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[Reelya]

Dang, you know it's real when people on Bay12 have it :/

Or alternatively, the deep state has long tentacles.

[Frumple]

Eh... it's possible you've dodged the plague bullet, but... yeah.

Good luck, hopefully you make it through without permanent organ damage

[hector13]

Yeah, the local health department here are all about you contacting people you were in contact with over the previous 48 hours before you develop symptoms.

The phone call I got telling me that happened about 9 days after I tested positive, which itself happened 9 days after I developed symptoms, so:.. yeah. I understand why they have to do it, but... alacrity.

[Zangi]

Dang, you know it's real when people on Bay12 have it :/

Or alternatively, the deep state has long tentacles.

Eh, had it early on.  Just hoping I don’t get a second ride.

[Jopax]

Yeah, the local health department here are all about you contacting people you were in contact with over the previous 48 hours before you develop symptoms.

The phone call I got telling me that happened about 9 days after I tested positive, which itself happened 9 days after I developed symptoms, so:.. yeah. I understand why they have to do it, but... alacrity.

Oh man I wish they bothered with that stuff here. According to my cousin they didn't even bother asking him any contact info. That means I don't really have an official reason to stay out of work, not until I possibly develop enough symptoms to get tested I guess.

[Bumber]

Looks like there may be long-term COVID immunity in most people, after all:

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.

Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.

The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date.

“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.

The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control.

And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering.

The findings are consistent with encouraging evidence emerging from other labs. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by the immunologist Marion Pepper, had earlier shown that certain “memory” cells that were produced following infection with the coronavirus persist for at least three months in the body.

A study published last week also found that people who have recovered from Covid-19 have powerful and protective killer immune cells even when antibodies are not detectable.

[Bumber]

On masks:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/18/flash-on-the-danish-mask-study/

On lockdowns:
https://www.aier.org/article/even-a-military-enforced-quarantine-cant-stop-the-virus-study-reveals/

Thoughts?

[hector13]

The second one is a bit silly. A conservative, libertarian Koch-funded site isn’t going to promote lockdowns.

90% of positive cases were symptomless - which means they’re spreading the disease between the weekly tests - and still only 2% of participants tested positive in what they term an extreme quarantine which really wasn’t that extreme because they essentially just described how a quarantine works, other than maybe the extent of cleaning they did.

Without checking the actual source, what they meant by not having “personal electronics or other items that might contribute to surface transmission” also describes almost literally everything small enough to fit in your hands.

The control group also didn’t seem like much of a control because it doesn’t actually appear they were tested at day 0, so who knows how many of them were positive at the start, and the PCR tests for active infections, not antibodies. It’s also very cheeky they don’t list how many of the control group were symptomatic, because I imagine coughing your lungs up is going to significantly inflate the virus you’re shedding into the environment.

OH THE KICKER! They accuse the media of ignoring the science because one paper supports their position that lockdowns don’t stop the virus. Magic.

I will read the first one now.

Post-read edit: just as silly as the second one.

He even says that surgical masks are better than cloth masks, which is utterly ridiculous.

It’s the same as the second one: an obviously biased person finding one study which supports their position ignoring all the studies suggesting otherwise and shouting “SEE! THEY WON’T LOOK AT THE SCIENCE TELLING THEM THEY’RE WRONG!” without any sense of irony.

[Starver]

Initial tboughts on the initial paragraphs of the mask article (it says it's the "longer version", and glancing at the scrollbar, barely showing at the top, I soon gave up)... Written with a bee in the bonnet. Even if it turns out to be self-consistent and truly have supporting citations, I've no confidence in it being balanced.

And I've seen similar car-crashes from the opposing POV, too, before you ask.

Maybe it's 4am talking (never you mind), but as you asked for thoughts... I'll look at the other later, when my brain is maybe more receptive.

((Ninjaed!)) (((Twice!)))

[Dostoevsky]

I'll pass on the latter two articles (aside from opining that I don't get why masks are so controversial - it's a minor inconvenience at worst and is actually nice and cozy in the cooler months), and instead respond to the above immune response study.

It's promising! But there are a few caveats - I'll quote from their conclusions:

It is well recognized that the magnitude of the antibody response against SARS-CoV-2 is highly heterogenous between individuals. We observed that heterogenous initial antibody responses did not collapse into a homogeneous circulating antibody memory. That heterogeneity is thus a central feature of immune memory to this virus. For antibodies, the responses spanned a ~200-fold range. Additionally, the heterogeneity showed that long-term longitudinal studies will be required to precisely define antibody kinetics to SARS-CoV-2. Nevertheless, at 5+ months PSO, almost all individuals were positive for SARS-CoV-2 spike and RBD IgG.

. . . .

While immune memory is the source of long-term protective immunity, direct conclusions about protective immunity cannot be made on the basis of quantifying SARS-CoV-2 circulating antibodies, memory B cells, CD8+ T cells, and CD4+ T cells, because mechanisms of protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 are not defined in humans.

. . . .

When considering potential connections between immune memory and protective immunity, it is key to consider the available epidemiological data. Individual case reports demonstrate that reinfections with SARS-CoV-2 are occurring (72, 73). What is currently lacking is an epidemiological framework for quantifying how rare or common such reinfection events are. Thus, interpretations of current events are very constrained. There is a high degree of heterogeneity in the magnitude of adaptive immune responses to this novel coronavirus. That heterogeneity was observed in this study to be carried on into the immune memory phase to SARS-CoV-2. As a result of the immune response heterogeneity, as observed in the cohort here, it may be expected that at least a fraction of the SARS-CoV-2-infected population with particularly low immune memory would be susceptible to re-infection relatively quickly.

. . . .

Nevertheless, immune memory consisting of at least three immunological compartments was measurable in ~90% of subjects ≥ 5 months PSO, indicating that durable immunity against 2° COVID-19 disease is a possibility in most individuals.  [emphasis added]

So my read is that in the timeline thus far examined (up to 6 months, which is limited but understandable) there is durability, but there's also really wide variance on the 'initial' level (I mean look at the charts, they're just giant clouds of datapoints when not connecting individuals' timelines). And we don't really know how well different levels of antibodies actually provide (or fail to provide) protection...

Overall, what this suggests to me is that we need to better understand the reason for (and distribution of!) that variance, and whether it can somewhat reliably track with protection against reinfection. Is it 10% of the population with insufficient immune response? 50%? 0.1%? Time will tell.

[feelotraveller]

Just on the mask study - I thought it was commonly understood (but apparently not) that the major purpose of wearing a mask was not to transmit the virus.  Inhaling is not equal to exhaling.  The exhaled material persists on surfaces for some time (longer when its colder, guess we're seeing that more clearly now) and gets picked up from there and transferred later picking your nose, or whatever.  Its the reason gloves are also recommended.  The communal problem is unmasked virus carriers spreading the shit everywhere.  'Nuff said.

[Reelya]

i'll give a quick take on the long-term immunity thing.

Think of it this way: it's a novel disease so we don't have many natural defenses for it, so it infects us easily.

But the flipside is also that it's a novel disease, so it also doesn't have many evolved ways to get around our natural defenses.

Influenza by contrast has been skirting our defenses for thousands of years, so it's a master shape-shifter compared to this virus.

[feelotraveller]

Lets hope none of the mechanisms the ancestor(s) of the virus evolved over thousands to millions of years in bats (probably) are in any way relevant to getting around human defenses.

[ChairmanPoo]

i'll give a quick take on the long-term immunity thing.

Think of it this way: it's a novel disease so we don't have many natural defenses for it, so it infects us easily.

But the flipside is also that it's a novel disease, so it also doesn't have many evolved ways to get around our natural defenses.

Influenza by contrast has been skirting our defenses for thousands of years, so it's a master shape-shifter compared to this virus.

I don't think it works like that

[Reelya]

I think it does. There are genes involved in controlling mutations, and different loci can have different mutation rates. Viruses would definitely have some tweaks going on that mean that they're prone to mutations at the right loci for purpose.

The structure of a virus may also mean it's prone to different type of copying errors, or errors at certain locations and not others. That's the stuff I'm talking about.

Also, think about flu on a meta level. A successful flu virus wants to be at or near the genetic average of all viable flu viruses, such that as many possible mutations lead to viable flu viruses for that host. This maximizes the chance of that particular flu virus mutating into another viable strain that outraces the immune system, whereas viruses which are at or near the edge of the viable gene pool will tend to be weeded out. So as influenza viruses cycle back and forth through the population, any specific viruses that don't have many viable options for mutating to new strains which can outsmart the previous anti-bodies won't tend to replicate as much as ones which have many possible pathways. This would then influence the "meta design" of the virus itself, optimizing it for efficient shape-shifting (measured in : how many possible mutations lead to good variants vs shitty variants).

So there are meta-selection pressures at work, too, to create viruses for which many possible mutations lead to viable routes as possible.

EDIT: another point is about search space size. Natural selection is about optimizing a search space, so you get a fitness landscape, and the genome converges on the local maximum of the fitness function. Successfully evading defenses requires two things: first, there's a second local maximum you can move to which infects the person but evades existing antibodoes, and second, every in-between mutation between the current local maximum and the new local maximum must also be a viable mutation. So, influenza's "search space" may contain many local maximums all with robust mutations in between them that allow many pathways and many variations, and that's the reason it's so successful. However, none of that implies that all viruses have this quality. It could be that the "sweet spot" for the current coronavirus to operate on humans is relatively small and that there are other viable genomes it could use which evade the antibodies for the current one, but there are non-valid genomes in between both sets of mutations, meaning one cannot flip to the other through normal-sized mutation and selection.