The Next Pandemic: SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19

[3rdnlng]

1 hour ago, TPS said:

Then there's this, which my detractors here won't like....https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-trumps-decision-to-back-off-of-his-easter-coronavirus-miracle

It took him awhile to figure out leading on this would overcome the economy tanking...

Trump’s latest tonal and tactical shift (and almost certainly not the last) was driven by several factors, both personal and political. Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White. Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

 

"A former West Wing official told me." Sounds like that came right out of the DNC.  This is nothing but pure political speculation.

[Doc]

16 minutes ago, ScotSHO said:

And then we can mark them so we all know they are acceptable humans.  And the rest can be stored somewhere.

 

Yes.  Tattoo them on their forehead with a "C."

[RochesterRob]

5 minutes ago, meazza said:

 

Anything being developed now can take months.

  I'm hearing 12-18 months right now.

[Warren Zevon]

4 minutes ago, ScotSHO said:

 

Not being ig-nant, but I want to know what happens to subject A who "passes" this test and has lot of magical antibodies, vs subject B who fails this test and does not has sufficient antibodies to go outside of their house.

 

What happens if subject B want to go sit on a park bench, or heaven forbid wants to get a job and make money to support their beanie baby collection?  I believe the powers that be will say they should be shunned for 18 months until there is an approved vaccination, correct?  And in the meantime, we will track their whereabouts, you know just to be safe.

 

Your question requires mostly assumption but I would assume subject B would be living like all subjects are right now - they are free to sit on a park bench and free to work. Just stay 6 feet away from whoever else in the park and work in an essential or from home job.

Edited April 2, 2020 by Gary Busey

[shoshin]

7 minutes ago, ScotSHO said:

 

Not being ig-nant, but I want to know what happens to subject A who "passes" this test and has lot of magical antibodies, vs subject B who fails this test and does not has sufficient antibodies to go outside of their house.

 

What happens if subject B want to go sit on a park bench, or heaven forbid wants to get a job and make money to support their beanie baby collection?  I believe the powers that be will say they should be shunned for 18 months until there is an approved vaccination, correct?  And in the meantime, we will track their whereabouts, you know just to be safe.

 

Where are you getting this dystopian dreamland from? The same place as thinking that an antibody test was magical 3 posts ago?

 

In June, we all can hopefully attempt to get back to work, except for certain obvious jobs. People who can still work from home and maybe older or at risk people don't, but the rest of us who can, return. 

 

The rapid antibody testing, if very widespread, identifies outbreaks EARLY so we can isolate those people who are positive early and isolate their contacts perhaps before they are contagious and get tested themselves. This is how you prevent more outbreaks and yet another way that testing saves lives. 

 

 

3 minutes ago, RochesterRob said:

  I'm hearing 12-18 months right now.

 

That's vaccine and that's still pretty damn optimistic at 18 months. Fingers crossed that some of the treatments show promise to shorten the length and severity of symptoms. The most easy to produce would be the anti-malarial combinations. 

Edited April 2, 2020 by shoshin

[GG]

38 minutes ago, Gary Busey said:

 

Your obvious point is obvious but many people who spread the disease are asymptomatic

 

Which gets back to the main point of the effectiveness of testing vs practicing good hygiene in stemming the spread.  How do you test asymptomatic people?   Do you mandate that every citizen take a test once a week?  Or do you hammer away at cleanliness?  Why did CDC reverse its position on masks?

[RochesterRob]

4 minutes ago, Gary Busey said:

 

Indeed - which is why people are rightfully upset the government dragged their feet throughout January and February.

  That same government which was running a sham impeachment?  The leaders of which who could have been working on legislation relative to Corona virus to be approved by the Senate and then the President?  That government?

[Warren Zevon]

Just now, RochesterRob said:

  That same government which was running a sham impeachment?  The leaders of which who could have been working on legislation relative to Corona virus to be approved by the Senate and then the President?  That government?

 

Yep - that government. 

[123719bwiqrb]

1 minute ago, shoshin said:

 

The rapid antibody testing, if very widespread, identifies outbreaks EARLY so we can isolate those people who are positive early and isolate their contacts perhaps before they are contagious and get tested themselves. This is how you prevent more outbreaks. 

 

 

You're mixing up the tests.  The antibody testing will not identify outbreaks - it will show if you will fight off the virus again or not.  The virus test in use right now will show if you are carrying the virus.

 

Again, in my fantasy dystopian vision that will obviously never ever happen, like ever, how would we enforce this?

 

[shoshin]

5 minutes ago, GG said:

 

Which gets back to the main point of the effectiveness of testing vs practicing good hygiene in stemming the spread.  How do you test asymptomatic people?   Do you mandate that every citizen take a test once a week?  Or do you hammer away at cleanliness?  Why did CDC reverse its position on masks?

 

You keep saying this like we have a binary choice between distancing/hygiene vs testing to prevent the spread.

 

It's not binary. We need both, and more steps, to prevent more deaths.  

Edited April 2, 2020 by shoshin

[\GoBillsInDallas/]

"You can help people but you need to get one of our City's expensive and time-consuming permits to do so"

[shoshin]

4 minutes ago, ScotSHO said:

Again, in my fantasy dystopian vision that will obviously never ever happen, like ever, how would we enforce this?

 

 

Set up the system, come up with the plan, (neither are that hard) and hopefully most sensible people will abide by it. 

 

Of course many won't because they want to party on the beach or plant their right to privacy flag on mass graves, but if enough do, we can control it.  

[GG]

4 minutes ago, shoshin said:

 

You keep saying this like we have a binary choice between distancing/hygiene vs testing to prevent the spread.

 

It's not binary. We need both, and more steps, to prevent more deaths.  

 

I've never argued that we don't need both.  I argued that too many people focused on the lack of testing as the primary reason for the rapid spread, instead of hammering away at keeping proper hygiene.   Cleanliness and separation would have been far more effective, especially with a novel virus for which the tests didn't exist.  It only took the officials 2 months to start constantly preaching it.

[123719bwiqrb]

1 minute ago, shoshin said:

 

Set up the system, come up with the plan, (neither are that hard) and hopefully most sensible people will abide by it. 

 

Of course many won't because they want to party on the beach or plant their right to privacy flag on mass graves, but if enough do, we can control it.  

 

And there it is.  Privacy people vs sensible people.  I would argue that the sensible people are the ones that want privacy, but that is crazy talk online.

 

This just in too - you can carry the virus, yet have the antibodies too.  What you say!  So take both tests, what daily?  And if you fail one of them, what do we do?  Are we on the honor system?  No that won't work.  It would have to have teeth behind it to actually work.

 

So we land on the personal freedoms question, and for that ideal many have died over the 240+ years that this little USA experiment has been happening.

[Gary M]

39 minutes ago, Doc said:

 

Yes.  Tattoo them on their forehead with a "C."

 

I suggest a gold star.

[CarpetCrawler]

35 minutes ago, ScotSHO said:

You're mixing up the tests.  The antibody testing will not identify outbreaks - it will show if you will fight off the virus again or not.  The virus test in use right now will show if you are carrying the virus.

 

Again, in my fantasy dystopian vision that will obviously never ever happen, like ever, how would we enforce this?

 

If you're in the more government is good crowd, you can do like Germany and test everyone who had COVID for antibodies and issue them certificates if they do so that they can go back to work. (and restrict those who don't)

Edited April 2, 2020 by CarpetCrawler

[123719bwiqrb]

5 minutes ago, CarpetCrawler said:

If you're in the more government is good crowd, you can do like Germany and test everyone who had COVID for antibodies and issue them certificates if they do so that they can go back to work. (and restrict those who don't)

I would have never thought Germany would ever institute such a solution.

[Tiberius]

On Wednesday, Trump explained how his thinking on covid-19 had changed. “The severity,” Trump said. “I think also in looking at the way that the contagion is so contagious, nobody’s ever seen anything like this where large groups of people all of a sudden have it just by being in the presence of somebody who has it. The flu has never been like that. . . . Also the violence of it if it hits the right person.”

?

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/02/trump-is-always-last-figure-it-out/

Quote

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker answer to the administration’s refusal to reopen the exchanges. “Frankly, this is leadership malpractice,” Pritzker said. “Now more than ever, we need as many people as possible to have access to health care to seek out testing, if we’re ever going to be able to fight covid-19 and eliminate it as a major risk to our people.” He added, “On that same note, the Trump administration’s continued pursuit of a legal case to destroy the Affordable Care Act, which has provided health care to tens of millions of Americans is a special insult to the people of this nation at this moment. To seek to kill the ACA at a time like this, not to mention ever, undermines everything that we’re trying to do to keep people safe.”

 

[Magox]

While I agree that they should waive all requirements for ACA enrollments outside of open enrollment this argument is a red herring.  

 

If people lose their health insurance due to the job losses, then they qualify for an SEP insurance enrollment in the marketplace outside of open enrollment.

 

So, just to reiterate, if people have lost their health insurance because of the CoronaVirus or for any other other reason over the past 60 days, then they can qualify for SEP Special Enrollment Period through the ACA.

 

 

[Buffalo_Gal]

Given that 7,800 people died daily in the United States in 2018 (I could not find the numbers for 2019), the look-back numbers on this will be interesting. Will the number of people dying daily increase in 2020? Or will it be a matter of instead of dying from A, that person is dying from B?  NYC apparently is pulling an Italy and anyone that has the disease is being labeled as dying from the virus, even if they actually died from a heart attack or some other per-existing condition (maybe assuming the per-existing condition exacerbated that condition?)