Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[PhaelixWW]

The stats show 126,127,489 tests have been performed in US. Wtf that's a huge number, like every one in three have done tests there? Where do people do it? I am just curious since I never had the incentive to go and perform the test. I'm more afraid to go to a test center filled with many ppl potentially carrying the virus instead of staying home while I'm feeling well.

When I went to get tested, I booked an appointment online and then went through a drive-through facility. Never left my car and was in and out in 10 minutes. The result came back the following morning.

It can vary a lot based upon where you live, of course.

[Tuor]

Average natural immunity is completely unknown so far, but realistically, it's almost certainly much longer than 6 months.

A lot o news saying otherwise...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00502-w

In March, a care-home resident in their sixties developed severe pneumonia and tested positive for the new coronavirus. The individual spent more than one month in hospital before testing negative. In July, the individual tested positive again, with milder symptoms of coughing and shortness of breath.

EDIT:
Found this aswell:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/def...ment-brief.pdf

[Edge-]

A lot o news saying otherwise...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00502-w

That's one case. Which hasn't been peer reviewed yet. And doesn't seem indicative of most cases, as the individual had a weaker antibody response to the first infection.

Right now this is a single anecdote, and even with more the plural of anecdote isn't data.

[PhaelixWW]

A lot o news saying otherwise...

No, it's really not.

The median household wealth in the US is ~$100k. Do you point to Jeff Bezos and say that it should be $175b instead? No, because outliers are outliers.

There are, so far, less than ~30? confirmed cases of reinfection in over 40 million confirmed total cases of COVID stretching back over 10 months.

6 months is nowhere near the average duration for natural immunity, otherwise we'd have tons of cases of reinfection already.

[Tuor]

That's one case. Which hasn't been peer reviewed yet. And doesn't seem indicative of most cases, as the individual had a weaker antibody response to the first infection.

Right now this is a single anecdote, and even with more the plural of anecdote isn't data.

No, it's really not.

The median household wealth in the US is ~$100k. Do you point to Jeff Bezos and say that it should be $175b instead? No, because outliers are outliers.

There are, so far, less than ~30? confirmed cases of reinfection in over 40 million confirmed total cases of COVID stretching back over 10 months.

6 months is nowhere near the average duration for natural immunity, otherwise we'd have tons of cases of reinfection already.

It's something that is slowly starting to happen. Also, imunity tests showing aswell that imunity keeps decreasing over time, and that is science working.

Those are just the reported cases, i'm sure there is a lot more of them.

[Edge-]

Those are just the reported cases, i'm sure there is a lot more of them.

And there's not enough evidence to support your 6-month immunity hypothesis, even if there are a lot more. We work with what information we have, not what information could exist that we don't know about.

[Tuor]

And there's not enough evidence to support your 6-month immunity hypothesis, even if there are a lot more. We work with what information we have, not what information could exist that we don't know about.

Doesn't matter much if it is 6 month or 9 month, the diference isn't much. What science is telling us is that the imunity response is short, that is why Swedish strategy was bad, they went for heard imunity without knowing what they were facing.

[Spectral]

Also, imunity tests showing aswell that imunity keeps decreasing over time, and that is science working.

This has not been demonstrated; diminished antibody titers do not necessarily imply diminished capacity for an immune memory response. T cell mediated immune responses are almost certainly very important in COVID-19 immune responses.

This is a good situation to engage in Bayesian reasoning and your prior should not be that there will be an absence of immunologic memory.

[Edge-]

Doesn't matter much if it is 6 month or 9 month, the diference isn't much. What science is telling us is that the imunity response is short, that is why Swedish strategy was bad, they went for heard imunity without knowing what they were facing.

It does matter, and that's still not what the science is telling us.

https://www.healthline.com/health-ne...ID-19-immunity

Long story short, we have very limited data to suggest a shorter immunity, but there's not enough data to come to any actual conclusion yet as the issue hasn't had enough time to be sufficiently studied. There are too many unknowns to say one way or another right now with any certainty.

[Forogil]

This has not been demonstrated; diminished antibody titers do not necessarily imply diminished capacity for an immune memory response. T cell mediated immune responses are almost certainly very important in COVID-19 immune responses.

This is a good situation to engage in Bayesian reasoning and your prior should not be that there will be an absence of immunologic memory.

True, there are normally B and T-cells handle that, but you should then update the prior when we see people regularly get reinfected with other corona-viruses after about a year.

Found this new study https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-...t-lasting.html https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1083-1

It may be different for severe infections (Sars-Cov seemed to give longer-lasting immunity), but there are many mild or possibly asymptomatic cases for Sars-Cov-2 - so the other corona-viruses seems like a more realistic case for them.

It may be something that causes them to get a mild case the second time as well, but they can still spread it.

[PhaelixWW]

Doesn't matter much if it is 6 month or 9 month, the diference isn't much. What science is telling us is that the imunity response is short...

Science is saying nothing of the sort, because science doesn't have enough data yet for such a conclusive statement.

NYTimes: Coronavirus Reinfections Are Real but Very, Very Rare

Reports of reinfection with the coronavirus evoke a nightmarish future: Repeat bouts of illness, impotent vaccines, unrelenting lockdowns — a pandemic without an end.

A case study published on Monday, about a 25-year-old man in Nevada, has stoked those fears anew. The man, who was not named, became sicker the second time that he was infected with the virus, a pattern the immune system is supposed to prevent.

But these cases make the news precisely because they are rare, experts said: More than 38 million people worldwide have been infected with the coronavirus, and as of Monday, fewer than five of those cases have been confirmed by scientists to be reinfections.

“That’s tiny — it’s like a microliter-sized drop in the bucket, compared to the number of cases that have happened all over the world,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.

In most cases, a second bout with the virus produced milder symptoms or none at all. But for at least three people, including one patient in Ecuador, the illness was more severe the second time around than during the first infection. An 89-year-old woman in the Netherlands died during her second illness.

Rare as these cases may be, they do indicate that reinfection is possible, said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, who wrote a commentary accompanying the Nevada case study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

“It’s important to note that there are people who do get reinfected, and in some of those cases you get worse disease,” Dr. Iwasaki said. “You still need to keep wearing masks and practice social distancing even if you have recovered once from this infection.”

We asked experts what is known about reinfections with the coronavirus, and what the phenomenon means for vaccinations and the course of the pandemic.


Reinfection with the coronavirus is an unusual event.
First, the good news: Reinfection seems to be vanishingly rare.

Since the first confirmed case of reinfection, reported in Hong Kong on Aug. 24, there have been three published cases; reports of another 20 await scientific review.

But it’s impossible to know exactly how widespread the phenomenon is. To confirm a case of reinfection, scientists must look for significant differences in the genes of the two coronaviruses causing both illnesses.

In the United States, where testing was a rare resource much of this year, many people were not tested unless they were sick enough to be hospitalized. Even then, their samples were usually not preserved for genetic analysis, making it impossible to confirm suspected reinfections.

A vast majority of people who do get reinfected may go undetected. For example, the man in Hong Kong had no symptoms the second time, and his infection was discovered only because of routine screening at the airport.

“There are a lot of people that are going to also have been exposed that aren’t having symptoms, that we’re never going to hear about,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

People whose second infections are more severe are more likely to be identified, because they return to the hospital. But those are likely to be even rarer, experts said.

“If this was a very common event, we would have seen thousands of cases,” Dr. Iwasaki said.


In most people, the immune system works as expected.
Reinfections can occur for any number of reasons: because the initial infection was too mild to produce an immune response, for example, or because the immune system was compromised by other health conditions. On occasion, a patient may be exposed to a large amount of virus that seeded an infection before the immune response could respond.

This variability is entirely expected, experts said, and has been observed in patients with diseases like measles and malaria.

“You’ll never have the distribution of anything with millions of people where you don’t have some very severe rare cases happening at the fringe,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a pediatric immunologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

At least two of the reinfected patients in Europe had compromised immune systems, for example, and the 89-year-old woman who died was receiving chemotherapy. In other reinfected patients, genetic factors or the lack of certain previous immune exposures may have blunted the body’s ability to fight off a second attack.

“There are some people who just don’t develop good immune responses to certain pathogens,” said Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “What is causing that? We’re not sure, but it’s rare, usually.”

In a vast majority of known infected patients, experts said, the immune system functions as it should against other pathogens.

“There are a lot of different infections where you can get re-exposed to the virus, and we would probably not know because you don’t have symptoms,” Dr. Pepper said. “And that might be an important part of boosting immunity.”

When the body is exposed to an unfamiliar virus, it’s normal first to develop some immunity and then to increase that response with each additional exposure. This phenomenon is well known among children, but it is less often seen in adults because they rarely encounter new viruses, Dr. Mina said.

“I think it’s important to recognize that reinfections are literally embedded in the evolution of our immune system,” he added. “We sometimes lose track of that with so many people talking about this who really haven’t studied the immune system.”


A resurgence of symptoms doesn’t prove reinfection.
For every confirmed case of reinfection, there are dozens of anecdotal reports of infected people who were sick and seemingly recovered but then became ill again weeks to months later.

Usually there are crucial data missing in those cases, like a confirmed lab diagnosis, or a virus sample that can be sequenced.

“The question is always, Is it a real reinfection?” Dr. Krammer said. “It’s very often very challenging to kind of get that kind of data.”

A vast majority of these cases are unlikely to be true infections. More likely, these are people experiencing a resurgence of symptoms connected to the original infection. The virus may set off an inflammatory response that can flare up even weeks later and cause symptoms like fatigue and heart problems. In rare cases, some patients may develop a chronic low-grade infection with the virus that never quite goes away.

“Even with viruses that can cause acute infections, like flu,” Dr. Krammer said, “you can have persistent infections if your immune system is sufficiently compromised.”

Although these are not real reinfections, they are still worrying if they lead to renewed illness or hospitalization months after the initial infection, Dr. Rasmussen said. “If there’s recrudescence happening frequently, and people are getting severely ill the second time around, that’s potentially its own problem,” she said.


People with a second bout may pass the virus to others.
Reinfected people without symptoms may still transmit the virus to others. The patient in Hong Kong, for example, was isolated in a hospital even though he had no symptoms. But his viral load was high enough that he could have passed the virus to others.

“Obviously, that person wasn’t ill, so it bodes well for him, but it doesn’t bode well for the community,” Dr. Pepper said.

But to be sure of infectiousness, researchers may need to look for live virus. South Korean researchers investigated hundreds of reports of reinfection and were able to rule them out as real cases after failing to grow infectious virus from the samples.

Similar procedures would be needed to rule out the possibility of transmission in each patient, Dr. Rasmussen said, adding, “I think that’s the only way you’d be able to get to the bottom of that.”


Vaccines may be crucial to preventing reinfections.
Reports of reinfection have raised concerns about whether vaccines for the coronavirus will be effective and help communities achieve population immunity. The worry is that the immunity produced by vaccines will not be sufficient in preventing reinfections with the virus.

In reality, experts said, vaccines have a better chance at generating robust immunity than does natural infection with the virus.

For example, the coronavirus is particularly adept at dodging the body’s early immune alarms, buying valuable time to seed an infection. In some people, this lag eventually triggers a cascading immune overreaction that can be more harmful than the infection itself.

Vaccines are intended to unfurl an immune response without interference from the virus, and thus may avoid this inflammatory sequence. Vaccines can also be manipulated to enhance immune memory, in that way producing more lasting, more protective responses.

Vaccine trials are designed to look for an absence of disease, rather than of infection, and it’s unclear whether vaccines can suppress virus levels enough to prevent transmission to others.

Still, vaccine-induced immunity should perform better than natural immunity, Dr. Rasmussen said, adding, “I’m optimistic.”

[Wilfire]

I really wish people either didn't observe COVID-prevention measures at all or observed them fully. It's annoying as hell when someone wears their mask as a chin diaper and pretends like they're being a saint for sacrificing their comfort when in reality they're stopping a whopping grand total of 0% of the virus from spreading.

If you ain't wearing a mask and washing your hands I can tell you to piss off. If you are wearing a mask and washing your hands, I can feel relatively safe around you. But when you're walking around with a cursed chin diaper I can do neither without you throwing a hissy fit.

[Forogil]

I really wish people either didn't observe COVID-prevention measures at all or observed them fully. It's annoying as hell when someone wears their mask as a chin diaper and pretends like they're being a saint for sacrificing their comfort when in reality they're stopping a whopping grand total of 0% of the virus from spreading.

If you ain't wearing a mask and washing your hands I can tell you to piss off. If you are wearing a mask and washing your hands, I can feel relatively safe around you. But when you're walking around with a cursed chin diaper I can do neither without you throwing a hissy fit.

How do you know if people are washing their hands?

And is it that important for you?
Clearly unwashed hands can spread the disease: if you shake hands, or you nibble their fingers, or possibly if you touch the same door-knobs etc; but the idea is to avoid all of that anyway.

[Shadowferal]

Simple...stop nibbling other people fingers.
If for no other reason than it just plain looks weird.

[Forogil]

https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus...s-rise-1540243

Sweden is starting to go on lockdown as cases start spiking again.

It seems it didn't start yesterday, but today.

https://www.thelocal.se/20201020/upp...local-measures

"This is not a lockdown, because a lockdown implies that you are shutting down the whole of society, which is not what we’re doing here," Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said at a press conference announcing the new measures.

From October 20th until November 3rd, people living in Uppsala are strongly advised to:

• avoid physical contact with people they do do not live with
• to avoid organising or taking part in parties or other social activities
• avoid travelling on public transport

[Edge-]

It seems it didn't start yesterday, but today.

https://www.thelocal.se/20201020/upp...local-measures

As others pointed out it's not a "lockdown" but a "strong advisement" right now.

So...basically the US. Because that's going so well for us : |

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.wflx.com/2020/10/20/scho...santis-says-2/

High Priest of the Covid Death Cult, and also governor of the state of Florida, Ron DeSantis is apparently convinced that schools aren't drivers of coronavirus spread and wants to ensure that they are not closed at all this winter.

"Schools are not drivers of spreading coronavirus, and schools need to be open. It is a bad public health policy to have schools closed," DeSantis said.

"Pretty much everyone acknowledges that having schools open is the right thing to do," DeSantis said. "It doesn't matter if it's in Asia, Europe, the United States, all across the Sun Belt, all across other parts of our country, we have seen that in-person instruction is vital, and it's something that needs to continue."

[Sama-81]

As others pointed out it's not a "lockdown" but a "strong advisement" right now.

So...basically the US. Because that's going so well for us : |

"Basically the US" has been somewhat applicable throughout most of the swedish corona-response, imho. Has been quite interesting reading headlines saying, basically, "Trump's horror show" and "Sweden's brilliant solution" at the same time, when the two responses have been, by and large, similar. Not to mention that many decisions seem to have been taken on similar grounds, ie what more or less amounts to "you guys, i've got a good feeling about this new idea i came up with just now" and "cool kids don't change their minds, they run with it!". I guess its nice it's at least professionals that do the guesswork around here, though...

[Zan15]

still not wearing the mask, still healthy


WHAT'S UP GANG

Trump Admin released some news:


https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/...cid=mm6942e2_w

Overall, an estimated 299,028 excess deaths occurred from late January through October 3, 2020, with 198,081 (66%) excess deaths attributed to COVID-19. The largest percentage increases were seen among adults aged 25–44 years and among Hispanic or Latino persons.


I also do not believe for a minute you are not wearing a mask. Unless of course you are unemployed and haven't left the house in 6 months

[Katchii]

That's one case. Which hasn't been peer reviewed yet. And doesn't seem indicative of most cases, as the individual had a weaker antibody response to the first infection.

Right now this is a single anecdote, and even with more the plural of anecdote isn't data.

I don't disagree with the sentiment here, but if enough anecdotes say the same thing they do in fact become part of the data set, become more relevant to the discussion or at the very least are the beginnings of further investigation into the issue and shouldn't be outright dismissed as such. Those anecdotes become the "problem statement" in an Investigation or study to gather further information.

- - - Updated - - -

I also do not believe for a minute you are not wearing a mask. Unless of course you are unemployed and haven't left the house in 6 months

Or they're just an asshole that lives in a part of the country with a bunch of other assholes and they let them get away with it.... it's that way where I live, on both political sides. It's infuriating.

[PhaelixWW]

Today, unfortunately, the 7-day rolling average for new worldwide cases ticked above 300k for the first time. This marks a 15.1% increase since July 31st, to pick a completely random day. Also of note is the fact that, since yesterday, the top three countries (USA, India, & Brazil), are responsible for less than half of the new cases, as the rest of the world has steadily overtaken them.

Since that randomly picked day, the top three countries have fallen 9.6% largely due to an 18.7% drop in India from their high nearly three weeks ago. This has been somewhat offset as Brazil seems to have plateaued for now and the US has seen a slight increase lately with students back in school.

During that same time period, the rest of the world has sadly increased a hefty 55.8%. For everyone in the northern hemisphere, I hope we can all take prudent caution in order to limit the spread as we pass through the typical flu season. Get your flu shots, if you can!

Two weeks ago I posted that the 7-day rolling average for new world cases had risen above 300k for the first time. Well, the last two weeks have not been kind. Since then, we've gone up another 25% to 377k.

For the top three countries, India new case count continues to fall, but the rise of cases in the US are mostly offsetting that. Brazil is fluctuating a bit as they had a holiday weekend the weekend before last, but they appear to holding close to steady with maybe a continuing slow decline.

The rest of the world, though...

Unfortunately, it looks like worldwide deaths are starting to rise again, as well.