COVID-19: Chapter 8 - Ongoing source of viral information, and a little fun

Gold standard trials show that Pfizer had around a 95 percent efficacy 2 weeks after a second shot given 3 weeks after the first. While it is possible that delaying the second shot longer could provide some additional benefit, it is also the case that COVID is circulating right now, so the sooner you can have both shots, the better. If you can get the second shot scheduled 3-4 weeks after the first, I would absolutely do that. If you can’t do that, it probably doesn’t matter other then you should continue to be careful until that second shot plus 14 days.

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Congrats! I had Pfizer with a 4 week gap, but would have went for 3 weeks if my state would have let me.

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Man, fuck Florida. These weekly data dumps are making it really hard to tell what’s going on with he 7dma. I think it’s still decreasing but it’s fucking choppy as hell now.

@anon6836464, it’s exactly this. I mean, there might be some combination of times out there that is better than what was done in the trial, but it’s really improbable that whatever you invent in your imagination is better than what the experts came up with in their work. This isn’t the time for fancy plays. Just copy what was done in the trials and lock in that sweet, sweet immunity.

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So my view of bitcoin is that it’s incredibly flawed and the blockchain is completely useless. The prices of these currencies at their levels are due to crime demand, rich stupid people who think they are smarter than their parents jumping on a “innovative new approach” to investing, along with market manipulators, some new ETFs capitalizing on those wanting to diversify their portfolio and increasing demand, and a limited and shrinking supply of the currency.

I assume some of the morons driving up the price are also the same morons who are anti government conspiracy theorists and thus are anti vax

I’m not sure national numbers are going to be as meaningful going forward when some states are approaching 60 percent vaxxed with kids providing continued momentum to 70 percent and some are dead in the 30s.

Florida cases and deaths appear likely to be rising again. Texas 7 day average looks like it has doubled, although I can’t tell whether that’s funky numbers as well. Alabama has a positive test rate of 13 percent and many of the other low vax states are north of 5 percent so probably not testing enough.

The next phase is probably regional outbreaks in areas with low vax and where Delta takes root, but it is going to be increasingly hard to detect until and unless hospitalizations rise.

The good news is that things still seem really good in high vax states (put aside variant detection, yeah it is a wild card but hasnt stopped momentum yet). It also looks like doing well may extend to the Dakotas, which have a middling vax rate but got smoked with natural infections and now look pretty good.

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I admitted someone for covid today, that was weird. 41M, no vaccine, bro kinda guy. Didn’t have a reason for not getting a vaccine. Felt for him.

Reason is probably Rogan.

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“Felt for him”

Sarcasm?

edit:Or was he not anti vax and just lazy? I assume as a doctor you have emotions for all the patients you provide care for, but those that are self inflicted you have a little less.

Absolutely not. Being mad at someone who is sick and scared is one of those things you generally only “do” online.

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Sorry, I edited my response

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I’d be empathetic for someone who was some generic antivax people too. It’s easy to get caught up in facebook nonsense. Now, if someone like Naomi Wolf crossed paths with me, then yeah, I’d laugh… but probably feel sorry for them… for how fucking stupid they are.

I’ve cared for drunks, thieves, rapists, murderers, drunk drivers that killed the three people that came in before them and died as trauma codes… that last one had the whole department mad. I hate some patients, but it’s really hard to get mad at someone struggling to breathe.

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Can’t say I understand. Isn’t the second half of the Hippocratic Oath, “Second, fuck those idiots.” ?

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This is clearly not good. We have to hope that in mutating to become more transmissible the virus loses some of its potency, or at least doesn’t develop the ability to evade the immune system.

There is also the concept of evolutionary trade-offs - in order to become better at one thing you often get worse at something else. The fastest vaccination programme in history will give the virus a different hurdle to overcome and squeeze it in another evolutionary direction.

“It is quite possible that changes in the virus that make it better at avoiding vaccines could end up compromising its ability to transmit in an absolute sense,” said Dr Katzourakis.

He thinks the Beta variant - which has a mutation called E484K that helps evade the immune system but hasn’t managed to take off - is an example of this. However, the Delta does have mutations that both help it spread and partially dodge immunity.

What will turn out to be the optimal strategy for coronavirus is still hard to predict. Different viruses use different techniques to keep on infecting. Measles is explosive, but leaves behind lifelong immunity so it always has to find someone new. Influenza has a much lower R0, barely above 1, but constantly mutates to side-step immunity.

“We’re in a really interesting, intermediate and somewhat unpredictable phase, it is difficult to predict how that’s going to play out a year from now,” said Prof Barclay.

One thing that is often claimed, but attracts scientific scorn, is that the virus must get milder in order to spread more easily. There is very little evolutionary pressure on the virus for that to happen. The virus is already off into the next person long before it kills the person it infected. And the people who do the most spreading (younger people) are those who don’t get very ill.

In rich countries with good vaccination campaigns it is hoped the next variants won’t be able to pose a major problem due to widespread immunity. But these progressively more transmissible variants are a nightmare for the rest of the world where they are making it harder and harder to stay on top of Covid.

Behind a paywall that no one in their right mind subscribes to, but with a quick c/p into Word we can see that…

Joint study ‘winds back the clock’ of virus genetics and dates initial outbreak as early as October

The Covid-19 pandemic may have started as early as October, according to a new joint study of its genetic make-up by researchers at University College London and the University of Reunion Island.

The pathogen wreaking havoc on the world, known scientifically as SARS-CoV-2, is thought to have made the jump from its initial host to humans at some point between October 6 and December 11.

The findings – based on analysis of more than 7,000 genome sequence assemblies collected from around the world since January – will be published in a forthcoming edition of scientific journal Infection Genetics and Evolution.

Researchers studied the evolution of the mutations since they jumped to humans in order to work back their molecular clocks to a common starting point.

Separately, Chinese government information, seen previously by the South China Morning Post, suggests one of the first patients to emerge was a 55-year-old resident of Hubei province on November 17. “Patient zero” has not yet been confirmed.

The theory the virus was circulating earlier than had been thought came after a French athlete who fell ill after competing in Wuhan in October said she had been told by doctors it was likely that she had caught Covid-19.

The claim by Olympic silver-winning pentathlete Elodie Clouvel bolstered theories that coronavirus may have been carried around the world by people who had taken part in an international competition in the Chinese city.

Ms Clouvel, 31, said that she and her 27-year-old boyfriend Valentin Belaud, also a pentathlete, had fallen ill after the Military World Games, held in Wuhan between October 18 and 27 and featuring 9,308 athletes from 109 countries.

Other French team members have since spoken to the French press, mainly on condition of anonymity, to say they too had become sick.

“We all fell ill with the same symptoms,” Ms Clouvel, a military police officer, told RTL radio. “We have recently had a contact with the military doctor, who said to us: ‘I think you had [it] because there were a lot of people who were ill afterwards’.”

The French army denies knowledge of anyone contracting the disease during the games.

This week, French doctors informed a 43-year old man that a “mystery” disease he contracted on December 27, which left him requiring oxygen, was Covid-19 after testing a frozen swab. Until then, the first confirmed case in France was on January 24.

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Alright, let’s see what the citation actually says.

That is in no realistic sense confirmation. It’s a hypothesis.

This is, once again, not confirmation, but a hypothesis about an undiagnosed respiratory illness, something that happens all the damn time.

I even took the extra step to check bioRxiv and the journal in question, as the Telegraph article failed to link to it or provide any details beyond the journal name to find the article, which should be considered malpractice in science journalism. It’s possible I missed it, but I couldn’t find anything. The journal itself is reputable.

Bottom line, churchill is once again spreading bullshit and vastly overstating the claims of his own citation.

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This is good news for the olympics.

Yeah well, that’s just insanity isn’t it.

https://twitter.com/SandwichGhoul/status/1403040309618094081?s=19

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