What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic entail?

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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby liminalOyster » Sun Apr 19, 2020 2:02 am

Wombaticus Rex » Sun Apr 19, 2020 1:15 am wrote:That just happened to emerge within a few miles of the only Level 4 lab in China. Which just happened to be working on coronavirus variants since they opened. To me, that seems like a coin toss right now.


I find it personally reassuring that the leaked cable about safety concerns from US officials at said lab took place in January 2018 meaning it was safely within the temporal reality-fortress of Trump and can thus not be added to any such wild insinuations. /s
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Project Willow » Sun Apr 19, 2020 11:35 pm

Wombaticus Rex » 18 Apr 2020 21:15 wrote:Agree x Disagree is a pretty weak paradigm for uncertain times.

But, it's worth considering that "herd immunity" isn't an option with this. That's essentially a bet that this is a naturally occurring, "zoonotic" coronavirus, right? That just happened to emerge within a few miles of the only Level 4 lab in China. Which just happened to be working on coronavirus variants since they opened. To me, that seems like a coin toss right now. I am also a fucking idiot, though, so factor that detail into all of my wagers.


No, its origin really doesn't matter as to that question, herd immunity is the goal with all novel contagions and natural herd immunity is best when mortality rates are low as they are with this virus. There are studies published over the last couple of weeks suggesting in terms of mortality it is no worse than a bad flu season, even Nature had to admit that the numbers coming back from Santa Clara look promising. This isn't Ebola gone wild, it isn't the black plague.

The "second wave" comes when we all go outside again, we aren't getting rid of it by staying inside, we're just prolonging the infection rate.

Scientifically, the tide turned this week, but we're seeing even more draconian control measures being pushed and a shitload of propaganda this weekend as if things are worse. That is a hint that this pandemic, however it arose, is being used as an op to move towards more overt authoritarianism, (and a host of other projects and tests).

What no one who is panicked over the virus seems to be considering is the predictable, inevitable death toll of economic collapse, delayed medical treatment for cancer and other conditions, and long term isolation. The UN estimated the economic shutdown would cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children across the globe. Who's talking about them?
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:12 pm

Yes, the CFR was never the problem, it will likely shake out to less than 1%. Definitely agree.

My concern is about the persistence of "reinfection" reports -- this indicates that antibody response is getting scrambled, if it's not just an artifact of bad testing. (And, there's a lot of that.) Also, organ damage.

The other unknown variable after that is whether people with antibody immunity can still transmit the virus to others.
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:41 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:12 pm wrote:Yes, the CFR was never the problem, it will likely shake out to less than 1%. Definitely agree.

My concern is about the persistence of "reinfection" reports -- this indicates that antibody response is getting scrambled, if it's not just an artifact of bad testing. (And, there's a lot of that.) Also, organ damage.

The other unknown variable after that is whether people with antibody immunity can still transmit the virus to others.


The other unknown variable -- will there ever be a formal acknowledgement (WHO or feds, etc) that we frankly still know very treacherously little about this thing? Echoing both you and Project Willow here that it seems a huge number of potentially also-lethal decisions (ie starving people with unempoyment and not providing necessary basic medical procedures) were made in the interest of creating a goal that may have had some short term institutional impacts (hospital overload) and made peopel feel they understood the whole thing better. But as a light armchair epidemiologist who halfway trusts my ability to reaosnably interpret the data, I remain truly shocked by how little we know yet (ie. is it more systemic than respiratory? is there coronavirus-like "immunity" that's fleeting? is reinfection pretty much common, etc)
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby stickdog99 » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:46 pm

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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Project Willow » Tue Apr 21, 2020 11:15 pm

Wombaticus Rex » 20 Apr 2020 09:12 wrote:My concern is about the persistence of "reinfection" reports -- this indicates that antibody response is getting scrambled, if it's not just an artifact of bad testing. (And, there's a lot of that.) Also, organ damage.

The other unknown variable after that is whether people with antibody immunity can still transmit the virus to others.


If it's like other corona viruses (common cold), it will mutate quickly and immunity will not be terribly long lasting. Until testing is more precise, I don't trust the reinfection reports either. Yes, there's still to much we don't know. There's always the more sinister possibility that new, more deadly strains will purposefully introduced. :ohwh

The point I was trying to make was more general, once these viruses are introduced, we will have to live with them and learn to grieve a certain amount of mortality. This is not a prospect that most people in the US are primed to accept, we don't deal with risk, death or grieving very well. Unless a novel infection does have a high death rate, it makes no sense to kill off other groups or populations through lock downs, etc.
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Apr 22, 2020 4:48 am

Wombaticus Rex » 21 Apr 2020 03:12 wrote:Yes, the CFR was never the problem, it will likely shake out to less than 1%. Definitely agree.

My concern is about the persistence of "reinfection" reports -- this indicates that antibody response is getting scrambled, if it's not just an artifact of bad testing. (And, there's a lot of that.) Also, organ damage.

The other unknown variable after that is whether people with antibody immunity can still transmit the virus to others.


Reinfection reports from South Korea are currently at 179 of 10683 cases. That's 1%. Any idea how long people are reinfected for or its severity? If it's only a day or two that's probably not unusual. Once you have "immunity" it doesn't magically stop you getting infected, it just means your immune system responds faster to the reinfection, usually the closer to the end of the last infection the more anti bodies you'll have to deal with it. You might get sick for a short period of time. If you're fully recovered it only takes a short time for your immune system to start cranking them out again, so you might get sick for a day or two. If you've ever had a flu for a fortnight than reovere and got it again you'll see it only lasts for a day or two and isn't anywhere near as bad.
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:32 am

Joe Hillshoist » Wed Apr 22, 2020 3:48 am wrote:Reinfection reports from South Korea are currently at 179 of 10683 cases. That's 1%.


Right, but this is where scale becomes critically important. 1% of the 2.5m people in the current tally is still a big wave. And this is an outbreak that's being projected to touch half the world before 2020 is done.

Between the fact this version of coronavirus has remarkably high shedding and the fact that early iterations of the vaccine will be marginally effective, if at all, that poses real problems because we're not getting the r0 anywhere close to "1." The reason flu vaccines work, to the extent that the work (and that's in the 'flip a coin' range for individual outcomes) is because regular-ass influenza has an r0 of ~2 to begin with.

Again, we're far from trustworthy concrete numbers on nCoV, but I don't think I'm overstating my concerns here, either.
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Sounder » Wed Apr 22, 2020 5:52 am

https://www.rt.com/news/486458-france-c ... nsmission/

A French schoolboy who contracted Covid-19 on a skiing holiday in February didn’t infect anyone else he came into contact with despite showing symptoms, a new study reports. It sheds new light on children as virus ‘vectors.’

The child had stayed in a ski chalet in Les Contamines-Montjoie, where British coronavirus ‘super-spreader’ Steve Walsh had also been vacationing. Walsh unwittingly exposed about a dozen of his fellow guests to the disease after picking it up during a business trip to Singapore in January, before traveling on to France.

A Public Health France investigation into the child’s case discovered that the nine-year-old did not pass it on to either of his siblings nor to anyone else, despite coming into contact with 172 people....
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby alloneword » Wed Apr 22, 2020 7:18 am

^^^ https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/172-Kontak ... 27469.html

(For those that don't like RT as a source ;) )
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Apr 22, 2020 7:42 pm

Wombaticus Rex » 22 Apr 2020 19:32 wrote:
Joe Hillshoist » Wed Apr 22, 2020 3:48 am wrote:Reinfection reports from South Korea are currently at 179 of 10683 cases. That's 1%.


Right, but this is where scale becomes critically important. 1% of the 2.5m people in the current tally is still a big wave. And this is an outbreak that's being projected to touch half the world before 2020 is done.

Between the fact this version of coronavirus has remarkably high shedding and the fact that early iterations of the vaccine will be marginally effective, if at all, that poses real problems because we're not getting the r0 anywhere close to "1." The reason flu vaccines work, to the extent that the work (and that's in the 'flip a coin' range for individual outcomes) is because regular-ass influenza has an r0 of ~2 to begin with.

Again, we're far from trustworthy concrete numbers on nCoV, but I don't think I'm overstating my concerns here, either.


My point is the intensity and duration of the reinfection in individuals.

It's hard to get accurate data so I don't know how long people are reinfected for or the intensity of the reinfection. But if these figures are low it's less of an issue IMO. It still fits within the expected range of behaviours in response to an infection at the moment.

Abstract
20 An outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute
21 respiratory syndrome CoV-2 (SARS-CoV-2), began in Wuhan and spread globally.
22 Recently, it has been reported that discharged patients in China and elsewhere were
23 testing positive after recovering. However, it remains unclear whether the convalescing
24 patients have a risk of “relapse” or “reinfection”. The longitudinal tracking of re-
25 exposure after the disappeared symptoms of the SARS-CoV-2-infected monkeys was
26 performed in this study. We found that weight loss in some monkeys, viral replication
27 mainly in nose, pharynx, lung and gut, as well as moderate interstitial pneumonia at 7
28 days post-infection (dpi) were clearly observed in rhesus monkeys after the primary
29 infection. After the symptoms were alleviated and the specific antibody tested positively,
30 the half of infected monkeys were rechallenged with the same dose of SARS-CoV-2
31 strain. Notably, neither viral loads in nasopharyngeal and anal swabs along timeline nor
32 viral replication in all primary tissue compartments at 5 days post-reinfection (dpr) was
33 found in re-exposed monkeys.
Combined with the follow-up virologic, radiological and
34 pathological findings, the monkeys with re-exposure showed no recurrence of COVID-
35 19, similarly to the infected monkey without rechallenge. Taken together, our results
36 indicated that the primary SARS-CoV-2 infection could protect from subsequent
37 exposures, which have the reference of prognosis of the disease and vital implications
38 for vaccine design.


https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf

The bold bit is what I'm talking about ... 5 days after reinfection there is no sign of the virus.

This is before the onset of serious symptoms at 7+ days. The monkeys may have been infected even for a few days immediately after reinfection but their immune response was able to take care of the reinfection before it took a serious hold.

However there are other issues with possible reinfection in people and potentially with ongoing anti body dependent enhancement. I think it's dependent on the strength of the immune response initially, and possibly on the severity of infection but I'm speculating.
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Apr 22, 2020 7:44 pm

Also ... Spare a thought for the monkeys who died to get us that information.

Not much if a life for them, and I find the way their death are referred to a sacrifices a little creepy, tho maybe it jut in the ence they are being sacrificed for our benefit...
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Grizzly » Wed Apr 22, 2020 8:16 pm

Anger mounts after corporations tap small-business relief funds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931339
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun May 10, 2020 1:55 pm

^^^ You'd think working class Trump supporters would be outraged, yet they stick with him, believing he can do no wrong. (in fact, the very subject of Trump's unchallangeable supremacy is now before the scotus)
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Re: What would a rational response to a deadly pandemic enta

Postby Sounder » Thu May 14, 2020 8:36 pm

How bout require nursing homes to accept Covid positive patients. Would that be a rational response to a deadly pandemic? Yeah, lets not talk about it.
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