black321 wrote:
 
Well if the world hadn't screwed up the response so far, eradication would be achievable. It has been effectively eradicated in several countries, but we all will continue to suffer the health and economic consequences of crappy policy and lack of political will that has allowed for the economic devastation for so many families that have lost their breadwinners and the ongoing mutation that comes from having lots of virus around to replicate. The current policies will have a high economic cost, just spread over more years. 

 black321 wrote:
 

next fall? i'd be surprised if there wasn't a therapeutic or two in widespread use by then as well

possibly something repurposed like ivermectin and maybe something developed (a combo of repurposed and something tweaked)

although there's nothing guaranteed, there are a lot of smart people with serious resources/tools on the job 

there are a few trackers out there and this is one of two that i check often

from a lot of material that i read, our own immune system's dysregulated inflammatory response after a couple of weeks into the illness is the problem

anti-inflammatory drugs/treatments could buy us some time and keep people at home by minimizing the disease (including long covid)

also help to free up hospitals

just amazed at the speed of vaccine development too

stay safe

edit: here's the second pipeline tracker

"It's going to disappear. One day, it's like a miracle — it will disappear."

Moderna CEO: US needs to prepare for fall, COVID-19 resurgence

Anjalee Khemlani·Senior ReporterMon, January 25, 2021, 1:24 PM·4 min readNews of Moderna’s vaccine’s weakened response to the South African strain (B.1.351) of the coronavirus is raising more alarm bells amid the ongoing pandemic.

Experts have been watching the strain closely as it may be resilient to the vaccine. Though it has not yet been detected in the U.S., the country should prepare for its potential spread, experts warn.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said as much on CBS Sunday, and Moderna (MRNA) CEO Stéphane Bancel told Yahoo Finance Monday that Fauci agreed with the company’s need to study the strain.

“This was all decided in the last few days,” Bancel said.

“We met with the team several times between the weekend, talked with the board, and decided this was the prudent thing to do— which Dr. Fauci confirmed to me yesterday as I was engaging with him,” Bancel added.

The concern adds to the list of questions about the vaccines, including how durable they will be long-term.

“Nobody ... knows how long the protection will last,” Bancel said, noting that the concern is larger for the elderly.

“I would definitely tell people, get vaccinated, you need to be protected now,” he added.

In the meantime, Moderna expects to start the booster studies in March— marking one year since the Phase 1 trials began— and then in the summer — sometime between June and August— to begin with last year’s Phase 3 participants.

“Because it’s only one dose, we will get the data faster,” Bancel said.

Even as vaccinations struggle to ramp up around the country, Bancel has an eye on next fall, when respiratory viruses start to spread.

“The thing we want to be ready for is the fall,” he said. “We don’t have to go again through a dreadful winter like we’re going through now.”

For that to happen, all vaccinations should be done by the fall so that any booster shots can begin by the winter — after a year is complete. The hope, Bancel said, is for the booster shots to be lower doses in order to produce a larger supply. Currently, the two-shot vaccine requires 100 micrograms to be effective.

“If a dose was 50 or 25 micrograms, which is possible because your immune system is already prepared ... you could potentially have up to eight times more product as a boost,” Bancel said.

Questions remain

Dr. Paul Offit, a top vaccine expert and pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), told Yahoo Finance Monday that there’s still a lot to learn about the Moderna news — such as what specifically is the level of antibody production, and B-cell and T-cell production. All three components are part of the vaccine’s ability to fight the virus, so more data from Moderna’s study is required.

But in the meantime, conducting two studies of booster shots, as Moderna is doing, with one engineered to target the strain and another for a general booster, are necessary, Offit said.

The World Health Organization’s Melissa Van Kherkove said during a briefing Monday that the emergence of variants means even more attention should be paid to mitigation measures in absence of widespread vaccinations.

“Everything we are learning about these variants does not change our approach to controlling COVID. It will take longer than all of us want for vaccines to have the impact that they will have,” she said.

Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, added that the virus is going to continue to transmit “likely for a very long time.”

To-date, smallpox is the only disease to be eradicated, with polio and measles an ongoing fight.

“I don’t believe we should start setting elimination or eradication of this virus as the bar for success. The bar for success is reducing the capacity of this virus to kill, to put people in hospital, to destroy our economic (and) social lives,” Ryan said.

“We have to reach a point where we are in control of the virus,” he said.

george church and companies just put out some research that attempts to identify certain genetics with critical covid-19 illness

obviously i can't post my version of that report here but you'll probably hear something about their work very soon

fascinating stuff

might look something like this

 

 kurtster wrote:
 
Well, it's not all about you, eh? If everyone was on board you probably could have beat back covid for the cost of the useless giveaway to rich corporations.

 kurtster wrote:
 

Surely there must be a bootstrap around that you cann pull on.

 rgio wrote: 
Just asking for my share of the socialist wealth redistribution.  That is the price for my cooperation.

and also a 2 X COLA in order to keep up with inflation and the real cost of living increases ...

 kurtster wrote:
 
Trumpsters learned from the best .... Can't spell aMErica without the emphasis on ME.  

Send me and the wife $2 k each per month and we will stay home for as long as it takes.  Otherwise, we all gotta do what we gotta do ...

 rgio wrote: 
Because America, by God...What percentage of that 70 some odd million who voted for the second place finisher will get with the program?  Not enough, I fear.

 westslope wrote:
 
We're going to slide backward in the US, as it seems the combination of exhaustion, rebellion and vaccination have made people feel like it's almost over.  

A friend of mine was texting me last night, and ended with "Gotta run...going out to dinner with my sister's family for her birthday".   When I questioned it, he said "restaurants are open for "dining in", and they need patrons".   They were closed last week.   It's not exactly the same....but take-out is business.

This morning...he said "it was packed....took me forever to park".  

The US just refuses to collectively pull our heads out of our asses and do what's necessary to limit the damage from COVID.  We've come this far...lets just cross the finish line.

4% of the global population: 20% of the deaths.  We suck.

Why Vaccines Alone Will Not End the Pandemic - NYT



My questions:   

Will social cooperation in the form of mask wearing and social distancing improve over the next few months, stay the same or go backwards?

Are government mandated restriction enough to overcome reluctance on parts of the public to 'cooperate'?

These questions apply to all countries.  

 sirdroseph wrote:
 
so what exactly did you mean by "Positive cases are going to drop overnight"?  seems to fit with the "it's all a conspiracy" thinking.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 
Well the problem is was that you didn't/couldn't put a system in place that would keep people isolated until their test results were in (now the problem is that the horse has bolted). People here largely keep self-isolated until the results are back. But you are right - it would work much better with fast screening tests.  Balancing false positives and false negatives is always a problem.

As far as the original post goes, they obviously went for minimising false negatives and catching the virus in the early growth stage when you maybe could stop a person from spreading it further. The state health departments here review the data for every positive test result and say, hmm, this looks like a low positive so we will watch that person and decide whether it is ok to take them off the books and stop the contact tracing. Or sometimes they figure that it is probably just a person who has recovered but is still shedding virus particles. All that is a heck of a lot easier if your cases are low.

sirdroseph wrote:

No, positive cases will not drop overnight. Not everyone follows WHO guidelines for PCR test procedure, and the false positive rate is already pretty small with PCR. It will have no effect on non-PCR testing, and the biggest impact from false positives comes when the infection rate falls to the point that noise in the results becomes a significant fraction of the signal. We're nowhere near that yet.

 islander wrote: 
This may be true, but wondering what this has to do with my post. Did you feel just like randomly saying that and figured this was as good as place as any to type it?

We have just canceled our annual sojourn south this year. Just the wrong time to get on a plane unvaccinated.  Hopefully our new administration can actually coordinate a federal response to a global problem.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

Yes. And just because the virus declines over the next months from proper procedures, vaccinations, warm weather, and 100 other reasons, it doesn't mean it was "fake/hoax".  Promoting such nonsense is irresponsible nuttery. 

 sirdroseph wrote:
 

I'm not going to argue that Trump is responsible but we've known all along that these tests were not proper for the prevention of spread. Yeah they're great for people wondering why they're feeling ill. What we need is easy, cheap, fast tests we can all have at home and take several times a week whether we feel symptoms or not. Precision is less important: if you're taking the test every 48 hours, odds are good the next test will catch the virus before you're spreading it. NEJM