Coronavirus: Better Call Sol - CORONAMANIA (9 Viewers)

[pete]

Eurovision cancelled.

 

[Lili Marlene]

Decent scaremongering thread to chew on

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[egg_]

Meh. I've enough to be fucking worrying about, thank you very much

 

[hydromancer]

Didn't this come from wild animals? Most likely bats, possibly via pangolins is what I heard

I think one of the worries with farming animals is the amount of antibiotics used which of course won't affect virus since they are not bacteria but there's a potential bacteria could become more resistant to antibiotics over time from overuse in farming. Bat soup is one rumour that some celebrity popularized briefly your probably the bat expert but one of the most numerous animals on earth that also lives in very obscure places.

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[Lili Marlene]

Meh. I've enough to be fucking worrying about, thank you very much

Yeah of course, we all do. The Shock Doctrine works for a reason. I remain hopeful myself.

 

[hermie]

One of my friends' partner is a pharmacist, they've tested a colleague of her's this morning.

My mate has been told 4 to 5 days for a test. Okay we're doing better than the UK and the US but they're perhaps not the best benchmark.

 

[David Kronenbourg]

Isn’t this how Planet of the Apes started?

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[hermie]

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[egg_]

I kinda hate Taleb, but he's giving me hope here so I accept what he's saying

In other news my daughter is currently having a piano lesson in the sitting room via video chat. SO FUTURISTIC!

 

[Unicron]

BT and Arnott's to close this evening. Good call, no need for them to be open

 

[hermie]

Sorry has that been done already? I normally don't see tweets but working from home, I can. Certainly more than a sliver of optimism in what he says there.

 

[Unicron]

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[flashback]

My understanding of herd immunity is that you have to either a) have a vaccine or b) have evidence that people who get the disease can't contract it again.

Have they got either of those? Or are they banking on b being very likely? Hell, you have to put your trust somewhere.

Sort of, yeah.

Herd immunity is a side effect of having greater than some critical proportion of people immune (by immunization or previous infection).

Once you get above that fraction it means even if a carrier goes into the population they're going to encounter few people that they can transfer it to, so the infection keeps on fizzling out.

It's easier to see in those models where you can tune the various params and see how it plays out, but herd immunity relies on there being so few available new hosts the disease can't get a foothold in a population.

Like you said, we don't have a vaccine, we don't have immunity from previous infection, and we don't even know that previous infection grants you immunity.

(Although, I'd be surprised if humans don't become immune after infection... like, I'd almost not believe it. The cases where people have "re-caught" the disease might not have been cleared from the first infection. If you were able to clear infection once, that means you've generated the appropriate battery of Ig cells, and I don't see how suddenly Immunoglobulin memory B cells wouldn't have been generated. Unless you have some hyper-variable parts of the virus like HIV, but still, how would it have been cleared in the first place? Or there could be two types of the virus, although that seems unlikely too, normally it takes a while to subtype off in the human population. Who knows I suppose, not my field.)

 

[hermie]

Well how do people keep getting the cold and flu over and over again? I think the answer is that different strains are continually emerging but, if so, is something similar not possible here?

 

[sleepy]

Hey, what was that band practice software that was being recommended earlier? I thought it was on this thread and @dudley had posted it?
Anyone help, going to try and use it over the next few weeks

Edit: found it. It was on the online Practice thread. Disregard.

 

[flashback]

Well how do people keep getting the cold and flu over and over again? I think the answer is that different strains are continually emerging but, if so, is something similar not possible here?

yeah, that's right. There's different strains of 'flu or cold or Ebola or whatever.

There's two sources of viruses: Other humans or animals. For common cold say, there's an existing virus in the human population, infecting people and moving from host to host. Once you catch that specific strain you generate a special type of cell that memorizes some trait of the infectious agent, and you clear that virus. You don't catch that version of the virus again. If the virus stays in the human population the special trait previously recognized and previously used to define the virus as foreign can change. This "successful" mutation typically takes longer periods of time, usually something on the order of a year let's say.

Then there's the other source, animal. That's where this lad came from. It's really unlikely that animal / human jumps occur. For that to happen twice is really_unlikely squared unlikely. IE really really really unlikely. So, you can be fairly sure there was only one occurrence of the virus jumping from animal to human.

 

[Cormcolash]

View attachment 13673

Found him

 

[hermie]

yeah, that's right. There's different strains of 'flu or cold or Ebola or whatever.

There's two sources of viruses: Other humans or animals. For common cold say, there's an existing virus in the human population, infecting people and moving from host to host. Once you catch that specific strain you generate a special type of cell that memorizes some trait of the infectious agent, and you clear that virus. You don't catch that version of the virus again. If the virus stays in the human population the special trait previously recognized and previously used to define the virus as foreign can change. This "successful" mutation typically takes longer periods of time, usually something on the order of a year let's say.

Then there's the other source, animal. That's where this lad came from. It's really unlikely that animal / human jumps occur. For that to happen twice is really_unlikely squared unlikely. IE really really really unlikely. So, you can be fairly sure there was only one occurrence of the virus jumping from animal to human.

So precisely because this virus is a coronavirus it is very unlikely to mutate in a way that human immune systems cannot recognize it? How unlikely, like if this 'herd immunity' approach were to allow the disease to become extremely widespread does it not leave open this possibility just a little bit? Would that be another point against that approach (apart from the heartless modelling of an acceptable number of deaths).

 

[therealjohnny]

This Side of Paradise: A Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Quarantined in the South of France

NOTE: This is a work of parody and is not an actual letter written by Fitzgerald. - - -Dearest Rosemary, It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a ...

www.mcsweeneys.net

A LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, QUARANTINED IN 1920 IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE DURING THE SPANISH INFLUENZA OUTBREAK.

Dearest Rosemary,

It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.
The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.
You should see the square, oh, it is terrible. I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. The long afternoons rolling forward slowly on the ever-slick bottomless highball. Z. says it’s no excuse to drink, but I just can’t seem to steady my hand. In the distance, from my brooding perch, the shoreline is cloaked in a dull haze where I can discern an unremitting penance that has been heading this way for a long, long while. And yet, amongst the cracked cloudline of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.
Faithfully yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

[flashback]

So precisely because this virus is a coronavirus it is very unlikely to mutate in a way that human immune systems cannot recognize it? How unlikely, like if this 'herd immunity' approach were to allow the disease to become extremely widespread does it not leave open this possibility just a little bit? Would that be another point against that approach (apart from the heartless modelling of an acceptable number of deaths).

Well, Coronaviridae (nice italics there by the way) are pretty common and they're found in human populations. This lad is a type of coronavirus, but it looks like it hasn't been seen before in humans. It's.... like, maybe theoretically possible that *this specific virus* could evolve in a way to become invisible to the immune system more quickly than other viruses, but it's unlikely.

Evolution is a tricky thing, and it relies on mutation. If you mutate too quickly your genome doesn't replicate successfully and you die. Most of the the genome needs to stay the same from generation to generation, so if you're freely changing it you end up in trouble. Some viruses are clever, and have these special hyper variable regions of the virus that can mutate freely, and leave the rest of it safe (like HIV for example). But normally speaking you need to be very conservative with how you mutate your genome, normally you need it to be ~identical to the previous generation. That same limiting factor helps us, because then normally we only have to come up with a solution to the infection one time, and that works forever.

I don't think I'm explaining this very well.


It's like this I suppose: No matter what happens, minimally 50% of the population of humans on earth will get this thing, and at some point herd immunity will kick in. At this point all we're doing is moving the numbers around of when they catch it, so that we can get to this state of herd immunity without destroying our hospitals. All we're trying to do is slow the rate of infection transmission.