This was literally Orrin Hatch 10-20 years ago. He got Congress to pass a bill that homeopathic stuff does not have to get FDA approval. The FDA can only act if a treatment is proven unsafe after it’s on the market.
So has there been any evidence yet that wearing a mask actually prevents you from getting the virus? Or are we just guesstimating?
Obviously it slows down the spread when the majority of people wear them so asymptomatic people don’t spread it.
Mostly just curious how safe someone is at the store with a surgical mask and gloves/hand sanitizer
Thanks for posting. I’ll chalk “Does initial dose effect eventual severity of symptoms? Signs point to yes.” up there with all the other 70/30s and 80/20s.
He told me that ongoing studies with macaques are investigating the relationship between the initial dose of the sars -CoV-2 viral inoculum and the amount of virus in lung secretions at a later time. He believes that there may be a correlation. “If we extended this logic to humans, we would expect a similar relationship,” he said. “And, logically, the larger amount of virus should trigger more severe disease by prompting a brisker inflammatory response. But that is still speculative. The relationship between initial viral dose and severity remains to be seen.”
Basically this for COVID - but more conclusive results with other viruses (HIV, SARS, other) that initial viral load does effect eventual symptom severity.
There was one counter-example where a high initial dose actual made eventual symptoms less severe.
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This is most of the section on that issue:
That raises the second question—does a larger viral “dose” result in more severe disease? It’s impossible to erase from one’s memory the image of Li Wenliang, the thirty-three-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm on the first COVID-19 cases, in his final illness; a photograph shows him crimson-faced, sweating, and struggling to breathe in a face mask, shortly before his death. Then there’s the unexpected death of Xia Sisi, a twenty-nine-year-old doctor from Union Jiangbei Hospital of Wuhan, who had a two-year-old child and, the Times reported, loved Sichuan hot pot. Another Chinese health-care worker, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse in Wuhan, fell so critically ill that she started hallucinating; later, she would describe herself as “walking on the edge of death.”
Could the striking severity of their disease—twenty- and thirty-year-olds with COVID-19 generally experience a self-limited, flu-like illness—be correlated with the amount of virus to which they were initially exposed? At least two E.R. doctors in the United States, both on the front lines of the pandemic, have also fallen critically ill; one of them, in Washington State, is only in his forties. To go by available data from Wuhan and Italy, health-care workers don’t necessarily have a higher fatality rate, but do they suffer, disproportionately, from the most severe forms of the disease? “We know the high mortality in older people,” Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease specialist and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. “But, for reasons that we don’t understand, front-line health-care workers are at great risk for serious illness despite their younger age.”
Some suggestive research has been done with other viruses. In animal models of influenza, it’s possible to precisely quantify exposure intensity, and mice who were given higher doses of certain influenza viruses developed a more severe form of the disease. Yet the degree of correlation between dose and disease severity varied widely from one strain of the flu to the next. (Curiously, in one study a higher initial load of respiratory syncytial virus, which can cause pneumonia, especially in young children, correlated negatively with severe disease—although another study suggests that the correlation is positive with toddlers, the most affected patient population.)
What sparse evidence we have about coronaviruses suggests that they may follow the pattern seen in influenza. In a 2004 study of the coronavirus that causes SARS, a cousin of the one that causes COVID-19, a team from Hong Kong found that a higher initial load of virus—measured in the nasopharynx, the cavity in the deep part of your throat above your palate—was correlated with a more severe respiratory illness. Nearly all the SARS patients who came in initially with a low or undetectable level of virus in the nasopharynx were found at a two-month follow-up to be still alive. Those with the highest level had a twenty- to forty-per-cent mortality rate. This pattern held true regardless of a patient’s age, underlying conditions, and the like. Research into another acute viral illness, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, reached a similar conclusion: the more virus you had at the start, the more likely you were to die.
Perhaps the strongest association between the intensity of exposure and the intensity of subsequent disease is seen in measles research. “I want to emphasize that measles and COVID-19 are different diseases caused by very different viruses with different behaviors,” Rik de Swart, a virologist at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, cautioned when we spoke, “but in measles there are several clear indications that the severity of illness relates to the dose of exposure. And it makes immunological sense, because the interaction between the virus and the immune system is a race in time. It’s a race between the virus finding enough target cells to replicate and the antiviral response aiming to eliminate the virus. If you give the virus a head start with a large dose, you get higher viremia, more dissemination, higher infection, and worse disease.”
He described a study from 1994 in which researchers gave monkeys different doses of the measles virus and found that higher infection doses were associated with earlier peaks in viremia. In human beings, de Swart added, the best evidence comes from studies in sub-Saharan Africa. “If you acquire measles through household contacts, where the density and dose of exposure is the highest—you might be sharing a bed with an infected child—then you typically have a higher risk of developing more severe illness,” he said. “If a child contracts the disease through playground or casual contact, the disease is usually less severe.”
I discussed this aspect of infection with the Harvard virologist and immunologist Dan Barouch, whose lab is among those that are working toward a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. He told me that ongoing studies with macaques are investigating the relationship between the initial dose of the SARS-CoV-2 viral inoculum and the amount of virus in lung secretions at a later time. He believes that there may be a correlation. “If we extended this logic to humans, we would expect a similar relationship,” he said. “And, logically, the larger amount of virus should trigger more severe disease by prompting a brisker inflammatory response. But that is still speculative. The relationship between initial viral dose and severity remains to be seen.”
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Yeah. This is the flip side of the fact that a week ago, we weren’t necessarily measuring the exponential growth in cases, we were measuring the exponential growth of testing. Now that daily testing seems to increasing linearly, it’s still hard to say much about the underlying infection rate.
I have a buddy that works in one of those Amazon warehouses. They are realllllly scrambing. Even after throwing the employees a bunch more money to implicitly pay them back for getting sick they still can’t come up with schedules, etc. He has a number of fairly rough stories.
I keep softly trying to get him to quit, or take multiple weeks off. I try not to be very harsh as I don’t know his money situation or what-have-you. I mean, I hate AMAZON and guillotine draft contender Jeff Bezos, not my friend. It seems like he’s had enough and will take a week sabbatical at the least.
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Mississippi woulda banned it around the time they had to use one cup instead of separate white and colored cups.
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Silly Captain caring more about his crew’s life than how Trump looks.
Deserves to be fired for that egregious act of treason.
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Did the captain say it publicly or did he just send a message to other navy commands?
France reporting 1355 deaths in the last 24 hours… have they suddenly changed their reporting criteria or something?
Sent a message that got leaked.
I read earlier that France hadn’t been including deaths outside of hospital eg nursing homes and some of those got hit very hard.
a couple of days ago they said they would start counting people that die at home so maybe they started adding those numbers in?
Yeah, 884 of them were deaths that had previously gone unrecorded because they occurred outside the hospital . 471 died today.
Sounds like the dude got canned for doing his job? What are they going to do, give some young captain a plague ship to sort out?
As long as he’s a loyalist, sure.
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In most cases, there are still hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs from that point and still a significant risk of failure.
Jared can do it.
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