I would expect our country to do that yes, but not your country or your president. While your government goes out of the way to horde things they’ve already sold, Canada supplies America with the only pulp that makes those masks and put nurses in American border cities. Does anybody care in your country care about this, and realize how bad it makes your country look? What is the strategy if the rest of the world tells you to go fuck yourself and keeps you trapped in your country? I mean... America is no more important than Canada, or China, or Luxembourg. We’re all sharing the planet, all effected by this virus and it does not care about borders.
“Importance” is irrelevant. Canada, China and Luxembourg are not on the same level of the US in terms of economic negotiating authority. The terms of each of the trade deals the US negotiated in the last 2 years, including China, illustrate that pretty clearly. Now ethically? Who knows. But I get why the US government favors protecting US citizens over Canadians. That’s literally the primary job of the government. But removing the invisible line in the dirt, none of that really matters. So I understand the anger, but I also get that it makes sense to do it. I don’t think there’s going to be any real economic retaliation. Sure, there will be a little hand wringing here and there and some symbolic stuff, but nothing meaningful. But maybe I’m wrong.
I've seen it mentioned that if you catch COVID, then you develop antibodies and you aren't going to catch it again. And that they're doing research to, for lack of a better word, harvest these antibodies from people who have had it and giving it to those who are sick, I think in their plasma? So first, once you get it then you aren't able to catch it again, correct? And if that's correct, how long do people's bodies show that they had it at some point? And where do we stand on testing that? It sounds like the vaccine is a long ways off (I understand that several years is still fast development), so is this idea of taking plasma from people who've recovered from COVID something that has legs?
To be clear, it’s a shitty thing for your government to do, especially given the amount of warning they had and how they ignored it. I’m not saying at all that Juice, individually, is an asshole.
I mean he is, because he posts on this board, but he is not personally responsible for the national supply chain of PPE.
So...not exactly. There could be multiple strains, as this thing may mutate from host to host. If you get COVID19, your body will develop antibodies that are effective at neutralizing the virus. They are researching those, yes, to see how they can be simulated in medications, how they can be supported, and if there is a component that can be used to speed up vaccine production among other things (as simple as I can put it). It sounds like you're saying they are taking antibodies from those who have beaten an infection and giving it to the infected, like a blood transfusion and that....doesn't sound right. Once you get it, you may be able to get it again, we don't definitively know. There are reports of Chinese patients getting it twice. And we may be dealing with a mutated strain in that case and not the exact same virus. We don't know how long the antibodies last, a good rule of thumb I've heard is 3-5 years for individuals. We can't really know until those antibodies disappear, and that will take years. We will literally have to test the genetic material of the virus(es) to ensure it's just one strain, and that will again, take a lot of time. The vaccine is at least 18 months away. If it gets here in 18 months, that will be the fastest vaccine development in history. That 18 month figure isn't a real estimate from what I can tell, as much as a more palatable way of saying "Not anytime soon, but also not 'years away' the way scientists talk about an AIDS vaccine or a fusion reactor". One of the reasons you don't want to rush it is...a bad vaccine can make this very much worse, like vaccinating the wrong strain, or causing a mutation with the vaccine that releases a worse virus. Regarding curing via blood transfusion: nah, bruh. It might work in an absolute emergency, but that doesn't scale. One, your blood is not like the oil in a Chevy: passing it from one human to the next has medical repercussions (easy case: blood types). Two, blood isn't going to produce more antibodies sitting on the shelf, so if you found a donor that was clean enough and they had COVID-19 antibodies, the longer they went from donation to infusion, the fewer antibodies make it into the infected recipient. Three: there are around 17,000 recovered, and 360,000 infected. If you eliminate the folks that couldn't donate for whatever reason, there's no way to get enough antibodies via blood to help that scale. Lastly, no guarantee that the antibodies one person produces are going to work in another person's body (think about one person's code to make a website and another person's code: the function might be identical, but the code could be completely different). There's no end to the folks working on possible solutions to this, but that's not striking me as a realistic one.
ok, yeah that's exactly what I was talking about. What you described as unrealistic, I've seen a lot on tv in the states as being a very real solution. The logistics of it all, with scaling it, is what sent up some bs triggers for me.
Quite honestly most of what we're being fed on the TV is BS. The sky is falling. The sky isn't falling. This will work. No, it won't. I've actually found @downndirty 's posts to be the most reliable information I've encountered through this whole thing.
I absolutely agree with you that this is not a scalable solution. That being said, I sat in on a Mass. General Hospital call with some doctors working on this and some serology studies. I might be able to send out the slides from this meeting to those who are interested (can get back on that in a bit). There absolutely are tests that can test for antibodies to show immunity, but they should probably be used for medical professionals and those who need to be exposed to potential carriers for a while. If my understanding of the situation is correct it seems that some people don’t really mount an effective counterattack on the virus, and do not have antibodies detectable. This group seeks to mostly be composed of the elderly, immunocompromised patients, people undergoing chemotherapy, etc. I believe there may be momentum in trying to launch a clinical trial to utilize samples taken from recovered patients for these vulnerable patients on a limited basis, but can’t speak to that in an informed fashion yet. On a positive note, there is progress being made to up private public partnerships and get more testing available for the general population, at least locally. We were just able to hook a local city up with enough capacity for an extra ~150 tests a day with 24 hour turnaround time, and might have another couple locations up and running soon for drive through testing. Considering that this is Los Angeles it’s really a drop in a bucket, but small victories are still nice.
Agree with everything. So many people are talking out of their ass, but with a lack of answers we’ll take anything we think sounds logical. I’ve been trying to turn off the tv and stay away from it but it’s hard to avoid. Extremely thankful for the info on here that I know is presented truthfully and without bias. We might all be idiots, but we also aren’t afraid to say when we don’t know something.
My understanding is that there is a step between nothing and a vaccine, and that is some form of effective treatment. Once we get some form of effective treatment, it will drastically reduce the growth of the numbers and the severity until such time as we get a full on vaccine... and the treatment has nowhere near the runway of a vaccine.
Things like this are happening all over the place. Doctors trying to find anything useful to use as a treatment. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011
I’ll take it. And to be clear, I’m not endorsing what the US is doing in that regard (even though re-reading my post, it kind of sounds like it). But how do you treat a viral infection effectively though? Based on my limited understanding and from what my wife tells me, all you can really do is come up with ways to minimize the symptoms so people stop suffocating.
Just like other viruses - HIV, rhinovirus, influenza - I don't think there is any way to cure a person with the 'rona. You can just treat the symptoms, as you suggest. However, like polio, also a virus, you can be vaccinated against something. People around my age were the last ones in the US to get polio vaccines, because it's a particular virus. Once people are vaccinated, and it can't spread, then it can cease to exist, for all practical purposes. Nobody gets polio vaccines anymore. I think (it's hard to know, there is so much conflicting data and new updates) that unlike the common cold or flu virus, COVID-19 is a specific virus that's not mutating in stronger forms or different forms for which a vaccine won't be effective. So, no cure, but a vaccine to prevent getting it altogether. Also, some FYI stuff: https://www.healthline.com/health-n...on-and-covid-19#What-this-means-for-a-vaccine
WHO is being pressured to force live animal markets to close thank god. Next one could be a fuck of a lot worse.
Jesus Christ, it’s just. Fucking. SHOPPING. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5522500 it’s high time to start making public examples of these thin-skinned sociopaths. And by that, I mean hang them from the sign of the store. With their lopped-off balls in their mouth.