Coronavirus

[Fat_Bulldog]

I just [expletive] hate all of this COVID [expletive]. It has hurt so many people in so many ways.

I hope we can have a big party one day to celebrate overcoming all of this and life going on. I hope that happens one day.

[mikechamp]

Hopefully this meshes with some of the things AW has been seeing/reading/sharing. Just be forewarned: this is a long article with lots of good (and technical) information:

'Breakthrough finding' reveals why certain Covid-19 patients die

Dr. Megan Ranney, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University, has learned a lot about Covid-19 since she began treating patients with the disease in the emergency department in February. But there's one question she still can't answer: What makes some patients so much sicker than others?

Advancing age and underlying medical problems explain only part of the phenomenon, said Ranney, who has seen patients of similar age, background and health status follow wildly different trajectories.

In some cases, provocative new research shows, some people — men in particular — succumb because their immune systems are hit by friendly fire. Researchers hope the finding will help them develop targeted therapies for those patients.

In an international study in Science, 10% of nearly 1,000 Covid-19 patients who developed life-threatening pneumonia had antibodies that disable key immune system proteins called interferons. These antibodies — known as autoantibodies, because they attack the body itself — weren't found at all in 663 people with mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infections. Only four of 1,227 healthy patients had the autoantibodies. The study was led by the Covid Human Genetic Effort, which includes 200 research centers in 40 countries.

"This is one of the most important things we've learned about the immune system since the start of the pandemic," said Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president for research at Scripps Research in San Diego, who wasn't involved in the new study. "This is a breakthrough finding."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-covid-19 ... 11975.html

I also wanted to include this part of the article, not because the person quoted has a comical last name, but because of what has been discovered thanks to COVID-19:

Significantly, patients didn't make autoantibodies in response to the virus. Instead, they appeared to have had them before the pandemic even began, said Paul Bastard, the antibody study's lead author, who is also a researcher at Rockefeller University.

For reasons that researchers don't understand, the autoantibodies never caused a problem until patients were infected with Covid-19, Bastard said. Somehow, the coronavirus, or the immune response it triggered, appears to have set them in motion. "Before Covid, their condition was silent," Bastard said. "Most of them hadn't gotten sick before."

Bastard said he now wonders whether autoantibodies against interferon also increase the risk from other viruses, such as influenza. Among patients in his study, "some of them had gotten flu in the past, and we're looking to see if the autoantibodies could have had an effect on flu."

[thrill]

For the first 4 months of this, I knew very few people who had gotten it. Now, pretty much everyone I know who's gone anywhere socially or professionally in the last month, has gotten it. It's wild.

[Fat_Bulldog]

For the first 4 months of this, I knew very few people who had gotten it. Now, pretty much everyone I know who's gone anywhere socially or professionally in the last month, has gotten it. It's wild.

Yup. The only people I really knew who had it were my BIL and nephew in April. That's because he was on the first lines at a local hospital.

Now, everybody.

[Jocephus]

at 165k cases already..with probably , 3-4 more hours of reporting time left

[pioneer98]

My wife and I both have symptoms now. She got tested this morning and I'm getting tested in about an hour. So far our kids do not have symptoms knock on wood. Our kids schools are going 100% online starting Monday for at least 2 weeks, but I bet it will be until January.

This graph seems concerning

[pioneer98]

WELP hope I don't need to go to the hospital any time soon

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... Ir9zccpzlQ

The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question."

[Joe Shlabotnik]

WELP hope I don't need to go to the hospital any time soon

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... Ir9zccpzlQ

The entire state of Iowa is now out of staffed beds, Eli Perencevich, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Iowa, told me. Worse is coming. Iowa is accumulating more than 3,600 confirmed cases every day; relative to its population, that’s more than twice the rate Arizona experienced during its summer peak, “when their system was near collapse,” Perencevich said. With only lax policies in place, those cases will continue to rise. Hospitalizations lag behind cases by about two weeks; by Thanksgiving, today’s soaring cases will be overwhelming hospitals that already cannot cope. “The wave hasn’t even crashed down on us yet,” Perencevich said. “It keeps rising and rising, and we’re all running on fear. The health-care system in Iowa is going to collapse, no question."

What's the governor have to say?

[pioneer98]

USA just passed 250K deaths

[heyzeus]

Maybe our government officials will care when people are dying en masse in hospital hallways and waiting rooms? I don’t know what it’s going to take. 16 states don’t even have mask mandates. Texas has one but the governor intentionally made it unenforceable and told law enforcement not to try.

Essentially we’re just waiting for a vaccine now, and we get to just guess what the body count will be until then.