Coronavirus

[defc0n]

Sad milestone reached today:

US Deaths from COVID-19: 3146
US Deaths from 9/11 attacks: 2977

I was just wondering yesterday when we’d surpass that. And then you start to wonder where money would be better spent by humanity. And then you get depressed.

 

[Norbert]

And in other news that isn't news, the naive CFR for Germany is 0.96% and rising - in spite of the massive recent growth in case numbers (the denominator). 14-day lag number is 10%. Obviously that could be skewed by a number of factors. It's also likely that a 14-day lag is a bit too high. IIRC, the 14-day adjustment that papers use is from onset of symptoms to death. We're doing "logged as positive to death". Which is likely closer to 7 days for an appropriate lag (a day or two of symptoms at least + a few days for test results needs to be subtracted from 14).

For Germany, that 7-day lag works out to 2.5%. SK works out to about 1.7%.

It is not "sudden" news, but has been progressing in this way for a while without much attention here. If I remember correctly, 1.6% is the number that I calculated some time ago based on a 14-day lag, and it is being exceeded now. The lag may depend on a country's medical treatment, and the reported number is influenced by changes in testing. So it is difficult to tell. However within the scope of my attention, so far the resulting numbers appear to be exceeded by reality (perhaps except for the very beginning of a spread).

 

[jkoya]

I may be confused because it's really confusing. I think they were testing "real time RT-PCR" and IgM-IgG vs. samples tested with conventional RT-PCR. If everyone were using a test with 66% sensitivity that would be really bad.
From you link:

RT-PCR in the case of RNA viruses typically refers to Reverse Transcription, the making of complimentary DNA from single stranded RNA. It is the cDNA that is amplified in RT-PCR. The DNA Polymerase enzyme used in RT-PCR is able to simultaneously perform the reverse transcription of the RNA strand and amplify cDNA.

Real Time PCR is an amplification technique where you don't have to wait until the end point to see if a sample is positive - provided enough copies are produced over the cut-off to give a positive result in this case. Negative samples would have to go until the end point of the test. The first Real Time PCR platform I saw was Roche's LightCycler and you could see the amplification results in "Real Time" on the display.

You can perform Reverse Transcription PCR testing using the Real Time PCR technique, which is what the author of the abstract is probably referring to.

 

[defc0n]

As someone who has has been really sick over the last 14 days my main concern and one that several people I've talked with who has had as much as a cold during the last two months seems to share is that it's a huge problem not knowing if I had the virus or not. Because now I'm so wishing the virus is actually what I had.

I've been way sicker than ever in my life and had several but not all of the virus effects. Just the odds of that happening right now makes me think I had it. And if I had it I want to know but there is no way I can find out. I would still be taking all precautions needed both tomorrow and six months from now but it would change my mindset if I knew. Right now I'm pretty sure I will thinking about how sick I was and worrying about getting even sicker a lot for months to come.

And I'm in a country with highly praised free medical treatment but I was actually told to call back in a few days when I contacted a hospital for the first time in 35 years. Telling them how horrible I felt they wouldn't even send a doctor because they were all needed at the hospital but I shouldn't come there because if I didn't have the virus that was a bad idea and they would probably just send me home again. So yeah, I know most cases are not found and never reported so any type of percentages are widely wrong and really just guesses. It's just impossible to say how wrong.

In most places in the world unless you go to a hospital and they can confirm that you have pretty severe symptoms you will not be tested. In my case It sounded like a good chance I wouldn't even be tested if I went to the hospital being very sick.

A vaccine is obviously a priority but some way to test who has actually already had this is much needed if life is to get back to normal anytime soon. It would also be way to figure out the real infection rates and death percentage.

People not knowing if they have been sick or not will have a huge impact on the economy.

Apologies if this has been discussed. Have had a hard time keeping up my reading habits the last few weeks.

I’ve had a very strange sickness too for a very long time. But I don’t remember the last time I had a fever. I had strange shortness of breath starting in late feb or early March, then starting having strange chest pain that would show up in different areas of my chest day to day.

last week I noticed that my body was definitely fighting something in the middle of the night for 4 days straight. Now I have had less chest pains and each day is either better or worse than prior. But overall feeling better I think finally.

for those that remember and were wondering, no I didn’t go on a cruise or goto Florida after all for vacation.

 

[Webeevdrivers]

I was surprised our local hospital (BC Canada) is proceeding with my prostate biopsy in the middle of this although with a couple of weeks delay. Psa of 5 ish 6 months apart. Late 50’s so that may be their concern. I would have thought they would have delayed it a couple or three months until we get to the other side of the curve. But apparently there are very few Covid cases here...at this point. Having said that, I’m glad I’m only there for an hour.

Courage to all dealing with Covid right now. You’ve got this.

 

[eevee-fan]

The official Chinese government line is that all the new cases being found now are due to foreigners bringing in the virus. However, foreign travel into China has essentially stopped.

If the new cases are from domestic transmission, then it is definitely a huge concern! Our hopes in the US is that if we shut down for a few months, the disease would be gone. Our remaining options, if that does not work, is not going to be pretty...

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

but has been progressing in this way for a while without much attention here.

To be fair, we've discussed it quite a lot here, and I think we're mostly on the same page. But there does seem to be a contingent of people who wanted to ignore the data and say the actual CFR was much lower.

But it looks like CFR will end up around 1.5-1.7% in well tested countries, and probably the IFR is pretty close to 1% (as that seems to be the number the experts are using).

 

[eevee-fan]

I don't expect 30% to continue. Of the high count state only NY (and sometimes NJ) grew that fast. Lockdowns should start to bend the curve this week, as in Italy

USA Today said there were 18k of them in the US.

We're expecting huge outbreaks in the midwest in the next 2 weeks from Spring Break and Mardi Graw...

 

[EVCollies]

Seems like the number that matter is the accuracy for moderate cases.
RT-PCR 66% (this was for "real time" PCR not conventional PCR. They used conventional PCR to get the positive samples)
IgM 80%
IgG 93%
What's the difference between IgM and IgG? Is the test accuracy between them correlated?
Also, they don't have a false negative rate for this test because they only tested positive samples.

As I recall, IgG suggests recent infection which can become negative over time. IgM suggests more distant infection which is initially negative but becomes positive with time, this can suggest immunity to future related infections.

As someone who has has been really sick over the last 14 days my main concern and one that several people I've talked with who has had as much as a cold during the last two months seems to share is that it's a huge problem not knowing if I had the virus or not. Because now I'm so wishing the virus is actually what I had.

I've been way sicker than ever in my life and had several but not all of the virus effects. Just the odds of that happening right now makes me think I had it. And if I had it I want to know but there is no way I can find out. I would still be taking all precautions needed both tomorrow and six months from now but it would change my mindset if I knew. Right now I'm pretty sure I will thinking about how sick I was and worrying about getting even sicker a lot for months to come.

And I'm in a country with highly praised free medical treatment but I was actually told to call back in a few days when I contacted a hospital for the first time in 35 years. Telling them how horrible I felt they wouldn't even send a doctor because they were all needed at the hospital but I shouldn't come there because if I didn't have the virus that was a bad idea and they would probably just send me home again. So yeah, I know most cases are not found and never reported so any type of percentages are widely wrong and really just guesses. It's just impossible to say how wrong.

In most places in the world unless you go to a hospital and they can confirm that you have pretty severe symptoms you will not be tested. In my case It sounded like a good chance I wouldn't even be tested if I went to the hospital being very sick.

A vaccine is obviously a priority but some way to test who has actually already had this is much needed if life is to get back to normal anytime soon. It would also be way to figure out the real infection rates and death percentage.

People not knowing if they have been sick or not will have a huge impact on the economy.

Apologies if this has been discussed. Have had a hard time keeping up my reading habits the last few weeks.

I agree, to know if you have had the disease and are immune, thus a valuable member of the herd, would be valuable. This will take a very long time to validate.

 

[eevee-fan]

More specifically, from the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/media/136534/download

View attachment 527487

Good thing that there are intelligent regulators who know what it is to consider all available evidence and make probabilistic cost/benefit intelligent decisions.

Who knows -- it may not be effective after all, or only in certain limited circumstances, or maybe something else will be much more effective; but at least for now they can see the limited evidence before them now and take action based on that rather just mocking people or pissing on ideas that they evaluated incorrectly when they first heard about them.

This makes an even stronger case of the importance of testing earlier in the disease state...

 

[HG Wells]

Just think of the money you could make If you had an employment agency that would certify having employes who tested positive for recovery.
Send me 1/2 of one percent please.

 

[EVNow]

I may be confused because it's really confusing. I think they were testing "real time RT-PCR" and IgM-IgG vs. samples tested with conventional RT-PCR. If everyone were using a test with 66% sensitivity that would be really bad.
From you link:

It is confusing - but when they say "real time" they aren't talking about some new fangled real-time test (as we might use in tech) - but they are talking about tests that were conducted when the patients came in. This is the usual rt-pcr nucleic acid test.

To further facilitate the efforts of clinical staff in testing, we compared the sensitivity and effectiveness of the currently available tests. We reported that serum antibodies-based testing was more sensitive and efficient to be used as a diagnostic option as compared to reverse transcriptase PCR, which exhibited comparatively superior to the nucleic acid-based test for patients in different stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our findings suggested that IgM-IgG antibody test provides an effective complement to the false negative results from nucleic acid test for SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosis.​

 

[Norbert]

To be fair, we've discussed it quite a lot here, and I think we're mostly on the same page. But there does seem to be a contingent of people who wanted to ignore the data and say the actual CFR was much lower.

Yes, we did, and yes, there is.

But it looks like CFR will end up around 1.5-1.7% in well tested countries, and probably the IFR is pretty close to 1% (as that seems to be the number the experts are using).

I don't have a problem with 1% IFR and I think it is possible. That was also my guess for a while. My current "guess" is very roughly 1.5%. Who knows, maybe that's my age group influencing me. Even so, a CFR of (almost) 1.5-1.7% is still possible if a country is really well tested and also has very good medical treatment. However I don't see such a country on the horizon, regardless of the actual IFR (except cruise ships). Certainly not China. Iceland might be a candidate, but it is still far too early to tell. Perhaps if some country does lot of antibody testing after the fact, so to speak.

 

[eevee-fan]

Giuliani wasn't a very effective person in the interview. It took him too long to get some of the concepts. Nonetheless, there's substance to what has been shown in results so far by the doctor. Don't let choice of messenger blind you to the contents of the message.

Why did the doctor need a lawyer to present his case study?!?

 

[bkp_duke]

Coronavirus Could Be a 'Chimera' of Two Different Viruses, Genome Analysis Suggests : COVID19

As you know, a cell infected with a virus is "hijacked" and becomes a factory that makes copies of the virus. It's possible to be infected by two different viruses at the same time. And it's possible that the hijacked cell creates a virus that is a combination of both viruses which infected it.

The article suggests that's what must have happened to create SARS-CoV-2

Keep in mind, every "combination" created by a doubly infected cell is a "mistake." Neither virus wants the cell to do that. They both want the cell to faithfully replicate it. And cellular machinery being what it is (that is to say, really quite good), most copies are faithful to one or the other virus.

And most mistakes are undoubtedly jumbled messes - viruses that don't actually work.

Therefore, the chance that any particular virus emerging from an infected cell is a viable, working hybrid is incredibly low - like winning lottery ticket low. But, when you're infected, millions of cells are infected and they're pumping out billions of viruses. Somewhere in there, someone won that lottery.​

cue : If the chance of it happening is low, it must have been created in a lab. Because conspiracy theories don't need any proof.

If this is the quality of "scientific opinion" on Reddit, you might consider moving to a different discussion venue.

Recombination events, especially of two viruses, do happen. Usually this happens in carriers (i.e. something like bats or another host that carries around the virus without it causing disease). This kind of event is not outside of the realm of "happens within nature". All data to date this does not appear to be a "man made" virus.


Also bear in mind, there are MANY more coronaviruses than the 7 that infect humans. My wife is a vet, and she is going bonkers with all the "my dog tested positive for coronaviruses posts".

 

[eevee-fan]

There are tons on HCQ treatment studies going on right now in many countries.

The study above is not a treatment study, it's a prophylactic study to see if it would prevent people in close contact with COVID-19 patients from contracting the virus in the first place. That takes time unless you specifically try to infect people on purpose.

We should have medicated all those kids before they went on Spring Break. They would have appreciated a $50 stipend to be part of the research. Missed opportunity.

 

[bkp_duke]

As I recall, IgG suggests recent infection which can become negative over time. IgM suggests more distant infection which is initially negative but becomes positive with time, this can suggest immunity to future related infections.

It's the reverse. The IgM subtype of antibodies are the "acute phase reactant" produced first by the B-Cells. Over time, they then convert over to IgG production. IgG production will wane over time as the infection is cleared and a small subset of the IgG producing bill cells will become senescent and form memory B-Cells to fight off future infection.

 

[eevee-fan]

We really should leave bats alone. They are an important part of the ecosystem, but they are also a reservoir for viruses. Bats don't tend to get sick with viruses very often, but their immune systems are not very good at killing them off either. So they can get infected with something and it just stays in their system. Living in colonies, one bat with an infection can infect the entire colony.

Similar effect on churches (case S Korea).

 

[Daniel in SD]

It is confusing - but when they say "real time" they aren't talking about some new fangled real-time test (as we might use in tech) - but they are talking about tests that were conducted when the patients came in. This is the usual rt-pcr nucleic acid test.

To further facilitate the efforts of clinical staff in testing, we compared the sensitivity and effectiveness of the currently available tests. We reported that serum antibodies-based testing was more sensitive and efficient to be used as a diagnostic option as compared to reverse transcriptase PCR, which exhibited comparatively superior to the nucleic acid-based test for patients in different stages of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our findings suggested that IgM-IgG antibody test provides an effective complement to the false negative results from nucleic acid test for SARS-CoV-2 infection diagnosis.​

What test did they use to get the 100% positive samples?

 

[AZRI11]

Which one of us has a prescriber's license?

Which one of us has, successfully, treated patients with off-label and compassionate care usages?


Thought so.

You guys know that your back and forth was noticed by Musk who then tweeted out his support for more research. Trump's son inlaw saw Musk's tweet and then did his "research" and informed The President who then "mentioned" it in a press conference and now we're here