Here’s my question though - are false positives generally a bad signal out of thin air, or are they generally antibodies from similar coronavirus? The disclaimer on the site I’m getting tested at Monday seems to imply the latter:
The Antibodies test is a serology test which measures the amount of antibodies or proteins present in the blood when the body is responding to a specific infection. This test hasn’t been reviewed by the FDA. Negative results don’t rule out SARS-CoV-2 infection, particularly in those who have been in contact with the virus. Follow-up testing with a molecular diagnostic should be considered to rule out infection in these individuals. Results from antibody testing shouldn’t be used as the sole basis to diagnose or exclude SARS-CoV-2 infection. Positive results may be due to past or present infection with non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus strains, such as coronavirus HKU1, NL63, OC43, or 229E. While the presence of antibodies doesn’t necessarily prevent future infections, they can reduce the severity of future infections of the current COVID-19 strain.
This sounds to me like it means that even if you didn’t get C19, you got something similar enough that the antibodies you have will help. So it’s not completely useless information. And the antibodies you have could potentially work toward establishing some kind of herd immunity.
If false positives can occur out of thin air, when no similar antibodies are present, then that’s a big mess from an individual POV. Seems to me like random completely false positives should be a cardinal sin of a post-infection serology test like this - which is used to determine a person’s immunity to future infection. Even 70% false negatives but no false positives is better than completely random false positives.
My mom hasn’t been able to pick up the ashes of her dead cat for three weeks because they’ve been locked down. She wants to adopt a new one, but all the adoption agencies have been closed. I can’t ever remember a time when she didn’t have cats about her house. It died of a respiratory-related illness convolved with old age and she thinks she might have given it the corona. There’s increasing evidence that this can spread from humans to cats, which is very odd and bad news for cats. And North American bats, too. Bats are already on hard times, they don’t need this corona shit fucking with them.
It’s all very stressful and that’s not what we need right now.
This disease is endemic in Asian bats maybe (or else pangolins?). It’s very, very bad if cats and bats in the US aren’t resistant to it.
A tiger in the Bronx zoo is a confirmed COIVD case? This is very bad news. idk much about keeping tigers, but I’m pretty sure you keep a good distance from them, must have been an asymptomaic carrier handling its food. It’s not very good for the ecology if apex predators start dropping dead from zoonotic diseases.
If we could somehow test everyone in the US then almost 17M would falsely test positive and any number above that would be our rough number of people with the antibodies.
We won’t test everybody and people won’t realize that if it’s low then false positive is more likely and thus they will engage in dangerous behavior, killing more people. This is why I’m so pushing back against everyone downplaying and underestimating the number of deaths we will have, because it’s gonna lead to more deaths. After how we handled initial testing and the mixed messages everyone gets from everywhere and the pressure to open back up, we are guaranteed to use these tests to send false positives out there to get infected and then infect others.
I wondered why Keith Olbermen (Lol sp) was tweeting about sports. Previously he had only tweeted about dogs in desperate need of adoption for well over a year.
My favorite show right now is The Zoo - which is literally about the Bronx Zoo and has featured that tiger - Nadia. She was the tiger who they tried to breed with an inexperienced, smaller male who didn’t quite get the angle right. Holy crap tiger mating is intense and scary.
The keepers sometimes feed them through a mesh so they can get a close look at the tiger for anything amiss. So they do come into pretty close contact at that phase. The tiger will rub its head and neck along the mesh just like a house cat when its owner gets home. The animals and keepers have a super tight bond even though they’re never in the same physical space.
I just can’t wrap my head around how this ends well. We have Donald fucking trump making the decisions right now. He is stealing shipments from states and hospitals. Still we as Americans do nothing. Its amazing we faded a catastrophe for as long as we did with trump in charge. They are going to come up with some bullshit guidance and say all is well go back to work and school. I don’t see that working and have no idea what happens after that.
My mom loves this show! She is a retired veterinarian. I’ve always been meaning to check it out. We’re all really fucked if cats start dying of corona.
I was mocked in this forum for using zinc lozenges when this started, utilizing the same logic as above from past research on common cold type coronaviruses.
I mean, you have some capacity left but they’re also not resuscitating people they’d normally try to save sand there are stories of patients waiting for someone to die to free up a vent. Healthcare is being rationed. I wonder if Javits isn’t being used because they don’t have enough healthcare workers to cover that space too?
Another 103 infections on the aircraft carrier were announced by navy officials on Saturday. That brings the total number of cases among the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt to 550 - or 10% of those on board.
3,696 workers have been moved offshore to Guam, where the ship is docked.
Kind of a similar situation here, because I’m in management and had a somewhat similar situation.
Difference being, the employee I had, self-reported to me, after he had already gone to the hospital to get tested. I had him contact our response team, who similarly asked him a series of questions about who he had contact with etc… I’m not involved in that process, obviously (I think it’s obvious), but part of that is come ‘contact tracing’ if you will, and through that they deem which other employees need to be informed of their potential exposure, and who potentially should isolate.
The outcome is that we have other employees, with maybe some contact, or no-contact but shared a lunch room, or ate in the lunch room at a different time, or shared a change room etc… And with so little information about things, it doesn’t take long before people start to panic mildly or question the process.
Basically, guy was detained for being beligerent and drunk. When at the station, be began claiming that he had coronavirus and threatened to infect the police officers with it. Now he faces 2 to 8 years in prison.
In other coronavirus news, restrictions will continue to be removed in this country so long as the number of new cases in a day doesn’t exceed 400. Of course that can only happen if there’s enough testing to make that a possibility. Thing is that over the last 5 days, 3.19% of tests have come back positive. Assuming that that detection rate stays the same, 12,540 tests would have to be processed in a day to get 400 positive tests.
But the most tests that have been processed in a single day up to now has been a bit above 8,000. With the holidays here, those test numbers have dropped quite a bit.
Methinks that the government is really pushing to get things open even if the country isn’t completely ready for it. That’s quite an odd turn given that a week ago the same people pushed to extend the state of emergency to mid-May. Of course, another way to look at is as a warning to people that it still isn’t businesses as usual and restrictions can be reapplied if necessary.
