Generic Virus Thread

[terrytini]

@HanoiVillan another great informative Post. Good stuff.

[chrisp65]

8 minutes ago, Genie said:

I completely agree, but is there anything being loosened? Garden centres reopening seems like it’s happening. Everything else the same?

 

From what I’ve been hearing and reading today, not in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, no.

I don’t know about England yet, that very much depends on what Boris Johnson says later, and I really really hope that if anything does change he’s specific about what parts of the UK he’s referring to.

It would certainly be odd to drop the red banded ‘Stay Home’ slogan, if this evening’s address was to be ‘nothing has changed’. I’d suggest the very fact there’s a bank holiday message on it’s way has given enough people enough of an excuse to change their behaviour. 

[terrytini]

@HanoiVillan - have you found anything that factually describes the ‘viral load’ parameters ?

For people to advise on the distance/time equation they must have more detailed knowledge of this than Ive seen anywhere.

The implication is you can get a certain amount of virus and it not make you sick. Perhaps that accounts for the asymptomatic people ? 
This in turn raises the possibility that a limited amount of exposure could - could - if it still initiated the creation of antibodies, create a possibility that such cases might get immunity ( with all the caveats about that).

A related issue would be the question of getting repeated amounts of virus at different times. In each case too little to cause illness. How many times, and/or over what time period could this be repeated ? 
Many other questions are raised by this, but I’ve found little research.

[terrytini]

I would add that I saw somewhere reference to a study of mice which showed repeated low doses could be just as infectious as a single high dose. 
This would obviously call into question some of the assumptions in the article over page.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

Allowing for that and accepting that what he's saying is correct and duly informed (which I am), I return to a point I made in an earlier exchange about people being out in public spaces but keeping their distance and having picnics, sunbathing, spending all day out, this is what is said about bogs, including public bogs:

Yes, I think that while the case for not hassling people in parks in any more is very strong, there is no case to open public toilets within parks, unless there is someone paid to be there to wipe down surfaces etc (which there clearly wouldn't be).

[Tomaszk]

5 hours ago, mjmooney said:

Herd immunity via the back door. Tell people to stay home but give very lax lockdown rules so that very little legislation is enforceable by the police. The media do the rest with their headlines.
Thousands more will die but the experiment goes on with plausible deniability.

Absolutely. I'm surprised they didn't just press on with it in the first place to be honest.

This government has generally done whatever they've wanted then repeatedly said whatever they want the story to be even if they're totally different.

42 minutes ago, markavfc40 said:

The reproduction rate in Germany is now at 1.1 just days after lifting some lock down restrictions. I'd imagine we will be in a similar position with in the next week or so.

I don't understand how it can not go up if it was below 1 when they lifted restrictions?

I think early on it was give a rough R of 3? Doesn't that mean that's the "natural" level? So if we didn't nothing it would generally hover around 3?

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[wedge]

4 hours ago, foreveryoung said:

I mentioned yesterday the car industry are in contact with the goverment and are due to open dealerships in a phased process tomorrow,  so there's a huge hint what's going to happen. I've been working a home but our company alone have 7000 employees around the uk.

I'm in the motor trade. Part of 13-dealer group. I'm back tomorrow regardless of what Uncle BoJo says.

[Stevo985]

59 minutes ago, Genie said:

I completely agree, but is there anything being loosened? Garden centres reopening seems like it’s happening. Everything else the same?

No, but it feels like the message is now softer. 
 

It feels like they’re trying to get people to start going out and back to work while being very careful not to actually tell people to do that

[limpid]

5 minutes ago, wedge said:

I'm in the motor trade. Part of 13-dealer group. I'm back tomorrow regardless of what Uncle BoJo says.

Even though it might be illegal?

[Davkaus]

What are we now, 7 weeks in? I just gave in and cut my own hair.

[Stevo985]

15 minutes ago, Tomaszk said:

Absolutely. I'm surprised they didn't just press on with it in the first place to be honest.

This government has generally done whatever they've wanted then repeatedly said whatever they want the story to be even if they're totally different.

I don't understand how it can not go up if it was below 1 when they lifted restrictions?

I think early on it was give a rough R of 3? Doesn't that mean that's the "natural" level? So if we didn't nothing it would generally hover around 3?

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Yeah it was around 3 in completely normal conditions with no restrictions. 
 

Given the government have said they need to keep the R below 1 at all times, and it’s apparently about 0.9 now, it doesn’t exactly feel like the time to be relaxing stuff 

[mjmooney]

35 minutes ago, terrytini said:

The implication is you can get a certain amount of virus and it not make you sick. Perhaps that accounts for the asymptomatic people ? 
This in turn raises the possibility that a limited amount of exposure could - could - if it still initiated the creation of antibodies, create a possibility that such cases might get immunity ( with all the caveats about that).

This is exactly what my next door neighbour wants to know. She's an A&E doctor. She felt a bit ill a couple of weeks ago, and as frontline NHS staff was able to get a COVID test. Sure enough, positive. She self isolated for a week, but only had very mild symptoms. She's now back at work, but doesn't know whether she has any improved resistance. No offer of antibody tests, but apparently private clinics in London are offering them (for a fee, natch), and the doctors' grapevine reckons they are reliable, so she's looking into it on her own initiative. Seems like a shambles to me. 

[snowychap]

29 minutes ago, wedge said:

I'm in the motor trade. Part of 13-dealer group. I'm back tomorrow regardless of what Uncle BoJo says.

It depends what you do and are going to be required to do tomorrow.

If car showrooms aren't removed from part 2 of Schedule 2 the regulations then they'll have to stay closed - though you can obviously still sell cars in any other way as has been the case all along.

[Davkaus]

29 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

No, but it feels like the message is now softer. 
 

It feels like they’re trying to get people to start going out and back to work while being very careful not to actually tell people to do that

I think this is exactly it, following on from a cabinet source claiming people are becoming "addicted" to being on furlough, you know, that addiction to paying your rent and buying food when you have been told not to go to work.

They're sending mixed messages hoping they they can spin the blame for both the highest excess deaths in Europe, as well as the huge economic damage. None of it will be their fault. They followed the science. 

I half expect Boris's announcement to be a recorded speech delivered from inside a fridge in an undisclosed location.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, terrytini said:

@HanoiVillan - have you found anything that factually describes the ‘viral load’ parameters ?

I believe the way that author used the term 'viral load' is slightly confusing, because it seems there are two key measurements - there is the 'infectious dose', which is the amount of viral particles that need to enter the body for an average person to become infected, and then the 'viral load' is the amount of the virus that is circulating within the blood after entering the body. So as I understand it, you would be best off searching for 'coronavirus infectious dose' for questions related to the former.

Bromage (the author of the piece linked earlier) makes clear that we don't know exactly the infectious dose, and that his estimate is based on SARS and MERS, which are from the same family of viruses:

'In order to get infected you need to get exposed to an infectious dose of the virus; based on infectious dose studies with MERS and SARS, it is estimated that as few as 1000 SARS-CoV2 viral particles are needed for an infection to take hold. Please note, this still needs to be determined experimentally, but we can use that number to demonstrate how infection can occur.'

It appears to be extremely difficult to measure the infectious dose, per another paper:

'The main problem is that measuring the viable infecting dose of the virus in people is extremely challenging: contemporary measures of viral density, viability, and viral contamination are all hard to obtain. Establishing the relation between infecting dose and the likelihood of developing disease is therefore difficult.

The challenge of establishing the infecting dose is complicated by environmental contamination. Experience with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), caused by another coronavirus (MERS-CoV), suggests that environmental contamination with SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be high, and this is supported by recent case reports of extensive environmental contamination from patients with covid-19.'

(from: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/369/bmj.m1728.full.pdf)

1 hour ago, terrytini said:

The implication is you can get a certain amount of virus and it not make you sick. Perhaps that accounts for the asymptomatic people ? 
This in turn raises the possibility that a limited amount of exposure could - could - if it still initiated the creation of antibodies, create a possibility that such cases might get immunity ( with all the caveats about that).

The most useful explanation I've seen of what happens when you receive a dose of the virus is the following, from a 'Dr Michael Skinner, Reader in Virology, Imperial College London':

'Viruses are not poisons, within the cell they are self-replicating. That means an infection can start with just a small number of articles (the ‘dose’). The actual minimum number varies between different viruses and we don’t yet know what that ‘minimum infectious dose’ is for COVID-19, but we might presume it’s around a hundred virus particles.

“When that dose reaches our respiratory tract, one or two cells will be infected and will be re-programmed to produce many new viruses within 12-24 hours (for COVID-19, we don’t yet know how many or over how long). The new viruses will infect many more nearby cells (which can include cells of our immune defence system too, possibly compromising it) and the whole process goes around again, and again, and again.

At some time quite early in infection, our ‘innate immune system’ detects there’s a virus infection and mounts an innate immune response. This is not the virus-specific, ‘acquired immune response’ with which people are generally familiar (i.e. antibodies) but rather a broad, non-specific, anti-viral response (characterised by interferon and cytokines, small proteins that have the side effect of causing many of the symptoms: fever, headaches, muscle pain). This response serves two purposes: to slow down the replication and spread of the virus, keeping us alive until the ‘acquired immune response’ kicks in (which, for a virus we haven’t seen, is about 2 to 3 weeks) and to call-up and commission the ‘acquired immune response’ which will stop and finally clear the infection, as well as laying-down immune memory to allow a faster response if we are infected again in the future (this is the basis of the expected immunity in survivors and of vaccination).

“With COVID-19, these two arms of the immune system (innate and acquired) obviously work well for 80% of the population who recover from more or less mild influenza-like illness.

“In older people, or people with immunodeficiencies, the activation of the acquired immune system may be delayed. This means that the virus can carry on replicating and spreading in the body, causing chaos and damage as it does, but there’s another consequence. Another job of the acquired immune system is to stand-down the innate immune system; until that’s done the innate immune response will keep increasing as the virus replicates and spreads. Part of the innate immune response is to cause ‘inflammation’. That is useful in containing the virus early in an infection but can result in widespread damage of uninfected tissue (we call this a ‘bystander effect’) if it becomes too large and uncontrolled, a situation named ‘cytokine storm’ when it was first seen with SARS and avian influenza H5N1. It is difficult to manage clinically, requiring intensive care and treatment and carries with it high risk of death.'

(from: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-questions-about-covid-19-and-viral-load/)

As I understand that, since the infectious dose is not presumed to be 1, it must be possible to receive very low doses (ie, below the infectious dose), and such a dose would not necessarily lead to the creation of antibodies, as the virus may have been caught by the 'innate immune response' or not even triggered that response. I would welcome correction by people who know more than me here though!

1 hour ago, terrytini said:

A related issue would be the question of getting repeated amounts of virus at different times. In each case too little to cause illness. How many times, and/or over what time period could this be repeated ? 
Many other questions are raised by this, but I’ve found little research.

I don't know the answer to this, but the body presumably has ways of removing cells that it doesn't want in faeces and snot and so on? And therefore, presumably you would need to accumulate enough viral particles to reach an infectious dose in less time than the body removed them? Again, though, this answer may be completely wrong.

EDIT: Tried to edit this to more accurately reflect how little I know!

Edited May 10, 2020 by HanoiVillan

[Brumstopdogs]

[HanoiVillan]

Striking how reasonable that evaluation from the public is. Hard to argue with that rough ranking.

[VILLAMARV]

I'll argue with subjective likert scales all day long.

Edit: though they have some practical applications in certain settings. Self evaluation in psychology settings for instance.

Edited May 10, 2020 by VILLAMARV
Added bit

[Xela]

3 hours ago, MCU said:

How long are those like myself going to be working from home for I wonder? The alarm at 7:00 before logging on by 7:03 is going to be sorely missed.

While not confirmed by our management, they've indicated that they think we'll be working from home for the rest of 2020. 

I can do my job from home so have no real need to go into a 2000 capacity office block with rammed lifts. 

[bickster]

3 hours ago, MCU said:

How long are those like myself going to be working from home for I wonder? The alarm at 7:00 before logging on by 7:03 is going to be sorely missed.

My CEO was talking to me the other day, about me working from home semi-permanently. Even when it gets back to normal (if that ever happens), he was talking about 1 office day a week and I'm not one of the one's that has to hot desk anyway. I have my own office which I share with one other person (and I strongly suspect he's for the chop after furlough)

We're slowly and succesfully bringig back call takers and they are working from home. I can't see them coming back to a hotdesk environment anytime soon (I reckon about half of them are for the chop too)