Day: March 7, 2020

Chart 1. The serious cases are at the lowest level since Feb 6th, over a month ago. Remember my ‘rule:’ you can’t die without being a serious case somewhere in the system, so a good predictor of the next week or so. It also broke an upward tick of serious cases we had a day ago; the down today might be a weekend reporting effect (folks are less vigilant in hospitals, etc. over the weekend) so will keep an eye on it.

Because the ‘coastal folks’ dominate the gadgets, cell phones, newspapers, etc. it is easy to forget that sometimes what goes on in the middle of the country can change the world.

So what does Coralville, IA, population 18,000, have to do with the coronavirus? Everything! This rural, largely farming community is ground zero for a key part of the science of this virus

In 1987 Dr. Joseph Walder was a newly minted MD, PhD from Northwestern with a vision: to start a company specializing in making DNA/RNA, arguably the most complex molecules in nature. The company became IDT, Integrated DNA Technologies. I worked with them about 13 years ago when I was developing a piece of RNA as a drug for Rheumatoid Arthritis. The darn thing worked well but my own little Shakespearean drama prevented it from being developed…you can learn what happened when the records are unsealed in 50 years! 🙂

Joe is a solid, salt of the earth man, great scientist, a practicing Jew, who just likes to get things done!

Fast forward to early January, when the first listing of the 30,000 letters in this virus’s DNA were available. Joe’s company was among the first to make a probe, a tool, that is the key part of a testing kit. When the hair-on-fire CDC folks contacted him about helping to make a test kit for the CDC he had already finished the weeks long process of making the tools and so FedEx could get them to the CDC by 10 am the next day. His company continues to make the probes for about 100% of the test kits in the entire US!

So next time you are on your five hour flight from LA to NY, look out the window at hour three and smile down on Coralville, the world’s center of coronavirus testing kit components.

Here is an interview with Joe! A few years ago he sold this little business he started for about $2 billion and is now splitting his time between IDT and his charitable efforts. This interview below focuses on the latter efforts.

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A/K/A the [China, South Korea, Italy, Iran] Virus:

95% of total cases in those four countries 88% of active cases in those four countries 86% of new cases in last 24 hours in those four countries

US report: five days of 7-8 serious cases is encouraging. This stability means when a death takes someone off this list they are being replaced with a new serious patient at about the same rate. Personally sad of course but public health perspective encouraging. If serious number starts to grow it is serious.

The South Korea [serious]/[active] ratio, applied to the US, suggests about 1500 active cases in US. South Korea has best DNA testing data.

US testing is the gap between 335 ‘total cases’ reported here and the untested, asymptomatic 1165 or so because US testing is just coming on line. So expect an artificial ‘surge’ in US cases over next week as DNA evidence replaces clinical symptoms.

Ending today on a positive note, for the first time in human history the evolutionary changes in a community epidemic of a new virus is being tracked in real time. The color coded genealogy in the middle is tied to the colors in the map on the right of where the specimen came from. Bubble size is number of cases from that location. Time is on the x-axis and each jump/indent is a new mutation.

The diversity line at the bottom is CRITICAL to vaccine development. This is the virus on truth serum telling the humans what part of its DNA book is critical and what part is changeable. Vaccines will zero in on the parts the virus is saying it can’t ‘live’ without; the places where no vertical lines tell you a mutation has occurred. So, for example, the right end of the DNA book has too many changes to be good for a vaccine. Etc… The observation that there are few long spaces without DNA mistakes is the reason a vaccine will be so hard to come up with.

24/7, as the sun travels over the sky, scientists are ‘reading’ viruses and putting their data into this system.

This whole, worldwide project is coordinated by our very own Seattle/Fred Hutch scientist, Trevor Bedford.