name scientists because they don't understand they are acting in a non deterministic system, as the life is - can treat the life as a mechanicistic strucuture where you can push button of an immaginary vaccine and it produces the results as foreseen. They have the claim to control one by one all viruses going around our Earth and Media and to be able to defeat the disease produced by a well know highly varying Coronavirus.

But - worse than that - they will try to get the merit and honors of the defeat of this epidemic even if it will normally arrive alone to an end, as life and evolution in themselves forever have produced (or conserved) the seeds for the following needed immunity! Didn't Cowpox virus acted that way Vs Smallpox!

... and what about the greed of those who look for absolute power and/or the billionnaire Jackpot of being the Emperor of World's Health?

JohnCV Sr would be happy to know to have gained so great reputation and importance up to trigger important decisions in the world economy just because of the scare it has produced!

That is just a tale!!!

(© Luca CODELUPPI)

Covid-19: Some further suggestions that nobody will give you (costless!), for your daily life!

Being an Italian inside the hurricane Covid-19 I experimented in my country that people do not realize that is a serious affair for at least three or four weeks from the ramp up of the epidemic; so before you risk I can give you some suggestions!
I cannot guarantee they will protect you, yet I prefer to give you some ideas on how to survive better rather than give you useless information that you can get everywhere else!
Shortly you'll be filled with a lot of rules to follow in those days, rules that sooner or later will be transformed in laws, then in law enforcement!

Anyway there are some simple rules that you can use by yourself that are simple enough to be considered logical and - I hope - nobody will flag them as hoaxes or worse!
If you just stop a moment and you think by yourself about them you'll discover that you could find them in common sense!

The danger of an indirect contact with virus

Everything you do to protect your breath is almost perfectly clear to everybody: it is sufficient to use masks! What is more complex to understand is the risk of contamination through indirect contact with stuff that was contaminated.

Fusion Medical Animation

When you enter a shop and you buy anything you, your purse, your credit card or your bags enter in contact with many different things or surfaces that were in contact under the same conditions, producing a path for possible further contaminations either or by you (if you are the unaware carrier) or toward you (if someone before you was contaminated).
We can add just for sake of completion the fact that your shoes walk on many square feet of land in just the time of a short walk!

Not only our objects can enter in contact but what is worse, some stuff we buy are maybe manipulated by someone and can be contaminated.

As the contamination has endurance from few hours to some days (you can easily find information about somewhere on the Net!), you have to take some measures to avoid the risk of swallow or breath the virus, thus you entering in the statistics in a couple of weeks!

The unavoidable habit of eating

Szabo Viktor

This is the main concern! We cannot avoid to eat during the lockdown and so we need to go out for shopping sometime!

Every time we go out, we are confronting with our capacity to dribble the virus as in soccer or basket! So the risk for us after our coming back at home has the same endurance the virus has and our best protection is to avoid the virus to enter our homes or become inactivated before we enter in contact with it or with the surfaces were under the risk of contamination!

How can the virus enter our homes if we pay attention and we clean everything? Through the surfaces or objects I mentioned before! 

A cyclical outer life!

You can wrap your external life over a cyclical system that permits you to prevent 

the above mentioned behaviors: surface contamination, endurance of virus on surfaces on goods, object, food and so on! If we organize our lives to have more days beyond the virus surviving time and easier will be our life at home; I mean, if the danger is - say - 2 days, so if I cycle my life over a period of 6 days starting to account them after any going out (for food or other reasons), I have 4 days effortless safe (or accordingly if the risk is longer!).

So the most of the risk is in the very early days after someone in our household has gone outside!

So we start to analyze what we can do in the first days after someone has entered our home!

CC BY-SA 2.5, Link

Operation at home: housewifing in the time of Covid-19

There are many things we normally do to protect ourselves but some of them can be dramatically improved to avoid subtle mistakes! 

One for all? How many people you guess can decide that the best, coming from outside, can be a nice cleaning of the floor with a vacuum cleaner? Yes the floor is clean yet subtle dusts that pass through the vacuum cleaner filters will fly jollily in the air you breath after they are lifted from the floor and spread in the air! Virus is tinier than the class of that filter!

Some other problems we can have:

Shoes! how can I manage them to feel myself comfortable? If I enter I can take out my shoes quitting
them beside the entrance door and i walk beyond bare feet! Yes this time I enter few tens of inches and next one few more and I never remember where exactly I have to leave them so I can walk on the same steps I did before or I'm doing it wrongly? And what about my children, my wife/husband? How can I guarantee to them and to myself that we are consistent in our shoes management?

Food I bought! How can I handle it safely? How can I eat it ? Because I bought it from outside and it was handled by peoples with unpredictable health conditions (for sure they pay attention who doesn't? Nevertheless the disease is spreading!) I have to be careful! I normally breath and you? I guess till you do it you are not in the statistics! Many try to use masks with valves, other change their masks continuously until they remain without! Have I to pay attention to myself only OR Have I to take care of others too?  If everybody would take in care of others using the best care he/she knows, the need for strong enforcement could be superfluous! But as everybody cares just for the self we can act accordingly!

How to increase our chance to avoid any contact with SARS Cov-19?

Provided that we would stay at home for 4-6 days consecutively (I suggest for well established couples to conceals knives anyway!) Vacuum cleaner must be used just before anyone exits so when he/she'll be back no particles can stay around to accept viruses and you can happily rug the floor as soon as the last step with the shoes is gone! This way - before the exit - your vacuum cleaner will take inside just dust and no viruses!

About shoes: the easiest way is to drawn a line of tape on the floor near the entrance door, so everybody enters with shoes on stays before the tape and walk the first step across it and the viceversa straight inside the shoes if someone has to go back and forth the home!

About the food the thing can be a little more tricky! I guess (is my opinion but is easily understood) that the handling of foods and the direct eating of them carry a risk of contamination as you are bringing to your mouth your hands! So how can we deal with this apparent contradiction?

You can decide to increase the meal you prepare by yourself but under a particolar condition: you have to use ingredients you bought at least a couple of days before!

Fresh food, used not before a couple of days after it entered your home it's a reasonable waiting time for virus to decay! Furthermore you have to avoid to touch them during the same time after you have stored them! So go for your next food shopping a couple of days before you are in need of! You can store your purchase in the refrigerator apart from other food, paying attention to wash thoroughly your hands as soon as you have finish to store it! 

Can be nice that before you go for shopping you have just eaten so your contact with your mouth is delayed and just for that, safer! Never leave your attention to drop during the storage of new bought food! Sometime happens that you enter your home and your attention drops!

Bianca Berg

You have a second option: you buy ready to eat food from outside! As you obviously have to eat it straight away you have to have more care for yourself: you have to discard carefully its packages, the outer and inner ones paying attention to manipulate external and avoiding to enter your mouth in contact with outside of envelops. Do not bring any FF at your mouth using your fingers, cut - instead of tearing it - sachet of sauce and avoid to touch it! I mean what you do normally but with more care, mostly after you trash the packages: wash your hands and do not touch your mouth for long, for many hours thereafter!
And now breathing: you have to know that masks with valve, protect you but do not protect your immediate neighbors (within the 3-4 feet around you!), so if you are going to visit old parents they are not protected form your viruses if you have some inside you! In this case try to find a better mask.
If you are crossing the path of other persons, you can keep your breath or just exhale for the few next seconds to avoid to breath where others did it in the seconds before!

and then?

I dare to add a small yet I think interesting suggestion: try to eat spicy foods adding them with red hot

pepper, ginger or Sichuan pepper, they do not heal anything, they are not virus killer, they have not the structure to be a healing principle but… they irritate your throat mucosa inducing it to produce a tiny layer of fluid mucus that protects you better against the installation of the virus in it! a sort of fluid glove!

You have to buy nothing costly: you just have to take maybe a new taste habit.

How much do you have to eat? the right amount for you to feel your nose running and your throat in need of clearing!
Someone speaks about ginger too and I agree!

What about masks?

I'm asking myself for long!!! As the virus survives just few days after contamination, it should be sufficient to have enough masks to create a sort of turnover keeping the masks separate each other in order to avoid contamination between the one you have just dismissed and the one you are going to put in service! How many? check for the virus surviving and use a couple of days more, do not touch the external surface of the dismissed mask because it can contain viruses if you ever came in contact with it!

so...

… be patient and live peaceful: every ounce of energy you can save from anxiety you can devote to careful and skilled actions; as soon as you start to understand it's like fasten seat belts, you do not think to accidents every time you wear them. Now it can be the same: you do it because now there is a strong need for!

So do whatever you could not in your busy days of your recent past!

©You have to cite the source in case of use

Just to summarize about SARS-CoV-2

I have been following the news about SARS-CoV-2 for many days now and applying Systems thinking I guess I understood many important facts and necessary behaviors that are unclear to many peoples, journalists and possibly health care systems too included, and must be taken in care to improve our chances of surviving in the next months with the least of possible damages and disruption!
There are some different axes we have to consider when individuals, countries or simply a groups of persons, being them friends, fellows, organizations or even cities, have to confront with a pandemic like the one is coming:

1. the axis of possible contamination history of every individual involved
2. the axis of disease spreading prevention
3. the axis of individual fears and needs
4. the axis of economy
5. the axis of personal freedom
6. the axis of laws and rules enforcement
7. the axis of resources to manage that will go under stress as the time passes on

Many of those axes have different interests and maybe sometimes opposite!
We can start with the first one

Contamination history

It is important mostly in those first phases to know how the virus spreads around. That is not a secondary question even if the outbreak will go beyond the prevention phase, because the narration of the spreading paths gives to the peoples a clear idea on the ways virus circulates and moves from a group of persons to the next one. Not only the fact that a cough or a sneeze can spread around droplets of contaminated saliva is important but it's really important to monitor else's behaviors around us and mostly our own ones!

Spreading Prevention

Another axis which is important is the spreading prevention on near/close peoples, random or afar groups contamination.
Amongst the possible types of groups we can have few of:

• people we live with, we work with
• people we meet on usual places (markets, busses, pubs) 
• people we meet in unusual places or places that are frequented by pople who come from afar.

Many peoples are gearing up to avoid to be contaminated maybe wearing surgical masks or so.
This is a paradoxical behavior that offers a practical effect: people use them to avoid the risk of being contaminates by others, but it is more important and effective not exactly to prevent contamination in the direction of the bearer, but to avoid possible contamination of others if we are unknowingly contaminated. So we must become aware that a civic sense of responsibility toward others can generally affect (in positive way) the life of our environment.

(not finished)

A strange guide line to create new vaccins against the new Corona-virus Flue

I was discussing yesterday with a friend, a biologist, about the real risk of coronavirus pandemic flue, when i realized that the arising problem of not only the healing but of prevention and vaccination had to be fitted in a larger panorama.

1. Attenuation of viruses.
2. Was this pandemic flue so strong in Wuhan food markets habitues too?
3. Why this very dangerous flue is not producing so many deaths as we could expect by it in China?

Confronting with all those  dilemmas at a certain point I realized that almost for sure in the living food market in Wuhan where this coronavirus seems to have started its career, there were its predecessors too or better the sibling strains of its brothers and cousins that for at least a 80% should share parts of its genome and capsid; consequently a large part of the people working in those markets have got immunity for the same reason cowpox was used to eradicate the smallpox: one is known to be related to the other one!

So a good idea to proceed is to find brothers and cousins of that virus to use as vaccination, flatily, at least to easily and fast increase the chance to put under a sort of provisional high rate of protection those (or the world at a whole) that are near the risk of infection, having a natural vax.

So:

• track the history of the virus
• Track back the strains of brothers and cousins
• Vaccinate with it as many people as it's possible using those cousins
• Make a statistical research afterward to check for the results.

It is maybe out of the standard of the traditional procedures vax companies do, but if the danger is really so high maybe a temporary solution offered by a common sense can increase meanwhile the chance of reducing the risk of a general pandemic by this corona-virus.

© Luca COLELUPPI - Verona, Italy

Social Performers

I would like to introduce a new definition in the Social Media Panorama.

Social Performer©: is a person or organization devoted to increase its own follower fellowship instead of acting a bona fide social action.

The Social performer exploits reptilian emotional reactions like:

• indignation
• Revenge
• what I call "defrauded syndrome"© (people who think literally "they received from the life less than they are entitled to" and therefore they complain for their status and never offer anything to others and mostly inside the organizations they belong to)
• social-media's generosity: a lot of bla bla, using money and energies belonging to Others (something like "NIMBY"; in this case WUMA (Without Using My Account)
• the good guy's party: we are the good guys indeed we think the right things, just because are the things good guys think!
•  

and so on.

Social Performers are less than what were sophists in Athens in the past, they are not able to juggle with subtle syllogisms, they are really rude because they deliberately cancel the part of the truth they know matters to their rise.

Doesn't matter what they are destroying or what monsters they are rising, it is instead the rising of their pedestal in front of an audience of self-lamenters, who want someone at stake.



Copyright notes!
"Social performer" and "defrauded syndrome" are Luca's ideas and the right of use them are under CC BY-NC license

Solutions Vs Objectives

I've seen the Short's short video "FLY1" (Alan Short is the author name also).


One of my friends commented that there is non limit to human stupidity and I objected that this is not the case. What pushed the first two characters (the fly is the third one) to act this way was another big problem of human mind: the sudden setting of the seems-to-be main goal.

The true problem for the two characters in the video is the choice of the goal they would pursue to solve their problem; the same happens inside teams too when they are looking for a good solution the a rising problem.

Strange: the goal and the solution of a problem sometime seem so tied together that just one amongst many possible different solving actions is transformed immediately into a goal and the person/teams struggle to pursue this objective instead of let evolving actions for the solution of the problem.

So, starting with the first instinctive response, the two allied opponents have set their goal and immediately forgotten the problem they had to face: Problem/Solution indeed belong to a higher abstraction level compared with goals, but Goal is easier to be maintained.

Just when many attempts to achieve the same goal (not to speak about the many repeating actions peoples normally do to achieve the same wrong goal!), peoples normally accept to discuss their original goal. Indeed just the not human player found the right solution in the movie!

So to have a solution to a problem, local goals must be frequently reshaped on the fly (!)

 

Moreover, in this particular case there is another important factor the main attacking players would not take into account: John Nash's Equilibrium Theory. Using that, they could get the right response to the disturbing flying object! And again: just a not human player gave the answer.

 

I have no idea how well prepared was Alan Short about human mind and John Nash's theory, but sometime artists are able to recognize things that scientists reach after a long while!

Corollary to Lawrence Peter's law

Following a discussion about system inaction here, I can enunciate my Postulate to Peter's law extended to Systems (Human organizations): every observable and manageable system is full of peoples who tend to avoid any decision until they are obliged to do that! Every system (human structure) tends to attract peoples that feel themselves protected in similar structures. Every position is occupied by persons that do not bother higher levels taking not foreseen actions. A person is promoted to a higher level until he does not produce problems. When they reach a position that starts to create problems at that time the person is paralyzed! The functional area the person occupies is then blocked. Sooner or later all the position in an organization are occupied by paralyzed peoples All functional areas are then blocked. Every system doesn't react till is obliged to do it. At that time it starts to eject peoples in the areas involved, creating innovation for a short time.