Coronavirus

[Norbert]

Learned something new today about herd immunity. I guess it is obvious, but I hadn't thought about it. The herd immunity point assumes you are starting from that point with 1 infection. If you have many infections at that point, the head of steam the epidemic will have will push you far beyond the herd immunity point in terms of proportion of the population infected. (Something like 90% in the case of this virus, based on what we know about the dynamics.)

Carl T. Bergstrom on Twitter

So practically speaking, it's pretty likely nearly everyone would be infected if you just let it rip. There's a mistake in tweet #9 (corrected later, missing a minus sign).

So overshoot happens if and when there are a lot of infectious (as opposed to infected) carriers at the point in time when the threshold is reached, right?

 

[Norbert]

So how many kids get hospitalized in NYC vs the 3 that died? Hundreds of them, just in the one city. Expand it out to the State or Federal level and you'll find a lot more kids hospitalized for this.

View attachment 534081

keep in mind the context vs this post from prior that implied people under 30 was basically immune just because no one under 30 died back then.

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/attachments/upload_2020-4-19_23-42-26-png.534075/

Which additionally raises the question of how it will affect the rest of their lives, in terms of health and life expectation.

 

[dhanson865]

Which additionally raises the question of how it will affect the rest of their lives, in terms of health and life expectation.

If we get wave 2 this fall and the same child gets it a 2nd time maybe they don't live a full year after getting it the first time. Or said another way:

Maybe the lack of deaths from the sub 10 year old crowd shows up as hospitalizations in wave 1 and as deaths in wave 2.

 

[Norbert]

There is what is wise to do and what the government is doing. The problem in a large country with land borders is already much more difficult than an island with a smaller population (or a peninsula with only one, unfriendly neighbor like South Korea). The political will in the US doesn't exist to do everything needed to contain the virus, so it's going to run loose and be a worse and worse outbreak until the political will is there.

Because the political will is not there, all these ideas are just pipe dreams. We need to live with the reality that social isolation is going to be the only thing we have until we either reach herd immunity or the political will changes very, very dramatically and universally throughout the country.

The political will exists in some places and persons more than in others. Trump is apparently already exhausted after commanding the organization of a few thousand ventilators. Maybe he regenerates and collects some more will.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Maybe he regenerates and collects some more will.

I was thinking someone should tell him that if we can get our case count way below Mexico's that there will be huge popular support for militarization of the southern border. I think his only immutable belief is opposition to immigration from central and south America.

 

[cwerdna]

I heard on U.S. NBC Nightly News yesterday that Russia is now reporting 5,000 cases of Covid-19 per day. So many questions:
...

• How does this rate compare to other European countries on a per capita basis?

You can go to Coronavirus Update (Live): 2,407,600 Cases and 165,083 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Pandemic - Worldometer and sort by total cases or deaths per 1 million population. I'm not sure the former is that meaningful given the HUGE amount of variation in availability and ease of getting tested, depending on the country.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

I was thinking someone should tell him that if we can get our case count way below Mexico's that there will be huge popular support for militarization of the southern border. I think his only immutable belief is opposition to immigration from central and south America.

This is an excellent strategy. Everyone wins. Xenophobes get their wall, nearly everyone gets to live.

 

[renim]

If we get wave 2 this fall and the same child gets it a 2nd time maybe they don't live a full year after getting it the first time. Or said another way:

Maybe the lack of deaths from the sub 10 year old crowd shows up as hospitalizations in wave 1 and as deaths in wave 2.

Notwithstanding the earlier 7x risk factor that BMI represents, kids really seem superhuman vs covid19.

 

[renim]

Hmmm

 

[renim]

In australian context

No way is covid19 anything but safer than flu for age group 0-44. There is currently 20x fatality rate for flu than covid19 for that age group here.

Actually currently all the australian age deciles have more flu fatality than covid19. That may change, and its only wave 1 so far, and there is that social distancing, but still.

Flu got a vaccine, covid19 doesn't.

 

[renim]

It will be interesting to see how effective the supression measures against covid19 also supress flu. I expect it to be a very low flu season in oz this year.

 

[wdolson]

The political will exists in some places and persons more than in others. Trump is apparently already exhausted after commanding the organization of a few thousand ventilators. Maybe he regenerates and collects some more will.

I think it would be easier to get a labrador to do calculus than Trump to do anything that involves compassion or anything where he doesn't see a personal benefit. Unfortunately they are alien concepts to him, part of being a malignant narcissist. There are some other politicians (in other parts of the world as well as in the US) who can't seem to make the trasision from politics as usual to a crisis footing where politics need to go by the wayside. Those antics are getting people killed.

 

[OPRCE]

So, is RdRp created in only infected cells, so Remdesivir would not cause harm to normal cell operations?
Is Remdesivir delivered some way that it only gets into targeted infected cells, or does it get inside all cells?
It seems like some sort of "ATP function distruptor" could do some bad things too...?

1. Yes, RdRp is produced only from the viral RNA, so should not be present in uninfected cells.

2. No, Remdesivir cannot be targeted only to infected cells, it goes basically everywhere via the bloodstream:
"A 10mg/kg intravenous dose given to cynomolgus monkeys distributes to the testes, epididymis, eyes, and brain within 4h"
-- Remdesivir - DrugBank

3. Remdesivir has several side-effects, one of which is damage to kidneys, and seems to cross the placenta and interfere with cell division(?) in the embryo, resulting in birth-defects. Thus it is not recommended for treatment of pregnant women:
-- https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/other/summary-compassionate-use-remdesivir-gilead_en.pdf

4. Favipiravir (aka Avigan), approved 16th.Feb. for trial treatment of COVID-19 in China, operates in a similar fashion (inhibiting viral RdRp enzyme activity using RTP) and is also known to cause birth-defects, thus not for pregnant ladies either:
-- Favipiravir (T-705), a broad spectrum inhibitor of viral RNA polymerase

 

[heltok]

Tomas Pueyo has a new article
Learning how to Dance

 

[bkp_duke]

I do not think this is true. I saw that simulation (probably the same one). I saw nothing in the description that led me to believe that this was based on the real physics of droplets large enough to contain the viral load required to infect someone. It was just as accurate as the physics done in game engines for movies...an artists conception.

The entire basis for the 6 foot separation guideline is that a coughed or sneezed droplet large enough to infect someone will fall to the ground at the 6 foot distance. Yes, some smaller droplets could get carried farther by a breeze...but they would not have enough surviving virus load to infect you.

Now maybe the 6 foot guideline is not exact. And maybe there is a 1% chance that in some situations a strong sneezer in the right humidity with the optimal breeze it should be 7.25 feet.
But that simulation is, IMO, not based on fact nor the idea that you can walk through a droplet cloud a minute later and get infected...based on CDC and WHO guidelines.

Actually, the opposite is true. We are finding out that the more we study this virus, it can survive AND infect using smaller droplets. New research shows that there is a reasonable chance of infection from 13 ft away.
CDC: COVID-19 Can Spread 13 Feet, Travel on Shoes
Aerosol and Surface Distribution of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 in Hospital Wards, Wuhan, China, 2020

3 words:
Masks, masks, masks

 

[JRP3]

Kill them all and use their combined wealth to kick start the economy and give everyone free healthcare.

Elon exemption?

 

[JRP3]

Way too much from that movie has already come true for comfort. But the real explanation for our lack of genetic diversity is probably the eruption of Toba about 75,000 years ago.

More recent work suggests that was not likely.
Ancient Humans Weathered the Toba Supervolcano Just Fine | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

“This is the first research that provides direct evidence for the effects of the Toba eruption on vegetation just before and just after the eruption,” Chad L. Yost, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study, says in the release. “The Toba eruption had no significant negative impact on vegetation growing in East Africa.”

In other words, the cores indicate the volcanic winter never took place, or was mild enough not to show up in the sediment record. Another recent article in Nature shows that during the post-Toba time period early humans were actually thriving, reports Gretchen Vogel at Science.

Toba Supervolcano Probably Didn't Kill Off Most Humans 74,000 Years Ago - ExtremeTech

In this case, artifact analysis at Dhaba shows that the humans living in the area had been using the same technology since as long as 82,000 years ago, and they kept using it straight through the critical 74,000 year period and beyond. This is an important metric of continuity. Even if a new group of humans had settled quickly enough to leave no break in the geological record, there’s no reason they’d be using exactly the same techniques for flint knapping.

 

[Dash-8]

Decent reporting this morning on wide criticism of the Stanford study in the San Jose local paper.
Stanford coronavirus study triggers feud over methodology and motives

"Statistician John Cherian of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry company, made his own calculations given the test’s sensitivity and specificity — and estimated the proportion of truly positive people in the Stanford study to range from 0.5% to 2.8%.

Adjusting for demographics, Cherian estimated a county infection rate of close to 1%. This would lead to a substantially higher mortality rate, rising above 1%."

 

[EinSV]

Decent reporting this morning on wide criticism of the Stanford study in the San Jose local paper.
Stanford coronavirus study triggers feud over methodology and motives

"Statistician John Cherian of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry company, made his own calculations given the test’s sensitivity and specificity — and estimated the proportion of truly positive people in the Stanford study to range from 0.5% to 2.8%.

Adjusting for demographics, Cherian estimated a county infection rate of close to 1%. This would lead to a substantially higher mortality rate, rising above 1%."

Should be interesting to see the updated article and new Appendix addressing comments/criticisms they've received:

In response, on Sunday, the study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the criticisms and incorporates many of the suggestions into the paper itself.

“We have received a vast number of constructive comments and suggestions on our working paper over the past couple of days,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University.

“This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” he said.
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[TheTalkingMule]

Only in America would we expend so much energy examining something in the theoretical that had and is already happening all around us.

10k random tests in NYC would tell us everything we need to know about mortality. 3M tests around the country would have let us begin opening back up in a tiered fashion today.