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

  • Thread starter baldgye
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Danoff
I'd like to know a little more about this. So how is it possible that nobody has immunity (and everyone has lungs), and yet some people won't be infected? Do some people have a natural immunity? I go through life assuming that anyone participating in public can come down with just about any virus, and that eventually they will (barring a vaccine).
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There's a couple of things at play.

The biggest one of all is that most - and overwhelmingly most - cases won't ever be suspected, tested, or recorded. Coronavirus family members generally causes colds, as in the common cold; it's usually a rhinovirus, but sometimes a coronavirus and others. They're almost indistinguishable from a regular cold, and might not even be suspected as anything apart from feeling crap for a day or three. I've got some sniffles and sneezes right now which could be a cold, but I think are "seasonal allergic rhinitis" (hayfever; probably early grass pollen). They might be COVID-19 - I've been out of the house a few times, my youngest goes to school with the great unwashed, my eldest had a weekend in Amsterdam two weeks ago - but I have no real reason to suspect that it is and no cause to be tested.

There is a good chance that two-thirds or more of all COVID-19 cases will never be recorded. Perhaps a small fraction will show up in random blood panels over the next few decades as "apparently you had coronavirus at some point" ("I knew that cold I had in March 2020 was a bit weird!"),


After that it's the transmission method. If it was fully airborne, the conversation would be about who won't get it, but it's not, it's droplet transmission. It essentially needs moist tract mucus to go from host to host, and honestly we're pretty good about keeping our mucus to ourselves most of the time. Societally we don't spit on the floor (we were conditioned out of it during the consumption era), we cover up when we cough rather than hacking into a window or the open air, and we usually wash our hands a lot. Fecal-oral is stymied by having bog lids and hand-washing, sexual transmission is thwarted by the condoms we've been using since HIV.

Probably the riskiest things in our society are shaking hands with someone who doesn't wash after a wee, or using things lots of other people touch (door or shopping trolley handles, McDonald's touchscreens, etc.) - which you can ameliorate by not putting your hands anywhere near your moist face holes until you've washed them. Letting your kid have a bite of your biscuit is another point of entry, solved by JOEY DOESN'T SHARE FOOD.

With SARS-CoV-2 there's a chance it can survive in fine mucosal mist (there's a pleasant thought for you) in the air for a few hours before it hits the floor, so it's possible to pick it up by wandering through places people have openly coughed. For comparison MeV/measles, which is airborne, has a basic reproductive number roughly ten times higher than SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 - on average each infected individual can infect 15-20 susceptible uninfected individuals, compared to two (ish... It's 1.5-3.5 or so at the moment). Of course we vaccinate for that, and with good reason, so measles outbreaks are rare and small - which isn't a limitation for COVID-19.


The last point is completely out of my area of expertise, which is the natural immunity you mention. To cause a disease, a virus has to get into its target cells and reproduce within the cell. Your immune system reacts against foreign bodies - even those it doesn't know definitely are a threat, and sometimes against some which definitely aren't - all the time. The hayfever I mention above is an example of the former, and autoimmune diseases like lupus of the latter. It's never lupus. The immune system doesn't have to know that something is bad, just that it shouldn't be there, and may react to virus particles. The cells may also not take kindly to invasion and self-destruct, so a mere virus entry into the body isn't a guarantee of infection (some viruses do have a 100% success rate though; I think HIV is one). I'm not great on immunology and virology (I did cancer), so Dr. @Touring Mars would be a waaaaaaaay better source.
 
UKMikey
C'mon, man, I just returned from Singapore and in terms of who was infected, where and how you must be one of the best informed populations on the planet. I wish we had as much information in the UK.
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I understand on that, hope you've had a great trip in Singapore despite the outbreak going wild everywhere. What I meant on "unknown situation" refers to the characteristics of the virus, there were cases of incubation period ranging from just few days and into several weeks. No one could determine the actual symptoms or early detection, so it's easily spread during the incubation stages of the virus.

I think I've had a fair share of near-hit and misses of the virus, some of my colleagues were put on immediate leave of absence when it was discovered that they had relatively close contact with a confirmed case. But ultimately we'll never know among ourselves who are the ones affected or safe from it.
 
Famine
There's a couple of things at play.

The biggest one of all is that most - and overwhelmingly most - cases won't ever be suspected, tested, or recorded. Coronavirus family members generally causes colds, as in the common cold; it's usually a rhinovirus, but sometimes a coronavirus and others. They're almost indistinguishable from a regular cold, and might not even be suspected as anything apart from feeling crap for a day or three. I've got some sniffles and sneezes right now which could be a cold, but I think are "seasonal allergic rhinitis" (hayfever; probably early grass pollen). They might be COVID-19 - I've been out of the house a few times, my youngest goes to school with the great unwashed, my eldest had a weekend in Amsterdam two weeks ago - but I have no real reason to suspect that it is and no cause to be tested.

There is a good chance that two-thirds or more of all COVID-19 cases will never be recorded. Perhaps a small fraction will show up in random blood panels over the next few decades as "apparently you had coronavirus at some point" ("I knew that cold I had in March 2020 was a bit weird!"),
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So this bit I count as "you're going to get it".

Famine
After that it's the transmission method. If it was fully airborne, the conversation would be about who won't get it, but it's not, it's droplet transmission. It essentially needs moist tract mucus to go from host to host, and honestly we're pretty good about keeping our mucus to ourselves most of the time. Societally we don't spit on the floor (we were conditioned out of it during the consumption era), we cover up when we cough rather than hacking into a window or the open air, and we usually wash our hands a lot. Fecal-oral is stymied by having bog lids and hand-washing, sexual transmission is thwarted by the condoms we've been using since HIV.

Probably the riskiest things in our society are shaking hands with someone who doesn't wash after a wee, or using things lots of other people touch (door or shopping trolley handles, McDonald's touchscreens, etc.) - which you can ameliorate by not putting your hands anywhere near your moist face holes until you've washed them. Letting your kid have a bite of your biscuit is another point of entry, solved by JOEY DOESN'T SHARE FOOD.

With SARS-CoV-2 there's a chance it can survive in fine mucosal mist (there's a pleasant thought for you) in the air for a few hours before it hits the floor, so it's possible to pick it up by wandering through places people have openly coughed. For comparison MeV/measles, which is airborne, has a basic reproductive number roughly ten times higher than SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 - on average each infected individual can infect 15-20 susceptible uninfected individuals, compared to two (ish... It's 1.5-3.5 or so at the moment). Of course we vaccinate for that, and with good reason, so measles outbreaks are rare and small - which isn't a limitation for COVID-19.
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This bit doesn't make a tons of sense to me. I'd think once a virus reached a certain level, it seems almost impossible to be hygienic enough to prevent it. At some point you're going to inhale a droplet in the air and get it. I'm particularly screwed, because my kids will put their mouths on anything (even my 7 year old still does it occasionally). And then they wipe their nose and shove their used tissues in my face "here daddy, can you throw this away"? Or cough in my eyes... or crawl into my wife's arms in order to vomit... it's a wonder we mange to survive as species.

Famine
The last point is completely out of my area of expertise, which is the natural immunity you mention. To cause a disease, a virus has to get into its target cells and reproduce within the cell. Your immune system reacts against foreign bodies - even those it doesn't know definitely are a threat, and sometimes against some which definitely aren't - all the time. The hayfever I mention above is an example of the former, and autoimmune diseases like lupus of the latter. It's never lupus. The immune system doesn't have to know that something is bad, just that it shouldn't be there, and may react to virus particles. The cells may also not take kindly to invasion and self-destruct, so a mere virus entry into the body isn't a guarantee of infection (some viruses do have a 100% success rate though; I think HIV is one). I'm not great on immunology and virology (I did cancer), so Dr. @Touring Mars would be a waaaaaaaay better source.
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I guess it makes some intuitive sense that some people's bodies are going to be more resistant than others. But it's still wild to me that there is a portion of the general population that we might expect to get exposed and just not get it.
 
So Trump is expected to make another TV address this afternoon. Is it too much to hope that he doesn't say something to make the situation worse? :indiff:
 
Biggles
So Trump is expected to make another TV address this afternoon. Is it too much to hope that he doesn't say something to make the situation worse? :indiff:
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Going on what I'm hearing, he will be invoking the Stafford Act, which will free up FEMA money.
 
Difficult to preserve a decent mood these days. It’s strikingly silent outside, government press conferences are broadcasted several times a day, and most sources of entertainment are either cancelled or in jeopardy.
 
I'm certainly no expert on immunology or virology (I just make virus particles and take pictures of them!), but it is an intriguing question as to how epidemics run out of steam.

It is perhaps counterintuitive... initially, the more people that have a virus, the more likely you are to get it - but.. the longer you go without the virus, the more likely you are not to catch it as the people who had it before are either now non-infectious or dead, thus the chains of infection that exist in the first half of an epidemic break down until the chances of catching the virus become negligible.

I assume there is also some natural immunity out there too - perhaps a more benign coronavirus that generally goes unnoticed might leave some people immune to this new variant.

-

On a more pleasant note, and not unrelated to @Danoff's points about changing the world permanently towards remote working, surely COVID-19 is the best thing that could have happened to eSports...?

-

@ProjectWHaT As of 5pm today, all lectures and face-to-face teaching at my work was cancelled indefinitely. I reckon this was deliberately timed so that long-suffering lecturers would just be getting to the pub and now have something to celebrate.
 
Touring Mars
I'm certainly no expert on immunology or virology (I just make virus particles and take pictures of them!), but it is an intriguing question as to how epidemics run out of steam.

It is perhaps counterintuitive... initially, the more people that have a virus, the more likely you are to get it - but.. the longer you go without the virus, the more likely you are not to catch it as the people who had it before are either now non-infectious or dead, thus the chains of infection that exist in the first half of an epidemic break down until the chances of catching the virus become negligible.

I assume there is also some natural immunity out there too - perhaps a more benign coronavirus that generally goes unnoticed might leave some people immune to this new variant.
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I feel like this is a fair concept, but the fact that the government hasn't recomedned that major public events be stopped or cancelled, kinda stops that from happening. The faster more people are exposed and infected, the bigger the spike?

The Government said that they estimate around 10k people where infected as of Thursday, and that one person going to a public event, could infect 1-2 other people... the possible speed at which it could ramp up in the UK seems insane.
 
baldgye
I feel like this is a fair concept, but the fact that the government hasn't recomedned that major public events be stopped or cancelled, kinda stops that from happening. The faster more people are exposed and infected, the bigger the spike?

The Government said that they estimate around 10k people where infected as of Thursday, and that one person going to a public event, could infect 1-2 other people... the possible speed at which it could ramp up in the UK seems insane.
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I think the UK Government are failing to explain the reasoning behind their decisions, but they aren't necessarily wrong. They will take the same steps as everyone else eventually, but only at the time when it is likely to have the most impact. That said, it does strike me as too little right now. I reckon they should be telling high risk groups to social distance themselves now, but it is arguably too early/counterproductive for more stringent measures (like school closures) which while decreasing the amount of infections in low risk groups would also likely increase infections in high risk groups i.e. elderly relatives being called upon for childcare.
 
Touring Mars
I think the UK Government are failing to explain the reasoning behind their decisions, but they aren't necessarily wrong. They will take the same steps as everyone else eventually, but only at the time when it is likely to have the most impact. That said, it does strike me as too little right now. I reckon they should be telling high risk groups to social distance themselves now, but it is arguably too early/counterproductive for more stringent measures (like school closures) which while decreasing the amount of infections in low risk groups would also likely increase infections in high risk groups i.e. elderly relatives being called upon for childcare.
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The biggest problem, is that the government has said for the past however many years that we've had enough of 'experts' and now is going off its own 'experts' and we're told to 'trust the science'... yet we aren't allowed to know what that science is... we're also going against what 90% of Europe is doing...
 
Access to UK Parliament to be curtailed
Officials at the UK's Houses of Parliament have announced that access by visitors will be restricted from next Monday.
House authorities say that public tours will end and Members of Parliament are to be discouraged from bringing in visitors.
The public can still watch Parliamentary proceedings in the Houses of Commons and Lords and be able to meet MPs in the central lobby. School visits can also still go ahead.


So parliment dosn't follow the governments advice, but we're supposed to??
 
...I've often heard some people decry the "cancel culture" attacking our freedom of speech, but well, this coronavirus is turning out to be the biggest culprit of them all. Events of both entertainment and educational nature are being cancelled left, right, and centre. I definitely don't want to make light of this situation, but couldn't help but chuckle a little at the unintentional irony of it all.
 
Touring Mars
On a more pleasant note, and not unrelated to @Danoff's points about changing the world permanently towards remote working, surely COVID-19 is the best thing that could have happened to eSports...?
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There's serious concerns that Evo will be cancelled this year, and I suspect the same concerns would apply to any real competitive gaming event of similar scope.
 
Danoff
So this bit I count as "you're going to get it".
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It's a maybe. Even if we say that 80% of COVID-19 cases will never be recorded - and that's possible - that's still only 0.5-2.5% of the population. To get to 60% of the population it'd need to be 99.2% of cases never recorded.
Danoff
This bit doesn't make a tons of sense to me. I'd think once a virus reached a certain level, it seems almost impossible to be hygienic enough to prevent it. At some point you're going to inhale a droplet in the air and get it.
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Airborne, sure. Droplets, nah. They're slaves to gravity, and to sticking to things.

Whenever I sneeze, I do it downwards. I had to think about it for a few minutes, and then pull out a nose hair to see what I did (for science), because it's a reflex. Assuming I don't cover up, my sneeze is going down at the ground, rather than at head height where someone might suck it in. Even if some of it lingers for 20 minutes before it makes it to ground, it basically requires someone to walk through the mist and it sticks to them - whereas fully airborne viruses are more like walking through smoke. They hang around for person after person to inhale.

Of course that might cause an issue for that person. When they take their outdoor clothing off and hang it on the peg, there's still virus on it. Depending on their routines, they may become exposed by the old hand-to-snot-to-moist-face-hole pathway...

... but then only 1 in 1,000 sneezes (at Italy rates) they walk through will hold some SARS-CoV-2 anyway.


I am going to have to look into this 60% number, because I'm just not seeing how it can be remotely true.
Danoff
I'm particularly screwed, because my kids will put their mouths on anything (even my 7 year old still does it occasionally). And then they wipe their nose and shove their used tissues in my face "here daddy, can you throw this away"? Or cough in my eyes... or crawl into my wife's arms in order to vomit... it's a wonder we mange to survive as species.
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Kids are gross. Like, as gross as dogs. If anyone's likely to get it, carry it, spread it, and survive it, it's kids - because schools are almost designed to be disease pits. Your kid might be the cleanest human being on Earth at home, but then they're in a class with Cletus Jr. who you can quite clearly see has hair that crawls, and the only reason he doesn't have COVID-19 is because the plague has left no cells for it to infect, and the teacher always sits him with your kid.


None of this means that COVID-19 is not a concern. It is, especially if you are, know, or have any family that are, someone in their 60s or older, and have any standing heart or lung issues (including being a smoker). But we can keep it at bay with good hygiene and avoiding touching other people. Or avoiding other people altogether.

Which is great for me.
 
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My go-to supermarket is one of the larger markets in the region, and tonight I was met with empty shelves. Pasta, potatoes, bread, rice, canned goods, frozen goods. All but gone. Fresh vegetables and meat was sort of available, water and toilet paper, plentiful.

Society has come down with acute moronitis. Special peopleritis. I'm ready to slap people back into sense.
 
KLM Airlines has to 'fire' 1500-2000 temp contracts and also ask work time reduction for all 35K employees. Meaning 30% less work per employee.
Effective immediately. KLM is for about 10% dependent of the flights to and from US and has special direct flight connections with China.
 
Dennisch
My go-to supermarket is one of the larger markets in the region, and tonight I was met with empty shelves. Pasta, potatoes, bread, rice, canned goods, frozen goods. All but gone. Fresh vegetables and meat was sort of available, water and toilet paper, plentiful.
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True story: I went to my local Aldi today (quite a large one) and was met with a similar scene. I couldn't find any cheese biscuits (whatever they're called) so I asked the assistant if they had any more in the storeroom. She said no, people had snapped them up as soon as they were refilled. "What sort of middle-class apocalypse is this?" I asked her, expecting a laugh.

"I don't know", she said, "I only started yesterday".

Dennisch
I'm ready to slap people back into sense.
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My local Aldi needs you.
 
TenEightyOne
True story: I went to my local Aldi today (quite a large one) and was met with a similar scene. I couldn't find any cheese biscuits (whatever they're called) so I asked the assistant if they had any more in the storeroom. She said no, people had snapped them up as soon as they were refilled. "What sort of middle-class apocalypse is this?" I asked her, expecting a laugh.

"I don't know", she said, "I only started yesterday".
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And you thought you were being sooo clever! :lol:
 
Dennisch
My go-to supermarket is one of the larger markets in the region, and tonight I was met with empty shelves. Pasta, potatoes, bread, rice, canned goods, frozen goods. All but gone. Fresh vegetables and meat was sort of available, water and toilet paper, plentiful.

Society has come down with acute moronitis. Special peopleritis. I'm ready to slap people back into sense.
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If you are going to slap them, make sure you wear gloves. Also, bring an actual honey badger.
 
Blitz24
If you are going to slap them, make sure you wear gloves. Also, bring an actual honey badger.
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I'm going for biological war fare. An all out bout at the registers and then quarantine myself for a couple of weeks, before the government does it for me.
 

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