4 ms·

> Only, there's no evidence that folks who recover from COVID are immune. Yup. But the usual assumption, experience, history, situation, whatever of viruses

> Only, there's no evidence that folks who recover from COVID are immune. Yup. But the usual assumption, experience, history, situation, whatever of viruses is that recovery means immunity at least for some significant time, say, a year or so. Also, I stated > So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses, I didn't explicitly repeat this qualification just before your quote but went for fewer words.

klyrs 7y ago
> so, I stated >> So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses... You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold. Anything you say based on this faulty assumption is hardly worth consideration. Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering. Herd immunity is a phenomenon observed elsewhere, but not here.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering. This is an extraordinary claim without evidence. There's a few case reports of "reinfection", but they are rare. In all cases A) symptoms were mild, and B) researchers were unable to culture SARS-CoV-2 from them. Many viral illnesses have people shed virus again a few times after "recovering", and this seems no different. A bigger concern is, humans seem to lose antibodies to coronaviruses with time-- this is how we get the common cold again and again. But infections after the first time seem to be less severe, thanks to longer-lived immunity from memory t-cells, etc. And at least for SARS-COV-1, immunity lasted quite a bit longer than typical for other human coronaviruses, with decent antibody titers at 3 years (no followup past then).
- graycat 7y ago
  > You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold. Not really! As you say, this virus is new. Soooooo, we are short on info. So, we should entertain several possibilities. I didn't say "should" and, to entertain more than one possibility, only said "If"! Biggie difference. Yup, we don't know. If we do a lot of very well designed and executed statistical trials, controlled, double blind, randomized, simple random sample, stratified sample, etc., then maybe in five years we will know enough to be sure on all the major points, across seasons, ages, other medical conditions, reinfection, spreading via HVAC systems, therapeutics with dosages, side effects, and contraindications, vaccines with number of shots, contraindications, etc. Ah, just wait five years!!!! Well, nope, to paraphrase, we go to war with the info we have and not the info we want. So, for the info we have, from the history of viruses, once recovered, then likely immune for a long time; for now we have to take that seriously and maybe are in effect forced to act as if we believe it. Yup, there are reports of "reinfection" from maybe China or South Korea -- I didn't pay much attention to those reports due to concerns about, call it, data quality. But, net, yup, maybe in some cases, maybe even in all cases, recovery does not mean immunity. At high cost, we will be finding out with some relatively good data, and in less than five years! Did I mention high cost?
mlyle 7y ago
A lot of people miss that herd immunity is likely the only reasonable path. Some models show decay to low case counts in a few weeks, but I'm not buying it. Here in the SF Bay Area, I'm seeing a 40% decay weekly in hospital admissions. If you assume infections outnumber hospital admissions by 20x, it's going to be months before we reach the low case counts (1 per million) needed for contact tracing and suppression efforts amid semi-normal activities. And that's assuming we keep the 40% decay rate, and don't encounter subpopulations with higher Rt's that keep the virus circulating much longer or even growing.

klyrs 7y ago

> so, I stated >> So, if want to accept the usual situation for viruses... You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold. Anything you say based on this faulty assumption is hardly worth consideration. Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering. Herd immunity is a phenomenon observed elsewhere, but not here.

mlyle 7y ago
> Folks don't develop immunity to this virus. They can get re-infected immediately after recovering. This is an extraordinary claim without evidence. There's a few case reports of "reinfection", but they are rare. In all cases A) symptoms were mild, and B) researchers were unable to culture SARS-CoV-2 from them. Many viral illnesses have people shed virus again a few times after "recovering", and this seems no different. A bigger concern is, humans seem to lose antibodies to coronaviruses with time-- this is how we get the common cold again and again. But infections after the first time seem to be less severe, thanks to longer-lived immunity from memory t-cells, etc. And at least for SARS-COV-1, immunity lasted quite a bit longer than typical for other human coronaviruses, with decent antibody titers at 3 years (no followup past then).
graycat 7y ago
> You're saying that we should assume "normal situation" in the face of evidence that your assumptions do not hold. Not really! As you say, this virus is new. Soooooo, we are short on info. So, we should entertain several possibilities. I didn't say "should" and, to entertain more than one possibility, only said "If"! Biggie difference. Yup, we don't know. If we do a lot of very well designed and executed statistical trials, controlled, double blind, randomized, simple random sample, stratified sample, etc., then maybe in five years we will know enough to be sure on all the major points, across seasons, ages, other medical conditions, reinfection, spreading via HVAC systems, therapeutics with dosages, side effects, and contraindications, vaccines with number of shots, contraindications, etc. Ah, just wait five years!!!! Well, nope, to paraphrase, we go to war with the info we have and not the info we want. So, for the info we have, from the history of viruses, once recovered, then likely immune for a long time; for now we have to take that seriously and maybe are in effect forced to act as if we believe it. Yup, there are reports of "reinfection" from maybe China or South Korea -- I didn't pay much attention to those reports due to concerns about, call it, data quality. But, net, yup, maybe in some cases, maybe even in all cases, recovery does not mean immunity. At high cost, we will be finding out with some relatively good data, and in less than five years! Did I mention high cost?

mlyle 7y ago

A lot of people miss that herd immunity is likely the only reasonable path. Some models show decay to low case counts in a few weeks, but I'm not buying it. Here in the SF Bay Area, I'm seeing a 40% decay weekly in hospital admissions. If you assume infections outnumber hospital admissions by 20x, it's going to be months before we reach the low case counts (1 per million) needed for contact tracing and suppression efforts amid semi-normal activities. And that's assuming we keep the 40% decay rate, and don't encounter subpopulations with higher Rt's that keep the virus circulating much longer or even growing.