A little tin-foily, but I went to Vegas with my family in late December. About 2 weeks after we got back, my dad had a severe case of the flu (so far as we know) and so did my cousin's girlfriend. They were both showing symptoms similar to Covid-19, but because testing was not available then, it's hard to say for sure. And it was flu season then.
Hopefully with the roll out of reliable antibody tests we can get the answers to these "mysterious flus" that lot of people anecdotally have. For me at least it would mentally comforting to know if the "flu" that I contracted after traveling to NOLA for Mardi Gras was in fact SARS-CoV-2.
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. covid-19 is the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. There are a few permutations of case, dashes etc.
My wife presented with symptoms quite similar to covid-19 to A&E (UK: A&E ~= ER) after a cruise we went on in late November. She has never smoked but she did get quite breathless and shook it off after about a week. As you say, there are a lot of anecdotes.
A decent antibody test would be nice but at the moment we don't know enough about how the bloody thing works. Even if you have detectable antibodies after an infection, does that mean you have any immunity to another infection and if so, for how long?
My money is on this thing turning into another 'flu after about five years. It will stop killing large numbers of people and evolve into a sort of status quo, just like the seasonal 'flus. It will still be a killer but not quite so aggressive as it is now. It is not as aggressive a killer as Ebola but it spreads far easier. Evolution will ensure that it will find a "happy" medium where it can carry on spreading but we don't still feel the need to eradicate it because we can live with the consequences of the adjusted version.
My language in the above para is a bit off but the sentiment is the same. We happily jump into cars every day (not so much now) and kill ourselves and others in pretty large numbers across the world but that is judged an acceptable risk. covid-19 will simply become another one eventually. For now, it is a right old shit show and we do not understand the enemy at all well. We do not know how to live with it.
We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years [1]. FWIW antibodies doesn't prevent you from getting sick- there's plenty of studies for the influenza vaccine that show it helps with severity of disease as well in some individuals [2]. I would much rather have a "really bad cold" again then get full COVID-19. Bigger questions around viral shedding after having immunity, but I would almost certainly imagine much less.
> We already know that SARS-COV-1 IGG antibodies last ~3 years
As far as I'm aware, this does not tell us that it'll be the same for SARS-CoV-2. Maybe it makes it more likely, but that's not the same as knowing for sure.
"Evolution", evolution takes multiple generations, we won't "evolve" to deal with that anytime soon. There's no reason it will be less of a killer for people that get infected. What we can do is as you say, for now, learn to live with it, and hope for a vaccine.
They mean the virus itself. Viruses that are too lethal can't spread as effectively because they cripple the host and are easily detected. This creates selective pressure for viruses which mutate to be less lethal to spread more widely. If the less lethal virus confers immunity to the more lethal version then the lethal version is likely to die off, or at least become less prominent.
This is not a message that any politician can ever espouse. It is sadly the way of things.
I suspect that the next novel coronavirus will meet with quite a lot of resistance. It seems we screwed the pooch/jumped the shark/fucked up ... with SARS which was our last warning apart from Bird flu (H5N1) and the other horrendous epidemics and pandemics across the years.
It's a bit embarrassing to have several world class virus killer orgs here in the UK and yet we are only deploying them properly fairly recently. You Yanks can stop sniggering at the back - you've screwed up in the same way we have. It is of course not that simple and we are all unprepared for this. It will be different next time and there will be a next time. All countries are changing visibly with their response to this thing. It is remarkable and quite humbling. Keep your eyes peeled and your brain on point and observe. We will never see the like again in our lifetimes (I hope)
My take away is that we need to get all our govts onboard with real risk assessment.
That's a bullshit line by incompetent politicians who deliberately dismantled the very systems that were put in place to deal with this.
As for warnings: By end of December, the epi community knew something was up. By mid January, there was a pretty loud clamor that we need to address this.By end of January, Covid was a regular occurrence in the intelligence briefing for the president, and the warnings weren't exactly ambiguous. By mid February, anybody who was paying actual attention was preparing one way or another.
As for warning the general public: Bill Gates did a whole song and dance on a TED stage. We had SARS, and Mers, and swine flu.
So, no, we are not "all unprepared". Many closed their eyes and pretended wishing extra-hard makes science go away.
And yes, there's a good chance we'll see another one in our lifetime. As we encroach more and more on animal habitats, it's pretty inevitable. (That, too, is a thing people have been warning about for decades)
Well put. A lot of people miss this fact. Also, the US/UK trying to pin the blame for their own incompetence on China suggests that reality attachment in these places, at the government level at any rate, is seriously sub-optimal.
In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff.
Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone.
It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic.
Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit?
It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought.
The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm.
Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress.
It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.
Almost 100% agree, except for the part tying this to form of governance. Democracies can handle this well (see NZ), and authoritarian places definitely fail (see Singapore now, and I'd argue Brazil and US are more authoritarian than democratic, too)
It does highlight that highly individualistic societies struggle more than places that put a higher value on collective wellbeing.
The evolutionary pressure you're talking about isn't a given.
The Influenza causing the Spanish flu became deadlier in the second wave, it then evolved to be milder in the third wave, however, still more dangerous than in the first wave.
The evolutionary pressure is for reproduction, and if other factors facilitate reproduction, like a large window during which the infected are asymptomatic but contagious, or maybe airborne transmission, then the virus can very well be deadly.
It appears SARS-Cov-2 is very well adapted given how contagious it is. Personally I fear a more dangerous second wave in autumn or next year.
It seems to me a long enough contagious incubation period makes the severity of the illness moot from an adaptability standpoint. What's the selective pressure against killing for a virus that spreads easily for days to weeks before it makes someone ill and then takes days to weeks more yet to kill?
Does lethality after the contagious period matter? Doesn't seem that there would be any selective pressure if the host (and its extant, too lethal viruses) perishes...
No, it wouldn't. I'm not an expert in epidemiology, so take what I'm about to say as speculation.
My understanding is that viruses typically cause symptoms because they cause the virus to spread, things like coughing spread the virus. If a virus induces too strong of a reaction then the host dies or can't function while they have it and it doesn't spread.
It's probably unlikely for a virus to develop an infectious period where the symptoms are mild but strong enough to spread and then shift phases to become lethal, as a virus has no coordination between itself.
I think typically viruses are either in an asymptomatic phase, where they're less likely to spread and don't cause symptoms (because they haven't replicated much), and a symptomatic phase where spreading is more likely but obvious the person has it.
As a last bit, my understanding is that "novel" viruses, such as this novel coronavirus, are particularly concerning when they cross over from a non human host and become infectious because they haven't developed to have mild symptoms that are amenable to spreading well, and so can be more deadly than viruses that evolved alongside or within the human population.
[It gets on my tits when people downvote a reasoned opinion - jeromegv is having a chat with me and a lot of other people. He is not being rude or offensive, just having a chat and espousing an opinion]
I didn't mean we will evolve. The virus will be doing the evolving. We live for years, this virus "lives" for days.
1) flu symptoms aren't the same as covid19 symptoms
2) most tests come back negative, despite generally being limited to people with symptoms
3) other coronaviruses have similar symptoms.
It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December.
> It's really very unlikely that any of you had covid 19 in Las Vegas in late December.
I think this needs to be repeated more often. Everyone who had a sniffle in the last 6 months thinks they had COVID-19. There are always a lot of different diseases going around in the winter.
That's why they don't think they had it, but are wondering if they could have. You are reading things into other peoples statements and dismissing them because of your own mistake.
Because it wasn't going around Las Vegas? Which we know because people haven't been tested for it? And so he shouldn't get tested to see if what he had was covid?
No, he shouldn't. What would be the point? We don't even know if having had it grants future immunity.
But beyond that, this trend I've seen of people thinking they had it because they had the sniffles is dangerous if it makes them think they're now somehow safe.
If we learn that people who've had it have resistance then we should all get tested, capacity allowing.
Having had a cold at some point is almost irrelevant, because it seems that most carriers are asymptomatic, and that most people with mild covid19-like symptoms don't actually have it. The predictive value really isn't that high.
There were a lot of nasty viruses going around that are easily mistaken for Covid-19. I've had two viruses this winter that lasted a very long time. Most likely neither were Covid-19, even though one lasted a very long time and made me very sick.
I live in Vegas, I'm pretty sure it swept through a few months ago. Before people were testing for it. We had deaths from people testing negative for the Flu and everyone I knew got sick in about a 2 week period (we are <40).
There's loads of reports like yours from LA too, if you get tested for antibodies I would not be surprised if you tested positive. You might well have been an asymptomatic carrier.
With all respect, that's terrible analysis. The epidemiology is really clear that the start of the US epidemics was around January. It's not impossible that there were people with the disease early, but we know with absolute certainty that this number was very, very small. Because if it weren't, we'd see it in incontrovertible evidence like the death curves, and we don't.
People who were sick in December (I mean, be real: a lot of people were sick in December!) are overwhelmingly more likely to have had the flu than a disease that even in Wuhan was at just a few thousand cases at most.
My kids in Idaho (that had visited Southern Utah not too far from Vegas) and all the symptoms of COVID-19 back in November. I guess quite a few people did. They were tested for flu and it came back negative, but breathing was hard. Guess we’ll never know.
