Half the world population lives in south east Asia. So there's a lot lot lot of chances for rare things to happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#:~:text=The%20Valeriepieris%20circle%20is%20a,than%20half%20the%20world's%20population.

The fifth person cured with a CCR5∆32 bone marrow transplant was announced today. At least it hit my feed today anyway.

No clue. It's a very small effect, that's why we only just noticed it recently.

Emotions trigger the same brain systems as physical pain for bad feelings. paracetamol must turn down pain by effecting common part of the system. So you blunt both physical pain and emotional pain and therefore you can't feel pain for other people.

Strep isn't viral. True strep is caused by streptococcus bacterium. That's how it got it's name strep, short for streptococcus. There are a bunch of ways to have an irritated throat that aren't strep though.

Sounds like a job for ERV/HRV

Aerobic respiration releases about 10x more energy than anaerobic respiration from the same energy sources. Oxygen is one of the best oxidizers that is commonly available which is why it's able to do that. There are much stronger oxidizers known to chemistry which could release even more energy. However if you get much stronger than oxygen they start reacting so easily with other things, those chemicals would destroy all the other molecules that make up an organism.

It's the first time we've had the biotech to follow the evolution of a viral pandemic in real time. We already mostly knew how it transmitted. Most of the discussion was really around the edges. We knew coronaviruses transmit mostly by air. But there was a really technical quibble about how far the particles that carry the virus could spread. Some viruses spread with very small particles in the air and can stay in the air for a long time. For others the particles that carry enough virus to get you sick are too large to stay in the air. They mostly settle out fairly quickly. The sanitizing groceries thing, it's still possible the virus might transmit that way a very little bit. It's not enough to be important however.

The hard part about studying transmission is that you can't do the most direct experiments that would settle the question. It's considered very unethical to intentionally infect someone, even infecting healthy informed volunteers is pretty controversial. Which is what would be need to answer the question directly. So you have to watch for "natural experiments" where things just happened in a way that you can get the information. You have to be pretty lucky to find them unfortunately.