Coronavirus

[Jocephus]

To defend Karp for a minute here, and I hope I'm not overstepping but I have some things in common and it's public info on this board... He's a recovering addict from pharmaceuticals iirc and has built a health-conscious lifestyle and ideology that works for him. I can imagine that some of the distrust is well-earned and I'll take him at his word that he's being as careful as possible within that framework. I've pushed back and argued as much or more than anyone with the details, but that's the place it's coming from if I had to guess. I don't mean to hand wave the arguments or condescend since I know he'll read this, but have a little perspective when saying someone is selfish or an [expletive].

does that also go both ways? i said a joke and he lashed out at me.

can i use his past addictions to judge him? who knows what those drugs did to his body? that's on him so who cares if he dies, right? just like being fat, blame the person. now let me be clear, that's hyperbole.

i've said before i dont care what carp does and he does seem like he's a healthy person. my annoyance, from what has been posted here, in a "public" space, is his veering into right wing nutbar "trutherisms" to twist around to justify his choices. i also dont think he's very alone 'cause clearly he's not considering how active covid is still and how profitable anti-information is. a god damn virus became political. unbelievable.

sure, he's in the minority here but...that was his choice, his freedom. i'm sorry he feels like he gets blasted every day but it seems to me it's people, at least here, challenging what he says. if that makes an echo chamber 'cause more people don't agree with him, well, sorry? i will never consider him a victim, via posts from GRB, 'cause he's in the minority of what, like, the same 20 people participating in a years long thread.

as countless threads have proven here on GRB over the all the years, no one is changing society via GRB. there's a whole baseball forum (the whole point of GRB) he could participate in but chooses to spend the majority of his time here, either defending himself or trying to prove people he's right. it never works, particularly on hot issues like this.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

?Sure, get vaxxed to protect yourself. Sure, wear masks to protect others. But, for how long? And, more importantly, is there a way this virus ever goes away? I'm not getting the warm and fuzzies given all that he said.

Certainly now preventative measures are needed to reduce demand on the hospitals. Is it going to be the same every year?

I really feel like the talk about pandemic mitigation measures have obscured in most people’s minds the basic dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks, namely that they end. This happens by them either being wiped out or becoming an endemic low level problem. With COVID, it seems almost certain at this point us that endemic is going to be the ultimate end.

But this does not mean that we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people dying from it every year in perpetuity. The deadliness comes from the novel part of the novel coronavirus. Once the virus is no longer novel to your immune system, either through vaccination or infection, repeat exposure is much less dangerous. There are several coronaviruses already in permanent endemic circulation. It’s pretty likely that these are the residue of past pandemics. For example, there’s recently been talk about the 1889 “Russian flu” pandemic actually being the entry point for one of these.

At this point, while these viruses can still be deadly for people with compromised immune response, for most, they are largely a nuisance or non-issue minor infection that you don’t spend much time worrying about.

What about variants? That’s certainly a concern, but variant evolution is not an unlimited process that churns out totally new and ever deadlier versions. In fact, the virus evolves to some kind of “best fit” form that maximizes its replication under the present immune conditions. Unclear how far that will go, but again the primary threat is to those without prior exposure. To generate a new threat the immune system can’t put up a good fight against, the virus needs to evolve in a separate population without circulating among humans. This is precisely the reason the big source for new deadly infections is crossover from other animal species.

Good article on this:
Novelty Means Severity: The Key To the Pandemic

Perhaps inhaled vaccination would be a route to truly wipe out COVID, but that would be a long term project. Development seems too late to be of much use in the acute phase. I would like to believe that this experience will be the motivation to pursue these sorts of long term projects even without an active ongoing catastrophe, but I guess we’ll see.

Also a really good article. Thanks for posting.

I think it's pretty inevitable that we see Covid end as an endemic. I was hopeful, perhaps stupidly and certainly before Delta, that with enough natural infections and enough vaccinations, we'd see an eradication of the virus at some point. The only way to get rid of the virus entirely at this point is if natural infections provide more sterilizing immunity than the vaccines and they do so even in vaccinated individuals that get infected, or a vax with sterilizing immunity is created and taken by enough people. Neither of which seem likely, though perhaps there's still hope.

But, if it ends an endemic, how bad is it? There are things like the common cold that cause relatively few deaths yearly. There's the flu that causes, what, 60K deaths yearly. Or it could be worse to a lot worse.

Is covid worse than the flu once covid is no longer novel? Does covid continue to disproportionately target the elderly and immunocompromised even once those subgroups have ample exposure? And they get booster shots with the hope that the antibodies are capable of neutralizing more serious infections? And then, eh, cross your fingers.

Viruses don't try to do anything, they reproduce and sometimes they mutate and sometimes that mutation allows it to reproduce more. In that vein, less severe infections are preferable because carriers spread it. Or they become more transmissible. Which is the case with delta. I've been pretty confident that the adaptive arm of the immune system would be able to handle any variant because the spike protein is what has been targeted with vaccines and precisely the reason the virus is capable of replicating (in humans, dunno about animals). But, how much time and how many chances does it need before it can mutate into something worse? Feels like we're going to really press our luck if the plan is to open everything back up, throw away masks, and let the virus replicate ad nauseum while relying on the spike protein not finding a way to evade the adaptive arm. Rather that's this year or next or the year after.

Like I said about a month ago, I'm more pessimistic about the future than at any point since the pandemic began for the above reasons.

At least the innate arm of children is still doing an exceptional job, relatively speaking, at killing the virus thanks to I think it's the interleukins (sp?). That's about the only silver lining to this virus.

ETA: The article quoted is almost exactly how I felt, say, 6 months ago, complete with the analogy about protecting the house.

[haltz]

does that also go both ways? i said a joke and he lashed out at me.

Sure it goes both ways but I've spent a lot of time arguing with him about this and I was thinking about it, trying to understand and it kind of clicked for me since I'm in a similar boat. My outlook I've constructed to maintain sobriety is a little different, but still have one and it needs to be pretty resolute or the fear is that it all comes crashing down and you're back where you started.

This is where it gets condescending like I alluded to earlier but I think his for partly good reason is a perfect storm for this scenario. Obviously I completely disagree with the choice, but I think I can understand it somewhat for whatever that's worth and anyway my post had nothing to do with you.

Just throwing that out there. There's a real opioid epidemic among the same communities that are vaccine hesitant. Maybe in the back of someone's mind they don't trust the same people to save their lives that killed their kids. Maybe that's a reach but this stuff is complicated and for a lot of talking heads it just means they've found an audience for their nonsense.

[Jocephus]

does that also go both ways? i said a joke and he lashed out at me.

Sure it goes both ways but I've spent a lot of time arguing with him about this and I was thinking about it, trying to understand and it kind of clicked for me since I'm in a similar boat. My outlook I've constructed to maintain sobriety is a little different, but still have one and it needs to be pretty resolute or the fear is that it all comes crashing down and you're back where you started.

This is where it gets condescending like I alluded to earlier but I think his for partly good reason is a perfect storm for this scenario. Obviously I completely disagree with the choice, but I think I can understand it somewhat for whatever that's worth and anyway my post had nothing to do with you.

Just throwing that out there. There's a real opioid epidemic among the same communities that are vaccine hesitant. Maybe in the back of someone's mind they don't trust the same people to save their lives that killed their kids. Maybe that's a reach but this stuff is complicated and for a lot of talking heads it just means they've found an audience for their nonsense.

yer a good dude haltz.

i do understand the need for routine and continuing things to keep order or to feel like keeping order be it mentally or physically.

[G. Keenan]

Hey, GRB talked me out of buying a bunch of Gemini Coin so who says no one ever changes their mind?

We should get a pool going on what date in 2022 carp gets his Covid booster

[Arthur Dent]

But, if it ends an endemic, how bad is it? There are things like the common cold that cause relatively few deaths yearly. There's the flu that causes, what, 60K deaths yearly. Or it could be worse to a lot worse.

Is covid worse than the flu once covid is no longer novel? Does covid continue to disproportionately target the elderly and immunocompromised even once those subgroups have ample exposure? And they get booster shots with the hope that the antibodies are capable of neutralizing more serious infections? And then, eh, cross your fingers.

In retrospect, once COVID escaped Wuhan, I think there was probably never a shot at near term full suppression. Now that an extremely infectious version has arrived, I agree long term suppression is probably out as well, though I also hope I will be wrong and natural immunity will turn out to be sufficiently sterilizing.

Long term, I don’t think we know how worried we should be about endimicity, but there is reason for optimism as COVID actually mutates at a much lower rate than the flu which will make it harder to get out ahead of the immune system. Or just consider the historical record where it seems clear that the impact of infectious disease depends primarily on structural factors like population density, sanitation, infection control technology, etc. Is there really a structural change that now allows disease to be deadlier than the past or would the best guess still be that this turn out like past outbreaks? The main structural change I see is much more global travel, which means rapid global spread but, if anything, less deadliness. In the past, you got deadly diseases because of isolated populations acting much like animal reservoirs for the development of novel viruses. Wilderness destruction increasing exposure to animal viruses may be a factor on the other side, but again I don’t see why they would be able to sustain much more deadly ongoing infectiousness than in the past.

Will it be worse for the elderly and immunocompromised? Surely, yes, and I don’t think we should just accept that. I think a return to the idea the we should try to eliminate the deadlier bugs would be a good idea. If there’s a way to genocide some of the nastier ones that play extremely dirty tricks, like HIV, we ought to do it. Barring full suppression, better control like using inhaled vaccines instead of injections for respiratory viruses would be great. I don’t quite understand why we don’t already do that. We have inhaled flu vaccines but they seem to be much less used. I tried to get one last year in part because there was some evidence that they might have side anti-COVID benefits through action at the site of infection, but hardly anyone was offering it. You had to go way out of town to some place that didn’t take my insurance, so I didn’t go for it. Would like to know what the deal with that is.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Somewhat related to recent convo.

tl;dw: Everyone's going to get the virus.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

But, if it ends an endemic, how bad is it? There are things like the common cold that cause relatively few deaths yearly. There's the flu that causes, what, 60K deaths yearly. Or it could be worse to a lot worse.

Is covid worse than the flu once covid is no longer novel? Does covid continue to disproportionately target the elderly and immunocompromised even once those subgroups have ample exposure? And they get booster shots with the hope that the antibodies are capable of neutralizing more serious infections? And then, eh, cross your fingers.

In retrospect, once COVID escaped Wuhan, I think there was probably never a shot at near term full suppression. Now that an extremely infectious version has arrived, I agree long term suppression is probably out as well, though I also hope I will be wrong and natural immunity will turn out to be sufficiently sterilizing.

Long term, I don’t think we know how worried we should be about endimicity, but there is reason for optimism as COVID actually mutates at a much lower rate than the flu which will make it harder to get out ahead of the immune system. Or just consider the historical record where it seems clear that the impact of infectious disease depends primarily on structural factors like population density, sanitation, infection control technology, etc. Is there really a structural change that now allows disease to be deadlier than the past or would the best guess still be that this turn out like past outbreaks? The main structural change I see is much more global travel, which means rapid global spread but, if anything, less deadliness. In the past, you got deadly diseases because of isolated populations acting much like animal reservoirs for the development of novel viruses. Wilderness destruction increasing exposure to animal viruses may be a factor on the other side, but again I don’t see why they would be able to sustain much more deadly ongoing infectiousness than in the past.

Will it be worse for the elderly and immunocompromised? Surely, yes, and I don’t think we should just accept that. I think a return to the idea the we should try to eliminate the deadlier bugs would be a good idea. If there’s a way to genocide some of the nastier ones that play extremely dirty tricks, like HIV, we ought to do it. Barring full suppression, better control like using inhaled vaccines instead of injections for respiratory viruses would be great. I don’t quite understand why we don’t already do that. We have inhaled flu vaccines but they seem to be much less used. I tried to get one last year in part because there was some evidence that they might have side anti-COVID benefits through action at the site of infection, but hardly anyone was offering it. You had to go way out of town to some place that didn’t take my insurance, so I didn’t go for it. Would like to know what the deal with that is.

It may have been unrealistic to think containment at some point would happen, but yeah with delta circulating whatever odds there were have certainly decreased. I guess fingers crossed natural infection after vaccination (or without vaccination) will lead to a more sterilizing immunity. Time will tell.

The slow rate of mutation is reason for optimism, certainly. Though, does it really matter for the foreseeable future if it doesn't mutate at all? It offers plenty of a risk in the near term as is.

In the end, it all comes down to will we get sterilizing immunity with natural infections.

If yes, reason for optimism.

If no, can history offer insight? I'm not so sure. While, yes we have more sanitary conditions and better medicine (like horse dewormer) including monoclonal antibodies, we also have a much higher population density and that seems to trump all other factors. To illustrate this point, look at measles. Measles is said to have an R naught of 12-18, so certainly higher than even the most liberal estimates of delta's R naught which is somewhere around 6-9.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meas ... untry=~USA

The US topped out at 630 measles cases per YEAR / 100K people in a year (1938). Comparatively, nearly every state in the nation topped 630 covid new cases per WEEK / 100K people in 2020. There are like 9 states at or above that rate currently.

The US had roughly 6,000 covid cases in 2020 / 100K citizens and have another, roughly, 6,000 covid cases in 2021 / 100K citizens with the fall months still to go. And, this latest wave is with the vaccines and with at least a year of exposures to the virus.

Granted, the measles had been around, so it wasn't novel, but at those types of rates (if they can be trusted), it's not like there was a lot of immunity in the population prior to the vaccine becoming available.

Perhaps they just kept poor records back then. But, it's not like measles was a difficult diagnosis or difficult to establish it as a cause of death. The death rate topped out in 1923 at 9.x / 100K citizens. Covid killed ~100 people / 100K citizens in 2020. It's killed ~80 people / 100K citizens in 2021 so far. The only optimistic thing that can be said in this comparison is the death rate fell for measles and likely will fall for covid. Regardless, the starting points are so, so different, I don't know much can be gleaned other than general platitudes.

General source for all the 2020/2021 stats taken from the graphs at this website: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Again, if there's no sterilizing immunity from natural infections, I don't see anything good happening in the near (or distant) future. The virus continues to spread. Sure, it mutates slowly, but if we go to a let er rip mentality with a virus that can spread even among those that have immunity from severe cases, and with 8+ billion people on the planet, and with vaccines that are specifically targeted at one single protein of the virus, as important as that protein may be, I'm reminded of Jeff Goldblum

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

@Arthur Dent Didn't mean to ignore your last paragraph which certainly has good points. I have no insight into any of that, though, and certainly have no clue why they didn't look at inhaled vaccines other than perhaps they knew it would take longer to get it approved. Or it would be a lot more difficult.

I also don't understand a lot of things like why we still have to ram a freaking footlong q tip up our nose to get tested then wait a day for the results. Or why, generally speaking, early treatments aren't being used especially for those at a higher risk, like monoclonal antibodies @$1,250 a pop. Or why there is still no CDC/FDA guidelines for how to prepare to get covid other than get vaxxed (like optimize vit d levels, lose weight, get sleep, use hydrotherapy on a daily basis, go for a walk in the woods, in general be more healthy). Sure, some of those ideas may not have tons of evidence or may do nothing at all. But, at worst, they're not harmful and at best, help boost immunity.

And, that's what drive me nuts more than anything. Say what you want about the FLCCC doctors and call them snake oil salesmen along with their propensity for hyping off label medicines like ivermectin. But, there are fractions of the medical community that are at least trying to find something that is available and affordable and works while the rest of the world sits here and mocks them. What's the FDA doing? Approving remdesevir? Insisting we ram telephone poles up our noses to get a test instead of spitting in a cup?

Sorry, got on a rant that wasn't necessarily directed at you, lol. It would certainly be worthwhile to at a minimum strike while the iron is hot and try to get rid of as many viruses as possible. I'm not overly optimistic that will happen though.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Went back and reread some of the stuff I missed while respond to ADs post today.

And have some general thoughts. Given that this is a polarized thread, and there are a lot more people on one side than the other, off color comments are going to be taken as personal attacks even if they aren’t or even if they aren’t meant to be. And it tends to lead to locked threads and unproductive conversations.

I’d also disagree that no one changes anyone’s minds. We’re not Neanderthals and can all read and understand typed words. I’ve changed my minds on lots of things.

Lastly, we have a sister thread in politics, a forum that was specifically created to keep all things political out of this forum. Why are we discussing politics in here? Lord knows there is plenty of [expletive] going on right now to keep us occupied. IMHO