The immune systems that sometime over react may become a continuing problem. 1. What if the covid - 19 virus mutates to a form not recognized by a human immune systms ?
2. Could a future covid - 21 cause immune systems to over react since it would be similar enough to the covid - 19 ?
3. What if other medical problems activating immune systems cause an exposure to -19 to be the straw on the camel's back ?
4. What other types of immune reactions could be possible ? What causes this virus to have immune over reactions ?
This virus is different than the Spanish flu. Most speclation is that the 1918 flue caused over reaction in persons 18 - 30 or 35.
For what its worth, the CDC reported back on April 1st that just under three quarters (I believe it was either 73 or 74 pecent--can't remember exactly) that died from the virus had significant underlying health problems. Given the number of deaths at the time, I worked out the death rate death at just about 1% for those who contracted the virus and didn't have the underlying health problems. So that's some good news since it means this should not be anywhere near as bad as the 1918 Flu. NOTE: I don't know if that satistic has been updated since April 1st since the weather here finally turned into Spring and I can do outside work so I'm not watching that much TV.
Charlie, I wared you not to make accusatilons. Now I must reply.
When my Dad spoke agaist Hitler, he was not drummig up hatred for Germans.
When many of us spoke against Communism, we were not drumming up hatred for Russians.
When I poat information how the Coronavirus problem became Global, I am not drumming hatred for the Chinese, or defending Trump.
Now Georgetown Uniniersity justifies Islamic terrorism against Jews. They use Gatestone's. Steve Emerson's, and Daniel Pipe's attacks on "Main-Stream-Islamic Organization" to justifiy calling them anti-Islam. But CARE had the other organizations have raised money that went terrorists as end-user organizatdions.
The lies that Georgetown University teaches:
.
Real proof of Georgetown U's faculty's statements and its sources of funding may take a few days to assemble, but I will have if and post it if another of Charlie's accuasions is posted. Apparently, it was not only Arab Government money that funded Georgetown's anti-Israel teaching, but oil-company money as well.
I'm not about to wade through the propaganda from Gatestone or your initial, incoherent remarks. I will simply say Georgetown University and its Foreign Service program. have a far better, earned reputation than the Gatestone propaganda mill, which does not deserve a tax-exempt status.
You obviously reponded without even reading what I posted, which happened to be from other sourcea than Gatestone. Enouogh said.
Who, exactly, today. holds G. U.'s Foreign Service Program in high esteem and how have they bettered the USA's relations with the rest of the world?
Lots of Universiries have tax-exempt status for donations, but a major fraction of them today make lives very difficult for Jewish Students and/or supporters of Israel in general on their campuses. Contact Campus Watch. a tax-exempt organization, and Steve Emerson, whose counter-terrorism organization is also tax-exempt.
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And if any poster agrees with Charlie's accusation that somethig I write is "incoherent," please tell me, and I'll try to do better.
daveklepperAnd if any poster agrees with Charlie's accusation that somethig I write is "incoherent," please tell me, and I'll try to do better.
Personally I just wish you would turn off the pro Israel propaganda channel. You are living over there, you have personal attachment withthe culture, etc etc etc....we get that. But must you drone on incessantly?
I don't care much for Charlie's position either, but I've been monitoring this from square one and I don't believe he would even be in this discussion if you had not insisted upon starting and perpetuating it.
I'm not saying this to be rude, or to offend you. But I feel that your continued pro-israel hammering is rude to the rest of us.
Convicted One daveklepper And if any poster agrees with Charlie's accusation that somethig I write is "incoherent," please tell me, and I'll try to do better. Personally I just wish you would turn off the pro Israel propaganda channel. You are living over there, you have personal attachment withthe culture, etc etc etc....we get that. But must you drone on incessantly? I don't care much for Charlie's position either, but I've been monitoring this from square one and I don't believe he would even be in this discussion if you had not insisted upon starting and perpetuating it. I'm not saying this to be rude, or to offend you. But I feel that your continued pro-israel hammering is rude to the rest of us.
daveklepper And if any poster agrees with Charlie's accusation that somethig I write is "incoherent," please tell me, and I'll try to do better.
Thank you. I have only briefly commented as David continues to post ream upon ream of ultra-right, racist nonsense from the likes of Steve Emerson, who David Cameron (former UK Prime Minister) said was "clearly a complete idiot", and other sources. It was bad enough when David copied and posted long articles verbatim in detail about Israelis and Covid-19, which usually had no relevance to most readers here. But I said nothing. But when he shifted into making this his personal propaganda blog, I felt I had to respond. Obviously if the forum was still moderated, he would have had to cease.
I will herewith cease commenting on David's posts. And I hope he will refrain from his not-so-subtle ad hominem shots.
Convicted OnePersonally I just wish you would turn off the pro Israel propaganda channel.
Convicted One your continued pro-israel hammering is rude to the rest of us.
Convicted OneBut must you drone on incessantly?
I concur with the above.
charlie hebdo But when he shifted into making this his personal propaganda blog, I felt I had to respond.
As well you should have.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Some doctors are now theorizing that they are treating the wrong aspects of covid-19
https://news.yahoo.com/rethinking-coronavirus-some-doctors-question-how-we-use-ventilators-123733204.html
blue streak 11. What if the covid - 19 virus mutates to a form not recognized by a human immune system?
Keep in mind that the virus is called SARS-CoV-2; only the disease symptoms are COVID-19. That can be more than a semantic difference, particularly when the actual 'causes' of ARDS progression become better defined.
This virus is fundamentally similar to a family of common-cold viruses, and much of its action is common to those. As you probably already know, 'colds' have been one of the nuisances that "medical science" perennially tries to find a 'cure' for, but never does: one of the reasons up to now being that mechanisms of infection mutate frequently (to be invisible to acquired immunity again) but effective replication leading to cellular damage and the usual sorts of 'cold symptoms' are highly conserved as effective. So it would not be surprising to see mutation in SARS-CoV-2 making it hyperinfectious to those with partial immunocompromise "anew".
It would also not be surprising to see mutation away from the combination of characteristics that have made this virus turn out to be as deadly as it is. paradoxically if the induction period is shortened, the clusters of infection may be smaller (particularly with common-sense measures of social distancing continuing after the shelter-in-place boondoggle is over), more easily contained, and of course susceptible to be eradicated via a cocktail of appropriate mammal-friendly inhibitors. The binding to ACE2 is accidental in a number of respects; if any given one of the involved regions on the spike protein drifts -- which is a major way 'novel' infectious viruses mutate -- it may decrease or even eliminate the great unprotected infection pathway that membrane-bound ACE2 facilitates.
If you have not gone to the site I suggested to Euclid and read up on the various systems and structures that make up antiviral (and antimicrobial) immunity, I strongly suggest that you do so. Many things -- including why fever, something not characteristic of 'colds', is being seen in many of the ARDS-susceptible patients -- may start becoming more significant in perspective.
2. Could a future COVID-21 cause immune systems to overreact since it would be similar enough to the COVID-19?
It is possible. Certainly the clones of H1N1 involved between 1918 and 1921 produced returns of lethality in several 'waves', although whether or not these included hypersensitivity reactions to previous H1N1 exposure, I don't know. Teitelbaum has apparently found and sequenced some of the particular H1N1 genome producing the more lethal attacks, but I don't know how much of the specific progression to ARDS has been traced from this. Barry noted that it appeared that some event circa 1915 might have primed many of the young ARDS victims for hyperreaction; his sources who would have suggested this to him will probably have been more specific in some details regarding what would be likely. I see nothing so far that concretely indicates, one way or the other, that 'return engagements' of pandemic-grade SARS coronavirus would be likely. (The take-home message as far as I'm concerned is that we should prepare going forward for the contingency that it is...)
3. What if other medical problems activating immune systems cause an exposure to -19 to be the straw on the camel's back?
In a sense this appears to be a great deal of what's actually happening in Italy, but not precisely in the sense you meant. Apparently the Italians are logging their statistics so that elderly patients, no matter the type or degree of pre-existing conditions, are logged as dying from SARS-CoV-2 whether or not the virus actually even accelerated their morbidity, let alone provided too much incidental stress.
There are a number of medical problems that might predispose to this, one of which may have some ominous implications. The idea of artificially enhancing ACE2 receptor expression on cells became something of a hot topic a few years ago, since there are a number of benefits to RAAS and other systems if there are more sites doing the conversion, and (at that time) few if any perceived drawbacks or side effects. It is at least possible that some 'relatively fringe' practitioners actually implemented this (like runners abusing hematoporphyrin, or rich short people giving their kids HGH) in which case the 'recipients' are at leveraged risk both to acquire infection and to have it progress to cytokine storm stage.
4. What other types of immune reactions could be possible?
Again, you'd be far better off learning this from an immunologist who has specially designed a great deal of material to be easily read and comprehended, and who moreover expresses a continuing interest in answering direct questions from his readers and audience. But be prepared to do some work and some critical thinking: there is not one 'immune system' but several; they have all co-evolved but without necessarily augmenting what other parts 'do', and most importantly there is no 'backspace key' on complex natural-selection mutation or drift. They also become active and begin to become less active at different times and for different reasons, too, which explains some therapies for elderly patients who no longer make some immune-system cells or factors for themselves, but still have what may be quite sensitive 'lethal parts' of a system present and active.
This virus is different than the Spanish flu. Most speculation is that the 1918 flu caused overreaction in persons 18 - 30 or 35.
If you can find a copy of "The Great Influenza" read the relevant sections, and do so as nearly as you can following the chronological order of the various outbreaks.
The likely agent in the 'Spanish flu' was probably an H1N1 virus very similar to that in the 2009 outbreak (but very different from, for example, the 1957 strain). It is probably even more similar to what Teitelbaum analyzed and sequenced, if not indeed as identical as supposed. I am reasonably certain that there were many other mechanisms of lethality in that early pandemic, probably substantially including many bacterial or pseudomonal co-infections or secondary infections which few in that technically benighted era knew how to address. There were also some ominous underdiagnosed conditions quite possibly associated with those strains, most notably the brain-related complications that manifested even relatively late. (See Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, something Barry devotes a chapter to...)
I see little like that in COVID-19: the infection with this strain just happens to be 'novel' in the wrong ways to facilitate relatively wide spread ... and it has the right antigenic makeup or behavior to induce progression to ARDS in a suspiciously wide range of ages. Once CDC and the states have worked out their little differences in statistics recording, we may actually be able to distinguish the different risks in geriatric patients of different age ranges, and some of the factors in the induced chain of reaction.
Let me repeat that even the 'under-the-radar' H1N1 epidemic this year has killed something like 100:1 more than SARS-CoV-2, and this while much of the social-distancing and other measures probably cut down some on transmission of the influenza. In my opinion we are fantastically lucky that SARS-CoV-2 is relatively mild as killing plagues go; some of the things that were done 'right' include very early effective identification and sequencing of the pathogen -- something involving substantial personal risk -- and then prompt relaying of that information to 'the world' even as research continued domestically. I now hear from Redfield of CDC that the initial 'testing' (for viral particles and sequenceable RNA) had been designed, 'weaponized' into test kits, and 'designed for production' and rapid rampup to distribution within about 10 days of CDC receiving the sequence data. Only a (somewhat suspicious) "bad reagent" kept early detection from becoming far more prevalent than it proved.
But we still had a lame response to the actual pandemic threat -- in many respects we still do. And, as you worry, there is no real guarantee that the next thing that achieves pandemic standing might not be more easily infectious, and more slowly developing to the point of recognizable symptoms, and ultimately vastly more lethal.
Fortunately, this little 'dry run' has shown not only where many of the holes in our practical response as a nation have been, but the very real financial and social consequences that will come any time a disease like COVID-19 achieves recognition as something needing heroic intervention. I don't really think the Democratic House has much likelihood of dedicating some of the 'recovery money' toward a permanently-endowed epidemiological organization -- preferably a thoroughly non-partisan one; y'all can stop snickering any time you like now -- that will manage both the public and private initiatives to solve even unanticipated problems in minimum time with minimal confusion and waste or duplication of effort.
Well you can bet the Islamic Terrorists or whoever wants to do great harm to the West are dusting off their bunson burners as we speak. Seems easy enough to destroy 1/3 of the economy in no time.
Who will decide when companies will go back to work? It seems like there is a fair amount of disagreement over when that should be allowed to happen.
Conicted one. At leaset you don't label me incoherent. Your monitoring seems to be missing something. I post something widely-held cncerning the specific role of China in the Cononavirus problem and Charlie accuses me of postinig it to defend th/e Trump Administstration, and challenges the specific information brcause I used the Gatestone. Possibly I could have used some other source for the same information, but would that have stopped Charlie from attacking me persnally? He labelled Gatestone as anti-Muslim and labeled me as anti-Muslim when I presented data to refute that charge. Now, do you and other posters wish me to continue to post Israel's response to Coronavirus or limit my resonse only to others? And if you have read all my posts you will note one or more favorable to one of Israel's self-defined enemies (Abbas-"Palestinian Authority") and one for China.
April 8th 2020
MTA Issues Letter to The New York TimesTo the Editor:The MTA during this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has been grievingover the tragic deaths of many of our colleagues. The one-sided NewYork Times story “41 Transit Workers Dead: Crisis Takes StaggeringToll on Subways” that ran April 8 only adds to that anguish byignoring the facts.Since March 1, when the first case of COVID-19 was identified in NewYork, the MTA has taken aggressive action to protect the health andsafety of our heroic workforce on the frontlines of this crisis.The only ‘sluggish’ response has been on the part of the World HealthOrganization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whoseguidelines against widespread use of masks the MTA (a transportationorganization, not a medical provider) initially followed but has sincedisregarded. To date, we have provided 460,000 N95 and surgical masksto all of our operating employees in addition to thousands of faceshields and 2.5 million pairs of gloves. Only last week – after theMTA acted and we recommended our customers wear face coverings – didthe CDC change course and recommend Americans wear masks. The WHO hasstill not acted.Additionally, here’s what the MTA, which took many of these stepsbefore any transportation agency nationwide, has done. On March 3, theMTA implemented new disinfecting procedures – sanitizing our stationsand full fleet of thousands of rolling stock daily and fully every 72hours. On March 11, we stepped those efforts up to disinfect stationstwice daily. We have implemented rear-door boarding to ensure socialdistancing for bus operators and eliminated cash transactionssystemwide to limit person-to-person contact.After the state implemented the ‘NY on Pause’ order on March 20, theMTA put into place the Essential Service Plan on March 24 to preserveservice for healthcare workers, first responders and other essentialworkers – allowing flexible scheduling to maximize social distancingand limit the number of people needed to come to work. We alsoimplemented unprecedented back office procedures to promote socialdistancing in and around crew rooms and bus depots.The MTA’s pandemic plan is a blueprint that we have followed andimproved on since day one. Unfortunately, what the plan, like othersnationwide, did not contemplate was that medical guidance during thisspecific period would be not to use certain stockpiled items for allemployees. Moreover, to set the record straight on supplies provided,the MTA has given employees: 12,500 gallons and over 50,000 bottles ofhand sanitizer, 500,000 sanitizing wipes and 53,000 gallons ofcleaning solution. We will continue to distribute these materials.The MTA’s singular focus is on protecting our heroic employees andcustomers. Any suggestion otherwise is baseless. We have implementedour plan and made necessary changes in real time as we deal with thisunprecedented public health crisis.Sincerely,Patrick J. FoyeMTA Chairman and CEO
"Seems easy enough to destroy 1/3 of the economy in no time."
Boy, if this ends up being our ultimate undoing, just think about all the worthless paper China is going to be left holding.
Talk about ironic.
And I must correct Charlie's and statement:
Gatestone Institute is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, Federal Tax ID #454724565
he Israeli biopharmaceutical firm Redhill Biopharma has treated a coronavirus patient in Israel with an experimental drug that aims to lessen symptoms, following Italy’s approval of its use, The Jewish Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
A coronavirus hospital patient with respiratory complaints was given the drug following approval from Israel’s Health Ministry under a compassionate-use program, which is when medical professionals treat patients with experimental drugs not as part of clinical trials, under special circumstances and with the approval of medical authorities.
The drug, called opaganib, has undergone testing, but has yet to be approved for general use. It was designed to have anti-cancer, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties.
Opaganib is expected to be used on additional patients in Israel in the coming days and has already been tested on 131 people in the United States. Italy approved the use of the drug for approximately 160 patients across three hospitals in the northern part of the country, which has been particularly hard-hit, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
He added that “RedHill is working diligently to evaluate the potential of opaganib as a treatment for COVID-19 to help patients worldwide in urgent need of a treatment option.”
Orlando, FL:
Publix has added directional markers to keep customers going one way down aisles and farther apart because of coronavirus.
Read the Latest
David: Your "correction" is wrong. I said Gatestone does not deserve a tax-exempt status.
Overmod: The more I read about the immune system the more it becomes apparent that there is a wide difference how different person's immune system may work in the real world. I can imagine that identical twins studies will be very important for tracking this C-19 pathology ?.
Another item that you caused my interest in is the possibility that older persons are having a much different reaction. Could that be because they were exposed to some enviromental agent pathogen or another enviromental polution when they were young that today's young are not exposed to ?.
This is not a theory but here are examples of a different enviroment. The polio virus was alive and strongly epidemic during their youth. The polio vaccine has eliminated that for the most part. Another is that our oldersters could possibly be exposed to smallpox so had to get smallpox vacinations. Another is coal smoke. Those 3 are just a small list of the many examples of what older persons experienced that for the most part today's younger persons do not experience.
Any thoughts that I am completely off base ?
Overmod blue streak 1 1. What if the covid - 19 virus mutates to a form not recognized by a human immune system? Keep in mind that the virus is called SARS-CoV-2; only the disease symptoms are COVID-19. That can be more than a semantic difference, particularly when the actual 'causes' of ARDS progression become better defined. This virus is fundamentally similar to a family of common-cold viruses, and much of its action is common to those. As you probably already know, 'colds' have been one of the nuisances that "medical science" perennially tries to find a 'cure' for, but never does: one of the reasons up to now being that mechanisms of infection mutate frequently (to be invisible to acquired immunity again) but effective replication leading to cellular damage and the usual sorts of 'cold symptoms' are highly conserved as effective. So it would not be surprising to see mutation in SARS-CoV-2 making it hyperinfectious to those with partial immunocompromise "anew". ~snip~
blue streak 1 1. What if the covid - 19 virus mutates to a form not recognized by a human immune system?
~snip~
I deleted the rest of it so as to clarify something, SARS-COV-2/COVID-19 is in the exact same family as the original SARS and MERS are, both of which have slipped into irrelevance since their original outbreaks, though neither is completely gone either. It's also the same family that give is yearly flu's, the cold virus is in a different family from what I've been reading.
As for it's mutation characteristics, if it's the same base virus as SARS and MERS it would take decades for it to mututate, if it even mutates at all. I'd say we have more to worry about from another virus in the COV family than the current one or passed one, of which there are about 2000, give or take a few here and there. That's 3 viruses out of 2000 some odd that have affected humans.
One of the biggest problems we as a society has had with viruses is developing man made vaccines vs letting the human immune system do it's job and create it's own anti-bodies. Unfortunately that allows those with compromised immune systems to be more susceptible to these and other diseases.
Why is Dave still posting, I think by now most people have tuned him out and are just ignoring him at this point, aren't they?
Answering your specific question, I repond to personal attacks and I also present information not otherwise posted regarding cononavirus treatment and control.
But, in a second response to your question, I will cease posting Israel's progress in controling the virus unless someone requests me to do so.
Regarding Gatestone and Georgetown U.. investigate both websites thoroughly. Appreciation of the research papers with sources given need not mean appreciation of their stand on a particular political issue. In looking at Georgetown U, please look at the names of all the courses offered and statements of and about faculty.
Gerald. After thinking it over--- apologies to you for taking you seriously!
Well, you got a second chuckle out of it anyway.
In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of all people who test positive for covid-19. The goal is to find who gave it to them and whom they may have given it to, in the hopes of isolating infected patients, alerting those potentially exposed, and ultimately halting transmissions.
The Department of Public Health is supplementing its own staff with city librarians and dozens of researchers, medical students, and others from the University of California, San Francisco. City health workers have already been contact tracing on a small level, but they plan to significantly scale up the effort over the next few weeks. The team includes about 40 people and could rise as high as 150.
You can read our most essential coverage of the coronavirus/covid-19 outbreak for free, and also sign up for our coronavirus newsletter. But please consider subscribing to support our nonprofit journalism.
The task force will interview every patient who tests positive and provide necessary support to ensure that all are completely isolating themselves, down to helping them find and get to shelter if necessary. They also expect to reach out to between three and five people that patients came into contact with in the preceding days. They’ll alert them they may have been exposed, ask them to limit their contacts, and either encourage them to go in for a test or bring one to them. Those who test positive will trigger additional rounds of interviews and contact tracing.
“We basically realized that if we ever hope to move beyond shelter in place, we need a robust containment strategy that’s sustainable and can identify every new case and contact,” says Michael Reid, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at UCSF, who is coordinating the university’s contributions to the effort. “And that needs to be in place at least, in the medium term, until we’ve got a vaccine.”
The Bay Area took some of the earliest and most aggressive actions in the US to slow the outbreak, and seems to have succeeded in flattening the curve of the disease. But the region is still reporting hundreds of new cases per day, and the death toll is rising.
The novel coronavirus is highly contagious, with each infected person passing it on to between two and three others, on average, absent social distancing measures. If covid-19 has a reproduction number of 3, toward the top of estimates, one positive case can turn into more than 59,000 in 10 rounds of infections, Reid notes. “So you have to reach out to other contacts as quickly as possible and tell them to stay … at home,” he says.
Other places, notably including Massachusetts, are also setting up major tracing efforts, to identify and contact thousands of residents who may have been exposed. But how the Bay Area does it, and whether that effort can help slow the current spread and prevent major additional outbreaks, could provide crucial lessons—or warnings.
The San Francisco Bay Area saw some of the first covid-19 cases in the US as well as early signs it was spreading in the community, with a case of unknown origin on February 26. On March 16, six counties ordered nearly seven million residents to mostly stay in their homes for weeks. Three days later, California became the first to roll out such measures statewide, as Governor Gavin Newsom ordered nearly 40 million people to shelter in place.
The measures appear to have helped. Daily deaths across California could peak as early as next week and reach zero by mid-May, according the state-by-state modeling at the University of Washington. New case counts in San Francisco, where more than 600 people have tested positive and nine have died, appear to have slowed down in recent days.
But the Bay Area’s success in slowing the spread may also mean that a large portion of its population isn’t immune, making the area especially susceptible to reintroduction of the disease from areas that didn’t respond quickly to the dangers, like Texas, says George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF. “We’re going to have to follow trace counts like a hawk,” he says.
Ramping up testing will also be critical for effective contact tracing, as researchers will need to be able to test everyone with symptoms as well as everyone they came into contact with, and obtain results quickly. To support that effort and contain the outbreak locally, San Francisco may need to be able to test as many as 130,000 cases per month, Rutherford estimates.
It’s not clear how many tests the city can process currently, but the number is rapidly building. A partnership between UCSF and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is now processing 2,000 samples per day and striving for 4,000 (60,000 to 120,000 per month). A number of other groups are also conducting tests, including the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the Health Department’s public labs, and commercial operations like Kaiser Permanente and the California Public Medical Center.
Contact tracing is mostly an arduous manual task, which means it often can’t capture every infection and contact during peak moments of outbreaks. But there are some tools and technologies that can help.
The San Francisco task force will use an online and phone-based contact tracing application developed by Dimagi, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to manage cases and ongoing care. Among other things, it will send daily text messages to potentially exposed people, asking if they’ve developed symptoms. If so, it’ll flag workers to follow up and provide additional guidance.
The team will also ask patients for permission to look at their phone location data, which can help to provide a fuller picture of where they’ve been and moments when they may have been in crowded areas. But without access to population-wide phone data, the team won’t be able to see every time they crossed paths with others, or who those people were.
Nations like China and South Korea took more aggressive steps to closely monitor the movements of their populations amid the pandemic, requiring citizens to download apps and tapping into sources of personal data, respectively. These efforts effectively allowed those countries to automate and massively scale contact tracing efforts.
China reportedly identified more than 700,000 people who had been in contact with infected and suspected cases, and identified tens of thousands of infections.
Given privacy laws and concerns, however, there are greater limits on what kind of location data US health officials can use. The federal government and research groups are exploring a variety of ways to set up voluntary and anonymized digital contact tracing, using mobile phones, apps, and other tools. Among other things, these could tell people if they’ve walked within close proximity of an infected person.
But it’s not clear whether a critical mass of the population will ever hear about or choose to download these apps, says Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who focuses on digital privacy issues. If few people enroll themselves in such tracing efforts, it could at least undermine their effectiveness and may even give some users a false sense of confidence about where they can safely go out in public, he says.
Even if regions do rapidly ramp up contact tracing and testing, and infections and deaths decline, life there won’t simply swing back to normal anytime soon.
Rutherford says that if the Bay Area hopes to relax its shelter-in-place rules, it’ll have to replace those mitigation measures with “containment on steroids.” Among other actions, he says, high-risk populations like the elderly should continue to stay at home, and the rest of the population should wear masks in public and continue to stay six feet apart. Buildings, workplaces, and restaurants will need to take precautions to keep people safe and separated as well, clearing out tables, staggering shifts, and providing hand sanitizer at the door.
Regions may also need to conduct widespread testing of another sort— antibody tests that indicate if people were previously infected—to develop a better understanding of how big secondary outbreaks could be and what kinds of ongoing efforts will be required before relaxing other rules, says William Miller, a professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University.
Antibody testing is just beginning to get under way in the US, through efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Stanford University, and one county in Colorado, among others.
But even with all these measures, cases will likely continue to flare up on occasion. If areas hope to keep infections low and save as many lives as possible, people and politicians will need to be ready and willing to quickly toggle between stricter and looser measures, possibly for many months to come.
“We can go back to normal when everybody has a vaccine in their arm,” Rutherford says, “and not until then.”
From Technology Review
Israel's Health Ministry signed an agreement with the Weizmann Institute of Science on Friday to use its advanced laboratories to perform coronavirus tests. According to the ministry, testing will start immediately and screen about 1,000 people per day.The news comes as the number of coronavirus patients in Israel surged past 10,000 on Friday morning leaving 93 people dead and the government lifted some of the restrictions on most of the country.
aaaaa
ealth Ministry recommendation but not fines were issuedTop articles2/5READ MORE
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