Continuation The One Covid-19 Science and Medicine Thread Part 2

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Myriad

...

That's all a rather ad hoc scenario, though. Overall, it's plausible but improbable. I doubt they'll even do an antibody test because at this point if they don't find something else, it wouldn't really make any difference. Doctors are understandably rather blasé about symptoms you had weeks ago.

The only reason to test antibodies is in a prevalence study.

Given the advice to still avoid exposure to COVID is the same regardless, there is no reason for a further diagnostic work up.

Not sure if anyone would follow you up when contact tracing.

[The Atheist]

This is doing the rounds of media right now, and thanks to some pretty strong credentials, it's getting traction:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...ne-expert-says

I'm quite happy to call BS on it.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

This is doing the rounds of media right now, and thanks to some pretty strong credentials, it's getting traction:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...ne-expert-says

I'm quite happy to call BS on it.

Here's the evidence for you that it is indeed BS:

Quote:

Jefferson believes that many viruses lie dormant throughout the globe and emerge when conditions are favourable. It also means they can vanish as quickly as they arrive.

“Where did Sars-1 go? It's just disappeared,” he said.

We know exactly where SARS 1 went. It was snuffed out by careful contact tracing and isolating potentially exposed persons. And if he doesn't know that basic fact, he can't be too knowledgeable.

[Orphia Nay]

World Health Organisation discontinues hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir treatment arms for COVID-19:

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail...G1vp57FChMh6Hk

Quote:

WHO today accepted the recommendation from the Solidarity Trial’s International Steering Committee to discontinue the trial’s hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir arms. The Solidarity Trial was established by WHO to find an effective COVID-19 treatment for hospitalized patients.

The International Steering Committee formulated the recommendation in light of the evidence for hydroxychloroquine vs standard-of-care and for lopinavir/ritonavir vs standard-of-care from the Solidarity trial interim results, and from a review of the evidence from all trials presented at the 1-2 July WHO Summit on COVID-19 research and innovation.

These interim trial results show that hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir produce little or no reduction in the mortality of hospitalized COVID-19 patients when compared to standard of care. Solidarity trial investigators will interrupt the trials with immediate effect.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Here's the evidence for you that it is indeed BS:We know exactly where SARS 1 went.

Yeah that was the one that sent my BS meter into overdrive. The guy's supposed to be a viral expert and didn't know that? The rest of it looked to be skating close to the 5G CT nonsense.

Still, Oxford does have some real work going on, and The Economist puts them as leading the vaccine hunt: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/hea...e-vaccine-race

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

World Health Organisation discontinues hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir/ritonavir treatment arms for COVID-19:

Thanks - I hadn't seen that. Treatment still at square one.

[pipelineaudio]

No, treatment has come a long way. Check out Twiv for the clinical look and what works and what they have learned so far. latest episode especially

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by pipelineaudio

No, treatment has come a long way. Check out Twiv for the clinical look and what works and what they have learned so far. latest episode especially

Mea culpa, I meant drug treatments. Treatment of Covid has indeed come a long way, which is no doubt why the death rate is falling.
___________________________

Meanwhile, the debate over aerosol transmission is being ramped up, with 239 scientists writing an open letter to WHO, which claims the evidence isn't strong enough at this stage.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/who-o...b612083c5e4b1b

[eeyore1954]

Originally Posted by Trebuchet

Late August? Late July seems more likely!

Don’t you think the USA has already had many 100,000 case days. Now we know about more of them.

[Myriad]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

The only reason to test antibodies is in a prevalence study.

The role of antibody tests in the statistics reporting is confusing to me right now. MA has been reporting the results of thousands of antibody tests a week, but there's nothing in the public guidelines, the instructions about who should get tested or what to do if you want to get tested, that even mentions the possibility of getting an antibody test. Maybe they are being used only for prevalence studies.

The strange thing, though, is that positive antibody tests are being classified as "probable cases" and as these are discovered, they're being reported as equivalent to new cases in the day to day numbers. In other words, each day there are "newly reported confirmed cases" (111, yesterday) from PCR testing and "newly reported probable cases" (25, yesterday) from antibody testing, and those are added together as 136 "newly reported cases today." And that's the number that data aggregator sites are using for the number of "new cases" each day in MA. Those time-shifted numbers could become very misleading as time goes on.

Quote:

Given the advice to still avoid exposure to COVID is the same regardless, there is no reason for a further diagnostic work up.

Yeah, exactly. I self-quarantined as if my test result had been positive anyhow. (Why not, it's not like I was feeling up to going out.) The only difference is, if my test had been positive, my wife would have also been quarantined and tested as a recent contact of mine. She had no symptoms at that point (or since), and went to work. All water under the bridge now, in any case.

Quote:

Not sure if anyone would follow you up when contact tracing.

I think MA has contact tracing going, so if my test had been positive there would have been follow up. It would have been easy enough, in my case.

[portlandatheist]

CNN reports Regeneron starts Phase 3 trial of Covid antibody drug

Quote:

The biotechnology company Regeneron announced the late-stage clinical trials of REGN-COV2, its investigational double antibody cocktail for the treatment and prevention of Covid-19, in a news release on Monday.

This is the first I've heard about it. Even if this treatment does pan out, I'm curious about how quickly they could scale up production to make it widely available. I hope this turns out.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by portlandatheist

CNN reports Regeneron starts Phase 3 trial of Covid antibody drug

This is the first I've heard about it. Even if this treatment does pan out, I'm curious about how quickly they could scale up production to make it widely available. I hope this turns out.

That is interesting, and I like the fact they haven't been shouting about it. Looks thoroughly professional and like you, I hope they find something that works.

[Minoosh]

The nursing home and assisted-living facilities where I live show COVID-19 has a pretty firm toehold among both residents and staff. Individual apartments haven't been hit at all. Gradually they are easing up some of the restrictions on apartment dwellers. I can now pick up groceries in the supermarket parking lot.

The thing I wonder about transmission is ... in any kind of shared-housing scenario, including meatpackers living/working in close quarters, prisons and nursing-home residents, it seems to me that the length of exposure matters. Some of the people in the nursing home have 12-hour-long shifts and the residents unfortunately are a captive audience. (Most also have advanced dementia and haven't been able to see family for 3 months). They also rarely see sunlight though there is a sun porch that is glassed-in.

I haven't really tried to follow the science on how it spreads, because I knew this would be a fast-moving situation.

Had to call security last night and this morning trying to retrieve a lost phone and both times they were in the middle of an "emergency." The campus had reportedly prepared a disused building to house COVID-19 cases, but it wasn't needed during the beginning of the lockdown. My guess is Security was involved in moving some active cases to that stand-alone building but I don't know for sure.

This place held the line for MONTHS but now it's at critical mass.

(BTW: From the "cloud" I could tell exactly where my phone was; it's accurate to within a few feet, but I'm not allowed in the building so security had to deliver it. Kind of impressive and scary at the same time.)

[Capsid]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

That is interesting, and I like the fact they haven't been shouting about it. Looks thoroughly professional and like you, I hope they find something that works.

Well it’s a therapy that’s been around for some time. Horse serum was used to treat tetanus in the early 1900s and rabies immunoglobulin therapy is currently used also. It has a good chance of working and lots of trials are underway.


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[TellyKNeasuss]

Originally Posted by portlandatheist

CNN reports Regeneron starts Phase 3 trial of Covid antibody drug

This is the first I've heard about it. Even if this treatment does pan out, I'm curious about how quickly they could scale up production to make it widely available. I hope this turns out.

I didn't quite grasp what this treatment is. Are they creating synthetic antibodies? Or replicating actual antibodies taken from people who have been infected? Or are they creating something that will stimulate the creation of specific antibodies if administered to a person?

[arthwollipot]

Wow.

Quote:

After a record 112 days on a specialised life-support system, a South Korean Covid-19 patient is recovering from double lung transplant surgery, doctors say, in only the ninth such procedure worldwide since the coronavirus outbreak began.

The doctors who conducted the eight-hour surgery described her destroyed lungs as hard like rock, Reuters reports.

The 50-year-old woman was diagnosed with the disease and hospitalised in late February and then spent 16 weeks on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) support, which involves circulating a patient’s blood through a machine that adds oxygen to red blood cells.

That’s the longest that any Covid-19 patient in the world has spent on ECMO support, her doctors said.

Various drugs such as the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, the HIV treatment Kaletra and steroids failed to stop her pulmonary fibrosis - scarring in the lungs - from worsening, said Dr Park Sung-hoon, professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Hallym University Sacred Heart Hospital.

That left few options other than a lung transplant.

“The probability of success in lung transplants on ECMO patients is 50%, and fortunately, our patient was well prepared before the surgery when we found the donor,” said Dr Kim Hyoung-soo, director of the hospital’s ECMO programme, who was in charge of the surgery.

Source

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

The only reason to test antibodies is in a prevalence study.

Given the advice to still avoid exposure to COVID is the same regardless, there is no reason for a further diagnostic work up.

Not sure if anyone would follow you up when contact tracing.

Why though?

Personally, I would like to know whether I have immunity or not, just so I don't have to worry anymore.

[Puppycow]

I was looking at the data from Japan today and I noticed that Tokyo, despite new infections being on the rise, has not recorded a single death due to COVID-19 since 6/24 (13 days ago, almost 2 weeks). In all of Japan, only 9 deaths have been recorded in that same period.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Why though?

Personally, I would like to know whether I have immunity or not, just so I don't have to worry anymore.

Because we don't know yet if people can get reinfected.

[marting]

At this point there should be a large enough set of folks that have been tested in the past for antibodies and were positive to provide preliminary data on the degree of immunity, if any, a prior exposure produces since people continue to get infected.

This is more doable in places that had serological surveys earlier as well as have been experiencing increasing new cases. California in particular.

So where is this data?

[rockinkt]

Originally Posted by marting

At this point there should be a large enough set of folks that have been tested in the past for antibodies and were positive to provide preliminary data on the degree of immunity, if any, a prior exposure produces since people continue to get infected.

This is more doable in places that had serological surveys earlier as well as have been experiencing increasing new cases. California in particular.

So where is this data?

Other than deliberately infecting them - how can you ascertain data for actual exposure much less amount of exposure?

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

Because we don't know yet if people can get reinfected.

Has there been a single verified case of it happening?

Even if we don't know with metaphysical certainty, it's a pretty darn good bet, and furthermore, even if reinfection is possible, is it likely? If a prior infection provides no resistance whatsoever, then we're all doomed anyway because a vaccine will be impossible.


Because the risks here are not only on one side of the equation. Humanity cannot remain on permanent lockdown forever. At some point life has to go back to normal.

Personally as a betting man, if I knew for certain that I had the antibodies, I would be much less worried about getting reinfected (just as I don't worry about getting measles or other diseases that I've been vaccinated for).

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by rockinkt

Other than deliberately infecting them - how can you ascertain data for actual exposure much less amount of exposure?

Compare them with a control group.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Has there been a single verified case of it happening?

No. But it's too soon to know if anyone who has recovered has been re-exposed.

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Even if we don't know with metaphysical certainty, it's a pretty darn good bet, and furthermore, even if reinfection is possible, is it likely? If a prior infection provides no resistance whatsoever, then we're all doomed anyway because a vaccine will be impossible.


Because the risks here are not only on one side of the equation. Humanity cannot remain on permanent lockdown forever. At some point life has to go back to normal.

Personally as a betting man, if I knew for certain that I had the antibodies, I would be much less worried about getting reinfected (just as I don't worry about getting measles or other diseases that I've been vaccinated for).

As an infectious disease practitioner for the last 30 years, I would not take that bet.

If you get the chance to try it out, let us know.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Compare them with a control group.

China has contracted with Canada for their phase 3 trials for this very reason. Since rates of natural exposure in China are way down, there really isn't a good control group. Canada has a high enough rate still that some exposure can be expected in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

China has contracted with Canada for their phase 3 trials for this very reason. Since rates of natural exposure in China are way down, there really isn't a good control group. Canada has a high enough rate still that some exposure can be expected in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.

Since there are already over 1 million recovered patients in the USA alone, a trial should be relatively easy to conduct.

Recruit X number of recovered patients and an equal number of people who haven't had it yet to be a control group.

Exactly how large X needs to be should be a matter for the statistics people to figure out. But the larger, the better.

For this trial you don't need to administer any drugs or placebos, you just need people to agree to be tested every few weeks or so.

Make the control group as close as possible demographically and geographically as the study group. Over time, presumably, some fraction of the control group will test positive. If nobody from the study group, or a significantly smaller fraction than the control group tests positive, you know that they have some immunity or at least resistance to reinfection.

[arthwollipot]

Melbourne is going into a stage 3 lockdown for six weeks while the rest of the states report a trickle of new cases, mostly from returning travellers.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Melbourne is going into a stage 3 lockdown for six weeks while the rest of the states report a trickle of new cases, mostly from returning travellers.

Tokyo is seeing a similar sharp rise. I wonder if a new lockdown is immanent.

[Skeptic Ginger]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Since there are already over 1 million recovered patients in the USA alone, a trial should be relatively easy to conduct.

Recruit X number of recovered patients and an equal number of people who haven't had it yet to be a control group.

Exactly how large X needs to be should be a matter for the statistics people to figure out. But the larger, the better.

For this trial you don't need to administer any drugs or placebos, you just need people to agree to be tested every few weeks or so.

Make the control group as close as possible demographically and geographically as the study group. Over time, presumably, some fraction of the control group will test positive. If nobody from the study group, or a significantly smaller fraction than the control group tests positive, you know that they have some immunity or at least resistance to reinfection.

While I see this is all (misguided) speculation, do you want to be the person that went through a COVID infection who now lets their guard down just to answer your question sooner rather than later?

It's not necessary. We know who people are that have recovered. If/when one turns up with a reinfection, we'll know.

Until then, there's nothing researchers need to do... except wait. That is the ethical thing to do.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger

While I see this is all (misguided) speculation, do you want to be the person that went through a COVID infection who now lets their guard down just to answer your question sooner rather than later?

It's not necessary. We know who people are that have recovered. If/when one turns up with a reinfection, we'll know.

Until then, there's nothing researchers need to do... except wait. That is the ethical thing to do.

I disagree. This is not the same as a "challenge" experiment where you intentionally expose someone to the virus. If I had been though it, unless I had a particularly severe case, I would in fact happily volunteer. If I was one of the asymptomatic ones, I would think it would be a risk worth taking. Mind you, I'm not suggesting anyone go out of their way to expose themselves again, just live your normal life.

In your scenario, how long do we have to wait and how will we know when we know? With over a million recovered patients (over 6 million worldwide) wouldn't we see at least a handful of reinfections by now, if it were possible to be reinfected?

[Orphia Nay]

Originally Posted by Myriad

The role of antibody tests in the statistics reporting is confusing to me right now. MA has been reporting the results of thousands of antibody tests a week, but there's nothing in the public guidelines, the instructions about who should get tested or what to do if you want to get tested, that even mentions the possibility of getting an antibody test. Maybe they are being used only for prevalence studies.

The strange thing, though, is that positive antibody tests are being classified as "probable cases" and as these are discovered, they're being reported as equivalent to new cases in the day to day numbers. In other words, each day there are "newly reported confirmed cases" (111, yesterday) from PCR testing and "newly reported probable cases" (25, yesterday) from antibody testing, and those are added together as 136 "newly reported cases today." And that's the number that data aggregator sites are using for the number of "new cases" each day in MA. Those time-shifted numbers could become very misleading as time goes on.

I'd love to see your source for this, Myriad. Very interesting!

Victoria jumped from about 90 cases on Sunday to 191 today.

Originally Posted by portlandatheist

CNN reports Regeneron starts Phase 3 trial of Covid antibody drug

This is the first I've heard about it. Even if this treatment does pan out, I'm curious about how quickly they could scale up production to make it widely available. I hope this turns out.

Thanks!

I noted these bits:

"Regeneron said last month that its antibody cocktail will be tested in four separate study populations:
people who are hospitalized with Covid-19;
people who have symptoms for the disease, but are not hospitalized;
people who are healthy but are at a high risk for getting sick; and
healthy people who have come into close contact with a person who is sick."

But not testing those who haven't been exposed? Or is that unethical?

And is this aimed to be a cure, not a vaccine?


Also from CNN:

"Regeneron is not the first company to get a Covid-19 antibody therapy into human trials. Eli Lilly and AbCellera started testing their antibody treatment in humans June 1."

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Personally, I would like to know whether I have immunity or not, just so I don't have to worry anymore.

That there goes for me too.

I had my blood taken for an antibody test 2 weeks ago, but haven't got the results back yet.

Originally Posted by marting

At this point there should be a large enough set of folks that have been tested in the past for antibodies and were positive to provide preliminary data on the degree of immunity, if any, a prior exposure produces since people continue to get infected.

This is more doable in places that had serological surveys earlier as well as have been experiencing increasing new cases. California in particular.

So where is this data?

See Myriad's post above?

Maybe now there is more antibody testing there will be more controlled results of known cases after-the-fact.

i.e. I mean that, like me, there were people who got the virus when tests weren't being done, and then later can get an antibody test.

Known knowns, known unknowns etc. Puppycow is an unknown known if he's been tested. I'm still an unknown unknown, officially.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

Puppycow is an unknown known if he's been tested. I'm still an unknown unknown, officially.

To clarify: I have never been tested. I live in Japan, and testing here is not very widespread. They do about 6K tests per day, and while I and may family all had cold-like symptoms back in February, we didn't get tested at the time and haven't been tested since. It's unlikely that we had it though, judging from population studies that have been done since. Only about 0.1% of the people are testing positive for antibodies as of June. Another study by SoftBank found 0.43% of the people they tested had the antibodies.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Has there been a single verified case of it happening?

Even if we don't know with metaphysical certainty, it's a pretty darn good bet, and furthermore, even if reinfection is possible, is it likely? If a prior infection provides no resistance whatsoever, then we're all doomed anyway because a vaccine will be impossible.

I think it's reasonably safe to say infection and consequent antibodies will offer protection for at least several months. The shortest protective period I can think of is norovirus, which is 3-4 months. We know humans build short term resistance to other coronaviruses, so it's not illogical to think we will to Covid.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

Melbourne is going into a stage 3 lockdown for six weeks while the rest of the states report a trickle of new cases, mostly from returning travellers.

I'd like to think some heads will roll over this - an extreme cock-up which is going to cost the state billions.

[Capsid]

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

I didn't quite grasp what this treatment is. Are they creating synthetic antibodies? Or replicating actual antibodies taken from people who have been infected? Or are they creating something that will stimulate the creation of specific antibodies if administered to a person?

Recombinant antibody technology allows for the production of the entire human antibody library and these are rapidly screened to identify clonal antibodies that can be manufactured to high volumes and purified for therapeutic use. Or the DNA isolated from the B cells of infected individuals can be isolated and developed into clonal antibodies. The last bit is not what they are doing, this would be a vaccine.

[Myriad]

Originally Posted by Orphia Nay

I'd love to see your source for this, Myriad. Very interesting!

For Massachusetts, it's spelled out pretty clearly in the daily "dashboard" document, on the initial summary pages. Note that the document itself is clear about distinguishing between PCR nasal swab tests (they use the term "molecular" tests) and antibody tests. It's when a data aggregator extracts one single number from all those results that the meaning gets a little garbled.

Here's Sunday's Massachusetts daily dashboard that I was referring to: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-da...-2020/download

An archive of past MA daily dashboards is here: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/ar...-massachusetts

And, just in the last two days, the formatting of the MA dashboard has changed, so that it now emphasizes only the confirmed (molecular/PCR tested) cases on the summary page, and describes the antibody test figures separately on a later page, and no longer sums their respective "new" case figures together. I guess I wasn't the only one complaining that that could be misleading.

Here's Monday's Massachusetts daily dashboard, with the changed format: https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-da...-2020/download

Most or all U.S. states have some sort of similar daily dashboard. You can usually find them by googling "[name of state] covid dashboard" and it might take a few clicks from there.

[marting]

There's enough data now to establish that there is some degree of immunity after recovering. What there isn't is enough data to establish that there is immunity beyond a short timeframe.

Looking at the USA data, by 4/27/20, there were 1,000,000 cases with PCR testing. By 6/7/20 that had doubled to 2,000,000. By 7/6/20 it had reached 3,000,000.

The reasonable assumption that 500,000 of the initial set were milder and not hospitalized and recovered at home within a 1 week period leaves a pretty big group of people that were going about their business in June. Further I assume these people behaved similarly to the population as a whole. This is a conservative assumption since I expect a significant percentage figured that they had already got it, were immune, and even if they got it again it wouldn't be serious.

So how does that work out?

If we take the estimate that for every 20 persons infected only 1 gets PCR tested positive.

That would mean in June roughly 1.5% more of the US population was infected.

Let's start with the null assumption that there is no immunity.

1.5% of the 500,000 previously recovered is 7,500 people newly re-infected folks. If one out of 20 of these then got tested that should be around 375 PCR positives on people that had recovered it there was no short term (beyond a few weeks) immunity.

Assuming that case tracking isn't completely broken in the USA, if that was occurring all sorts of alarm bells would be ringing. But the data is there, it just isn't published which probably means that it is a much smaller number than 375.

So the evidence is that there is at least a significant degree of short term immunity. But this tells us little about whether such immunity lasts more than a few months. That remains the critical question. Over time we will learn more about how long and how much of immunity lasts.

[JeanTate]

Originally Posted by marting

There's enough data now to establish that there is some degree of immunity after recovering. What there isn't is enough data to establish that there is immunity beyond a short timeframe.

Looking at the USA data, by 4/27/20, there were 1,000,000 cases with PCR testing. By 6/7/20 that had doubled to 2,000,000. By 7/6/20 it had reached 3,000,000.

The reasonable assumption that 500,000 of the initial set were milder and not hospitalized and recovered at home within a 1 week period leaves a pretty big group of people that were going about their business in June. Further I assume these people behaved similarly to the population as a whole. This is a conservative assumption since I expect a significant percentage figured that they had already got it, were immune, and even if they got it again it wouldn't be serious.

So how does that work out?

If we take the estimate that for every 20 persons infected only 1 gets PCR tested positive.

That would mean in June roughly 1.5% more of the US population was infected.

Let's start with the null assumption that there is no immunity.

1.5% of the 500,000 previously recovered is 7,500 people newly re-infected folks. If one out of 20 of these then got tested that should be around 375 PCR positives on people that had recovered it there was no short term (beyond a few weeks) immunity.

Assuming that case tracking isn't completely broken in the USA, if that was occurring all sorts of alarm bells would be ringing. But the data is there, it just isn't published which probably means that it is a much smaller number than 375.

So the evidence is that there is at least a significant degree of short term immunity. But this tells us little about whether such immunity lasts more than a few months. That remains the critical question. Over time we will learn more about how long and how much of immunity lasts.

Good!

Quibbles:
- just how “significant” the degree of short term immunity is is important: nearly everyone has it, but there are big variations in duration, protective power etc (maybe oldies have much shorter, weaker immunity?)?
- in some places in the US case tracing is likely robust, in others not so much; for sure how good it’s been, in any place, has surely varied a lot over the last ~four months.

[TellyKNeasuss]

This article says that traces of SARS-CoV-2 were found in a wastewater sample in Spain in March. 2019!

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Co...FAi6mc1N64bMxo

[Capsid]

Originally Posted by TellyKNeasuss

This article says that traces of SARS-CoV-2 were found in a wastewater sample in Spain in March. 2019!

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Co...FAi6mc1N64bMxo

I am sceptical of their assay. It’s not at all definitive data. Others have questioned it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Max_mang]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

Has there been a single verified case of it happening?

Even if we don't know with metaphysical certainty, it's a pretty darn good bet, and furthermore, even if reinfection is possible, is it likely? If a prior infection provides no resistance whatsoever, then we're all doomed anyway because a vaccine will be impossible.


Because the risks here are not only on one side of the equation. Humanity cannot remain on permanent lockdown forever. At some point life has to go back to normal.

Personally as a betting man, if I knew for certain that I had the antibodies, I would be much less worried about getting reinfected (just as I don't worry about getting measles or other diseases that I've been vaccinated for).

This is the kind of optimistic "I'm sure it will be fine" mindset that got most of the world in the situation we're all in now.