totm april 2020 Coronavirus

[DDE]

Has anyone checked up on Germany?

 

[Souptime]

1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:

Love the comparison to the Kessler syndrome.

I mean, thats kinda what it is

Oh hey new page

[Clamp-o-Tron]

Well, things just took a turn for the worse for me. I just got the news that my niece has tested positive, and her sister is showing symptoms. This is bad by itself, but my brother-in-law and their father has cardiac problems that may lead to a more serious outcome.

Even worse- they are in and out of a bubble with my 78 and 80 year old parents. We await the results of their tests anxiously. I'm safe, as I live 200 km and a state away. I just hope they'll be okay.

[Souptime]

10 minutes ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

Well, things just took a turn for the worse for me. I just got the news that my niece has tested positive, and her sister is showing symptoms. This is bad by itself, but my brother-in-law and their father has cardiac problems that may lead to a more serious outcome.

Even worse- they are in and out of a bubble with my 78 and 80 year old parents. We await the results of their tests anxiously. I'm safe, as I live 200 km and a state away. I just hope they'll be okay.

that sucks, hope hey get better

[Entropian]

6 hours ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

Well, things just took a turn for the worse for me. I just got the news that my niece has tested positive, and her sister is showing symptoms. This is bad by itself, but my brother-in-law and their father has cardiac problems that may lead to a more serious outcome.

Even worse- they are in and out of a bubble with my 78 and 80 year old parents. We await the results of their tests anxiously. I'm safe, as I live 200 km and a state away. I just hope they'll be okay.

That's not good at all.  Be careful and, I hate to say, be prepared for the worst outcome.  The same thing happened to me near the beginning of the first wave and it did not go well at all, to say the least.

[Scotius]

1 hour ago, Entropian said:

That's not good at all.  Be careful and, I hate to say, be prepared for the worst outcome.  The same thing happened to me near the beginning of the first wave and it did not go well at all, to say the least.

My family got lucky then. My uncle and his oldest daughter got sick, but managed to recover - though uncle suffered from pulmonary problems early on. Curiously, my cousin's husband completely avoided the infection.

[AHHans]

11 hours ago, DDE said:

Has anyone checked up on Germany?

*looks out of the window* Still there.

P.S. @Clamp-o-TronI hope your family gets better soon.

Edited November 24, 2020 by AHHans

[Codraroll]

20 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

Let's look at the actual statistics. The most accurate way of assessing "How many people are really dying here" is not to ask what percentage of the population is dying, but how many people are dying compared to how many people usually die.

The average annual death rate in the United States is 723.6 per 100,000, or 0.7%. In poor places like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama it is higher: 0.9-1.0%. In places like California, Colorado, and Massachusetts it is lower: 0.6-0.7%.

How many people have died from COVID this year compared to how many people usually die in a given state?

• In Georgia, COVID deaths are over 11% of the number of deaths in a normal year.
• In Arizona, COVID deaths are over 13% of the number of deaths in a normal year.
• In North Dakota, COVID deaths are over 16% of the number of deaths in a normal year.
• In Connecticut, COVID deaths are almost 21% of the number of deaths in a normal year.
• In New York, COVID deaths are over 28% of the number of deaths in a normal year.

An average flu season in the United States is responsible for 1.4% of the number of deaths that year.

Stop pretending this is normal. It isn't.

Also keep in mind that these death numbers occur while society is bent over backwards trying to stop them. The flu seasons tend to rage on without people wearing masks, disinfecting their hands, or socially distancing, and with international/regional/local travel ticking in high gear.  Covid is being fought tooth and nail, and still there are lots more deaths than flu seasons normally cause. If we had done as little to combat its spread as we normally do for flu, things would have been a whole lot worse. 

[AHHans]

4 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The flu seasons tend to rage on without people wearing masks, disinfecting their hands, or socially distancing, and with international/regional/local travel ticking in high gear.

Indeed. In Germany the upper respiratory illness monitoring shows that last winter's flu season essentially stopped suddenly in mid to late March 2020.

Edited November 24, 2020 by AHHans
tried to improve the English

[tater]

On 11/23/2020 at 11:30 AM, sevenperforce said:

Stop pretending this is normal. It isn't.

It's not normal, it's about like 1968, the response to which was... nothing at all. I managed to survive that one, and my dad doesn't remember it being anything they worried about. My in-laws said the same thing (and they were likely paying more attention as medical people).

It not being normal doesn't mean it's the end of the world.  Nothing matters except the risk at your age (and if you have the data, the risk for your comorbidities).

If all ARIs in a given year kill a similar number of people, and you are NOT concerned about those, you should not be concerned about this one. That's the take away. This idiotic, undemonstrated NPIs being pushed need to have a trigger. Pick a number that can be unambiguously determined, and let's see it. IFR >X and we destroy the world, IFR <X and apparently we ignore it. Flu is never 1 flu, we have a few in circulation each year. Should we only be concerned about a flu season when ONE strain exceeds some value, or should we aportion our concern to the entirely of the season, with however many strains are causing harm? Clearly the latter.

Lockdowns are idiotic, and not without real human cost. Not just happiness, and security, but actual loss of life. CDC says that 2/3 of the excess deaths so far are COVID—so 1/3 is deaths caused by the interventions (delayed care, etc). That's a real cost, and if saving a 90 YO in a nursing home so they can die of RSV in 6 months anyway is worth losing a 40 YO to heart disease... you're doing different math than I am.

Targeted mitigations are, and have been just fine. Try to minimize mortality.

Universal "mitigations" that are not demonstrated to be effective, and have shown themselves in the last X months to be uncorrelated to outcomes make no sense to double down on. (universal mitigations also equalize risk, and the risk is grossly different for different age cohorts, orders of magnitude different).

 

PS: It's "kinda normal" for people under 60. The risk relative to seasonal flu even for MY age cohort (50-59) is only slightly higher than annual flu risk (comparing IFRs as a function of age, not population level risk), and COVID-19 risk proportions to age. I am at substantially more risk than someone in the cohort below me (40-49)—which effectively means below 50 there is almost no relative risk compared to previous years).

Edited November 25, 2020 by tater

[tater]

9 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Also keep in mind that these death numbers occur while society is bent over backwards trying to stop them. The flu seasons tend to rage on without people wearing masks, disinfecting their hands, or socially distancing, and with international/regional/local travel ticking in high gear.  Covid is being fought tooth and nail, and still there are lots more deaths than flu seasons normally cause. If we had done as little to combat its spread as we normally do for flu, things would have been a whole lot worse. 

With a annual vaccine, with the most at risk vaccinated at a high rate (60%+ for >65 I think), and an R₀ of ~1.3 (total outbreak size of ~23% of the pop).

If you think that we are "fighting this," it should be trivial to show how outcomes directly correlate to stringency.  They don't (not in the right direction, anyway). NY "fought" the virus by it running its course. Ditto the entire NE.

The only real "fighting" done is front line physicians figuring out how to best treat people, and the people making vaccines. The argument goes that if the mitigations don't show they worked, they were not strong enough, or lacked compliance, how do you falsify NPI claims? All the incentives are wrong. Pols do all the things (at once, so we can't tease out efficacy because they are confounded) with no controls, and if they have a mild course in their area, they claim it was the NPI, if it was bad, "it would have been worse." Those are positive claims that need to be demonstrated. Any place that did more NPIs and didn't do much better than Sweden is suspect, IMO, and they need to prove their mitigations worked.

The NPIs have not demonstrated efficacy—bodies are piled in the street in FL, right? I mean they've been open 2 months, it must make NYC look like NZ, right? Yeah, nope (probably more to do with climate than anything else, even though they have an older, and hence more at risk population).

Any mitigation until vaccine (that's the drill at this point), should have been sustainable.

Destroying the travel and food service industries, plus any business that is not owned by Jeff Bezos to save people so they can die of a different ARI later this year or next (RSV, etc) seems like a not great idea.

Tell people facts, and let them make their own decisions. Provide support for people actually at risk (pretty much the elderly and the morbidly obese) so they can isolate themselves if they prefer. The only impact on employers should probably have been to actually allow sick people to stay home (vs current incentives). You could even close mass gatherings (conventions, etc). Those are all NPIs that can be sustained almost indefinitely. Telling my wife's Pilates instructor she can't teach 1 on 1 classes is insane—meanwhile for 3 days in a row I have driven past the yellow signs with arrows pointing to the filming location they are shooting at (being from Hollywood makes you immune, you see, not to mention, "essential" (non-essential fully closed in NM right now)).

 

 

[tater]

20 hours ago, Scotius said:

My family got lucky then. My uncle and his oldest daughter got sick, but managed to recover - though uncle suffered from pulmonary problems early on. Curiously, my cousin's husband completely avoided the infection.

If they were not elderly, or seriously compromised to start with, they "managed to recover" from something with a mortality slightly worse than seasonal flu assuming they don't all live in assisted living.

COVID-19 is killing people because many more are infected, not because it is grossly more deadly.

The CDC says 11 times as many people have had this as have tested positive.

As of today the US is 12.4M positive tests, so that implies 136.4 M infections so far using CDC's math. ~41% of the population. More than 2X a bad flu year worth of infections. Slightly more mortality per infection, plus many more infections means a substantially larger death toll.

On the plus side, not many need to be vaccinated to hit the HIT, even if it is really high, like 60%. The trick of course is that they need to be people that have not already had it, and most who had it have no idea they had it already.

[K^2]

5 hours ago, tater said:

If they were not elderly, or seriously compromised to start with, they "managed to recover" from something with a mortality slightly worse than seasonal flu assuming they don't all live in assisted living.

COVID-19 is killing people because many more are infected, not because it is grossly more deadly.

It seems like part of the problem is that it's a different segment of population that's unusually vulnerable to COVID compared to influenza. The elderly and immuno-deficient are an overlap, of course, but it also kills people in their 30s and 40s with no pre-existing condition, which is unusual and scary.

Some of the recent publications point to a potential cause in that a significant fraction of patients with severe COVID cases, these requiring hospitalization, have certain types of autoantibodies related to function of interferons, which are part of the system allowing immune system to identify infected cells. (article) So in effect, immune system might be fighting parts of itself, allowing corona virus to spread.

It's notable that some of the genes known to be related to autoimmune conditions also caused by IFN autoantibodies are located on the X chromosome, which might be an explanation for why severe cases of COVID are more common in men.

 

All of this still needs way, way more research. In particular, I haven't seen any work focused on finding out if COVID somehow triggers autoimmune response or simply happens to be significantly more dangerous to individuals with an existing, but undiscovered condition. But regardless, unlike the influenza, where people particularly vulnerable to it tend to know that they don't handle influenza well, COVID can turn out to be exceptionally severe or even deadly to people who don't suspect any problems with their own health.

Of course, that's just one more reason to be more careful. Wear mask (for others' sake), use disinfectant, and avoid crowds, even if you think you're young and healthy. With COVID, you just can't know.

[sevenperforce]

16 hours ago, tater said:

It's not normal, it's about like 1968, the response to which was... nothing at all. I managed to survive that one, and my dad doesn't remember it being anything they worried about. My in-laws said the same thing (and they were likely paying more attention as medical people).

The 1968 influenza epidemic killed an estimated one million people worldwide in just over a year and a half, or about 50,000 per month. COVID-19 has killed 1.4 million people in under a year...and those are only the confirmed deaths. Using the same estimation framework used for the 1968 flu, that's 170,667 deaths per month. And yes, there are more people alive today, but the seasonal flu is also much less deadly today because we have much better therapeutics than we had half a century ago. The average flu season between 1967 and 1976 killed about 35 people per 100,000 in the U.S.; the 1968 influenza pandemic killed 50 people per 100,000. That's only a 42% increase.

In comparison, the average flu season between 2010 and 2018 killed less than 12 people per 100,000 in the United States. Current projections have the death toll for COVID-19 reaching 150 people per 100,000 in the United States by February. That's a 1164% increase. It's not even close.

And you're correct -- there weren't many mitigation measures taken in 1968. But travel was simply not the same in the 60s and 70s. For example, the number of airline passenger tickets in 1970 represented 8.4% of the world population; today, the number of airline passenger tickets represents 47% of the world population. So mitigation strategies just weren't comparable.

17 hours ago, tater said:

It's "kinda normal" for people under 60. The risk relative to seasonal flu even for MY age cohort (50-59) is only slightly higher than annual flu risk (comparing IFRs as a function of age, not population level risk), and COVID-19 risk proportions to age. I am at substantially more risk than someone in the cohort below me (40-49)—which effectively means below 50 there is almost no relative risk compared to previous years).

Calculating those numbers based on IFR is pointless because COVID-19 is far, far more transmissible than influenza. You have to look at the actual number of per capita deaths within each cohort.

During the 2018-2019 influenza season, the number of deaths per 100k in the U.S. was 1.8 for the 18-49 cohort, 9.0 for the 50-64 cohort, and 48.7 for the 65+ cohort.

I looked up the current COVID-associated deaths by age bracket. Adjusting those numbers by the February projections, the number of COVID-19 deaths per 100k in the U.S. will be 60 for the 18-49 cohort, 178 for the 50-64 cohort, and 466 for the 65+ cohort. Even if you subtract the number of deaths which would have happened due to flu anyway, that's a 3,000% increase in deaths per capita for the 18-49 cohort, an 1,870% increase in deaths per capita for the 50-64 cohort, and an 860% increase in deaths for the 65+ cohort.

17 hours ago, tater said:

The argument goes that if the mitigations don't show they worked, they were not strong enough, or lacked compliance, how do you falsify NPI claims? All the incentives are wrong. Pols do all the things (at once, so we can't tease out efficacy because they are confounded) with no controls, and if they have a mild course in their area, they claim it was the NPI, if it was bad, "it would have been worse."

I agree, comparative studies of mitigation strategies are very challenging because we do not know the base rates, susceptibility, pre-existing resistance rates, or really anything else.

17 hours ago, tater said:

The NPIs have not demonstrated efficacy—bodies are piled in the street in FL, right? I mean they've been open 2 months, it must make NYC look like NZ, right? Yeah, nope (probably more to do with climate than anything else, even though they have an older, and hence more at risk population).

Any mitigation until vaccine (that's the drill at this point), should have been sustainable.

The population density of New York City is more than thirty times the population density of Florida's densest and most populous counties. That alone more than explains the difference. Then you factor in things like average income, access to healthcare, and so on.

But yes, any mitigation until vaccine should have been sustainable. I agree.

17 hours ago, tater said:

Tell people facts, and let them make their own decisions. Provide support for people actually at risk (pretty much the elderly and the morbidly obese) so they can isolate themselves if they prefer. The only impact on employers should probably have been to actually allow sick people to stay home (vs current incentives). You could even close mass gatherings (conventions, etc). Those are all NPIs that can be sustained almost indefinitely. Telling my wife's Pilates instructor she can't teach 1 on 1 classes is insane—meanwhile for 3 days in a row I have driven past the yellow signs with arrows pointing to the filming location they are shooting at (being from Hollywood makes you immune, you see, not to mention, "essential" (non-essential fully closed in NM right now)).

I'll take these one at a time.

• "Tell people facts, and let them make their own decisions." Bad idea. People are dumb and they are immune to facts. Public health officials, not Facebook misinformation threads, should be leading the response to a pandemic.
• "Provide support for people actually at risk..." The risk is hundreds to thousands of times greater for ALL age groups.
• "The only impact on employers should probably have been to actually allow sick people to stay home." Federally-funded incentive programs would be great, yeah.
• "You could even close mass gatherings." Agreed. But we really haven't done that consistently, which has resulted in repeated superspreader events.
• "Telling my wife's Pilates instructor she can't teach 1 on 1 classes is insane..." See, here's the problem. Public health officials have to make recommendations that can be broadly implemented and enforced. I'm sure that the risks of 1-on-1 Pilates lessons are minor, but you have to come up with broad categories. At the end of the day, maybe the category boundaries could have been better-chosen. I'm sure they also could have been worse-chosen.

11 hours ago, K^2 said:

All of this still needs way, way more research. In particular, I haven't seen any work focused on finding out if COVID somehow triggers autoimmune response or simply happens to be significantly more dangerous to individuals with an existing, but undiscovered condition. But regardless, unlike the influenza, where people particularly vulnerable to it tend to know that they don't handle influenza well, COVID can turn out to be exceptionally severe or even deadly to people who don't suspect any problems with their own health.

Agreed.

[DunaManiac]

21 hours ago, tater said:

Tell people facts, and let them make their own decisions.

Doesn't usually work. Most of the time people are incredibly susceptible to misinformation, especially because almost 50% of all adults in the US alone get their news from Social Media, which isn't very reliable as it is. Besides, even if assuming that everyone knows the facts, not everyone would choose the right decision.

[DDE]

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472

Quote

Background
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, was first identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, with subsequent worldwide spread. The first U.S. cases were identified in January 2020.

Methods
To determine if SARS-CoV-2 reactive antibodies were present in sera prior to the first identified case in the U.S. on January 19, 2020, residual archived samples from 7,389 routine blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from December 13, 2019 to January 17, 2020, from donors resident in nine states (California, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin) were tested at CDC for anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Specimens reactive by pan-immunoglobulin (pan Ig) enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) against the full spike protein were tested by IgG and IgM ELISAs, microneutralization test, Ortho total Ig S1 ELISA, and receptor binding domain / Ace2 blocking activity assay.

Results
Of the 7,389 samples, 106 were reactive by pan Ig. Of these 106 specimens, 90 were available for further testing. Eighty four of 90 had neutralizing activity, 1 had S1 binding activity, and 1 had receptor binding domain / Ace2 blocking activity >50%, suggesting the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2-reactive antibodies. Donations with reactivity occurred in all nine states.

Conclusions
These findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may have been introduced into the United States prior to January 19, 2020.

Remember that batexcrements theory (*ba-dum-tss*) by China's foreign ministry spokesman, claiming that COVID was circulating in the US for a almost year before coming to Wuhan?

[Scotius]

So, roughly 0,7% of tested Americans carried signs of infection. Nothing much happened. Then it got to Wuhan and... pandemic exploded? I'm not a virologist, but it looks like a weird behavior from a pathogen. After all there are plenty of dense population centers in USA for a virus to go all out too.

[DDE]

5 hours ago, Scotius said:

So, roughly 0,7% of tested Americans carried signs of infection. Nothing much happened. Then it got to Wuhan and... pandemic exploded? I'm not a virologist, but it looks like a weird behavior from a pathogen. After all there are plenty of dense population centers in USA for a virus to go all out too.

Agreed. The same goes of reports of COVID being unnoticed in the south-east Asia countries for months - same countries where it was subsequently squashed relatively easily and efficiently.

[tater]

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub 0pubmed

Quote

Results: Among 3410 close contacts, 127 (3.7% [95% CI, 3.1% to 4.4%]) were secondarily infected. Of these 127 persons, 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical. Compared with the household setting (10.3%), the secondary attack rate was lower for exposures in health care settings (1.0%; odds ratio [OR], 0.09 [CI, 0.04 to 0.20]) and on public transportation (0.1%; OR, 0.01 [CI, 0.00 to 0.08]). The secondary attack rate increased with the severity of index cases, from 0.3% (CI, 0.0% to 1.0%) for asymptomatic to 3.3% (CI, 1.8% to 4.8%) for mild, 5.6% (CI, 4.4% to 6.8%) for moderate, and 6.2% (CI, 3.2% to 9.1%) for severe or critical cases. Index cases with expectoration were associated with higher risk for secondary infection (13.6% vs. 3.0% for index cases without expectoration; OR, 4.81 [CI, 3.35 to 6.93]).

Yet another paper showing what Fauci said in January: asymptomatic people are not significant drivers of respiratory disease outbreaks.

Sick people should self-isolate, everyone else should go about their business as usual.

[lajoswinkler]

This thread's title should be changed. "Coronavirus" is the name of virus family. There's a lot of coronaviruses. The ones causing SARS and MERS are also coronaviruses. And I assure you, others will come, as well.

This virus has been known by "new coronavirus" or nCoV-19 before it got the name SARS-CoV-2, and the illness it produces is called COVID-19 (compare it to HIV causing AIDS).

I don't know why are people so squeamish of using correct names. It's been a year since it was detected. Pandering to mediocrity is a bad thing.

Change the title to "COVID-19 (new coronavirus disease)" and that's it...

[sevenperforce]

On 12/2/2020 at 7:06 AM, DDE said:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472

Remember that batexcrements theory (*ba-dum-tss*) by China's foreign ministry spokesman, claiming that COVID was circulating in the US for a almost year before coming to Wuhan?

As usual, antibody tests have a higher false positive rate than PCR tests because they can trip on other coronaviruses........particularly NL63.........which also binds to ACES2............

3 hours ago, tater said:

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub 0pubmed

Quote

Results: Among 3410 close contacts, 127 (3.7% [95% CI, 3.1% to 4.4%]) were secondarily infected. Of these 127 persons, 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical. Compared with the household setting (10.3%), the secondary attack rate was lower for exposures in health care settings (1.0%; odds ratio [OR], 0.09 [CI, 0.04 to 0.20]) and on public transportation (0.1%; OR, 0.01 [CI, 0.00 to 0.08]). The secondary attack rate increased with the severity of index cases, from 0.3% (CI, 0.0% to 1.0%) for asymptomatic to 3.3% (CI, 1.8% to 4.8%) for mild, 5.6% (CI, 4.4% to 6.8%) for moderate, and 6.2% (CI, 3.2% to 9.1%) for severe or critical cases. Index cases with expectoration were associated with higher risk for secondary infection (13.6% vs. 3.0% for index cases without expectoration; OR, 4.81 [CI, 3.35 to 6.93]).

Yet another paper showing what Fauci said in January: asymptomatic people are not significant drivers of respiratory disease outbreaks.

Sick people should self-isolate, everyone else should go about their business as usual.

Ugh. No. I hate arguing with you on this but I just can't let it stand, because you're not accurately representing the study.

The baseline secondary infection rate for this study was 3.7%.

The secondary infection rate (95% CI) for each class of patients was:

• Asymptomatic: 0%-1%
• Mild: 1.8%-4.8%
• Moderate: 4.4%-6.8%
• Severe: 0.6%-6.0%
• Critical: 4.6%-16.3%

But there are two critical limitations.

First, there were 391 index cases whose contacts were traced. However, 168 of these lacked information on clinical symptoms, and so we don't know how many of them were asymptomatic: it could have been none of them, or half of them, or all of them. Those 223 index cases which did have information on clinical symptoms were linked to 2,610 close contacts, resulting in 121 secondary infections from 68 of those index cases. Only one of those 68 index cases was asymptomatic. The number of asymptomatic index cases going into the study was ALWAYS going to be low because asymptomatic cases are simply less likely to be detected, so the data just isn't large enough to draw meaningful conclusions about asymptomatic transmission.

However, the second problem is much bigger. 

Quote

"There was potential recall bias regarding symptom onset among patients with COVID-19, and the symptoms and severity of index cases were not assessed at the time of exposure to contacts."

That's the problem. Over and over, analysis of actual patients have shown that in all but the most severe cases, the peak-positive presence of the virus (and thus the highest opportunity for secondary infection) occurs before the onset of symptoms. "Sick people should self-isolate" doesn't work. If you do not currently have symptoms, you simply do not know whether you are uninfected, infected and asymptomatic, or infected and presymptomatic. Additionally, for persons with seasonal allergies, mild symptoms will be missed during the period of highest infectiousness. I'm on Zyrtec year-round for my allergies...should I have been self-isolating the entire year?

Fauci was right in January: before COVID-19, asymptomatic transmission had never been a major driver of a pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is one of the first viruses which has significant contagiousness for an extended period of time prior to symptom onset.

This study was able to conclude that patients whose cases were ULTIMATELY more severe generally were more likely to have infected close contacts. This makes sense, because they were the ones who had the highest viral load prior to symptom onset. It does not say that people who are presymptomatic are not a major driver of secondary infection.

Edited December 3, 2020 by sevenperforce

[Serenity]

I read somewhere that vaccines will accelerate the rate of mutations, it will try to survive and be more aggressive, do you think that holds any truth,

are we getting ourselves in more trouble or its part of what's best.Do we even know how it will react with these new m-rna thingies....

Edited December 3, 2020 by Boyster

[Scotius]

9 minutes ago, Boyster said:

I read somewhere that vaccines will accelerate the rate of mutations, it will try to survive and be more aggressive, do you think that holds any truth,

are getting ourselves in more trouble or its part of what's best.Do we even know how it will react with these new m-rna thingies....

Virus can't plan to survive. Nor it can regulate its own aggressiveness. Remember - even now there are plenty of people apparently naturally immune to infection. Virus doesn't spontaneously mutate to circumvent their immunity.

[Serenity]

20 minutes ago, Scotius said:

Virus can't plan to survive. Nor it can regulate its own aggressiveness. Remember - even now there are plenty of people apparently naturally immune to infection. Virus doesn't spontaneously mutate to circumvent their immunity.

Wait...what...?

If viruses needs to go against more defenses doesn't that mean it will mutate faster than if it has an easy job?

I am confused, i am sure i read some articles about this...

Edit, obviously talking about the long term, not in the same person...

Edited December 3, 2020 by Boyster

[cubinator]

13 minutes ago, Boyster said:

Wait...what...?

If virus needs to go against more defenses doesn't that mean it will mutate faster than if it has an easy job?

I am confused, i am sure i read some articles about this...

A vaccine filters out the viruses that can't survive it. If a few viruses happen to be immune to vaccine, due to mutations that happen randomly and without purpose, then you risk eventually ending up with those viruses becoming the common ones, and you need to modify your vaccine. 

Edited December 3, 2020 by cubinator