Covid-19 #18: Everything Old is New Again!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

15 hours ago, Argonath Diver said:

That's irrelevant to whole swaths of the population. One of the most likable bar regulars in town is fiercely anti-mask for the usual "Muh Freedums" logic. He lost his best friend recently to Covid, and put a FB picture up of the guy on his Harley with the caption, "No masks in Heaven, Ride On Brother". What the hell? There are so, so many people I know who are "Over it" or simply don't consider the risk of death worth the change of lifestyle. Even if this election goes like a dream, and the Dems win the Senate and the White House, I have no earthly idea how our leaders are going to change the minds of an ever increasing amount of people saying things like "Enough is enough", "It's never going away" and the like. They're going to hate Biden and AOC and libs like me forever because Wing Night meant that much.

This is a sad truth. If Democrats have a sweeping victory, they'll put in place policies that are for the greater good, but loads of people will hate them forever for doing so. It's really frustrating that those among us who don't give a damn about fixing this situation will probably ultimately be rewarded for bitching about it. 

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

It's really frustrating that those among us who don't give a damn about fixing this situation will probably ultimately be rewarded for bitching about it. 

Fine them by making them dig the graves.

 

[Clueless Northman]

If I may rant for 20 secs:

How the fuck is it possible that we are less effective - both us as people and our governments - to protect against a pandemic than our (sometimes illiterate) ancestors back in the 14th century when the Black Plague hit?

[karaddin]

That Jake Tapper interview of Mark Meadows makes it pretty clear that the US is just giving up any further containment of this, at least at the federal level. I know they've done jack shit so far but not feeling they need to pretend otherwise after the two highest days of the pandemic so far feels really fucking chilling.

[A True Kaniggit]

14 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

If I may rant for 20 secs:

How the fuck is it possible that we are less effective - both us as people and our governments - to protect against a pandemic than our (sometimes illiterate) ancestors back in the 14th century when the Black Plague hit?

Freeeeeduuuuuumbbbbb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Edit: tldr, human beings are idiots.

[DireWolfSpirit]

One of those beak masks and a14th century plague costume would make the perfect Halloween get up this year though.

[A True Kaniggit]

This is one area where gamers have the advantage.

Gotta social distance?

We just play more games. (Goes back to CK3 playthrough)

 

[Fragile Bird]

2 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

If I may rant for 20 secs:

How the fuck is it possible that we are less effective - both us as people and our governments - to protect against a pandemic than our (sometimes illiterate) ancestors back in the 14th century when the Black Plague hit?

Honestly? I have to ask if you’ve lost your mind. It’s estimated 25% of the population of Europe died. That’s like 80 M Americans dying from Covid-19. 70,000 people died in London alone, when the population was what, 200,000? 
 

eta: in the first plague in the 1340s London had a population of 70,000, and some historians believe the death rate of 25% is low, more likely it was closer to 40%. In the last plague, in the 1660s, about 100,000 died in London, about 25% of the population.

[Castellan]

11 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

If I may rant for 20 secs:

How the fuck is it possible that we are less effective - both us as people and our governments - to protect against a pandemic than our (sometimes illiterate) ancestors back in the 14th century when the Black Plague hit?

I think we foreigners had similar thoughts watching Hurricane Katrina unfold.

[Werthead]

There we go. A series of major antibody tests involving hundreds of thousands of people and results has confirmed that COVID antibodies drop off relatively quickly, with loss of most of the antibodies taking place between three and eight months. The elderly lose their antibodies the fastest and the youngest the slowest.

What is relatively positive is that constant exposure to the virus results in continuous antibody generation, meaning that health care workers, if they've had the virus and survived, may develop a form of de facto immunity and not fall ill again whilst treating people with COVID. For everyone else, it's another sign that any COVID vaccine may be temporarily effective and we may need to have regular booster shots on an annual bases, if not more frequently.

The early hopes of immunity lasting years or decades have been pretty firmly dashed.

On 10/25/2020 at 10:06 PM, Clueless Northman said:

If I may rant for 20 secs:

How the fuck is it possible that we are less effective - both us as people and our governments - to protect against a pandemic than our (sometimes illiterate) ancestors back in the 14th century when the Black Plague hit?

The first point is that it isn't. Both in terms of absolute numbers of deaths and relative based on population percentages, COVID-19 is nowhere near as deadly as the Black Death.

The second is that we live in a vastly more populous world, with almost 19 times the population we had in the mid-14th Century. Some cities are far beyond that (London has around 117 times the population it did in 1300). We can move around at speeds that would appear magical to someone in the mid-14th Century. We can travel to the other side of the planet in the time it used to take people to travel to the nearest town and home again. Many of us live on top of one another in close proximity to one another and travel to work in sealed metal cans with dozens of other people. Many of us spend our days in sealed rooms with dozens to hundreds of other peoples, with the air we breathe being constantly cycled around and around for eight hours or more straight. If anything, it's much more amazing we don't have these mass infection problems much more often.

The third is that "plague denial" was a huge problem in the 14th Century. In some cities fatalities were as high as 80% and in rural areas as low as 5% (and most people lived in rural areas). The doctors of the time - if that's not too generous a term - actually made suggestions that were counter-productive, such as not washing because they believed that diseases entered the body through pores. So in cities, where there were more people, more doctors and less hygiene, that would encourage virus spread. In rural areas people never heard this advice and people in the countryside tended to wash more often than those in cities anyway. Doctors also proscribed measure that was BS: bloodletting, leeching and rubbing faeces in open wounds, which of course was not helpful. There's also the fact that the healthier you were, the more likely you were to survive plague, so people in rural areas, who made up the bulk of the population, were healthier to start with and they likely saw more people they knew surviving the plague, so when they heard entire city neighbourhoods being wiped out they thought those were exaggerations and nonsense. 

[Fragile Bird]

I was busy reading the above reply when the guys on CNBC started talking about a drug Merck is working on, 2,700 people on a Phase 2/3 test. (Sorry, he said 2/3). So I didn’t catch all the details.
 

The treatment is neither a vaccine nor an intravenous drip, but a pill that is taken over a course of 5 days. Merck has been very quiet about the drug, which they said was very typical of Merck, mentioning how quiet they were about a kidney cancer drug that they would not talk about because they didn’t want hopes raised but that has turned out to be very effective.

A five day course of pills to protect you from Covid-19 would be fantastic.

eta MK-4482 is what it’s called. The treatment stops the virus from replicating. I’ll post a link in a moment.

The cancer drug is called Keytruda and has become their biggest selling drug.

eta 2 This Bloomberg article is from late August. As Wert says above, it notes the fact that it was already suspected that vaccines might not be effective for very long.

Quote

One of the early standouts in the war doctors and scientists are waging against the disease was Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir, now known as Veklury. But clinicians have yet to see Covid-19 results from either Veklury or plasma products that show a definitive benefit in extending people’s lives.

Phase 2 results from two studies of Merck’s antiviral pill -- one in hospitalized patients with Covid-19 and one in outpatients -- are expected in the next few weeks.

If those results “are positive and arrive in a timely manner, we believe Merck could begin phase 3 trials in September, which could support an emergency use authorization before year-end, inline with” Veklury’s approval timeline, SVB Leerink analyst Daina Graybosch wrote in a note.The pill called, MK-4482, stops the virus from replicating. It was discovered by scientists at Emory University and is being tested with collaborator Ridgeback Biotherapeutics LP. The pill form gives it an edge over Veklury, as well as convalescent plasma, a treatment that the Food and Drug Administration has given the go-ahead for widespread use. Both need to be administered via an infusion, though an inhaled formulation of Veklury is also being developed

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-25/merck-antiviral-may-displace-scrutinized-covid-19-therapies

[rotting sea cow]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

There we go. A series of major antibody tests involving hundreds of thousands of people and results has confirmed that COVID antibodies drop off relatively quickly, with loss of most of the antibodies taking place between three and eight months. The elderly lose their antibodies the fastest and the youngest the slowest.

What is relatively positive is that constant exposure to the virus results in continuous antibody generation, meaning that health care workers, if they've had the virus and survived, may develop a form of de facto immunity and not fall ill again whilst treating people with COVID. For everyone else, it's another sign that any COVID vaccine may be temporarily effective and we may need to have regular booster shots on an annual bases, if not more frequently.

The early hopes of immunity lasting years or decades have been pretty firmly dashed.

I think people misrepresent these findings. Antibodies do fall with time. It is completely inefficient to keep the antibodies up all the time in case you encounter the virus again. Also, many antibodies are the cause of inflammation and other problems. In particular with this disease, which is looking more and more like an auto-immune one (lots of news about auto antibodies recently).

What it is important is whether the body (actually the B-cells) remember how to make the antibodies again in case they find the virus again. Antibodies aren't also the only immune response. There are the T-cells which seems to be very important in this disease.

This is the theory of course, I've been myself very gloomy lately with all these news of reinfections. I'm unsure if lasting immunity is possible and I have serious doubts regarding the efficacy of vaccines to stop infection chains. The reason, I know a person who have been reinfected. Fortunately, both courses seems to have been quite mild. But if a healthy individual was reinfected, what can we expect for the rest of the people?

These aren't the only bad news I've seen lately. Unfortunately.

 

[Heartofice]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

There we go. A series of major antibody tests involving hundreds of thousands of people and results has confirmed that COVID antibodies drop off relatively quickly, with loss of most of the antibodies taking place between three and eight months. The elderly lose their antibodies the fastest and the youngest the slowest.

What is relatively positive is that constant exposure to the virus results in continuous antibody generation, meaning that health care workers, if they've had the virus and survived, may develop a form of de facto immunity and not fall ill again whilst treating people with COVID. For everyone else, it's another sign that any COVID vaccine may be temporarily effective and we may need to have regular booster shots on an annual bases, if not more frequently.

The early hopes of immunity lasting years or decades have been pretty firmly dashed.

 

AFAIK Antibodies are not the only arm of protection that we have against viruses, and they do generally drop off over time anyway. Is it really the best and only way to measure immunity in a community?

[williamjm]

6 hours ago, Heartofice said:

AFAIK Antibodies are not the only arm of protection that we have against viruses, and they do generally drop off over time anyway. Is it really the best and only way to measure immunity in a community?

I remember reading that it was far harder to test for T-cells because it would require a lot of laboratory work unlike the relatively simple antibody tests.

[Werthead]

Heartening - cautiously - news.

The Oxford University/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine has shown efficacy in all age groups (with a caution that they haven't done a lot of testing for over 70s, but what they have done is promising) and they've submitted the data from the vaccine trials for peer review and publication.

Assuming they get regulatory approval, they are hoping to start a vaccination programme in December, although the UK government seems to think that's very tight and the New Year is more likely. They have increased the initial dosage mass production run to 1.5 billion doses.

They note that any early vaccine candidate is likely to be effective only for limited periods and boosters will be required, but obviously this will be a start on a (probably still somewhat long) road back to normality, and other, better treatments will still be needed.

[Clueless Northman]

Even though I know a lot of people will want that vaccine and a lot of people will have to be vaccinated, planning for a first run of 1.5 bio doses means they must feel quite confident on the short-term efficiency of the vaccine.

As for the Black Plague, it was far deadlier, so it's silly to compare body counts. But when people shut down their cities or went for quarantines, they could be very serious and very effective at it. And they hadn't the benefit of internet - often, news of the plague and its effects arrived after the plague had hit your area/city.

[Impmk2]

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

As for the Black Plague, it was far deadlier, so it's silly to compare body counts. But when people shut down their cities or went for quarantines, they could be very serious and very effective at it. And they hadn't the benefit of internet - often, news of the plague and its effects arrived after the plague had hit your area/city.

The black plague was also caused by a bacteria (Y. pestis), and was primarily spread by fleas & rats, making it far easier to control with decent pest management. It wasn't generally transmissible human to human before late stage septicemia. The only 19/20th century outbreaks had far lower infection numbers and were very quickly brought under control. So it's basically a bad comparison full stop.

[Mudguard]

4 hours ago, Werthead said:

Heartening - cautiously - news.

The Oxford University/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine has shown efficacy in all age groups (with a caution that they haven't done a lot of testing for over 70s, but what they have done is promising) and they've submitted the data from the vaccine trials for peer review and publication.

Oxford's vaccine hasn't demonstrated efficacy yet.  When discussing vaccines, "efficacy" has a specific meaning regarding the reduction in infection between a vaccinated group and an unvaccinated group.  We won't have this data until the phase 3 clinical trials are either complete or unblinded early, neither which has happened.

All they've demonstrated, and this is essentially old news, is that patients that receive the vaccine generate antibodies.  This doesn't always lead to actual efficacy, and in some rare cases, the antibody response generated by a vaccine actually increases the likelihood of getting the disease.  Bottom line, we need to wait for the results of the trials.

[Fragile Bird]

So I gather Macron is doing a major speech tonight. Lockdown time for France? The predictions of hitting 100,000 cases a day are pretty grim.

Be careful out there, Eurocommies!

[RhaenysBee]

Hi all, I’ve been wondering, are the Trumps all right? There was such huge media coverage of the president’s testing positive for Covid and controversy over his return to the White House, but I’ve never seen news confirming that he, Melania Trump and their son recovered all right. ETA - found an article she wrote about the experience - but the question remains: why does the news never cover a favorable ending to a story, only the sinister beginning?... maybe I just missed it with all our National covid and non Covid drama. 

(This always happens to me - or it’s just how the media works, I can’t tell - I always miss the resolution of stories. Like we were well into the coronavirus crisis in March by the time I finally found out when and how and with what outcome the bushfires stopped - in fact I have no idea when or how the recent fires in California stopped if they did at all. ETA. No they haven’t  poor residents. Why do I always miss the end of a news story?)