COVID-19 (2): Turns out it's going to be pretty bad actually

Musk likes some good and interesting things, but it’s not like he’s a technical genius who develops this stuff. There were already some very very fast custom made electric cars before Tesla. Musk’s idea was to lose a ton of money putting out a very expensive fast luxury electric car. It’s been good for the brand of electric cars among the exotic and sports car market I reckon and I’m sure it will lead to good things in the long run, but it’s no Toyota Prius as far as moving the industry along.

The Space stuff is - who knows - but if it’s just cool for the sake of spending a lot of money and doing a shit load of damage to the environment, then it’s not good. Going to Mars is incredibly stupid and wasteful. A bunch of satellites? Dunno.

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Coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperature, a threat to lab staff around world

The new coronavirus can survive long exposure to high temperatures, according to an experiment by a team of French scientists.

Professor Remi Charrel and colleagues at the Aix-Marseille University in southern France heated the virus that causes Covid-19 to 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit) for an hour and found that some strains were still able to replicate.

The scientists had to bring the temperature to almost boiling point to kill the virus completely, according to their non-peer-reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org on Saturday. The results have implications for the safety of lab technicians working with the virus.

Probably ponied on this but this seems to finally put the “warm weather miracle” theory to rest.

Similar situation for my wife (also NYC). 3 weeks ago the first symptom arrived (serious fatigue), and ~2.5 weeks ago the difficulty/painful breathing started. It never got severe, always mild to moderate. But it simply hasn’t gone away completely. There have been good days, when it seems like the virus is in the past, but then the next day difficulty breathing and utter exhaustion will return.

(The assumption is it’s the virus. Never got tested, but she’s never experienced anything like this).

Possibly. I think there needs to be more info than just whether it survives or not. What does it do to the possibility of contracting? Does it kill some percentage of virus? Does it affect the ability to infect? How does the concentration of exposure to the virus affect how easy it is to contract it?

Something that could still be dangerous (especially in a lab with constant exposure) might still take the effective R-value to below 1.

There could be other factors in warm weather that hinder the virus’s effectiveness eg more sunlight = more vitamin D, warm air holds more moisture = higher humidity (=virus spreads less?), among others.

Testing is really important. Someone with these symptoms in non-Covid times would definitely go to the doctor and could have something more dangerous. Not trying to scare you or anything and this is unlikely in your case, but there are probably some middle aged people somewhere thinking it’s COVID and they should wait and see how bad symptoms get before they go to the hospital who have really had a heart attack.

I have faith California was never stupid enough to actually count on any ventilators coming from Musk

What does IFR stand for?

I don’t disagree testing is important. I just have no idea how you go about getting a test right now.

Her PCP wasn’t/isn’t seeing patients in person, and a hospital supposedly won’t give you the time of day unless you need a vent or are dying. Nor can you just walk into a Quest location and get one.

We’re in the group that has insurance and disposable income, and I honestly still have no idea how and where to get a test. Plus, if symptoms first appeared 3 weeks ago, the test could very well be negative by now, and an antibody test – probably even harder to get – would be needed.

It does seem like there’s something to the idea that this thing can replicate for a long time w/o causing symptoms and therefore triggering antibodies. Or the antibodies don’t really work well on it in places like the throat and sinuses. Or something like that.

antibody tests seem to be the easier ones to get. Suzzer just got one.

Infection Fatality Rate

The warm weather theories I’ve read are generally more about what happens in the human body in heat vs. cold - and in the large and small droplets that carry the virus in heat vs. cold. It was never about hot temperatures flat out killing the virus afaik.

Scientists don’t know why Spanish flu paused in the summer, SARS died in the summer, and a lot of cold and flu bugs are seasonal. They just know it happens.

Yeah, my mom was just complaining to me about how it’s dumb to crash the economy because NYC is dirty (or something along those lines). There’s a lot of chatter building on the right that’s essentially saying rural areas don’t need the same type of response (ie lockdown) that big (liberal) cities need. This sentiment will only gain momentum as time passes, especially if rural areas don’t become hot spots.

Infected Fatality Rate = total number of infected people / fatalities.

CFR = Case Fatality Rate = known infected people / fatalities.

IFR can be inferred to some degree from smaller scale studies that test everyone in an afflicted region - assuming demographics are the same in the larger region you want to infer.

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TY

Antibody test was super easy for me to get. Not sure how accurate it is though. Not FDA approved yet.

The lab company you used has no locations within 60 miles of me. I can’t remember the others who were offering it.

8.4M in NYC

15% of that is 1.26M having it

Death toll is 11,000 in NYC

11k/1.26M = 0.88% fatality rate and many who already have it will still die in the coming weeks

Wow. 60c for 10 minutes is fairly common for lab kill prior to dumping down the drain, though not for pathogens. I’d assume they’d treat it as medical waste.

Sometimes you want to do the minimum to the sample to kill the agent without drastically altering the rest of the sample chemistry. 60 (140F) is common.