outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/24/strokes-coronavirus-young-patients/?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_strokes-605pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

this is just one in a number of stories about odd blood clotting. can't find it at the minute, but apparently during autopsies, several hospitals expecting to find normal pneumonia symptoms in the lungs, they were finding a lot of blood clots

I guess that this is still cautiously being treated as a late stage side effect and not the primary effect of the immune response, but it's sounding more like a primary effect?

read about that, that is scary as hell.

on the bright side it means we're getting more data about the known immune reactions to the virus and can start coming up with better treatment regimens? on the bright side, none of the cranks seem to be jumping on this yet as Trump hasn't rambled about how we have to thin the blood or w/e

The stories coming out of Wuhan re: ‪reinfection/reactivation of the virus are not encouraging: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-patients-ins-idUSKCN2240HI‬

Can we have a COVID thread that only posts positive news for my mental well being? Jesus Christ.

i've got a john krasinski link for ya

a friend of mine was recently saying how annoyed he was that all the news was trump and coronavirus, coronavirus and trump, can't they talk about anything else and it took a lot of self control for me not to say "yeah, enough about godzilla destroying the city already; what's going on in botanical science?"

there's a KIP COVID thread

I was due for a chemo treatment yesterday, but it was cancelled because I had a low platelet count. Whether that means anything re me being exposed to the virus, I don't know.

Wxpanding on akm's post... NYT:

The World Health Organization has warned against using coronavirus antibody tests as a basis for issuing “immunity passports” to allow people to travel or return to work.

Laboratory tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus “need further validation to determine their accuracy and reliability,” the global agency said in a statement on Friday. Inaccurate tests may falsely label people who have been infected as negative, or may falsely label people who have not been infected as positive, it noted.

Countries like Italy and Chile have weighed providing “immunity passports” to let those people who have recovered from the virus return to work, in an effort to begin easing lockdown restrictions and stem the economic fallout.

In the United States, scientists working around the clock in shifts managed to compare 14 antibody tests on the market, and the news wasn’t good. Only one test delivered no false positives — and just two others did well 99 percent of the time.

I think those are good results. They tested a bunch and found one that worked!

inclined to agree. now let's test the one that worked!

The stories coming out of Wuhan re: ‪reinfection/reactivation of the virus are not encouraging

I'm a month along and I swear I can still feel it rattling around in there. My taste for alcohol still hasn't come back. I still have ringing in my ears.

fucking psychotic

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-expands-battle-with-world-health-organization-far-beyond-aid-suspension/2020/04/25/72c754e6-856e-11ea-9728-c74380d9d410_story.html

that's why the herd immunity strategy Sweden is doing is insane. there's no definitive proof yet that you're immune after getting it once, so your entire strategy rests on something that you don't have any clue about.

― genital giant (Neanderthal), Saturday, April 25, 2020 8:37 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This isnt what Sweden is doing (they're just doing a much more attenuated version of social distancing) and their public health officials have been open that we dont know how immunity from COVID works.

They're barely social distancing at all. They're just preventing large gatherings mostly and taking small measures like "suggesting" working from home and trusting people to socially distance, basically at the level the US was taking before it spiraled out of control.

Anders Egnell, the scientist behind this, seems to believe despite all of the studies showing otherwise, that most carriers are symptomatic. From him: "There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms"

He also seems to have a strong belief in herd immunity working and reinfection not being likely, when neither are known. Also from him: "It is very difficult to know; it is too early, really. Each country has to reach ‘herd immunity’ [when a high proportion of the population is immune to an infection, largely limiting spread people who are not immune] in one way or another, and we are going to reach it in a different way.

There are enough signals to show that we can think about herd immunity, about recurrence. Very few cases of re-infection have been reported globally so far. How long the herd immunity will last, we do not know, but there is definitely an immune response."

So he's banking on herd immunity working, and reinfection not being possible, despite having little knowledge of how the immune response works.

If he's wrong, and few antibodies develop for much of the infected, making many people vulnerable to reinfection, the entire experiment will fail. They can bet hedge all they want, but their scientists are outright saying more exposure to the disease will result in increased immunity, which, while that is obviously true, may not provide enough immunity to significantly mitigate the disease. They're taking a huge gamble.

22 Swedish scientists wrote into one of their leading daily papers to criticize the approach, and many of them are saying people are unnecessarily dying

Compare Egnell's response to Fauci's, who estimates 25% - 50% of those infected and contagious being asymptomatic. Nobody knows for sure the impact and it's possible Fauci is overestimating the asymptomatic carriers but that's a helluva wildcard for Sweden to gamble on, esp as it isn't the prevailing belief in most nations.

i don't really care how they hedge their bets publicly, they clearly are gambling on some form of herd immunity, whether short term or long, because their strategy won't work without it.

Don't bother about Trump and the WHO. He needs enemies like he needs oxygen and he invents them at a breakneck clip.

Xps. I'm not saying that what they're doing is right - they have more deaths than neighbouring countries so obviously they're approach is having
consequences - but they've expressly said that they're not aiming for hard immunity. The majority of swedish people are taking social distancing measures,lots of people are working from home, their healthcare system us less overwhelmed than the UK which is enforcing a lockdown etc. Sweden had a bit of a different civic culture from the US so it's a bit of apples and oranges to compare.

Sweden had a bit of a different civic culture from the US so it's a bit of apples and oranges to compare.

IOW they told everybody to stay home...and they listened. (Also, I read somewhere that the majority of Swedes live alone, which helps.)

Just rewatched Outbreak. Mostly terrible--the first half-hour has some resonance.

xxpost sure, but I can compare them to Norway, who had their first case at the same time, and has only a third of the infections, and a tenth of the deaths, and is doing 3 times the testing

(the number of deaths per 1,000 people is more than 6 times worse for Sweden as it is Norway, so can't merely be that they're twice as big)

I watched Outbreak the other week, it was lol and actually distracted me from the current situation.

I have a friend who lives in Sweden and was working in Denmark and there was a stark difference between the two.

Anti-lockdown protests in Berlin, which seem to be coming mostly from the left and stupid hippies.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8257013/Germany-police-arrest-100-protesters-Berlin-demonstrating-against-lockdown-measures.html

(xpost) Among 10,000 Hollywood contrivances--the stuff Contagion stays clear of for the most part--the most ludicrous is how, once they get the host back to Cedar City--they've got the treatment within 15 minutes.

I read that the original script had the president recommending household disinfectants as a cure, but the general feeling was that they had to draw the line somewhere.

w/r/t how out of touch the president is regarding the death toll (reminder, these are first wave projections through Aug 1, 2020):

“It looks like we’ll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of,” Trump said during a news briefing on Sunday, April 19, adding the next day that “the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We could end up at 50 to 60 [thousand].”

4 days later (4/23), the USA death toll surpassed 50k. It will surpass 60k next week, with more than 3 months remaining until 8/1.

he was referring to the Washington Institute's model that, at the time, estimated 60k deaths. but like the typical idiot he is, he didn't realize it's just a model, and one that's drawn significant criticism. it's since bumped up to 67k deaths, but even that's hard to square with the 2k deaths per day that are still occurring.

it will still be lower than if there was no action, but 100,000 looking a lot more likely. hopefully I'm wrong.

hard to imagine with the slate of state re-openings it's going to stay on the "low side"

well, if all other states open up prematurely, then yeah, that number will definitely skyrocket.

And we are probably undercounting deaths by a significant amount

Most certainly.

Also the consequences of state reopenings won't stay confined inside those states, as the borders are porous (I can cross three state lines on a 20-minute drive). This will muddle the data.

ban states IMO

(US politics post, sorry) the sad part is, those "uncounted" deaths are never going to count to trump or his voters. what's that you say, there was some model that said that the number of deaths is higher than the official count? you're telling me the blue states are trying to make trump bad by counting deaths that aren't even real, based on a model? etc. the only deaths that will "count" to any of them are the obvious confirmed ones, and they'll probably cite the lowest estimates of those too

IMO make them visit the cemetary and look at the exhumed corpse of every dead person, maybe that will satisfy them

oh who am I kidding

"there's no evidence this person isn't still alive...look, they twitched!"

"this person was obviously killed by a gunshot wound or cancer or something like that"

"this is a crisis actor in an induced vegetative state, and I claim my $5"

they would never lie about such a thing...

In late August 2018, almost a year after the hurricane, the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University published their results. They estimated 2,658–3,290 additional people died in the six months after the hurricane over the expected background rate, after accounting for emigration from the island.[6] As result, the official death toll was updated from the initial 64 to an estimated 2,975 by the Governor of Puerto Rico.[216][208]

In September 2018, President Trump disputed the revised death toll. Writing on Twitter, Trump claimed that "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico", but that the Democrats had inflated the official death toll to "make me look as bad as possible". Trump provided no evidence to support his claims.[230]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWi9UUSWsAImuGR?format=jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWi99LBWsAYvK9o?format=jpg

Even worse with those graphs that include the official Covid-19 death stats as a third line

It's good that those excess deaths mostly seem to be dropping in the most recent week... right?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/04/we-still-dont-know-how-the-coronavirus-is-killing-us.html

by one measure 88 percent of New York patients put on ventilators, for whom an outcome as known, had died. In China, the figure was 86 percent

Ned shared this on FB. Scary as hell. I was worried about running out of ventilators but now I'm beginning to wonder if we're killing people with them.

well those are the people who are the sickest. it’s a last resort.

very good article though. very weird about the blood clotting.

Yes but if you count patients on ventilators whose cases are unresolved it becomes something like 20%, and people on ventilators are taking a long time to resolve. That figure is only counting people who are recovered or dead.

aka “by one measure”

this article from a few weeks ago is about doctors pushing back against ventilator use

https://time.com/5818547/ventilators-coronavirus/

xp

Are we really saying most people ventilated in China in February are still alive and still on ventilators?

Le Monde is reporting today a mortality rate of 30% to 40% among French patients who need advanced life-support for the virus (meaning ventilation, generally), as opposed to the 10% that's been reported by the ministry of health until now.