Coronavirus COVID-19 - Global Health Pandemic #52

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Lilibet said:
I’m thinking the same thing and have been checking out vegetarian recipes. It would be easier than running out to stock up on meat to cram into my too-small freezer or buy an auxiliary freezer. Probably better for us too.
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so much better for you
right now I'm making zucchini lasagna with tofu (as the ricotta) and mushrooms & onions in the sauce.
yum
 
katydid23 said:
That's what my husband is suggesting as well. We did fill up our small freezer on top of the fridge with meat already. But he is saying maybe it is time to go Vegetarian. our kids/grand kids are vegans already.
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I am on a very low-carb diet and it's hard to eat vegetarian and stay low-carb. I did find this article that gives some suggestions as to how to avoid high carb foods while eating vegetarian.

Low-Carb and High-Protein Vegetarian Foods
 
Nobel prize-winning immunologist Peter Doherty provided some much-needed respite from the effects of ongoing isolation Monday after inadvertently asking his 26,000 followers for the opening hours of Dan Murphy’s, a liquor retailer in Australia.

“If this is something to do with a clinical trial sign me up,” responded one user.

Nobel prize-winning immunologist accidentally asks Twitter for liquor store hours
 
@The Night Watchman

I share your concerns about Sweden (and the IMHE modeling). I think IMHE backpedaled using technical jargon saying that "Well, a bell-shaped curve is what our statisticians expect"

WTH? No, that's not how viruses work. Humans do things that fall on bell-shaped curves but viruses (and lightening and rock fall and all kinds of other things) do not. Viruses are going to do what they do.

I do not see how ANYONE can think that a virus would not thrive (and do all kinds of crazy curves) if we (the hosts) don't do something.

IMHE says they got the model together quickly and put in those shaded areas to show "what could happen if the bell curve doesn't work"). Well - it's clear that we, as a planet, could plateau at thousands of deaths per day, or at last close to that.

So, Sweden ended up having slightly more than half its death be people over 75. No biggie right? People gotta die. But expectations regarding lifespan and retirement - and continued expertise of well-trained people from the 20th century - are now disrupted.

Good luck training new nurses and doctors without the 60+ group teaching the higher level classes, including clinical oversight.

But, for Sweden as elsewhere, a bunch of deaths in nursing homes wasn't initially consider "a big deal," it was part of herd immunity. But, as healthcare workers began to die, they rethought that.

Also, in Sweden, it was poorer communities (nearly all of them the immigrants that Sweden controversially permitted into their nation). Poor people dying isn't such a big issue for some people. In fact, I daresay that some people's sentiments or politics run toward "old people are gonna die anyway" and "immigrants aren't that productive and they're annoying."

Better minds are prevailing in Sweden. They see the problem - they can "ride it out" or they can protect the vulnerable. Big surprise - we've seen this thousands of times in human history. Treating each person as a real, living human being - with importance - is hard to do.

Now that I'm officially "elderly," it's weird to suddenly be considered "no big deal." It's weird to see myself excluded from college meetings (if they are occurring in any meaningful sense) because...social distancing and I'm now officially in a vulnerable group. I realize that people want my job. I realize that no one really understands how long it takes to amass information on a topic (well, WSers do).

I guess it's a good thing that H. sapiens is establishing a new, lower limit for its life expectancy, even if it's just a few years. Instead of averaging 79 in the US, we'll average 76. Or 75. Or 70. Or 69. (a return to 1915?)

Doesn't really matter when you're young.
 
Lilibet said:
I can’t imagine being Nick when he comes out of the coma and finds out about his amputation! Poor guy. I wish him well.
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If he comes out. Now sepsis set in. Here is a young guy, thin, don't think he had pre-existing conditions. Why does he reacted so severely to covid?
"Amanda Kloots, who has been documenting on Instagram her husband’s battle with COVID-19, shared on Tuesday that the “Rock of Ages” actor had gone into septic shock after an infection in his lungs spread into his blood."
Nick Cordero’s COVID-19 battle takes a turn; Broadway castmates salute him in song
 
tresir2012 said:
From the National Geographic link

Tracking cases through mutations
Bedford’s lab has been using genetics to track the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, since the first U.S. cases started to multiply in Washington State in February and March. Back then, public health officials focused on tracking patients’ travel histories and connecting the dots back to potentially infected people they’d met along the way.

Meanwhile, Bedford and his team turned to unlocking the virus’s genetic code by analyzing nasal samples collected from about two dozen patients. Their discovery was illuminating: By tracing how and where the virus had changed over time, Bedford showed that SARS-CoV-2 had been quietly incubating within the community for weeks since the first documented case in Seattle on January 21. The patient was a 35-year-old who had recently visited the outbreak’s original epicenter in Wuhan, China.

In other words, Bedford had scientific proof that people could unknowingly be spreading the coronavirus if they had a mild case and didn’t seek care, or if they had been missed by traditional surveillance because they weren’t tested. That revelation has fueled the frantic lockdowns, closures, and social distancing recommendations around the world in an attempt to slow the spread.

“One thing that’s become clear is that genomics data gives you a much richer story about how the outbreak is unfolding,” Bedford says.

Nextstrain’s visualization tools have also helped engage a public that’s hungry to learn about the science of the coronavirus, says Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, whose lab has contributed more than a thousand genomes, including West Nile and Zika viruses, to the project.
GENETICS 101What is a genome, and how are traits passed from generation to generation? Learn how pea plants helped launch the study of genetics and how the field of genetics research has evolved over time.
“I like these tools because for the longest time it was just nerds like me looking at these trees, and now it’s all over Twitter,” says Andersen. The site’s open-source ethos has also generated genome-sharing enthusiasm among researchers around the world, who offer to send viral samples to his lab or who contact him looking for specific advice on how to sequence the virus. “They see the data display and say, ‘We have patients, too. We’d like to sequence them.’”

Although such charts and trees are useful for seeing the big picture of how the pandemic is unfolding, Andersen cautions random visitors against jumping to conclusions, because they can’t see the more extensive background data. Case in point: Bedford had to back-track on Twitter after suggesting that similar sequencing data from an infected German patient in Italy and a Munich patient who became infected a month earlier showed that the European outbreak had started in Germany.

“The tree might suggest a connection, but there are so many missing pieces in the transmission chain that there can be other explanations of what could have happened,” says Andersen.

And in places where testing and case-based surveillance are limited, Bedford says genetic data will continue to provide clues about whether all these social distancing interventions are working.

“We’ll be able to tell how much less transmission we’re seeing and answer the question, ‘Can we take our foot off the gas?’” he says.

Not a bioweapon
In addition, the ability to reveal the virus’s evolutionary history helped researchers quickly debunk conspiracy theories, such as the one that SARS-CoV-2 was secretly manufactured in a lab to be used as a bioweapon.

A March 17 article in Nature Medicine co-authored by Andersen makes this argument by comparing the genomic features of SARS-CoV-2 with all of its closest family members, including SARS, MERS, and strains isolated from animals such as bats and pangolins.

First off, most of SARS-CoV-2’s underlying structure is unlike any of coronaviruses previously studied in a lab. The novel coronavirus also contains genetic features that suggest it encountered a living immune system rather than being cultivated in a petri dish.

Moreover, a bioweapon designer would want maximum impact and might rely on history to obtain it, but the novel coronavirus carries subtle flaws indicative of natural selection. For instance, coronaviruses use what are known as spike proteins, which look like heads of broccoli, to bind and access cellular “doorways” called receptors. It’s how the viruses infect animal cells. Experiments have shown that the novel coronavirus strongly binds with a human receptor called ACE2, but the interaction isn’t optimal, the authors explain.

“This isn’t what somebody who wanted to build the perfect virus would have picked,” Andersen says. Overall, their analysis suggests the virus jumped from an animal to humans sometime in November.

In the future, genetic sequencing will become an even more important tool to identify local or regional viral flare-ups before they spread.

“If a potential virus was to emerge in a community in Africa, for example, we now have the ability to get samples to the lab to do shotgun sequencing,” says Phil Febbo, a physician and chief medical officer of Illumina, the world’s largest genetic sequencing machine manufacturer, based in San Diego, California. The shotgun technique allows researchers to sequence random genetic strands to identify a virus at a faster pace, so that officials can more quickly determine appropriate containment measures to stop transmission.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to create such a rapid-response global surveillance network: Labs have to be created. Governments have to get on board. Workers need to be recruited and trained to run sequencing machines and interpret results.

“It’s not a limitation of technology,” Febbo says. "It’s a matter of finding the right resolve as an international community.”
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Keep in mind that this study was still retrospective (they knew exactly what they were looking for). When a new virus pops up, that's not true.

The US does have "shotgun" sequencing (although it's a poor choice of words - the sequencing is completely genetic and biological and has nothing to do with a gun - and if they're looking for a metaphor for speed, "rifle" comes to mind).

The "right resolve" will cost billions of dollars. I'm fine with that. Let everyone give up their multiple baseball caps and sodas and many pairs of shoes, right? I don't need 12 lipsticks and 6 foundations.

Unfortunately, no one is using similar tech to study the genome of the afflicted. It's clear that viruses prefer certain people and nutrition/exercise/weight play a role - but so do genes.
 
jjenny said:
If he comes out. Now sepsis set in. Here is a young guy, thin, don't think he had pre-existing conditions. Why does he reacted so severely to covid?
"Amanda Kloots, who has been documenting on Instagram her husband’s battle with COVID-19, shared on Tuesday that the “Rock of Ages” actor had gone into septic shock after an infection in his lungs spread into his blood."
Nick Cordero’s COVID-19 battle takes a turn; Broadway castmates salute him in song
Click to expand...

One thing that CoVid seems to be doing is attacking the part of the brain that controls breathing. Instead of breathing being automatic, the person has to be conscious and making an effort to breathe. This is obviously an exceedingly serious complication.

That person has to go on a ventilator - but, will the brain ever recover? It's not "general brain deadness." It's just a part of the brain - a very important part. For most of those patients, death will be the outcome, but for some, the brain seems to compensate.

This is a terrible disease. We've never had one like it since written history began. If something like it existed, no one lived to write much about it.

Septic shock means that the virus is in the blood and therefore, attacking every part of the body simultaneously - so perhaps it isn't the brain, in his case - let's pray that it's not. But viral sepsis, by itself, is almost untreatable.
 
Everyone here doing well? All good here in SW Ontario Canada. I'm back to work next week. Was going to retire but they offered me very minimal contact and minimal hrs. approx. 30 hrs a month. PPE provided. I agreed but I feel that come early fall it will be time to retire. I'm not going to wait until virus ramps up over winter, which I believe it will. In the end I was exposed to 5 people in March and I managed to dodge it. Thankfully. I am worried for some of these City's opening up so soon and business's that are going to find it impossible to implement precautions.
 
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