What do I need to know about coronavirus?

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Birdstrike said:
Wait, you mean they're wrong? I thought CO2 is poison that's going to "make the planet uninhabitable in 9 years"?
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man you don’t stop!
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Birdstrike said:
I'm on a roll, man :rofl:

I know, I've been bad. Just slap me now. Do it, LOL :slap:
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Birdstrike said:
You're better at rephrasing than me. You give it a shot.
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LOL fine! I'll correct your mistake.

The article hasn't proven that you are "immune", but rather that there is activation of the cellular mediated immunity adaptations likely developed from other more benign coronavirus infections when exposed to SARS-COV-2. Activation will result in a variable immune response. So it's not like 35% of people can never get the infection. We don't know that yet.

I still think this is substantial though and confirms my suspicion that there is some cross reactivity of our immune system to other betacoronaviruses. But virus propagation is what it is and still difficult to institute public health measures given this information. For instance I wouldn't eschew viral mitigation spreading techniques based on this, at this time. In other words this is only good news it's just hard to know how good it is.
 
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veaselhaufen said:
Regarding the antibody tests, isnt the specificity somewhere around 95%? If you apply this test to a population with a low prevalence wouldnt you expect a lot of false positive antibody tests? Does this really mean 1-4% of people have really been exposed?

IHME forecasts deaths until August 4. Do you really expect COVID to stop on August 4?
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Birdstrike said:
No. Although we may be well past peak August 4th, I'm of the opinion COVID-19 is here to stay.
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That's today!
 
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thegenius said:
LOL fine! I'll correct your mistake.

The article hasn't proven that you are "immune", but rather that there is activation of the cellular mediated immunity adaptations likely developed from other more benign coronavirus infections when exposed to SARS-COV-2. Activation will result in a variable immune response. So it's not like 35% of people can never get the infection. We don't know that yet.

I still think this is substantial though and confirms my suspicion that there is some cross reactivity of our immune system to other betacoronaviruses. But virus propagation is what it is and still difficult to institute public health measures given this information. For instance I wouldn't eschew viral mitigation spreading techniques based on this, at this time. In other words this is only good news it's just hard to know how good it is.
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I like your analysis, but dude, your re-write of my "headline" for the article is 2 paragraphs. I wrote a quick, click-bait headline to get you to click and read the article and it worked.
 
Birdstrike said:
I like your analysis, but dude, your re-write of my "headline" for the article is 2 paragraphs. I wrote a quick, click-bait headline to get you to click and read the article and it worked.
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Dude! You are as bad as the TV-baits CNN and Fox. You just instead use click-bait. It's like internet chum. You just did the equivalent of 2.2 million! :lol:

(such a stupid smile emoji)
 
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The interesting thing in all this discussion is the covid spike in sunbelt states still resulted in a lot fewer deaths / 1 million compared to NY, NJ, CT, MA. So why is this spike a much bigger deal than the March to April covid disaster?
 
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There's still the issue of high morbidity and cases overwhelming hospital systems....
 
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bravotwozero said:
There's still the issue of high morbidity and cases overwhelming hospital systems....
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That's been known for several months now. Yet the number of people dead in two different covid spikes is markedly different. I'm not sure if this can be attributed to lack of knowledge alone. I think the states that got hit initially made very bad decisions that worsened the crisis and ended up killing far more people.
 
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The northeastern states let COVID spread like wildfire in nursing homes.

If they had locked them down you would be looking at least half the deaths.
 
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alpinism said:
The northeastern states let COVID spread like wildfire in nursing homes.

If they had locked them down you would be looking at least half the deaths.
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Right which is what Germany did to achieve their low death rate. We would be over the Coronavirus pandemic already if we'd taken simple, reasonable steps:

1. Use resources to screen, quarantine, and protect all vulnerable nursing home patients.
2. Tell ambulatory elderly, and high risk patients to stay home and quarantine. Wear PPE if they have to go out
3. No LOCKDOWNS!
4. Let the young, not-at-risk population go about their business and get the virus

If we'd done those 4 steps, our national curve (with the exception of NYC) would look like Sweden, and we'd basically be in the clear low. Instead we elected for ineffective lockdowns which prolong the time this is going to spread in our community, and simultaneously damage our economy moreso than the virus would by itself.
 
alpinism said:
The northeastern states let COVID spread like wildfire in nursing homes.

If they had locked them down you would be looking at least half the deaths.
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And so the states royally screwed up with the covid response. Because if the states are going to destroy the economy with lockdowns, their first thought should be to lockdown the nursing homes.
 
GeneralVeers said:
Right which is what Germany did to achieve their low death rate. We would be over the Coronavirus pandemic already if we'd taken simple, reasonable steps:

1. Use resources to screen, quarantine, and protect all vulnerable nursing home patients.
2. Tell ambulatory elderly, and high risk patients to stay home and quarantine. Wear PPE if they have to go out
3. No LOCKDOWNS!
4. Let the young, not-at-risk population go about their business and get the virus

If we'd done those 4 steps, our national curve (with the exception of NYC) would look like Sweden, and we'd basically be in the clear low. Instead we elected for ineffective lockdowns which prolong the time this is going to spread in our community, and simultaneously damage our economy moreso than the virus would by itself.
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“However, on a per-capita basis, Sweden far outpaces its Scandinavian neighbors in COVID deaths, with 567 deaths per million people compared with Denmark's 106 deaths per million, Finland's 59 deaths per million, and Norway's 47 deaths per million. The Swedish figure is closer to Italy's 581 deaths per million.”
 
IMGASMD said:
“However, on a per-capita basis, Sweden far outpaces its Scandinavian neighbors in COVID deaths, with 567 deaths per million people compared with Denmark's 106 deaths per million, Finland's 59 deaths per million, and Norway's 47 deaths per million. The Swedish figure is closer to Italy's 581 deaths per million.”
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A big meh to that one. We are still talking about tiny numbers. A virus that kills .05% of your population isn't that concerning. If we shut everything down, destroy the economy, and it only kills .005% I don't consider that big victory.


I think it's hard to compare different countries. Belgium had 850 deaths/million despite stricter lockdowns. I could infer from that that lockdowns kill.....

Also Belgium, Spain, and other countries are now trending up again after lifting their lockdown restrictions, so expect their numbers to be more similar to Sweden when this is all over.
 
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IMGASMD said:
“However, on a per-capita basis, Sweden far outpaces its Scandinavian neighbors in COVID deaths, with 567 deaths per million people compared with Denmark's 106 deaths per million, Finland's 59 deaths per million, and Norway's 47 deaths per million. The Swedish figure is closer to Italy's 581 deaths per million.”
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Tbh i think the policies implemented by Europe were better than in US (and definitely better than the northeastern states). Sweden fared worse than its neighbors but they're still better than northeastern states.
 
Lawpy said:
The interesting thing in all this discussion is the covid spike in sunbelt states still resulted in a lot fewer deaths / 1 million compared to NY, NJ, CT, MA. So why is this spike a much bigger deal than the March to April covid disaster?
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Because it's all political, there's an election coming up, and the purpose is to shape your perception for you, before you have a chance to do it yourself.


Deaths per 1 million population, as of 8/4:

Democrat Governors (states you mentioned)

NY- 1,686
NJ- 1,793
CT- 1,245
MA- 1,256


Republican (Sunbelt)

AZ- 528
FL- 345
TX- 264
SC- 359
GA- 369


Trump

USA- 484


The media leans heavily Democrat. NY/NJ/CT/MA all have Democrat Governors. They all favor harsh lockdowns. The Governors of all the sunbelt states are Republican AZ/FL/TX/SC/GA. They all have favored early reopening and have been anti-lockdown. They also happen to be in the same party as someone else who favors early reopening and avoiding further lockdowns, President Trump.

Team Democrat, including the media, want to make everything look bad for the Republican Governors and Trump, in the months leading up to the election. That includes praising Dem governors who have presided over deaths per capita hundreds of percents higher, and trashing Republican Governors in the sunbelt who had a fraction of the deaths. It also means keeping terrible economic numbers going (unemployment, economic depression) which lockdowns perpetuated, to drag down the national numbers (big states like NY/CA/NJ can do this). Then come election time, they can say, "See, the US economy is terrible, COVID-19 was handled terribly, the Republicans are to blame, especially Trump. Vote for Biden and Dems." When in reality the economy is and will be improving greatly, held back only by their unnecessary lockdowns, and it is they that are presiding over death counts hundreds of percents higher than the USA as a whole and comparable Republican states.

It's all political.
 
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IMGASMD said:
“However, on a per-capita basis, Sweden far outpaces its Scandinavian neighbors in COVID deaths, with 567 deaths per million people compared with Denmark's 106 deaths per million, Finland's 59 deaths per million, and Norway's 47 deaths per million. The Swedish figure is closer to Italy's 581 deaths per million.”
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Why lockdown and destroy your economy like Italy only the face the same, actually higher, death count than Sweden?
 
Lawpy said:
www.harvardmagazine.com

New Test Paradigm Needed for SARS-CoV-2 | Harvard Magazine

Michael Mina maintains a new testing regimen could end the COVID-19 pandemic—in three weeks.
www.harvardmagazine.com www.harvardmagazine.com
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It's pretty refreshing to read something different. Right or wrong, at least it's not the same drumbeat of "we need a vaccine" and "we'll never have a vaccine" and "kids can transmit it" and "kids can't transmit it" and "open up" and "lock down."
 
I don't understand viewpoints like that. Nothing is going to end this pandemic in 3 weeks. Not universal masking, not universal testing, not owning the libtards, not fumigating the white house, not having every person in the country locked in the closet for the next two weeks.

It's a virus. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't think, it doesn't care. It's not political, it's not evil. It's a piece of RNA encoding for, and surrounded by, a protein capsid, engineered through natural selection to be capable of causing a worldwide pandemic.
 
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turkeyjerky said:
I don't understand viewpoints like that. Nothing is going to end this pandemic in 3 weeks. Not universal masking, not universal testing, not owning the libtards, not fumigating the white house, not having every person in the country locked in the closet for the next two weeks.

It's a virus. It doesn't sleep, it doesn't think, it doesn't care. It's not political, it's not evil. It's a piece of RNA encoding for, and surrounded by, a protein capsid, engineered through natural selection to be capable of causing a worldwide pandemic.
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Your forgot to add that it is widespread, endemic in the population and spread through respiratory contact. Politicians go by the rule: "Do something! Anything!". They are taking a lot of ineffective, pointless but very inconvenient and harmful steps to "combat" this virus.

My question is what are all the infectious disease experts and epidemiologists thinking? Did they completely forget everything we know about respiratory virus transmission?

As I've been saying since the beginning, this virus is going to do what it does naturally. It's going to spread massively through the population regardless of what we do. At some point it will either disappear, be reduced to a low level in the population, or return annually like the flu. There are no steps we can take to change the outcome. We tried slowing down the process with lockdowns, which have just lengthened the time it will take to reach whichever endpoint we get to.
 
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La Cumbre Lines said:
I mostly agree, but would include a caveat that the buck stops at the top with there being a massive absence of good leadership at the head (or lack of one) of the current administration.
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Agreed, in general. The President (and most politicians) don't know a thing about science or medicine. He has received questionable, constantly changing and often contradictory advice from his "experts".

Our entire testing infrastructure and strategy have been incredibly flawed. It's interesting to hear an alternative thought on how we should be testing.
Instead of universal strategies like masking, vaccines and lock downs, if we are going to do anything I like the more nuanced approach of trying to cheaply and quickly identify the most highly infectious individuals - quarantining those people. Good luck in this country effectively quarantining everyone of those most infectious though when the self-serving interest is predominant over individuals always thinking altruistically about what is best for society, or maybe the American cowboy attitude is what's best as nature and natural selection intended in survival of the fittest :unsure::eyebrow:
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There was no way we could do this. Contact tracing and isolation only works when the virus is confined to a small population in a small geographic area. By the time we were actually testing for it, the virus was nationwide, infecting thousands of people. Even early on there was no way we could contain this. I won't even go into the constitutional/legal issues of forcibly quarantining people, which would be necessary.

Survival of the fittest? You mean the 99% or more of people who survive this? It's seriously astonishing that we've radically altered our civilization for this virus.
 
La Cumbre Lines said:
Science is a process. Knowledge changes over time. Intelligent people change their views and corresponding advice over time as knowledge changes. I think several experts have demonstrated this ability to some degree. One person though has been proven incapable of handling responsibility and power.
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I won't defend Trump on his lack of knowledge or understanding of basic science. I've been critical of that in past threads. I do think Fauci has done a disservice to the country, and his opinions have resulted in a lot of unnecessary measures we have implemented.

I’m not suggesting or arguing for full blown contact tracing and systemic forcible quarantining in regards to this disease. I just think it makes sense that if you are highly infectious maybe it’s worth primarily identifying that and suggesting you should stay home. Just like we tell people with the flu every year.
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Apologies if you aren't. You seemed to suggest that we implement testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. It's been too late for this since February even if you could get Americans to accept it.

Everyone talks about "testing testing and more testing" as some sore of solution to this. I think the testing is largely pointless at this point other than to gauge were we are on the curve.
 
La Cumbre Lines said:
Nope, didn’t mention contract tracing. You can’t contract trace if you can’t even figure out who is positive. I have sent people home from the ED for a while now with a negative test that I’m convinced are positive with false negative testing. Patients don’t hear that though when I tell them I think that. They just hear, “my test was negative.” SARS-CoV-2 is everywhere and has been for months. I don’t see a point in contract tracing a disease with high prevalence. The cat is out of the bag.

I think everyone will eventually be infected. I’m not sure how this idea permeated throughout our culture that you can hide from or wait out a highly infectious widely spreading respiratory virus. It’s snuck in everywhere and will keep doing that.
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Which is why I'm confused that infectious disease doctors who should know this are advocating lock downs.
 
I've written this elsewhere (or maybe in this thread) but, I'm just going to say it again. Look at history for the Spanish Flu pandemic back in 1918. It lasted from Feb 18 to April 20. There were 4 waves of it. Estimates of worldwide deaths was anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, although higher numbers are more likely.

Now, that was influenza A H1N1. This current is coronavirus. So, structurally, there's some differences. However, I didn't do the homework to
note what are those - I don't know if it is Ford to Chevy, or car to truck, or automobile to horse, or land to water.

That we are counting thousands of deaths, work three times the population, is progress (also, we're not dumping our garbage in the street, and, we wash or hands). However, I just can't predict the future.
 
Just got my antibody result back. Positive!!! (yes I realize it may not be specific). It was the LabCorp IgG if anyone was wondering.
 
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GeneralVeers said:
Just got my antibody result back. Positive!!! (yes I realize it may not be specific). It was the LabCorp IgG if anyone was wondering.
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Nice! I think it’s about time I get retested. I was negative, but that was before the huge peak of cases in my area.
 
Birdstrike said:
I haven't formed an opinion on it yet. I just thought it was interesting enough to share.
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I agree, very interesting to read. I'm sure COVID-19 was around several years before it became a pandemic. Just like Ebola has been around for years before it became epidemics.

GeneralVeers said:
Just got my antibody result back. Positive!!! (yes I realize it may not be specific). It was the LabCorp IgG if anyone was wondering.
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I've had two antibody tests. Both have been negative. The fire department where I serve as medical director has some rapid antibody tests. The accuracy isn't as great as LabCorp's.
 
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southerndoc said:
...I'm sure COVID-19 was around several years before it became a pandemic. Just like Ebola has been around for years before it became epidemics.
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You are correct. First they said it was born in Dec 2019. Then they said Fall 2019. Then, some wastewater studies in Europe found evidence of COVID-19 in European wastewater in early 2019 (which were roundly dismissed by most people on this forum). Meanwhile, some "anti-science right wing wacko conspiracy theorist" was saying all along it was likely around years before that. Almost 6 months ago:

Birdstrike said:
My theory is that this type of coronavirus could easily have been here all along and no one has bothered to, cared to, or had a means to test for it....
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I was lampooned for saying this. And now, PhD's in Virology and Molecular Biology and Genetics are dating it back to as far as at least 2012.
 
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La Cumbre Lines said:
SARS-CoV-2 may have been around for awhile in an isolated location before it started rapidly spreading and becoming a pandemic towards the end of 2019. I think it is unlikely though that it has been widely spreading around the world undetected until just recently because we didn’t think of it or test for it previously as you implied. There would have been a far greater number of unexplained deaths previously from viral respiratory illnesses. Also viruses tend to become less lethal over time evolving to help them spread instead of the inverse, and so it likely didn’t just start causing higher morbidity/mortality.
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The viral evolutionary tree tells us that coronaviruses have been around for thousands, likely millions of years, including at least 4 strains that cause common colds, plus SARS-1, MERS, SARS-2, and who knows how many more are skanking around in bat caves as we speak, waiting for their day in the limelight. When each of those mutations sprouted their own branch on that tree, I'll leave that up to the viral evolutionary DNA experts, but suffice it to say, humans and COVID disease have a long and parasitic relationship.

The bad news is, we'll never know for sure how many "non-specific viral pneumonias," "flu-like viral illnesses" or "culture negative infiltrates" were caused by a virus we didn't know existed and didn't have a test for. We'll also never know how many plagues in history, prior to the discovery and naming of viruses, were due to coronavirus disease variants. The good news is it has the perfect makings for an internet debate that goes on for an eternity, without resolution :lol: .
 
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La Cumbre Lines said:
I can’t say I have taken care of many people over the past few years with clear viral pneumonia without an identified culprit on PCR testing.
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You make some good points.

Although it's great that it's easier to diagnose viruses the past few years and will be into the future, that still tells us nothing about the past, and what viruses were infecting people before we could test for them. Obviously, hindsight bias is going to favor assuming disease were from things we could diagnose, not things that existed yet we couldn't diagnose. Just because records show no positive bacterial cultures prior to Leeuwenhoek discovering bacteria in 1676 doesn't mean there were zero cases prior to that. The same goes for the time prior to the discovery of viruses in 1892 and COVID-19 in 2019. That's my 2 cent opinion.
 
Interesting chart from the CDC. Every year they track "influenza-like illnesses" which are flu-negative. This last season we had a big, unusual spike in December, as well as one in Feb-April. Were these likely COVID cases before started testing?

www.cdc.gov

Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report

Learn more about the weekly influenza surveillance report (FluView) prepared by the Influenza Division.
www.cdc.gov www.cdc.gov

Typical government site wouldn't let me paste the chart directly, but scroll down to "ILINET"

Even more interesting, did we have a random respiratory virus hit us in 2017-2018 that went unrecorded?
 
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While Uber-rich liberals & Democrats push publicly for lockdowns for you, privately they’re calling COVID the “poor man’s virus” while partying it up, taking fantastic trips on private jets, getting citizenship in non-lockdown countries to travel to, and buying up property where they can live lockdown-free.

‪“Super rich party it up during COVID-19, the 'poor person’s virus'”
 
I find it amazing that in 2020, in the midst of a global pabdemic that has killed roughly 3-5 times as many Americans per capita per day than the flu despite our attempts at control, we are arguing about socially distancing and wearing masks.

It’s just ludicrous. The entire world stage is laughing at us.

Turning this into some anti-democratic talking point is rediculous, and some of y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.
 
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TeddyBoomBoom said:
I find it amazing that in 2020, in the midst of a global pabdemic that has killed roughly 3-5 times as many Americans per capita per day than the flu despite our attempts at control, we are arguing about socially distancing and wearing masks.

It’s just ludicrous. The entire world stage is laughing at us.

Turning this into some anti-democratic talking point is rediculous, and some of y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.
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Do these measures slow down the virus? Probably, and I think we all agree on that. What we are arguing over is what is the goal of social distancing/masks. Is it to give hospitals time to prepare? Is it to reduce the total number of cases? Is it to protect the elderly? The goal will determine the length of time a country is locked down and the severity of the lockdowns.

I'm against lockdowns in general, because I believe in private property rights. If government wanted to seize businesses under eminent domain, then they should have purchased the closed-down businesses at fair market value.
 
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