8 ms·

They are around, but their existence and availability is assiduously kept out of the public discourse. I would bet even a large proportion of primary care physi

They are around, but their existence and availability is assiduously kept out of the public discourse. I would bet even a large proportion of primary care physicians don't know about them. Any time the subject of natural immunity comes up you will still very often hear "but the antibodies wane after a few months" as though that is the sole determinant of how well protected a recovered individual is. I will leave the reasons that our public health establishment might want measurement of natural immunity focused on a narrow and rapidly-decaying metric as an exercise for the reader.

michaelmrose 5y ago
Nobody is arguing that you can acquire a good degree of immunity by contracting covid and doctors are certainly aware of such tests but there is little import in educating the public about such tests as there is little benefit to the consumer. Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection than infection alone and supplies in the states are ample. There simply is no conspiracy because neither the fact nor the motivation makes any sense. I encourage you to think through the matter more thoroughly.
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  > Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection This has been very sparsely studied (recovered individuals were excluded from the clinical trials) and is not as straightforward as you make it sound. At least one study has already suggested that cellular immune response may be eroded by a second dose of the mRNA vaccines. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    > A reminder: they have not been formally peer-reviewed and should not guide health-related behavior or be reported in the press as conclusive. A scientific viewpoint does not consist of finding a months old non peer reviewed study that suggests a viewpoint might be correct. In actual fact vaccinated individuals have half the reinfection rate across a large population. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm7032e1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
- roenxi 5y ago
  We don't really know enough about the long term impacts of the vaccines. The heart issues being linked to the Pfizer vaccine are mildly concerning. The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point. The vaccine is also, in my experience, painful. Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine. People already eat bad food, don't exercise and take risks.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The mRNA vaccines are causing some cases of myocarditis, however the absolute risk is still low. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/... Prior infection does seem to provide better protection than vaccination against future symptomatic infections. But it's also possible that vaccination after infection could give a further boost to immunity. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/94258 https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/94258 We already know that the vaccines aren't very effective at stopping people from catching SARS-CoV-2 infections. However they remain very effective at preventing deaths. The vast majority of patients dying now are unvaccinated.
    - newbamboo 5y ago
      “ however the absolute risk is still low.” For an 18 year male athlete, is the risk lower than the risk from COVID? That’s the appropriate question. We don’t screen boys for prostate cancer. Why is that? How do we know the vast majority of deaths are in the unvaccinated? Also, is it possible that vaccination status influences medical care? Can we do randomized blind studies to test your assertion? You are probably right, but given the lack of public reporting and the fact that people who make this claim never qualify it with the age or health status makes me deeply skeptical.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        An 18 year old male athlete absolutely should get vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my... People have reported 1339 (778 confirmed) cases of myocarditis or pericarditis out of 363 million doses. This is not to say that the vaccine caused every case. Incidence in the general population is 10-22 per 100k. If I read that correctly as the annually. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32127272/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32127272/ Then one would expect 300-750 cases to occur within the same week in a vaccinated patient naturally. Another confounding factor is covid is known to cause the same thing so its entirely possible that we are vaccinating people with covid or whom have gotten over covid and in some cases blaming the vaccine for the effect of the disease. Let us suppose that all reported cases are ultimately confirmed and one would expect 300 cases without the vaccination and thus the vaccine caused 1000 extra cases in 363M doses. This is a 1 in 363,000 chance of a side effect that rarely kills you. In that same 363,000 if infected with covid will see 726 deaths 0.002 death rate and most will have some sort of lung damage even if they were perceptively asymptomatic. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200906202950.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200906202950.h...
- MrRiddle 5y ago
  Recent study posted on hackernews from Israel says immunity from Covid itself is 13 times stronger than from Pfizer vaccines. There is absolutely no reason to vaccinate if you already had Covid, yet that’s not normalized. Policies are built around vaccination, and natural immunity is an afterthought.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Studies have also shown that people who have had the vaccine and covid have half the reinfection rate as those who have had covid alone. Granted this is reducing an already modest risk but there is virtually no risk to the pfizer vaccine so on balance it makes sense to vaccinate. Especially since reinfection means more spread including to millions of antivaxxers. Conversely everyone who had a sniffle in 2020 or even 2019 thinks they already had covid. The message don't get vaccinated if you've been infected would ultimately if implemented lead to millions of people being exposed because they thought they had covid infecting millions of others who are unvaccinated. So do we want to use our ample supply of vaccine to make everyone including formerly infected slightly more safe or do we want to infect millions of additional idiots. The choice is clear. Even in the fictional world where everyone was smart enough to understand the nuanced message of get tested to ensure you actually had covid we would be expending scant medical resources to do what? Help people be slightly less safe to avoid feeling unwell for two days?
    - MrRiddle 5y ago
      That’s very first world thinking, we don’t have ample supply of vaccines, many countries are still without them. It’s about providing those countries with vaccines vs making first world people slightly more protected. Also, vaccines are not completely safe, even though in very small number of cases, they did cause side effects, as serious as hearth inflammation or blood clots.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        The decision about how to allocate doses and the decision of an individual to get vaccinated are not connected. There is no box to check to send this dose to a poorer nation. Given the availability of the dose it is logical for you to both ask for more doses to be provided to those who need them overseas AND consume the doses allocated to your state which otherwise may simply go to waste to nobody's benefit.
redis_mlc 5y ago
In the first weeks of Corona's "official" entry to the US in 2020 (1), it was reported that sick people in the NY area had to pull strings or prove contact with a known patient or recent travel to an infected area to get tested when calling the official hotline. So nobody who caught it on a train or in an office could confirm if they needed to quarantine, which actually happened. If that person was later admitted to a hospital, it was game over for that hospital and any elderly people sent back to their nursing home. 1. The actual entry date was likely fall 2019 because of the Wuhan Military Games and airline travel from China to the US. SF never really had a hospitalization spike in 2020, so corona infection appears to have been spread out compared to other cities and was probably endemic in 2020.
- lrem 5y ago
  Wasn't the first patient in France confirmed, post-factum, to have been in November or October 2019? What would be the chances that US people travel to China less than the French?
  - orwin 5y ago
    1/ The first confirmed case in France was late-december, probably infected mid-december. So the first case in France it a least in december. We can try to infere more but this is only speculation. 2/ Well, actually... So we French have a huge Chinese immigrant population, and a lot of Chinese students. Weirdly enough, of those i met and spoke with when i was a student or at my company (including my scrum master right now), none of them came from the coastal cities. I don't know why, maybe because the universities used to be basically free for them until 2018 (and are still pretty cheap, 5k/y i think?). I wouldn't be that surprised if France was the first foreign country infected by SRAS-Cov2. Wouldn't bet on it, but wouldn't be surprised.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Some French blood samples from November 2019 appear to contain antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab727/6356216 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
nikolay 5y ago
Sure. The nice thing about Bulgaria is that I can go to any lab and request any test - I don't need a doctor to prescribe it. In a small city, I had 2 labs offering the test (QuantiFERON SARS-CoV-2), i.e. it's widely and readily available unlike here!
marton78 5y ago
What do you mean physicians don't know about this. The existence of memory T-cells is common knowledge. It is taught in school.
- smolder 5y ago
  They meant primary care physicians might not know about the T-cell covid-19 test, not that they don't know about T-cells. PCPs cant know everything about everything, which is why there are specialists.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    “PCPs cant know everything about everything” is quite an understatement in my experience.
    - smolder 5y ago
      Mine, too.
atatatat 5y ago
Can you please tell me the best route to getting one of these tests? My situation is ruining my life.

michaelmrose 5y ago

Nobody is arguing that you can acquire a good degree of immunity by contracting covid and doctors are certainly aware of such tests but there is little import in educating the public about such tests as there is little benefit to the consumer. Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection than infection alone and supplies in the states are ample. There simply is no conspiracy because neither the fact nor the motivation makes any sense. I encourage you to think through the matter more thoroughly.

AndrewBissell 5y ago
> Even if you have already gotten covid you get better immunity with a very safe vaccination + infection This has been very sparsely studied (recovered individuals were excluded from the clinical trials) and is not as straightforward as you make it sound. At least one study has already suggested that cellular immune response may be eroded by a second dose of the mRNA vaccines. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436441v1
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  > A reminder: they have not been formally peer-reviewed and should not guide health-related behavior or be reported in the press as conclusive. A scientific viewpoint does not consist of finding a months old non peer reviewed study that suggests a viewpoint might be correct. In actual fact vaccinated individuals have half the reinfection rate across a large population. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm7032e1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
roenxi 5y ago
We don't really know enough about the long term impacts of the vaccines. The heart issues being linked to the Pfizer vaccine are mildly concerning. The evidence seems to be that the coronavirus will continue mutating and the vaccine will not stop people from catching COVID again at some point. The vaccine is also, in my experience, painful. Given these trade-offs it is reasonable for someone who has already been infected to avoid the vaccine. People already eat bad food, don't exercise and take risks.
- nradov 5y ago
  The mRNA vaccines are causing some cases of myocarditis, however the absolute risk is still low. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2781601 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/... Prior infection does seem to provide better protection than vaccination against future symptomatic infections. But it's also possible that vaccination after infection could give a further boost to immunity. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/94258 https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/94258 We already know that the vaccines aren't very effective at stopping people from catching SARS-CoV-2 infections. However they remain very effective at preventing deaths. The vast majority of patients dying now are unvaccinated.
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    “ however the absolute risk is still low.” For an 18 year male athlete, is the risk lower than the risk from COVID? That’s the appropriate question. We don’t screen boys for prostate cancer. Why is that? How do we know the vast majority of deaths are in the unvaccinated? Also, is it possible that vaccination status influences medical care? Can we do randomized blind studies to test your assertion? You are probably right, but given the lack of public reporting and the fact that people who make this claim never qualify it with the age or health status makes me deeply skeptical.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      An 18 year old male athlete absolutely should get vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/myocarditis.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my... People have reported 1339 (778 confirmed) cases of myocarditis or pericarditis out of 363 million doses. This is not to say that the vaccine caused every case. Incidence in the general population is 10-22 per 100k. If I read that correctly as the annually. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32127272/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32127272/ Then one would expect 300-750 cases to occur within the same week in a vaccinated patient naturally. Another confounding factor is covid is known to cause the same thing so its entirely possible that we are vaccinating people with covid or whom have gotten over covid and in some cases blaming the vaccine for the effect of the disease. Let us suppose that all reported cases are ultimately confirmed and one would expect 300 cases without the vaccination and thus the vaccine caused 1000 extra cases in 363M doses. This is a 1 in 363,000 chance of a side effect that rarely kills you. In that same 363,000 if infected with covid will see 726 deaths 0.002 death rate and most will have some sort of lung damage even if they were perceptively asymptomatic. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200906202950.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200906202950.h...
MrRiddle 5y ago
Recent study posted on hackernews from Israel says immunity from Covid itself is 13 times stronger than from Pfizer vaccines. There is absolutely no reason to vaccinate if you already had Covid, yet that’s not normalized. Policies are built around vaccination, and natural immunity is an afterthought.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Studies have also shown that people who have had the vaccine and covid have half the reinfection rate as those who have had covid alone. Granted this is reducing an already modest risk but there is virtually no risk to the pfizer vaccine so on balance it makes sense to vaccinate. Especially since reinfection means more spread including to millions of antivaxxers. Conversely everyone who had a sniffle in 2020 or even 2019 thinks they already had covid. The message don't get vaccinated if you've been infected would ultimately if implemented lead to millions of people being exposed because they thought they had covid infecting millions of others who are unvaccinated. So do we want to use our ample supply of vaccine to make everyone including formerly infected slightly more safe or do we want to infect millions of additional idiots. The choice is clear. Even in the fictional world where everyone was smart enough to understand the nuanced message of get tested to ensure you actually had covid we would be expending scant medical resources to do what? Help people be slightly less safe to avoid feeling unwell for two days?
  - MrRiddle 5y ago
    That’s very first world thinking, we don’t have ample supply of vaccines, many countries are still without them. It’s about providing those countries with vaccines vs making first world people slightly more protected. Also, vaccines are not completely safe, even though in very small number of cases, they did cause side effects, as serious as hearth inflammation or blood clots.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      The decision about how to allocate doses and the decision of an individual to get vaccinated are not connected. There is no box to check to send this dose to a poorer nation. Given the availability of the dose it is logical for you to both ask for more doses to be provided to those who need them overseas AND consume the doses allocated to your state which otherwise may simply go to waste to nobody's benefit.

redis_mlc 5y ago

In the first weeks of Corona's "official" entry to the US in 2020 (1), it was reported that sick people in the NY area had to pull strings or prove contact with a known patient or recent travel to an infected area to get tested when calling the official hotline. So nobody who caught it on a train or in an office could confirm if they needed to quarantine, which actually happened. If that person was later admitted to a hospital, it was game over for that hospital and any elderly people sent back to their nursing home. 1. The actual entry date was likely fall 2019 because of the Wuhan Military Games and airline travel from China to the US. SF never really had a hospitalization spike in 2020, so corona infection appears to have been spread out compared to other cities and was probably endemic in 2020.

lrem 5y ago
Wasn't the first patient in France confirmed, post-factum, to have been in November or October 2019? What would be the chances that US people travel to China less than the French?
- orwin 5y ago
  1/ The first confirmed case in France was late-december, probably infected mid-december. So the first case in France it a least in december. We can try to infere more but this is only speculation. 2/ Well, actually... So we French have a huge Chinese immigrant population, and a lot of Chinese students. Weirdly enough, of those i met and spoke with when i was a student or at my company (including my scrum master right now), none of them came from the coastal cities. I don't know why, maybe because the universities used to be basically free for them until 2018 (and are still pretty cheap, 5k/y i think?). I wouldn't be that surprised if France was the first foreign country infected by SRAS-Cov2. Wouldn't bet on it, but wouldn't be surprised.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Some French blood samples from November 2019 appear to contain antibodies for SARS-CoV-2. https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab727/6356216 https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

nikolay 5y ago

Sure. The nice thing about Bulgaria is that I can go to any lab and request any test - I don't need a doctor to prescribe it. In a small city, I had 2 labs offering the test (QuantiFERON SARS-CoV-2), i.e. it's widely and readily available unlike here!

marton78 5y ago

What do you mean physicians don't know about this. The existence of memory T-cells is common knowledge. It is taught in school.

smolder 5y ago
They meant primary care physicians might not know about the T-cell covid-19 test, not that they don't know about T-cells. PCPs cant know everything about everything, which is why there are specialists.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  “PCPs cant know everything about everything” is quite an understatement in my experience.
  - smolder 5y ago
    Mine, too.

atatatat 5y ago

Can you please tell me the best route to getting one of these tests? My situation is ruining my life.