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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

#51

Post by Krssst »

sokoloff wrote: post #16
incangold wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point of view of someone who is immunocompromised this seems like the bare minimum we can do as a society to protect the vulnerable. Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. At the moment we’re at “almost nothing”.

Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.

Allowing a single covid-positive kid go to school means contaminating a significant portion of the class's students and students' parents. Ten days out of school sounds fine. Long covid is a thing; being unlikely to die does not mean that illness is unlikely to be life-altering.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#52

Post by anonymouskimmer »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #47
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're still touching things, then touching your face. You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask. Your eyes are exposed to the air. And if you wear the same mask more than once, you are trapping all sorts of bacteria and other nastie…

> You're still touching things, then touching your face.

> Your eyes are exposed to the air.

I'm not the person you're responding to. Just what I do.

The mask covers the mucus membranes, except around the eyes. And I've got glasses with side-shields for the eyes. And an ASTM-III mask over the N95 mask so that I can touch and manipulate the masks without touching the breathing surface of the N95.

> You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask.

It's a virucidal N95, so besides the filtering also kills much of the virus that it traps. While the filtering is not 100%, the killing on top of the filtering should greatly reduce risk of infection or transmission in the unlikely event I'm infected but don't know it.

> Masks are mostly theater in everything but controlled environments.

I used to get a respiratory infection about yearly. I haven't had a contagious illness that I am aware of since January 2020.

Edit to add: And I take my daily shower after coming home for the day. I have never used a delivery service to grocery shop. I got about one month of work from home before coming back to the job part-time, and was fully back to the job by September or October of 2020.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#53

Post by anonymouskimmer »

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…

I particularly like the nose spray application. If even non-susceptible people get in the habit of using a nose spray before starting their day, any contagious viruses that they may already have could be covered with an inactivator upon sneezing them out. Hypothetically this could protect susceptible people who inhale the sneezed out viruses.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#54

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #52
PM_me_your_math wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still touching things, then touching your face. You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask. Your eyes are exposed to the air. And if you wear the same mask more than once, you are trapping all sorts of bacteria and other nastie…

> You're still touching things, then touching your face. > Your eyes are exposed to the air. I'm not the person you're responding to. Just what I do. The mask covers the mucus membranes, except around the eyes. And I've got glasses with side-shields for the eyes. And an ASTM-III mask over the N95 mask so that I can touch and manipulate the masks without touching the breathing surface of the N95. > You're still breath…

I wear an N95 when I go out but only my regular glasses. I too haven't been sick since January 2020. I used to get colds pretty much quarterly, and so it's absolutely worth it to me. If it bothers someone else to see me wearing one that's their problem, I'm not asking them to wear one.

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#55

Post by gigibec »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #38
AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

[dead]

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#57

Post by anonymouskimmer »

photochemsyn wrote: post #48

There do seem to be some alternative views on the role of this protein, LRRC15, in the lungs with respect to Sars-CoV-2. See this other paper (Feb 3 2023): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... Just to cover the basics, the virus normally accesses cells by binding to ACE2. > "The interactions between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and human host factors enable t…

Those are interesting earlier results about LRRC15. The effect of its expression may be dose dependent, with lower levels of LRRC15 promoting infection (or the negative effects of fibrosis) and higher levels inhibiting infection.

It also shows that what happens in cell culture doesn't necessarily translate to in vivo.

> Accounting for the appearance of this furin cleavage site is a problem for anyone promoting a 'natural origin theory'.

I very much think the lab leak origin is quite possible. Whether an engineered virus, or a natural chimeric virus due to bad lab practices (the Wuhan lab collected a large amount of viruses). That said it's not as if other betacoronaviruses don't have furin cleavage sites: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230209/Assessing-the-zoo...

"The team analyzed 201 Alpha and Beta CoV strains for furin cleavage sites in their spikes. Cleavage sites in spikes were identified from 44 strains, 17 of which have bats as hosts, while 27 have other mammalian hosts. Domestic animals, including dogs, cats, cattle, horses, and rabbits, were also identified as hosts for potentially transmissible CoVs."

> Science is complicated, and popular media reports on recent science are often of very poor quality.

"The University study is one of three independent papers that reveal this specific protein’s interaction with COVID-19."

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#58

Post by gigibec »

incangold wrote: post #13
logifail wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the existence of this protein explain asymptomatic infections? I wonder what percentage of the population have it. Our [unvaccinated] 8 year-old had Covid last Spring and his symptoms lasted exactly one entire morning. PCR swab tests were done in school on day 1, on day 2 I got a frantic phone call from his school at 7am saying "keep him home, he has Covid!". We would not otherwise have known, since he had pre…

From the point of view of someone who is immunocompromised this seems like the bare minimum we can do as a society to protect the vulnerable. Something between “almost nothing” and “nobody leaving the house” would be nice. At the moment we’re at “almost nothing”.

[dead]

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#59

Post by gigibec »

aflag wrote: post #19
sokoloff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolating and denying effective schooling to every kid who comes down with a one-day mild illness for ten days does not seem like a risk-proportionate response to me.

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.

[dead]

Re: Scientists discover receptor that blocks Covid-19 infection

#60

Post by gadders »

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…

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