Possible scenario for Covid-19

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PeterNSteinmetz

PeterNSteinmetz

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PeterNSteinmetz
I thought this was a thoughtful article about a likely scenario with Covid-19.

“One outcome is now looking almost certain: This virus is never going away.

The coronavirus is simply too widespread and too transmissible. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that the pandemic ends at some point—because enough people have been either infected or vaccinated—but the virus continues to circulate in lower levels around the globe.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/coronavirus-will-never-go-away/614860/
 
Sounds familiar
 
Why would anyone even think that such an infectious agent would disappear?
Smallpox has been technically eradicated via a WHO directed vaccination program worldwide. What is the likelihood such a vaccination program would be successful in this day and age of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers?
 
Whether or not science is, well, science, has become a political debate. At that point, a pandemic becoming endemic is more or less inevitable.
 
I don’t think it was ever likely it could be contained. By the time the doctors in a city see 2 or 3 deadly cases and think something might be going on, 100s of others have been infected and in this day and age a fair number have traveled elsewhere in the world.
 
I’ve seen some research recently. About half the people appear to already have immune response to corona. It needs to be be verified, but scientists doing an experiment found that their control group of blood samples from 2016-2018, before this virus, already had the T cells to prevent infection. That immunity might come from regular coronavirus, aka, the common cold.

Couple that with experience that they don’t think the virus spreads beyond about 20% of the population, maybe because 50% + 20% is the 70% they think we need for herd immunity. If that 20% is correct, our worst case scenario In the US may be only 1/5th of what we previously thought, say 70 million positive tests but under a million deaths. That is still a horrific number, but remember that is worst case.

Ironically, by segregating and sanitizing, we may be also reducing the spread of the cold which helps provide a natural immunity against Covid. There is a scientifically based explanation that maybe we are making it worse.

will it disappear? Remains to be seen, but I doubt it. It will exist in low levels ongoing and, like the common cold, will just be something we look for and monitor for.

i am still considering how vaccines play into this.
 
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The vaccine candidates so far look really promising for the short term. But I think we’re going to discover that they won’t provide permanent immunity. They all work by using our own body’s ability to product the corona immunity, but it isn’t permanent, our bodies don’t preserve immunity to corona viruses. If we did, everybody would get a cold just once in your life.

we might be into this for getting boosters several times a year.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
I don’t think it was ever likely it could be contained. By the time the doctors in a city see 2 or 3 deadly cases and think something might be going on, 100s of others have been infected and in this day and age a fair number have traveled elsewhere in the world.
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It absolutely could have been contained. New Zealand and other countries have shown that. But we're Americans and we're far too... Independent? Smart? ...to listen to experts who recommend actions we would not otherwise carry out.
 
Juliet Hotel said:
It absolutely could have been contained. New Zealand and other countries have shown that. But we're Americans and we're far too... Independent? Smart? ...to listen to experts who recommend actions we would not otherwise carry out.
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Have to disagree. I don’t think there is any good scientific evidence the proposed interventions would have worked. The case of New Zealand is anecdotal and a very different situation with an isolated island with a relatively small population.

I also suspect it will invade New Zealand eventually as well or they will need to vaccinate everyone. You can only keep up draconian isolation and quarantine for so long.

But I understand you have a different theory about all this.
 
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PeterNSteinmetz said:
Have to disagree. I don’t think there is any good scientific evidence the proposed interventions would have worked. The case of New Zealand is anecdotal and a very different situation with an isolated island with a relatively small population.

I also suspect it will invade New Zealand eventually as well or they will need to vaccinate everyone. You can only keep up draconian isolation and quarantine for so long.

But I understand you have a different theory about all this.
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What do you make of the fact that the European Union is doing so much better than we are? Unlike New Zealand, they are not geographically isolated, and they have a larger population than we do.

EU vs US.jpeg

https://www.statista.com/chart/22102/daily-covid-19-cases-in-the-us-and-the-eu/

Maybe we should find out how they're doing it. :dunno:
 
BTW, digging into numbers....this chart is a little deceptive. 65,000 is not a 7 day average, it's a weekly peak. Additionally, the EU numbers seem to be off. I pulled the numbers myself and came up with over 12,000 as the value for Jul 30 for the EU. There appears to be some bias in the presentation, which makes me think that the chart may be structured to show a political point.

Last, I looked at the overall numbers. The EU has had 1.79 million cases and 183,400 deaths. That's 0.4% catching it, 0.1% of identified infected people dying and .041 % of total population dying (99.6% not dying). In the US, there's 4.95 million cases and 161,000 deaths. That's 1.5% catching covid, only 0.03% dying from it and still.049% of total population dying from it (99.5% not dying).

So, more people in the US were identified with it, but far fewer of them died. The overall fatality rate for the population is about the same.

There's no doubt many countries in the EU are doing better than the US, but how do we attribute that? I don't know, but there's a number of things I suspect
1) Since many of the countries are more spread out, it's possible that isolation is a natural barrier to spread.
2) some countries, such as Italy, already had a burst of this and are now not as active.
3) health care in many of the 28 EU countries is not on par with the US and cases may simply not be reported. Testing is certainly not as available in say Slovenia as it is in the United States. This is strongly suggested by the higher infected fatality rate in the EU.
4) possibly a different strain is going through the EU, one which is harder to spread, but more deadly when it does.
5) Numbers aren't accurate for multiple reasons. For example, in the US, there is a financial gain by reporting positive cases, so dishonest organizations would tend inflate the numbers.
6) Certain segments of the US population have not stayed home - youth and protesters come to mind first.

All of the above?

Results...are inconclusive.
 
The ‘best people’ are on it, hopefully something comes of the effort. The other day they compared numbers, MN to WI. With their data, it showed higher deaths, cases, & hospitalizations in MN, even though they had a longer & stronger lock-down & mask mandate. I didn’t check numbers myself.

I’m not flippant about it, but if the Rona is gonna get you, it’s gonna get you.

So much of the data needs to be delved into. Even that graph above, some countries have really backed off on testing the ‘healthy’ people, hence lower numbers. We’ve had counties where a bunch of negative tests weren’t added to the numbers, which left the ‘positive’ % artificially high.

As of a month or so ago, 81% of the Covid deaths in WI had serious other underlying health issues.
 
This virus doesn't seem to sustain peaks for very long in smaller geographic regions. Even places that one would think are "hot" in the US, like Texas and Florida, are in decline. 3 weeks ago, Florida was at 53,000 new cases/day but today that is down to 32,600 and the infection spread rate is .85. The virus is shrinking there. If it follows the pattern, their new cases will crash and they'll be on a low level for a long time.

Having spent time looking at data, my best read on this is that developed immunity lasts about 3-4 months. Many places appear to be showing peaks now were also peaking in April, perhaps people that got a little and didn't show symptoms before are showing symptoms now. Other factors could be influencing that. I'm seeing more data that supports a co-immunity with other coronaviruses, such as the many cold viruses. So, if you had the sniffles, you might be safe from covid for a few months?

Maybe I'm just being optimistic.
 
Bob Noel said:
kind of like influenza and other pathogens
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Except that the influenza we have this year is not caused by the same virus that caused influenza lets say in 1987. That virus family has the ability to rapidly change substantial portions of its coat due to re-shuffling of a few genes. It is my understanding that while corona mutates (every virus does), that genetic variability does not have the same degree of change to its envelope and is probably more stable from an antigen perspective.
 
bflynn said:
BTW, digging into numbers....this chart is a little deceptive. 65,000 is not a 7 day average, it's a weekly peak. Additionally, the EU numbers seem to be off. I pulled the numbers myself and came up with over 12,000 as the value for Jul 30 for the EU. There appears to be some bias in the presentation, which makes me think that the chart may be structured to show a political point.

Last, I looked at the overall numbers. The EU has had 1.79 million cases and 183,400 deaths. That's 0.4% catching it, 0.1% of identified infected people dying and .041 % of total population dying (99.6% not dying). In the US, there's 4.95 million cases and 161,000 deaths. That's 1.5% catching covid, only 0.03% dying from it and still.049% of total population dying from it (99.5% not dying).

So, more people in the US were identified with it, but far fewer of them died. The overall fatality rate for the population is about the same.

There's no doubt many countries in the EU are doing better than the US, but how do we attribute that? I don't know, but there's a number of things I suspect
1) Since many of the countries are more spread out, it's possible that isolation is a natural barrier to spread.
2) some countries, such as Italy, already had a burst of this and are now not as active.
3) health care in many of the 28 EU countries is not on par with the US and cases may simply not be reported. Testing is certainly not as available in say Slovenia as it is in the United States. This is strongly suggested by the higher infected fatality rate in the EU.
4) possibly a different strain is going through the EU, one which is harder to spread, but more deadly when it does.
5) Numbers aren't accurate for multiple reasons. For example, in the US, there is a financial gain by reporting positive cases, so dishonest organizations would tend inflate the numbers.
6) Certain segments of the US population have not stayed home - youth and protesters come to mind first.

All of the above?

Results...are inconclusive.
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I agree with a lot of your thoughts, but be careful when citing percentages. You have (most likely unintentionally) moved the decimal point incorrectly and your calculated percentage figures are 100x too low. For instance, 183,400 deaths out of 1.79 million confirmed cases in Europe represents approximately 10%, not 0.1%; 0.1% of 1.79 million would be 1,790. Similarly, the US figure should be 3% based upon your stats, and not 0.03%.

In any case, however, the interpretation that the EU did or is doing things right and we are not based upon the infection rate is not logical, which is why I agree with the gist of your post. A more logical interpretation would be based on the mortality rate, which would indicate that either we are testing a larger percentage of our total population (including those with few or no symptoms), we are better equipped to assist and care for those who DO become seriously ill, or both.
 
bflynn said:
The vaccine candidates so far look really promising for the short term. But I think we’re going to discover that they won’t provide permanent immunity. They all work by using our own body’s ability to product the corona immunity, but it isn’t permanent, our bodies don’t preserve immunity to corona viruses. If we did, everybody would get a cold just once in your life.
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Not exactly. The 'common cold' is a common set of symptoms caused by a number of different viruses...rhinovirus, coronavirus, parainfluenza, RSV (and multiple strains of all of those), all cause 'colds'. So you can catch colds multiple times without ever having the same disease...but you will have the same symptoms.
 
Palmpilot said:
What do you make of the fact that the European Union is doing so much better than we are? Unlike New Zealand, they are not geographically isolated, and they have a larger population than we do.

View attachment 88643

https://www.statista.com/chart/22102/daily-covid-19-cases-in-the-us-and-the-eu/

Maybe we should find out how they're doing it. :dunno:
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The first thing I would do in trying to interpret a graph of raw cases numbers like that is normalize for population and testing rates. Then I would examine other independent factors like population density, use of public transport, and obesity levels, the latter having been shown to have a significant impact of actual mortality due to a Covid-19.
 
Does anything really ever go away? I thought even exotic ailments that are largely "extinct" still crop up from time to time in some communities and populations. I doubt any reasonable person actually ever believed that in a world with nearly 8 billion people (most of whom have horrible hygiene habits) this would ever simply magically go away

Like anything else (tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox, influenza, rotavirus, pneumococcal, diptheria, etc.) this will turn into an immunization people get
 
Tantalum said:
Does anything really ever go away? I thought even exotic ailments that are largely "extinct" still crop up from time to time in some communities and populations. I doubt any reasonable person actually ever believed that in a world with nearly 8 billion people (most of whom have horrible hygiene habits) this would ever simply magically go away

Like anything else (tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox, influenza, rotavirus, pneumococcal, diptheria, etc.) this will turn into an immunization people get
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This is the point I’ve been making since the beginning of this thing. Hiding from it is only effective while you hide, and unless you are off the grid and growing your own food, not totally effective even then. Hiding for years hoping for a vaccine is stupid.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
The first thing I would do in trying to interpret a graph of raw cases numbers like that is normalize for population and testing rates. Then I would examine other independent factors like population density, use of public transport, and obesity levels, the latter having been shown to have a significant impact of actual mortality due to a Covid-19.
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Well, the first item on your list is easy. 2019 population estimates are 328.2 million for the U.S., and 447.7 million for the E.U.

There is no mortality data in the chart I posted.
 
Palmpilot said:
Well, the first item on your list is easy. 2019 population estimates are 328.2 million for the U.S., and 447.7 million for the E.U.

There is no mortality data in the chart I posted.
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Yes, it usually takes some considerable effort to pull together the data in a reliable way and develop the appropriate statistical models to account for the other variables.
 
Salty said:
This is the point I’ve been making since the beginning of this thing. Hiding from it is only effective while you hide, and unless you are off the grid and growing your own food, not totally effective even then. Hiding for years hoping for a vaccine is stupid.
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I think it depends on the risk group a person is in. Since vaccines are looking promising in trials now, I advise the very vulnerable people in my family that a reasonable plan is to hunker down, if they can stand it, in strict isolation for the next 6 months to a year.

If you stay at home, have almost everything delivered, have visitors who must come use N95 or better protection or use same yourself, and minimize time when within 10 feet of other people, you can really reduce the risk.

Once either enough people have been vaccinated or infected to provide herd immunity, then things will start looking better. Seems like these things take one or two seasons usually.

This virus has thrown everybody a bad deal and it is very much a hardship to have to isolate like that, but if that is the price of survival, many will choose to do that.
 
bflynn said:
BTW, digging into numbers....this chart is a little deceptive. 65,000 is not a 7 day average, it's a weekly peak.
Click to expand...

What you mean by "weekly peak"? Also, what makes you think that the 65,000 is not a seven-day average?

Additionally, the EU numbers seem to be off. I pulled the numbers myself and came up with over 12,000 as the value for Jul 30 for the EU. There appears to be some bias in the presentation, which makes me think that the chart may be structured to show a political point.
Click to expand...

What is the source of that number?
 
Palmpilot said:
What is the source of that number?
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Google.

Daily testing numbers go up and down on a weekly cycle. It's one of the most obvious things about the data.
 
Now that Virginia has released its mobile app that uses the phone toolkit, how long before it becomes mandatory? How will "contact" be registered if folks are in separate cars with windows up? How long before some politician or agency decides to collect the data? And are the so-called anonymous tokens really anonymous if the state can associate them with a positive test and send it to your phone? And, of course, with data mining the tokens ca be associated with enough data to identify you personally?
 
bflynn said:
Google.
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I tried Google, but no luck.

I provided a link to my source. How about doing the same?

Daily testing numbers go up and down on a weekly cycle. It's one of the most obvious things about the data.
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The Statista chart is labeled as a seven-day moving average, and I have yet to see any data to contradict that.
 
isn't it interesting that we can easily find reports of new confirmed cases and probable cases, but where are the reports of people recovered? Where are the reports of the people that never develop symptoms?
 
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