Coronavirus

[TheTalkingMule]

https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadm...s-of-SARS-CoV-2-viral-load-by-patient-age.pdf

Study from Germany, not peer reviewed.

"Analysis of variance of viral loads in patients of different age categories found no significant difference between any pair of age categories including children. In particular, these data indicate that viral loads in the very young do not differ significantly from those of adults. Based on these results, we have to caution against an unlimited re-opening of schools and kindergartens in the present situation. Children may be as infectious as adults."

Caveats:
- low sample size. Few children present with symptoms, and mostly only people with symptoms get tested.
- even if kids have similar viral loads to adults they probably will not spread as much because again they have fewer to no symptoms. Less sneezing/coughing.

Anecdotal advise from one doctor does not trump statistical analysis of actual cases. Yes, we all need to be careful. However all indications are that not only do 10 and under kids almost never show symptoms, they almost never transmit to adults. That's a big deal and needed to be factored into our response.

 

[Papafox]

Edit: This post previously contained a link to a video which one member thought was self-promoting. I disagree with that assessment but nonetheless have respected the member's concerns and I have removed the link, which had to do with my belief that 100% of airline passengers and cabin attendants should be wearing masks during the current phase of the coronavirus pandemic.Some of the likes/dislikes below are now disconnected from the post which inspired them.

 

[TespaceX]

I see no plans to do widespread case-based intervention anywhere except maybe this talk in Maryland. Essentially our plan is to "wait it out" or what was termed at the onset "flatten the curve". Basically nothing.

That's likely what has Elon and others a bit peeved. This lockdown is not part of a plan to move into case-based tracing, so there's really no point to it if in fact the curve has been flattened and/or it looks like we have hospital capacity.

We're not tracing anyone, not that I can see anyway. Certainly nothing like that is happening or planned in PA.

San Francisco health dept and UCSF have partnered and begun contact tracing efforts with over 100 people so far, upping that to 150 people soon. Among the people involved in the effort are UCSF med students, city health employees, and translators.

Really happy to see this occurring. But, wish this kind of thing was more of a concerted program set up by gov higher up.

 

[TEG]

...Iceland about their diligent efforts to isolate lots of contacts, suspects and being careful with incoming travel.

How an Austrian ski paradise became a COVID-19 hotspot

...
Warnings from Iceland ignored
Icelandic authorities had already declared Ischgl a risk area on 5 March, on a par with Wuhan or Iran. However, it took nine days for the Austrian government to take measures to isolate the area.
The Icelandic warning was issued after returning Ischgl vacationers tested positive for the coronavirus.
Franz Katzgraber, Director of the Tyrolean Regional Health Service, responded by stating that “from a medical point of view, it is unlikely that infections have occurred in Tyrol.” Instead, he put forward the thesis that the Icelanders contracted the disease from another air passenger, a person returning from Italy...

 

[TEG]

...This lockdown is not part of a plan to move into case-based tracing, so there's really no point to it if in fact the curve has been flattened and/or it looks like we have hospital capacity...

Well, "flattening the curve" as much as possibles give doctors a chance to learn how to better treat this. It also gives us hope a vaccine can be released BEFORE all of us get exposed.
Further, hospitals could use "breathing room" to treat other kinds of illnesses, so expecting them to fill up with COVID patients is not good for people needing other treatments.

 

[Papafox]

@TheTalkingMule , I see you disagree with my mask idea. In early April air travel in the United States (measured by TSA passengers handled statistics) fell 95%. Clearly, people are afraid to fly at the moment. Why would you oppose this policy of everyone wearing masks in the cabin? The greatest safety benefit of mask wearing is if THE OTHER GUY wears a mask. One infected passenger on the plane without a mask endangers a huge number of passengers. The freedom to travel without wearing a mask will come when a suitable vaccine is found and possibly sooner. Airlines are going to be unprofitable until people feel comfortable flying on them again. What specifically are you objecting to? If you don't like wearing the mask, the flight you want to travel on likely won't even take off because it's canceled because not enough people are willing to board. What I'm saying is that right now lots of flights in the air with no rules requiring mask wearing is not an option. Masks will be necessary to bring air travelers back. Is that what you disagree with? I am curious.

 

[SageBrush]

ArsTechnica has a very nicely written primer about vaccines
The Ars COVID-19 vaccine primer: 100-plus in the works, 8 in clinical trials

They have a valid construct for following the race to vaccination.

 

[SageBrush]

[mule], I see you disagree with my mask idea.

An anti-vaxxer, perhaps ?

 

[lascavarian]

We're not tracing anyone, not that I can see anyway. Certainly nothing like that is happening or planned in PA.

Gates on the CNN interview last night mentioned that Bloomberg was working with NYS to standup tracing. He also mentioned Washington state is working in a similar fashion (sounded like Gates might be helping but he did not say it directly). These states will likely be the first to launch. PA was not mentioned.

There is clearly a sequence to this. There is little use in tracing if testing is so slow that the point of tracing is just to send condolence cards to those that have been exposed days before. Once testing is is able to report results in 24 hours then tracing begins to pay dividends.

Delivering test results within 24 hours opens up further benefits. Otherwise even testing is not worth much. YMMV.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

@TheTalkingMule , I see you disagree with my mask idea.

Message board self-promotion. Automatic disagree!

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Well, "flattening the curve" as much as possibles give doctors a chance to learn how to better treat this. It also gives us hope a vaccine can be released BEFORE all of us get exposed.
Further, hospitals could use "breathing room" to treat other kinds of illnesses, so expecting them to fill up with COVID patients is not good for people needing other treatments.

Nearly zero chance we have an effective vaccine before wave 2 is in full swing this coming fall/winter. We're all getting this and there's no plan in place to avoid that. On the up side, maybe we won't even have a wave 2 in the US if we're all subjected to it in wave 1.

Hospitals are relatively empty. We've flattened the *sugar* out of any curve.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The Stanford scientists issued an updated version of their Santa Clara paper. They added data that allowed them to tighten up the specificity error bars, and also added a section responding to the extensive input they received on the earlier draft.


Of course the most obvious issue with their estimate is that antibodies are unlikely to detectable in only 3 days per their very conservative assumption, so their IFR estimate may be too high. For some odd reason nobody mentions this issue.

Let the next round of flame wars begin.

The extra data definitely provides a clue to what might have happened here. You can see that there is quite a lot of variability in specificity from batch to batch of tests. Some batches of blood are perfectly specific, while quite a few other batches are quite poor.

It looks like the researchers assumed that the average specificity from all of these groups was what they should use for their estimate of specificity.

But that's not valid - it's quite likely that the Santa Clara County sample of serum tests is one of those examples of a set of blood samples which would have had quite a few false positives! (This hypothesis could be tested through statistical analysis.) There is likely a physical reason for these higher false positive rates, and all that's required is for the Santa Clara County population to have that physical underpinning to get a high rate of false positives.

Certainly, this hypothesis is likely enough (6 out of 13 (mostly) small samples showed this behavior!!!) that much more follow-up would be needed (gold-standard verification would be a start!), in order to determine what was going on here.

Again, in the end, it still boils down to the simple summary that the test simply is not specific enough for the prevalence of antibodies being measured. But it may be considerably worse than the average 99.5% specificity would imply! Fortunately, we have a few populations now where incidence of coronavirus have been high enough to give good antibody prevalence. So we can focus on those for now, while we look for an antibody test which performs better.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Another wonderful tidbit today. Hospitals in Philly are so empty they're either furloughing large chunks of doctors/nurses/staff or moving the most experienced(read: expensive) ones to random "coronavirus teams" that don't actually treat any coronavirus patients.

The hope is by having a bunch of orthopedic and gastrointestinal surgeons/nurses on these teams they can offload the cost when hospital bailouts comes raining down.

Isn't our healthcare system great?

 

[SageBrush]

There is clearly a sequence to this. There is little use in tracing if testing is so slow that the point of tracing is just to send condolence cards to those that have been exposed days before. Once testing is is able to report results in 24 hours then tracing begins to pay dividends.

Cuomo has been quite upfront and transparent in his updates but he continues to only talk about part of the scope of the problem. It goes like this:

NYS has ~ 1000 new Covid hospitalizations a day. That works out to ~ 200 deaths a day, and using a 1% IFR it implies ~ 20,000 new infections a day. If contract tracing leads to e.g. 50 contacts per infection then the plan is to apply 14 day quarantines on 1M people a day.
SAH has failed in NYS, and barring other successful measures this test,trace and quarantine strategy just amounts to another somewhat worse SAH outcome.

 

[TEG]

Nearly zero chance we have an effective vaccine before wave 2 is in full swing this coming fall/winter. We're all getting this and there's no plan in place to avoid that...

Well, I plan to stay isolated as long a possible and hope that there will be a vaccine before I get exposed. That is a really rough thought if a vaccine won't show up until next year !
I can see how most people assume there is no way "shelter in place" could last that long.

Maybe there are some really isolated people, like hermits living in the wilderness, people sheltering on their yachts, etc, that could hold out a long time without being exposed...

 

[Papafox]

Message board self-promotion. Automatic disagree!

I'm not promoting myself, I have nothing material to sell. I'm promoting an idea that 100% of passengers wearing masks on an airliner is ultimately good for everyone at the moment, including the airline. I'm also encouraging others to break free of this safe little coronavirus thread and to speak out publicly on issues that affect our safety. Ironically, this idea of 100% of passengers on an airliner wearing masks both improves public safety while simultaneously helping to open the economy. It should appeal to a wide spectrum of political views.For this reason, I was trying to understand what you found objectionable. Nobody on this thread gives a rat's ass about who I am, but they do care about ideas related to coronavirus.

 

[azaz]

John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter

Brazil looking bad

 

[Daniel in SD]

Clearly, people are afraid to fly at the moment.

I wouldn't take a flight right now without a full face respirator. Haha. My friend's sister flew back from NYC in March and tested positive for COVID-19 sometime after arriving (obviously she could have spread it to other people on the plane or contracted it on the plane).
There was a SARS Classic super spreader on a flight in 2003 that infected 22 people (killed 5 Air China Flight 112 - Wikipedia). Luckily SARS-CoV-2 isn't nearly as deadly but it seems much more contagious.

 

[SageBrush]

I find the ECDC data most informative and I start my day with updated graphs from their data. This graph is through Apr 30 and tracks most of the successful countries. I have left Singapore on the graph because if is actually a tale of TWO cities: success with the residents, and massive outbreak amongst the migrant worker population subject to extremely poor living conditions. For context, USA is at ~ 90/million*day and climbing. Taiwan has had zero new cases for 5 days running.

 

[Singer3000]

Musk not being on the call would be a solid 100-150 point downswing in the stock price the next morning. No chair of the board is going to consider it.

How are you feeling about this comment now?