All things CoronaVirus

[Typical Lax Dad]

Which part is false?

Tongue in cheek. Some scrap of information may have been omitted.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Which part is false?

population of u.s. has been over 330 million for a while now.
and it's falsehood.

Like that scrap.

[ardilla secreta]

Which part is false?

You left out the miracle.

[Matnum PI]

Which part is false?

population of u.s. has been over 330 million for a while now.
and it's falsehood.

As opposed to "Population of United States: 328 million" as written...

[ggait]

Florida reported #Covid deaths

Fri. August 7: 180
Fri. August 14: 229
Fri. August 21: 121
Today: 89

Virus gonna virus. And when virus is done virusing, it’s done.

Cry more, libs.

(AB)

190 today.

The virus isn't listening to Petey. No one else should either.

202 in FL on 9/9. 205 today 9/10.

FL 7 day average is 96 and rising. Was 38 on 6/30 when Petey first told us it was dying out.

Virus is still not listening to Petey.

[runrussellrun]

For all of the fools on this forum who believed that COVID-19 was largely harmless for young adult patients, a Harvard Study just proved you wrong.

The research letter from Harvard found that among 3,222 young adults hospitalized with Covid-19, 88 died — about 2.7 percent. One in five required intensive care, and one in 10 needed a ventilator to assist with breathing.

Among those who survived, 99 patients, or 3 percent, could not be sent home from the hospital and were transferred to facilities for ongoing care or rehabilitation.

The study “establishes that Covid-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages,” wrote Dr. Mitchell Katz, a deputy editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, in an accompanying editorial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/worl ... e=Homepage

DocBarrister

according to the report, almost all were FAT, HIGH blood pressure, Diabetes...bla blah blah.

In other words, once again, thank your for proving that mostly the unwell get sick. Can't do much about diabetes, but FAT, and hypertension?????"

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamain ... erm=090920

love the lone comment for this report. Seems to us that she thinks income inequality is a problem. I thought the poor had good health insurance.

Race/ethnicity and Socio-economic Status
Angela Sauaia, Professor | University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
I read with interest the study by Cunningham et al. The authors showed a disproportionate illness severity in patients identified as Black or Hispanic, similar to previous studies. The authors reported concerns about the accuracy and/or reliability of the race/ethnicity variable. I was disappointed by the absence of any variable denoting socioeconomic status (SES), such as health insurance coverage, usually available in hospital data, a modifiable risk factor. Race/ethnicity is a social construct, and a very poor proxy for SES, cultural issues, genetics, and other biological or medical issues. It is an excellent measure of the effects of racism though, but such issues are seldom explored.

[ABV 8.3%]

watching the nfl high lites from tonite season openor.


ALL trump supporters on the field.......after the game, all hugs, NO masks. No different than sturgiss bikers.....
....IS this a problem? nfl players NOT wearing masks while doing the post game "find a friend" hand shake stuff.

hypocrites.......and now the espn analysist spitting into each others opinions.

IS...vc19 serious, or not. it came on after that awesome tennis match. Partied with Az....and her loser boyfriend, years ago, in Mason OH

[youthathletics]

Interesting conversation, seems the CDC is using Ct values greater than 30 to define positives. https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/stat ... 64801?s=20


THis study implies what the poster on Twitter is saying...
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.co ... ischarged/

Correlation between successful isolation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in cell culture and cycle threshold (Ct) value of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeting E gene suggests that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with Ct above 33 to 34 are not contagious and can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement, according to a brief report published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases

This stuff is certainly interesting. Maybe they (labs and CDC, etc) are using this high Ct as a higher standard, which provides them wiggle room to argue they wanted a much higher safety factor? Unfortunately the article cited, implies differently, which appears to skew the numbers we are seeing in favor of the virus still being highly active..and yet, states are relaxing more and more.

There is certainly a disconnect between what we hear and read, vs. what we are seeing.

[Bart]

Interesting conversation, seems the CDC is using Ct values greater than 30 to define positives. https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/stat ... 64801?s=20


THis study implies what the poster on Twitter is saying...
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.co ... ischarged/

Correlation between successful isolation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in cell culture and cycle threshold (Ct) value of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeting E gene suggests that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with Ct above 33 to 34 are not contagious and can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement, according to a brief report published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases

This stuff is certainly interesting. Maybe they (labs and CDC, etc) are using this high Ct as a higher standard, which provides them wiggle room to argue they wanted a much higher safety factor? Unfortunately the article cited, implies differently, which appears to skew the numbers we are seeing in favor of the virus still being highly active..and yet, states are relaxing more and more.

There is certainly a disconnect between what we hear and read, vs. what we are seeing.

Very simple, quick explanation of Cycle threshold, if anyone is interested: https://www.wvdl.wisc.edu/wp-content/up ... alues1.pdf

[CU88]

We have a long way to go. From NTY Daily "Newsletter"

The virus is a marathon

Last week’s newsletter comparing the U.S. coronavirus death toll to the global average helped spark a continuing debate: What’s the fairest expectation of how bad the pandemic should have been in this country?

Your answer to that question guides your judgment of the Trump administration’s response. Ross Douthat of The Times has argued that it was merely mediocre, while Vox’s German Lopez and The Atlantic’s David Frum consider it to have been far less effective than other countries’ responses.

One of the people who’s weighed in — via email — is Donald McNeil. By now, you may know him as the Times science reporter who has frequently appeared on “The Daily” podcast to talk about the coronavirus.

Donald makes a fascinating point: Don’t look only at snapshots, like a country’s per capita death toll. “It’s not fair to pick one point in time and say, ‘How are we doing?’” he writes. “You can only judge how well countries are doing when you add in the time factor” — that is, when the virus first exploded in a given place and what has happened since.

The pandemic, he adds, is like a marathon with staggered start times.

The virus began spreading widely in Europe earlier than in North America. Much of Europe failed to contain it at first and suffered terrible death tolls. The per capita toll in a few countries, like Britain, Italy and Spain, remains somewhat higher than in the U.S. But those countries managed to get the virus under control by the late spring. Their caseloads plummeted.

In the U.S., the virus erupted later — yet caseloads never plummeted. Almost every day for the past six months, at least 20,000 Americans have been diagnosed with the virus. “Europe learned the hard lesson and applied remedies,” as Donald says. “We did not, even though we had more warning.”


The population-adjusted death toll in the U.S. surpassed Western Europe’s two months ago. The U.S. toll is far above those of France, Germany, Canada, Japan, Australia and many other countries — and is on pace to overtake Italy’s in the next few days and Britain’s and Spain’s not long after that.

Donald does add one important caveat. “We won’t really be able to judge until it’s over,” he says. Cases have recently begun rising again in Spain and some other parts of Europe, raising the possibility that Europe is on the verge of a new surge of deaths. In the U.S., Labor Day gatherings and the reopening of some schools may cause new outbreaks — or may not.

For now, the simplest summary seems to be this: Adjusting for time, there is no large, rich country that has suffered as much as the U.S.

[CU88]

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell

Staff Editor, Opinion

On Tuesday, the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca halted clinical trials of its promising coronavirus vaccine candidate, one of three in late-stage testing in the United States, after a patient developed an inflammation in her spinal cord.

Scientists and public-health officials were quick to stress that the incident was less a bad omen than a sign of things working properly: Clinical holds are routine in trials as large as AstraZeneca’s, and because it’s not yet known whether the patient’s condition was caused by the vaccine, the halt may ultimately have very little effect on its development.

Still, the news seemed to briefly puncture the prevailing faith, promoted not least by the president himself, that a “shockingly good” vaccine is just over the horizon. What if it’s not? How will the pandemic progress if a vaccine takes years rather than months to arrive, and what will happen if it doesn’t work as well as we hope? Here’s what people are saying.

Waiting for a medical miracle
Interminable as the wait for a pandemic-ending vaccine may feel, it’s worth remembering just how extraordinary it is that we expect one at all: In the history of medicine, no vaccine has ever been created in less than four years, as Siddhartha Mukherjee notes in The New York Times Magazine. Given the unprecedented global effort to find one for the coronavirus, scientists are hopeful about beating that record, but those Mukherjee spoke with said that 12 to 18 months from the beginning of the pandemic — i.e., spring or summer of 2021 — is still about the soonest we should expect a candidate to be approved. And even then, it will have to be mass produced and distributed — an easier task than creating the vaccine in the first place, perhaps, but not by much.

“With all the challenges regarding developing, testing, manufacturing and distributing a safe and effective vaccine — no matter how much effort so many scientists and companies put on the problem — it could still take years or even longer,” George Yancopoulos, the chief scientific officer of the biotechnology company Regeneron, told Mukherjee.

What would happen in the meantime? According to one team of Harvard epidemiologists, the pandemic’s trajectory in the coming years would hinge largely on how long natural immunity lasts. If immunity is permanent, they wrote in Science magazine, the virus could disappear within a matter of years, barring any significant mutations. If it isn’t, the virus might stay in circulation, much like the flu, causing annual or biannual outbreaks depending on how quickly immunity wears off.

Many of the potential costs of a protracted pandemic are already plain to see. As we enter the ninth month of the crisis, Ed Yong argues in The Atlantic that the United States risks becoming habituated to the horror of mass death. “The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal,” he writes. “Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, Covid-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.” And on an economic level, the uneven nature of the recovery may worsen inequality, with most of the gains flowing to wealthy people who can afford to isolate as the rest of the country stagnates.

One (relatively) good piece of news, though, is that people won’t necessarily be stuck in an indefinite state of lockdown, Megan Scudellari writes for Nature. She notes one June report on 53 countries, compiled by a team at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, that suggests that personal behavioral changes such as hand-washing and wearing masks have helped stem the tide of infections in some places even as lockdowns lift. Another study concluded that if at least 50 percent of people are cautious in public — if they wear masks, wash their hands and avoid large gatherings — social-distancing measures could be gradually eased every 80 days over the next two years without overwhelming hospitals or causing a new peak in cases.

Waiting (and waiting) for a medical mediocrity
Over the past few months, the arrival of a coronavirus vaccine, whenever it happens, has become synonymous with resolution, the herald of a near-immediate return to prepandemic life. But as Carolyn Y. Johnson writes in The Washington Post, that scenario is very far from the likeliest one. “The declaration that a vaccine has been shown safe and effective will be a beginning, not the end,” she says.

That’s because no vaccine is 100 percent effective, and only some confer lifelong immunity. Whereas the measles vaccine, one of the best at preventing disease, is 97 percent effective and has to be administered only twice, influenza vaccines are on average about half as effective and have to be administered every year. For a coronavirus vaccine to meet the Food and Drug Administration’s approval threshold, it will have to prevent or reduce severe disease in only 50 percent of people who receive it. That’s why, as one expert in drug development put it to Johnson, “the first generation of vaccines may be mediocre.”

What would a “mediocre” vaccine do? As Sarah Zhang writes in The Atlantic, it might limit Covid-19’s severity without entirely stopping its spread. That could still be a great help in suppressing case rates and saving lives, but according to the experts Zhang spoke with, it would not make the virus simply disappear. “For context, consider that vaccines exist for more than a dozen human viruses but only one, smallpox, has ever been eradicated from the planet, and that took 15 years of immense global coordination,” she writes. “We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives.”

But as Dhruv Khullar argues in The New Yorker, an exceptionally effective vaccine is not the only way to get the virus under control. The public, he says, has been trained to think of the coronavirus like polio, which was eradicated in the United States after a “silver bullet” vaccine was introduced in 1955. But the path the coronavirus takes could end up being more similar to that of tuberculosis. Like polio, tuberculosis ravaged the United States in the 1900s, but it has no comparable vaccine, and was instead beaten back incrementally with an array of imperfect medical advances and public-health strategies.

“Unless you have a perfect vaccine, which very few are, you’ll always have people who end up getting sick,” Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, told Khullar. “With or without a vaccine, we’re going to need other treatments.”

Fortunately, Khullar writes, there are already three types of therapies in development:

Antiviral drugs, which, in contrast to vaccines, tend to be administered after the body has already been infected. Antivirals are perhaps best known as a treatment for H.I.V., though they’re also used to treat herpes and influenza. Only one antiviral, remdesivir, has been shown to be effective against the coronavirus, but researchers are working to develop more powerful ones. Khullar raises the possibility that such drugs could eventually be prescribed prophylactically, much as H.I.V. antivirals have come to be in recent years for those at high risk of contracting it.
Antibody drugs, which mimic the immune response of a recovered patient. Regeneron, Yancopoulos’s company, has developed an antibody drug that entered Phase 3 trials in July. Regeneron received a $450 million contract from the federal government to start manufacturing the drug, so if the trials go well, it will be available soon after their conclusion.
Immunomodulating drugs, which don’t stop the virus from replicating but help prevent the immune system from overreacting to an infection. Last week, the World Health Organization confirmed that cheap, readily available steroids can reduce the risk of death in patients critically ill with Covid-19 by one-third in this way, and other drugs already in use are being tested for the same purpose. “With immunomodulators, we’re in a land of riches,” Michael Mansour, an infectious-disease doctor and an assistant professor at Harvard, told Khullar.
None of these interventions are likely to be sufficient on their own, Khullar argues, but together, they could lower the fatality rate of the coronavirus enough to end what he calls “the world-stopping phase” of the pandemic. “Alone or in combination with a vaccine,” he says, “they could help us turn the tide.”

[youthathletics]

Interesting conversation, seems the CDC is using Ct values greater than 30 to define positives. https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/stat ... 64801?s=20


THis study implies what the poster on Twitter is saying...
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.co ... ischarged/

Correlation between successful isolation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in cell culture and cycle threshold (Ct) value of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeting E gene suggests that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with Ct above 33 to 34 are not contagious and can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement, according to a brief report published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases

This stuff is certainly interesting. Maybe they (labs and CDC, etc) are using this high Ct as a higher standard, which provides them wiggle room to argue they wanted a much higher safety factor? Unfortunately the article cited, implies differently, which appears to skew the numbers we are seeing in favor of the virus still being highly active..and yet, states are relaxing more and more.

There is certainly a disconnect between what we hear and read, vs. what we are seeing.

Very simple, quick explanation of Cycle threshold, if anyone is interested: https://www.wvdl.wisc.edu/wp-content/up ... alues1.pdf

Help us out here. if Ct value is inverse to a positive, then why is anything greater than 33-34 being used to indicate a positive/contagious person by the CDC/Labs?
Based on this data, researchers deduced that patients with Ct values > 34 do not excrete infectious viral particles and thus may be discharged.

[kramerica.inc]

What is the point of the article? To keep the stranglehold on those also afraid of their shadow. Blame bars but not thousands upon thousands in a street, and yet South Korea is experiencing spikes even with mask wearing.

Well, I can think of a few points:

Provide a counterpoint to the Trump Administration's suggestion that all is well and that the virus will just "disappear, I hope;"

Drill home the message that certain types and places of interaction are more likely to spread the virus.

Reactions like yours are pretty disappointing; Americans are proving to be the silliest of citizens. Our strange and mis-comprehending devotion to individual rights about all else is actually harming our fellow citizens.

You have a “right” to go to a bar and infect people.

You can also do whatever you want- protest for hours in close proximity, hold hands at the 50 yard line or officiate a wedding without masks, as long as you SAY you are “doing things the right way.”

“Precautions were taken!”

Even if they weren’t.

[Brooklyn]

202 in FL on 9/9. 205 today 9/10.

FL 7 day average is 96 and rising. Was 38 on 6/30 when Petey first told us it was dying out.

Virus is still not listening to Petey.

Petey's hero:

[Typical Lax Dad]

What is the point of the article? To keep the stranglehold on those also afraid of their shadow. Blame bars but not thousands upon thousands in a street, and yet South Korea is experiencing spikes even with mask wearing.

Well, I can think of a few points:

Provide a counterpoint to the Trump Administration's suggestion that all is well and that the virus will just "disappear, I hope;"

Drill home the message that certain types and places of interaction are more likely to spread the virus.

Reactions like yours are pretty disappointing; Americans are proving to be the silliest of citizens. Our strange and mis-comprehending devotion to individual rights about all else is actually harming our fellow citizens.

You have a “right” to go to a bar and infect people.

You can also do whatever you want- protest for hours in close proximity, hold hands at the 50 yard line or officiate a wedding without masks, as long as you SAY you are “doing things the right way.”

“Precautions were taken!”

Even if they weren’t.

What is the testing protocol for NFL players? What is the testing protocol for Sturgis motorcyclists? I actually think playing football is kind of stupid in this environment. It’s only going to prolong our situation. You won’t see it directly. The NBA bubble with no fans is good execution. However in this environment, sports are a low priority in my book.

[kramerica.inc]

NFL is testing at facilities during the week, but hugging at the 50 and tackling and breathing on eachother for 60 minutes.
What is the testing protocol at the protests? Sturgis is little different than the protests that have been going on.
The only difference I see is Sturgis was one weekend, and the protests have been going on for the past 4 months.

[MDlaxfan76]

About 2 minutes in you get a sense of who supports Trump and why this pandemic will continue to rage through America.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... tn-vpx.cnn

[wgdsr]

Interesting conversation, seems the CDC is using Ct values greater than 30 to define positives. https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/stat ... 64801?s=20


THis study implies what the poster on Twitter is saying...
https://www.infectiousdiseaseadvisor.co ... ischarged/

Correlation between successful isolation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in cell culture and cycle threshold (Ct) value of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) targeting E gene suggests that patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with Ct above 33 to 34 are not contagious and can be discharged from hospital care or strict confinement, according to a brief report published in the European Journal of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases

This stuff is certainly interesting. Maybe they (labs and CDC, etc) are using this high Ct as a higher standard, which provides them wiggle room to argue they wanted a much higher safety factor? Unfortunately the article cited, implies differently, which appears to skew the numbers we are seeing in favor of the virus still being highly active..and yet, states are relaxing more and more.

There is certainly a disconnect between what we hear and read, vs. what we are seeing.

Very simple, quick explanation of Cycle threshold, if anyone is interested: https://www.wvdl.wisc.edu/wp-content/up ... alues1.pdf

Help us out here. if Ct value is inverse to a positive, then why is anything greater than 33-34 being used to indicate a positive/contagious person by the CDC/Labs?
Based on this data, researchers deduced that patients with Ct values > 34 do not excrete infectious viral particles and thus may be discharged.

is it known anywhere that cdc just takes in pos regardless of standard?
also, is it only first time that a patient tests for it and not follow ups?

i've imagined that we're all over the map with diff states and diff labs, diff tests... that makes case counts tough to decipher. hospitalizations and deaths, just as in the beginning when tests were very limited, continue to be the standard to follow. which just makes it a major lag.

hospitalizations are down big, but deaths while lower have been stubborn. hope it's the lag and follows hospitalizations, with of course hope not being a strategy.

[Typical Lax Dad]

NFL is testing at facilities during the week, but hugging at the 50 and tackling and breathing on eachother for 60 minutes.
What is the testing protocol at the protests? Sturgis is little different than the protests that have been going on.
The only difference I see is Sturgis was one weekend, and the protests have been going on for the past 4 months.

I thought I said I am against sporting events given the health risk. IF you believe the NFL testing protocol is no better than 0 testing protocol for a motorcycle rally, you are stupid. As for the protestors, anyone not wearing a mask and keeping their distance is stupid also.... EDIT: in my opinion

[Peter Brown]

About 2 minutes in you get a sense of who supports Trump and why this pandemic will continue to rage through America.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/202 ... tn-vpx.cnn

MD is our new expert on masks, so I thought I'd ask him to explain this graph please:

Masks.jpg (101.19 KiB) Viewed 949 times

I'll wait.