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“I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

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Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#61

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ohazi wrote: post #4

> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). Anyone have sources for this? I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA a…

It's probably accurate. But the assumption that this is a game changer is more questionable.

This variant of CV is fairly infectious and makes some people very ill. It also kills a non-trivial percentage.

So the worst case is an incredibly dangerous virus that mutates every season. We'd have to get used to taking extreme measures, or losing around 1% of the population every year.

But the usual trend is for viruses to mutate in a less dangerous direction. And immunity isn't binary. It's more like molecular pattern matching with variable memory. So the population as a whole wouldn't be starting from scratch every season - any more than it does with colds or flu, even though they both mutate quickly.

Short term we're likely to have the equivalent of a few years of very bad flu seasons, and longer term that would settle down to a less dangerous cycle - still lethal for some people, but not a perpetual state of danger and crisis.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#62

Post by saneshark »

It's a beautiful thing if it can bring humanity together towards a common aim.

But if it leads to the collapse of monetary systems, the collapse of civil society, looting, rioting, the rise of nationalism, and WWIII that's most certainly going to lead more death and destruction than the virus itself.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#63

Post by DoreenMichele »

viraptor wrote: post #56
DoreenMichele wrote: post #39

Some solutions that already exist, are already in use and could be firmed up: 1. Working from home. 2. Ordering online and getting takeout. 3. Using self checkout. 4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet. You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector. We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote…

> Ordering online Annoyingly, this got disrupted in my area. I was hoping to do all ordering online instead of cherry picking some of the things like before. Unfortunately the shop is overrun by customers so all staff are busy. On top of that, because of many items are out of stock, online orders have been disabled. I'm really disappointed in those decisions - not only we have more people waiting in lines in the same…

The local Little Caesar's has too little business at the moment to keep pizzas on hand "hot and ready." This means if you go in, you have to wait while they cook it, potentially exposing you to infection.

Meanwhile, their "pizza portal" sits completely unused. You could theoretically order online and pick up without interacting with anyone.

I suggested this on the local Reddit for my area. I got snarkily asked when I became the manager of the local Little Caesar's.

We have the technology. We just aren't using it to solve this.

We could.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#64

Post by 101404 »

netsharc wrote: post #49
TuringTest wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ``drumroll`` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Maybe, but what do you do with people whose livelihood depend on those superfluous bullshit jobs? Until we have a system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing productive , those busyworks are used to justify giving food, shelter and healthcare to those people.

The sane/benovelent governments will probably switch to universal basic income, i.e. go deep into debt and just pay everyone money to live. And no, actually going into debt is not a huge problem, ask Keynes, or what happened in WW2; it was an emergency and governments borrowed and borrowed with no fear.

UBI could be possible in a closed society, but not if you are open for uncontrolled influx of people from outside your society. Because the offer "get free money" is just too good.

There was the choice what to focus on, and we decided we wanted uncontrolled immigration. Fair choice, but the consequence is that UBI won't work anymore.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#65

Post by empiricus »

FreeRadical wrote: post #21
ohazi wrote: post #4

> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). Anyone have sources for this? I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA a…

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.990226v1

So they tried to reinfect monkeys 28 days after the initial infection, and the monkeys were immune. This looks good, at least for the very short term. For the long term, see previous link

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#66

Post by vladvasiliu »

ekianjo wrote: post #18
jonrimmer wrote: post #12

In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the…

> tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.

As a sibling said, this is already where we are in Europe.

But if we had a system such as this, we could have prevented the first patients from spreading it around, and so we wouldn't have had to have millions of people stay at home.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#68

Post by tsimionescu »

wwweston wrote: post #33
black_puppydog wrote: post #15

I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ` `drumroll` ` scaling back shit that nobody needs. Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and. Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an…

> scaling back shit that nobody needs. Do we know what nobody needs, for real? Sure, there might be some low-hanging fruit, but this seems like an area where Chesterton's fence would apply in spades, lest our judgments age as well as Rick Perry talking about the Department of Energy. And there's also the fact that it's demand for non-essential things that employs the large portion of people who moved out of farming a…

Given the lack of any incentives to prioritize productive work and useful products over feel-good products, it would actually be strange to discover that the economy is actually only producing useful items.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#69

Post by ohazi »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #7
ohazi wrote: post #4

> How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). Anyone have sources for this? I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA a…

I remember reading they expect immunity to last as little as 6 months for Covid-19, found this paper about the SARS outbreak of 2002 which was also a type of corona virus, saying patients had an average immunity of 2 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/

Wikipedia-grade non-biologist here, so again, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

As far as I'm aware, antibodies don't stick around after they're no longer needed... They're produced by B cells when an infection is detected, and after an initial infection, some B cells that learned how to make effective antibodies stick around in your body as "memory B cells" - these will produce the same antibodies again upon reinfection.

Counting antibodies a few years after a SARS infection doesn't seem like it would tell you much about immunity.

Re: “I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”

#70

Post by discodave »

londons_explore wrote: post #27
jonrimmer wrote: post #12

In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the…

Imagine a future where you do a swab test every morning while brushing your teeth. If you had any of thousands of infectious diseases, you're required to stay home. The test would take only 5 minutes, and you get fined if you don't do it, and receive sick pay if you test positive. I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher r…

Sounds like Gattica :)
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