Global Pandemic Part II: Sequel Escalation

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Also some good news in New York, even though Mondays are the best days as far as these things go (let's see if they hold up tomorrow).

Fewest number of deaths since late March (226, from a peak of 799 on April 10), only 11% of tests were positive, by far the lowest so far. If we keep it up for a couple of weeks, we'll be in a good spot.
 
With new discoveries and treatments being made all the time and social distancing doing its part to keep hospitals below capacity, simply waiting until after Memorial Day weekend to open could save thousands of lives.

Opening in any capacity will lead to a regression, but it could orders of magnitude less impactful if we're starting out from a lower r0. Rt.live uses a similar metric and claims that all but 6 states have a Rt below 1, which does NOT mean we can open up. It means what we're doing is working and should be continued until social distancing alone can sufficiently manage the r0.

Another site has their own variant called the "effective r0" that places most states between 0.9 and 1.3, but I think that's more of a multiplier than a true r0: https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/national/united-states/
 
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My take is thank fuck I live in Australia and not in America, holy shit, the problems in the US run so, so deep.

But that doesn't mean pockets of Australia aren't insane. This owns:



We're on stage three restrictions in Victoria, my state, meaning gatherings of more than two people are banned and you can be fined if you're outside your place of residence for anything other than daily exercise, shopping or essential school or work.

Our country has done quite well, with our graph tracking downwards since its heights in late March / early April.

I am hoping that the restrictions will be eased soon to allow gatherings of up to 10 people. That will be quite exciting and I feel like it will make people appreciate simple things way more than we have previously, as we took them for granted. Sport looks set to resume in June/July, without crowds.
 
:huh: geeeez
What a waste of money! Don't you have any right-wing TV media in Aussie land?

gump Good to hear. Guess I, well, actually I didn't to much news- so I missed that.

:ohmy: And a frickin' (under Trump's permissive zeitgeist) Kluxer showed up in supermarket!? :gah:
 
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When discussing the possibility of a second wave, attenuating mutations in the virus are worth taking into consideration. It looks like this evolutionary process may have already begun:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-scientific-team-unique-mutation-coronavirus.html

Now, using a pool of 382 nasal swab samples obtained from possible COVID-19 cases in Arizona, Lim's team has identified a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that had never been found before—where 81 of the letters have vanished, permanently deleted from the genome.

The study was published in the online version of the Journal of Virology.

Lim says as soon as he made the manuscript data available on a preprint server medRxiv, it has attracted worldwide interest from the scientific community, including the World Health Organization.

"One of the reasons why this mutation is of interest is because it mirrors a large deletion that arose in the 2003 SARS outbreak," said Lim, an assistant professor at ASU's Biodesign Institute. During the middle and late phases of the SARS epidemic, SARS-CoV accumulated mutations that attenuated the virus. Scientists believe that a weakened virus that causes less severe disease may have a selective advantage if it is able to spread efficiently through populations by people who are infected unknowingly.
Click to expand...

Theoretically, this could mean continued efficient spread of the virus, albeit with fewer severe and critical cases, which reflects a pattern we've been seeing in the numbers for a while now. The worldwide number of active severe and critical cases is lower today than it was in mid-April despite active cases in general climbing by over 60% since then.

Now, how widespread will this mutation become? What localities will experience it? That remains to be seen.
 
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giphy.gif


There's still so much unknown about this virus and how it will mutate and evolve and where we'll be in a few months.

The "ehermagaad this is just a fluuuu let's go to zee beach" people and the "ehermagaad we're never going to be the same life as we know it is uveeer" folks can both probably shut the fuck up, as the end result will likely be somewhere in the middle.
 
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Its a good news/bad news thing.
If its a markedly less severe strain, it could be a good thing for it to spread easily and get us closer to herd immunity, assuming you achieve immunity from all strains if you get the less severe strain. Or could just spread lesser disease more readily and not provide immunity against the severe original strain.
Certainly bears watching.
 
oh man, concerts are a no brainer.

Just sell 6,000 tickets for 60,000 seat stadium, and charge 2,000 dollars a ticket. BAM! done.
 
I think that's the pricing scheme for the new Rolling Stones tour.
 
^

That could make for a very awkward moment. If you have self-awareness.
 
anitram said:
^

That could make for a very awkward moment. If you have self-awareness.
Click to expand...



It feels intentional. Like someone in the factory knew what they were doing.

And, yes. Trump is bored. He has the drama of playing the vicitm of yet ano her whistleblower to look forward to, but it’s much more fun to hold rallies and do racisms and complain complain complain about how EVERYONE is mean to you.
 
Today's numbers compared to last Tuesday:

Worldwide:
Cases +4,728 (+6.2%)
Deaths -901 (-13.5%)

USA
Cases -611 (-2.4%)
Deaths -120 (-4.9%)

In case you're wondering where those extra 4,728 cases came from, Russia reported 3,691 more cases than they did last Tuesday.

The worldwide trend continues of mild cases outpacing severe ones at a higher rate, with the result showing up in the death totals. Just makes the evidence of viral mutation that much more compelling.
 
At the risk of sounding like I know what I’m talking about when I know very little about this sort of thing, given our general tendency to brand things whilst knowing that coronaviruses are actually pretty common as a viral family (one of many common-cold viruses), gotta start to wonder if the rapid proliferation of testing as an emergency response has left the tests vulnerable to accidentally testing other coronaviruses as positives. Same can be said for antibody teats.

Wish we had a resident immunologist here [emoji14][emoji14]
 
I was one until I became a corporate lawyer.

The answer is that no, you are not getting false positives (at least not in the manner you were wondering about) because the test kits are running RT-PCR of a gene encoding a nucleocapsid protein which has been fully sequenced and for which studies exist in not just strains of human coronavirus but coronavirus of a number of animal species. The gene has shown itself to be essentially fully distinct (and is how we know that the origin of this novel coronavirus was bats).

ETA - the antibody test would be done totally differently (ELISA) and I haven’t really looked into it much to see what they are analyzing at the moment.
 
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Would you look at that. We do have a resident immunologist. Thank you!

Certainly my worries were more with the antibody tests, mostly because those can give a false sense of security.
 
LuckyNumber7 said:
At the risk of sounding like I know what I’m talking about when I know very little about this sort of thing, given our general tendency to brand things whilst knowing that coronaviruses are actually pretty common as a viral family (one of many common-cold viruses), gotta start to wonder if the rapid proliferation of testing as an emergency response has left the tests vulnerable to accidentally testing other coronaviruses as positives. Same can be said for antibody teats.

Wish we had a resident immunologist here [emoji14][emoji14]
Click to expand...

The German study in Heinsberg I posted about came under some criticism for claiming that the antibody test they used to determine how many people had already been through the infection had a 99% success rate in differentiating Covid-19 from other Coronaviruses (based on claims by the manufacturer). Other researchers said they don't believe any test at the time of the study had more than 70% precision. Unfortunately, with the speed of developments and the news cycle, I didn't yet see any follow-up on that. But the first manuscript of the Heinsberg study was released two days ago, so maybe I'll find an update on that.
 
Guess Trump has given up against the “invisible” enemy.

It’ll be interesting and horrifying to watch he and his team try to paint a completely different reality. They’ll claim the economy is great, but it’ll be in shambles.

His hope is that the stock market can continue its climb again and use that as proof the economy is back.
 
The stock market hates uncertainty.

If everything re-opens and the number of cases and deaths skyrockets, it will be up to governors to manage the situation and there will be a total quagmire.

It’s also impossible to reopen fully while the rest of the world is following a different path. What country will want American tourists or businessmen traveling there? What international tourists will want to go to the US? There will be further supply chain disruptions globally as well.
 
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