COVID-19/Coronavirus Information and Support Thread (see OP for useful links)

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I can't read the article as I don't pay for the WSJ, but going by the headline, wouldn't that mean the entire US or even the world at large has experienced Covid-19 since the fall? And if so, do hospitalization rates pre-lockdown reflect a potential outbreak that went unnoticed?
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The WSJ article seems to be debunking the theory. And given the National Review sourcing, I'd wager the theory is founded upon the notion that those pinko libtards over in Kalifornistan couldn't possibly get something right.

Why they need to concoct something so elaborate, instead of just questioning testing rates or the veracity of the figures provided by officials in California, I don't know.
 
View attachment 914460 View attachment 914461The WSJ article seems to be debunking the theory. And given the National Review sourcing, I'd wager the theory is founded upon the notion that those pinko libtards over in Kalifornistan couldn't possibly get something right.

Why they need to concoct something so elaborate, instead of just questioning testing rates or the veracity of the figures provided by officials in California, I don't know.

Ah, gotcha. I always assumed California was less effected simply because they're nothing like the East coast where everyone lives stacked on top of each other. If I'm not mistaken, you don't have to go too far away from many large east coast cities to see infection/death rates similar to that of California.
 
I can't read the article as I don't pay for the WSJ, but going by the headline, wouldn't that mean the entire US or even the world at large has experienced Covid-19 since the fall? And if so, do hospitalization rates pre-lockdown reflect a potential outbreak that went unnoticed?
The WSJ story is an opinion piece in the business section. Nothing in it is peer reviewed. In view of the many unreliability reports of CDC test kits and the antibody tests, I personally feel the best approach going forward is the precautionary principle. In my case, that means isolation and social distancing to the maximum extent possible. The most interesting sentence I draw from the article is this one:

“We are in a completely fluid situation, more of the certainties of the last 5 weeks have been proven uncertain and we should entertain an open mind about the next patient zero, the likely number of infected, the lethality of the virus,” as well as “the track record of ‘not likely’ or ‘likely’ assessments.”​

It is a theory that seems to be spreading as quickly as the virus itself: The new coronavirusis infecting relatively few in California because the state suffered a silent outbreak as far back as the fall, well before official reports indicate it hit the U.S. As a result, the theory goes, many residents are now resistant to the disease.

The hypothesis, sparked by an article written for the conservative National Review by a military historian affiliated with Stanford University, went viral in recent weeks. Questions around when and how quickly the virus began to spread resurfaced Tuesday, after authorities in the San Francisco Bay Area reported that the first U.S. death from the virus took place in one of its counties on Feb. 6—nearly three weeks earlier than previously reported.

The theory, that the first U.S. cases could have occurred undetected months earlier, has been used to support arguments that social distancing, as being practiced in California and many other places, might be unnecessary.

The first diagnosed case in the U.S. was on Jan. 21 in Washington state, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists say there is no scientific evidence to indicate the virus was circulating last year. They point to testing on patients with respiratory symptoms on the West Coast that revealed very few cases even in February, and note the genetic blueprint of the virus hadn’t significantly mutated in February and March, based on studies of samples from patients in California. Viruses tend to mutate over time.

Recent studies indicate that while the number of infections is likely greatly underreported, nowhere near enough Californians are infected to generate the kind of vast herd immunity required to damp the virus.

“Any talk about the virus circulating in the fall has no scientific evidence,” said Charles Chiu, an infectious-diseases expert at the University of California, San Francisco.

Viruses mutate as they infect more people, gradually straying from their original blueprint. To test whether the novel coronavirus was newly introduced to California, or had been circulating there for a long time, Dr. Chiu examined the genomes of a number of local cases.

Dr. Chiu mapped several known strains of the virus in the 29 people who tested positive in Northern California between Feb. 3 and March 15. “Early infections disproportionately occurred in returning travelers,” he said.

The strain circulating aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship that docked in Oakland matched the first known U.S. infection in January. Two individuals from the same household in San Mateo County matched a strain from China. And other individuals from the same county matched strains circulating in Europe. Dr. Chiu’s research is being peer-reviewed.

In a separate study that hasn’t yet been reviewed, Dr. Chiu found 20 of the first 46 patients diagnosed at UCSF had traveled to places such as Europe and New York, among other U.S. cities. That dovetails with other research that found that early infections detected in California closely resemble strains earlier reported elsewhere, suggesting visiting or returning travelers introduced the infection rather than that it was circulating over time.

To examine the early spread of Covid-19—the disease caused by the virus—in the San Francisco Bay Area, researchers tested nasopharyngeal samples collected from people between Jan. 1 and Feb. 26. Those people sought care for respiratory problems at Stanford Health Care but tested negative for common respiratory viruses. Of the 2,888 patients screened, only two tested positive for Covid-19.

“Our results suggest that viral prevalence in the Bay Area was low before February,” said Benjamin Pinsky, medical director of Stanford’s clinical virology laboratory, whose findings were vetted by other experts and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this month.

A similar study of more than 6,900 people who reported flu-like symptoms in Seattle earlier this year detected its first Covid-19 infection in late February.

Doctors testing for antibodies, which show whether an individual was previously infected, do say the number of U.S. infections is grossly underestimated. Earlier this month, researchers estimated that 2.8% to 5.6% of Los Angeles County’s 10 million adults had been infected at some point.

Those numbers, however, are nowhere close to the levels typically needed for herd immunity of 50% or above, said Michael Busch, director of the Vitalant Research Institute, which is conducting a nationwide serology study funded by the National Institutes of Health. “I doubt we’ll see more than 5% to 10% of the U.S. population immune,” Dr. Busch said.

Victor Davis Hanson, the author of the National Review article, said in a follow-up piece dated April 11 that he didn’t claim to be a “doctor, much less an epidemiologist or a conductor of any such study,” and that he wasn’t affiliated with Stanford’s medical school.

In an email, Mr. Hanson added, “We are in a completely fluid situation, more of the certainties of the last 5 weeks have been proven uncertain and we should entertain an open mind about the next patient zero, the likely number of infected, the lethality of the virus,” as well as “the track record of ‘not likely’ or ‘likely’ assessments.”

His theory lives on. In a series of tweets last week, conservative radio-show host Bill Mitchell pushed the idea of herd immunity to his hundreds of thousands of followers. “The downside of social distancing, assuming it works at all, is that it prevents herd immunity,” he wrote.

San Francisco interior designer Susan Collins spied the theory on Twitter. Now she believes her dry cough in December means she is one of the many Californians who has already contracted, and recovered from, coronavirus.

“I’m convinced I had it,” she said. “A ton of people are out there saying the virus has been around for much longer than we think. It’s totally believable.”
 
Ah, gotcha. I always assumed California was less effected simply because they're nothing like the East coast where everyone lives stacked on top of each other. If I'm not mistaken, you don't have to go too far away from many large east coast cities to see infection/death rates similar to that of California.
Precisely. Major population centers in the east were firmly established by the time the automobile came about, while places like Los Angeles grew much later and sprawled out more. It's why cities like New York and Phila del Phia have comparatively low pollution per capita, since walking and mass public transit are major means of transportation by virtue of workplaces and residences being separated by shorter distances.

I'm given to understand San Francisco has experienced a higher rate of infection than Los Angeles, but it too is an older, smaller and more densely populated city.
 
So it begins...

Personally, I'm inclined to say that if you ingest disinfectant you deserve everything you get.

I want to say fake news but I am afraid it is not really a news.. One thing I don't understand. Did they seek medical attention or did they just called for advice?

And people need to read/listen more carefully. He suggested injection not ingestion! :banghead:
 
I want to say fake news but I am afraid it is not really a news.. One thing I don't understand. Did they seek medical attention or did they just called for advice?

And people need to read/listen more carefully. He suggested injection not ingestion! :banghead:
The article may not be completely accurate in suggesting that they are brainwashed Trumpists. CDC figures show a spike in calls in March, long before 45 gave his dubious advice. It could be that people are worried about accidentally swallowing cleaning products as a result of their increased use in the wake of the pandemic. Not that this makes the President any less of an asshole for propagating such a theory.

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The article may not be completely accurate in suggesting that they are brainwashed Trumpists. CDC figures show a spike in calls in March, long before 45 gave his dubious advice. It could be that people are worried about accidentally swallowing cleaning products as a result of their increased use in the wake of the pandemic. Not that this makes the President any less of an asshole for propagating such a theory.

That or maybe the Gen-Z crowd are socially deprived in isolation and upped the anti in the Tide pod challenge to compensate for a lack of attention. God help that crowd. I'm half joking.
 
That or maybe the Gen-Z crowd are socially deprived in isolation and upped the anti in the Tide pod challenge to compensate for a lack of attention. God help that crowd. I'm half joking.
Gen-Z must be better at sourcing detergent than I am... my favourite brand is all sold out.
 
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A possible explanation for anomalously high infection rates in in northern Italy and other polluted areas: viruses carried on air pollution particles, wafting in the breezes and falling from the sky above you.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/scien...MkJs4Bvpyu1mRkOFIDEpxp7SWsrvNmJFo9mE6GXJu-0p8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/24/coronavirus-detected-particles-air-pollution

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20061713v1
Interesting theory but would we not expect to see many more cases in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc?
 
A possible explanation for anomalously high infection rates in in northern Italy and other polluted areas: viruses carried on air pollution particles, wafting in the breezes and falling from the sky above you.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/scien...MkJs4Bvpyu1mRkOFIDEpxp7SWsrvNmJFo9mE6GXJu-0p8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/24/coronavirus-detected-particles-air-pollution

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20061713v1

I really believe it's simply a result of early, widespread undetected infection & an old population living in shared accommodations with younger family members.
 
I think the only way I'd ever trust a politician with medical advice is if he was a medical doctor himself (or herself). Although, if he were an intelligent doctor, he'd never enter politics.

Ireland's Prime Minister is a doctor and has returned to working one shift a week.

He's still desperately unpopular though.
 
Never said the contrary.
I'm not sure you understand the comment to which you responded. I didn't say you said or didn't say anything.

The message I was addressing with my comment was that when there are explicit warnings on product packaging that indicate the product is harmful to the human body, it probably ought not be taken internally...in any manner.
 
I'm not sure you understand the comment to which you responded. I didn't say you said or didn't say anything.

The message I was addressing with my comment was that when there are explicit warnings on product packaging that indicate the product is harmful to the human body, it probably ought not be taken internally...in any manner.
I understand what you meant.
The part you quoted was just a bad joke to the tweet.
 
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