Looking at the Bright Side

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Jun

Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Jun »

Undaunted wrote: Sat Mar 28, 2020 7:09 pm Believe it or not Trump has highest rating in his presidency:
I find this is remarkable.

He was in denial for ages.

Then he unilaterally stops all incoming flights from Europe, when the only reason the US stats looked better than Europe was because the US had not got its act together with testing at the time. The truth is apparent now they are testing.

Now he's expecting GM to make ventilators at virtually no notice. Does the guy not even know the difference between a car and a ventilator ? Even all the relevant stuff like electronics and small air pumps is outsourced, whilst GM make things like engines, bodies and assemble it. Besides, GM cannot even manage their car business properly. For example, they lost money on GM Europe for 20 years, then within 12 months of selling it to Peugeot, it's profitable.
If he's going to put a company from a different discipline onto ventilators, it needs to be one with more nimble and entrepreneurial management. There will be plenty of such companies in the US.

The UK might also succeed or fail with procurement of ventilators, but at least companies like Dyson specialize in moving air, electronic control, piping etc and are run by a capable entrepreneur.

Hopefully Mr Biden will hold him to account in the second half of the year.
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Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Undaunted »

Trump is a professional promoter whether it be real estate, beauty pageants, TV shows or in this case himself. I thought Biden was a shoo in but now I am not sure as Trump has the bully pulpit and will promote himself as the great savior and his followers will eat it up, while Biden will hardly be noticed, this tragedy could turn out to be Trump’s greatest asset.
As for the ventilators GM had already joined a partnership with a ventilator company to produce 100,000 ventilators after which Trump said it was upon his order which is a blatant lie however, his followers will believe he did it :!:
"In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king"
gera

Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by gera »

Dodger wrote: Sat Mar 28, 2020 6:30 pm
Jun wrote: Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:08 pm In hind sight, if the leaders of so many countries (including the U.S.) would have listened to their medical experts back in January this thing could have been nipped in the bud.
On the bright side: Donald Trump said everything is going to be fine...people should continue working...and fill the churches on Easter Sunday. Of course one hour after making these statements at a press release, he was forced to sign a $2 trillion dollar bipartisan stimulus package.
i doubt that there is any way( short of scientific breakthrough) to stop this epidemic. The testing on diamond princess revealed that 18 percent of infected people were asymptomatic. taking into account the old average age of passengers , it is reasonable to assume that this percentage is even higher in general population. Ask any epidemiologist, and they will tell you it is impossible to stop it until a sizable percentage of the population develop the immunity. It is really important to start randomly test on antibodies (different from current testing on virus presence) to get a realistic picture how close we are to the end. It is statistically clear that humanity will survive. As for individuals of age and preconditions (like myself) the only hope is medications or vaccine (remdesevir probably the best shot right now).
Jun

Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Jun »

HIV mutates very quickly, so it's difficult to develop a vaccine.

Covid-19 mutates very slowly, so it should be possible. In fact, the first vaccine was designed within hours of sequencing the covid virus. All the testing and scaling up manufacture is what is expected to take 12~18 months. Some vaccines may be rejected, but as there are several under development, one would expect something to succeed.

Incidentally, the technical capability way above what it was when HIV first appeared on the scene in the last century.

Also, I think some common sense will be applied to vaccine development. When there is an immediate threat which might kill 1% of the infected people in lots of rich developed countries, the risks of the vaccine development need to be balanced against that death rate.
So there's more incentive to take risks in accelerating testing of a vaccine. Hence we have a vaccine being tested on humans in the US already. Human trials on another vaccine will shortly start in the UK. The Germans have vaccines under development.
I presume the Chinese do as well.
gera

Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by gera »

Regarding vaccine, I do not hold my breath. I own a stock of the company (Moderna) which was the first to develop a vaccine prototype and which is currently goes through the first stage of trials in US. Two things: they never developed any vaccine so far and I noticed that the management of the company selling its stock on permanent basis and never buys. Hardly an encouraging sign.
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Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by ceejay »

I have read (on BBC news) that there is an antibody test for Covid-19. This is a definitive test for whether or not someone has had the illness.
In the UK it's immediate use will be to test healthcare workers to see who has had it and is therefore immune. It will also give a reliable figure for the rate of non-symptomatic infection.
It will also presumably be used to test the efficacy of candidate vaccines.
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Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Dodger »

gera wrote: Sun Mar 29, 2020 1:02 am Ask any epidemiologist, and they will tell you it is impossible to stop it until a sizable percentage of the population develop the immunity.
I don't even know what an "epidemiologist" is, let alone know what they are saying. So, here's two admittedly dumb questions that maybe you can answer:

If someone is infected with the virus, and then recovers, is that person then immune?

If the answer is yes, what percentage of the global population would need to build this immunity in order for the virus to be powerless?

If the answer is no, then we're fucked.

On the bright side: I guess we have to thank Italy, the U.S., Spain and Iran for their significant contributions towards the solution. The way they're headed we should have this virus licked in no time.
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Re: Looking at the Bright Side

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Dodger wrote: Sun Mar 29, 2020 9:23 am If someone is infected with the virus, and then recovers, is that person then immune?
Do You Get Immunity After Recovering From A Case Of Coronavirus?

by Nell Greenfieldboyce

March 20, 2020

It's unclear whether people who recover from COVID-19 will be immune to reinfection from the coronavirus and, if so, how long that immunity will last.

"We don't know very much," says Matt Frieman, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. "I think there's a very likely scenario where the virus comes through this year, and everyone gets some level of immunity to it, and if it comes back again, we will be protected from it — either completely or if you do get reinfected later, a year from now, then you have much less disease."

"That is the hope," he adds. "But there is no way to know that."

Researchers do know that reinfection is an issue with the four seasonal coronaviruses that cause about 10 to 30% of common colds. These coronaviruses seem to be able to sicken people again and again, even though people have been exposed to them since childhood.

"Almost everybody walking around, if you were to test their blood right now, they would have some levels of antibody to the four different coronaviruses that are known," says Ann Falsey of the University of Rochester Medical Center.

After infection with one of these viruses, she says, antibodies are produced but then the levels slowly decline and people become susceptible again.

"Most respiratory viruses only give you a period of relative protection. I'm talking about a year or two. That's what we know about the seasonal coronaviruses," says Falsey.

In studies, human volunteers who agreed to be experimentally inoculated with a seasonal coronavirus showed that even people with preexisting antibodies could still get infected and have symptoms.

That happens even though these viruses aren't as changeable as influenza, which mutates so quickly that a new vaccine has to be developed every year.

"We work with some common cold coronaviruses. We have samples from 30 years ago, strains that were saved from 30 years ago, and they're not appreciably different than the ones that are circulating now," says virologist Vineet Menachery of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Still, seasonal coronaviruses probably do mutate a bit over time to evade the body's defenses, says Frieman. But there's little known about what those changes might look like, since researchers don't do annual surveillance of coronaviruses as they do for influenza.

It's also possible that, for some reason, the body's immune response to seasonal coronaviruses is just not that robust or that something about the infection itself may inhibit the body's ability to develop long-term immunity.

"Maybe the antibodies are not protective, and that is why, even though they are present, they don't work very well," says Frieman.

The other known human coronaviruses, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome, can cause more severe disease, and basically nothing is known about the possibility of reinfection with those viruses.

Some people sickened by SARS, the dangerous coronavirus that emerged in China in 2002, did develop a measurable immune response that lasted a long time.

"We've gone back and gotten samples from patients who had SARS in 2003 and 2004, and as of this year, we can detect antibodies," says Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa. "We think antibodies may be longer lasting than we first thought, but not in everybody."

Still, it's hard to predict how those survivors' bodies would react if they were exposed to the SARS virus again. "There were 8,000 cases, the epidemic was basically brought to an end within six months or eight months of the first case, so we don't have anyone who was reinfected that we know of," says Perlman.

The other severe coronavirus, MERS, emerged in the Middle East in 2012. "We have almost no information about reinfection because there has only been a total of 2,500 cases over eight years," says Perlman, who notes that the odds of anyone getting reinfected with that virus are not great, especially considering that 35 percent of people who had it died. Survivors of MERS did generate an immune response to the virus that can be detected up to two years later, he says. And the more ill the patient was, the more robust and long-lasting the immune response.

Until the recent emergence of SARS-Cov2, the official name of the current coronavirus, and this pandemic, scientists say, there just hasn't been much of a research push to fully understand how and why reinfection with coronaviruses can occur.

"You get colds over and over again, and I don't think we think that we're really so well protected against any of them, second time around," says Perlman. "You don't care, either, because it's just a cold virus. I mean, you'd like to not get a cold again, but it's not really a big deal."

This pandemic, he notes, "is a big deal."

He would bet that the virus that causes COVID-19 won't reinfect people. But he wouldn't guess how long their immunity might last.

What's more, some people might have stronger protection from reinfection than others.

"Based on other infections where you get a deep lung infection, you are usually protected against the second infection. If you just have a mild COVID-19 infection that involves your upper airway, maybe it will behave like a common cold coronavirus and maybe you can be reinfected again," says Perlman. "We just really don't know. It's even hard to speculate."

Understanding the natural immune response to this virus is important for vaccine development, he notes.

"If the natural infection doesn't do very well in giving you immunity, what is going to happen with the vaccine?" says Perlman. "How are we going to make sure that that vaccine not only induces a response that works for the next six months, but two to three years?"

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... oronavirus
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Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Dodger »

NPR wrote: Sun Mar 29, 2020 11:06 am Do You Get Immunity After Recovering From A Case Of Coronavirus?

by Nell Greenfieldboyce
Thanks GB.

I guess the bottom line is... the experts don't have a clue.
Jun

Re: Looking at the Bright Side

Post by Jun »

Dodger wrote: Sun Mar 29, 2020 9:23 am If someone is infected with the virus, and then recovers, is that person then immune?

If the answer is yes, what percentage of the global population would need to build this immunity in order for the virus to be powerless?
They don't know for sure, but the majority of the experts I've seen commenting expect immunity and expect that immunity to be fairly long lasting. This doesn't mean they are right.

The Coronavirus is currently thought to have an R0 of 2.5, which means each person spreads it to 2.5 others. If R0 is above 1, obviously the number of cases increases and if R0 is below 1, the number of cases decreases. So once 60% are immune, only 40% would be able to catch it and 40% x 2.5 = 1, so that's possibly the threshold. So when comfortably over 60% have immunity, there's a good chance it dies out.

In practice, it's probably more complicated, as R0 would be higher if people are crammed in together in somewhere like Manila.

As there is no vaccine, obviously one strategy is to have minimal restrictions for younger people so a high percentage of them develop immunity, whilst encouraging older people to stay at home for 3 months.
As I tell my older relatives, it's better than having to put up with WW2 for 6 years (see thread title).
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