Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[HisMajestyBOB]

Yes I think there's a bit of wishful thinking going or is it clutching at straws?

If we assume that nearly everyone has already been exposed, then there's no reason to close businesses or stop travel, so we can go right back to business as usual!

[Legbiter]

If we assume that nearly everyone has already been exposed, then there's no reason to close businesses or stop travel, so we can go right back to business as usual!

Yeah, only some countries have developed a serological test. We'll have an answer but it'll be after the fact. Assume the worst in the meantime.

[Josquius]

Then of course you've got the uncertainty over whether you can catch it again once you've had it,.

There's no uncertainty on that. You do gain immunity. The only caveat is whether the virus will mutate enough to reinfect you later on (like it happens with flu viruses).

I've certainly read of cases where its happening already. Wasn't there one in Japan where a lady recovered but then caught it again and went critical?

[Sheilbh]

Multiple questions today basically asking British experts and ministers about various things Trump has said - should people use that drug, is the cure worse than the disease etc?

[Fate]

This virus will have a vaccine. It would be nice if we could do the moonshot/Manhattan Project version of that effort.

Hopefully. We still don't have an effective vaccine to the original strain of SARS coronavirus from 2003.

[Iormlund]

If you want help in a small way, you can download a program which will use your surplus computing power to run protein folding simulations on the Wuhan virus. It's basically the world's largest supercomputer at this point. It runs unobtrusively in the background.

https://foldingathome.org/iamoneinamillion/

I used to do this way back when. guess I can do it again. 

[celedhring]

Then of course you've got the uncertainty over whether you can catch it again once you've had it,.

There's no uncertainty on that. You do gain immunity. The only caveat is whether the virus will mutate enough to reinfect you later on (like it happens with flu viruses).

I've certainly read of cases where its happening already. Wasn't there one in Japan where a lady recovered but then caught it again and went critical?

Those were not re-infections. Just people relapsing.

[Sheilbh]

Yes I think there's a bit of wishful thinking going or is it clutching at straws?

The FT article about it:

Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study
New epidemiological model shows vast majority of people suffer little or no illness
Clive Cookson, Science Editor an hour ago

The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

"We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now," she said.

The modelling by Oxford's Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. "I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model," said Prof Gupta.

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.

The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a "susceptibility-infected-recovered model" of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.

The modelling brings back into focus "herd immunity", the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients.

But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.

To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised "neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity," Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.

No idea - but sounds interesting and look forward to seeing what comes out of the testing.

[Legbiter]

This virus will have a vaccine. It would be nice if we could do the moonshot/Manhattan Project version of that effort.

Hopefully. We still don't have an effective vaccine to the original strain of SARS coronavirus from 2003.

Yeah, that's more because we got stupidly lucky and it died out on it's own. People came down fast with obvious symptoms and it was several times more lethal than this bug. But what a close shave that was.

[alfred russel]

I go back to the point I was discussing last week...there needs to be a view toward sustainability.

In Atlanta, stay at home orders haven't been issued (theoretically they have, but they exclude parks, pedestrian pathways, restaurant takeout, and other stuff, and also those restrictions only apply in the city limits which are a small part of the metropolitan area).

My view from the weekend:

I went hiking in North Georgia at Mount Yonah. The place was jammed orders of magnitude worse than I've ever seen it. The parking lot was completely full, and the 1/4 mile access road was completely lined with cars as well as the area along the main road. However, the trails, while busy, were not packed because people have room to spread out over miles of trails. Nearby restaurants seemed full.

I did a driving tour of Atlanta. The parks were more full than I've ever seen them (outside of festivals), and most people seemed to be trying to maintain their distance. People were packed like sardines on the sidewalks to get to the parks. I drove by a plant nursery and it was so busy they had a cop out to direct traffic. I went to a home improvement store to use the downtime to catch up on repair stuff I've been ignoring, and it seems like the whole city had that idea and it was packed. In summary: everyone seems to just funnel to the stuff still open and they can do.

Restaurants with takeout are still opened, so we ordered takeout. I didn't leave until the restaurant notified us the order was ready. However, when I got there, it turned out there were only 3 people working and a party of 12 had wandered up to order food (why all 12 needed to show up escapes me). The restaurant was struggling to get their order together, and 4 of us waited for them to be taken care of. The result was that 15 of us were huddled on a small patio waiting to pick food. Really the situation would have been better if the restaurant was still open.

I don't have solutions. I don't see a european style shut down being at all sustainable however, and the current system doesn't seem like it will be effective.

[Legbiter]

If you want help in a small way, you can download a program which will use your surplus computing power to run protein folding simulations on the Wuhan virus. It's basically the world's largest supercomputer at this point. It runs unobtrusively in the background.

https://foldingathome.org/iamoneinamillion/

I used to do this way back when. guess I can do it again. 

There's several vaccination teams using it. Just remember to select any disease in the interface. Covid-19 calculations are the biggest priority, everything else is on the backburner. The combined computing power is now seven times more than the Summit supercomputer.

[Sheilbh]

Figures from the Health Secretary that now over 11,000 recently retired clinicians have volunteered to return the NHS which is very heartening - as mongers said the opposite of the selfish and hoarding behaviour we've seen elsewhere.

Also 5,500 final year medical students and about 19,000 final year student nurses are being rushed through and into hospitals. It's probably not enought but it is about another 35,000 staff on their way which is positive.

The London Excell Centre - a conference centre - is being converted by the military into a new 500 bed hospital at the moment and should apparently be open next week. Hopefully London's hospitals have capacity until it's online and receiving patients.

Edit: But it will be close - latest report I saw was that London's estimated to be four days from full capacity Hopefully that can be avoided.

[Legbiter]

I don't have solutions. I don't see a european style shut down being at all sustainable however, and the current system doesn't seem like it will be effective.

Places will implement total shutdowns when the local hospitals get overwhelmed.

[Syt]

India will go into lockdown for three weeks.

[alfred russel]

I don't have solutions. I don't see a european style shut down being at all sustainable however, and the current system doesn't seem like it will be effective.

Places will implement total shutdowns when the local hospitals get overwhelmed.

I used to work as an EMT in Atlanta. It was 20 years ago so I'm out of date, but I don't think the situation has substantially changed.

Especially in the inner city, the hospitals operate on the edge of capacity in normal times. There were a few times I'd drop off patients at hospitals on "bypass" status because they were at capacity because all the hospitals in the area were on that status and I had to go somewhere (the nurses at receiving were not understanding of those situations). The main inner city hospital basically reserved its ER rooms for TB patients and everyone else either went straight to surgery or beside a wall.

The point being: I don't know that hospitals are far from "overwhelmed" status in normal times.

I've talked to the couple doctors I know about maybe being able to help out, but I don't think there is any use for me. It would sure beat sitting at home.