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Coronavirus


Bjornebye

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34 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

This is a piece from the guardian about this national lockdown. The highlighted piece sums up this entire crisis. 

 

Meanwhile in the 16 days since tier 3 was introduced new cases and cases per 100k in Liverpool are down one third. Does this not suggest tier 3 works? 

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Fuck knows, they're massively off piste with this. They should have done it weeks ago. If it's some sort of fucked up plan to let things trundle on while the north suffers, then lock down before it spreads to the south and re-open like heroes for Christmas, they should fucking hang. That's crediting them with far too much competence though, they've fucked this up since the very start and this is more likely to be the last desperate attempt to 'save Christmas'. 

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44 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

This is a piece from the guardian about this national lockdown. The highlighted piece sums up this entire crisis. 

 

Meanwhile in the 16 days since tier 3 was introduced new cases and cases per 100k in Liverpool are down one third. Does this not suggest tier 3 works? 

Screenshot_20201030-234902.jpg

Seen this on Twitter before and she kind of answers your question. 
 

 

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Covid-19 antibodies diminish over time, but experts say there's no reason to be alarmed


Most experts agree that drops in antibody levels over time are expected, and that these declines are not altogether concerning.

 


By Denise Chow
Coronavirus antibodies may provide protection against reinfections even if they wane over time, according to experts, who say people shouldn’t be alarmed by recent studies that had seemingly contradictory results.

Antibodies and other immune responses have been a major focus of coronavirus research because there are important implications for how long people could be protected before a vaccine is available. If antibodies confer immunity that is long-lasting, for example, people who have been infected may be protected until there is a viable vaccine. But waning antibodies could mean that Covid-19 survivors may be at risk of reinfection.

A pair of studies released this week raised some confusion because of their divergent findings. One paper published in the journal Science, led by scientists in New York, found that Covid-19 antibodies developed by the immune system lingered at stable levels for around five months. But two days earlier, a preprint study that has yet to be peer-reviewed, found that among hundreds of thousands of participants across England, antibody levels declined rapidly, falling more than 26 percent over a three-month period.

Most experts agree that drops in antibody levels over time are expected, and that these declines are not altogether concerning.

“If you think about basic immunology, you should have an antibody response initially and then that antibody response should go away,” said Ritesh Tandon, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, who was not involved with either study. “Antibodies are dynamic — they are not made one time and stay in the blood.”


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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, echoed that sentiment, adding that declining antibody levels do not necessarily translate into a lack of immunity.

“Just because the level of antibodies diminish, that doesn’t mean you lose protection,” he said Thursday in a press briefing from the National Institutes of Health.

In the recent study published in Science, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai used a database of immune responses from 30,000 New Yorkers who tested positive for the coronavirus between March and October and monitored 121 volunteers over time.

The researchers found that antibody responses peaked roughly two to three months after infection. And in 90 percent of the people who recovered, antibody levels subsequently dropped but remained stable for around five months, said Dr. Ania Wajnberg, an associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine and a co-author of the Mount Sinai study.

A “majority of patients have a relatively robust response and so far, that is persisting over time,” she said.

In the U.K. study, scientists at Imperial College London found that antibody prevalence in the British participants fell from 6 percent at roughly the end of June to 4.4 percent in September. And using at-home tests that were distributed to more than 365,000 people, the researchers observed a more than 26 percent decline in antibody levels over three months.


But there were limitations with the British study. Although the study had hundreds of thousands of participants, the researchers did not follow the same people over time. The study also did not precisely measure antibody levels.

“The sensitivity between the two tests is a major difference,” said Alan Wu, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with either study. “It’s a little bit apples and oranges, in the sense that the studies are not done in the same way.”

But despite the seemingly divergent results from the two studies, they can both be true, according to Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the molecular microbiology and immunology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It’s not unreasonable — or particularly alarming — if antibody levels decline rapidly after a person recovers and then persist for some time at a much lower level, he said.

“We know that other coronaviruses tend to elicit immunity that is not long-lasting,” Casadevall said. “The question is: How much antibodies do you need to prevent reinfection? It may be that you need very little.”

Still, antibodies are not the only weapons in the immune system’s arsenal. There are cellular immune responses that could recognize a virus and provide some protective immunity. People who have been infected with a virus also typically produce “memory cells” that can recall certain pathogens and quickly mobilize a defense against reinfection.

“Antibody immunity is only one part of immunity,” Casadevall said. “If you have immunological memory, it means that if you confront the coronavirus again, your body doesn’t need two weeks to figure out how to react. That memory could kick in right away.”

 

There is no easy way to detect memory cells and cellular immune responses in recovered patients, but it is an active area of research, according to Tandon. And so far, immune responses to the coronavirus are more or less in line with other known coronaviruses, he added.

“It does play by the rules of immunology — it’s not an alien virus that we seem to know nothing about,” Tandon said. “I haven’t seen anything that makes me think this is a virus that is very different from anything we’ve seen before.”

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45 minutes ago, an tha said:

Well what a fucking depressing read this is...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54661843

It is, but this is hilarious-

 

We are already closer to normal than we were in lockdown - schools are open and, with the exception of Wales, where there is a two-week "firebreak" we are not being told to stay at home.

 

We're in this mess because we came out of the first lockdown too early and still haven't gone into another one. Oh, and schools are very likely to be the main issue, they always were- it's as though they think kids don't come home to their families after 6-7 hours in their petri dish classrooms. And we're still not testing people coming in from trips abroad. Or contacting and isolating anywhere near people. Aside from that, everything's peachy.

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7 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

Seen this on Twitter before and she kind of answers your question. 
 

 

Well I can't speak for everywhere across the north as I've not looked up that data. But I have looked at Liverpool's data and what she says there is just wrong. Cases are not going up, they're coming down, both new cases per day and cases per 100k have reduced by 1/3 in the 1st 16 days of tier 3. So maybe Liverpool is some weird isolated case, but I don't believe that to be the case because on the BBC news the other night the top 20 places of cases per 100k were nearly all tier 2 locations. I think what is the case is tier 1 and tier 2 are pretty ineffective. Here's Liverpool's data from the day we went into tier 3, 7 days later and the latest available yesterday. 

 

 

 

 

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I think there should be another lockdown for as long as it takes to get us over the line. Then I think that I'm a cunt for thinking it because i'll be alright financially/mentally when plenty of others wont be. Its horrible.

 

I would cancel Christmas though

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5 minutes ago, johnsusername said:

I'm looking forward Eat Out to Help Out 2 after Lockdown 2. That was my highlight of the worldwide pandemic. 

If they could have come up with a dastardly plan to spread the virus even faster, while preying on people's love of cheap food then they couldn't have come up with a better one that EOtHE. Well apart from spraying each McDonald's burger with the virus directly. 

 

That and sending schools and colleges back, it's almost as if they aren't listening to their experts or are listening too well. Depending on how sinister you think the tories are. 

 

 

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