D&D and the rising pandemic

[ad_hoc]

That is worrying, but not surpising. Right from the start I've had a strong feeling that a lot of the projections that various governments around the world have been making about vaccines against Corona, have been wildly optimistic. At the rate at which this virus mutates, will it not have become immune to a vaccine once it is finally ready? Will it keep adapting as quickly as the flue does, and keep returning every year? Perhaps this is going to become the new normal, and we should all start settling in? Because I don't think this virus is going away any time soon.

Does it mutate rapidly?

I have read that one of the good things about it is that it isn't likely to.

One of the real problems though is that people might not be building immunity to it or for very long. This is the case with some of the coronaviruses so there is the fear that will occur with this one too.

 

[Imaculata]

Apparently there are already at least 3 variants going around. As for immunity, I heard something about cured patients becoming infected a 2nd time...

 

[FrogReaver]

...only to turn around and stoke certain fires with his new series of “LIBERATE (Insert State Name Here)!” tweets.

Since I have no hope that team mod will call this out. I figure I will. This is blantantly political and against the site rules.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That is worrying, but not surpising. Right from the start I've had a strong feeling that a lot of the projections that various governments around the world have been making about vaccines against Corona, have been wildly optimistic. At the rate at which this virus mutates, will it not have become immune to a vaccine once it is finally ready? Will it keep adapting as quickly as the flue does, and keep returning every year? Perhaps this is going to become the new normal, and we should all start settling in? Because I don't think this virus is going away any time soon.

I mentioned Covid’s mutation rate somewhere upthread, with a link.

Compared to the rate for influenza viruses, Covid is a Model T next to drag racers. As of mid March, there were 8 known strains of Covid-19, but they were all very similar. Because of this, virologists were optimistically suggesting that any treatment or vaccine would likely be effective against all strains, and of long-lasting efficacy.

Of course, there’s hundreds of coronaviruses out there...

 

[GreyLord]

I have heard promising things about remdesivir.

Unfortunately a hedge fund manager promote it to boost the stocks and the company had to come in and tamp things down (but only after they found out about the promotion of the hedge manager, ran it through Public Affairs, and got them to put out a statement which took around 3-4 hours -which may seem like a long time but is actually really fast when you consider how long it can take corporations to respond with Public Affairs sometimes). This was long enough to do a pump and dump for the hedge fund.

It did not reflect well on the company, but it was not the company itself dumping it's stocks but a hedge fund manager and PR firm. They tried to squash it and hopes that it was a cure quickly as they are still doing research.

However, the ideas he latched onto were promising. It is ONLY in a very early stage but it appears to help a LOT with the early cases. However, it is limited enough in research that they are unwilling to say whether it is a placebo affect or the actual medicine before more analysis is done on what happened (end of April and early May at the earliest for real analysis to be done) and then more widespread testing if the results are positive.

Now, this is not a cure as people would think it is. It stops the virus from replicating. This means the virus is still in the person's system, but it will be unable to duplicate itself as easily. It does not heal the person or cure them, that is still up to the immune system. It helps keep the disease under control while the immune system is still working. The patients I think have been taking it for only about a week in the study. The disease can over a normal course take up to 20-40 days to run it's course so I can understand why they don't know if the patients are actually cured, it's gone into a sort of isolated state and will resurge, or what will happen. Even then, it was a limited course and they had trouble finding test subjects.

However, if it turns out that this CAN be used as a treatment with a high level of success (and the soonest they might actually know it seems would be June or July and maybe August or September, they still need more testing and a larger test group for a second and third wave of testing and viability) this could be almost as good as a vaccine. Just like when you get strep you can go to the doctor and get a medicine to help treat it, you could go and get a medicine to treat the COVID.

We could probably all go out and do our normal thing at that point and if we came down with symptoms early on, go and get the treatment and continue on with our lives.

I HOPE the tests turn out well because this medicine is a tad less intrusive than the other options people have looked at in hope to treat this illness thus far, but...it's too early to know.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The trials on that look promising. There was also some buzz about a head-lice treatment,

Can a drug that kills head lice cure COVID-19 patients? It works in a petri dish, but…

Add a head lice-killing drug called ivermectin to the list of medicines that researchers are testing as a possible treatment for COVID-19 patients. In a petri dish, the medication eradicates SARS-C…

www.chicagotribune.com

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don’t recall if I posted this here or not:

Using blue shop towels in homemade face masks can filter particles 2x to 3x better than cotton, 3 clothing designers discover after testing dozens of fabrics

Three clothing makers built their own particle-testing lab to design a better homemade surgical mask.

www.businessinsider.com

I’m posting/reposting as an update. We have a small supply of masks in our house, and since I’m the person using them- mostly on shopping trips for groceries- they should last a little while. However, with the uncertainty surrounding the length of the current lockdown and the possibility of future waves of
Covid-19 outbreaks (or other contagions), we thought it would be a good idea to get out the sewing supplies to make our own.

We’re still considering what we need for the outer layers, but that article convinced us to track down some of these for the inner layer. Here’s why:

Inserting two of these towels into an ordinary cotton mask brought filtration up to 93% of particles as small as 0.3 microns, the smallest their machine could test. Meanwhile, the cotton masks filtered 60% of particles at best in their tests, Schempf said.

Well...easier said than done. I don’t know if everyone had the same idea, but polyester hydro knit towels are kinda hard to find right now. Maybe people are using them instead of pater towels in their kitchens, etc.

I could find similar products with ease, even from the same manufacturers. But neither they nor the products from other companies actually listed the materials used, only breakdowns of the amount of recycled material used.

It took me vitiating an Ace, a Lowe’s and 2 Home Depots to find those ones specifically mentioned in the article.

Lowes had them in the website, but didn’t have them anywhere in store. Apparently, they’re not dealing with the vendor who distributes them anymore. And one place I found them online didn’t have locations in my state and was selling them in-store only.

For the record, even though they’re normally found in the Cleaning Supplies sections of stores, Home Depot ALSO carried them in the Paint department. The first location I hit had none, but the second had great big stacks of them in the paint department only.

 

[ad_hoc]

How effective are cloth masks at blocking and limiting the distance of droplets from the person wearing them?

That is the primary reason why it is good to have a society wearing them.

 

[tomBitonti]

The trials on that look promising. There was also some buzz about a head-lice treatment,

Can a drug that kills head lice cure COVID-19 patients? It works in a petri dish, but…

Add a head lice-killing drug called ivermectin to the list of medicines that researchers are testing as a possible treatment for COVID-19 patients. In a petri dish, the medication eradicates SARS-C…

www.chicagotribune.com

Later in that article a virologist is quoted as saying that they would never think to use the drug to treat Covid-19 because of how toxic the drug is at levels which kill the virus. (I tried to cut and paste the paragraph here, but Chicago Tribune does something that break select/copy on an IPad. Bad, CT, Bad!)

I suspect this is the case for a lot of drugs. Lysol probably kills the virus very effectively, but you don’t want to spray your lungs with that.

Be Safe, Be Well,
Tom Bitonti

 

[Morrus]

How effective are cloth masks at blocking and limiting the distance of droplets from the person wearing them?

That is the primary reason why it is good to have a society wearing them.

Yeah, they don’t protect you. They protect people from you. They work when everybody is wearing them.