I upvoted this just because of the nature.com link - but after I actually read it, I am disapointed. Summary:
Q: Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?
A: We don't know yet
The results presented not verified by experiments yet.
"But some researchers are cautious about overstating the role of the activation site in helping the coronavirus to spread more easily. “We don’t know if this is going to be a big deal or not,” says Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin"
Professor Christian Drosten from the Charite clinic in Berlin, Germany, estimates the virus could infect up to 70 percent of the world or 5.2 billion people.
He said: “Presumably between 60 and 70 percent of the people will get infected but we don’t know in what timeframe.
“It can be two years or even longer. It will be more problematic if the infections occur in a short amount of time.
“That is why authorities are doing everything to recognise the origin of infections and slow down any further spread of the infection.”
According to Professor Drosten, the coronavirus epidemic could even match the Asian flu pandemic of 1957 and the 1968 flu pandemic, which began in Hong Kong.
In the former case, the Asian flu is estimated to have killed between one and two million people.
Professor Drosten said: “If the whole pandemic process lasts two years, we will manage.
“If it is only a year, it will be much more difficult because many more cases will occur all at the same time.
“The necessary number of beds for patients requiring intensive care unit therapy is difficult to predict.
Presumably between 60 and 70 percent of the people will get infected
Professor Christian Drosten, Charite clinic
“If we don’t do anything now, they may not be enough.”
On the other hand... OCR is meanwhile so good that it can be used for many PDF text extraction projects. So often there is no longer the need to bother with PDF internals, just screenshot the PDF document and parse it. A free pdf ocr service is for example ocr.space.
The amount of up- and downvoting on anything China related feels insane. I wish someone at Hackernews will write a blog post about this some day (accounts, IP addresses, and whatever other data they have). From a casual reader perspective, I feel I have not seen this pattern on other controversial topics that sometimes show up here, e. g. gun control.