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

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ryzno
I recall saying I started wearing a mask after I posted a link here saying that the strain of Covid was how do I say, morphing into different strains.
I was dumb for not wearing it and changed my mind after taking to you fine people here. Also I needed to go to the store at some point. Can't go in with no mask. Though I do perfer my camouflage bandana.
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I assumed based on your history here that you weren't serious so I'm happy to be wrong about that.
 
Joey D
The problem with something like COVID is that in order to get to herd immunity quickly, we're going to run into an issue with hospitals getting overrun. If there was a proven, effective treatment for COVID then I'd agree that building a heard immunity would work. People could just get sick, get a prescription, stay at home for a couple of days to recover, and then be good. But the problem is we don't have an effective treatment and while a majority of people can just stay home and recover, many can't. So what would happen is that you'd have a ton of people get sick all at once and flood the healthcare system. This would not only result in people dying from COVID, it'd also prevent people who need the healthcare system for other things to not get the care they needed.

I don't think a lockdown is currently needed, but people should be staying at home and doing all the can to prevent contracting COVID.

In talking with the head of infectious disease where I work, he believes we're on track to have a vaccine by December. Then in Q1 of 2021 people in nursing homes would get it along with clinical staff that has direct contact with patients. By Q2 we'll see others starting to get it based on their need and by Q3 it'll be available for everyone. So there's no sense in rushing herd immunity if we're within a year of getting vaccinated.
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Joey, has there been any more research into whether or not re-infection is a legitimate concern, or were the case studies that came out of S. Korea (I think) & a couple others confirming a re-infection, caused by random variables that aligned to infect those folks again? I remember the S. Korea study making a note that re-infection would throw a major wrench into any desire for herd immunity.
 
McLaren
Joey, has there been any more research into whether or not re-infection is a legitimate concern, or were the case studies that came out of S. Korea (I think) & a couple others confirming a re-infection, caused by random variables that aligned to infect those folks again? I remember the S. Korea study making a note that re-infection would throw a major wrench into any desire for herd immunity.
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I don't think there's been a ton of research yet. As of right now, I believe the only two confirmed instances are in South Korea and one in Reno, Nevada (although the Reno case is awaiting peer review). I talked with a buddy of mine who works for the University of Michigan health system and said that one of their microbiology professors, Dr. Adam Lauring, recently gave a talk about it. He basically said while reinfection is probable, people shouldn't worry right now since it's a fraction of a percent. Our head of infectious disease has said pretty much the same thing too.

I tend to agree too. While I think reinfection can happen in some cases, I don't believe it'll be the norm. I think we will eventually find that patients with X condition can get COVID multiple times. Whether that's an immune disorder, something present in the blood, etc.

What I keep hearing is that the bigger worry is not the reinfection but what potential lingering effects someone can get from COVID. Everyone I've talked to basically says they are far more worried about people developing respiratory or cardiovascular diseases because of the virus than they are about people getting COVID multiple times.

With regards to research, I think there are some more studies still in the works but the conditions to confirm the hypothesis of getting COVID more than once is difficult. The patient would need to have two pretty sound samples for researchers to compare. Simply comparing test results wouldn't work since COVID tests are only about 80%-ish accurate.
 
novcze
Come on, not all wanted to follow them and not everybody did follow them. We all seen pictures from Sweden.
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That's true, not everyone did. But the vast majority did.
The deaths we have had was 90% old people at old people's homes where the virus had free access since the caretakers didn't use visors and mouth guards.
But yes, some went out and went to restaurants. And the restaurants that didn't keep the distance between customers where shut down by authorities. So some enforcement was done.

But we are pretty good at following guidelines here. As an example Italy has mandatory vaccination for measles and vaccinates 68-75% of children.
We have voluntary and vaccinates 96% of children. And I can tell you that most towns and cities looked like ghost towns.
 
DesertPenguin
So we're just ignoring all the facts and data about a symptomatic cases?
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No. But can you tell me how many of them there are? Because that would be really useful. The way pcr testing works could be tuned in this manner to produce useful results.

@JoeyD If everybody kept getting the same disease over and over again, then we'd have all died out by now. There will always be a few outliers.

UKMikey
So if we ignore the lock-down we might catch the virus but are unlikely to die from it? That's not very reassuring.
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Yes. For reassurance check this out https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12641004/flu-pneumonia-killed-ten-times-brits-covid-last-week/. How scared were you by the flu last year?

What I find particularly amusing about all this mask business, is that those proponents of the masks would be the first to call Conspiracy Theorists - "tin-foil hat wearing loonies". If there's the slightest chance that the tinfoil hats work then shouldn't you all be wearing them?

Quote from Telegraph article by someone in Sweden https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/sweden-really-like-right-now-masks/
Swedes actually revel in being fearless, and wear rationality as a badge of honour, which is why, perhaps, we’re behaving differently to the rest of the world. If you allow yourself to be ruled by fear, then what kind of life is that? We’re a fatalistic lot. “What happens will happen”, people say. “We’re not God.” Our own media’s reporting is not hysterical, as Britons will be used to. Yes, the pandemic is still headline news, but sensationalism is absent and the journalist code is always to put forward a variety of opinions. We had daily briefings at the height of the crisis, but our state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was clear and honest – and didn’t pile on the fear. He admitted that nobody really knows the best strategy, but that lockdown would be “like killing a fly with a hammer”. We were offered reassurance that only certain groups were at risk, and he explained that face masks are not proven to be effective in the community – so they were never introduced.
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x3ra
No. But can you tell me how many of them there are? Because that would be really useful. The way pcr testing works could be tuned in this manner to produce useful results.

@JoeyD If everybody kept getting the same disease over and over again, then we'd have all died out by now. There will always be a few outliers.

Yes. For reassurance check this out https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12641004/flu-pneumonia-killed-ten-times-brits-covid-last-week/. How scared were you by the flu last year?

What I find particularly amusing about all this mask business, is that those proponents of the masks would be the first to call Conspiracy Theorists - "tin-foil hat wearing loonies". If there's the slightest chance that the tinfoil hats work then shouldn't you all be wearing them?

Quote from Telegraph article by someone in Sweden https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/sweden-really-like-right-now-masks/
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While that quote is true the headline on the article isn't. Face masks are getting more common and we are maybe proud of being rational but we never stare at people who distinguish themselves. It's not polite.
 
x3ra
@JoeyD If everybody kept getting the same disease over and over again, then we'd have all died out by now. There will always be a few outliers.
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People do get the same disease multiple times, probably the two most known ones are the common cold and influenza. While you won't get rhinovirus with serotype A again (at least not right away) you can easily get rhinovirus with serotype B. Same goes for influenza A and B.
 
Speaking of the flu, this season shouldn't be that bad with all covid precautions.

Data from Australian winter suggest that could be the case
 
UKMikey
I got a flu jab. Where's the Covid jab?

Give me bloody strength...
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Well you'll be safe 40-60% of the time.

While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm

Better than a mask though.


 
x3ra
Well you'll be safe 40-60% of the time.

While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to the flu vaccine. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm

Better than a mask though.
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The other 60%-40% of the time I'm unlikely to end up stuck on a ventilator or causing any elderly relatives or respiratorially-challenged friends in my vicinity to do the same. Swap the flu for Covid, however, and we don't know what'll happen so it's irresponsible to behave as if we do until more results are in.
 
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Joey D
People do get the same disease multiple times, probably the two most known ones are the common cold and influenza. While you won't get rhinovirus with serotype A again (at least not right away) you can easily get rhinovirus with serotype B. Same goes for influenza A and B.
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Two questions. Where's the cold vaccine? And if you can catch it twice then what good is a vaccine?

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This article should make you feel better about the worries of a second wave https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/
 
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x3ra
Two questions. Where's the cold vaccine? And if you can catch it twice then what good is a vaccine?
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We did this already, in July already:
Famine
Flu is a rather broad term covering a group of symptoms for a disease caused by any one of a number of different types of an entire family of viruses called "influenzavirus", each with tens of different subtypes, each with hundreds of different strains (not "strands"). Influenza vaccine typically has three of the most common types - one Influenza A virus of H1N1 subtype, one Influenza A virus of H3N2 subtype, and one Influenza B virus - and it is effective at vaccinating against those viruses. It doesn't vaccinate against any of the others, so you can still get "the flu" from them.

A immunisation doesn't work against viruses that are not the specific strain immunised against. You can pick up flu from Influenzavirus A/H1N1/09 if you were vaccinated against Influenzavirus A/H1N1/NA. That doesn't mean that the vaccine didn't work, it means you caught a disease from a different virus....


It's very odd to link flu vaccines to a putative COVID-19 vaccine, because COVID-19 is a disease caused by a single virus, called SARS-CoV-2. If a vaccine is created for SARS-CoV-2, it will vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2, and if it's effective you won't get COVID-19.
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A cold vaccine doesn't exist for the same reason - there's hundreds of viruses that cause colds (amusingly, some of them are coronaviruses) so it isn't possible to create a vaccine that prevents you from getting a cold... and there's simply no reason to create one. Colds do not cause widespread death and debilitation, or even missed days of work, so there's no financial motivation outlay required to create a vaccine.

The latter point is also the reason why there's never been a vaccine against any one particular coronavirus strain - they simply haven't been that bad before. Not even SARS or MERS. Except the one in chickens, where the financial outlay from creating it is more than recouped by chicken stocks (both meat and laying) not dying.
 
Famine
Colds do not cause ... missed days of work,
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Some of my coworkers would beg to differ. A simple cough and saying you don't feel well will get you out of work.
Checks FB: coworker is at the lake fishing...
 
x3ra
This article should make you feel better about the worries of a second wave https://lockdownsceptics.org/addressing-the-cv19-second-wave/
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That article is quite staggering in several ways.

Firstly, it is not peer-reviewed. It is not even a pre-print - it's a self-published opinion piece with no review whatsoever. Alarm bells.

Secondly, it's already out of date. Although this version is dated last week, the text states it was written in mid-August.. but it also looks like it has been updated before that too (see references), suggesting the original text was written at least a few months ago. And while the text may have been updated, the data shown only goes up to August 23rd.

The key contention of the article is that the rise in cases observed in Europe since the 'first wave' are artefacts caused by increased testing. And as of August 23rd, in the UK at least, that was probably true... testing in the UK has increased linearly since the beginning of April, and the increase in cases in the UK since the beginning of July is consistent with that.

Unfortunately, the data from the last three weeks destroys that narrative completely. Pity, then, that the article and the data shown therein doesn't show this, even though it was supposedly updated a few days ago...

As such, it already has a touch of the Murray Walker's about it - ("I don't make mistakes, I just make predictions that immediately turn out to be wrong...").

Lastly, they are looking for donations - really?!
 
Touring Mars
That article is quite staggering in several ways.

Firstly, it is not peer-reviewed. It is not even a pre-print - it's a self-published opinion piece with no review whatsoever. Alarm bells.
.....
Lastly, they are looking for donations - really?!
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I guess the writer knows he's about to be canned so he is looking to raise money to keep up his lifestyle while unemployed.
 
ryzno
Some of my coworkers would beg to differ. A simple cough and saying you don't feel well will get you out of work.
Checks FB: coworker is at the lake fishing...
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There's malingerers everywhere, but colds don't cause widespread missed work days:
Famine
Colds do not cause widespread death and debilitation, or even missed days of work, so there's no financial motivation outlay required to create a vaccine.
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Of course now a simple cough gets you two weeks off...
 
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ryzno
Some of my coworkers would beg to differ. A simple cough and saying you don't feel well will get you out of work.
Checks FB: coworker is at the lake fishing...
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In all fairness, not being at work doesn't necessarily mean you are incapacitated. One of my guys was told to self isolate for two weeks since he'd been in close contact with someone that tested positive... he was fine - not symptomatic at all. If he was at a lake fishing, or smashing FIFA tournaments on the Playstation then so be it, so long as he's alone... he's subsequently tested positive for the virus. So from the company perspective, job done.
 
Washington State has a population of 7.615 million. We have conducted 1,644,524 tests. The 28 day moving average of positive results has declined from 5.8% to 5.0 %. The goal is 2% positive to allow a removal of lockdown.
 
Dotini
Washington State has a population of 7.615 million. We have conducted 1,644,524 tests. The 28 day moving average of positive results has declined from 5.8% to 5.0 %. The goal is 2% positive to allow a removal of lockdown.
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From my reading of the Washington government website, it looks like there is not a lockdown in place. Phase 1 (which I gather is the most restrictive phase, in place in only a few counties) doesn't look like lockdown. It's a partial reopening.
 
Northstar
There isn't one because the "common cold" is merely an umbrella term covering about 200 different viruses.

https://www.cdc.gov/antibiotic-use/community/for-patients/common-illnesses/colds.html
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Famine
We did this already, in July already:

A cold vaccine doesn't exist for the same reason - there's hundreds of viruses that cause colds (amusingly, some of them are coronaviruses) so it isn't possible to create a vaccine that prevents you from getting a cold... and there's simply no reason to create one. Colds do not cause widespread death and debilitation, or even missed days of work, so there's no financial motivation outlay required to create a vaccine.

The latter point is also the reason why there's never been a vaccine against any one particular coronavirus strain - they simply haven't been that bad before. Not even SARS or MERS. Except the one in chickens, where the financial outlay from creating it is more than recouped by chicken stocks (both meat and laying) not dying.
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Can we get an international health organization (like the WHO) working on vaccines for all of this stuff? Imagine how fantastically good we'd be at responding to a pandemic and developing new vaccines if we actually tried to knock out tons and tons of diseases. Even ones which don't kill a lot of people.

Perhaps we've been a little too tolerant of viruses, and should be systematically eliminating them from existence rather than letting them mutate into pandemics which shut down the world.

Also... along this note... at what point does a person's immune system stop storing new information? Surely we can't respond to an infinite number of vaccines.
 
Danoff
Can we get an international health organization (like the WHO) working on vaccines for all of this stuff? Imagine how fantastically good we'd be at responding to a pandemic and developing new vaccines if we actually tried to knock out tons and tons of diseases. Even ones which don't kill a lot of people.

Perhaps we've been a little too tolerant of viruses, and should be systematically eliminating them from existence rather than letting them mutate into pandemics which shut down the world.

Also... along this note... at what point does a person's immune system stop storing new information? Surely we can't respond to an infinite number of vaccines.
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I agree with you but have a feeling that the reason the world doesn’t pursue preventative measures like this is because without instant beneficial results it's hard to financially justify. Look what happened to the pandemic response team in the US.
 
UKMikey
I agree with you but have a feeling that the reason the world doesn’t pursue preventative measures like this is because without instant beneficial results it's hard to financially justify. Look what happened to the pandemic response team in the US.
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Let's call it national defense or preserving the peace or some kind of humanitarian effort then. One of those *waives hands*.
 
Danoff
Let's call it national defense or preserving the peace or some kind of humanitarian effort then. One of those *waives hands*.
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I'm not sure what you're going to do without your hands :lol: but presumably this is how Obama justified the program to Congress in the first place (unless he forced it through via executive order). We're all on the same side here but it's hard to see why Trump yanked the programme in the first place. I'm guessing it was tainted in his mind by association with his hated predecessor.

His efforts to discredit the WHO (alongside the WHO's own, to be fair) wouldn't help with their setting up such a programme in other countries, I feel.
 
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