Lurker > Esuriat

Suburbs and rural areas are worse, virtually without exception, with following social distancing.

In better news, NIAID through Fauci is saying they are pleased with the results of their remdesivir trial so that's a nice update from the last trial preview out of China that declared it useless.

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Essy

With a Walmart order last week I got a free sample of an Aunt Jemima "Pancake on the Go" thing. Just batter in a plastic cup that you mix with water and microwave for just over a minute.

It was okay. Fine texture but no browning so far less character than a pancake and it was on the salty side, probably because of extra leavening to make it work.

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Essy

Yuri_LowelI posted...

Why is it only in united states of dumbasses they have protests?

I know Germany's been having a few protests, and their biggest one yet happened last weekend.

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Essy

No but I think being a furry would complicate my prospects

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Essy

New York had a second round of antibody testing on a much larger selection (7,500 vs. 3,000 in the first round) and the positive rate increased to 14.9%. 24.7% for New York City.

wew

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Essy

Ryokles posted...

So the clinic my moms friend went to told her that she had cleared an infection previously but I just dont see how thats possible while she has only igm antibodies. They told her shes not contagious and Im like uhhhhhhhhh maybe she should call them back before she celebrates. Im only a chemistry tech though so what the hell do I know

There can be a noninfectious convalescent period before IgG appears, but with the uncertain nature of the virus I agree.

I suppose T cell and B cell concentrations could be looked at as well but I don't think any range for that has been established with this virus. Especially given the T cell suppression that's been noticed with some patients with COVID-19.

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Essy

iiaattgg posted...

pretty much no one where i live in VA gives a shit anymore. the roads were empty for about 5 days and then there was less traffic than usual for a bit but my morning commute has returned to its normal bullshit all last week. pretty much anytime im out it seems like a normal day, just with lots of places closed.

Pretty much the same here, except maybe even less of a dip in activity. The weather is getting warmer and a lot of people have gone a month or so without any noticeable personal threat (my county recently passed 100 confirmed cases) so they're getting a massive sense of ennui with the whole situation.

Virginia has still been lagging badly in testing so that side of the control doesn't give me much optimism either. So I say "hopefully hospitalizations will decline" but more likely is that Virginia coasts at this pace for a long time.

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Essy

I think WHO is specifically afraid of the "immunity pass" concept. There's the possibility of antibodies not protecting people to a sufficient degree (very unlikely at this point) or not long enough (still plausible, but still unlikely) and if either of those are true then it could be catastrophic.

There's also the likelihood that any country creating immunity passes will see a surge of people intentionally getting themselves infected.

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Essy

The Goonies

It's a decent enough guess.

Or maybe Back to the Future

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Essy

Virginia has been pretty stable in virtually every category over the last 10 days. Just a plateau of 500-800 new cases daily (which means virtually nothing as far as understanding spread in the state), hospitalizations have been between 70-110 daily and deaths have been between 20-50 daily. Hopefully the hospitalization numbers decline soon.

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Essy

Agreed. Bolsonaro's response has been among the worst of any head of state in the world with him declaring even the official records a falsification intended to personally smear him.

Obviously it can get worse, like in Turkmenistan where mentioning coronavirus is banned.

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Essy

Kinglicious posted...

Don't think ecuador was posted in here but...

Ecuadors Death Toll During Outbreak Is Among the Worst in the World https://nyti.ms/3atVJgF

Apparently estimate is they're off by 15x.

Yeah, I'd seen murmurs about this before, specifically about Guayaquil alone

It's pretty sobering. Also to be noted in South America is that Brazil reported by far their greatest daily deaths yesterday and their number of people in serious condition is second only the US. I think they're poised to start putting up 1k deaths daily soon.

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Essy

Special K
Pineapple
Hard-boiled egg

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Essy

I'd probably be lazy and rank Wii, 64 and DS evenly at 4th, but otherwise this is spot on for me.

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Essy

Also I'd say mask wearing is maybe 10% around here. Just semi-rural DC bedroom community things

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Essy

Speaking of Santa Clara county, allegedly one person died of coronavirus there on February 6th, and another on February 17th. Both are believed to be from community spread.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Santa-Clara-county-coronavirus-February-deaths-15217371.php

Of course the official count is that the first death in the US in general was on February 29th. On February 15 there were only 15 known cases.

Stories like this are what make me question the higher R0 evaluations and think again that the ball was just dropped that fucking badly. To be clear, it's still a relatively high R0, I'm just talking about the original high estimate of 3.3 vs. the more recent 5.7.

EDIT: On second thought, this is still in line with both the higher reproduction number and established community spread possibly by late January.

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Essy

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3580524

If more comes out on ivermectin, I won't be surprised by stories of people taking their dog's heart worm medicine. The FDA has apparently already issued an advisory against that.

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Essy

Suprak the Stud posted...

It was like 60-70% on the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, wasn't it?

It was a little over 50% when the testing was first done but two weeks later it had dropped to 20%. It was seen as a major affirmation of the case breakdown observed in Wuhan since the numbers were seemingly quite close. But there were plenty of factors that could have skewed it like the average age of passengers on Diamond Princess being 69.

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Essy

The number of new cases declined the last two days, but not by very much. At this point the new case numbers aren't very helpful or indicative of much beyond affirming there definitely is still severe community spread. Hospitalizations, unfortunately through a lag effect, show severity as of around 8-10 days ago, but they are a little better of a metric.

I don't know a lot about what those are showing, though, besides Virginia which I follow closely. Today was a bit worse than the past 10 days, but hospital reporting is also inconsistent so it's frustrating.

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Essy

A turkey sandwich

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Essy

I can also confirm that sneezing specks of blood is something that happens to me a bunch while I'm sneezing from allergies.

Thankfully it never gives me full nosebleeds or anything

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Essy

Yeah, basically. Obesity itself causes systemic inflammation, causing elevation of interleukins. The interleukin IL-6 in particular is implicated in cytokine storm which is a large factor in many patients' eventual death from COVID-19.

It's also potentially the factor that precipitates hypertension and T2 diabetes in the first place.

That said, the demographic breakdown of patients in intensive care by BMI doesn't skew very much from the general population's percentage of the number of overweight and obese people. But it does factor, as mentioned here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/health/coronavirus-obesity-higher-risk.html

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Essy

Some of these potentially lower infection fatality rates are interesting especially when you compare them with the IFR reported in smaller, complete population sizes like February's Diamond Princess fiasco. Everyone aboard was tested and there were 712 cases with the 13th death happening April 9. That gives an IFR of 1.82%.

A particular note with the demographics on the Diamond Princess is that average age of passengers was much higher than the general population, being something like 69. The crew's average age was 36. Older people going on cruises are generally going to be healthier than your average person that age, but that likely doesn't change much since they'll still likely have a comorbidity or two by that point. It also seems to be enough of a difference that, considering how steeply mortality escalates with age, may agree with the Dutch figure.

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Essy

I would wait until they were showing clear symptoms of turning and may or may not have already bitten several others already before I would commit to killing them.

Do we even know yet if this is worse than seasonal rabies, I mean this economist says...

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Essy

I've seen murmurs float around about a thing known as ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement) which is where, upon reinfection, the antibodies from the initial infection augment the virus' spike protein in a way that entry into cells is facilitated. This makes for a far more severe infection. This was a significant barrier to the creation of both SARS and MERS vaccines during trials on mice and rabbits, but nothing conclusively showed what kind of outcomes humans would have with those since interest and funding evaporated.

I think with how widespread this virus is, and with plenty of recovered doctors and others in China, Iran, Italy, Spain, France, the US, etc. continuing to be exposed, evidence of this effect should be showing itself by now with far more intense infections and worse outcomes but I've seen absolutely nothing so far. It's something to continue looking out for, but I'm very optimistic this will not be the case. ADE being a thing with COVID-19 is a worst-case scenario.

It's also of course one of the reasons why the reinfection/reactivation topic is getting focused on a lot, but those stories haven't often indicated what kinds of symptoms these people are showing. But those that have have never mentioned much worse than mild symptoms.

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Essy

KamikazePotato posted...

I like rallies when they benefit me and dislike them when they don't

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Essy

Good, hope you continue getting better for real this time!

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Essy

Agreed, I think reactivation is the most likely answer to this. And there are concerns that it could simply turn dormant like hepatitis B or chicken pox/shingles only to activate much later, but that won't be known for much, much later. Right now it has to be treated as if there's no evidence either way, so of course it will be a "concern." I know that the convalescent plasma infusions for some of the so far "chronic" cases have resulted in rapid clearance so at the very least there seems to be possible treatment for these people.

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Essy

Cereal and fruit, yet again

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Essy

Corrik7 posted...

Southern Hemisphere will get harder in our summer.

A little, yeah, but I don't expect it to be significantly worse. Some of that has to do with most of them not seeing a lot of the sustained low temperatures that you see in the north. And the case for actual seasonality is still relatively weak.

Most equatorial countries are still inconclusive. Indonesia's Java seems to be one of the hardest hit islands, but it's also incredibly densely populated so it's hard to compare it to the spread in Australia's cities.

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Essy

One of the more odd countries in this right now is Australia. Restrictions have generally varied by state like in the US and they didn't act very proactively in general. Their testing infrastructure has been pretty good but doesn't seem like it would explain the dramatic tapering off of cases.

They were pretty warm when their outbreak first started, but general studies still allege that warm weather doesn't mitigate the spread by very much.

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Essy

Life cereal, a peach and a hard-boiled egg

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Essy

That's accurate. And for comparison, if you expanded the current death rate from New York state to the whole US, there would be 13k deaths daily.

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Essy

Scrambled eggs, a half peanut butter sandwich and some pineapple

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Essy

Denmark, which is far less hard hit than Germany, did a similar antibody test and estimated an infection rate of around 3%.

But yeah, 5.7 sounds much closer to what I'd expect given the ever increasing realizations of how readily it spread while asymptomatic. It was far more viable than SARS-CoV had ever been, and yet official figures (which, granted, were established back in mid-January or so) still pegged it with a slightly lower R0 than SARS-CoV.

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Essy

Virginia had a 45% jump in deaths today. Hospitalization increase was virtually the same as each day over the past week, though.

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Essy

Esuriat posted...

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/wilmington-nursing-home-covid-19-residents

It will be interesting to follow up on this one in 7 days.

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/coronavirus/7-die-from-coronavirus-at-wilmington-nursing-home/2104753/

Only five days. I was curious about it for the number that were asymptomatic, and it appears most of them still are, but going from asymptomatic to dead in 5 days seems a little unusual.

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Essy

Deaths from other causes are clearly accelerating as well because of this. People are avoiding treatments and not getting a portion of their proactive medical care because of fears of infection and other precautions. Wuhan would have been no different, especially with the draconian lockdown. I would imagine a very large proportion of those people really weren't technical COVID-19 deaths.

15-42x sounds like some Hong Kong propaganda numbers, though. Not that I fully believe CCP numbers, of course.

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Essy

Esuriat posted...

Honey Nut Cheerios

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Essy

Honey Nut Cheerios

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Essy

Granted there is the weight of a pandemic raging at the moment that could be distracting you.

At least I'm certain it's been distracting me.

But yeah, some people do like the compartmentalization of going to an office.

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Essy

Cavedweller2000 posted...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52192604

According to The Times (yeah, I know) 80% of people admitted to IC don't make it out.

I believe it was 48% of those who specifically get intubated go on to die. I forget which country specifically cited those outcomes, but high figures like 80% have been strictly anecdotal.

Not all people who go into IC are being intubated, but it is a very large portion of them.

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Essy

Cinnamon Toast Crunch with milk and a banana

I've had cereal and a banana every morning for like three weeks straight.

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Essy

Curfews seem counterproductive if anything, by driving people to do necessary travel and errands during peak hours.

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Essy

Virginia had a 15.8% positive rate in their latest test batch. Not the best ratio there. But it was also the largest number of tests in a single day so far, hence the jump of nearly 400 cases.

2,500 per day is still well under the ideal target here.

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Essy

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/wilmington-nursing-home-covid-19-residents

It will be interesting to follow up on this one in 7 days.

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Essy

I know, but my point is more with the currently unknown asymptomatic percentage. You're right that the ratio would be no different between Telluride and New York. With the Diamond Princess there was ultimately a 20% asymptomatic rate at the end of observation (down from 56% when the observations began), but it was also an older population and there may have been other factors at play. Iceland of course had a study that claimed a 50% asymptomatic rate, but that may have similarly contained a large number of presymptomatic people just like the initial overview of the Diamond Princess.

The difference between 20% and 50% is still enormous, even if neither back up the idea of significant percentages being infected yet.

I'd love to see more of these studies be done for a much larger sample size to show what the scope of spread has been so far, with less of an inherent social distancing.

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Essy

A couple of things with that report. San Miguel county is a very sparsely populated county, the county seat Telluride being a town of just 2,484 (2018 est.). Spread is inherently going to be much slower in places such as these. And I like how in the replies this guy immediately shuts this possibility down with no extra qualification.

Not to say I completely disagree with the substance of that tweet, and it's still useful information. Any claim of "most" being infected by now is bullshit. Imperial College recently implicated ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellow ships/Imperial-College-COVID19-Europe-estimates-and-NPI-impact-30-03-2020.pdf ) that in Europe between 0.72% in the lightest affected country, Germany, and 15% in the worst, Spain, may have been infected by the date given of March 25. I think it's become pretty clear through comparison of what we're seeing now and what the anecdotes are supposing that any significant spread through January is unlikely and February sickness was still highly limited. Bear in mind that the US is about 10 days behind most of these countries' curves.

EDIT: Close the space in the link, of course

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Essy

Hope things get better for you, Tim

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Essy

mnkboy907 posted...

Well damn why didn't he just do that a couple months ago?

He needed to farm piety to cast the holy spell

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Essy