Coronavirus

[ChadS]

Yeah, it's hard to tell who's going to get it, and who's going to get lucky.

My Mom and stepfather live in an assisted-living facility, which for months was in lockdown - no visitors in the building, no leaving the building except for doctor visits, and no wandering the building except for one reserved walking slot a day and one small distanced event a week. Despite that, my 85-year-old stepfather got COVID (they believe from the next-door neighbor who had a family member sneak in through the garage; my stepfather would sometimes talk to the neighbor in the hall despite the prohibition and my Mom nagging at him not to do so).

My 77-year-old mother lived with him in a 2-bedroom apartment. Once he tested positive, he mostly stayed in his bedroom (although he has Alzheimer's and forgot a lot); the staff told my Mom she was almost definitely going to get it, but she wore KN95 pretty much except when sleeping in the other bedroom, and wiped down all surfaces constantly. They estimate he caught it about 3-4 days before their testing showed he had it; so they'd spent a fair amount of time eating at the same table, and sitting in the same living room (though their chairs are at opposite windows).

My stepfather survived easily (his symptoms were fairly mild, except for one day), and my mom managed to avoid getting it (good thing as she's overdue for heart and lung surgery and I'm less certain she would have done well if she had caught it). She has type-O blood and takes vitamin D supplements; maybe one of those helped, maybe not.

 

[TEG]

When I started taking extra vitamins and supplements through all this, I figured they might help lessen symptoms slightly if I caught it, but not help avoid catching it.
Also, back at the beginning I figured Zinc was going to be the most important thing, but is sounds like vitamin D is the best thing going.
Not sure what to credit if I really didn't catch it ever. ( I do NOT have type O blood in case that matters... )

 

[MXLRplus]

For ex-military, check with the VA for vaccination. One of my staff who is 50 years old received his first shot this week.

 

[TEG]

I guess many of us think we got it in Q1 last year. I had a month long cold/cough in March - so did my wife, though kids got over it soon. I even got a home test - but after a month.
But still, most likely we didn’t get Covid at that time. Common cold was still much more common at that time

Yeah, last hurrah of the pre-mask and socially close era when a variety of viruses had free reign.

 

[NikolaACDC]

Can you test positive after being vaccinated for COVID? Yes, experts say, and it's an expected but rare event

"Four people in Oregon tested positive for COVID-19 even though they’d been fully vaccinated and enough time had passed for their second doses to become fully effective, state public health officials announced Friday.
The news makes Oregon one of the first states in the nation to identify so-called “breakthrough cases” where people who were considered immune have now been sickened with mild cases of the disease.
...
“I anticipate that more states will be reporting more numbers of breakthrough cases as they have more people who are fully vaccinated,”
...
He said they either had no symptoms or mild symptoms."

 

[TEG]

^^^ Well that seems to go against the latest CDC guidance. I assume they were still contagious if they test positive.

 

[alloverx]

Recall the vaccine(s) are designed to minimize any virus impact to you and keep you out of hospital.

 

[bkp_duke]

I guess many of us think we got it in Q1 last year. I had a month long cold/cough in March - so did my wife, though kids got over it soon. I even got a home test - but after a month.

But still, most likely we didn’t get Covid at that time. Common cold was still much more common at that time

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.

 

[bkp_duke]

Can you test positive after being vaccinated for COVID? Yes, experts say, and it's an expected but rare event

"Four people in Oregon tested positive for COVID-19 even though they’d been fully vaccinated and enough time had passed for their second doses to become fully effective, state public health officials announced Friday.
The news makes Oregon one of the first states in the nation to identify so-called “breakthrough cases” where people who were considered immune have now been sickened with mild cases of the disease.
...
“I anticipate that more states will be reporting more numbers of breakthrough cases as they have more people who are fully vaccinated,”
...
He said they either had no symptoms or mild symptoms."

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.

 

[Yuri_G]

Israeli study boosts belief post-COVID immunity stays when antibodies fade

Strong immune response to covid months after infection, even with waning antibodies.

 

[jerry33]

When I started taking extra vitamins and supplements through all this, I figured they might help lessen symptoms slightly if I caught it, but not help avoid catching it.
Also, back at the beginning I figured Zinc was going to be the most important thing, but is sounds like vitamin D is the best thing going.
Not sure what to credit if I really didn't catch it ever. ( I do NOT have type O blood in case that matters... )

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).

 

[Jeff N]

"Four people in Oregon tested positive for COVID-19 even though they’d been fully vaccinated and enough time had passed for their second doses to become fully effective, state public health officials announced Friday.

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.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

It's a fallacy that everyone keeps telling themselves to make themselves feel good, but it's just not true.

Yep, it would be like the chances of winning a horrible kind of lottery.

 

[cwerdna]

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.

 

[TEG]

WHO in China: Wuhan mission finds possible signs of wider original coronavirus outbreak in 2019 - CNN

(CNN) - Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought, and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine.

The lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December...

...Prof. Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, said: "As there was already genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 sequences sampled from Wuhan in December 2019, it is likely that the virus was circulating for a while longer than that month alone."...

 

[Jeff N]

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.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

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.

 

[madodel]

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?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

What is going to happen when this skyrockets 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 weird how some states are just declaring victory and dropping what few restrictions they had.

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.

 

[heltok]

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.