Coronavirus

[DanCar]

How would that be? What's your theory?

Not that I agree with the theory, but the very old, don't contribute to the infrastructure of the economy. In other words they take and spend on consumables rather than contribute to long term infrastructure projects. Younger people contribute more taxes and therefore contribute to infrastructure projects. For example in California people living long time in their homes, pay substantially less property taxes. Also those that live in rent control districts pay less, the longer they have been there. There are special laws disallowing evictions of elderly people. Taxes go to support the elderly rather than to infrastructure projects.

 

[plumazul]

This is really confusing to me. We make seasonal flu vaccines every year. Among them, for other coronaviruses. Why would it take a year and a half to make this one?

Why is there no HIV vaccine after almost 40 years?? Every virus is unique and presents a different set of problems to overcome. SARS-CoV-2 has some interesting properties. ADE(antibody dependent enhancement) is one. If there are spike protein antibodies in sera that is not enough to overwhelm the virus, it actually can make things worse. This could be one reason the virus is so deadly to the elderly and infirm. These things must be tested and testing takes time.

 

[avoigt]

China new infections continue to be low which is a very positive signal. If that remains without new break outs it would be a strong sign that they manage it. Considering the really high amount of active cases its quite impressive.

For the next weeks we will unfortunately see rising numbers in other continents IMO. Germany just announced that some cases cannot be tracked to the infection point any more which is alarming but no reason for a panic.

As for the stock market people get quickly excited and forget quickly.

 

[JRP3]

Jack Rickard of EVTV has basically sold out of everything because he fears market over reaction. Around the 55 minute mark of his latest video, he goes on about it for 25+ minutes.

 

[SpaceCash]

How would that be? What's your theory?

Obviously because old retired people tend to sap the social security, welfare, medical, and other care-related industries while contributing little or nothing in the way of productivity. I have no idea why this would need to be spelled out.

 

[Singer3000]

Obviously because old retired people tend to sap the social security, welfare, medical, and other care-related industries while contributing little or nothing in the way of productivity. I have no idea why this would need to be spelled out.

You are conflating economic activity with health of public finances. Retired people spend from savings, contributing to economic output by a greater multiplier than working people, who tend to have a pretty high portion of their income used to either repay debt or build savings.

You can make the argument if you want that in the long term an economy might have a greater allocative or productive efficiency if it has a younger population. And this in turn will lead to superior gdp growth. But a suddenly much higher mortality rate among seniors cannot do anything but have a negative impact on short term economic growth.

And this is quite aside from the negative social impacts.

 

[SageBrush]

If there are spike protein antibodies in sera that is not enough to overwhelm the virus, it actually can make things worse.

Nonsensical BS

 

[SpaceCash]

Nonsensical BS

Ahhh, the ol' "run a bunch of big scary words together to spook the proles" tactic. Classic!

 

[scottf200]

Probably a repeat but ... for the late comers to this thread:

John Hopkins graphics and data:
Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS

Another tracker from CDC data:
Tableau Public

 

[plumazul]

Ahhh, the ol' "run a bunch of big scary words together to spook the proles" tactic. Classic!

I have offered to explain the "big scary words" to you and those like you. All you have to do is ask, nicely. Knowledge is a good thing.

 

[plumazul]

Nonsensical BS

Do you know how to use PubMed? Obviously, your education ended a long time ago. Mine never has.

 

[JRP3]

Everything will be fine now, Trump has put Pence in charge of the US coronavirus effort.

 

[SpaceCash]

Everything will be fine now, Trump has put Pence in charge of the US coronavirus effort.

That's good! Pence will pray the plague away

 

[jerry33]

How would that be? What's your theory?

According to Henry Kissinger, old people are just useless eaters.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Can we get this thread back to useful information rather than arguments and chit chat?

 

[Causalien]

This is really confusing to me. We make seasonal flu vaccines every year. Among them, for other coronaviruses. Why would it take a year and a half to make this one?

ED: Looking into this some more, and it makes even less sense. I ran into this about how vaccines against wild-type bird flus are made:

Making a Candidate Vaccine Virus (CVV) for a HPAI (Bird Flu) Virus | Avian Influenza (Flu)

Apparently they're more difficult than seasonal flu vaccines because bird flus tend to kill the eggs that vaccines are grown in... and despite that, it "is a multistep process that takes months, from start to finish". And one of those steps is the distribution of the finished vaccine.

ED2: Looks like they expect to have the answer to whether Modena's vaccine is both safe and effective by July or August. According to Fauci.

First potential coronavirus vaccine arrives in US

Past experience with SARS vaccine suggest cytokine storm is likely. And the vaccine end up elevating the death rate. So I gathered they will need trials to prove it is safe first.

 

[KarenRei]

Daily graphs. We'll probably get more than the 2 currently from Japan as a later update. Lots of new cases in Italy and South Korea, but IMHO it's good to see how quickly they're tracing out new potentially infected people. Iran's still en route to be Pre-Containment Wuhan 2.0, and an active seeder.

Lots of global growth, due to Italy and Iran. Of the countries in particular that I might want to add to the list, Bahrain in particular has a lot of cases - 31 in the past two days. Overwhelmingly they're people who traveled to Iran, which is the main reason I haven't done so already. But that's a lot of cases to not have its own line. Kuwait is another similar case - 21 in the past 2 days, 15 of those today.

 

[SageBrush]

Past experience with SARS vaccine suggest cytokine storm is likely. And the vaccine end up elevating the death rate. So I gathered they will need trials to prove it is safe first.

'cytokine storm' is a clinical syndrome, and a poorly defined one at that since there are perhaps dozens of possible participants. The syndrome is a mixture of cytokine levels and their interactions. Any severe infection of any type will have markedly elevated cytokines. The transition from helpful to harmful is murky.

This case report
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30076-X/fulltext

is interesting because it is really not possible to know if the patient died from the infection or the interferon (immune system augmentation therapy, if you will) therapy. I suspect the latter.

 

[SageBrush]

I find Hubei troubling, in the sense that the plateau is in the context of an ongoing strict quarantine.
It makes me wonder if a resurgence would occur if the quarantine was lifted.

It must be a very difficult decision for the Chinese health authorities.

 

[plumazul]

Past experience with SARS vaccine suggest cytokine storm is likely. And the vaccine end up elevating the death rate. So I gathered they will need trials to prove it is safe first.

Here is an abstract to a study pointing out a few of the problems.