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Here's the phylogenetic tree for Washington State. Only recently (this past week) have cases shown up in WA state (in the sampling that has been done - not nearly every case is sequenced) which are from other locations other than the "Washington Patient 0" case (imports).
So it's reasonable to think that nearly all of the infections in Washington State (to date) are due to that traveler from Wuhan in mid-January who was identified and quarantined and contact-traced (but the virus escaped in spite of those efforts). That virus circulated undetected for a couple weeks. The Flu Study picked it up after a couple weeks, knew it was likely COVID-19, but was not allowed to run a test to confirm it. They finally were allowed to confirm it at the end of February. There was a story in Seattle Times that gives all the details on the timeline; I'm too lazy to look it up right now.
We live in the subrubs of Portland, OR. Washington is very Puget Sound-centric and even though the Vancouver, WA metro are is just about tied for second largest in the state (with Spokane), it's ignored by the state to a large degree.
There is a lot of travel between Seattle and Portland, so it is quite possible the strain we got originated in Seattle. It's also almost certain that some strains will never be sequenced because they popped up and died out quickly. RNA viruses mutate faster than DNA because they only have one strand of genetic material and no way to repair damaged strands.
A mutation that leaves a virus still virulent, but only quasi stable may fall apart at its next mutation and not spread. Other reasons are a single point introduction of a strain into a population could die out quickly because it has a mutation to be less contagious, or the number of people infected by case 1 is small and those people don't spread it for some reason. I work from home all the time and my SO does most of the time, plus we're pretty careful about washing hands and such all the time.
I've never liked shaking hands with people, avoid it when possible, and for years have made a point of not touching my face after shaking hands with someone and washing my hands as soon as possible afterwards. Handshaking is a vector for transmitting cold and flu way and I haven't had a full blown illness of any kind in over 10 years. It's a bit OCD of me, but it works.
with mouser and digikey (and a few other) you know you're getting real parts.
I'm also going to play with UVC and see what I can come up with. I ordered an assortment of bulbs, both glass and led. need to work out the 'box' and timer stuff, but that's just mechanics.
what I (and others) want to know is - how do we know when we're done? what is the DoD (definition of 'done')? we can throw power and time at it, but any way to detect when the virus is deactivated? that's the trick.
or, if we knew what the equiv time and power needed was, we could measure it (with what sensor, btw?) and use calibrated tables. at least that would be something.
I didn't read the whole thread today so this might have been answered: DoD (Department of Defense) spec parts are built to survive more extreme temperatures. Though counterfeit parts are a big problem in the electronics industry hitting even the highest rep companies. About 10 years ago NEC ended up with a large batch of counterfeit capacitors in their monitors. There are replacement kits you can buy to replace the originals with more reliable capacitors. The counterfeits tended to pop open after a while.
I had a monitor that was affected, replaced the capacitors and it's still functional.
I also work for a company that makes IC testing equipment and they are starting to branch out into counterfeit IC testing. I wrote the software for the tester and the guy I report to is running the testing program. Some of the testing they have been called to do is test batches of out of production parts that a company acquired for a production project. They need that part and had to scour the remaining supplies out there and remaining supply is sometimes filled with bad parts that have been sitting around a long time.
But they also test new, in production parts sometimes to see if a batch is full of counterfeits. Unscrupulous suppliers, often in China, clone popular parts with cheaper materials and/or poorer production controls and end up with parts that may initially work, but will fail down the road or will only work marginally.
Alaska Airlines lost and MD-80 off Los Angeles about 20 years ago due to some counterfeit bolts that came out of China. The bolts needed to be hardened for high stress use and it turned out they were soft steel that were marked as hardened.
From what I've heard Digikey and Mouser do get burned with counterfeits sometimes, but they are actively working to keep their supply chain clean, so their parts are probably more reliable than say somebody chosen at random on EBay.
Am I seeing that correctly: The death rate among closed cases is 13% ? How does this number relate to the usually much lower numbers?
As noted above the number of closed cases is still small and probably a very high percentage of the active cases will see full recovery. Additionally there are quite a few asymptomatic and mild cases that are not reported in the data. If you could count then and include them in the data, the death rate would fall into single digits. Probably less than 1% in places with good healthcare systems that didn't reach the critical thresh hold of overwhelm.
The 1918 flu worldwide killed about 675,000 people in the US, which was about 0.6% of the population. For most things something affecting that small a percentage of the population would be ignored. If say that is the percentage of Americans without internet (it's probably more, but just as an example) that would be considered pretty darn good market penetration. If unemployment reached 0.6% that would be a historic achievement.
But 0.6% of the population all dying of the same cause in a short period of time, especially when it becomes the dominant news story is very traumatic. And there is the medical system tightrope walk through the crisis. Where the medical system gets overwhelmed deaths skyrocket because savable patients die because they can't get medical care. That's the nightmare everyone wants to avoid if at all possible.
