Coronavirus

[AlanSubie4Life]

One thing to remember to put things in perspective is that early cases didn’t have the advantage of wearing a mask due to the public policy of limiting masks to our frontline health workers since supplies weren’t stockpiled to meet the pandemic. The current maskless “Asymptomatics Gone Wild” groups, along with citizens who simply don’t care about anyone and refuse or intentionally miss-wear masks, clearly are the reason for the overwhelming of care facilities now. These people don’t have an excuse of not having knowledge of the virus or lack of supplies.

Yeah, and apparently there's a fair amount of self-selection for people without co-morbidities, and people who are relatively young. People with co-morbidities & age risk aren't messing around. Not 100% the case, but the self-selection certainly drives down mortality. Still, this will be difficult to contain.

A bunch of these people, I imagine, are quite surprised that they ended up in the hospital!

 

[dfwatt]

Sad this stupidity/insanity is worldwide. @dfwatt I see International expansion for your moron spray product in the near future.

We are now massively backordered. Lunacy is running amok. There is not enough Moron Spray to treat all the lunatics running around without masks claiming to be protecting their freedoms. They're not free . . . . they're loose!

 

[dfwatt]

I'm stumped - what is the chemical reaction ? For that matter, what business does HOCl have existing ?

It's actually the same chemistry and same mechanism used to chlorinate the salt water pools that are now so common in the south. Mildly salinated water with electrodes creates chlorine gas which creates hypochlorous acid. Also creates a complementary Alkali I believe. But my chemistry is a bit Rusty.

 

[dfwatt]

Sad to come here and report that Nick Cordero has passed away from his covid illness.

Nick Cordero, Standout Actor in Broadway Musicals, Dies of COVID-19 Complications at 41

This is incredibly sad news. After a brutal illness and heroic fight Nick lost his life. He was much beloved, but hopefully a high-profile case like this will make younger people think twice about taking covid-19 lightly. At least one would hope so. Still, incredibly sad news.

 

[dfwatt]

"A bus driver in the south-west of France has been left brain dead after being attacked by passengers who refused to wear face masks."



Bus driver is left brain dead after he was beaten up for insisting on masks in France | Daily Mail Online has a confusing prior account that seems to cover periods when he was still alive and only one person was arrested.

"A bus driver in the south-west of France has been left brain dead after being attacked by passengers who refused to wear face masks."



Bus driver is left brain dead after he was beaten up for insisting on masks in France | Daily Mail Online has a confusing prior account that seems to cover periods when he was still alive and only one person was arrested.

I think there was a post that actually got at this issue earlier but I can't find it now. It was about the significant overlap between the loudest and most self-righteous anti-mask folks and antisocial personality disorder.

 

[SageBrush]

It's actually the same chemistry and same mechanism used to chlorinate the salt water pools that are now so common in the south. Mildly salinated water with electrodes creates chlorine gas which creates hypochlorous acid. Also creates a complementary Alkali I believe. But my chemistry is a bit Rusty.

Thanks, interesting !
I presume the complementary base is hypochlorite.

I'm still at a loss to as to how Cl-O-H exists in nature but organic chem and I are not on speaking terms.

 

[dfwatt]

Thanks, interesting !
I presume the complementary base is hypochlorite.

I'm still at a loss to as to how Cl-O-H exists in nature but organic chem and I are not on speaking terms.

I think that's probably right sodium hypochlorite which is a mild alkali. Outside of an endogenous source for free chlorine I suspect hypochlorous acid does not exist in nature. Unclear if volcanic vents ever contain chlorine but I don't think so.

 

[TespaceX]

There are personal accounts online of people in FL waiting up to 2 weeks to get back diagnostic test results because of overwhelming backlog. It almost makes it useless.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

There are personal accounts online of people in FL waiting up to 2 weeks to get back diagnostic test results because of overwhelming backlog. It almost makes it useless.

Excellent news. Best testing in the world.


Go get them 'rona, tiger! (Makes it very clear why mortality is dropping. It's not the weak and pathetic mutated virus that is causing an improvement, as you might conclude from Twitter and various other media outlets.)

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

@bkp_duke,

Is it true that just because you have undetectable antibodies, that means you do not have any immunity? I understand that it makes immunity less likely, but your other immune cells may well be primed to respond and mount a quick response, right? (The only way we'll find out is through further study I assume?)

Just wanted to clarify whether I was understanding this correctly...

Obviously this has implications for serology prevalence studies, but not as sure about the implications for resistance to further disease (and herd immunity, since we seem to have selected that as our winning strategy).

 

[bkp_duke]

@bkp_duke,

Is it true that just because you have undetectable antibodies, that means you do not have any immunity? I understand that it makes immunity less likely, but your other immune cells may well be primed to respond and mount a quick response, right? (The only way we'll find out is through further study I assume?)

Just wanted to clarify whether I was understanding this correctly...
View attachment 561226

The answer is not a clear cut yes or no.

What you want are Memory B-cells (these are the cells that survive long-term - in theory till you die) and re-recognize the virus and ramp up production of the antibodies again (faster than the first time someone was infected) to fight off the virus.

By design, we don't walk around with a full compliment of antibodies to everything we have ever been exposed to. That would be horribly inefficient and like a soldier carrying around 50,000 lbs of gear on his back. Instead we basically carry around a molecular-level 3D-printer that can re-build the tools we used to fight off the infection the first time, faster, so that we have a custom fighting tool, but don't expend a ton of resources keeping every weapon imaginable at the ready.


Now . . . with that said. At 2-3 months after you have been infected, you would expect to have detectable levels of antibodies to the virus, they should not wane that quickly. It almost makes me wonder what they were using to check for antibody levels. Remember - not everyone's body will build molecular-identical antibodies.


I believe what studies like this are finding is that we are truly having problems detecting antibodies in a subset of people because there are so many different strains of this virus out there, causing us to generate so many different antibodies. Remember, these are "quick" tests, it means they only detect a specific type of antibody against the virus, and if you don't have that EXACT antibody, they may not register as positive (even though you are actually immune and have a valid, different compliment of antibodies). -- -- This also means that immunity to one strain of SARS-CoV-2 may not confer immunity to all strains (and there is some data out there to support this assertion).

Academic Laboratory-grade tests could sort this out, but those are not what you are going to do for these questions, as the throughput is too low.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

If they stop being able to reduce the number of patients in ICU for non-COVID reasons (at some point they won't be able to reduce further), it's really going to start to suck rapidly in AZ. If case growth continues (fortunately positivity seems to be plateauing at 20-22%, so who knows, it might slow down soon), they could run out of space very suddenly after a few weeks of apparently stable ICU capacity.

https://twitter.com/Garrett_Archer/status/1280225544458473472?s=20

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

At 2-3 months after you have been infected, you would expect to have detectable levels of antibodies to the virus, they should not wane that quickly. It almost makes me wonder what they were using to check for antibody levels. Remember - not everyone's body will build molecular-identical antibodies.

They did say that 14% of these people did test positive in the first antibody test, though. So assuming they were using the same test, and it is sufficiently sensitive...it's a little troubling that it would wane that fast.

Are there any diseases that we are aware of where antibodies actually go away this quickly? Or would that be unusual behavior for the immune system? If not, it does seem like it could be some sort of test issue.

 

[bkp_duke]

They did say that 14% of these people did test positive in the first antibody test, though. So assuming they were using the same test, and it is sufficiently sensitive...it's a little troubling that it would wane that fast.

Are there any diseases that we are aware of where antibodies actually go away this quickly? Or would that be unusual behavior for the immune system? If not, it does seem like it could be some sort of test issue.

It does happen that quickly, and usually in infections that are fought off more with T-cells than antibodies. It is a concerning finding, and may indicate incomplete immunity for future infections. Time will tell.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

It does happen that quickly, and usually in infections that are fought off more with T-cells than antibodies. It is a concerning finding, and may indicate incomplete immunity for future infections. Time will tell.

I realize you have to speculate here...but...

So, continuing this line of thought...so people who were relatively asymptomatic appear to often have quickly waning antibodies according to this study.

So that would suggest that perhaps people who were asymptomatic usually fought the infection off with T-cells?

Assuming they were infected again, with minimal antibodies remaining, is it pretty likely that they would again have a mild illness (though very possibly be contagious) the second time around? Would it be even more mild (they were asymptomatic before)?

I guess I'm just thinking that asymptomatic people getting infected constantly seems like no biggie - but it does matter if they are contagious, of course. That's the big concern.

I guess we could hope that those people who fought the virus with T-cells will really annihilate it the second time around - with minimal ability to transmit? I guess I'm wondering what is the likelihood of this...

 

[SageBrush]

I think that's probably right sodium hypochlorite which is a mild alkali. Outside of an endogenous source for free chlorine I suspect hypochlorous acid does not exist in nature. Unclear if volcanic vents ever contain chlorine but I don't think so.

I failed at solving the lewis dot structure but Google helped. Valencies of H, O and Cl are 1, 6 and 7 respectively. Looks easy now, doesn't it ? ;-)

I presume this is a very weak acid and a very strong base

 

[dfwatt]

@bkp_duke,

Is it true that just because you have undetectable antibodies, that means you do not have any immunity? I understand that it makes immunity less likely, but your other immune cells may well be primed to respond and mount a quick response, right? (The only way we'll find out is through further study I assume?)

Just wanted to clarify whether I was understanding this correctly...

Obviously this has implications for serology prevalence studies, but not as sure about the implications for resistance to further disease (and herd immunity, since we seem to have selected that as our winning strategy).

View attachment 561226

I'm curious what our senior colleagues says and this is a little bit above my paygrade but my understanding is that learned immunity is encoded not simply an antibodies but also in T cells and B cells.

 

[bkp_duke]

I'm curious what our senior colleagues says and this is a little bit above my paygrade but my understanding is that learned immunity is encoded not simply an antibodies but also in T cells and B cells.

That is correct, but I don't remember all the factors the cause the balance to tip towards one side or the other (T vs. B). I know there are specific cytokine signals, but I don't have to motivation to go dust off that Immunology text book right now.

 

[SageBrush]

I'm curious what our senior colleagues says and this is a little bit above my paygrade but my understanding is that learned immunity is encoded not simply an antibodies but also in T cells and B cells.

Plasma cells are antibody secreting, very angry and transformed B cells
You are right about T helper cells though, there is clonal expansion to foreign antigen similar to B cells, and a cohort survives long term which allows a more rapid response to future exposures.

 

[Doggydogworld]

https://twitter.com/SquawkCNBC/status/1280092727363997696

I strongly disagree with this take. Fear-mongering! I doubt we are still only finding 1 out of 10 infections (though it could get back to that depending on what happens in FL & TX & AZ). We'd be seeing way higher mortality, even after accounting for delays, if that were the case.

View attachment 561202

Yeah, 700k/day seems way too high. Though I think COVID Projections' 200k is too low. They have TX at 20k/day. We're finding 6-8k/day and with positivity of 13%+ I'm confident we're not catching 1 in 3 infections. They seem to be behind the curve in other hotspots, too.