AIUI, and I may be conflating things, during the European witch trials and the Inquisition, someone accused could lose their property--and at least part of it went to the accuser, and maybe some to local authorities.
It was, at least partly, a way to punish and kill uppity women. Pogroms were to punish and kill Jews (who probably didn't have to be uppity, but would attract dangerous attention if they were).
Croesos' post, just above, has me wondering if all that was a way to sort of claw at getting some of the remaining wealth after plagues, wars, and civil unrest. People want someone to blame, and hate to see a person doing better in the world than they themselves are. So they pick someone who stands out, doesn't fit, is annoying, and act out their animus.
I may be stating the bleeding obvious, but in case this is the answer you wanted--yes, it's way premature to be talking of herd immunity. No place anywhere in this world has reached a state where, if you were to drop a couple dozen COVID patients into their midst, the infection would simply fizzle and die out for lack of new vulnerable people to contract it. Not even Wuhan.
So "herd immunity" is a goal rather like the Promised Land--we strain our eyes hoping to see it shimmer in the distance, but in the meantime we've got a long, dangerous trek ahead of us, and we're not even sure what route we're taking to get there. There's one extreme that involves letting the virus burn, burn, burn till we're pretty much dead or immune, and another extreme that involves keeping as many people away from the virus as possible (e.g. lockdown and other measures) until we can come up with a safe and effective vaccine. What we'll probably do is careen somewhere down the middle, with certain places getting closer to one extreme or the other. Eventually we will arrive at herd immunity (presuming the virus doesn't mutate sufficiently that all our hard-won immunity is useless again, which to be fair, seems unlikely--this virus is much more stable than flu). But it won't be for a long time yet, and any fool who is talking of it as if it were going to happen this summer, say, is... well, a fool.
The great unknown about this disease is how many people get the disease and are asymptomatic or have such a mild case they think it is no more than a cold. Some projections say up to 80% of COVID cases are asymptomatic. But we really will not know until we have a test that can reliably show antibodies.
We do have such tests--quite a few such tests. The problem is that they aren't getting distributed (and results reported) as widely as they need to be, and also that there are quality-control issues. Some tests are simply crap. Others are quite decent, but the false-positive and false-negative rates are too high to make them as useful as we need.
The BBC has reported a Roche antibody test which has been tested as accurate at Porton Down. So, there we go.
Yep the Roche antibody test looks really good.
Two caveats;
1) Roche are only beginning to scale up their production. As far as I can tell, information is not in the public domain as to how quickly they can do that. It's a brilliant test and will be very much in demand.
2) The test will be really good at telling you who's had SARS-CoV2. What we don't know is what such a result means. The presence of IgG to SARS-CoV2 infers immunity. And that's probably true - we need more data to be sure, but in reality having IgG means your protected. The question is, if I test you today and you have IgG; will you still have it in 6 months' time? That is totally unknown at this stage.
There are very good reasons to think that SARS-CoV2 will behave very differently to influenza. The biology of these two viruses is quite different. Hopefully I will have some time later to explain why this is so, but the multiple strains and variability of 'flu does not translate to Coronaviruses.
This is a very useful article and although it contains some technical language I think it is not too difficult to catch the drift.
Some 90% of COVID-19 survivors have been found to have virus-protecting antibodies. These results are based on those who have been hospitalised and more information is required re patients who have been mildly infected to find out the detectable rate of antibodies in that proportion of cases.
Studies of closely related coronaviruses has shown that antibodies are detectable beyond one year after hospitalisation. Obviously there is no such evidence related to COVID-19 survivors. The novel virus has only been around in human beings since last November.
So we are short of certainty about immunity as this quote makes clear.
The route to certainty on the degree and nature of the immunity required for protection will require evidence from formal proofs using approaches such as titrated transfers of antibodies and T lymphocytes to define protection in non-human primate models, as used, for example, in studies of Ebola virus.
But there is evidence which strong!y indicates that vaccine research is on the right track and there will be some degree of immunity for a period in most of those already infected.
Kids have to go back to school, youngest on up. Anybody healthy under 40 can go back to work for a start.
That is contradictory. If kids go back to school they will need teachers. But, a large proportion of teachers are older than 40. So, if only under 40s go back to work most schools won't have enough teachers to allow kids to come back.
Of course it is Alan. Such are Devil's alternatives. Therefore fast track student teachers, deploy teaching assistants and let up to 50s back if they want, risk made explicit. The old must give way to the young. Must. The young must protect the old. Or we end up with the greatest global depression for a century and more.
This is a very useful article and although it contains some technical language I think it is not too difficult to catch the drift.
Some 90% of COVID-19 survivors have been found to have virus-protecting antibodies. These results are based on those who have been hospitalised and more information is required re patients who have been mildly infected to find out the detectable rate of antibodies in that proportion of cases.
Studies of closely related coronaviruses has shown that antibodies are detectable beyond one year after hospitalisation. Obviously there is no such evidence related to COVID-19 survivors. The novel virus has only been around in human beings since last November.
So we are short of certainty about immunity as this quote makes clear.
The route to certainty on the degree and nature of the immunity required for protection will require evidence from formal proofs using approaches such as titrated transfers of antibodies and T lymphocytes to define protection in non-human primate models, as used, for example, in studies of Ebola virus.
But there is evidence which strong!y indicates that vaccine research is on the right track and there will be some degree of immunity for a period in most of those already infected.
That's one approach, Martin, and makes some sense. But people of all ages have caught the virus, gotten sick, died. Plus all the weird effects of the virus that are gradually turning up. And some people seem to either get it repeatedly, or maybe have some relapsing/remitting cycle. Plus there's some thought that there will sometimes be long-term after-effects.
Plus I'm not sure it's fair to put younger people at risk, just because they're younger.
Tangentially: there's also the issue of people doing all sorts of essential work (particularly thinking of grocery stores, delivery people, restaurant staff in semi-open restaurants, factory workers, Amazon rank and file employees, etc.), and being mistreated, underpaid, not having proper protective gear, and possibly being considered expendable.
I don't have any miraculous answers. But whatever is done, the people taking risks for the rest of us need to be protected and treated well. And *all* of us need to be protected and treated well.
And, for God's sake, o high mucky-muck powers that be, make sure everyone has food, and enough of it! There's been news footage of cars backed up for miles on US roads to get donated groceries. And the entire parking lot of a huge mall filled with parked cars, waiting to leave their slots and get donated groceries. Not to mention all the folks who are flooding beleaguered food pantries. Or suffering at home.
And set up miniature golf in the White House basement, and put T there. 24/7.
I'm working in healthcare in semi-rural Scotland. We don't know how many of us have had mild or asymptomatic infection with SARS-Cov-2 virus. One of our colleagues locally has had confirmed COVID-19, and another had 2 negative tests but we're still suspicious that their tests were false negatives.
All our systems and protocols have been completely changed. I hadn't done a steroid joint injection for weeks until I did one yesterday which was deemed by a consultant rheumatologist, the patient and me to be essential. We are not doing minor surgery or routine ultrasounds locally. I have done some essential emergency scans. Several of my colleagues are shielding and therefore working from home or remotely; one has been seconded full time to a management role.
People have been very patient and understanding so far, but perhaps too reticent to call when they need our services. Thankfully we are now getting more calls. It is possible that by delaying calling some people have missed out on appropriate care.
With changes in systems there have been glitches; misunderstandings about where and when an appointment was meant to be and people walking in to our building who should have phoned. Many older and frail people have surprised us by taking to video consultations like teenagers to social media. Some have really struggled, especially those who are hard of hearing.
Where I live my neighbours have started to say that they don't believe the coronavirus is that common around here. They feel as if it must be far away and nothing to do with them. They feel safe, so they take unnecessary risks. Unfortunately the bug is still spreading in our area and there are a significant number of people at home and in hospital with suspected and confirmed COVID-19.
Staggering that Hancock said in yesterday's press conference that the govt threw "a protective ring" around care homes. Eh? They turfed thousands of patients, some with covid, from hospital into care homes, and the rest is carnage. I wonder if the media will pick this up, I'm not counting on it.
@Cattyish in my similar part of Scotland I am also hearing people say that the risk is not great here. When we just don’t know. We only know the numbers hospitalised.
Yesterday shopping in Inverness for the first time (as I had to be there for work) I was the only one in a big supermarket wearing a mask, although they are more common in my smaller community (and the middle sized community 14 miles away). I know the Highland statistics are low, but that level of complacency startled me.
A question. I got triggered into looking at white cell chemistry, principally T-lymphocytes, B-lymphocytes and Natural Killer cells. It looks to me that all three are part of the body' natural defence mechanism and they work in different ways. Apparently, T and B lymphocytes also produce "memory cells" so that if the same virus enters the body again, the memory cells enable a faster and more successful repelling of the invader.
Apart from being (not for the first time) amazed at how our bodies work in response to external threats, I wondered whether these differences were reflected in the different kinds of approaches to the production of a successful virus.
I'm not sure how many other Shipmates would be interested in such detailed information, but maybe it will be significant in understanding the timescales involved in the journey towards a successful vaccine? And we're all interested in that!
There’s a type of RNA vaccine being developed, and ready for trial, which causes the body to recognise the ‘spikes’ on the surface of the virus. Apparently you only need a tiny dose, using nano particles.
“ Using this strategy, biotechnology firm Moderna Inc. announced on Feb. 24 that it had rapidly developed an experimental COVID-19 mRNA vaccine called mRNA-1273, ready for clinical trials in humans. This vaccine candidate is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The mRNA-1273 encodes for a stable form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”
There seem to be a variety of vaccines using different approaches that are in advanced states of development (though, advanced could still be a year or more from being demonstrated as safe and effective, much less produced in sufficient numbers of doses to be useful). Which is good news, it means we don't have all our eggs in one basket - if there was only one vaccine under development and it turns out to be a complete dud we'd be back where we started, with several there's hope the next one to get to trial stage might work. If the vaccines target different parts of the virus that also means that a small mutation is even less likely to make all the vaccines ineffective.
Martin--
That's one approach, Martin, and makes some sense. But people of all ages have caught the virus, gotten sick, died. Plus all the weird effects of the virus that are gradually turning up. And some people seem to either get it repeatedly, or maybe have some relapsing/remitting cycle. Plus there's some thought that there will sometimes be long-term after-effects.
I am now over 8 weeks since developing my first symptoms of suspected covid and appear to have developed Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome as a post-viral dysautonomic response. I suspect a lot of people who think they have the virus repeatedly are actually experiencing post-viral disorders as symptoms overlap such as fatigue and shortness of breath.
I was previously a fit 50 year old on no prior medications who walked 4 miles a day. I have spent the last 6 weeks teaching my body to respond correctly to standing up and walking around. Today was the first day I have stood up in the morning without getting tachycardia immediately (I didn’t get it til I brushed my teeth, I still haven’t got my body to respond correctly to lifting my arms). I had mild-moderate covid without hospitalisation - I dread to think what it is like to try to recover from a severe case.
A young friend of ours who became ill six weeks ago also has persistent fatigue and shortness of breath. Profound sympathies to you and hopes and prayers that the post viral effects fade away. As GK has said, these continuing infirmities are often overlooked when considering the overall impact of the virus.
If the only way to get the economy working is to let lots of people die or become ill, some with long-term conditions, maybe we need to rethink our economy.
A young friend of ours who became ill six weeks ago also has persistent fatigue and shortness of breath. Profound sympathies to you and hopes and prayers that the post viral effects fade away. As GK has said, these continuing infirmities are often overlooked when considering the overall impact of the virus.
2 trips to casualty and another to an acute admissions unit for a lung scan didn’t get me a diagnosis (though a helpful paramedic did suggest it), and who knows how long it will be until I see a cardiologist for investigation. I’m an ex-nurse so diagnosed myself with POTS and recognised the need for early rehabilitation to prevent deconditioning. I’m now drinking hourly glasses of water to increase fluids to my heart, doing calf exercises before getting up, wearing light compression running tights, making slow transitions to standing (on tiptoe) and doing gentle daily walking, supplemented by yoga, to retrain my body to respond to exercise. None of these interventions were suggested by doctors.
Today was the first day I have got up from bed where I haven’t had tachycardia so hopefully I’m winning the battle.
Staggering that Hancock said in yesterday's press conference that the govt threw "a protective ring" around care homes. Eh? They turfed thousands of patients, some with covid, from hospital into care homes, and the rest is carnage. I wonder if the media will pick this up, I'm not counting on it.
I think the row over schools going back - with associated teacher-shaming, a favourite right-wing press pastime - is a dead cat to distract from the carnage in care homes and the way government policy caused it. It seems to be working too, I think the FT have picked up on Hancock's jaw-dropping lies, but no-one else, not even the Guardian.
My finger in the air global cost of flu is a hundred billion (pounds, dollars, euros). So it's not worth spending even that, annually, on suppressing it further, probably only by a factor of 10 if that. Not in a capitalist, low tax economy. Coronavirus' cost must be a hundred times that. Ten trillion. Therefore it's worth spending at least a trillion a year on it. Unless the principalities and powers decide herd immunity for the under 50s and isolate the rest is more cost effective.
Staggering that Hancock said in yesterday's press conference that the govt threw "a protective ring" around care homes. Eh? They turfed thousands of patients, some with covid, from hospital into care homes, and the rest is carnage. I wonder if the media will pick this up, I'm not counting on it.
I think the row over schools going back - with associated teacher-shaming, a favourite right-wing press pastime - is a dead cat to distract from the carnage in care homes and the way government policy caused it. It seems to be working too, I think the FT have picked up on Hancock's jaw-dropping lies, but no-one else, not even the Guardian.
I think Sky actually interviewed care home managers who talked about covid patients being dumped on them, plus people dying without oxygen. Haven't got a link. People are surprisingly brutal about mass deaths, I suppose also there's a feeling of no point in crying over spilt milk.
And if it turns out that we can't figure COVID out, well, let's not go there With the massive numbers we've created, there will no doubt be survivors. May they be wiser than we have been.
If we never find a way to confer lasting immunity then we’ll either have to destroy our whole society and culture or accept a whole lot of death. Neither is a good choice, but I’d choose to preserve our society and culture even at the cost of many lives.
Hell, about half the population of Europe died in the Black Death, but European cultures still thrived afterwards. And for the survivors it was even better in many ways than it had been before.
Marvin you seem to feel that if we reeopened and all the "whole lot of death" ensued, that it would otherwise have no effect on "our society and culture". I think that it's more likely that the deaths would have such a profound effect on our society and culture that they would become unrecognizable anyway. You aren't going to get your pre-covid life back, either way. The best bet is lockdown now, fewer deaths, and a more normal life later.
A question. I got triggered into looking at white cell chemistry, principally T-lymphocytes, B-lymphocytes and Natural Killer cells. It looks to me that all three are part of the body' natural defence mechanism and they work in different ways. Apparently, T and B lymphocytes also produce "memory cells" so that if the same virus enters the body again, the memory cells enable a faster and more successful repelling of the invader.
Apart from being (not for the first time) amazed at how our bodies work in response to external threats, I wondered whether these differences were reflected in the different kinds of approaches to the production of a successful virus.
I'm not sure how many other Shipmates would be interested in such detailed information, but maybe it will be significant in understanding the timescales involved in the journey towards a successful vaccine? And we're all interested in that!
If you're interested, I can PM you a link to some good stuff on the Immune System that I wrote a few years back. This will be quite a long post.... feel free to scroll past!
In the meantime; lymphocytes....
Blood cells come in lots of types and they are produced by your bone marrow. Simplistically, they are referred to as Red Blood Cell and White Blood Cells. Red cells are the vast majority, carry oxygen and make blood red.
White blood cells come in lots of difference types. They include: Macrophages, Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Eosinophils....
Lymphocytes in turn come in different types. But basically we are concerned here with 3 types. B-lymphocytes (that make antibodies); T-lymphocytes that have a very different function to B-lymphocytes but are similar in specific ways; and non-T, non-B lymphocytes as they were originally called. Non-T, non-B lymphocytes are also known as Natural Killer Cells. (NK cells, which is one of my favourite things in molecular immunology; I mean what a brilliant name!)
So, how does the body fight bacterial infection? Primarily, neutrophils and macrophages absorb and destroy the bacteria. These cells are capable of responding to bacterial infection unaided but antibodies are really useful here. Essentially an antibody will bind to the bacteria and then bind to the macrophage which makes it much easier for the macrophage to absorb the bacteria and kill it. Antibodies have lots of other functions as well but that's probably the most important way of fighting a bacterial infection. When you meet a bacteria for the first time, you need to generate the necessary antibodies in order to fight it which takes time. Some of the B-lymphocytes then become 'memory-B-cells' able to produce the antibodies you need the next time you meet the same bacteria.
Fighting viruses is a very different game. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites - the defining feature of a virus is that it cannot replicate on its own and has to hijack the biology of a cell in order to replicate - so the virus gets into the cell and then starts to replicate. Once inside the cell, the antibodies are of no use because they cannot see it. This is where the T-lymphocytes and the NK-cells become important. Essentially the way to kill a virus is to kill the infected cell. The trick is to only kill infected cells and avoid collateral damage of the non-infected cells. This is what both NK-cells and a subtype of T-lymphocytes both do. This sub-type is called killer-T-cells (or cytotoxic T-cells). These cells work in different ways to do the same thing. Essentially a NK cell looks for a signal that cells produce that says 'I'm infected, kill me' and they then bind to the infected cell and kill them.
Cytotoxic T-cells do the same thing but in a different way. Proteins are being broken down inside a cell all the time. This is normal metabolism of the cell. And hence there are fragments of proteins inside the cell (they will then be further broken down and the amino-acids will be used to make new proteins). If you have a virus replicating in a cell, then some of the protein fragments will be viral-protein fragments. All cells take some of these fragments and 'present them' on the cell surface, so that passing T-cells can see them. T-cells have a receptor which works very much like an antibody (and is structurally quite similar) that binds to this receptor and protein fragment complex. If the fragment is from the cell itself no T-cell will recognise it* - if it's viral in origin then the right T-cell will bind to it and then kill the infected cell. When a virus is new, the specific T-cells that you need to kill off the infected cells don't exist, and it takes time to produce them. But once you have, like with memory B-cells, you produce memory T-cells that hang around so if you see the same virus again you can kill it off more easily.
As you might expect, this is only part of the story - there's quite a lot I've left out. However from those two pathways, you could think that antibodies are therefore not important in fighting viruses. The general thinking is that they are less important than for bacteria but they do play an import role.
If the virus is coated with antibodies then it is unable to bind to any cell and thus cannot infect it. Hence antibodies are said to inactive the virus. The importance of this is that for vaccines, producing a good and long-lasting antibody response is much easier than inducing the production of memory T-cells. (I won't go into why here). That's not to say that there aren't vaccines that aim to produce memory T-cells but I'll leave that for now.
One of the vaccine strategies which I think is very promising and is the one I know most about is to produce antibodies to the SARS-CoV2 Spike protein. All Coronaviruses have a spike protein and they are different is each different Coronavirus (as in, they have a slightly different structure). This protein's function is that it binds to the host cell as the first step to allowing the virus to enter the cell and start replicating. If this protein is covered in an antibody is simply cannot bind to the host cell and the virus becomes effectively inactive.
So, if you have the memory B-cells that produce these antibodies, then if you are exposed to the virus, you can produce these antibodies quickly and stop the virus from infecting any cells.
AFZ
*One of the common reasons why people get autoimmune diseases is because they have T-Cells that recognise 'self' proteins and hence react to uninfected cells as if they are infected. There is a mechanism during development whereby all T-cells that bind to 'self' rather than 'other' are excluded but as with all biology, this is not a perfect system and sometimes fails; hence autoimmune diseases.
Where I live my neighbours have started to say that they don't believe the coronavirus is that common around here. They feel as if it must be far away and nothing to do with them. They feel safe, so they take unnecessary risks. Unfortunately the bug is still spreading in our area and there are a significant number of people at home and in hospital with suspected and confirmed COVID-19.
Nightly news coverage of the Vietnam War taught military and political leaders never again to show the American public war that up-close. Bodies and blood don’t sell geopolitical abstractions very well. Nor does a parade of coffins — flag-draped or otherwise — bolster support for endless military adventurism and war profiteering. So the George W. Bush administration turned the Iraq invasion into a video game. The supposed war on COVID-19 is similarly sanitized.
<snip>
We are spared all that. “Everything we hear about the impact of this virus is technical,” [ Andrew ] Sullivan explains. “All the dead are abstractions. We chart graphs. We predict curves.”
Broadcasting etiquette, medical privacy laws, and refrigerated trailers keep stacked bodies from public view. Only drone footage of mass burials on Hart Island give a hint of the scale of death in New York City. Over 27,000 have died statewide at this writing and over 88,000 nationally. Many victims never make it to the hospital. Few but family and FDNY crews see them.
This is why, IMO, there are so many deniers. No bodies on the streets, no real problem.
More news reports should be done from inside hospitals and morgues.
An excellent video on the spread of a virus. It goes through several scenarios of how different types of social distancing and contact tracing can impact the spread. It does not talk about how a vaccine can impact the spread, through.
There was a powerful letter written by a 16-year-old in our local paper today. She pointed out while some think the virus is impacting only those who are high risk, she said she has an immunocompromised member in her household who is her everything.
No it's not. Only if you think stasis and changelessness are the only source of happiness. Society and culture will adapt whatever happens. But it isn't going to be the same no matter what, and pretending it will be is pointless.
You aren't going to get your pre-covid life back, either way.
Well, that’s a bleak vision of hopelessness and despair, isn’t it.
Why not just tell me to off myself right now?
I think the reality is that the economic situation is going to be affected either way and we aren't going to get back to a world where the pandemic didn't happen.
To take the most prosaic interpretation of NicoleMRs post; people who experience a percentage of their extended family dying aren't going to be going out, spending and boosting the economy.
No one can get their previous life back. Even without a pandemic our lives 6 months ago are different from today, and in 6 months time they'll be different again. The accumulated experience gained over time means life is always changing ... if that's not true of you then you have my sympathy that your life is so boring that nothing ever changes. We happen to be going through a particular time when external conditions have resulted in all of us experiencing a radical change, and when it's over there'll be another radical change back towards where we were before but it will never be to exactly where it was because we'll have months of new experiences (hopefully some good) that will have changed us and those around us.
@Cattyish in my similar part of Scotland I am also hearing people say that the risk is not great here. When we just don’t know. We only know the numbers hospitalised.
The thing is, if people go back to their old behaviour, the gap between "the risk is not great" and "people are dying in the streets" isn't all that large. That's exponential growth for you.
Thanks AFZ. I actually 'got' just about all of that and would definitely appreciate a PM with a link. It's pretty mindboggling to reflect on these defensive mechanisms and their importance to our well being and survival.
The accumulated experience gained over time means life is always changing
That’s not what people mean when they say we won’t ever go back to how we were before, and you know it. They’re talking about whole areas of life irrevocably and radically changed. Rights and freedoms that we may never have again. Emergency laws that will never be repealed.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
Why do you think that? What is your evidence that gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again? That seems incredibly unlikely to happen to me. If I were listing previously very unlikely things that are getting more likely, in my opinion, I would list possibilities like universal basic income or the U.S. getting real rights for workers. I think that these things are somewhat (not very) more likely because I think that covid increases the chance of the Republican party, in this country, having to change or die.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
Or one of those "we'll never see airports without metal detectors again" things.
One of the things that's rarely factored in by pro-infection advocates (infect them all, let the virus sort it out) is that while we're not certain about the long-term effects on those who recover from COVID-19, what we do know doesn't look good. Things will also never go back to normal for those living with diminished lung capacity, or heart disease, or who need dialysis for the rest of their lives. Pretending that there's a simple binary dichotomy of those who get COVID-19 and die and those who recover from it and go back to normal life just as before obscures a lot of other possible outcomes of infection
This is another way in which delay is your friend; it gives medical science time to come up with better treatments for those who are infected, leading to fewer long-term effects. For example, imagine the difference between being diagnosed HIV+ in the 1980s (a certain death sentence) versus being diagnosed HIV+ in the 2010s (a manageable condition with little to no effect on life expectancy).
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
Why do you think that? What is your evidence that gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again? That seems incredibly unlikely to happen to me.
No evidence whatsoever, and that’s not the point.
The point is that changes that happen as a result of covid turning out to be with us forever will be significant, and not the sort of changes many of us would ever have agreed with six months ago. Such change should not be casually consented to with an airy “well we’re always changing, aren’t we?” or a callous “shit happens, deal with it”. Or so it seems to me.
For example, imagine the difference between being diagnosed HIV+ in the 1980s (a certain death sentence) versus being diagnosed HIV+ in the 2010s (a manageable condition with little to no effect on life expectancy).
Ok. Now you imagine if all world governments had strictly banned any form of extramarital sexual activity for that whole 30-year period just to ensure that as few people as possible were exposed to HIV without there being a reliable and proven treatment.
Many lives would have been saved. Would it have been a price worth paying?
The accumulated experience gained over time means life is always changing
That’s not what people mean when they say we won’t ever go back to how we were before, and you know it. They’re talking about whole areas of life irrevocably and radically changed. Rights and freedoms that we may never have again. Emergency laws that will never be repealed.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
No, it's gatherings involving the high risk that can't be allowed until there's a vaccine. Set the low risk free.
Jesus wept, it has been less than three months. At the very least could we not wait until we have some more reliable data on immunity, transmission and vaccine possibilities before we throw the entire disabled and chronically ill population under a bus.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
Why do you think that? What is your evidence that gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again? That seems incredibly unlikely to happen to me.
No evidence whatsoever, and that’s not the point.
The point is that changes that happen as a result of covid turning out to be with us forever will be significant, and not the sort of changes many of us would ever have agreed with six months ago. Such change should not be casually consented to with an airy “well we’re always changing, aren’t we?” or a callous “shit happens, deal with it”. Or so it seems to me.
And that's why you are a small c conservative. My brother died when I was 22. That also changed my life in ways I did not consent to. Most people here have had similar changes. Change is inevitable. I left for college in a world where no one needed an ID to fly. I came home from my first semester of college with an ID and a realization that I lived in a world that would never relax about airplanes the same way again. We can't keep the world the same or go backwards. We can only redirect the flow to a place that doesn't suck as much. If you are worried about getting back to large get togthers, I think it behooves you to ask What kind of measures can we take in a post-covid world to make sure that such gatherings can happen sooner rather than later? What has to happen so that people can do that and still survive it? How do we do arrange for that to happen?
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
Or one of those "we'll never see airports without metal detectors again" things.
My local airport had its metal detectors and x-ray machines removed... year before last, I think?
Ok. Now you imagine if all world governments had strictly banned any form of extramarital sexual activity for that whole 30-year period just to ensure that as few people as possible were exposed to HIV without there being a reliable and proven treatment.
Many lives would have been saved. Would it have been a price worth paying?
I'm sure you remember all the condom public health adverts. Proper use of condoms is pretty effective against the transfer of HIV.
No, it's gatherings involving the high risk that can't be allowed until there's a vaccine. Set the low risk free.
Marvin, you're talking bollocks.
Being low risk doesn't mean you're less likely to catch the virus - it means you're less likely to die if you get it. And the thing about high risk people is that they inevitably have to have some contact with low risk people (Shopping. Nursing care. Food prep. Whatever.) The way to protect those high risk people is to make it unlikely that the low-risk people they interact with have the virus, as well as limiting the interactions they have. And the way you do that is by not having thousands of asymptomatic virus-spreaders in every town.
Jesus wept, it has been less than three months. At the very least could we not wait until we have some more reliable data on immunity, transmission and vaccine possibilities before we throw the entire disabled and chronically ill population under a bus.
They will be 'protected'. There will be no vaccine for a year and more and it will have a minority effect on average, like flu shots. And it will cost a trillion a year just to do that.
No, it's gatherings involving the high risk that can't be allowed until there's a vaccine. Set the low risk free.
Marvin, you're talking bollocks.
Being low risk doesn't mean you're less likely to catch the virus - it means you're less likely to die if you get it. And the thing about high risk people is that they inevitably have to have some contact with low risk people (Shopping. Nursing care. Food prep. Whatever.) The way to protect those high risk people is to make it unlikely that the low-risk people they interact with have the virus, as well as limiting the interactions they have. And the way you do that is by not having thousands of asymptomatic virus-spreaders in every town.
Comments
It was, at least partly, a way to punish and kill uppity women. Pogroms were to punish and kill Jews (who probably didn't have to be uppity, but would attract dangerous attention if they were).
Croesos' post, just above, has me wondering if all that was a way to sort of claw at getting some of the remaining wealth after plagues, wars, and civil unrest. People want someone to blame, and hate to see a person doing better in the world than they themselves are. So they pick someone who stands out, doesn't fit, is annoying, and act out their animus.
So "herd immunity" is a goal rather like the Promised Land--we strain our eyes hoping to see it shimmer in the distance, but in the meantime we've got a long, dangerous trek ahead of us, and we're not even sure what route we're taking to get there. There's one extreme that involves letting the virus burn, burn, burn till we're pretty much dead or immune, and another extreme that involves keeping as many people away from the virus as possible (e.g. lockdown and other measures) until we can come up with a safe and effective vaccine. What we'll probably do is careen somewhere down the middle, with certain places getting closer to one extreme or the other. Eventually we will arrive at herd immunity (presuming the virus doesn't mutate sufficiently that all our hard-won immunity is useless again, which to be fair, seems unlikely--this virus is much more stable than flu). But it won't be for a long time yet, and any fool who is talking of it as if it were going to happen this summer, say, is... well, a fool.
We do have such tests--quite a few such tests. The problem is that they aren't getting distributed (and results reported) as widely as they need to be, and also that there are quality-control issues. Some tests are simply crap. Others are quite decent, but the false-positive and false-negative rates are too high to make them as useful as we need.
Yep the Roche antibody test looks really good.
Two caveats;
1) Roche are only beginning to scale up their production. As far as I can tell, information is not in the public domain as to how quickly they can do that. It's a brilliant test and will be very much in demand.
2) The test will be really good at telling you who's had SARS-CoV2. What we don't know is what such a result means. The presence of IgG to SARS-CoV2 infers immunity. And that's probably true - we need more data to be sure, but in reality having IgG means your protected. The question is, if I test you today and you have IgG; will you still have it in 6 months' time? That is totally unknown at this stage.
There are very good reasons to think that SARS-CoV2 will behave very differently to influenza. The biology of these two viruses is quite different. Hopefully I will have some time later to explain why this is so, but the multiple strains and variability of 'flu does not translate to Coronaviruses.
AFZ
Ohher
This is a very useful article and although it contains some technical language I think it is not too difficult to catch the drift.
Some 90% of COVID-19 survivors have been found to have virus-protecting antibodies. These results are based on those who have been hospitalised and more information is required re patients who have been mildly infected to find out the detectable rate of antibodies in that proportion of cases.
Studies of closely related coronaviruses has shown that antibodies are detectable beyond one year after hospitalisation. Obviously there is no such evidence related to COVID-19 survivors. The novel virus has only been around in human beings since last November.
So we are short of certainty about immunity as this quote makes clear.
But there is evidence which strong!y indicates that vaccine research is on the right track and there will be some degree of immunity for a period in most of those already infected.
Of course it is Alan. Such are Devil's alternatives. Therefore fast track student teachers, deploy teaching assistants and let up to 50s back if they want, risk made explicit. The old must give way to the young. Must. The young must protect the old. Or we end up with the greatest global depression for a century and more.
That's an excellent review article.
Here (back on April 30th) I attempted to describe a vaccine strategy.
More later...
AFZ
That's one approach, Martin, and makes some sense. But people of all ages have caught the virus, gotten sick, died. Plus all the weird effects of the virus that are gradually turning up. And some people seem to either get it repeatedly, or maybe have some relapsing/remitting cycle. Plus there's some thought that there will sometimes be long-term after-effects.
Plus I'm not sure it's fair to put younger people at risk, just because they're younger.
Tangentially: there's also the issue of people doing all sorts of essential work (particularly thinking of grocery stores, delivery people, restaurant staff in semi-open restaurants, factory workers, Amazon rank and file employees, etc.), and being mistreated, underpaid, not having proper protective gear, and possibly being considered expendable.
I don't have any miraculous answers. But whatever is done, the people taking risks for the rest of us need to be protected and treated well. And *all* of us need to be protected and treated well.
And, for God's sake, o high mucky-muck powers that be, make sure everyone has food, and enough of it! There's been news footage of cars backed up for miles on US roads to get donated groceries. And the entire parking lot of a huge mall filled with parked cars, waiting to leave their slots and get donated groceries. Not to mention all the folks who are flooding beleaguered food pantries. Or suffering at home.
And set up miniature golf in the White House basement, and put T there. 24/7.
The Word Of The Key.
All our systems and protocols have been completely changed. I hadn't done a steroid joint injection for weeks until I did one yesterday which was deemed by a consultant rheumatologist, the patient and me to be essential. We are not doing minor surgery or routine ultrasounds locally. I have done some essential emergency scans. Several of my colleagues are shielding and therefore working from home or remotely; one has been seconded full time to a management role.
People have been very patient and understanding so far, but perhaps too reticent to call when they need our services. Thankfully we are now getting more calls. It is possible that by delaying calling some people have missed out on appropriate care.
With changes in systems there have been glitches; misunderstandings about where and when an appointment was meant to be and people walking in to our building who should have phoned. Many older and frail people have surprised us by taking to video consultations like teenagers to social media. Some have really struggled, especially those who are hard of hearing.
Where I live my neighbours have started to say that they don't believe the coronavirus is that common around here. They feel as if it must be far away and nothing to do with them. They feel safe, so they take unnecessary risks. Unfortunately the bug is still spreading in our area and there are a significant number of people at home and in hospital with suspected and confirmed COVID-19.
Cattyish, contemplating a second breakfast.
Yesterday shopping in Inverness for the first time (as I had to be there for work) I was the only one in a big supermarket wearing a mask, although they are more common in my smaller community (and the middle sized community 14 miles away). I know the Highland statistics are low, but that level of complacency startled me.
A question. I got triggered into looking at white cell chemistry, principally T-lymphocytes, B-lymphocytes and Natural Killer cells. It looks to me that all three are part of the body' natural defence mechanism and they work in different ways. Apparently, T and B lymphocytes also produce "memory cells" so that if the same virus enters the body again, the memory cells enable a faster and more successful repelling of the invader.
Apart from being (not for the first time) amazed at how our bodies work in response to external threats, I wondered whether these differences were reflected in the different kinds of approaches to the production of a successful virus.
I'm not sure how many other Shipmates would be interested in such detailed information, but maybe it will be significant in understanding the timescales involved in the journey towards a successful vaccine? And we're all interested in that!
“ Using this strategy, biotechnology firm Moderna Inc. announced on Feb. 24 that it had rapidly developed an experimental COVID-19 mRNA vaccine called mRNA-1273, ready for clinical trials in humans. This vaccine candidate is funded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The mRNA-1273 encodes for a stable form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”
Fingers crossed. 🤞
Link - https://tinyurl.com/rzrpxvu
I was previously a fit 50 year old on no prior medications who walked 4 miles a day. I have spent the last 6 weeks teaching my body to respond correctly to standing up and walking around. Today was the first day I have stood up in the morning without getting tachycardia immediately (I didn’t get it til I brushed my teeth, I still haven’t got my body to respond correctly to lifting my arms). I had mild-moderate covid without hospitalisation - I dread to think what it is like to try to recover from a severe case.
A young friend of ours who became ill six weeks ago also has persistent fatigue and shortness of breath. Profound sympathies to you and hopes and prayers that the post viral effects fade away. As GK has said, these continuing infirmities are often overlooked when considering the overall impact of the virus.
Today was the first day I have got up from bed where I haven’t had tachycardia so hopefully I’m winning the battle.
I think the row over schools going back - with associated teacher-shaming, a favourite right-wing press pastime - is a dead cat to distract from the carnage in care homes and the way government policy caused it. It seems to be working too, I think the FT have picked up on Hancock's jaw-dropping lies, but no-one else, not even the Guardian.
I think Sky actually interviewed care home managers who talked about covid patients being dumped on them, plus people dying without oxygen. Haven't got a link. People are surprisingly brutal about mass deaths, I suppose also there's a feeling of no point in crying over spilt milk.
Marvin you seem to feel that if we reeopened and all the "whole lot of death" ensued, that it would otherwise have no effect on "our society and culture". I think that it's more likely that the deaths would have such a profound effect on our society and culture that they would become unrecognizable anyway. You aren't going to get your pre-covid life back, either way. The best bet is lockdown now, fewer deaths, and a more normal life later.
If you're interested, I can PM you a link to some good stuff on the Immune System that I wrote a few years back. This will be quite a long post.... feel free to scroll past!
In the meantime; lymphocytes....
Blood cells come in lots of types and they are produced by your bone marrow. Simplistically, they are referred to as Red Blood Cell and White Blood Cells. Red cells are the vast majority, carry oxygen and make blood red.
White blood cells come in lots of difference types. They include: Macrophages, Neutrophils, Lymphocytes, Eosinophils....
Lymphocytes in turn come in different types. But basically we are concerned here with 3 types. B-lymphocytes (that make antibodies); T-lymphocytes that have a very different function to B-lymphocytes but are similar in specific ways; and non-T, non-B lymphocytes as they were originally called. Non-T, non-B lymphocytes are also known as Natural Killer Cells. (NK cells, which is one of my favourite things in molecular immunology; I mean what a brilliant name!)
So, how does the body fight bacterial infection? Primarily, neutrophils and macrophages absorb and destroy the bacteria. These cells are capable of responding to bacterial infection unaided but antibodies are really useful here. Essentially an antibody will bind to the bacteria and then bind to the macrophage which makes it much easier for the macrophage to absorb the bacteria and kill it. Antibodies have lots of other functions as well but that's probably the most important way of fighting a bacterial infection. When you meet a bacteria for the first time, you need to generate the necessary antibodies in order to fight it which takes time. Some of the B-lymphocytes then become 'memory-B-cells' able to produce the antibodies you need the next time you meet the same bacteria.
Fighting viruses is a very different game. Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites - the defining feature of a virus is that it cannot replicate on its own and has to hijack the biology of a cell in order to replicate - so the virus gets into the cell and then starts to replicate. Once inside the cell, the antibodies are of no use because they cannot see it. This is where the T-lymphocytes and the NK-cells become important. Essentially the way to kill a virus is to kill the infected cell. The trick is to only kill infected cells and avoid collateral damage of the non-infected cells. This is what both NK-cells and a subtype of T-lymphocytes both do. This sub-type is called killer-T-cells (or cytotoxic T-cells). These cells work in different ways to do the same thing. Essentially a NK cell looks for a signal that cells produce that says 'I'm infected, kill me' and they then bind to the infected cell and kill them.
Cytotoxic T-cells do the same thing but in a different way. Proteins are being broken down inside a cell all the time. This is normal metabolism of the cell. And hence there are fragments of proteins inside the cell (they will then be further broken down and the amino-acids will be used to make new proteins). If you have a virus replicating in a cell, then some of the protein fragments will be viral-protein fragments. All cells take some of these fragments and 'present them' on the cell surface, so that passing T-cells can see them. T-cells have a receptor which works very much like an antibody (and is structurally quite similar) that binds to this receptor and protein fragment complex. If the fragment is from the cell itself no T-cell will recognise it* - if it's viral in origin then the right T-cell will bind to it and then kill the infected cell. When a virus is new, the specific T-cells that you need to kill off the infected cells don't exist, and it takes time to produce them. But once you have, like with memory B-cells, you produce memory T-cells that hang around so if you see the same virus again you can kill it off more easily.
As you might expect, this is only part of the story - there's quite a lot I've left out. However from those two pathways, you could think that antibodies are therefore not important in fighting viruses. The general thinking is that they are less important than for bacteria but they do play an import role.
If the virus is coated with antibodies then it is unable to bind to any cell and thus cannot infect it. Hence antibodies are said to inactive the virus. The importance of this is that for vaccines, producing a good and long-lasting antibody response is much easier than inducing the production of memory T-cells. (I won't go into why here). That's not to say that there aren't vaccines that aim to produce memory T-cells but I'll leave that for now.
One of the vaccine strategies which I think is very promising and is the one I know most about is to produce antibodies to the SARS-CoV2 Spike protein. All Coronaviruses have a spike protein and they are different is each different Coronavirus (as in, they have a slightly different structure). This protein's function is that it binds to the host cell as the first step to allowing the virus to enter the cell and start replicating. If this protein is covered in an antibody is simply cannot bind to the host cell and the virus becomes effectively inactive.
So, if you have the memory B-cells that produce these antibodies, then if you are exposed to the virus, you can produce these antibodies quickly and stop the virus from infecting any cells.
AFZ
*One of the common reasons why people get autoimmune diseases is because they have T-Cells that recognise 'self' proteins and hence react to uninfected cells as if they are infected. There is a mechanism during development whereby all T-cells that bind to 'self' rather than 'other' are excluded but as with all biology, this is not a perfect system and sometimes fails; hence autoimmune diseases.
This is a consequence of sanitized mass death.
More news reports should be done from inside hospitals and morgues.
There was a powerful letter written by a 16-year-old in our local paper today. She pointed out while some think the virus is impacting only those who are high risk, she said she has an immunocompromised member in her household who is her everything.
Well, that’s a bleak vision of hopelessness and despair, isn’t it.
Why not just tell me to off myself right now?
I think the reality is that the economic situation is going to be affected either way and we aren't going to get back to a world where the pandemic didn't happen.
To take the most prosaic interpretation of NicoleMRs post; people who experience a percentage of their extended family dying aren't going to be going out, spending and boosting the economy.
The thing is, if people go back to their old behaviour, the gap between "the risk is not great" and "people are dying in the streets" isn't all that large. That's exponential growth for you.
That’s not what people mean when they say we won’t ever go back to how we were before, and you know it. They’re talking about whole areas of life irrevocably and radically changed. Rights and freedoms that we may never have again. Emergency laws that will never be repealed.
It’s not one of those “you can never cross the same river twice” sort of things, it’s one of those “gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again” sort of things.
That was entirely uncalled for.
As others have said, life is going to change, whether we like it or not.
Shit happens. Deal with it - as we all shall have to do...
Why do you think that? What is your evidence that gatherings of more than 100 people may never be allowed again? That seems incredibly unlikely to happen to me. If I were listing previously very unlikely things that are getting more likely, in my opinion, I would list possibilities like universal basic income or the U.S. getting real rights for workers. I think that these things are somewhat (not very) more likely because I think that covid increases the chance of the Republican party, in this country, having to change or die.
Or one of those "we'll never see airports without metal detectors again" things.
One of the things that's rarely factored in by pro-infection advocates (infect them all, let the virus sort it out) is that while we're not certain about the long-term effects on those who recover from COVID-19, what we do know doesn't look good. Things will also never go back to normal for those living with diminished lung capacity, or heart disease, or who need dialysis for the rest of their lives. Pretending that there's a simple binary dichotomy of those who get COVID-19 and die and those who recover from it and go back to normal life just as before obscures a lot of other possible outcomes of infection
This is another way in which delay is your friend; it gives medical science time to come up with better treatments for those who are infected, leading to fewer long-term effects. For example, imagine the difference between being diagnosed HIV+ in the 1980s (a certain death sentence) versus being diagnosed HIV+ in the 2010s (a manageable condition with little to no effect on life expectancy).
No evidence whatsoever, and that’s not the point.
The point is that changes that happen as a result of covid turning out to be with us forever will be significant, and not the sort of changes many of us would ever have agreed with six months ago. Such change should not be casually consented to with an airy “well we’re always changing, aren’t we?” or a callous “shit happens, deal with it”. Or so it seems to me.
Ok. Now you imagine if all world governments had strictly banned any form of extramarital sexual activity for that whole 30-year period just to ensure that as few people as possible were exposed to HIV without there being a reliable and proven treatment.
Many lives would have been saved. Would it have been a price worth paying?
No, it's gatherings involving the high risk that can't be allowed until there's a vaccine. Set the low risk free.
Do these people’s lives not matter ?
And that's why you are a small c conservative. My brother died when I was 22. That also changed my life in ways I did not consent to. Most people here have had similar changes. Change is inevitable. I left for college in a world where no one needed an ID to fly. I came home from my first semester of college with an ID and a realization that I lived in a world that would never relax about airplanes the same way again. We can't keep the world the same or go backwards. We can only redirect the flow to a place that doesn't suck as much. If you are worried about getting back to large get togthers, I think it behooves you to ask What kind of measures can we take in a post-covid world to make sure that such gatherings can happen sooner rather than later? What has to happen so that people can do that and still survive it? How do we do arrange for that to happen?
My local airport had its metal detectors and x-ray machines removed... year before last, I think?
I'm sure you remember all the condom public health adverts. Proper use of condoms is pretty effective against the transfer of HIV.
Marvin, you're talking bollocks.
Being low risk doesn't mean you're less likely to catch the virus - it means you're less likely to die if you get it. And the thing about high risk people is that they inevitably have to have some contact with low risk people (Shopping. Nursing care. Food prep. Whatever.) The way to protect those high risk people is to make it unlikely that the low-risk people they interact with have the virus, as well as limiting the interactions they have. And the way you do that is by not having thousands of asymptomatic virus-spreaders in every town.
They will be 'protected'. There will be no vaccine for a year and more and it will have a minority effect on average, like flu shots. And it will cost a trillion a year just to do that.
That's what I said.