Sure, ventilation should be a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that it’s reduced the risk of dining indoors down to, say, that of grocery shopping with 100% mask compliance. It’s really unlikely that ventilation can reduce the risk of indoor dining down to that level.
I meant relatively in respect to bars and restaurants with re-circulation.
Just because something’s a little better than the worst thing you can do outside of making out with patients on ventilators in the local ICU doesn’t mean that the risk is especially low.
2 Likes
I am in a law practice that has one other attorney. To date we have been very careful and have basically had no clients in the office. Him and his wife have seemingly been more careful than me. That has actually made my work life very easy and allowed me to continue to work from the office. His wife has recently started taking gym selfies maskless with her exercise partners. Fun times. WAAF
4 Likes
I know. I always just need to phrase it as something is worse than something else. I never get pushback on that. I only get pushback when I say something is better than something else.
Saying something is bad is rarely ever challenged itt. Any assertion is just allowed to stand. But saying something might not be as bad - you better bring binders of evidence and be prepared to defend your dissertation.
Restaurants are open all over the place - indoors. I’m not planning to go into any until covid is over. But if they’re going to be open it would be nice to at least address ventilation.
If this thing becomes endemic (bad thing = could happen right?), then we’re really going to have to address ventilation.
2 Likes
“partial herd immunity” is a misnomer
4 Likes
Yeah I thought the whole point was herd immunity = attaining a critical mass of people that don’t transmit. That’s a very different dynamic than X% unlikely to catch again, but it’s still running rampant in the other Y%.
2 Likes
The point is that science communication is tricky.
Partial herd immunity
Better ventilation
Crowd size limits
Mask compliance
Season
Surface cleaning
All factors that can hurt or help. However NONE with enough magnitude and/or certainty to be actionable as far as recommending loosening of rules. But that is exactly what is happening. Exactly.
4 Likes
“partial herd immunity” probably isn’t the best way to frame it, but the reason it hasn’t been continually blowing up exponentially is that the virus eventually becomes harder to find new people who are susceptible to it.
5 Likes
Since immunity doesn’t last very long with Covid, maybe 60-90 days, herd immunity won’t exist. It won’t lower R0 by very much either since I’m fairly certain those that get it a 2nd time don’t have bad reactions because of t cells, but are still fairly contagious when they don’t get it.
I call bullshit. The reason it’s not runaway anymore is that hugely significant numbers are masking and social distancing. Way ahead of any “partial herd immunity”.
Look at the places that still have the higher growth rates. Red states being idiots.
2 Likes
Sure. Wearing masks and social distancing are two good ways to take yourself out of the pool of susceptible people.
1 Like
It’s too early to tell for certain but scientific consensus leans towards immunity not lasting much more than 90 days
I saw a new one today: the woman ahead of me in the checkout line was wearing a very loose mask while chewing gum. Result was her nose popping completely out of the mask on every chew.
I just lol’d and kept my distance.
I don’t think this is true. I suspect the main reasons are that a large portion of the population has removed themselves from normal activity and mask use.
1 Like
This is not true. There’s no true consensus at length, but 90 days is absolutely wrong. If it was, we’d have common reports of re-infection instead of sporadic questionable ones.
1 Like
It could be both right? I mean suzzer and I have had our fair share of disagreement on Covid but it seems obvious to me that the higher % of immunity that exists the harder it is for the virus to spread. It isn’t like there is no effect from 0-70% and then magically herd immunity happens. Yes the effects are small with 10-20% immunity but they aren’t zero.
1 Like
Ive heard it reported that way, those that have it then test negative for antibodies eventually or catch it a second time. Don’t think it’s confirmed as fact yet, but evidence points toward it. I assume those that get it a 2nd time show are more likely asymptomatic because of t cells, but they still probably are capable of being contagious
I think the 90 days is worse case scenario for some but not all immunity lasts only 90 days
If you could get it after 60-90 days and it be just as virulent and you just as infectious - there would be way more than just a few anecdotal reports of people getting it twice. Every month that goes by w/o this pushes out the window of full-blown re-infection.
Everyone should really take the time to read this article. It’s not as simple as “well you can get it again after X, and it will be just as bad”. The human immune system rarely works that way with these types of viruses. Plus think about the implications of this scenario if vaccines don’t work that well. We’d be completely fucked.
Sterilizing immunity
Sterilizing immunity would be a best-case scenario. It describes an immune system that is armed against a foe, able to fend it off before infection can take hold.
Diseases that we think of as “one-and-done” infections induce such a robust and durable immune response in a single encounter that we cannot be reinfected. In general terms, measles fits into this category, although there are rare reports of people contracting measles more than once.
The bad news is that viruses that infect via the mucus membranes of the nose and throat, like SARS-2, typically don’t induce sterilizing immunity.
“Sterilizing [immunity] in my view is out of the question, as with any respiratory virus,” said Marion Koopmans, head of virology at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Stanley Perlman, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa, called this option “not so likely.”
Functional immunity
Functional immunity, on the other hand, may be within reach. In fact, it’s the scenario Menachery sees as most likely.
Under this scenario, people whose immune systems have been primed to recognize and fight the virus — whether through infection or vaccination — could contract it again in the future. But these infections would be cut short as the immune system’s defenses kick into gear. People infected might not develop symptoms or might have a mild, cold-like infection.
“I’m a believer that if you’ve gotten Covid-19, then your likelihood of dying from a second Covid-19 case is very low, if you maintain immunity,” Menachery said.
Peiris agreed. “It won’t have the impact it has now. … It becomes manageable.”
There’s been enormous amounts of debate — and concern — about how long-lasting or “durable” immune responses to this virus will be, based on a few scientific papers that suggest some people don’t develop many antibodies to the virus and others that report that those antibodies appear to decline quickly.
The experts who spoke with STAT all felt that the immune responses to this virus are exactly what you would expect to see. And the case of the Hong Kong man who appears to have been reinfected underscore that, several said.
“The fact that somebody may get reinfected is not surprising. But the reinfection didn’t cause disease,” said Peiris, who knows about the case but was not one of the authors reporting it.
Waning immunity
Waning infection, the third scenario, is a variation of functional immunity. In this scenario, people who have been infected or vaccinated would lose their protection over time. But even if immunity wanes, reinfections would be less severe, Menachery said.
“You will never get as sick as you were the first time,” he said.
The man from Hong Kong may be an example of this phenomenon, though details of his immune responses to his first and second infections are not yet public.
This is the pattern seen with the four coronaviruses that cause about 15% of what we consider common colds — OC43, 229E, NL63, and HKU1. People can be reinfected with these viruses after a relatively short period of time.
Thirty years ago, British scientists reported that a year after deliberately infecting a small number of volunteers with 229E, two-thirds became reinfected when again exposed to the virus. “However, the period of virus shedding was shorter than before and none developed a cold,” they wrote.
Lost immunity
Lost immunity describes a scenario in which people who have been infected would lose all their immune munitions against the virus within some time frame. A reinfection after that point would be like a first infection — carrying all the same risk of severe disease now seen with Covid-19.
None of the experts who spoke to STAT felt this was a possibility.
“I can’t imagine this being a situation where I get infected and then in 10 years, I get infected again and I have zero immunity,” Perlman said.
“If you generate a response to clear the virus, I think you will maintain that immunity long term,” Menachery added, though he raised a question about people who have had symptom-free or mildly symptomatic infections. “For people with mild or asymptomatic infection, it may not be lost immunity, but rather no immunity generated.”
Now maybe all these guys are wrong and we have lost immunity after X days. But that seems really really unlikely. And X is definitely not 90 days.
The big question for me is how infectious is the person when they catch it again in a functional or waning immunity scenario.