***NON-POLITICAL COVID-19 Discussion Thread***

[JakeF]

A couple of reminders...

Originally Posted by Bwana

Once again, don't come in this thread with some kind of political agenda, or you will be shown the door. If you want to go that route, there is a thread about this in DC.

Originally Posted by Dartgod

People, there is a lot of good information in this thread, let's try to keep the petty bickering to a minimum.

We all have varying opinions about the impact of this, the numbers, etc. We will all never agree with each other. But we can all keep it civil.

Thanks!

Click here for the original OP:

Spoiler!

Apparently the CoronaVirus can survive on a inanimate objects, such as door knobs, for 9 days.

California coronavirus case could be first spread within U.S. community, CDC says
By SOUMYA KARLAMANGLA, JACLYN COSGROVE
FEB. 26, 2020 8:04 PM

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating what could be the first case of novel coronavirus in the United States involving a patient in California who neither recently traveled out of the country nor was in contact with someone who did.

“At this time, the patient’s exposure is unknown. It’s possible this could be an instance of community spread of COVID-19, which would be the first time this has happened in the United States,” the CDC said in a statement. “Community spread means spread of an illness for which the source of infection is unknown. It’s also possible, however, that the patient may have been exposed to a returned traveler who was infected.”

The individual is a resident of Solano County and is receiving medical care in Sacramento County, according to the state Department of Public Health.

The CDC said the “case was detected through the U.S. public health system — picked up by astute clinicians.”

Officials at UC Davis Medical Center expanded on what the federal agency might have meant by that in an email sent Wednesday, as reported by the Davis Enterprise newspaper.

The patient arrived at UC Davis Medical Center from another hospital Feb. 19 and “had already been intubated, was on a ventilator, and given droplet protection orders because of an undiagnosed and suspected viral condition,” according to an email sent by UC Davis officials that was obtained by the Davis Enterprise.

The staff at UC Davis requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, but because the patient didn’t fit the CDC’s existing criteria for the virus, a test wasn’t immediately administered, according to the email. The CDC then ordered the test Sunday, and results were announced Wednesday. Hospital administrators reportedly said in the email that despite these issues, there has been minimal exposure at the hospital because of safety protocols they have in place.

A UC Davis Health spokesperson declined Wednesday evening to share the email with The Times.

Since Feb. 2, more than 8,400 returning travelers from China have entered California, according to the state health department. They have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days and limit interactions with others as much as possible, officials said.

“This is a new virus, and while we are still learning about it, there is a lot we already know,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We have been anticipating the potential for such a case in the U.S., and given our close familial, social and business relationships with China, it is not unexpected that the first case in the U.S. would be in California.”

It is not clear how the person became infected, but public health workers could not identify any contacts with people who had traveled to China or other areas where the virus is widespread. That raises concern that the virus is spreading in the United States, creating a challenge for public health officials, experts say.

“It’s the first signal that we could be having silent transmission in the community,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “It probably means there are many more cases out there, and it probably means this individual has infected others, and now it’s a race to try to find out who that person has infected.”

On Tuesday, the CDC offered its most serious warning to date that the United States should expect and prepare for the coronavirus to become a more widespread health issue.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see coronavirus spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “It’s not so much a question of if, but a question of when.”

According to the CDC’s latest count Wednesday morning, 59 U.S. residents have tested positive for the new strain of coronavirus — 42 of whom are repatriated citizens from a Diamond Princess cruise. That number has grown by two since Messonnier’s last count Tuesday, although the CDC was not immediately available to offer details on the additional cases.

More than 82,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported globally, and more than 2,700 people have died, with the majority in mainland China, the epicenter of the outbreak.

But public health leaders have repeatedly reminded residents that the health risk from the novel coronavirus to the general public remains low.

“While COVID-19 has a high transmission rate, it has a low mortality rate,” the state Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday. “From the international data we have, of those who have tested positive for COVID-19, approximately 80% do not exhibit symptoms that would require hospitalization. There have been no confirmed deaths related to COVID-19 in the United States to date.”

CDC officials have also warned that although the virus is likely to spread in U.S. communities, the flu still poses a greater risk.

Gostin said the news of potential silent transmission does not eliminate the possibility of containing the virus in the U.S. and preventing an outbreak.

“There are few enough cases that we should at least try,” he said. “Most of us are not optimistic that that will be successful, but we’re still in the position to try.”

[Bob Dole]

Originally Posted by Chris Meck

Man, I don't know.

This is going to string out until at least summer, and I doubt many venues are going to be able to float it that long to be honest.

Things will for sure look a lot different. Probably a lot more pop-up events and non-traditional venue shows. Probably a lot less bigger events and established venues.

Our major live music venues are bars, mostly on the AR side. So far, they are still open and booking again Th,Fri and Sat at one I just passed. The musicians around here have taken a serious hit, though. One friend touring with Charlie Farley just walked away (though he gets decent revenue from the stuff he’s sold in Nashville over the years).

[TLO]

From Derek Lowe (major expert in the field)

How long will the vaccine protection last?

This one can’t be answered with total confidence by any other way than just waiting and watching. But we will be able to give a meaningful answer well before that, fortunately. Here, just out in the last couple of days, is the most long-term and comprehensive look at the duration of immunity in recovered coronavirus patients. In fact, it appears to be the largest and most detailed study of post-viral-infection immunity in the entire medical literature (!) It’s from a multi-center team at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, UCSD, and Mt. Sinai, and it looks at 185 patients who had a range of infection experiences, from asymptomatic to severe. 38 of the subjects provided longitudinal blood samples across six months.

We’ve already seen from the convalescent plasma comparison samples in the various vaccine Phase I trials that the antibody response to coronavirus infection can be quite variable, and that was the case in this study as well. That gives you wide error bars when you try. to calculate half-lives, and it’s not even clear what kind of decay curve the antibody levels will best fit to (it might well be different in different patients). But one figure to take home is that 90% of the subjects were still seropositive for neutralizing antibodies at the 6 to 8 month time points. The authors point out that in primate studies, even low titers (>1:20) of such neutralizing antibodies were still largely protective, so if humans work similarly, that’s a good sign. An even better sign, though, are the numbers for memory B cells, which are the long-term antibody producers that help to provide immunological memory. B-cells specific to the Spike and to the nucleocapsid coronavirus proteins actually increased over a five-month period post-symptom-onset, thus with no apparent half-life at all. These had interesting variations in antibody type (by the end of the period, they were strongly IgG, the others having dropped off), but as the paper notes, we really don’t have many viral infection profiles in humans to compare these results to. B-cell memory overall, though, looks to be long-lasting, and is expected by these results to stretch into years. For what it’s worth, there are patients who survived the 1918 influenza pandemic who had B cells that still responded with fresh neutralizing antibodies after over 90 years, so they can be rather hardy.

What about the other immune (and immune memory) component, T cells? The news there is good as well. CD4+ and CD8+ memory T cells appear to have half-lives of at least five or six months in these patients, and helper T cells (crucial for those memory B cells to respond later on) were completely stable over the entire period studied. Again, there are very few viral infection studies to compare this one to, but these numbers look consistent with long-term protection via reactivated immune memory.

Looking over the whole set of patients, it was clear that the immune system’s famously individual character was on full display here. That heterogeneity could well be the reason that there are real cases of re-infection, although it still seems to be rare. Different components of the immune response (both in antibodies and T cells) varied widely among patients, and these differences only became more pronounced over time. Nevertheless, at the five-month time point in a measure of five components of immune response and memory, 96% of patients were still positive on at least three of them (the categories were IgG antibodies against the Spike receptor-binding domain (RBD), IgA antibodies against the same Spike RBD, memory B cells aimed at the RBD, total SARS-CoV-2-specific CD8+ T cells, and total SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4+ T cells).

Bottom line: Taken together, this study, several others over the past few months, and this recent work all paint a consistent picture of a strong, normal, lasting immune response in the great majority of patients. Add in the results we’re seeing from the two vaccines that have reported interim data so far, and I think that the prospects for lasting immunity from vaccination are also very good. Remember, the early vaccine data suggested antibody responses at least as strong as those found in naturally infected cases.There seems (so far) every reason to think that vaccine-based immunity will be as good or better than that conferred by actual coronavirus infection. I very much look forward to more data to shore up this conclusion, but that’s how it looks to me at the moment.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipelin...-possibilities

[htismaqe]

I know it's just music but man, it's depressing to see this.

Not only is this virus killing people itself, it's killing people through the depressive side effects AND it's killing all of our outlets for escape - bars, movie theaters, live music - so many things that help us deal with every day life are disappearing.

It's hard not to get caught up in nihilism over something like this. It's one thing to physically survive but another thing to live in a world with ever decreasing amounts of joy.

[MahomesMagic]

Hospital Covid numbers...

Over the last week, 898 patients at Miami’s public hospitals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, but more than half of them — 471 — were admitted for other reasons, largely to emergency rooms, without typical COVID-19 symptoms.

Public health experts say it’s yet another indicator of increasingly widespread transmission of the virus in Miami-Dade County, as the virus ramps up across the country. Vicky Perez, a nurse and the director of critical care at Jackson North Medical Center, said she’s seen it in growing numbers: patients who show up for anything from a car accident to abdominal pain are later testing positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/cor...247234864.html

So even the hospital numbers are full of people that tested +on an over-calibrated PCR test and are not in the hospital because of Covid.

[dirk digler]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

I know it's just music but man, it's depressing to see this.

Not only is this virus killing people itself, it's killing people through the depressive side effects AND it's killing all of our outlets for escape - bars, movie theaters, live music - so many things that help us deal with every day life are disappearing.

It's hard not to get caught up in nihilism over something like this. It's one thing to physically survive but another thing to live in a world with ever decreasing amounts of joy.

Thank god we have still have sports.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by MahomesMagic

Hospital Covid numbers...

Over the last week, 898 patients at Miami’s public hospitals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, but more than half of them — 471 — were admitted for other reasons, largely to emergency rooms, without typical COVID-19 symptoms.

Public health experts say it’s yet another indicator of increasingly widespread transmission of the virus in Miami-Dade County, as the virus ramps up across the country. Vicky Perez, a nurse and the director of critical care at Jackson North Medical Center, said she’s seen it in growing numbers: patients who show up for anything from a car accident to abdominal pain are later testing positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/cor...247234864.html

So even the hospital numbers are full of people that tested +on an over-calibrated PCR test and are not in the hospital because of Covid.

So either those people were sick and not saying anything or had no idea. Or ....

[TLO]

New York shutting down schools effective as of tomorrow.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by TLO

New York shutting down schools effective as of tomorrow.

And it continues...

[Donger]

Originally Posted by TLO

New York shutting down schools effective as of tomorrow.

Yeah, I saw that. Sounds like the trigger was 3% positivity.

[O.city]

If I was a parent there I’d be furious

DeBlasio and Cuomo are awful

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by O.city

If I was a parent there I’d be furious

DeBlasio and Cuomo are awful

Hey! Cuomo got his 11% raise so you just back off!

[MahomesMagic]

Originally Posted by O.city

If I was a parent there I’d be furious

DeBlasio and Cuomo are awful

They are fine with working people not being able to pay their rent or businesses closing down as they are getting even bigger paychecks for themselves and their crew.

[ChiliConCarnage]

Pfizer filing its EUA paperwork Friday

[dirk digler]

NFL is going to intensive Covid Protocol

https://www.nfl.com/news/all-nfl-tea...rting-saturday

With COVID-19 infection rates rising rapidly throughout the country, the NFL announced that starting on Saturday all 32 teams will operate for the rest of the season under the league's intensive protocol.

That calls for, among other restrictions, all players and coaches must have a negative from the previous day's testing before entering the facility, in addition to regular daily PCR testing, all meetings being held virtually unless they can be held outdoors or indoors with a pre-approved plan, and for face masks being worn at all times at the facility, including on the practice field by all personnel. All meals must be served in grab and go style to prevent people from congregating in meal rooms. Locker room use is strongly discouraged on non-game days.

The protocol also prohibits team or player gatherings away from the facility, a particularly important prohibition with Thanksgiving next week.

"The upcoming holidays, beginning with Thanksgiving next week, will introduce new risks of exposure that we need to address now," Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a memo to teams Wednesday, obtained by NFL Media. "Because we have a highly sophisticated program of daily testing, we know when the virus enters our facilities, which underscores the importance of contact tracing and other steps to minimize close contacts within a facility. Recent experience has highlighted the importance of minimizing high-risk close contacts; on multiple occasions, we have seen individuals identified on that basis test positive within a short time. We have also seen many instances in which effective action by clubs to minimize these close contacts prevented the virus from spreading within the club, and avoided players or coaches being ruled out of practice or games."

[eDave]

It's baaaack.

Ducey is supposed to address a press conference this afternoon. Rumor has it he’ll be temporarily shutting schools, but I’ll believe that when I see it. A lot of schools are already shutting down voluntarily.