International Coronavirus Breaking News, v13: Over 21,000 Healthcare Workers From Around The U.S Heading To N.Y

[trac209]

Could someone answer this question for me, I can't seem to find the answer on Google.

If someone is immune to a virus, do they still show positive when tested for that virus?

From what I gather once they identify the antibodies they can tell exactly that.

 

[Wadtucket]

Could someone answer this question for me, I can't seem to find the answer on Google.

If someone is immune to a virus, do they still show positive when tested for that virus?

What do you mean by "immune to a virus"? Nobody is immune to this virus yet with the possible exception of some of those who recovered from an infection. If you mean getting infected but having no symptoms, then yes, you will still shed virus and test positive for the antigen as well as antibodies. It can be more difficult to get a good enough sample if you don't have symptoms, but in the case of this virus it colonizes the nose so you just have to stick a q-tip really far up your nose to get some virus. You could also swab your asshole, since you will shed virus through your poopchute at some point during the infection. Once you have cleared the infection you will likely be able to detect antibodies for a long time.

 

[irish_thug]

I’m no fan of plus 40 with the humidity but I’ll take 4 months in a row if it will help kill this covid bastard..

Whoever said Canada is a dry climate has clearly not spent much time in Ontario

 

[Jfrizzle]

I’m no fan of plus 40 with the humidity but I’ll take 4 months in a row if it will help kill this covid bastard..

Damn right. It's funny how different the heat feels when you have a high humidity. While growing up in New Brunswick you always had extremely high humidity in the summer and just got used to it. When I lived in Alberta, a 30 degree celcius summer day felt like nothing.

 

[trac209]

Whoever said Canada is a dry climate has clearly not spent much time in Ontario

Winters in Manitoba are so dry your recliner can turn into an electric chair. Even in my basement my salt water tank evaporates about 4 gallons per day.

 

[curryjunkie]

Just trying to be nice, I don't know what's been going on with his week.

How are things in your neck of the woods? Everyone behaving?

Still relatively quiet in N Yorkshire. I think we'll be spared this first wave, which means we'll get fucked by the ones that follow.

slow rise in my county,12 cases confirmed from a population of 30,000. so far everyones behaving themselves on the whole, my neighbour was pissed cos he went to the farm co-op which is classed as essential cos of animal feed etc, to get a skilsaw, they wouldnt sell it to him, and the woman ahead on the queue bought a broom and a curtain...ireland as a whole seems to have dodged a sharp rise, more of a steady climb of 4273 confirmed cases, 120 deaths. im optimistic it will flatten out next week.
Today's statistics:

• 18 deaths located in the east, three in the south, one in the west of the country.
• The patients included 11 females and 11 males.
• 16 patients were reported as having underlying health conditions
• Median age of today’s reported deaths is 80
• The median age of deaths in Ireland is 82.

17:11 03/04/2020

Another 12 patients have died in a day in Northern Ireland after contracting coronavirus
A further 12 patients in Northern Ireland have died after contracting coronavirus.

It is one of the highest number of deaths in a day recorded by the Public Health Agency so far.

Friday's update brought the total number of people who have died in the region with Covid-19 to 48.

The PHA also notified 130 new positive cases of infection, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the region to 904.

So far, Belfast has over twice as many positive tests as anywhere else in Northern Ireland, with 272 confirmed so far.

The next highest total is in the Lisburn and Castlereagh council area, 272.

 

[Gomi1977]

What do you mean by "immune to a virus"? Nobody is immune to this virus yet with the possible exception of some of those who recovered from an infection. If you mean getting infected but having no symptoms, then yes, you will still shed virus and test positive for the antigen as well as antibodies. It can be more difficult to get a good enough sample if you don't have symptoms, but in the case of this virus it colonizes the nose so you just have to stick a q-tip really far up your nose to get some virus. You could also swab your asshole, since you will shed virus through your poopchute at some point during the infection. Once you have cleared the infection you will likely be able to detect antibodies for a long time.

From what I gather once they identify the antibodies they can tell exactly that.

Okay, thanks guys. And I was not talking this virus specifically, I was talking viruses in general, like influenza, or other corona-viruses. From my understanding, some people are naturally immune to (certain) influenza-/ coronavirus(-strains), or am I getting things mixed up now? Or does immunity in that sense simply means that those people's immune systems are better equipped to quickly "come up" with the correct antibodies for that virus?

 

[Get To Da Choppa]

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coron...ruses-1.4880736?taid=5e86f530daabfa000144900d

Researchers look at humidity as a weapon in the fight against airborne viruses
Michelle McQuuigge


SHARE

The ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic could get a boost if Canadians paid more attention to the relative humidity levels in public and private spaces, according to a growing body of international research.

Doctors, scientists and engineers agree that sufficient indoor air moisture levels can have a powerful but little-understood effect on the transmission of airborne diseases. While the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is currently treated as one that's transmitted through droplet infection rather than the air, research on exactly how it passes between humans is still underway.

Most buildings, however, fall short of the recommended threshold of 40 to 60 per cent relative humidity, particularly in countries with colder, dryer climates such as Canada.

• Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

Addressing the issue now, they contend, could confer some immediate short-term benefits and offer a powerful tool for warding off similar epidemics in the future.

"Transmission is greater in dry air, infectivity is higher in dry air, and the ability of a human being to fight infection is impaired," said Dr. Stephanie Taylor, a graduate of and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. "Any one of those would be important, but all three of them are in play."

Taylor concedes that the notion may seem counter-intuitive, saying the idea of humidity conjures images of fetid swamps and disease-bearing mosquitoes. But she said a growing body of research has suggested that relative humidity levels that are much more comfortable for humans offer a host of benefits.

She said airborne particles carrying viruses can travel farther in air that isn't sufficiently hydrated. For reasons researchers are still probing, she also said viruses seem to be more infectious in those dryer conditions as well.

Dr. Samira Mubareka, a medical microbiologist at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital and a member of a team that isolated the novel coronavirus, previously helped conduct research on the effect of temperature and humidity on influenza strains.

The research, which evaluated data from Toronto over a roughly five-year period, found higher humidity levels seemed to help create less favourable conditions for viruses to thrive, particularly in colder overall temperatures.

"It was in that range of 50 to 60 (per cent) where we saw the least amount of transmission," she said.



Bring on the summer! That may be our turning point here in NB. It is humid AF in the summer. Unfortunately our summer is still months away and lasts for about 10-15 minutes.

I really hope that's the case, but MERS was able to spread in the summer. It was traced back to the Middle East in September 2012, where it was probably already tank top season hot. The two outbreaks also happened in the summers of 2015 and 2018. COVID19 has a lot of similarity with MERS unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong, and I'm cautiously optimistic.

 

[trac209]

Okay, thanks guys. And I was not talking this virus specifically, I was talking viruses in general, like influenza, or other corona-viruses. From my understanding, some people are naturally immune to (certain) influenza-/ coronavirus(-strains), or am I getting things mixed up now? Or does immunity in that sense simply means that those people's immune systems are better equipped to quickly "come up" with the correct antibodies for that virus?

Put it this way once a body identifies a specific virus it remembers and next time it doesn’t allow it to take hold.

 

[JDragon]

Well my wife just got off the phone with her moms care home. There is a case there now and her mom also is showing signs of respiratory illness. She’s been in there for over 5 years and has been basically bed ridden for 5 years. We will see if she pulls through, she has so far beaten appendicitis and two bad falls and a heart attack. She is 86 but a tough old bird so we will see.

Wish you all the best, but this doesn't sound good at all.

 

[Wadtucket]

Okay, thanks guys. And I was not talking this virus specifically, I was talking viruses in general, like influenza, or other corona-viruses. From my understanding, some people are naturally immune to (certain) influenza-/ coronavirus(-strains), or am I getting things mixed up now? Or does immunity in that sense simply means that those people's immune systems are better equipped to quickly "come up" with the correct antibodies for that virus?

It's complicated and not on topic in this thread. But you can have natural immunity by lacking certain protein receptors that a specific virus needs to gain entry to the cell. In this case that would for example be ACE2 receptors. Your natural susceptibility could be genetic. Then you have acquired immunity which you get from having antibodies that work more or less well against certain viruses. Anyway, completely off topic I guess.

 

[Big Nasty Edison]

Illinois has officially surpassed a 2% death rate.

Location
Illinois

Positive Cases
8904

Deaths
210

https://coronavirus.illinois.gov/s/county-map

 

[Jfrizzle]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-trail-leading-back-to-wuhan-labs/

A really interseting read. A lot of it has been fleshed out in this thread but worth a look.

The Trail Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs
Jim Geraghty

Medical workers in protective suits attend to a patient inside an isolated ward of the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Hubei Province, China, February 16, 2020.

There’s no proof the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a laboratory, but we can’t take the Chinese government’s denials at face value.

It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”

Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)

On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”

Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.

Scientific American verifies much of the information Tye mentions about Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species.

Shi — a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years — walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals — particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “could they have come from our lab?”

. . . By January 7 the Wuhan team determined that the new virus had indeed caused the disease those patients suffered — a conclusion based on results from polymerase chain reaction analysis, full genome sequencing, antibody tests of blood samples and the virus’s ability to infect human lung cells in a petri dish. The genomic sequence of the virus — now officially called SARS-CoV-2 because it is related to the SARS pathogen — was 96 percent identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan, they reported in a paper published last month in Nature. “It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir,” says Daszak, who was not involved in the study.

Some scientists aren’t convinced that the virus jumped straight from bats to human beings, but there are a few problems with the theory that some other animal was an intermediate transmitter of COVID-19 from bats to humans:

Analyses of the SARS-CoV-2 genome indicate a single spillover event, meaning the virus jumped only once from an animal to a person, which makes it likely that the virus was circulating among people before December. Unless more information about the animals at the Wuhan market is released, the transmission chain may never be clear. There are, however, numerous possibilities. A bat hunter or a wildlife trafficker might have brought the virus to the market. Pangolins happen to carry a coronavirus, which they might have picked up from bats years ago, and which is, in one crucial part of its genome, virtually identical to SARS-CoV-2. But no one has yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Wuhan market, or even that venders there trafficked pangolins.

On February 4 — one week before the World Health Organization decided to officially name this virus “COVID-19” — the journal Cell Research posted a notice written by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology about the virus, concluding, “our findings reveal that remdesivir and chloroquine are highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro. Since these compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering from the novel coronavirus disease.” One of the authors of that notice was the “bat woman,” Shi Zhengli.

In his YouTube video, Tye focuses his attention on a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology named Huang Yanling: “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”

There was enough discussion of rumors about Huang Yanling online in China to spur an official denial. On February 16, the Wuhan Institute of Virology denied that patient zero was one of their employees, and interestingly named her specifically: “Recently there has been fake information about Huang Yanling, a graduate from our institute, claiming that she was patient zero in the novel coronavirus.” Press accounts quote the institute as saying, “Huang was a graduate student at the institute until 2015, when she left the province and had not returned since. Huang was in good health and had not been diagnosed with disease, it added.” None of her publicly available research papers are dated after 2015.

The web page for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Lab of Diagnostic Microbiology does indeed still have “Huang Yanling” listed as a 2012 graduate student, and her picture and biography appear to have been recently removed — as have those of two other graduate students from 2013, Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua.

Her name still has a hyperlink, but the linked page is blank. The pages for Wang Mengyue and Wei Cuihua are blank as well.

(For what it is worth, the South China Morning Post — a newspaper seen as being generally pro-Beijing — reported on March 13 that “according to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.”)

On February 17, Zhen Shuji, a Hong Kong correspondent from the French public-radio service Radio France Internationale, reported: “when a reporter from the Beijing News of the Mainland asked the institute for rumors about patient zero, the institute first denied that there was a researcher Huang Yanling, but after learning that the name of the person on the Internet did exist, acknowledged that the person had worked at the firm but has now left the office and is unaccounted for.”

Tye says, “everyone on the Chinese internet is searching for [Huang Yanling] but most believe that her body was quickly cremated and the people working at the crematorium were perhaps infected as they were not given any information about the virus.” (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that handling the body of someone who has died of coronavirus is safe — including embalming and cremation — as long as the standard safety protocols for handing a decedent are used. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether those safety protocols were sufficiently used in China before the outbreak’s scope was known.)

As Tye observes, a public appearance by Huang Yanling would dispel a lot of the public rumors, and is the sort of thing the Chinese government would quickly arrange in normal circumstances — presuming that Huang Yanling was still alive. Several officials at the Wuhan Institute of Virology issued public statements that Huang was in good health and that no one at the institute has been infected with COVID-19. In any case, the mystery around Huang Yanling may be moot, but it does point to the lab covering up something about her.

China Global Television Network, a state-owned television broadcaster, illuminated another rumor while attempting to dispel it in a February 23 report entitled “Rumors Stop With the Wise”:

On February 17, a Weibo user who claimed herself to be Chen Quanjiao, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported to the public that the Director of the Institute was responsible for leaking the novel coronavirus. The Weibo post threw a bomb in the cyberspace and the public was shocked. Soon Chen herself stepped out and declared that she had never released any report information and expressed great indignation at such identity fraud on Weibo. It has been confirmed that that particular Weibo account had been shut down several times due to the spread of misinformation about COVID-19.

That Radio France Internationale report on February 17 also mentioned the next key part of the Tye’s YouTube video. “Xiaobo Tao, a scholar from South China University of Technology, recently published a report that researchers at Wuhan Virus Laboratory were splashed with bat blood and urine, and then quarantined for 14 days.” HK01, another Hong Kong-based news site, reported the same claim.

This doctor’s name is spelled in English as both “Xiaobo Tao” and “Botao Xiao.” From 2011 to 2013, Botao Xiao was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and his biography is still on the web site of the South China University of Technology.

At some point in February, Botao Xiao posted a research paper onto ResearchGate.net, “The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus.” He is listed as one author, along with Lei Xiao from Tian You Hospital, which is affiliated with the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. The paper was removed a short time after it was posted, but archived images of its pages can be found here and here.

The first conclusion of Botao Xiao’s paper is that the bats suspected of carrying the virus are extremely unlikely to be found naturally in the city, and despite the stories of “bat soup,” they conclude that bats were not sold at the market and were unlikely to be deliberately ingested.

The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which were more than 900 kilometers away from the seafood market. Bats were normally found to live in caves and trees. But the seafood market is in a densely-populated district of Wuhan, a metropolitan [area] of ~15 million people. The probability was very low for the bats to fly to the market. According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization could not confirm if bats were present at the market. Botao Xiao’s paper theorizes that the coronavirus originated from bats being used for research at either one of two research laboratories in Wuhan.

We screened the area around the seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus. Within ~ 280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention. WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province. The expert in Collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT). Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him.

Surgery was performed on the caged animals and the tissue samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction and sequencing. The tissue samples and contaminated trashes were source of pathogens. They were only ~280 meters from the seafood market. The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital (Figure 1, bottom) where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic. It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.

The second laboratory was ~12 kilometers from the seafood market and belonged to Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences . . .

In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories. Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.

However, Xiao has told the Wall Street Journal that he has withdrawn his paper. “The speculation about the possible origins in the post was based on published papers and media, and was not supported by direct proofs,” he said in a brief email on February 26.

The bat researcher that Xiao’s report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of “negligence” and the responsible officials had been punished.

In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled “Youth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.” Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats. “Among all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,” he says in Chinese. “You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.” He emphasizes, “bats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.”

One of his last statements on the video is: “In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.”

The description of Tian Junhua’s self-isolation came from a May 2017 report by Xinhua News Agency, repeated by the Chinese news site JQKNews.com:

The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.

Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.

The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didn’t flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.

Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?

Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.

But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification

 

[Gomi1977]

Put it this way once a body identifies a specific virus it remembers and next time it doesn’t allow it to take hold.

Yes, I understand that, I'm sorry, I'll try to be more clear, maybe this is just a lingo-issue.
If a body meets a new virus, for that body, but that body does not get sick, does that mean that body's immune system is better equipped to deal with that virus, i.e., does that person still get infected, but the immune system is so quick to generate the appropriate antibodies that the body does not get sick, and is that what some people mean when they say immune, while others call it asymptomatic?
I'm learning new jargon in two languages at the same time, I'm getting dizzy.

 

[Bry]

Texas is doing ok so far. Reporting only 5330 cases with 90 deaths. I am assuming we will start going up in the next week or two. That is with 55k tests done so far. We do have high humidity year round in most of the state, but that didn’t seem to help Louisiana, so not sure why it is taking longer to get here.

Bry

 

[Gomi1977]

It's complicated and not on topic in this thread. But you can have natural immunity by lacking certain protein receptors that a specific virus needs to gain entry to the cell. In this case that would for example be ACE2 receptors. Your natural susceptibility could be genetic. Then you have acquired immunity which you get from having antibodies that work more or less well against certain viruses. Anyway, completely off topic I guess.

Okay thanks, one more follow up please: in that case, would that person still show as infected when tested for that virus (PCR, non-serologic)?

 

[Jfrizzle]

I really hope that's the case, but MERS was able to spread in the summer. It was traced back to the Middle East in September 2012, where it was probably already tank top season hot. The two outbreaks also happened in the summers of 2015 and 2018. COVID19 has a lot of similarity with MERS unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong, and I'm cautiously optimistic.

I think those are relatively dry climates though. Correct me if I'm wrong. Hopefully the combination of heat and humidity is more effective than heat alone. Which is what I think this research is pointing to.

 

[curryjunkie]

Texas is doing ok so far. Reporting only 5330 cases with 90 deaths. I am assuming we will start going up in the next week or two. That is with 55k tests done so far. We do have high humidity year round in most of the state, but that didn’t seem to help Louisiana, so not sure why it is taking longer to get here.

Bry

im likin this post so your single like dont get lonely...

 

[Wadtucket]

Yes, I understand that, I'm sorry, I'll try to be more clear, maybe this is just a lingo-issue.
If a body meets a new virus, for that body, but that body does not get sick, does that mean that body's immune system is better equipped to deal with that virus, i.e., does that person still get infected, but the immune system is so quick to generate the appropriate antibodies that the body does not get sick, and is that what some people mean when they say immune, while others call it asymptomatic?
I'm learning new jargon in two languages at the same time, I'm getting dizzy.

Asymptomatic means that you have an ongoing infection without showing any symptoms. You have an ongoing infection as long as you have virus replicating in your body. You can suppress the viral load with antiviral drugs, and for some viruses you can completely clear the infection. If you can't readily clear it, you will have a chronic infection (like HIV, Hep C, HSV, etc). The reason you can't clear it is sometimes that it will colonize for example your cerebrospinal fluid, where your antibodies can't get to it.

Once you have been infected by the antigen, the body mounts an immune response by producing antibodies to fight off the antigen. If it is a novel antigen, it takes longer for your body to mount the response and you will likely get sicker. If you recently were exposed to the antigen, chances are your body will already be prepared to ramp up the immune response before the viral load gets high enough to cause symptoms.

Some people have natural immunity or resistance due to genetics. A virus needs to bind to specific receptors on whatever host cell it targets. Some people have less, and some people have more, of that specific receptor. Certain drugs can prevent viruses from binding to those receptors, some drugs can inhibit the enzyme needed for the binding to happen, et cetera.

 

[Clippy]

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coron...ruses-1.4880736?taid=5e86f530daabfa000144900d

Researchers look at humidity as a weapon in the fight against airborne viruses
Michelle McQuuigge


SHARE

The ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic could get a boost if Canadians paid more attention to the relative humidity levels in public and private spaces, according to a growing body of international research.

Doctors, scientists and engineers agree that sufficient indoor air moisture levels can have a powerful but little-understood effect on the transmission of airborne diseases. While the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is currently treated as one that's transmitted through droplet infection rather than the air, research on exactly how it passes between humans is still underway.

Most buildings, however, fall short of the recommended threshold of 40 to 60 per cent relative humidity, particularly in countries with colder, dryer climates such as Canada.

• Newsletter sign-up: Get The COVID-19 Brief sent to your inbox

Addressing the issue now, they contend, could confer some immediate short-term benefits and offer a powerful tool for warding off similar epidemics in the future.

"Transmission is greater in dry air, infectivity is higher in dry air, and the ability of a human being to fight infection is impaired," said Dr. Stephanie Taylor, a graduate of and lecturer at Harvard Medical School. "Any one of those would be important, but all three of them are in play."

Taylor concedes that the notion may seem counter-intuitive, saying the idea of humidity conjures images of fetid swamps and disease-bearing mosquitoes. But she said a growing body of research has suggested that relative humidity levels that are much more comfortable for humans offer a host of benefits.

She said airborne particles carrying viruses can travel farther in air that isn't sufficiently hydrated. For reasons researchers are still probing, she also said viruses seem to be more infectious in those dryer conditions as well.

Dr. Samira Mubareka, a medical microbiologist at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital and a member of a team that isolated the novel coronavirus, previously helped conduct research on the effect of temperature and humidity on influenza strains.

The research, which evaluated data from Toronto over a roughly five-year period, found higher humidity levels seemed to help create less favourable conditions for viruses to thrive, particularly in colder overall temperatures.

"It was in that range of 50 to 60 (per cent) where we saw the least amount of transmission," she said.



Bring on the summer! That may be our turning point here in NB. It is humid AF in the summer. Unfortunately our summer is still months away and lasts for about 10-15 minutes.

Hey now last year we got 20 minutes it was great. I took my sweater off that day