outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

agree

There are reports elsewhere of evidence that the presence of antibodies in some people is short lived and therefore reinfection may be possible.
At this stage in what is still a novel virus there won't be a wide evidence base of multiple reinfections but I wouldn't dismiss this story based on "it's in vox" and the doctor quite correctly qualifying their opinion rather than speaking in absolutes (due to the lack of an antibody test in this particular patient). The doctor is explicit in stating there were two positive tests and two periods of symptoms with a negative test and period of wellness in between.
It's a sample of one, but it's not an anecdote.

still wondering about tests that detect antibodies, how accurate they are and whether or not they correlate with immunity

I feel like these two thoughts should co-exist:

1) data on whether reinfection is possible is still unclear

2) our strategy should be to proceed as if it IS possible to get more than once since we don't know that you can't.

I couldn't believe I talked to some idiot the other day who said "since there's no clear-cut evidence that we can be reinfected yet, we should assume you cannot".....that's.....not...how it works.

I have a friend who had the virus in April who's gone from "I thought I was dying" to literally not caring about masks, distancing, etc. because he thinks he's immune.

if antibodies really were that short lived, you'd think we'd have a bunch of examples of people getting reinfected by now right? or do we have to wait until a shithole country like the USA passes the 6-month mark

still hope there is some immunity after infection, even if antibody negative

xpost evidence of re-infection presupposes the person who was infected the first time got tested then tested a second time and a corresponding antibody test, so it's hard to tell with how sloppy the testing is.

interesting question might be how many of the people who get reinfected have the same sort of severity the second time around

the Vox article concerned me by mentioning it might be like Dengue Fever, where you can get different strains multiple times, and it's usually worse the second time.

i was freaked out about getting it last Sept-Oct when I was there as I got bit the fuck up by mosquitoes one day.

(Philippines = there)

viral reinfection so soon doesn't make sense to me, am skeptical

Not my Orange County, but CA.

Nbd just board of education members citing conspiracy theories about harmful nature of masks

https://voiceofoc.org/2020/07/oc-board-of-education-considers-schools-returning-with-no-masks-or-distancing/

People called me an overreacter when i was upset we were reopening when we did. "It'll be done safely", they said.

Who could have foreseen people going to bars when you reopen them?!

symptoms of that Vox patient first time around were “a mild cough and sore throat”

there has been plenty of speculation that your infection needs to have been strong enough (no one knows exactly how strong) to provoke a sufficient antibody reaction, otherwise you could get it again. this would seem to fit with that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/12/immunity-to-covid-19-could-be-lost-in-months-uk-study-suggests

Can't find a link yet but both Dutch and Chinese studies came to the same conclusions in the last couple of days.

“I cannot underscore how important it is that the public understands that getting infected by this virus is not a good thing. Some of the public, especially the youth, have become somewhat cavalier about getting infected, thinking that they would contribute to herd immunity. Not only will they place themselves at risk, and others, by getting infected, and losing immunity, they may even put themselves at greater risk of more severe lung disease if they get infected again in the years to come.”

But Prof Arne Akbar, an immunologist at UCL, said antibodies are only part of the story. There is growing evidence, he said, that T cells produced to fight common colds can protect people as well. Those patients who fight the virus with T cells may not need to churn out high levels of antibodies, he added.

Shattock said the study was important and indicated that neutralising antibodies rapidly wane. “This certainly suggests that we cannot be confident natural infection will be protective for a significant proportion of individuals, nor certain of the duration of any protection.”

He added: “We would however expect that re-infection would be less severe for any individual as they will still retain immune memory allowing them to more rapidly respond. Nevertheless they could still be a source of onward transmission.

Well, that's just great. By the way, couldn't help but notice that the Science Editor of the Guardian is called Ian Sample.

I presume everyone saw this dead idiot

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/13/30-year-old-dies-covid-party-texas

Darwin Awards going to be hotly contested this year

Dead idiot but I can't feel any schadenfreude - there's been a concerted effort of disseminating misinformation ranging from Russia to the GOP to standard issue social media grifters to billionaires who wanted their workers back to downplay the virus. Lot of poor bastards like that guy on their souls.

Two nanobodies — small, stable antibody variants derived from llamas — that can neutralize SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture by blocking its interaction with the human ACE2 receptor are reported in a Nature Structural & Molecular Biology paper.

Passive immunization, which involves giving a patient virus-neutralizing agents — either serum from people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 or purified antibodies — could represent a useful therapy for COVID-19. Antibodies against SARS-CoV-1 can neutralize the virus by blocking the binding of the virus’ spike protein to ACE2, but many do not cross-react with SARS-CoV-2. Human antibodies, like those of most mammals, have two chains (heavy and light), but camelids, such as llamas, also possess an additional single heavy chain antibody variant, known as a nanobody. Nanobodies are small, stable and easily produced and thus often serve as alternatives to conventional antibodies for diagnostics and imaging. They are currently being developed against SARS-CoV-2 as research tools and potential therapeutics.

James Naismith, Raymond Owens and colleagues report the identification and characterization of two closely related nanobodies (H11-H4 and H11-D4) that can block the attachment of the SARS-CoV-2 spike to ACE2 in cell culture. The nanobodies target a region of the protein immediately adjacent to and slightly overlapping with the ACE2 binding region. Both nanobodies were shown to neutralize live SARS-CoV-2, with H11-H4 showing particularly high potency and additive neutralisation with a human antibody.

The authors suggest that the nanobodies may find application alone or in combination with other antibodies used for passive immunization of patients with severe COVID-19. As camelid-derived antibodies are highly conserved with their human counterparts, they are likely to generate only low immune responses against them in humans; nevertheless, well developed humanization strategies are available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMC3DjAFQEs

The friendly llamas will save us all!

there has been plenty of speculation that your infection needs to have been strong enough (no one knows exactly how strong) to provoke a sufficient antibody reaction, otherwise you could get it again. this would seem to fit with that.

Right, but if I were to rephrase this as "Sans a vaccine, this isn't going away until 25% of humanity have serious long term health problems (on top of any they may already have), and 25% of humanity are dead", you can see why my hair might be standing on end?

on the flip side of this, it'd be good if people could catch and gain immunity to this a bit at a time, if you could arrange that.

Btw, saw this bit of mask advice.

There's an infographic version here too about how to wear one, how not to wear one. This is good! pic.twitter.com/oMs4b3dvqc

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) July 13, 2020

I'd missed that the WH is now (finally, inevitably, sadly) attempting to discredit Fauci. We're so fucking fucked.

the only silver lining is that this will hurt him come November even more, but....how happy can I be about that, knowing the cost is tens of thousands of lives?

this is a neverending psychological Hell as much as a physical one

xps lol I would hardly call llamas friendly, but yes plz give me their nanobodies

The @voxdotcom article is a perfect example of doing what @BillHanage and I wrote in Feb. would cause trouble with COVID-19: conflating "x is possible" with "x is common." https://t.co/LXkKF6CNYX. Most would expect some reinfections: q is how often, how severe, how contagious? https://t.co/PVCorruQp7

— Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) July 13, 2020

Btw, saw this bit of mask advice.

Got emailed this by my work in anticipation of restarting.

Are there any people really unaware of how to wear a mask? I don't think so. People who aren't wearing masks correctly now are doing it because they want to due to discomfort or because they're an asshole.

Well, there's people who've never worn a mask, for a start.

bit strong. don't think a lot of this stuff is overly intuitive

There's an infographic version here too about how to wear one, how not to wear one. This is good! pic.twitter.com/oMs4b3dvqc

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) July 13, 2020

xp

Is more widespread helpful information a bad thing?

re: testing availability and delays, i think this TPM post is useful. Also, i wasn't aware of the story behind keisha bottoms' testing, but it seems very instructive on the practical consequences of the delays:

...On its face this may seem simply a matter of frustration and needless anxiety for people waiting for their test results. But it is actually much more than that. Individual patient care is one thing. But at the societal level a core focus of testing is containment and mitigation. The faster you get results the faster you get positive people quarantined and the quicker you can contract trace. If you get a test and then don’t know whether you’re positive for 7 or 10 days you’ve likely infected other people you wouldn’t have if you’d been quarantined. If you’ve quarantined for 10 days when you didn’t have COVID that’s needless disruption for you personally and at scale in the whole society.

The Post includes the telling anecdote of the case of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The Bottoms family took precautionary tests after attending a funeral. Tens days later they still hadn’t gotten their results. By then her husband had COVID symptoms. They went for speedier tests at Emory University (possibly available since she’s the Mayor). At that point wife, husband and one son were all positive. Then the original tests came back. Those showed only the son positive.

There can be a lag between infection and positivity. So we can’t know for sure. But it seems at least very possible that if the Mayor’s family had gotten their results within a day they would have quarantined their child and neither parent would have been infected at all.

The speed of test results is a big, big deal.

Put simply, succeeding at mitigation and stamping the virus out (or down to trivial levels) means getting tests back quickly so you can clear those without infections and isolate and contract trace those who are infected. Time is of the essence. If you have these long delays one of the two or three biggest tools for success isn’t even being used.

Why is this happening? Once again it seems like the result of a largely absent federal government, no superintending national authority which can oversee and organize the production and distribution of critical supplies, maintain and expand testing capacity beyond state level and more. It’s just not there. As cases mount, of course, the problem will only get worse.

as I've been around a new roommate this week and had unintentional contact with people, I'm doing an antibody test and two COVID tests spread days apart to rule out false negatives (I'm doing them at places that are free and open so as not to take a slot from someone who is sick).

but yeah, if you aren't quarantining while you wait for test results, that helps nothing. supposed to assume "positive" and live that way until you get "negative"...and even then, right about now, nobody in highly affected areas should be using a negative to do anything cos it's a past data point by that point.

in conclusion, everybody in the US will be inside until 2028, by then Liverpool will have won 4 more Premierships, and no American sport will have played a full season

Got my negative test result the day after I sent my swab off with the courier.

is this real? it's really quite something

Here is a high res version of the Cuomo pandemic poster he unveiled today. pic.twitter.com/3LlcewnuOV

— Nick Reisman (@NickReisman) July 13, 2020

oh it's real

i rarely saw any of cuomo's briefings, but i tuned in a couple weeks and he was pointing to a big mountain which i think i had a name? i didn't think much of it at the time, but i see there's a whole lexicon here

How...how is that real? Did someone spill their Mr. Pibb into the simulation server?

honestly i appreciate putting "111 days of hell" right in the middle. the whole thing looks like a tin-poisoned alchemist's lab assistant trying to document a local plague

but so they're saying the end state is the river/economy falling into the "sea of division"?

i remain unclear about the boyfriend cliff

TS: octopus vs. Captain