That is an absolutely terrifying thought. It would mean that, without a cure or us all locking ourselves away, it would eventually infect us all.

That adjustment has been happening on a rolling basis in the US. New York did it this week. They apparently not only added nursing home figures but the ones I've been talking about where there was a clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 but not any kind of test.

In fact, the immunity seems to have a limited duration (this is all still under study so what I'm saying are some preliminary judgements). Guesses I've seen are that antibody levels fall after a year or two. But then you'd have what's called an anamnestic response: The body doesn't forget antigens, including germs, it has previously encountered even though it may stop producing defenses if it stops seeing them for a while. In such a response, antibodies are rapidly produced against the repeat encounter with the antigen rather than taking the 10 days or more it does the first time. The result may be that you get sick again but in a much milder way.

This is the way it tends to work with many infections including viral ones. There are certain exceptions like Herpes and HIV that have found ways around the body's defenses. But so far I've seen nothing to suggest other coronaviruses have done anything like that.

Only in movies do infections kill off the whole population. It's not even in the interest of the virus to kill its host. In cases where an infection can be deadly for a defenseless population, over time the deadliness of the germ tends to attrit because the "fittest" germ is the least deadly one, the one that leaves its host alive to host it.

But we will have a vaccine for coronavirus. It does not appear to scientists to be an especially difficult virus to make a vaccine against. For one thing, its "corona" is a protein coat that helps it enter human cells. That coat makes it vulnerable to antibody attack.

As I just said, there will be a vaccine.

There will also be antiviral treatments, probably several different ones from different makers.

Within, I'd guess, 2 years this will be a preventable and treatable disease, and it will get more so as, over time, companies develop new antivirals and, perhaps, new vaccines (no vaccine is 100% effective and just as the current polio vaccine is better than what Jonas Salk produced, the first one for coronavirus probably won't be the last one).

But the real threat is that the circumstances that produced this virus will likely produce others. What we really need will be "plug-in" techniques for producing antivirals and vaccines. Once you have the genetic code of the virus (we can get that quite quickly now) and its molecular configuration and mode of attacking human cells (we have those for coronavirus now), some sort of AI program can generate candidate drugs and vaccines to fight it. And we would also need rapid platforms to test these drugs and vaccines. The way we do it now is just too slow. Just as we learned how to "test" nuclear weapons using computer modeling, we need something like that to test drugs and get them approved for use. Or perhaps we need to just learn to accept short duration trials for drugs against deadly diseases.

I didn't say "kill" I said "infect". If covid-19 is a chronic disease then we will all eventually get it because it is highly infectious. If we all get it then it will probably kill far more of us than any model is currently projecting...

That's heartening.

What if this was a virus we couldn't recover from or our bodies couldn't kill off completely? We would be so fucked. I don't get how we have some viruses that stay in our bodies for the rest of our lives while others our immune system can kill.

^^^ Some viruses, like HIV, infect cells in our immune system and constantly mutate to avoid attack. Others like herpes ( especially the varicella zoster variant that causes chickenpox) hide in our dermatome nerve regions and pop up years later as painful shingles.

And then, you have the collateral effects of the immune system on the body itself, which is what kills most people with coronavirus. The pneumonia is a result of immune cells damaging normal lung tissue as they are trying to kill infected tissue.

In a nutshell, as long as we keep experimenting with animals that have unique zoonotic diseases, we will continue to expose to viruses and bacteria that can potentially screw us over. Whether it was a wet market or a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese government needs to control this shit. This, HIV, Swine flu, bird flu, MERS, SARS, etc are all giving us a message: we need to stop fucking around with nature or nature will fuck us up in the worse possible way. Dying slowly from an infectious disease is one of the worse ways to go out.

I mean, you could have said the same thing thousands of years ago as older diseases like Smallpox originated from humans beginning to live in close proximity to herding animals. 100's of millions of people have been wiped out by viruses likely transferred from cattle and pigs. We tend to have a historically euro-centric view that draws the lines at those animals that we've built up immunity to over a long period of time.

It will be interesting to see if China actually carries through with bans on exotic animal sales after this. It's all been lip service before. East Asia weaning itself off wild animal consumption would do wonders for endangered ecosystems everywhere. The amount of sharks killed to be used as a tasteless cracker in a wedding soup makes my blood boil.

You have to understand what viruses are and how they work.

First of all, unlike bacteria, viruses are not "alive". They are not a "life form". By themselves, they are inert bits of nucleic acid (either RNA or DNA but not both), often enclosed in some kind of "coat", usually protein.

To reproduce, they have to enter and take over the functions of a host cell, either in humans or some other species. Again, typically the coat of the virus contains molecules that are able to link to the surface of cells and allow the virus to penetrate, inject its nucleic acid into the host cell and from there it begins to use the cell's machinery for nucleic acid reproduction (often ultimately resulting in the death of the cell when a new generation of virus particles are released).

The classic virus that goes "dormant", herpes, does this by remaining inside the host cell, usually a nerve cell. It is able to periodically turn on the machinery of its own reproduction inside the cells which results in creation and ejection of a burst of new virus particles. Each time this happens, the body does respond with the panoply of the immune response and eventually the body suppresses the virus. This is why your herpes sores go away. But by then the virus has entered new cells and gone dormant there, hidden inside the cell from the factors of the immune response . . . until the next time it decides (to anthropomorphize a bit--we don't understand all this totally) to break out.

But not many viruses are able to pull off this trick and other coronaviruses don't so there's little reason to think SARS-CoV-2 does. Most likely the seeming recurrence of positive tests or actual illness in some patients thus far has been due to testing error--that is, they never really had gotten well before they seemingly relapsed and tests indicating they had were wrong.

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/aust...me-last-april/

It was calculated based on the “million deaths” strawman.

The death rate is also not as high as calculated based on deaths relative to confirmed cases. We don’t really know.

Tests take time to develop and produce, especially antibody testing.

Maybe. It’s not even clear yet whether it’s possible to vaccinate for this using live attenuated virus, or a dead virus. Probably not the former if the risk of killing the patient is too high, and a dead virus won’t necessarily produce the necessary immune response. Then there are studies into mRNA based vaccines (like Moderna’s), but if that works it will be a first.

No vaccine against a coronavirus has ever been produced, so it’s actually still as much a question of ‘if’ as ‘when’.

And two years of lockdown is just not a viable scenario. We would just need to accept a higher number of deaths, or make the vulnerable isolate while the rest of us get back to work, in that case. We aren’t waiting for a vaccine, we are waiting for testing, ICU capacity and ventilators.

I was wondering when speakeasies would start showing up...

I still haven't heard a credible explanation of how this could work given that the most vulnerable usually need care staff, regular medical treatment etc. If the virus is rampant in general society it will be rampant among the people providing those medical and care services.

Multiple vaccines are already in clinical trials or about to be. Moderna’s is. Johnson and Johnson’s is or is about to be. So is one from Novavax. There are 2 in China developed there.

70 Coronavirus Vaccines Are Under Development, With 3 in Human Trials, WHO Says

The most interesting vaccine candidates use niether live attenuated virus nor killed whole virus. Love to know what you do for a living so I could understand where you get your BS.

Wow, the IHME finally updated their models again and Arizona looks amazingly better. Rather than having weeks to go until our "peak", we have passed it:

https://uniim1.shutterfly.com/ng/ser...167227/enhance
https://covid19.healthdata.org/unite...merica/arizona

* off topic posts deleted *


this isn't the great obesity debate thread, it's the "how is covid-19 impacting your city" thread.

please stay on topic, folks.