Stayin' Alive - Covid-19 #10

[Raja]

2 hours ago, Isis said:

I would not assume that every positive result leads to each person being tested more than once -

Yeah - as you mention, I'm not sure what the community protocol would be but I think in places like hospitals it would be routine to get a couple of negative nasal swabs/ at least one before discharging them. Then again, discharge criteria could be modified where you discharge based on resolution of clinical symptoms, but I would imagine most hospitals want to err on the side of caution and are not doing that unless they are *really* short on test kits.

[Isis]

1 hour ago, RhaenysBee said:

What do you all think about this quarantine conundrum? 

my father wants us to visit my grandmother for her birthday and wave from the street while she stays behind the fence of her front yard. 

Obviously, no. That's DoH guidance. Don't visit relatives or friends. It's not essential. It's not a conundrum. 

Use the phone or internet to do birthday greetings. Send flowers, a cake, presents etc. Don't visit. 

[Fez]

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus-low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about?__twitter_impression=true

Worrisome initial study (n=175) out of China. They found that almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients had extremely low levels of antibodies; with younger patients more likely to have low levels. In ten patients, antibodies could not be identified at all. All study patients experienced "mild" symptoms (no ICU patients) and its not known why this disparity in antibody levels exist yet.

The researchers are concerned about the risks of reinfection, and whether a vaccine will even be helpful for these people (If the live virus didn't produce antibodies, why would a vaccine?). And it's important to remember that these weren't asymptomatic cases either, they had to deal with the virus. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

9 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

And whose parents actually survive Star Wars?

Baby Yoda's adoptive step-father is holding strong! 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 minute ago, Fez said:

https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus-low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about?__twitter_impression=true

Worrisome initial study (n=175) out of China. They found that almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients had extremely low levels of antibodies; with younger patients more likely to have low levels. In ten patients, antibodies could not be identified at all. All study patients experienced "mild" symptoms (no ICU patients) and its not known why this disparity in antibody levels exist yet.

The researchers are concerned about the risks of reinfection, and whether a vaccine will even be helpful for these people (If the live virus didn't produce antibodies, why would a vaccine?). And it's important to remember that these weren't asymptomatic cases either, they had to deal with the virus. 

Marge Simpson groan

I've been concerned by the overconfidence in short term immunities, but this is even darker. Hopefully it's just a one off report. 

[Toth]

Day 23 of the lockdown. I... I'm afraid my body starts to dissolve into a heap of pain. While I am a big couch potato, this amount of sitting at the laptop that I am doing right now is truly ridiculous. Because I have started to fight with constant neck pain and headaches I have started to pick up jogging again yesterday. After a small jog and a shower my pain is like blown away, but over the course of the day and into the night till the next morning it slowly returns. This happened yesterday and this happened today, with me already having my headache back. This... this is super frustrating... I guess I have to look for stuff I can do inside to work on my fitness, but here I have to deal with my usual anxiety attacks that prevent me from doing any exercise for fear of getting seen. Gah...

[Arakan]

2 hours ago, Alarich II said:

Please, people are dying and yet your entire tone is so full of German smugness, you were begging for this comment. 

Through a stroke of luck and without any great contribution from ourselves we are in a lucky situation where we live in a country that may hopefully avoid some of the bad shit that our neighbours and allies suffer. This is not the time to go about pontificating about the deficits of other countries or make broad statements about their populace.

500.000 Tests per week, ramping up to 1 million is not luck. Professional contact tracing on local level is no luck. Spare me this. If you wanna cozy up with Brexiteers and MAGAs please don’t quote me. You don’t know the comments of people like him in the past. If hard data and facts are called smugness I don’t care. Brexiteers and Trumpists have blood on their hands. 
 

ETA please spare that „allies“ talk. BJ and his cabinet missed opportunity after opportunity to work together on this with the EU. Spare me your patronizing allies talk. 

[Arakan]

3 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Personal attack, no facts. 

I don’t care. What I predicted 10 days ago is happening. People like you and that other one were carrying the flag of liars and smoothtalkers like BJ. Go back and read the conversations. Stored on the www for all eternity. 

[HexMachina]

17 minutes ago, Toth said:

Day 23 of the lockdown. I... I'm afraid my body starts to dissolve into a heap of pain. While I am a big couch potato, this amount of sitting at the laptop that I am doing right now is truly ridiculous. Because I have started to fight with constant neck pain and headaches I have started to pick up jogging again yesterday. After a small jog and a shower my pain is like blown away, but over the course of the day and into the night till the next morning it slowly returns. This happened yesterday and this happened today, with me already having my headache back. This... this is super frustrating... I guess I have to look for stuff I can do inside to work on my fitness, but here I have to deal with my usual anxiety attacks that prevent me from doing any exercise for fear of getting seen. Gah...

Your pains are probably more to do with your posture etc. while working on your laptop all day. What is your current set up? There are a lot of simple changes you can make which should help to deal with this. 

The firm I work for circulated a very helpful info sheet for setting up to WFH (and its prepared by someone’s who’s actual job it is to carry out workplace assessments and suggest changes that need to be made, so not just a load of BS). Happy to share the suggestions with you if you want

 

edit: should also add these are changes you can do for free/very low cost, using equipment or items you likely already own. There is obviously more expensive stuff out there which can achieve the same

[Arakan]

1 minute ago, JoannaL said:

You don't get it, do you??? Leave RT troll

Deliver facts. Personal insulting is not facts. But I remember past conversations with you. Worthless and Useless to further „discuss“ with you. Feel free to ignore me. 
 

Your insult showed your pathology. 

[Toth]

6 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Your pains are probably more to do with your posture etc. while working on your laptop all day. What is your current set up? There are a lot of simple changes you can make which should help to deal with this. 

The firm I work for circulated a very helpful info sheet for setting up to WFH (and its prepared by someone’s who’s actual job it is to carry out workplace assessments and suggest changes that need to be made, so not just a load of BS). Happy to share the suggestions with you if you want

edit: should also add these are changes you can do for free/very low cost, using equipment or items you likely already own. There is obviously more expensive stuff out there which can achieve the same

Well, thanks and you are right, it is likely my posture. I am working with my laptop, but I have put it on a wooden stand and am using an ergonomic mouse to limit the stress on my hand. I am also sitting at a desk with a decent chair, but unfortunately I am sharing that one with my mother and when it is blocked I have to retreat onto my bed, which is literally suicide and it's my own fault for doing that.

[HexMachina]

2 minutes ago, Toth said:

Well, thanks and you are right, it is likely my posture. I am working with my laptop, but I have put it on a wooden stand and am using an ergonomic mouse to limit the stress on my hand. I am also sitting at a desk with a decent chair, but unfortunately I am sharing that one with my mother and when it is blocked I have to retreat onto my bed, which is literally suicide and it's my own fault for doing that.

Do you have a kitchen/dining room table you could set up on? If not, i would just recommend trying to set up your bed in such a way as to be as comfortable as pssoible. Rest your back on the wall/headboard, stack up books to rest your laptop kn to be an appropriate height etc. 

The ideal situation (which from your post you obviously know) is to set up at a hard workstation, use a chair with full back support etc. But where thats not possible there are compromises/workarounds 

[Alarich II]

 

1 hour ago, Arakan said:

500.000 Tests per week, ramping up to 1 million is not luck. Professional contact tracing on local level is no luck. Spare me this. If you wanna cozy up with Brexiteers and MAGAs please don’t quote me. You don’t know the comments of people like him in the past. If hard data and facts are called smugness I don’t care. Brexiteers and Trumpists have blood on their hands. 
 

ETA please spare that „allies“ talk. BJ and his cabinet missed opportunity after opportunity to work together on this with the EU. Spare me your patronizing allies talk. 

Never mind, Raja is right.

[Raja]

Man, y'all need to chill.

[Clueless Northman]

12 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

One of the stories I saw about flu research had graphs showing how cholesterol levels drop as the body fights the flu, but afterwards they rise again.

Oh I never expected the levels to stay low, but it's interesting that the flu decreases them. Now, if high levels could actually help in the fight, that would be nice (for me at least, though it would probably be bad news for many people with usually low levels).

[Fez]

Wow. I should get a goddamn medal from my landlord. Or at the very least a freeze on any rent increases when my lease is up in October. Everyone able to still pay their rent should have a huge bargaining chip in negotiating with their landlords.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Isis said:

I don't think it has anything to do with modelling (predicting outcomes based on a number of factors). It is to do with policy and context (and finance!).

A case is a case. It should only be counted once (unless patient recovers and then acquires a new infection and then they would be considered a second case not the same one*). One case is one infection in one person. 

One person may have multiple samples taken, either at the same time or on separate occasions. For example, in our Acanthamoeba lab we might test two contact lenses and a swab from a single patient. Three samples. If one is positive, and two are negative, that's one positive result (one positive case). We might get further samples from the same patient a week later, and whether they are positive or negative, that would be the same infection and still only counts as one case.

Sometimes there are issues with samples where they cannot be tested, are contaminated or discarded in error or something, meaning they do not give rise to test results which can be validated (released). These can still count toward the number of tests taken. 

Obviously not every test will be positive. The negative results still count as tests performed.

I would not assume that every positive result leads to each person being tested more than once - that is going to be highly dependent on context. If it was a positive test in the community, we would not want potentially positive people going back to a clinic or whatever to get tested again as that would be a risk of exposure for others. It is more likely to happen in a hospital or specific research/surveillance setting.

*We used to have this argument with the two people who do the case counting for imported malaria in the UK. They wanted a person to ALWAYS have the same unique identifier regardless of how many samples we got on that patient. Also in malaria you get relapses, drug resistance, partial prophylaxis/treatments etc. This 'give the patient the same number' approach was really confusing for us in the lab. After years, we switched it so that we give as many unique sample numbers as we need to do our jobs properly and the pen pushers do the work of 'is this the same case?' - because that's actually their role, not ours.

Thanks, I really appreciate this response. 

I think I phrased my initial question inartfully though, or else I'm too dense to understand your answer (totally possible!), but it could also be that I didn't quote the post in the other thread I was responding to, as that probably would have provided necessary context.

I guess what I'm trying to nail down is trying to get an idea of the (idk the right word to use)...saturation (I guess)...of testing in any particular community.

For example, if we're given the data point that 50,000 tests have been conducted, and there have been 5,000 confirmed cases out of those 50,000 tests, that doesn't  necessarily mean they tested 50,000 people and 10% of those came back positive, right? And my assumption is not necessarily based on assuming any particular protocol and how many tests are conducted in that protocol, but rather on the assumption that people that test positive are more likely to be given multiple tests to ensure they're no longer shedding the virus before releasing them from care, when it comes to the novel coronavirus (I guess I'm asking is whether that's a safe assumption to make, for one).

I think you probably answered the question in your opening paragraph, but I'm just wanting to confirm that "number of tests performed" is kind of a meaningless statistic unless you know what the testing protocol is for the numbers being reported, correct?

Ack, this is frustrating because I'm not quite sure how to articulate what I'm trying to get at. Basically, we shouldn't assume that just because 50,000 tests (for example) have been conducted, it means 50,000 people have been tested, right? Because I see that conflation being made quite often.

[Maithanet]

2 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

Ack, this is frustrating because I'm not quite sure how to articulate what I'm trying to get at. Basically, we shouldn't assume that just because 50,000 tests (for example) have been conducted, that means 50,000 people have been tested, right? Because I see that conflation being made quite often.

Yes, you should not assume that.  We do not have a good idea of how many people are getting multiple tests, and I'm sure it varies by location.  Some hospitals require you to test negative to be released (I think China was doing that?) but most US hospitals are not doing that, if you are stable and agree to self quarantine at home, they're happy to discharge you. 

[Werthead]

27 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Oh I never expected the levels to stay low, but it's interesting that the flu decreases them. Now, if high levels could actually help in the fight, that would be nice (for me at least, though it would probably be bad news for many people with usually low levels).

I recently switched to a high, "healthy cholesterol" diet, mainly through regularly eating 5% fat Greek yogurt. It'd be interesting to see if that was helpful as well as the "bad cholesterol" approach.

[BigFatCoward]

29 minutes ago, Fez said:

Wow. I should get a goddamn medal from my landlord. Or at the very least a freeze on any rent increases when my lease is up in October. Everyone able to still pay their rent should have a huge bargaining chip in negotiating with their landlords.

My tenants and I came to an agreement of 20% rent drop for 6 months.