Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Nellise]

Anything new in the treatment/vaccine part?

Other than Moderna trying to pump their stock again with results from 20 people, there won't be much real news for a bit as most of the vaccine trials are just starting to get participants for their phase 3 trials. Those will take several months at least to have anything to report.

[Poopymonster]

@Thepersona, you sly devil, how could you hide what you've been doing at home.

[Thepersona]

@Thepersona, you sly devil, how could you hide what you've been doing at home.

Ok, i laughed

[Pohut]

But those were just old people.

They're not really people, and it's okay if they die.

I mean, according to certain political parties, anyway...

Considering that those old people are the ones usually voting for the parties that are trying to kill them now. Those parties are not thinking this through at all.

[Forogil]

And another million-mark passed:
US passed 6 M reported cases.
The next are likely Russia next week (1 M), and Brazil and India within a fortnight (4 M).
And 1 M reported deaths in perhaps a month.

[Nellise]

Abbott Labs is releasing their new rapid test kit. Except in one of the articles about it, it says: "According to Abbott officials, the new test is 97.1 percent accurate in identifying positive results and 98.5 percent accurate in identifying negative results when administered to people with suspected cases of COVID-19 within a week of their first symptoms." In my state, they do about 50k tests a day and have about 2000 or so positive cases (4% positivity rate). If this test were used instead of PCR tests, there would be a large amount of error in the reported cases, right? Like this would be nearly useless for any place with low positivity rates (PCR is nearly 100% correct).

[breadisfunny]

https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/newsl...l-Anytime-Soon well it looks like the second covid relief bill is dead in the water. gg republicans and that even if one is reached it won't include any sort of direct payment.

[Themius]

Huge crowd with little masks for the president tonight.. didn't the least time he did this lead to a spike and the death of a sycophant???

[Forogil]

Abbott Labs is releasing their new rapid test kit. Except in one of the articles about it, it says: "According to Abbott officials, the new test is 97.1 percent accurate in identifying positive results and 98.5 percent accurate in identifying negative results when administered to people with suspected cases of COVID-19 within a week of their first symptoms." In my state, they do about 50k tests a day and have about 2000 or so positive cases (4% positivity rate). If this test were used instead of PCR tests, there would be a large amount of error in the reported cases, right? Like this would be nearly useless for any place with low positivity rates (PCR is nearly 100% correct).

There is a problem, but not that severe, and I would say it's worse for anti-body tests.

If those percentages are correct and testing a similar amount, with similar amount of infections you would get:
1942 covid-19 with positive answers, and 58 with negative.
47280 without covid-19 with negative answers, and 720 with positive answers.

The 0.1% with covid-19 getting a negative result doesn't sound that bad. However, 27% of the ones getting a positive answer wouldn't have covid-19.

For a PCR test that wouldn't be so bad immediately from a disease point of view (as people should stay home and don't infect anyone - it hardly matters that they stay home with the common cold; economically it seems manageable as well). However, for an anti-body test (and later on for PCR test) it would be problematic - as they could assume they are immune and behave in a way that would make them more likely to get infected for real; and also to assume that it wasn't covid-19 the second time and thus spread it more before getting tested.

However, the accuracy rates don't tell the entire story - although the following seems less problematic:
One would assume that PCR gives accuracy for being infected, and anti-body gives accuracy for having been infected; but there seems to be some infected that are not PCR-positive and a larger percentage that don't develop noticeable levels of anti-bodies (and additionally developing anti-bodies takes a few week, and then they begin to fade away as well - so there is also a narrow window to detect them).

[Puupi]

Abbott Labs is releasing their new rapid test kit. Except in one of the articles about it, it says: "According to Abbott officials, the new test is 97.1 percent accurate in identifying positive results and 98.5 percent accurate in identifying negative results

How does a test that has two different result options have different accuracy for them?

[Breccia]

COVID-19 reinfection reported in Nevada patient, researchers say

F#$*( c#$#$master sonofa b#%&! D#$(!-H@$ter bull$!(*

The case is detailed in an online preprint, a study that has not yet been peer reviewed before officially being published.

Okay, well, hopefully it's not true.

The case involves a 25-year-old man living in Reno, Nevada, who first tested positive for COVID-19 in mid-April. He recovered, but got sick again in late May. The second time around, his illness was more severe, the case report said.

Researchers reported that genetic sequencing of the virus revealed that he had been infected with a slightly different strain, indicating a true reinfection.

It's still unclear why the patient was reinfected. The cause could lie in his immune system, the virus itself, or a combination of the two.

Mark Pandori, director the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory and one of the authors of the report, stressed that reinfection with the coronavirus appears to be rare. This is the first instance reported in the U.S. among the nation's nearly 6 million cases so far, and "may not be generalizable" to the public, Pandori said.

Still, he urged caution. "If you've had it, you can't necessarily be considered invulnerable to the infection" again, said Pandori, who is also an associate professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

"The evidence so far suggests that if you've been infected and recovered, then you're protected for some period of time," Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said. "We don't know how long, and we're going to find individual cases of people for whom that's not true."

It seems rare, but possible. I was hoping the Hong Kong case was a one-off.

[Forogil]

How does a test that has two different result options have different accuracy for them?

That's common.

In some cases the underlying test produces a value, and then there is cut-off between positive and negative and it depends on where you set it.
If the test produces values above e.g. 0.2 they say it's positive otherwise negative.
If they changed that to threshold to 0.3 they would have decrease the number of positive results correctly identified, and increase the number of negative results identified. Obviously there is some threshold where they match - but for any other threshold they don't.

So, why didn't they chose the threshold where they match?
It could be that they didn't hit the spot exactly at first, and got it tested and verified and couldn't adjust the threshold afterwards.
It could also be that they didn't want the same accuracy for both - as some mistakes are more costly.

[Mihalik]

this is why the population density is so low for the country:


barely anyone lives up there...

The population density of Sweden remains low even if you only take into account urban areas.

Roughly about 15% lower than that of Germany at 1.69k (1.4k for Sweden), way lower than that of the UK (at 3.5k, although the urban population density numbers in the UK are probably extremely skewed due to the weight of London).

On average Sweden's urban areas are anywhere between 10% to 30% less dense than that of other European nations, especially the ones with big cities like London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Milan.

Sweden should only really be compared to places like Scandinavia, the Baltics, the Balkans and the smaller Central European countries.

But oddly enough population density doesn't seem to be a good indicator for infection rates.

Currently the most severely affected areas per capita both in the US and Spain seem to be the more rural areas, and transmission seem to be mostly community transmissions (people you hang out with).

[Zantos]

Seems the FDA is now just throwing anything at it while ignoring all science. They approved this for treatment as a possible cure,despite it already being shown to be unable to cure anything on its own. It did help recovery time, but it didn't cure it.

This is worrisome that the FDA is ignoring procedures to now try to treat this. It could cause a lot of harm.

[Coolthulhu]

Seems the FDA is now just throwing anything at it while ignoring all science. They approved this for treatment as a possible cure,despite it already being shown to be unable to cure anything on its own. It did help recovery time, but it didn't cure it.

This is worrisome that the FDA is ignoring procedures to now try to treat this. It could cause a lot of harm.

"Throwing anything at it" is what's supposed to happen during emergencies, especially when facing an enemy that's still little understood. Aside from that, what I read is that they gave "emergency use authorization", which sounds drastically different than "approved it as a possible cure". Matter of fact, the word "cure" is completely absent from the press release. Which is exactly what one would expect in such a case.

[Zantos]

"Throwing anything at it" is what's supposed to happen during emergencies, especially when facing an enemy that's still little understood. Aside from that, what I read is that they gave "emergency use authorization", which sounds drastically different than "approved it as a possible cure". Matter of fact, the word "cure" is completely absent from the press release. Which is exactly what one would expect in such a case.

Here is the thing, that word is absent purely as a "gotcha" card. The fact they approved it for use means exactly that, they think it could be a cure despite all evidence suggesting its useless except to possibly help some recover faster. Heck, that is exactly what it means for the FDA to use the EUA, that it needs to be thought of to be able to cure, prevent, or diagnose something. We already know this drug does none of that. Its been studied by other agencies. As long as they say the same thing that you did, they can waive all bad press away by saying "well, we didn't explicitly say the word cure" while we all know that is what their hoping.

And no, logically speaking, throwing anything at is is the absolute last thing anyone should be doing during an emergency. Doing so runs the risk that you waste time in the best case scenario, and make it far worse in the worst case. Its absolutely not whats supposed to happen unless you're desperate and are facing utter extinction. While this is bad, we are not facing extinction. Heck, it wouldn't even be this bad if our president in the US was competent. Our country has single handily made this thing look FAR worse then what it could have been.

Now we have the FDA just throwing things out there, which can make things worse. Remember the last time they tried it with something else? They had to revoke its use because it was causing serious cardiac issue. Further showing that you need to be careful more then anything during this with what you allow to be used. Especially when its already been shown to not be effective.

[Zan15]

Huge crowd with little masks for the president tonight.. didn't the least time he did this lead to a spike and the death of a sycophant???

maybe its going to kill herman cain a second time since apparently he came back to life to keep tweeting

[Themius]

maybe its going to kill herman cain a second time since apparently he came back to life to keep tweeting

Apparently it is his daughter keeping the hate and appeal to demagoguery going.

[Gorsameth]

Apparently it is his daughter keeping the hate and appeal to demagoguery going.

Yes his twitter mentions its his family tweeting but that doesn't make it any less respectful in my eyes. If you want to spout your political views do it on your own space, not that of your dead family member.

[Omega10]

The Trump administration is moving towards the Swedish approach to virus control.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...Mz7?li=BBnb7Kz

Title: New Trump pandemic adviser pushes controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy, worrying public health officials

Excerpts:

One of President Trump’s top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial “herd immunity” strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing.

The approach’s chief proponent is Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist from Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, who joined the White House earlier this month as a pandemic adviser. He has advocated that the United States adopt the model Sweden has used to respond to the virus outbreak, according to these officials, which relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.

But Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’s liberties.

Elections have consequences. Trump won in 2016, and his policies prevail. The US has been moving towards the Swedish model little by little, and it looks like we will be moving more quickly in that direction.