Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

It's always better to react using good information than bad.

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

But we can improve the odds by maximizing the reliable and the informed, and minimizing the biased and unhinged. It'll still be challenging, and we may still get it wrong, but I'd rather make informed decisions than not. Just like in this crazy game we love. Information is everything.

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

Here's one perspective from yesterday, contains links to official sources.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy
Designing RT-PCR primer sets that are specific to COVID-19 and only that virus (so as to not yield related viral false positives) is hard work and fraught with difficulty. Considering the fact that they've had the virus for what-one month?-I think they're doing the best they can in a difficult environment and time.

I would believe that, except that every other developed country got it done at capacity before us. In addition, it turns out that declaring an emergency here actually prevented everyone but CDC on moving forward with their own tests, which was somehow considered a good idea in a health emergency.

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

My reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, is that testing will not stop worldwide spread of COVID-19, it will help with identifying those who catch it and are most vulnerable, thereby can benefit from most aggressive treatment.

Most of what I've heard about vaccines is a year is about the best case, usually a couple of years. Maybe some of the recent advances plus the priority of this situation will allow them to do it more quickly in this case. But, it's also my understanding that some viruses have simply never had a successful vaccine created against them.

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

My reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, is that testing will not stop worldwide spread of COVID-19, it will help with identifying those who catch it and are most vulnerable, thereby can benefit from most aggressive treatment.

Most of what I've heard about vaccines is a year is about the best case, usually a couple of years. Maybe some of the recent advances plus the priority of this situation will allow them to do it more quickly in this case. But, it's also my understanding that some viruses have simply never had a successful vaccine created against them.

I think we can do better than one year. During the Ebola outbreak, worldwide Level 4 labs began researching ways to deal with it. Winnipeg Federal Lab came up with one of the first, partially effective vaccines in about two months. The testing period was waived as the need was dire, so the site of the outbreak became the testing ground and quickly returned results indicating the vaccine greatly reduced mortality among those who subsequently contracted the disease - i.e., they had higher resistance.
To be fair, the lab had been working on Ebola and Marburg viruses for years so they had some idea of how to produce a vaccine targeting that sort of virus. The COVID-19 is "new" in it's detail, but still based on the Coronavirus family which we have seen before. We are not starting from absolute 0 in our research.

And maybe the virus itself will become diluted, interacting with other viruses to make it much less potent. My guess is that the 1918-1919 flu virus did something like that.

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805

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ORIGINAL: warspite1

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

My reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, is that testing will not stop worldwide spread of COVID-19, it will help with identifying those who catch it and are most vulnerable, thereby can benefit from most aggressive treatment.

Most of what I've heard about vaccines is a year is about the best case, usually a couple of years. Maybe some of the recent advances plus the priority of this situation will allow them to do it more quickly in this case. But, it's also my understanding that some viruses have simply never had a successful vaccine created against them.

I think we can do better than one year. During the Ebola outbreak, worldwide Level 4 labs began researching ways to deal with it. Winnipeg Federal Lab came up with one of the first, partially effective vaccines in about two months. The testing period was waived as the need was dire, so the site of the outbreak became the testing ground and quickly returned results indicating the vaccine greatly reduced mortality among those who subsequently contracted the disease - i.e., they had higher resistance.
To be fair, the lab had been working on Ebola and Marburg viruses for years so they had some idea of how to produce a vaccine targeting that sort of virus. The COVID-19 is "new" in it's detail, but still based on the Coronavirus family which we have seen before. We are not starting from absolute 0 in our research.

And maybe the virus itself will become diluted, interacting with other viruses to make it much less potent. My guess is that the 1918-1919 flu virus did something like that.

warspite1

I thought the second attack was stronger than the first? Or did I remember wrong?

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I thought the second attack was stronger than the first? Or did I remember wrong?

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The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was much deadlier than the first. The first wave had resembled typical flu epidemics; those most at risk were the sick and elderly, while younger, healthier people recovered easily. By August, when the second wave began in France, Sierra Leone, and the United States,[88] the virus had mutated to a much deadlier form. October 1918 was the deadliest month of the whole pandemic.[89]

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

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ORIGINAL: warspite1

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ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

My reading of the tea leaves, so to speak, is that testing will not stop worldwide spread of COVID-19, it will help with identifying those who catch it and are most vulnerable, thereby can benefit from most aggressive treatment.

Most of what I've heard about vaccines is a year is about the best case, usually a couple of years. Maybe some of the recent advances plus the priority of this situation will allow them to do it more quickly in this case. But, it's also my understanding that some viruses have simply never had a successful vaccine created against them.

I think we can do better than one year. During the Ebola outbreak, worldwide Level 4 labs began researching ways to deal with it. Winnipeg Federal Lab came up with one of the first, partially effective vaccines in about two months. The testing period was waived as the need was dire, so the site of the outbreak became the testing ground and quickly returned results indicating the vaccine greatly reduced mortality among those who subsequently contracted the disease - i.e., they had higher resistance.
To be fair, the lab had been working on Ebola and Marburg viruses for years so they had some idea of how to produce a vaccine targeting that sort of virus. The COVID-19 is "new" in it's detail, but still based on the Coronavirus family which we have seen before. We are not starting from absolute 0 in our research.

And maybe the virus itself will become diluted, interacting with other viruses to make it much less potent. My guess is that the 1918-1919 flu virus did something like that.

warspite1

I thought the second attack was stronger than the first? Or did I remember wrong?

It was - I watched a TV documentary on that flu last night. But after late 1919 it suddenly waned and disappeared. They did not suggest the dilution theory, but it was all I could think of for that result.
The interesting theory in the documentary (supported by lots of correlational evidence around times and places) was that the flu started in rural Kansas in 1916 from wild sources. A local doctor noted the high mortality rate for this flu and wrote letters to the appropriate authorities but they were ignored. Because people didn't travel much at that time it remained local until 1917 when the US Army had to raise an army to send to France and built a Camp nearby for training recruits. Contact with the local populace resulted in the Camp also being affected - as many as a third of the recruits were sick and many died.

Alarms were sent to Washington about this but the first drafts of recruits were already on troop ships headed for France. Troop ships are great environments for spreading disease so there were a lot of sick troops discharged onto French soil and hurried to the front. Woodrow Wilson had to decide whether to continue sending troops but he had sketchy and contradictory information, so he continued to send them.

Meanwhile a new agency had been set up to coordinate War propaganda in the US and it decided the news about the virus in the US would hurt recruiting so it suppressed it, going so far as to threaten one newspaper editor with treason charges for printing a story about the outbreak. Since Spain was not involved in the war it was one of the few countries that printed factual information about the flu. This is when the rumor started that the virus was Spanish in origin. It's not hard to see how secrecy and misinformation helped spread the problem.

England expects that every man will do his duty. Horatio Nelson October 1805

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The French have banned kissing, . . . and the Japanese have stopped going to school. Getting interesting

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The world must be ending if those two things are happening!

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ORIGINAL: JohnDillworth

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The world must be ending if those two things are happening!

I do believe Germans are still drinking beer so there is still hope

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ORIGINAL: Scott_USN

Italy is surprising. I was suspecting it to get lose in more countries with less medical care such as parts of Africa.

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ORIGINAL: obvert

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ORIGINAL: Scott_USN

Italy is surprising. I was suspecting it to get lose in more countries with less medical care such as parts of Africa.

It may be happening elsewhere as it did in Italy, just that no one knows yet that it's happening.

One of the countries I'm most concerned about is Indonesia. Only two reported cases now but a few people who traveled from there developed symptoms and tested positive.

If this disease transmits equally in warm and cold climates we could be in for a very long infectious period throughout the world. Usually there is a flu season, the fall through winter, and then transmission lessons through spring and summer. It seems this is transmitted strongly in warm weather areas like the gulf states, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.