To be fair this Redfield guy is like 70 and sporting a chinstrap. What else would you expect?
Should also consider decreasing the “hide Covid deaths because Daddy told us to” rate.
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Yeah, I know, it’s terrible there but the tests are outpacing cases still which I think is better than all bad.
Wichita, I think it’s very important to have a spread in cases vs. tests. Any significant difference in spread regardless of positivity is a decline or rise and AZ’s appears meaningful. If the cases aren’t tracking nearly identically with the tests, that’s a trend one way or the other. That doesn’t change that their cases are going to be high for awhile, just that they definitely appear to be on a legit trend down (they’ve trended down the last two weeks).
Looking at the graphs goofy posted, MO clearly looks in trouble, CA is trending toward bad, FL looks to be flattening and the same goes for TX. That doesn’t mean lowering in Texas and Florida, just that the rise is pacing the tests.
Curious where you are getting 25% pos rate for AZ? The state data dashboard is showing 14% for most recent week (ending 7/19) and 15% for the previous week.
Maybe the right wing are correct and the people actually testing positive vs those who are asymptomatic is 1% and so the states have herd immunity!
Thanks. I see 2335 new cases on 10799 new tests reported today on the official dashboard which is 22%. No idea where their testing % weekly data is coming from or why it’s lagging so much.
It is confusing. The numbers on the front page of the dashboard are overall pos percents but they do break down PCR vs. serology. I.e., 14.6% of all PCR tests, and 4.6% of all serology tests since the beginning have been positive (12.5% of all tests combined). This presentation seems pointless; who would care about the average positive rate over the past 6 months?
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CA #1 State in US #1 country for Covid.
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About the only thing I find encouraging right now is that Santa Clara county has had 3 consecutive days of week-over-week declines in new cases, July 15-17. Their reports and graphs are in terms of sample collection date, not the date the result of the test was reported, so days after the 17th are somewhat indeterminate, as they can continue to rise even days after the day in question. Thus far, those days also look low, almost too low, but while that’s not definitive yet, it’s better than the alternative. I was on the brink of pulling the kids out of daycare and having the grandparents stay with us again, but maybe we can get this under control.
On a lighter note:
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Latest news from the vaccine front: everyone is throwing the kitchen sink at the virus, no one knows a priori what the best strategy is. Looks like the main candidates are mostly safe, but for now that says nothing about how effective they are.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02174-y
Moderna and Oxford/AZ seem to be in the lead right now with vaccines that elicit an antibody response. You will definitely need a booster shot. But antibodies might not be the whole story? Pfizer could be a dark horse with a vaccine that produces a strong CD8 T cell response. I’ve been posting about this for a while here, but these CD8 Killa T cells could be key to true long-term immunity. Of course I could be dead wrong. All of this is very preliminary. What we know for sure right now is that the Oxford/AZ vaccines almost surely won’t harm you.
I’ve been following this dork Derek Lowe and his news column in Science here:
But (as I was going on about above), antibodies are not the whole story in the immune response to the coronavirus. Read those two posts linked on the subject if you haven’t, but the short form is that it appears that T-cell responses may be (1) longer-lasting, (2) important for some degree of protection against infection, and (3) perhaps already present (pre-COVID-19) in some fraction of the population due to exposure to as-yet-uncharacterized animal-derived coronavirus infections that we haven’t even noticed over the years. Moderna characterized their T-cell responses, and saw mostly CD4+ (as opposed to CD8+), and in those, mostly a Th1 response (see that earlier post for more on that). In this case, BNT162b1 produced CD4+ responses in 34 of 36 patients (one of these did have low levels of pre-existing reactive CD4+ cells, by the way – a lower percentage of people than found in the recent Nature paper, but it does confirm that such people are out there). The CD4+ responses correlated with the antibody titers raised in individual patients. And as with the Moderna results, these seemed to be almost entirely Th1 instead of Th2 – the authors believe that this is potentially a good thing, but as noted in the Moderna post, you can find arguments both ways about that point.
But as opposed to the Moderna candidate, there was also a robust CD8+ T-cell response (29/36 patients), which did not necessarily correlate with the antibody titers raised by the vaccine. Interestingly, neither of these T-cell effects were very dose-responsive. 6 out of 8 patients tested in the 1 µg dose cohort raised a T-cell response, and their CD4+ and CD8+ levels were almost the same as the 50 µg group! As a per cent of total circulating T cells, the levels seen after vaccination were significantly higher than those seen in the blood of convalescent patients, which could be a real difference. Recall that in the case of the 2003 SARS coronavirus, that antibodies disappeared from recovered patients, but that T-cell immunity has persisted for up to 17 years.
So while one would want to keep an eye on the antibody levels with this candidate (and believe me, you can be sure that Pfizer and BioNTech are doing that), the T cell response looks promising (and probably better than the Moderna candidate). We’ll have to keep all this in mind as the actual Phase II/III data hit, and we’ll see what difference all this makes in the real world!
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Killa T would have been an outstanding 2000’s-era nerdcore rap name. Someone’s has almost certainly thought of it.
Read the entire informed consent form and do not hesitate at all to ask any questions
I had heard of two girls one cup before and never bothered to see what it was. I knew enough to search in an incognito window. And I just read the wikipedia entry on it. Still, I’m sorry I did that much.
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Top story on CNN now:
Your pony got gassed.
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Thats what I get for grunching lol. Didn’t think many people used reddit on here.
To be fair my version was better. The " Now just wait a fuckin second there buster " reply is the cherry on top.
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Yeah, I read through it and it’s pretty straightforward. 2 injections of vaccine or placebo a month apart and 5 blood draws over 2 years. My biggest question that is not answered is if I’d be eligible for a vaccine that becomes approved while this study is still ongoing. Particularly if I’m in the placebo group or if the study vaccine is ineffective or suboptimal.
Be careful, this may imply that they are using antibody tests in there somewhere.