Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ChairmanPoo]

My city's officially stay-at-home as of tomorrow.  We're still allowed to go grocery shopping though, so I'm not sure how much this is changing (I think restaurants have been take-out-only for a while at this point).

It's sort of working in Italy and Spain. Also unavoidable unless you get the army and police to distribute food house to house. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Try to make your purchases ample and infrequent

[Greiger]

I have no idea how accurate it is, but here is an explanation of coronavirus. Maybe someone with more biology experience can comment:

https://www.little-gamers.com/2020/03/25/in-case-you-didnt-know/
...

Not a biologist just someone who dabbles in the kiddy pool that is random science trivia.

From what I can gather the main point of it is that the flu our bodies deal with all the time, so we have some antibodies ready to recognize and fight it all the time. Not enough to completely eliminate it from our systems immediately like an immunity does because the flu mutates enough from year to year for our body to not be 100% sure how to, but enough to mitigate it until our body ramps up to fight it using more specialized mechanisms.  Our body essentially knows what the little spikes on the outside of the virus look like and knows to hit the red alert lever when it sees it.

Coronavirus came from animals, our bodies have NEVER seen this virus before, i imagine it recognizes it as an outside invader and treats it as such, but the body's reaction to outside invaders is ineffective against viruses (If I understand it right it may be actively detrimental).  Out body does not recognize the little spike like protrusions on the outside of the cell like it does the flu that tells it that it needs to fight this differently.

When we are exposed our immune system goes to work, somehow recognizes that the reaction is ineffective, and then there are some other kinds of cells that go out, sacrifice themselves by eating the virus, get a sample of it's dna and then show that dna to the rest of the body.  Once the body knows the virus' dna THEN the body does a proper response to fight it, and in the case of many viruses your body remembers that dna for the rest of it's life and knows how to fight it.

One of the questions that are still up in the air is if coronavirus mutates enough to keep that dna memory effective, or if it changes enough every year to make it hard for the body to tell exactly what it is on a year to year basis.

EDIT for more clarity: We get viruses from animals all the time, but like how our body does not know how to fight it animal viruses don't know how to infiltrate our cells.  Coronavirus basically got lucky and guessed the password to get into our cells and then told that password to all it's millions of kids.

[Iduno]

I have no idea how accurate it is, but here is an explanation of coronavirus. Maybe someone with more biology experience can comment:

https://www.little-gamers.com/2020/03/25/in-case-you-didnt-know/
...

Not a biologist just someone who dabbles in the kiddy pool that is random science trivia.

From what I can gather the main point of it is that the flu our bodies deal with all the time, so we have some antibodies ready to recognize and fight it all the time. Not enough to completely eliminate it from our systems immediately like an immunity does because the flu mutates enough from year to year for our body to not be 100% sure how to, but enough to mitigate it until our body ramps up to fight it using more specialized mechanisms.  Our body essentially knows what the little spikes on the outside of the virus look like and knows to hit the red alert lever when it sees it.

Coronavirus came from animals, our bodies have NEVER seen this virus before, i imagine it recognizes it as an outside invader and treats it as such, but the body's reaction to outside invaders is ineffective against viruses (If I understand it right it may be actively detrimental).  Out body does not recognize the little spike like protrusions on the outside of the cell like it does the flu that tells it that it needs to fight this differently.

When we are exposed our immune system goes to work, somehow recognizes that the reaction is ineffective, and then there are some other kinds of cells that go out, sacrifice themselves by eating the virus, get a sample of it's dna and then show that dna to the rest of the body.  Once the body knows the virus' dna THEN the body does a proper response to fight it, and in the case of many viruses your body remembers that dna for the rest of it's life and knows how to fight it.

One of the questions that are still up in the air is if coronavirus mutates enough to keep that dna memory effective, or if it changes enough every year to make it hard for the body to tell exactly what it is on a year to year basis.

I caught what they meant, I'm just curious about the accuracy. Specifically the speed of mutation. We've got a high enough percentage of people here who either will or cannot get vaccinated, so I'm curious how often we'll see flareups from now on.

[MaximumZero]

My city's officially stay-at-home as of tomorrow.  We're still allowed to go grocery shopping though, so I'm not sure how much this is changing (I think restaurants have been take-out-only for a while at this point).

It's sort of working in Italy and Spain. Also unavoidable unless you get the army and police to distribute food house to house. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Here in the US, that may actually be feasible. The military is certainly fucking big enough.

[ChairmanPoo]

The speed of mutation was not supposed to be brutally high... for a RNA virus, which tend to kutate fast.

I actually managed to find a paper listing the number of nucleotide substitutions of covid19,  and they seemed lower than the flu (numbers were 2.5 for covid19 and 10.5 for the flu or somesuch). I'm no virologist though so, beyond the basic concept of mutation rate (substitutions per nucleotide per cell infection)  I dont know  how to put these numbers into context.
 I think someone here WAS a virologist though? Maybe he can enlighten us.

Anyways the opinions I've read about on the subject spin around that even if it mutates it will take a while and it wont be total vulnerability. So it wont be as bad, hopefully.

[Greiger]

Well it has to mutate to spread to humans, the mutating is basically that guessing the password bit.  I'm not sure about the mutating again to spread human to human, I assumed tha'ts a given because I think it guessing the password becomes encoded into it's dna.  If a virus has the right shape spikey thing to attach to our cells properly I imagine all its kids would too.  But again not a biologist or virologist.

A quick google shows that there are indeed two distinct strains, one being the original strain that jumped to humans, and one being a more aggressive successful evolution but the differences between them are minimal, so minimal that if our body recognizes one strain it will likely recognize the other even if it never saw it before. 

It is apparently constantly evolving because the virus itself does not quite know what is effective at keeping it alive in our bodies yet.  So if I understand that correctly, the virus is basically going under an extreme amount of mutation to try to adapt to our bodies and extend it's viability time, and that makes vaccines challenging.  But we do not yet know if its capable of evolving enough to counter our immune systems.

Yea I recall bay 12 having an actual virologist at one time.  But I'm sure they are busy and don't have time to give an explanation to us at the moment.  If a doctor or our virologist says something that conflicts with anything I said side with them not me.  I just like knowing how stuff works so when stuff like this happens I like to look it up.  Since I started looking it up after it became news I may be misled.

[Frumple]

Far as I'm aware, the crow plague doesn't seem to be mutating particularly fast, no. Nor does it seem to be mutating in a way to render vaccines ineffective against parts of it (some of the confusion on that front appears to be coming from specialists using the term 'strain' differently than casual conversations would -- don't remember much about details, but short version is there being multiple strains doesn't mean we'll need multiple vaccines).

Like, on the vaccination front we frankly seem borderline blessed by CoV-SARS-2. It's so far not showing signs of actually being that "slippery", to use that comic's terminology. At the moment, our timeline on that front is still looking like a year or so for a vaccine being ready to roll out for more or less the global population.

[McTraveller]

Ugh. Viruses don't "try" to do anything.  Please don't anthropomorphize them.

Viruses don't mutate "because they are trying to figure out how to be successful."  Viruses mutate because transcription errors are pretty damn common.

Successful viruses (read: remain in the environment longer) are: environmentally stable (don't fall apart outside a host) and reproduce fast enough without killing their hosts.  The most "successful" viruses therefore don't kill their host at all.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I think we all understand that viruses aren't intelligent beings. However, the process of natural selection acts similar to volition, and so our language often describes it in those terms.

Covid is a successful virus - in bats and pangolins. Human biology merely happens to be able to run the RNA instructions of covid, and very poorly for that difference.

[Jimmy]

A good layman's explanation of the reason COVID-19 is so dangerous.

Also the reason you're SOL if you need hydroxychloroquine. It increases endosomal pH and interferes with the glycosylation of cellular receptors of SARS-CoV. Also immunosuppressant, so great for preventing secondary damage from the immune response to infection. Kind of wish I'd hung onto my last few bottles.

Still pretty slow over here in kangaroo land. Bad time to be asthmatic, since most relievers are gone. Forget about finding face masks, hand sanitizer or gloves too. I'm not holding out too much hope for the salbutamol to return to supply. Last time I toured the facility that manufactures the local brand, their machines broke down three times in the five hours I was there, and that was just a normal workload.

Since then, I know they've actually had several batches of medications from that place recalled because they found 'contaminants' in their product. It was parts of their aging machines that had snapped off and been ground into their drug products. Their equipment is old, worn out and only just able to meet normal demand. Forget about trying to ramp up supply. When you have a government that's been aggressively seeking lower drug costs by cutting supplier margins for decades, you get what you pay for.

[feelotraveller]

A good layman's explanation of the reason COVID-19 is so dangerous.

Nice link. 

In other Australian news our government has decided it is critical that hairdressers keep working.  (They had imposed a 30 minute limit per client but that has now been lifted.)

[wierd]

Hey Poo--- Maybe you can get the files I need (or want..)

My little nursing home is out in the boonies, and not terribly rich. We have absolutely no full-automated respirator of any kind in our kit, and would be unlikely to get one.  We DO have a crash bag with a manual bag respirator.

I also have a (crappy) 3D FDM printer, and a mostly new spool of ABS.

I would like to print out a Leitat 1, but cannot find the STL files anywhere. I understand that it was developed, tested, and approved in Spain. If you can get your grubby little doctor claws on the data for me, I would be appreciative.  It occurs to me that the time to invest in printing is BEFORE we end up with it in the facility, not after.

For those wondering:
https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/leitat-presents-first-medically-validated-industrialized-3d-printed-ventilator/

Its basically a simplified bag squeezer. 

While not approved for use in the US, I would rather face angry bureaucrats, and not have dead residents.

Could this be what you're looking for? I saw this recently.

https://www.oxygen.protofy.xyz/en-blog?fbclid=IwAR0fynHggV5gXFLGUQqNRDiuombN8mXhKQD5jJyyRSQXIIyww0OxGn_I2Fc&lang=es

It's of course an auto ambu-squeezer rather than a ventilator proper. I guess it beats not having anything at all...

As the website says, not validated anywherr, no warranty, use at your own risk, etc..

I'd much rather have a leitat-1, simply because it has actually been tested, and has evidence of being effective as an emergency ventilator supplement.  There *IS* a reason why things get tested and approved, and I would like to at least TRY to honor that as much as possible, even in a time of all out crisis.

I'm sure you know what I mean. 

[Reelya]

From what I can gather the main point of it is that the flu our bodies deal with all the time, so we have some antibodies ready to recognize and fight it all the time. Not enough to completely eliminate it from our systems immediately like an immunity does because the flu mutates enough from year to year for our body to not be 100% sure how to, but enough to mitigate it until our body ramps up to fight it using more specialized mechanisms.  Our body essentially knows what the little spikes on the outside of the virus look like and knows to hit the red alert lever when it sees it.

There's a bigger point here which that article misses out on too. Most years, most people don't get the flu. That may be because similar flus have made the rounds before and if you got that one, or fought it off, you're pretty ok until you're hit with a different flu strain. Something like an average of 1/12 Americans get the flu each year. However, nobody has had anything similar to this new virus so it can infect say 8/12 people, so it could infect 8 times as many people in the first year, and if its death rate is 5-10 times higher than the flu then it could kill 40-80 times as many people as a normal flu year. Assuming an average of 35000 flu deaths per year then you would estimate deaths of 1.4 million to 2.8 million based on those ballpark figures, which is close to what the experts are actually saying.

So the thing with flu is that they're slightly exaggerating the need for it to mutate. Each person on average gets the flu once every 12 years, so it doesn't need to change as much as you'd think from year to year to keep infecting people.

[Cthulhu]

Ugh. Viruses don't "try" to do anything.  Please don't anthropomorphize them.

Viruses don't mutate "because they are trying to figure out how to be successful."  Viruses mutate because transcription errors are pretty damn common.

Successful viruses (read: remain in the environment longer) are: environmentally stable (don't fall apart outside a host) and reproduce fast enough without killing their hosts.  The most "successful" viruses therefore don't kill their host at all.

One, you're being pedantic, nobody's going to be misled if you say a virus is trying to do something, two, anthropomorphization is a great way to model unintelligent systems and is often pretty predictive.  Do you even into egregores.

[martinuzz]

Our government decreed that people who cannot pay their rent anymore cannot be evicted by their landlords / housing corporations for the duration of the crisis.

Furthermore, they cannot be charged any collection costs for being behind on payment.