So much for herd immunity - 33% of ex-covid patients getting reinfected with Delta

What have YOU done to help, tough guy? My wife and I worked for over one year in a Covid-19 unit, treating moderate cases, critical cases, intubating people, placing them on ventilators... yes, with PAPR respirators (which are not this ridiculous contraption you think you are so smart and witty for challenging me with).

While you think I'm a coward who hides from the virus, I've VOLUNTEERED to help at the Covid-19 unit in my hospital (when my job description is senior enough including being in an administrative position, that I didn't need to do that if I didn't want to).

Now, I'm trying to warn you about the sequelae of this virus, that the issue with it is not just life or death, because I'm trying to save YOUR ass from a terrible sequela and a curtailed life.

You're welcome.

 

So can I put ya down for two orders then? (for you and your wife)

 

Jesus. What a ridiculous couple of posts. With this, you're now being moved to the list of people I don't read. Say whatever asinine thing you want; it won't reach me. So annoying that you won't be able to spout some other supposedly witty (in your feeble opinion) comeback, huh? (Or actually, you will... but I won't read it. I always find it amusing how people still try to have the last word even when they know they are not being read. Yeah, frustrating, I know... poor guy.

By the way, do you even know what PAPR is? Why would my wife and I need your contraption, if we have professionally-provided PAPR??? But you probably have no clue about it. Look it up. Google is your friend.

Do you really think YOU can teach ME something about this virus and its prevention? Wow.

Oh, maybe before I move you to that list, you should tell me your full name and contact info. I'll be happy to submit a nomination on your behalf to the Darwin Award Committee. You fully deserve it. You're welcome. Hmmm. nah. I'll just move you now, because I'm sure you'll be able to self-refer, with your actions and inactions, given how thoroughly misguided you are about this.

Now, over and out forever (as far as YOU are concerned). Have a nice and long life. Stay safe.

 

For when you are out and about. Not working? Unless you wear your masks to the theatre and ball game and stuff?

Guy. I've read the studies. I'm still not going to live in fear.

 

Why are the tests for Covid failing? I know of two people very sick with positive family members and they themselves keep testing negative. And yes, both are vaccinated.

 

Tests are of variable quality in terms of false positive and false negative. Also, sometimes tests have a window of opportunity to catch the virus in the oropharynx.
What exactly were the tests done by your friends - type, brand name, method of sample collection?

 

One rare piece of good news.

Following what happened in the UK and India, now another major epicenter in the world, Brazil, is seeing a decline in number of cases. There as a decline by 30% in the last two weeks. For three consecutive days, the basic reproduction number fell below 1 and was estimated at 0.97. That is, 100 people pass the virus on to 97 people. When the R0 number falls below 1, we call it an inflexion point, meaning that the contagion has passed its peak and the outbreak is receding. 52% of the population got a first dose of a vaccine, and 25% are fully vaccinated.

So, the hope is that at some point in September or October we'll see the same happening in the USA. Fingers crossed.

 

Viruses + globalism was always going to be the death knell.

We could have survived the viruses, but the travel has made that impossible.

 

Calamities always are. It's how we adjust to the them that matters.

 

Viruses aren't the problem .. our constant movement is. Viruses will always behave as they do (mutating etc), so in order to live with them in safety we have to accommodate their habits. That means vastly reduced movement, much stronger borders, no recreational travel, etc etc.

 

Yep. It’s possible we end up with no herd immunity. Of course it depends on how one defines herd immunity. Here’s Webster’s.

I’ve been reminding people since last spring herd immunity is not eradication of a pathogen or disease. It’s not a state where nobody ever gets infected or sick. The “much less likely” bit in Webster’s definition above is subjective and I think we were probably too sanguine about this all along. I was too sanguine in the time period between the excellent results of vaccines coming in and the “arrival” of delta. I didn’t take my own advice

Actually there is quite a bit of “herd immunity” to influenza type B. The reason is because type B exhibits antigenic drift only as opposed to antigenic drift and antigenic shift of type A. Type A exhibits shift mostly by reassortment of its segmented genome in multiple species (notably swine and birds). Type B can not reassort in other species like type A because it only infects humans (and seals I believe). Subsequently we see influenza infections average 80-85% type A and 15-20% type B in humans. So there is quite a bit of immunity to type B because “mutations” that present new antigens to humans are less common with type B than type A. (This is also why all pandemic influenza viruses are type A). We have “time” to build up immunity to type B.

Now, how does SARS-CoV-2 compare to influenza in this regard? First, coronaviruses are not segmented so reassortment is off the table—in human and animal hosts. Second, coronaviruses proofread their genome during replication so point mutations are less common than in influenza viruses. This leaves SARS-CoV-2 without the two main mechanisms of antigenic drift and shift that influenza A possesses, making it more similar to type B but still much less “able” to drift than B even though it’s more zoonotic than type B influenza.
SARS-CoV-2 is left with only relatively rare point mutations (compared to influenza) and recombination to evade vaccine or natural immunity.

Because of the above, I don’t believe Covid will end up like influenza even though currently the R0 is much higher for Covid. Covid will be endemic, but immunity built up over time in populations will be more similar to influenza B than A and likely stronger even than for influenza B.

There is evidence cellular immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is cross reactive with endemic coronaviruses and SARS1, and MERS. Also memory B cells have been identified 6-8 months after infection to not only all regions of the S protein but the nucleocapsid as well.

Of course this is no guarantee individuals will not have damage from or die from Covid in the future but it’s good evidence we will build immunity to SARS-CoV-2 going forward.

Neutralizing antibodies are great—the best—but it looks like they are not going to be adequate.

Yes, I agree antigenic sin will likely affect Covid the same or similar to how it does influenza. As of now there’s nothing we can do about it.

 

And, MJ brings it with useless silliness (just to make you laugh!

@557, you have to call it "herd mentality" because that's what Orange Jesus calls it.

 

I *want* to be excited about this, but I'm feeling a bit hesitant given our track record with cooperating on fighting this nastiness. Here's a tiny, tentative "yeah!"

 

Or basically, lockdowns... travel restrictions... the problem is, it doesn't fly, in democratic societies. The Chinese can do that efficiently. We've tried here (USA) and already failed, and now there is even less appetite for it.

 

No appetite for it? That's precious.

I witnessed a woman almost jump over the customer service counter because the clerk told her they could not take back returns due to the virus. She went ballistic.

I witnessed groups of people unleashing on the store manager because they locked all the dressing rooms.

I interceded when people were acting like animals pushing and grabbing around seniors trying to get their groceries.

No appetite? Is that we're calling selfish, self-absorbed entitled jerks these days? Oh, okay.

 

LOL. I stand corrected!

 

anyone feel like we keep having to repeat this, the vaccine does not keep you from getting covid, it trains your body to fight covid *IF* you do get it

the natural immunity may only affect the current varient you got, the vaccine targets the spikes so may affect them all

 

Why is that, FreshAir? Anybody that does NOT know this by now does NOT want to know it.

 

Still infected, (only 33%? Not bad!) but not hospitalized or dying. Plus, they probably wouldn't be infected at all if they didn't have anti-vaccine kooks around them.

Modern medicine is truly a marvelous thing. If everyone were vaccinated, Covid-19 would be history. The longer it is allowed to spread among the anti-vaccination kooks (people of mediocre intelligence who love to imagine that they're really smart for believing some bozo on the internet over qualified experts), however, the more mutations we will see and the greater the chances of a variant that the vaccines can't protect against. It is bad enough that there are places where people don't have access to vaccines yet and so are forced to be incubators and spreaders of this virus.

 

Nice to be discussing Virology with you again! Welcome back to the discussion!

Antibodies against the nucleocapsid are not neutralizing, just binding... They are more important for diagnosis (e.g. serology tests) than for the clinical course.

Cross reactivity, sure, a possibility; might explain in part (as one of many factors) why some people are a bit less susceptible than others... But populationally speaking, it's not great and I doubt it will be the solution in the long run. Why? Because of this next paragraph which tends to indicate that this virus, unlike many others, is evolving to gain more virulence instead of less as it is often the case:

Relatively rare point mutations, well, the ones we've got already have already made a lot of havoc. There are actually hundreds of thousands but only a few, you are right, have conferred an evolutionary advantage to the spike protein. But as you know, recombination is always a possibility, and then all hell might break lose. Get an immunocompromised person who gest infected, say, by both the Delta and the Lambda simultaneously (both already in the USA), and suddenly you have a risk of recombination and a REAL Covid on steroids... Or, the Gamma and the Delta, both running through Brazil right now (recombination is what made, for influenza, of H1 and N1, H1N1 - for those who don't know, H is for hemagglutinin with 18 subtypes, and N is for neuraminidase with 11 subtypes, and they tend to recombine in various ways such as H1N1, H3N2, etc. with significant antigenic drift). Not to forget, we had the MERS, the SARS-1, now the SARS-CoV-2... and multiple variants of concern already, all still within the SARS-CoV-2... but with the thousands of bat coronaviruses, I'm bracing for the SARS-CoV-3.

Recombination has already been seen for the SARS-CoV-2 in North American and European sequences. See this paper; it is not conducive of optimism:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0251368

OK, so, can you imagine the havoc with Gamma + Delta? Yikes.

I know that I'm pessimistic. In part is burn-out. In part it is my dismay at seeing how stupid we were as a society, as a people, as a political body, to face this. I am profoundly disappointed. It doesn't seem like we learned any lessons. And China didn't either - if this turns out to have been a lab accident, then people have played with fire and got burned.

Look at us: we get the MERS scare, the SARS scare, the Ebola scare, the various scary influenza A viruses... (by the way, there is C too, and even D but the D is not in humans; cattle only)... and we STILL cede almost all our means of production of PPE to China, and we are caught with our pants down... These days, my trust in American exceptionalism is shattered.

----------

Edit: I forgot to address this: yes, the dictionary definition of herd immunity only talks about minimizing... but of course we had the hope of seeing this nasty bug petering out like the MERS and the SARS-1, and it's just not happening.

See, MERS and SARS-1 did not get to become endemic... but the SARS-CoV-2 has all the hallmarks of an endemic virus.

I just saw today an article about British virologists saying, "OK, that's it, we'll just have to get used to 25,000 deaths per year from the SARS-CoV-2, every year" (and do realize that our country is 5 times more populous than theirs, and we are also less disciplined and less proficient in health care, so I wouldn't be surprised if we'll end up with 100,000 yearly deaths by the SARS-CoV-2.

 

Hey, I'm trying to learn from you, and being kind... haha

 

No, the problem with this figure is that these are RE-infections. That is, the virus got again, people who had already had Covid-19 before (vaccinated or not; this figure applies to a past history of the natural infection). 33% of re-infection is not a small number, and is a very concerning number because it betrays the virus' ability to continue to go round and round among the population with no end in sight. This has nothing to do with not hospitalized and not dying. This is not the number of breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated. It is rather, an indicator that the Delta variant doesn't care if you had Covid-19 before: it can get you again.

I think we missed the boat. We could have controlled this, if we had massively and quickly vaccinated almost everybody, BEFORE the nastier variants emerged and spread out. I mean, in a sense it was a lost cause from the beginning. Not many people know that the Delta variant was first detected in India in December of 2020 (so most likely had already emerged a couple of months before that), that is, BEFORE vaccination even started (the first vaccines were given to the population on January 16, 2021). By the time their FDA-equivalent (and our FDA here) approved the first vaccines, Delta had already emerged.

Still, even though Delta was already there, we could *theoretically* (but not really) have curtailed its progression.

This is because when I say we, it's not just we the United States. It's we the people of Planet Earth. And while even in very advanced and very rich countries we've struggled to get enough people vaccinated, in the Third World it's been much worse, and it is not for nothing that of the main variants of concern, the majority came from South America, South Africa, and India, and only one came from Europe.

The unassisted, unvaccinated Third World is keeping the variants coming...

But yes, the pandemic is definitely worse than it could have been here in the United States if only we didn't have this much vaccine hesitancy.

 

But one got a jolly by using cultural, marxist, and public in one sentence. They hate most of Americans because they want to live in society.

 

It's actually a different reason.

When you get the natural disease (the whole live virus), your immune system doesn't really prioritize the spike protein. It will recognize as foreign, all the viral proteins. So it will make antibodies against all parts of the virus. However, the only type of antibodies that can efficiently neutralize the virus, are those that either target the spike protein (which is the virus' Achilles Heal so to speak, because without it, the virus can't penetrate the cells, and without penetrating the cells, it can't replicate thus it dies out), or prevent the release of the genetic material. Most of the other antibodies are just what we call binding antibodies. They attach to the virus, they can signal the cytotoxic T cells that kill the infected cell, but that's a slower process.

So what happens is that the defense is non-specific, diverse, and kind of distracted... not very efficient. This is why it's been demonstrated (including by the study that started this thread) that the natural infection with the whole virus confers worse immunity than what the mRNA vaccines can do.

Why? Because the mRNA vaccines ONLY make the spike protein... focusing the entirety of the immune system to direct its defenses to the virus' Achilles Heal.

The problem is that the mRNA vaccines are synthetic; they make one specific artificial spike proteine that mimicks precisely the one made by the variant that was used as the genetic source.

The more these new variants acquire spike protein mutations, the less an mRNA vaccine tailored to the spike of an ancestral variant will be effective.

However, once the technology exists, it is relatively easy to remake new batches of the mRNA vaccines using genetic material from newer variants.

That's precisely what BioNTech has already started doing.

 

Yes... LOL... good point.

But another funny thing is that this guy tried to target me with this commentary, and I was a kid of private schools, all the way from K to elementary middle, high, and to the Ivy League. I only attended one public school in my life... and it was a few years after my graduation in Medicine (which was also done in a private Ivy League school). It was in a foreign country. I earned my PhD in a public European university - in a highly specialized scientific field; no time or space in that program for any political consideration. We did pure science there, not politics.

So, this guy seemed to identify in what I was saying, some product of public education (I'm sure he considers that it's brainwashing) when my entire education was private, except for the very end of it where I was in a highly specialized research lab rather than listening to philosophical or political lectures... LOL

It shows that people see what they want to see, even when it's not there. It's called a pre-judice.

This said, I believe that we have truly excellent public universities. UNC-Chapel Hill, UVa, UC-Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, etc., are among the best universities in the world, and they are public.