DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... 28 Days Later: COVID-19

A lot of em out there man. A lot of them out there....just unsung. You know that as well.

I was surprised in the diff ways the CV presents itself. What's affected in one doesn't present itself in another, etc, etc. Didn't know that.

I don't even read these CV threads anymore. The gloom and doom area inside my cranium is overflowing/full. I'll tune in to 1 channel for an hr each night for the daily death tolls, etc. It seems like the next day and the next day and the next day are just wash, rinse, and repeat days.

Dear God.....thank you for fast-forwarding us to football and the draft.

I believe that's a safe assumption. Heavy testing was done in prisons and there were a large number of confirmed cases.

I wonder how much they are testing now in nursing homes. Probably about 4-5 weeks ago we got a call from the nursing home my dad is in that he was running a slight fever. The treated him and tested him for the flu but not covid. He has been in quarantine but they said the next day that the fever went down and they would watch him. They called about 2 weeks later (first week of April) and said that they have their first case (was not my dad). I checked the stats last night and there are 11 patients and 25 workers that have tested positive. The mom of one of my sons best friends works there and tested positive and she has been in the hospital for a week.

Looks like today might be a new high for new covid cases in one day in the USA.
Still a few states to report and we are just under 36,000 cases today

Here's what we've been having as of late.

Sort of helps we have a tiny population spread across an area the size of Texas. A bunch of nurses are also doing contact tracing around the clock. Our Governor has followed DeWine in the response.

Sorry to hear this is so close to home for you. I hope the home your dad is in is implementing every tool available to keep it under control. I hope all the staff has N95’s.
Prayers for you and yours.

j/c...

j/c

An interesting listen whether you agree with these doctors or not. It's long, just over an hour. I know a lot of people won't agree with them, but they make some good points based on available data.

I saw an abbreviated version of this earlier today. The way they apply data makes as much sense as what anyone else is doing. Their surmising that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the common flu will make heads spin. These docs own a chain of urgent care centers, so they are seeing things first hand, and gather their own data. I'm surprised Trump isn't all over this.

I listened to them a while this morning on FB. I think they are as right as the original models but their data extrapolations are just as flawed. They don't account for contagion rate/period or population densities. And their number don't jive at all with international numbers reported. I'd say however the truth seems much closer to what they are reporting than the huge numbers originally predicted here in the states. I also think ignorance and poverty are playing a bigger role than we know right now too. This thing is just now hitting many of the red states so we'll have to see what happens there to determine if I'm right or not. I'd love to see a breakdown of economic statuses and education levels compared to this thing. We've already seen a report that those listening to Sean Hannity died more than those listening to Tucker Carlson.

They also seem to skip/gloss right over the part where we're only part way through this and is everything is thrown open willy-nilly, the number of cases in the hospitals will skyrocket.... and avoiding that is the entire point of all of this.

On a different note ...... evidently, Social Security will direct deposit the stimulus into my desperately requiring a stimulus checking account on Wednesday the 29th. My mom will also receive hers on the same day.

Mine is coming right at the right time .... because my fridge is leaking all over the floor.

I didn’t get that everything should be opened willy nilly from it. Common sense opening, much like Sweden. They still said no large gatherings and that testing needs to substantially increase. At risk people need to stay home as well.

What they are saying is that the models provided at the beginning were horribly wrong and there isn’t a need to have things locked down as hard as they are. Their data, which is a small sample, shows recovery of 96%, the 4% that die it was something like 80 or 90% had preexisting issues - diabetes, copd, emphazema.

The part where they spoke about a blood test that can have results in 3 minutes would be great, sounds like that may be close.

When I go to the store, Kroger, Sams, or Lowe’s for example they are packed. What is the point of the lockdown if there are hundreds of people there? Their argument is people need to build immunity - herd immunity is the term used I believe. Almost all healthy people recover, much like the common flu.

I’m not saying they are correct, but it is an interesting analysis by some doctors that know a lot more about disease than I do.

I agree ignorance and socioeconomic status play a part. Are poorer people less healthy? I think that could be the case. Are ignorant people not washing their hands and not practicing social distancing? Probably. Every time I go to the store there is some idiot that barges right in to a shelf I’m getting something from. We were at TSC the other day and my wife was looking at the baby chickens, some kid, about 15 probably, walks right up next to her, literally 10 inches from her face.

At this point I’m starting to think we need to resume life, slowly. I suppose next week we will be.

Are you mixing up the Fridge and the bathroom again in the middle of the night?

All of that, I agree with.

I do think that certain parts of our country can and should switch to Sweden's model immediately. Those areas being everything with a lower population density. But, we also need to learn from Sweden's mistakes, and that means taking better care of the elderly, the at-risk, and those in nursing homes and community living. It turns out, this is a major part of why their deaths are so relatively high for a comparable population size. I always compare them to Ohio because we are just about the same size population, including major cities as Stockholm and Columbus are quite similar in size. We have nearly the same number of confirmed cases, nearly the exact same amount of testing... they have three or four times the number of deaths. Incurring that knowing it could be avoided would be irresponsible and unacceptable.


When you look at the prison infection rates we've been seeing, something like 90% have been asymptomatic infections. I think that ratio has been fairly consistent, so far. I haven't compared it to the cruise ship data as I'm riffing this thought off the top of my head, but if it is a decent example, then a legitimate extrapolation is that there are at least nine asymptomatic cases out there for every confirmed... which means that this country already has nearly 10 million cases. Perhaps a good bit more as we only test the cases that are severe enough to require hospitalization right now.

There are two ways to look at that, I think:

1. with masks & social distancing maintained through summer and into the fall (distancing, not lockdowns), we should be able to slowly work our way toward herd immunity by late fall

2. we are a looong ways away from herd immunity as we currently sit at less than 5% of our population having had it, and it has already done a number on our hospitals, and we still have 65% more to go.

2b. that implies we are looking at a death total of roughly 13x our current number in order to get to herd immunity: with or without relaxing things; remember, most of the deaths in this country have come well after the respective areas locked down

Don't forget we probably have 5 to 10 times more people who have or have had it already. They just never got tested, and didn't have any, or only a few minor issues. So we could be at 25 to 50 percent of the population already?

That is accounted for in the 90% to put us at 5%.

To get a more accurate number, we'd need to get the percentage of the prison/cruise ship populations that required hospitalization and extrapolate from that. It almost certainly makes the total population that has already had it a larger number.

Also, somebody, somewhere, needs to get off their ass and start doing some testing with antibodies.

Do antibodies even prevent re-infection?
If so, what is the current running maximum period of time that antibodies remain effective?

In short, we have THOUSANDS of people in this country that have recovered from this. We have antibody tests.

Start drawing some freaking blood from volunteers on a weekly basis and test it!

Interesting, I was reading this article just before I logged in to this thread.


https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-...1?ocid=msedgdhp

So, kinda like the rush to claim "we have a vaccine ready for trial!", we have a number of companies rushing to market antibody tests that aren't ready for primetime. It's like the software world where they treat their released product as their beta testing.

Those guys sounds more like bitter people about their freedoms being taken away than anything else... They do give a case for why things should be slowly opened up, but they even said themselves the testing is not there to allow it. They argued that we shutdown too much, then in another thought say that fauci didn't overreact since no one knew the how it would really be at first, before they take shots at him...

They also sound like two guys with a huge financial stake (owners of an urgent care system), therefore a conflict of interest, as motive for their reasoning for wanting to re-open. Urgent Care visits have seen a dramatic decline in patient visits since the lockdown. Several Urgent Care systems have had to consolidate to remain viable.

ER departments are feeling the squeeze as well.

Here's one example...

https://www.johnsoncitypress.com/Health-...re-centers.html

An article from NYT over the weekend....

Can Antibody Tests Help End the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The tests are not reliable enough to guide policy on lockdowns and reopenings, experts said. But they can help model the spread of the virus.

By Apoorva Mandavilli
April 26, 2020

A survey of New Yorkers last week found that one in five city residents carried antibodies to the new coronavirus — and in that, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo saw good news.

If so many had been infected and survived, he reasoned, the virus may be far less deadly than previously thought. But many scientists took a darker view, seeing instead a vast pool of people who are still very vulnerable to infection.

Like the leaders of many states, Mr. Cuomo has been hoping that the results of large-scale antibody testing may guide decisions about when and how to reopen the economy and reintegrate society.

Few scientists ever imagined that these tests would become an instrument of public policy — and many are uncomfortable with the idea. Antibody tests, which show who has been infected, are often inaccurate, recent research suggests, and it is not clear whether a positive result actually signals immunity to the coronavirus.

On Friday, the World Health Organization warned against relying on these tests for policy decisions. While countries such as Italy have even floated the idea of “immunity passports” for people who test positive, W.H.O. officials noted that it is not known to what extent people carrying antibodies are immune to the virus.

(The W.H.O. on Saturday backed off an earlier assertion that people with antibodies may not be immune at all.)

But widespread testing has started nonetheless, and important decisions are likely to flow from the results. The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and virtually every university with an epidemiology department has begun antibody surveys in communities across the United States.

“It seems like all of a sudden, everybody just decided that antibody tests are going to give them some grand answer,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

The goal of most of these projects is to get a handle on the size and nature of the epidemic here, rather than to guide decisions about reopening the economy. But now scientists are racing to fine-tune the tests and to learn more about what having antibodies actually means, both for the patient and for the community.

Many questions raised by these initiatives have no easy answers: When will we achieve “herd immunity”? How quickly does the virus spread? How long does immunity last and how strong is it?

“This is a very difficult problem, and the solutions are not going to be easy,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. “Normal is not on the horizon yet.”

The results in New York State offer an early glimpse of the promise and pitfalls of widespread antibody testing.

Public health officials tested 3,000 residents at grocery stores and big-box retailers throughout the state. In New York City, about 21 percent of participants were found to carry coronavirus antibodies.

The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester County and Rockland County, and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.

New York’s survey was reasonably well designed and the results largely credible, experts said. But unlike Mr. Cuomo, few saw happy news in the numbers.

“I just don’t see any way to put a silver lining on any of these results,” said Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. “I think that the efforts to spin it that way are irresponsible.”

If one in five residents in hard-hit New York City has been exposed to the virus, he and others said, then four in five are still vulnerable — and that underscores how far we are from the pandemic’s end.

New York’s results suggested a death rate of between 0.5 and 1 percent, figures some conservative commentators have argued are too low to justify statewide lockdowns.

Public health experts like Dr. Bergstrom took the opposite view. “If the mortality rate is 1 percent, we’re looking at 2 million deaths, which is unprecedented in our nation’s history and unimaginable,” he said.

“Anyone talking about the death rate as ‘only 1 percent and so we should not worry about it’ has an extraordinarily callous view.”

The New York survey confirms what experts have long believed: that because of the lack of tests, the state has undercounted the true number of infections by about a factor of 10.

Reopening society with such a huge vulnerable population, and without careful consideration, could be disastrous, allowing the virus to sweep through the country, Dr. Bergstrom and others said.

If one in five residents in hard-hit New York City has been exposed to the virus, he and others said, then four in five are still vulnerable — and that underscores how far we are from the pandemic’s end.

New York’s results suggested a death rate of between 0.5 and 1 percent, figures some conservative commentators have argued are too low to justify statewide lockdowns.

Public health experts like Dr. Bergstrom took the opposite view. “If the mortality rate is 1 percent, we’re looking at 2 million deaths, which is unprecedented in our nation’s history and unimaginable,” he said.

“Anyone talking about the death rate as ‘only 1 percent and so we should not worry about it’ has an extraordinarily callous view.”

The New York survey confirms what experts have long believed: that because of the lack of tests, the state has undercounted the true number of infections by about a factor of 10.

Reopening society with such a huge vulnerable population, and without careful consideration, could be disastrous, allowing the virus to sweep through the country, Dr. Bergstrom and others said.

Scientists have also repeatedly cautioned that the presence of antibodies does not signify protection from the virus. Some preliminary evidence suggests, for example, that people who are asymptomatic might not produce enough antibodies to prevent a second infection.

To be sure about what quantity of antibodies are needed in the blood, researchers need further tests, both to measure the exact amount — which the majority of rapid tests available do not provide — as well as more detailed analyses of the antibodies’ strength. The answers will take weeks to months.

“We’re kind of heavily leaning on these tests when they’re not perfect,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“And we still have a lot of people susceptible, so it’s a dangerous thing to heavily rely on them right now.”

Dr. Osterholm said an antibody survey, because it provides “historical data” on who was infected, is like a smoke alarm that gives out a report once a month.

“It doesn’t work very well if you have a fire right now,” he said.

Diagnostic tests for the virus offer a better snapshot of the current picture, he added, and states should focus on acquiring accurate diagnostic tests that can provide timely data on the rise or fall in the number of infections.

“That should be the data we use to judge opening or not opening” the economy, Dr. Osterholm said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/health/can-antibody-tests-help-end-the-coronavirus-pandemic.html

I did notice that as well!

Have you checked your freezer’s condensation drain? My guess is it’s frozen over. Hense it’s leaking. Sounds like a defrost is needed.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - sell it, ship it, use customer feedback to improve it.

j/c...