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Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big
- Thread starter JosephStalin
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- Dec 17, 2019
The biggest gem from that article is this:Here's an article on "long covid" that we're all supposed to be so scared of now-
What is long covid? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
This article tells you everything you need to know about long covid, what the symptoms are, how long it usually lasts, and whether or not it is real.sebastianrushworth.com
TL;DR it's a collection of vague, self reported symptoms that can't be directly attributed to covid and there are no studies suggesting it exists outside of people's imaginations.
Its like this particular Coronavirus isn't anything special...
Oh and it looks like that same author did a great breakdown about "muh no lasting antibodies". Fucking excellent write-up, takes me back to BIO-1107 and easy to comprehend.
(Archive)
Herd immunity without antibodies?
“Only a minority of people in Sweden have antibodies, so they can’t have herd immunity!”That is the most common argument I’ve been hearing for why Sweden can’t have achieved herd immunity. This is in spite of the fact that the rates of hospitalizations and deaths have dropped continuously since the peak in April, and are now stable at basement levels.
The argument is also made in spite of the fact that the most recent currently available antibody data (showing that 19% in parts of Stockholm had antibodies and 7% in Sweden as a whole had antibodies) is three months old or older. And in terms of covid spread, three months is an eternity.
A study that was carried out in Japan over the summer, looking at the prevalence of antibodies among asymptomatic workers at a number of different locations around Tokyo, found that antibody levels rose from 6% to 47% over the course of the three summer months.
What conclusion can we draw? It is perfectly possible that 50% of Sweden’s population have antibodies by now, which negates the whole premise of the “only a minority have antibodies” argument. We’ll know whether that is true or not when newer antibody data becomes available from the Swedish public health authority later this year.
Apart from that, there are a few reasons why herd immunity might be achieved with only a minority of the population having antibodies, both epidemiological (to do with how the infection spreads in a population), and immunological (to do with how the immune system works).
In the rest of this article I will focus on the immunological reasons why herd immunity is possible when only a minority have antibodies. I have been receiving a lot of e-mails lately asking me about specifics of how the immune system works, so I thought it would be useful to discuss the topic in some detail. The following is a crash course in the workings of the immune system, which should help you to understand the current discussions happening in society about T-cells, antibodies, herd immunity, and whether reported cases of re-infection are real or not.
Innate immunity
The immune system consists of two fundamental parts: the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. The innate immune system is the first part to become activated when the body encounters a new pathogen, and it consists of four parts.The first part is physical and chemical barriers like skin, phlegm, and stomach acid, that serve to make it harder for a pathogen to get further in to the body.
The second part is immune cells that specialize in hunting down and destroying foreign invaders. These include macrophages (literally “big eaters”), which eat or wall off anything foreign that they come across, and neutrophils, which destroy bacteria.
The third part of the innate immune system is proteins, produced by the liver, that interfere with the functioning of pathogens. The most important example is the complement system, which consists of a sequence of different proteins that bind to and disable pathogens. This is the reason people with liver failure are so prone to having severe infections – they no longer have these essential proteins floating around in their bodies.
The fourth part is a collection of internal mechanisms that all cells in the body have to detect when they have been invaded, and which causes them to activate internal defences and to warn neighbouring cells that there is an infection going on. Interferon is one such signaling molecule that is released by cells when they realize that they have been invaded by viruses. It causes the infected cell to lock itself down, making it much harder for viruses to replicate inside it.
The cells, proteins, and internal mechanisms of the innate immune system are all activated in the same basic way. They recognize conserved features that are common among pathogens. An example might be a molecule called lipopolysaccharide, which is common on the surfaces of many bacteria. Another example is double-stranded RNA, which does not exist naturally in the human body, and if it is present inside a cell it is a sign that the cell has been invaded by a virus.
Since the innate immune system is always present and always active, it can react quickly. But since it needs to be able to react to many different types of pathogen (bacteria, viruses, parasites), it is not particularly effective at dealing with any single one. It is like a swiss army knife – it does lots of different jobs, but none of them extremely well. That is where the adaptive immune system comes in.
Adaptive immunity
The adaptive immune system consists of two main parts, T-cells and B-cells. B-cells make antibodies, which are proteins that can bind to pathogens and interfere with them in some way. Antibodies are similar to complement in the sense that they bind to and incapacitate pathogens, but whereas complement is always present and recognizes conserved features shared by many pathogens, antibodies are much more specific, and only appear after the body has encountered a new pathogen for the first time.T-cells are the other part of the adaptive immune system. They can be further subdivided in to several specific types. The two main ones are T-helper cells (also known as CD4+ T-cells) and T-killer cells (also known as CD8+ T-cells).
T-helper cells are the “brain” of the adaptive immune system. They regulate the function of the other parts. Both B-cells and T-killer cells can only become fully activated after T-helper cells have been activated. That is why everyone who has antibodies by definition also has T-cells. T-helper cells are needed in order to activate B-cells.
The fact that T-helper cells are so central to the adaptive immune system is the reason HIV is such a deadly disease. The HIV virus specifically targets T-helper cells, and kills them. Without T-helper cells, the rest of the adaptive immune system cannot become activated, and so the person becomes highly susceptible to other infections. It’s not the HIV itself that kills people, it’s the fact that the immune system becomes too crippled to deal with other infections.
T-killer cells are quite different in function from T-helper cells. They are specifically designed to stop viral infections. Once they have become activated, they search out cells that have become infected by a virus and tell those cells to commit suicide. This prevents the virus-infected cells from releasing more viruses in to the body, and stops the infection in its tracks.
That is why T-killer cells are actually more central to the defence against viruses than antibodies are. T-killer cells keep viruses trapped inside infected cells, which prevents them from spreading and infecting other cells. Antibodies can only attack virus particles that are floating around outside cells – they can bind to and inactivate these virus particles, but they are only really keeping the problem at bay temporarily, because they cannot do anything about the virus particles that are multiplying inside cells. Antibodies are big molecules and have no way of crossing the cell membrane and entering cells. They always only exist outside cells. That is why antibodies are most effective at dealing with big pathogens that always exist outside cells, like most bacteria and parasites.
I mentioned before that B-cells produce antibodies. There are actually several different types of antibodies. When B-cells are first activated, they produce IgM. IgM are short lasting antibodies, generally present in the body for only a month or two at most, and they are not very specific. After a few weeks, the B-cells will usually do something known as “class switching”, where they will stop producing IgM antibodies and instead start producing other types of antibodies that are more specific. These new antibodies are generally much more long lasting than IgM.
There are four types of antibodies that can be produced after class switching. The most common antibody type is IgG, which is also the type most commonly measured in clinical antibody tests. IgG is found throughout the body.
Another important type when it comes to covid-19 is IgA, which is found primarily in areas where the body is in direct contact with the outside world, such as the lining of the respiratory tract and the gut (technically, the contents of the gut are outside the body – weird, right?). The reason IgA is important with regards to covid is that covid is a respiratory virus that is found primarily in the respiratory tract. The main difference between IgG and IgA is that IgA is hardier than IgG. It is designed to exist in harsh environments, like the respiratory tract and gut, where IgG would quickly be degraded.
Why am I talking about IgA? Because a recent study from Switzerland found that 15-20% of people who didn’t have IgG antibodies to covid-19 in their blood stream did have IgA in their respiratory tract. The reason this is important is because most antibody tests only look at IgG in the blood stream, which means that a significant number of people with antibodies to covid will be missed by standard antibody tests.
Immune memory
While the innate immune system is like a swiss army knife, the adaptive immune system is more like a very specific type of screw driver. It only does one job, but it does it very well. The adaptive immune system takes time to wake up the first time the body encounters a new pathogen, but the next time it encounters the same pathogen it reacts much more quickly, thanks to “immune memory”.When the adaptive immune system is activated, some of the T-cells and B-cells will become memory cells. They will bide their time in the body in a state of dormancy, and the next time the body encounters the pathogen, they will quickly become activated and start mass producing clones of themselves. This usually results in the infection being dealt with before the rest of the body even realizes it has become infected.
What does this mean? That having immunity to an infection doesn’t prevent re-infection, as some people seem to think based on media reports of people having a second covid infection in spite of not having any symptoms. It just means that when re-infection happens, the adaptive immune system wakes up so quickly that the infection is dealt with before the rest of the body realizes what has happened. That is what immunity means, that the body reacts so quickly that the pathogen doesn’t have time to do damage, not that the body can’t be reinfected.
One thing to note about immune memory is that memory B-cells are dormant. This means that they are not actively producing any antibodies. So if you just look for antibodies in the bloodstream, you won’t know whether there are memory B-cells present in the body or not. What I’m getting at with this is that just because someone doesn’t have measurable antibodies any more after an infection, doesn’t mean that all the B-cells have disappeared, and doesn’t mean that the person no longer has B-cell based immunity.
A final thing to note is that T-killer cells and B-cells are activated along separate pathways (although both require T-helper cells to be activated). So it is perfectly possible for an infection to result only in T-killer cell activation, and also for an infection to only result in B-cell activation. Either pathway can result in immunity to viral infection. The more severe a viral infection is, the greater the likelihood that both pathways will be activated.
This has been shown clearly by a Swedish study that I wrote an article about a while back. In that study, more serious illness was correlated with a greater likelihood of developing both antibodies and T-cells. However there was a significant number of people who had T-cells specific for covid-19 but who didn’t develop antibodies. Those people likely have immunity to covid-19, but won’t be visible in an antibody test.
Conclusion
I hope this helps people understand the discussions currently going on about T-cells, antibodies, herd immunity, and whether or not people can be reinfected with covid-19, and also helps people to understand why it is perfectly possible to become infected with covid, and develop immunity, without ever developing measureable IgG-antibodies. I hope it also explains why it is perfectly possible to still have functioning immunity even if the antibodies that can be measured in the blood stream disappear after a few months.You might also be interested in my article about why I think Sweden now has herd immunity, or my article about whether you should take fever lowering drugs when you’re sick. If you haven’t already done so, I would strongly urge you to read my guide to scientific method in medical and health science.
Back in late-April/early-May when Georgia was planning to (and did) open up after just 2 weeks of lockdown there was some viral post on Facebook making the rounds by a self-proclaimed gay waiter bemoaning the fact that he would get fired for not going back to work and wouldn't be able to collect unemployment if he chose not to pursue employment. TL;DR: he's an oppressed victim and its a great injustice to ask servers to work during COVID.
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- Jul 29, 2016
If I have to hear one more family dinner table debate over whether someone’s relative is in somebody else’s government mandated “bubble” I’m gonna throw hands like holy shit who cares
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- Oct 7, 2019
Does this imply that as time goes on we may get more vaccination options that are less novel and therefore less dubious than mRNA vaccines? I was under the impression that there is something in particular about coronaviruses that makes more traditional vaccination methods not an option.
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- Jan 6, 2019
yeah, I mean if you’re sick enough to need serious breathing support that alone means you’re likely to have some damage somewhere. Add in the fact that being sedated and intubated is very bad for you in and of itself and this is only done to save your life. Then add in the age profile of the people you’re looking at. Heart attack survivors have huge depression rates - a serious brush with death knocks you, it’s not like movies where the guy has a ‘wonderful life’ moment and skips off happily.
Having said that, there are some slightly fucky things this virus does. A mate of mine (not in the Uk) got her family in the clinic’s CT scanner when one of them tested positive. (Ukraine..., they do things differently there...) and found areas of obvious pneumonia (focal ground glass lesions) even in the asymptomatic children. But then I don’t think anyone has done that for regular respiratory viruses, maybe we’ve just never looked to see if this happens? We’ve also seen a fair bit of liver damage and some cardiac damage. But flu can do that too and rates of liver damage are higher than you’d think due to epic levels of alcohol abuse and lard. It’s not clear if we are seeing covid specific effects or of this happens with novel flu type viruses anyway. Things like flu can result in inflammation of heart tissues even in healthy young people.
If we can get some decent research into this we should find some interesting things that we can apply across viral types.
Nothing I’ve seen so far leads me to think lockdowns are good or that we should be destroying society.
edited to avoid double posting to reply to @smugcat - yeah, I mean there’s nothing particularly worse about an mRNA vaccine in principle. Theyre untested is the issue. The original SARS vaccine candidate caused antibody dependent enhancement and so it got shelved (well that and all the funding being pulled quietly.) I don’t necessarily think a ‘trad’ vaccine is going to be better or safer, what I want to see is solid years worth of safety data on a LOT of subjects, including those who have already had the illness.
A few of the candidates also have some ‘booster’ type techniques which I will be interested to see when they come out.
It’s easy to make a vaccine - any half competent group can bang out a few candidates in the lab. There are well used and various ‘platforms’ for doing it.
The hard bit is making sure what you made is safe and works. Which is why we have trials that cost hundreds of millions and take years. And very often find stuff doesn’t work or is harmful.
What happens when you add this amount of pressure and money into the works and remove liability?
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- Dec 17, 2019
Yes to more options, unless of course somehow only the new unproven methods get past clinical trials while all the other efforts get lost in the ringer.
But IIRC the only two Coronaviruses worth considering a vaccine for were SARS & MERS, and they got a working MERS vaccine in like 2018 or 2019, but the disease had largely fizzled out on its own.
Oh yeah, this can absolutely do some fucky things to the human body, I've never denied that.
I've been raging against the angle that COVID infection means you WILL have lasting damage or even that most will see such lasting damage. Also the idea that these symptoms are somehow "new" for a disease, when the flu and certain cold strains can do the same thing in severe cases.
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- Oct 10, 2014
This makes me wonder if COVID was really circulating that early or if they were using tests prone to insane false positive rates on the samples. There has also been speculation that some people have developed effective COVID antibodies before the pandemic due to exposure to related viruses (hence why the virus seems to simply bounce off a lot of people).
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- May 18, 2014
You know what else would help small businesses? Not forcing them into bankruptcy with lockdowns and restrictions you gigantic faggot.
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- May 30, 2019
Is there even any proof that eating in restaurants and bars lead to any sorts of serious disease spread? I mean, yeah, I understand the logic if you’re meeting up with someone you don’t see on a regular basis and sitting across a table from them for an hour. That prolonged contact would do it. But the amount of respiratory illnesses that I or anyone I know has contracted from another random patron in a restaurant is... well, none.
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- Jul 1, 2017
Aka endless food for the Munchies the next decade-plus. Shit, you'll find Munchies who aren't even born now claiming they caught COVID-19 when someone suffering long COVID. And since we're likely fucked, the government and establishment will probably hand these people truckloads of cash on your dime as part of "dealing with the pandemic".Here's an article on "long covid" that we're all supposed to be so scared of now-
What is long covid? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.
This article tells you everything you need to know about long covid, what the symptoms are, how long it usually lasts, and whether or not it is real.
TL;DR it's a collection of vague, self reported symptoms that can't be directly attributed to covid and there are no studies suggesting it exists outside of people's imaginations.
Just open a restaurant in this faggot's living room. As long as you wear black and say you're peacefully protesting for Black Lives Matter, Mayor Ted will lick your boots. Shit, if you're a black business owner, have your guys and some BLM guys crash Mayor Ted's place again and start selling fried chicken there. If the police try and remove you you'll have every commie in the city fighting for you.
Shit, any black business owner could probably get away with defying this order as long as they say the right social justice words (since it's the police harassing poor BIPOCs trying to make a living), and all the cracker COVID-Stasi in Portland won't say a word lest they be considered racist.
It's extremely low. The easiest way to contract the disease is in cramped indoor settings, which the majority of restaurants aren't since neither your waiter nor people at nearby tables are anywhere near 6 feet of you. The CDC found transmission from surfaces was extremely rare, and we know this some you can count the number of outbreaks linked to grocery stores on one hand. Most transmission appears to occur from all sorts of settings and then spreads in an indoor environment, usually an apartment.
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- Jul 3, 2019
The great state of Iowa also known as The cornfield. Is currently in panic mode although no major lockdowns
Businesses have begun shutting down and peeps Are preparing for a long dark Winter.
https://governor.iowa.gov/press-rel...s-a-state-of-public-health-disaster-emergency
Businesses have begun shutting down and peeps Are preparing for a long dark Winter.
https://governor.iowa.gov/press-rel...s-a-state-of-public-health-disaster-emergency
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spinal gas chamber
kiwifarms.net
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- May 19, 2020
Buy a gift certificate for a business that might not be in business, does this guy own a gift certificate company or what?
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- Oct 21, 2019
Look, I sympathize with the restaurant owners but I rarely order takeout/delivery because the quality is shit compared to eating onsite for most restaurants that are not fast food and the orders come screwed up half the time.
Tomorrow, Tyrant Walz is going to end fall high school sports in the middle of their playoffs. Winter sports will not be allowed to start. He is messing around with holidays and now the greatest Minnesotan pastime: hockey. Will this be the last straw? Who knows.
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- May 18, 2014
I really hope I'm wrong but I suspect the Covid precedent of being able to shut down private industry via executive order will be used against political dissidents in the future
Disagree with the government? Well now your family owned business is shut down indefinitely because of a bad flu season or bad weather. Sorry about that.
Disagree with the government? Well now your family owned business is shut down indefinitely because of a bad flu season or bad weather. Sorry about that.
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- Jan 25, 2020
But DPRK aint bad folks! I really can't even call that country a good example of socialism. Who knows how they handled the disease. My state imposed a two week lockdown freeze and people are pissed, they hate the Governer but can't do shit about it cause the larger cities vote for the D.
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- Jul 3, 2019
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- Dec 17, 2019
Look, COVID only effects people between the hours of 10pm and 5am. Everyone knows that. This will make a huge difference because of all those massive outbreaks at places that are open after 10pm like...nothing comes to mind, but I'm sure there were some. He probably had a super vague story about outbreaks at places after 10pm that have no details at all but are totally true. We also have "mask compliance units" that'll be visiting businesses to make sure they're following the mask mandate. I mean, they already were, they already had signage and such, but we're going to double check, because...well clearly it's these mystical people who don't wear masks that are doing it that no one but the governor and his shills can find, but they totally exist.
I'm really starting to think DeWine's only solution was "everyone wear masks" and now that it hasn't worked all he has is "everyone wear masks harder!" It's kinda sad, to be honest.
ColtWalker1847
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- Dec 20, 2017
They have been playing that game with permitting and licensing for years.
PaleTay
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- Aug 25, 2020
So the government is advising everyone to live like DSP?
I don't know how anyone can see mayors ordering people to avoid going outside and exercise, yet spending money on unhealthy and overpriced meals and trust them in any way.
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