^^^ Well that seems to go against the latest CDC guidance. I assume they were still contagious if they test positive.
To date, the people that have been tested for this hypothesis have been WOEFULLY wrong. VERY VERY few actually had Covid when they had a cold/flu-like symptoms back in Q1 2020. It's a fallacy that everyone keeps telling themselves to make themselves feel good, but it's just not true.
This is what, and I caution it is EARLY data, we are seeing with the South African COVID-19 variant. People that are vaccinated appear to be protected against the variant enough not to have symptoms, but do appear to have an asymptomatic carrier state. Right now, we assume this carrier state is transient, but I have not seen that confirmed as of yet.
Israeli study boosts belief post-COVID immunity stays when antibodies fade Strong immune response to covid months after infection, even with waning antibodies.
Never took zinc, but do take C and D. Haven't had it. I think I'm type O blood, but don't actually know as doctors never seem to tell you anything that could be useful, they appear to mostly want to process you as quickly as possible (this doesn't matter whether you are in the U.S. or Canada). I think mostly they want women patients where they can prescribe pills or perform beauty surgery (U.S. and Canada are the same in this case too).
This isn’t surprising at all. The 95% efficacy is around preventing symptomatic disease, not reinfection with the original Wuhan virus. So, around 1 in 20 people with future new cases of COVID-19 will have been fully vaccinated. The B.1.1.7 (UK) variant, which is still probably quite uncommon in Oregon but spreading, is slightly more capable of evading some of the vaccines. However, asymptomatic reinfection efficacy is probably quite a bit lower than 95% (60-80%?). There isn’t solid data on this yet since it wasn’t a primary issue of concern during the phase 3 testing of these vaccines. The B.1.351 variant (SA) dropped the efficacy against outpatient symptomatic disease for the Novavax vaccine to around 60% (in South Africa) from its 95% efficacy against the original virus in U.S. testing. There may be other reasons that tend to make vaccine efficacy somewhat generally lower in South Africa such as the background prevalence of parasitic or other infections. But still, 95% to ~60% is a big drop. There has been early lab testing and guessing around the projected efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines for the “351” variant but there isn’t much field data yet. Another pending vaccine, Novavax, uses already created spike proteins rather than mRNA to tell your body to make the spike proteins, but in the end it’s essentially the same pre-fusion stabilized spike protein that causes the vaccine to trigger the immune response. The Novavax protein particle technique is similar to the Shingrix vaccine which causes a strong antibody and t-cell response based on one of the proteins on the surface of the virus that causes Chicken Pox. Of course, I don’t expect the Novavax vaccine to have an identical efficacy as the mRNA vaccines but it would seem a little surprising if Novavax were only 60% with the B.1.351 variant but the mRNA vaccines were much better. Most scientists seem to be more optimistic. I’m looking forward to when we start to get real-world data in a bunch of weeks. The prevalence of B.1.351 in Oregon is probably quite low. The B.1.1.7 variant is now thought to make up at least 4% of new confirmed virus cases in California and at least 9.5% in Florida. Those numbers are from a week ago and the percentage of prevalence is roughly doubling every 10 days. The acronym SGTF means Spike-gene Target Failure. The trend toward increasing B.1.1.7 prevalence seems to be following roughly the same pattern as in several European countries. It remains to be seen how much effect this apparent increased transmissibility or virus fitness will have on overall infection and disease rates over the next 2-4 months in the U.S.
I sometimes watch NHK Newsline on channel 817 on my Comcast lineup. The broadcasts are usually a the top of every hour and often only 10 minutes long. 16 minute broadcasts seem to be the exception. In the recent past, I was surprised that in Japan, they hadn't started vaccinating healthcare workers yet. Today or last night, I heard about Japan Health Ministry says it has approved Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. NHK themselves said Japan is the last of the G7 nations to approve a COVID-19 vaccine for use in their country.
WHO in China: Wuhan mission finds possible signs of wider original coronavirus outbreak in 2019 - CNN
Not to alarm anyone, but..... B.1.1.7: Status & Tracking in the U.S. Bookmark this link: Helix SARS-CoV-2 Viral Sequencing Tableau Public Discussion: https://twitter.com/alexbolze/status/1361214111422550017?s=21 A worser case analysis: Discussion begins at the 6 and 1/2 minute mark. Episode 43: A Realist Adjusts the Sails I’m not personally confident how this will play out over the next 4-12 weeks but it’s certainly a serious risk.
Yeah hard to say. We have real significant partial herd immunity in some communities (at enormous cost). For variants that don’t evade that (unlike B.1.351) it’s going to really slow them down. Though B.1.1.7 will still end up the dominant variant. Those communities dominate the infections so that means a lot of suppression overall. Other communities will continue to effectively shield themselves even with greater transmissibility. So I tend to think we’ll end up in the next couple weeks at an unacceptably high plateau. Probably 20-40k cases per day. And then maybe a month later it’ll finally decay to levels not seen since the beginning of the pandemic. Really hard to say though. No one is asking and no one knows what our projected vaccine supply looks like exactly for the next critical three months. And that will likely matter a lot, assuming they actually continue to be extremely effective against all variants (currently suggested by limited available evidence). It’ll be interesting to see where B.1.351 flourishes. Probably in hard-hit states it’ll do pretty well since the local partial herd immunity effect will not be so strong. Really unclear what reinfections do though. I’d expect generally reinfections would lead to mild illnesses (with all notable exceptions reported in the media). All the reopening and dropping of mask mandates seems like a terrible idea though. At this point everything should be data driven and situations which lead to spread should be kept closed. Really does risk a strong resurgence; even though I am not sure it will happen, it definitely increases risk. Should be putting a lot of resources into ventilation and mitigation measures in schools. Etc.
It is almost eerie how case numbers are going down, hospitalized cases are down in our county while the CDC and Fauci keep saying this is going to get worse with these new variants just beginning to spread. It's weird how some states are just declaring victory and dropping what few restrictions they had. What is going to happen when this skyrockets again? Will these people wait again until they are out of body bags to start all over again?
I’m not convinced that will happen. I think we could see a sustained rise in cases but unless the virus gets more tricky, I think we are well past the worst of this even with the variants and what has been seen in other countries. There may be localized places (entire states for example) where this does not hold true though - depends on current B.1.1.7 prevalence. Really a race against time. It’s an economic tradeoff I guess, though I really don’t get how some places are not keeping restrictions in place that have minimal economic cost. Instead, they should be just pounding on the messaging to be careful, while allowing things to open somewhat more. Instead the message appears to be “it’s over” - which could be true, but it’s uncertain enough it doesn’t make sense to assume it.
To add to the b117 and b1351 discussions. We will soon have a lot of b117 infections in people with some form of immunity, through vaccines and previous infections, that will lead to evolutionary pressure for B117 to evolve to be better at infecting people with some form of immunity. Soon some form of the B117 will emerge that will be as good or better than B1351 at evading antibodies. Imo that is what we should fear. A lot of people still seem to simplify the pandemic into Covid-19, while in fact it is a lot of of sub pandemics that are constantly evolving. Covid-21 will likely be much worse than Covid-19. I wonder when China will be able to open up again, or if they will have to have do quarantines and lockdowns until we have vaccinated everyone with a newer vaccine that covers all possible future mutation. Because once they open up they not have to face an explosion of mild covid-19, but they will have an explosion of not as mild covid-21. Even if very few people die, having hundreds of million people with flu like symptoms at the same time will not be easy.
We are already WAY far afield from the original Wuhan variant, and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines still cover all 8 current variants very well (even B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1 - the Brazil variant). If we can just get people to get vaccinated (big problem here in the US), and get enough vaccine produced (big problem globally), the odds of this being able to move through a mutational "escape" and maintain pandemic status are low.
On the bolded part, I noticed that most mainstream news outlets (both local and national) besides focusing on other news when they talk about COVID-19 seem to focus on vaccinations (and logistical probs including lack of supply and now complications due to severe storms in many places) and case counts + declines and that and hospitalizations. That was when the US was still having over 2K to 3.xK people dying a day of COVID-19. From looking at the graphs near the bottom of United States Coronavirus: 28,317,703 Cases and 498,203 Deaths - Worldometer, if you turn on the 7-day moving average for daily new deaths in the US, it's still above 2000/day. I mean, it's peaked and hit a decline but I remember months back, it was a big deal that the US began hitting 1K deaths per day from COVID-19 and things were "bad" back then. I guess the US is ok with 1K to 2K deaths per day from COVID-19 now?
A company in Finland has developed a coronavirus breathalyzer: DSA Breathpass. 30 tests/hour capacity, result in 2 minutes.
I would expect that the rate at which C-19 and its variants can mutate and evolve is a function of the ongoing volume of new cases. If that's correct then it would seem to follow that as vaccines and herd immunity continue to reduce daily new cases, the rate at which new more contagious variants appear is also likely to decline. I expect vaccine developers going forward will be adjusting their vaccine development efforts to improve effectiveness against a wider range of likely new variants.
Only partially. It's a factor of: 1) the proof-reading error rate of the viral replication machinery (which is about 2.5X lower than influenza, for reference) 2) the number of cases You are correct that if we can get vaccines quickly, we have a very good chance of squashing this thing, even with current variants.