This seems like a bit of revisionist history and I believe you got an antibody test because you thought it might have been (or that you may have already had it) right? Or am I thinking of a different poster? It has been months now.
I’m not trying to be a dick but this same derail has come up on numerous occasions and to those of us reading it for the tenth time it sure seems like people have wondered if it was Covid. Hell I had the same thing back in December and wondered myself at first even if I’m not sure I posted about it or not.
I took a very similar path with both the covid threads and the DJT threads. Just skimmed May and early June and it was a much needed mental break.
But now I’m back to reading every post. It’s just unfathomable what we are experiencing right now and this forum at times feels like the only place I can turn to for mostly sane, logical, and thoughtful discussion.
COVID19 is different from other viruses in a lot of ways. It has a proofreading system that keeps it from mutating as fast as most viruses. There was a lot of promising progress toward closely-related SARS and MERS vaccines before those viruses went away on their own. Of course, it could throw us another curveball and it might be here to stay, no one knows.
As I’ve been poking around the internet, it turns out we have an effective MERS vaccine now as of April 2020. So that’s good news if you were worried about MERS in 2020.
I’ve read every post in every Covid thread. I have habitually checked the Covid data to the point I know the order the state data appears on Worldometers typically. It isn’t remotely healthy.
That being said this is likely to be one of the most transformative events of our lives. It has also disrupted my life to an extreme extent and left a hole that I haven’t yet figured out how to fill. My wife and I normally are spending a significant amount planning out and going on our various travels. Last year we went to Colombia, Spain, Croatia, Portugal, UK not to mention travels in North America. This year nothing and no ability to plan anything out either. Instead it has been replaced by coronavirus obsession which is a pretty awful trade.
I agree with you that what is happening is unfathomable. The complete incompetence on display in the US at virtually every level is stunning.
Yeah I’m with you, staying on top of all of this is exhausting and depressing. But it feels necessary to make informed decisions, given that our leaders cannot be trusted on it, and given that a lot of the information we’re getting here is coming in at least a couple weeks ahead of the national media and being put into better context.
Yeah I thought I might have had it too for a while, but it’s become fairly clear via antibody testing and such that there wasn’t some widespread preliminary wave of COVID-19. At most we may find that we had a few small outbreaks in a few cities where there were a lot of minor cases among the young and a few ICU cases/deaths that went down as pneumonia or flu, but we’re probably talking < 1,000 nationally and likely mostly in Seattle and NYC. It’s a very small number.
Well the big question is how many we actually count. An official tally of 250K by Election Day will probably mean more like 350K real deaths.
Since you’re the resident expert on these exchanges, am I correct that we got a study this week that said that T-cells from other coronaviruses will NOT help with COVID-19, but also one that said they will?
Good to see we’re narrowing down the range. We’ve got it narrowed down to yes, no, and maybe so. Tune in next month when we we replace “maybe so” with “we have no fucking idea.”
BTW guys, a lot of the struggles in this regard are probably because USA#1 abdicated its role in leading all this stuff. I surmise that we’d usually be at the forefront of driving and organizing these research efforts, but instead we’ve got the Leader of the Fascist World driving and organizing the anti-mask push.
T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 was observed in unexposed people; however, the source and clinical relevance of the reactivity remains unknown. It is speculated that this reflects T cell memory to circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses. It will be important to define specificities of these T cells and assess their association with COVID-19 disease severity and vaccine responses.
There is substantial data from the influenza literature indicating that pre-existing cross-reactive T cell immunity can be beneficial. In the case of the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009, it was noted that an unusual ‘V’-shaped age distribution curve existed for disease severity, with older people faring better than younger adults. This correlated with the circulation of a different H1N1 strain in the human population decades earlier, which presumably generated pre-existing immunity in people old enough to have been exposed to it. This was verified by showing that pre-existing immunity against H1N1 existed in the general human population9,10. It should be noted that if some degree of pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 exists in the general population, this could also influence epidemiological modelling, and suggests that a sliding scale model of COVID-19 susceptibility may be considered.
In conclusion, it is now established that SARS-CoV-2 pre-existing immune reactivity exists to some degree in the general population. It is hypothesized, but not yet proven, that this might be due to immunity to CCCs. This might have implications for COVID-19 disease severity, herd immunity and vaccine development, which still await to be addressed with actual data.
Here’s the twitter thread I also already posted, pasted here in it’s entirety so you don’t have to follow an onerous link:
I haven’t done my own deep dive into the numbers because I feel like I have enough information to determine that things are bad, but whether things are very bad, super bad, or crazy bad isn’t really going to change what my response should be. Once I start doing like that, I have a tendency to be obsessive. And I don’t feel comfortable figuring out the science. I’ll read what actual scientists are thinking, but I don’t think I am qualified to speculate too much.
My wheelhouse is thinking about politics, so I get more interested in questions like wondering if we need to re-think HIPAA and privacy laws to properly address a pandemic.
Before I go back to live poker, I’m going to re-read these threads, though. I’m not going to put up with people spreading bad information at the tables. I’ve been reading the threads, but I haven’t been working to retain the information.
By the way, I’m a white male in the northeast who’s extended family and friends are mostly upper middle class, and this thing is starting to hit really close to home economically and health wise. I’ve got a cousin and her husband who tested positive, one of my best friends was exposed and is awaiting a test result (she’s not in the US, though), a close friend furloughed (and his wife unemployed), another friend out of work driving Uber to scratch and claw his way through this, and a close friend who works in a company of 3 who thinks she’s about to be laid off. Her boss and husband own it, and they stopped drawing salaries and zero revenue has come in for a couple months - no new clients (legal consulting) and lots owe them money and haven’t paid.
Meanwhile my best guess is that my apartment complex is somewhere around 25% vacant, and keep in mind there’s a moratorium on evictions so who knows how many people are living here without paying rent right now.
I also have an uncle who is having some medical problems that are blood-oriented, and he has been and continues to be very careless with regard to COVID-19, so until I hear he tested negative his issues could be related to COVID. Somewhat unrelated, but one of my closest friends growing up just lost his daughter to leukemia (she was 9).
It feels like almost every day I have a conversation with someone who is scared or struggling and I try to cheer them up and be supportive, but man, if its hitting this close to home for someone as privileged as I am and as geographically far away from any outbreaks, how fucked are we as a country?
So if this is a thing, we should be trying to get testing for people to find out if they have T-cells that might help, right? Not that we’re an intelligent enough society to have people actually make good decisions about this, but if I knew I had T-cells for it and the likelihood was that I would (at least) not have a severe case, I’d be behaving quite a bit differently. I’d be shopping for myself and my parents, at the very least. I’d feel safe by the pool. I’d probably also stimulate the economy a little bit with some outdoor dining/drinking.
Genuinely curious how you and any friends you’ve discussed this with feel. I don’t know how I’d feel - I certainly wouldn’t like the idea that my area that handled it well was now risking more spread and reducing our available hospital capacity because the next state over was YOLOing it and being irresponsible, but on the other hand I wouldn’t want to leave people to die either. I guess in San Diego or ABQ I’d want to help them out, because we had the available beds. In Vegas, with our own crisis impacting our hospital capacity, I think I’d lean more towards saying, “Sorry, we can’t tie up beds right now with our own residents in need.”
