Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

i never said there will never be different strands of a virus. Sure next year we could face another strand of coronavirus just like what we do yearly with the flu. As far as covid-19 you’ll be able to easily fight it off a second time. Next year if it comes back as a different strand, than yes it could affect you again.

so far most of the reports I have read has indicated covid-19 is not mutating fast at all.

 

Not betting my life or my loved ones' lives on immunity, with the current data available.

 

Keep in mind that the linked interview is from March 20, before Trump's poll numbers started to plummet and before he became really obsessed with reopening the economy and while it's unlikely that Trump tried to pressure Fauci into echoing the Administration's narrative, it is very likely that Trump and company did have an agenda of limiting Fauci's access to the media.

 

Nor am I with my parents and my grandpa. Myself and my wife, we are young and healthy. We are not crazy and going out to packed bars but we have mask on while shopping for food.

 

Yep. You lap it all up. Great job!

 

You are making declarations I don’t think even the people studying viruses are making, as far as “easily fighting-it a second time”. Just getting a grip on who has actually been infected TWICE seems highly sketchy right now.

I have seen some of those working in vaccine development claim mutations should be covered by the vaccine, I didn’t understand it enough to recite why, but it had to do with the structure of coronaviruses vs flu virus (which already starts with a couple of different strains, influenzas A or influenza B). They cautioned the vaccines might not work at all, just that IF they worked mutations actually might not be a problem the same way they are with different strains and mutations within strains of influenza, which is the reason flu vaccine is only 50% effective at best usually.

 

It has been reported those tests had a 40% false negative rate, hence the CDC wanting to develop their own.

 

Here we are talking about Fauci just as the White House wants.

Yet it is Trump who intentionally misinformed Americans about the spread; did nothing for a month while the virus spread exponentially; botched the PPE crisis, including still-unanswered questions of federal agents confiscating lawful purchases of states, cities and hospitals; undermined his own Task Force; ridiculed his top infectious disease expert while at the same time spreading falsehoods by a game show host; threatened the nation’s governors who were doing the job he refused to do; played golf while the virus exploded, and refused to wear a mask until 130,000 died.

Under Trump’s leadership US performance against Covid-19 is simply the worst among the members of the G-7 nations.

And Fauci is the problem? What a joke.

 

Part of lasting immunity it to have Killer T-Cell immunity most of the current vaccines in trial are using mRNA which doesn't give Killer T-cell immunity.

 

Riiiiiggggghhhhtttt!!!!!

 

German study finds no evidence coronavirus spreads in schools

 

We'll see if that holds water in the US soon enough.

 

The flu is a known quantity. It kills less than 200 kids every year, and almost every one is high risk. These are kids with already compromised immune systems. COVID-19 is still now a completely known quantity and we are still learning about it every day.

There are also very few school personnel and parents who die from the flu every year. Annually, total flu deaths are between 12,000 and 60,000 annually. COVID-19 has already taken over 130,000 this year alone, and that's with most schools having been closed since mid-March. What will the community spread look like if we engage in what the CDC calls a high-risk activity of reopening schools?

There's also a flu vaccine annually. It isn't 100% effective, sure, but if everyone took the vaccine who could, we could come close to herd immunity. There is almost always a portion of the population that is immune to whatever flu "bug" is going around from previous exposure. Most years, the flu vaccine is 50% or more effective. If schools are worrying about flu exposure and the liability it produces, make sure all staff that are eligible can receive the vaccine for free. This would reduce the liability.

At current, there is zero vaccine for COVID-19, and the only way to reduce risk is reduce exposure. Masks help, but they aren't a panacea, especially when you're talking about a group of 20 or more, inside together, for hours a day, 5 days a week. Again, it's not a matter of if someone in the class gets COVID-19, it's when. Then what?

We don't need a vaccine to reopen schools either, and I've never said we have to wait until a vaccine to open them up. We do, however, need to get the virus under control and meet, at minimum, CDC guidelines for level 2. This plus aggressive tracing for anyone that tests positive would reduce the risk to an acceptable level for most parents, including me. Instead of over 4,500 new cases and over 90 reported deaths like we had in Arizona today, we'd have new cases under 100 a day, and much fewer deaths.

There are likely places in the US that meet these standards. Many, including the entire state of Arizona and Florida, don't come close to meeting this standards. Reopening schools under the current conditions in FL and AZ will only increase the number of COVID-19 positive people, which as all charts have shown, mean an increase in hospitalizations, and eventually, an increase in deaths. These are things I wish to avoid. I don't want my kid to bring COVID-19 into my household because he/she got sick in school. I don't my kid to infect his/her teacher and cause that teacher to end up on a ventilator and possibly die. And again, at the rate the disease is spreading in Arizona, it's a guarantee that there are people who will bring COVID-19 into the schools.

 

Absolutley amazing. A CNN piece long on conjecture, opinion, and speculation but short on fact.

I never thought I would see something like this???

 

Where is the info that only 200 kids die a year from the flu? I'd like to see that info. The rest of what you said is scare tactics. You saw a German article saying kids aren't likely transmitters of Covid19. You see Pediatricians saying get kids back to school. Yet you are taking the CDC's word on this. The same CDC who along with the WHO and our Govt have botched this pandemic every which way possible. Florida should start school on time and I will with zero worries send my kids to their HS. They have a significantly higher chance of dying in a car accident at their age than from Coronavirus.

 

And the false negative rate for that test is what?

COVID-19 false negative test results if used too early

That isn't worth the time we wasted. Not even close. That is one major reason why we will have more cases and deaths today than South Korea has had in the entire run of the virus.

If the worry was that the test wasn't accurate, you ramp up production of that test AND try to produce a better test. You don't just fail to test at all.

 

For those in the northern Virginia area, got this today. Antibody testing available without an appointment.

COVID-19 Antibody Test Patient First

 

And today’s death count is tracking slightly behind last weeks. Surprising a bit but not shocking given last week probably had a lot of carryover from the holiday weekend. But not an exponential takeoff as of now. Still some big states to come in though.

 

I'm just explaining why the CDC elected not to use the test that was available. Mind you the virus was sequenced in record time I think they had it sequenced in mid January, do you have any clue how long it takes to develop an accurate PCR test? In particular for a pathogen from the other side of the world?

Its really easy to play Monday morning QB.

I can do it too. WE SHOULD HAVE CLOSED THE US BORDERS TOTALLY IN LATE JANUARY.
Then it wouldn't have even made it here. Any US citizen could have gone to a quarantine area for 2 weeks before being released. (BTW that's what they did in NZ)

 

I got the number of kids dying from the flu from the CDC.

While relatively rare, some children die from flu each year. Since 2004-2005, flu-related deaths in children reported to CDC during regular flu seasons have ranged from 37 to 187 deaths.
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As for the German study, it's one study, and not conclusive. Remember Sweden? They didn't shut down K-8 schools, and they had some different results than Germany:

However, a scan of Swedish newspapers makes clear that school outbreaks have occurred. In the town of Skellefteå, a teacher died and 18 of 76 staff tested positive at a school with about 500 students in preschool through ninth grade. The school closed for 2 weeks because so many staff were sick, but students were not tested for the virus. In Uppsala, staff protested when school officials, citing patient privacy rules, declined to notify families or staff that a teacher had tested positive. No contact tracing was done at the school. At least two staff members at other schools have died, but those schools remained open and no one attempted to trace the spread of the disease there. When asked about these cases, Ludvigsson said he was unaware of them. He did not respond to a query about whether he would amend the review article to include them.

An indirect clue about schools’ role in spread might come from antibody studies. On 19 May, the Swedish Public Health Agency announced preliminary results from antibody surveys of 1100 people from nine regions. They reported that antibody prevalence in children and teenagers was 4.7%, compared with 6.7% in adults age 20 to 64 and 2.7% in 65- to 70-year-olds. The relatively high rate in children suggests there may have been significant spread in schools. The agency did not provide more specific data to distinguish between younger children and those in high schools and universities, which have switched to remote teaching.
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There's so much we don't know about COVID-19. Do we really want to use our school system as a giant laboratory? Is it worth putting kids, teachers, and staff at risk of spread, especially where cases are spreading like wildfire?

What we don't know about the German study or the Swedish cases? What was the community infection rate? Which strain of COVID-19 was most prevalent in the community? And for the kids that did get sick, what, if any, are the long term effects of the virus.

There is just too much we don't know about the virus to risk opening schools in hotspots. There are thousands of new positives daily in Arizona and Florida, and how many them are kids or have kids that will be in the school system in a few weeks?

Even at 1% transmission, there are over 3.2 million public school teachers in the US. That's 32,000 sick adults, likely over 1,500 in the hospital, and over 100 dead. That's just teachers in public schools, and doesn't cover other school personnel, or any private school numbers. To put this in perspective, least year, there were 48 law enforcement deaths that happened in the line of duty. That's out of 800,000 officers. So best case scenario, and the teaching profession becomes as dangerous as law enforcement. Anyone want to consider worst case?