Methods to Combat the COVID-19 Coronavirus

I really don't understand this...the WHO has a test for this that only takes a few hours. Apparently the US isn't using it. Wtf is that all about?

Yes it'll mutate, but no - it's unlikely to mutate into something more deadly. The common cold has been mutating for thousands of years, every year, and yet it's still just an annoyance. The most lethal threats are the ones that suddenly jump species, like this virus did - we have no herd immunity to them so they spread like wildfire through the human population.

We're lucky that this one only kills less than 3.5% of the infected; it could've been much much worse.

 

Yeah I've been noticing that too. At first I assumed that the World Health Organization had the right answer of 3.4%, but as I've been reading more lately it seems that they're basing their numbers on official cases - that is, people who had had a severe enough problem that they sought medical help. There appears to be a large number of people who don't get very sick and don't seek medical help - they wouldn't get counted in the official number of cases. So depending on the size of that fraction, the number can go down a little bit or by a sizable fraction.

Which brings us back to the testing problem: hardly anyone is getting tested, because the cheap pricks running our government don't want to spend money on saving millions of people from a lethal virus. Without widespread testing, everyone is guessing at the numbers.

Also, the mortality rate depends on the hospital care. Iirc, the US has only 95,000 ventilators. So if we end up with 500,000 people in need of ventilators at the same time, the mortality rate will skyrocket.

Since I'm a cynic and I believe that government incompetence has already doomed us to the worst-case scenario, I'm expecting 50-70% of the population to catch the virus, and 3.4-5% of those people to die because they won't be able to get proper medical treatment, whereas maybe <1% of them would've died if we'd acted when it still mattered.

The rotten choice that we have now is this: our best hope for saving lives, at this point, is to slow the spread of the virus so our medical infrastructure doesn't get completely overwhelmed all at once. But if we succeed in that, then we'll be dealing with this outbreak for an entire year or more.

Welcome to the lose-lose scenario.

 

Yep. But it doesn't make the news when tens of thousands of people in the third world die every day from preventable hunger and diseases, or from our bombs raining down on their heads, so I doubt we'll hear about their mortalities from the coronavirus either.

This is a form of the common cold. It'll probably keep mutating, and keep reinfecting people and killing old people - a deadly form of the common cold that keeps coming back year after year after year...

Too bad medical science can't come up with a cure for the common cold and other coronaviruses - looks to me like life will keep being shittier than ever for the foreseeable future.

 

Yes. It's like the common cold in that way - once you've beaten a strain of the common cold, you'll never come down with that strain of the cold again (unless you become severely immunocompromised). But most of us have had more than one cold in our lifetimes because new strains arise rapidly...like every year rapidly.

A recent paper by Chinese researchers asserts that there are two strains of this new coronavirus, an "S" strain and an "L" strain. They seem to think that you can get infected by both strains at the same time:

"A controversial research paper claims the new coronavirus has split into two distinct strains and that it is possible to be infected with both, but some experts are unconvinced." March 5, 2020
Coronavirus researchers claim virus has split into two strains, but many experts disagree

It's still unclear if a patient can catch one strain, beat it, and then catch the second strain. Or if patients will have a higher mortality rate if they become infected with both strains. And that's a hugely important question. But we can't answer these questions yet - typically one paper does not a scientific fact make; lots of individual papers have been wrong in the long march of science, and some experts have been grousing about the quality of that research paper.

So all we can say at the moment is that there might be effectively two strains of this virus, and that might be significant.

But here's a worrying thing: the more people this virus infects, the higher the chances that it will mutate enough that the body's immune response to one strain won't work against the new strain. And, like the common cold, there's a very good chance that this will indeed happen over time, and we could see an entirely new strain of this thing every year, just like the common cold....except more deadly.

 

This sounds like BS to me. The new coronavirus is extremely contagious - if those vapers had caught this virus, outbreaks would've rapidly spread to everyone around them and they would've been identified as "patient zeros" by the CDC. That didn't happen. In fact, that was months ago, long before the Wuhan outbreak. If this thing had been in the US way back then, we would've been the first country overrun with this virus last year, not China.

 

That may be the worst article I've ever read. It's 2-3 times longer than it needs to be because he spends most of his effort inserting stupid cutesy pop culture references into it that he thinks are witty. And every possibility that he raises, he then retracts "might be this...or then again it might be that." Worthless rubbish.

But I did learn that the immunity to the original SARS only lasts a couple of years - I wasn't aware of that. And yes, that's terrible news - if the same applies to this virus, then we could all get the same virus every couple of years even if it doesn't mutate appreciably. But then again, we don't know if the immune response to this virus is like the response to that virus, yet.

As that awful Bruce Y. Lee article in Forbes mentioned, both of those cases could be attributable to false negative tests. Remember: this virus has only been around since about Dec. 1, 2019 - the tests are far from reliable at this point. They've been running 3-4 tests per patient because the test is so unreliable.

This is why you should never do research using YouTube videos - this clip says that you can catch the same cold twice. Then he explains that you can only get it again after it mutates. That's not the same virus - it's a new strain. That was my whole point - it's the mutations that find ways around our earlier immunity. And viruses mutate constantly.

It's almost always a bad idea to panic, so I'm glad you're coming to grips with all of this. But you're also in the high risk group, so don't get too complacent - we're all going to have to be very smart and thorough with our safety and decon measures for many months, possibly even a year or more. One lapse of attention and a stranger's cough in your face can undo months of careful measures. So don't panic, but be consistently prudent....we want to keep you around for a good long while for a whole lot of cool conversations over the years ahead, amigo.

 

Nobody has any level of immunity to this virus - it's unlike all of the earlier coronaviruses. That's one of the main reasons why it's spreading like wildfire all over the globe.

With the earlier coronaviruses, they often share similarities with earlier strains that can confer a partial immunity to some new strains. That doesn't seem to apply to this one, according to all of the virologists I've seen interviewed in articles on this. But some people have very robust, fast-acting immune systems - kids for example. So when they get infected with this thing, there's enough latency time for their bodies to mount an effective immune response, and they get moderate if any symptoms. Old people's immune systems aren't so spry, so old people have trouble mounting a defense before this little bastard shreds their lungs cells.