Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Interesting reading. I wonder why well over half of the infections are in females? Is this something to do with the churches or a social thing?
 
green.pixel said:
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
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Meanwhile we have peer reviewed studies which show that SARS-CoV(-1) originated from 'wet markets' aka chinese markets where all kinds of different wild, illegally hunted animals are kept in close proximity without any care for hygiene and absolutely everything points to that SARS-CoV-2 following the suite. This has nothing to do with agriculture or capitalism or whatever.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Hindsight being 20/20, I'm sure a lot of people will be saying X should have done such and such. Even if they may have been one of the ones saying X shouldn't do such and such at the start of the whole thing.
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There's one absolute recommendation though, and that's have effective testing for everyone. With that, containment is possible for any disease.

As I understand it, testing requires looking for the RNA presence. Maybe some other approach is needed? Protein binders could adhere to the antigens. Although they have some trouble making these for medicines, as a test you don't have to worry about human safety. You'd just need something that could bind to the antigens. In classic Sci-fi style, you'd put some spit into a test-tube and it'd turn blue. With modern tech, you could use a tiny amount of indicator fluid and a camera, and not even have a visible change; you could detect a change in a different wavelength absorption if necessary.
 
Rurouni said:
The guess is that because around 50% of male South Korean smoke and less than 5% for female.
In Italy, 28% in male population vs 20% in female population that smoke.
Got the data from this CNN opinion piece https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/opin...oronavirus-survivability-sepkowitz/index.html
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But that doesn't explain why more women are diagnosed with having the coronavirus. Surely smoking doesn't make you less likely to catch it? Perhaps it does - but then you're much more at risk if you do get the virus!
 
Shifty Geezer said:
There's one absolute recommendation though, and that's have effective testing for everyone. With that, containment is possible for any disease.

As I understand it, testing requires looking for the RNA presence. Maybe some other approach is needed? Protein binders could adhere to the antigens. Although they have some trouble making these for medicines, as a test you don't have to worry about human safety. You'd just need something that could bind to the antigens. In classic Sci-fi style, you'd put some spit into a test-tube and it'd turn blue. With modern tech, you could use a tiny amount of indicator fluid and a camera, and not even have a visible change; you could detect a change in a different wavelength absorption if necessary.
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Sure if it were possible to do, the most effective response would have been...
  • Locking down national borders.
  • Testing everyone entering the country.
    • Even limited to this amount of people the logistics and testing needed would be huge.
    • Prior to restricted travel due to Covid-19, 100's of thousands of travelers entered and exited the US on a daily basis. Back in 2017, an average of 325,000 people were entering the US daily via international flights.
      • Even just limiting ingress to US nationals would present a large logistical challenge.
      • Something we can currently see with people posting pictures of lines of people awaiting testing at US international airports.
      • And even then, they are only testing people that might show signs. They aren't testing everyone, so invisible carriers can still get in.
Once you fail either of those, then you basically need to test everyone due to the presence of invisible carriers. In the US that would mean testing ~330 million people unless you can track the movements of the entire population to be certain that X location has had no contact with any other region that might have had contact with an invisible carrier.

IMO - just testing alone wasn't a logistically practical solution for this pandemic.

Regards,
SB
 
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At an Italian town called Vo'Euganeo where they tested all the residents, they concluded that actually 50-75% of the infected are actually completely asymptomatic.

https://www.repubblica.it/salute/me...4302/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I251454518-C12-P3-S2.4-T1

Or in google translate.

It's scary because it shows this thing is completely unstoppable save for complete social isolation on entire communities. It's less scary because the virus actually affects a lot less people than we initially thought (we thought the rate of asymptomatics was around 2.5%).

Shifty Geezer said:
In my case, I have all the early symptoms but at a very mild level. I could really do with being tested but the NHS is only testing those with more pronounced symptoms, who, let's be honest, don't need testing. If you have a temperature and cough, you have Covid19!
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That's the stupidity of the situation. All NHSes of western countries are restricting the test as much as they possibly can because the current state-of-the-art tests are expensive and takes too many man-hours to do. End result is they're only testing the people who 1) have all the symptoms and need a hospital bed + 2) have been in contact with confirmed infections, meaning they're just testing the ones they don't need to test because those patients aren't going anywhere at that point.
 
Testing is honestly pointless already, we're long past the point it would have had any effect on limiting the virus from spreading.
Also since asymptomatic spread it just like symptomatic people do, you'd have to literally test everyone for there to be any point on testing in the first place (if the goal was to limit the spread).
 
Kaotik said:
Testing is honestly pointless already, we're long past the point it would have had any effect on limiting the virus from spreading.
Also since asymptomatic spread it just like symptomatic people do, you'd have to literally test everyone for there to be any point on testing in the first place (if the goal was to limit the spread).
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It's not pointless if you want communities to gain a stronger workforce to fight the virus, and eventually to retake their productivity levels ASAP to avoid crashing even harder than they already are.
If you're a healthy and asymptomatic person who tested positive, then after two weeks you can just go on with your life without fear of passing it on to other people. You can also be helpful on treatment zones where things are more serious.

If everyone is constantly afraid of catching it (even if they're already immune), then things will take a lot longer to return to normal.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
You do know that Trump started restricting travel to the US in January depending on which countries were hardest hit at the time? China in January (before there were any known US infections), Iran and other countries starting in Feb. European leaders at the time objected to Trump restricting travel into the US, especially when he started to restrict travel from some EU nations.
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Factually not true, unless you are believing what trump saiz, mate dont listen to trump, yes he may occasionally say something true, but with him its really just a crap-shoot, he really is a sociopath who doesnt really value human life, he only values the market
to quote forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveke...ina-before-americait-didnt-work/#71a6b269481b
Speaking to the nation last night, U.S. President Donald Trump said a ban on Europeans entering the United States is necessary because Europe hadn’t banned flights from China early as the U.S. had done.
“The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots as a result a large number of new clusters were seeded by travellers from Europe,” he said.
But virtually every part of this statement is untrue.
Italy imposed a ban on flights from China on 31 January, immediately after a Chinese couple in Rome tested positive for the virus. The U.S. began to restrict flights from China four days later. But while Italy enacted a full ban, the U.S. policy was only a restriction, with wide exemptions
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(Replying to ToTTenTranz)

That is, providing you won't get it more seriously if you catch it again.

There is so little known that everyone is just working with informed guesses at this point.
 
Silent_Buddha said:
Sure if it were possible to do, the most effective response would have been...

IMO - just testing alone wasn't a logistically practical solution for this pandemic.
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Sure, but looking forwards, all the evidence shows us that effective, mass testing is the secret to disease prevention. We need a solution for that. Let's get our sci-fi brains coming up with solutions - a simple testing machine at every home or community or something that everyone can use. Every new disease, create a protein binding indicator and get that out to everywhere. That'd be a whole lot better than what we have now which is be unable to test, disease goes wild, lock everyone down regardless.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
At an Italian town called Vo'Euganeo where they tested all the residents, they concluded that actually 50-75% of the infected are actually completely asymptomatic.

It's scary because it shows this thing is completely unstoppable save for complete social isolation on entire communities. It's less scary because the virus actually affects a lot less people than we initially thought (we thought the rate of asymptomatics was around 2.5%).
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We could really do with the demographics of those asymptomatic carriers. The way info is presented currently, it sounds like young people walk around without symptoms and all old people suffer horribly. Is that true? Are some old people asymptomatic also?
 
Mariner said:
But that doesn't explain why more women are diagnosed with having the coronavirus. Surely smoking doesn't make you less likely to catch it? Perhaps it does - but then you're much more at risk if you do get the virus!
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Oh, I misread the initial question. It's probably because female simply might be more at risk? Or maybe they simply like to socialize more? 20-29 is the highest age group to get this virus, so maybe young adult people simply have a hard time not socializing and most of them are probably female (that have a hard time)? Or maybe they tested more female than male because they are more willing to get tested? Honestly I don't know, but the fact that female fatality rate is half of male, I don't think it is something to make us concerned (about more South Korean female vs male that got covid19). The focus is still people around 60 and above that are the most susceptible. Well, I guess if a female in her 80 and smoke cigarettes then you definitely want to keep her isolated.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
It's not pointless if you want communities to gain a stronger workforce to fight the virus, and eventually to retake their productivity levels ASAP to avoid crashing even harder than they already are.
If you're a healthy and asymptomatic person who tested positive, then after two weeks you can just go on with your life without fear of passing it on to other people. You can also be helpful on treatment zones where things are more serious.

If everyone is constantly afraid of catching it (even if they're already immune), then things will take a lot longer to return to normal.
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No, you really can't. Or shouldn't anyway, even when it's the official recommendation. We already know several cases where incubation period has been way over that, longest confirmed so far has been 27 days IIRC, and who knows how long it might be on people who never really show the symptoms and never got tested.
Yes, median incubation time is mere 5 days and most cases fall within 14 days limit, but that's not all the cases.

Only people worth testing really (IMO) at this point are those who work in critical roles, like healthcare etc, to keep the system running as smoothly as possible.
 
It seems that most of the testing taking place is the PCR testing because it is most accurate (not to mention, the first to be developed). It seems there are also quicker, though slightly less accurate tests available which test for antibodies. These can be produced in the millions relatively quickly.

It would surely be worth using some of these antibody tests to see how many people in the population have unknowingly had the virus already? If you get a few false positives or false negatives in a larger study, it doesn't really matter, but it would give us some kind of an idea what is going on out there.

Here's the link where I found my information about the tests:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-testing-uk
 
ToTTenTranz said:
At an Italian town called Vo'Euganeo where they tested all the residents, they concluded that actually 50-75% of the infected are actually completely asymptomatic.
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So how did China manage to cut its infection rate to near zero?
Remember it was not just in wuhan but in large numbers (over a hundred) in nearly every province of China. And these are just the known numbers, which are the iceberg above water.
 
Everyone had to stay put not just people with symptoms, just like in many European countries right now.
 
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