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Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

sydney.edu.au

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Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#31

Post by callahad »

neoromantique wrote: post #26
callahad wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one week and a half of school when you're 8 I think you're vastly underestimating how often kids exhibit symptoms potentially consistent with Covid during a school year.

How often do they exhibit symptoms AND trigger a PCR test?

Oh sure. I think we're interpreting the parent comments differently (i.e., I'm understanding sokoloff's and aflag's comments to be about more general precautionary isolation based on symptomatic illness, not necessarily PCR-confirmed infection like logifail's kid.)

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#32

Post by maxerickson »

sokoloff wrote: post #25
aflag wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I don't think skipping one week and a half of school when you're 8 will have any real effect in your life neither in the short or long term future. Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.

I think kids are likely to catch asymptomatic or extremely mild Covid annually. That’ll potentially be 4-5% of their educational time. Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.

You have to look at both sides of the intervention, right?

Like if isolating that kid doesn't prevent any further infections, then it isn't doing any good. If isolating them for 3 days prevents a couple other kids from getting infected, it's less clear.

Using PCR tests to evaluate clearance doesn't make sense though, since they can be positive if there are fragments but no viable virus.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#33

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

binarymax wrote: post #20

To me the more interesting aspect of this research is the possibility to test susceptibility to severe infection. If you know ahead of time you are high risk, then the treatment and behavior is different than someone who knows they are low risk. Right now we treat everything the same - recommend everyone is vaccinated and everyone wear masks during outbreaks. I’d really like to know how at risk I am, and act accordin…

(Disclaimer: covid averse, lost family member, upset with society for “being done.”)

I’m not sure what to think about this.

A year+ ago, I would have worried that folks would treat a low-risk evaluation as a permission slip to say “the pandemic is over for me,” stop masking/etc, and thus increase the aggregate spread of the virus to folks who are high risk.

But now everyone is already doing that anyway. So yeah, it would be nice to know whether we are high risk or should just let it all go and say whatever.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#34

Post by aflag »

sokoloff wrote: post #25
aflag wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I don't think skipping one week and a half of school when you're 8 will have any real effect in your life neither in the short or long term future. Meanwhile, if they get in contact with someone with some sort of immunodeficiency along the way it could cause irreparable damage.

I think kids are likely to catch asymptomatic or extremely mild Covid annually. That’ll potentially be 4-5% of their educational time. Kids of wealthy families with parents with flexible jobs will be fine. Not every kid is in a home situation like that.

Assuming a 180 day school year (which would actually mean a 10 day period would be closer to 3-4% not 4-5%), that means that half of the year they are not in school anyway. So they have a good chance of catching it outside of school days anyway even if they catch it annually. Besides that, if that's that's a huge and consistent problem, school could just reduce the number of holidays by a week or so. The variance of number of school days throughout the world is already larger than that.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#35

Post by aflag »

callahad wrote: post #31
neoromantique wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do they exhibit symptoms AND trigger a PCR test?

Oh sure. I think we're interpreting the parent comments differently (i.e., I'm understanding sokoloff's and aflag's comments to be about more general precautionary isolation based on symptomatic illness, not necessarily PCR-confirmed infection like logifail's kid.)

I was not really suggesting kids should be isolated whenever they have any sort of possible symptoms. But if you're diagnosed with some contagious illness, it's probably not a bad idea to try to curb the spread.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#37

Post by User23 »

maxerickson wrote: post #27
eagerpace wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen the spikes mentioned a lot. Are these mechanical descriptions of how the spikes operate dumbed down for the average person to understand? Im surprised we don’t hear more about biologically destroying the cells instead.

It isn't entirely understood, but the actual shapes of the molecules matter, so there is at least some mechanical analogy.

Van der Waals force[1] is sort of midway between chemical and mechanical interaction. We think of proteins as crystals because that’s how we can image them, but really they’re sort of floppy things that can often change their shape dynamically in response to forces and then exert different forces because of that. This leads to all kinds of interesting feedback loops. The polarity of the water molecules they’re floating around in plays a role too.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#38

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #33
binarymax wrote: post #20

To me the more interesting aspect of this research is the possibility to test susceptibility to severe infection. If you know ahead of time you are high risk, then the treatment and behavior is different than someone who knows they are low risk. Right now we treat everything the same - recommend everyone is vaccinated and everyone wear masks during outbreaks. I’d really like to know how at risk I am, and act accordin…

(Disclaimer: covid averse, lost family member, upset with society for “being done.”) I’m not sure what to think about this. A year+ ago, I would have worried that folks would treat a low-risk evaluation as a permission slip to say “the pandemic is over for me,” stop masking/etc, and thus increase the aggregate spread of the virus to folks who are high risk. But now everyone is already doing that anyway. So yeah, it w…

Sometimes I think I'm the only low risk person left on the planet wearing a mask and vaccinating. Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too. There's even some performers asking fans to mask up so high risk people can come to their shows. Gives me a tiny glimmer of hope for humanity.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#39

Post by technothrasher »

flobosg wrote: post #6
froglets wrote: post #3

I think the title/article uses the word infection when they should be using disease.

COVID = Coronavirus disease

Which makes the headline even more confusing. How can you be infected by a disease? The article gets it right, even if the headline doesn't, SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#40

Post by Sakos »

superkuh wrote: post #8

That's good. But the lower lungs already get seepage of body serum/humoral igM and igG. If you really want to protect against infections then you have to induce mucosal immunity (and get tissue resident B and T cells) in the surface layer of the upper respiratory. Unfortunately intramuscular vaccinations do not do that, they only give serum/humoral immunity. So they're only the first step to protect against serious d…

I'm surprised we haven't gotten an intranasal vaccine before now. We've been talking about the issues with intramuscular vaccines in regards to mucosal immunity since the very beginning.
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