Manic of a panic is geopolitical

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by ATH

Daily reports on the China CDC site:
http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/news/TrackingtheEpidemic.htm

I made 2 charts from the data.

Official figures out of China are to be taken with a huge grain of salt, especially any related to things that might cast the leadership of the CCP in a negative light.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

So Recoveries overtook Deaths just yesterday, Feb 2. I guess that bespeaks initial lack of detection and treatment, leaving some patients fatally unsupported. It's good to see that countermeasures seem to be taking hold.

My take on it is, it bespeaks how long it takes for the disease to run its course, how fast it's spreading, and how virulent it is.

Note that the numbers of deaths and recoveries are in the hundreds, while the number of cases is in the tens of thousands. According to the figures in the charts, around 95% of cases are neither dead nor recovered.

You could keep the number of deaths greater than the number of recoveries if the disease were spreading fast enough. Using the estimate of a 2% mortality rate, and a 2-week time for the disease to completely run its course (whatever that means; perhaps when the patient is no longer shedding virus), that would require a more than 50-fold increase in cases every two weeks. That might happen initially, but it couldn't continue for long.

[a1call]

Not having a medical degree, I won't know the answer to the following question unless I ask:
Is there anyway to isolate the antibodies from people who have recovered and create vaccines using them?
Thank you for any clarification.

BTW Relevant thread on my old board:


https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthr...98#post2503798



I found the following after posting:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_immunity

Artificially acquired passive immunity is a short-term immunization achieved by the transfer of antibodies, which can be administered in several forms; as human or animal blood plasma or serum, as pooled human immunoglobulin for intravenous (IVIG) or intramuscular (IG) use, as high-titer human IVIG or IG from immunized donors or from donors recovering from the disease, and as monoclonal antibodies (MAb). Passive transfer is used to prevent disease or used prophylactically in the case of immunodeficiencydiseases, such as hypogammaglobulinemia.[11][12] It is also used in the treatment of several types of acute infection, and to treat poisoning.[2] Immunity derived from passive immunization lasts for a few weeks to three to four months.[13][14]There is also a potential risk for hypersensitivity reactions, and serum sickness, especially from gamma globulin of non-human origin.[8]Passive immunity provides immediate protection, but the body does not develop memory, therefore the patient is at risk of being infected by the same pathogen later unless they acquire active immunity or vaccination.[8]

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by a1call

Not having a medical degree, I won't know the answer to the following question unless I ask:
Is there anyway to isolate the antibodies from people who have recovered and create vaccines using them?

Yes, for example for Ebola there has been some progress made on this front:

Treatment of Ebola Virus Infection with Antibodies from Reconvalescent Donors | CDC

Clinical evidence suggests that antibodies from reconvalescent donors (persons who have recovered from infection) may be effective in the treatment of Ebola virus infection. Administration of this treatment to Ebola virus–infected patients while preventing the transmission of other pathogenic viruses may be best accomplished by use of virus-inactivated reconvalescent plasma.

But if you read beyond the abstract of this CDC article, you'll note progress has been a slow, multiyear slog, and even if an effective antibody-based vaccine is found, scaling it up to fight a global pandemic does not seem to be in the cards - had such cutting-edge methods been used against, say, the 1918 Spanish flu, the progress of the disease would have not been slowed one whit, because it would have circled the globe by the time the vaccine development had just got its boots on, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous saying about lies vs truth.

[a1call]

Nice find ewmayer.
Thank you for sharing it.
As the expected development of a vaccine is 1 year away and the fact that one might expect that in a few weeks there will be thousands of recovered individuals in the outbreak center, the treatment might be a useful tool in fighting the spread of the coronavirus.
To paraphrase an artist currently known as the unknown artist, desperate times call for desperate measures. Consider the immediate passive immunization of limited number of people willing to go to the outbreak regions as aid, delivery-personnel and health-care professionals until a vaccine is developed.

ETA A non medical alternative would be to use the same recovered individuals for the above tasks if feasible, rather than cutting them off from the rest of the world, once it can be established that they are not coronavirus carriers.

[ewmayer]

Meanwhile, there may be a large-scale outbreak occurring in Kerala, India:

Kerala declares coronavirus a state calamity, Hong Kong reports first death | Hindu Business Line

Kerala, the first [Indian] state to report infection of nCoronavirus with three confirmed cases till now, has declared it a state level disaster with 84 persons in hospitals and 2,155 other under home quarantine.

Note that Kerala is on the SW coast, about as far from China as one can get in India. It remains to be seen how many of those in-hospital and under-quarantine persons have 2019-nCov.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

My take on it is, it bespeaks how long it takes for the disease to run its course, how fast it's spreading, and how virulent it is.

Haha, reading all this thread in the light of the new title is really funny... Sorry, I could not stop myself. That was a good spark from whoever renamed the thread, but now I am a bit afraid to talk math (even at the crackpot level), because some official here will put me in quarantine... This guys didn't go to church/temple too often

[Dr Sardonicus]

Meanwhile, here in the good ol' USA, the CDC reports that the 2019-2020 seasonal flu has so far infected around 19 million people, hospitalized 180,000 people, and killed 10,000 people.

[VBCurtis]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Meanwhile, here in the good ol' USA, the CDC reports that the 2019-2020 seasonal flu has so far infected around 19 million people, hospitalized 180,000 people, and killed 10,000 people.

A death rate of 1 in 2000. Meanwhile, the death rate for this coronavirus is (naively) 2%, but likely quite a bit higher as many of the "confirmed" cases are people still hospitalized.

An illness 40-50 times more deadly than the flu is rather important to keep from infecting as frequently as the flu does, don't you think? For the regular population (say, those between 7 and 70 years old), the coronavirus may be 100x as deadly or more. That's kind of a big deal.

EDIT: "naively" refers to dividing the deaths by the confirmed number of cases, per the Johns Hopkins data linked & referenced earlier in this thread.

[kladner]

Thank you for making those points, Curtis. Just the flu statistics stunned me: the epitome of naivete. I have so long evaded the annual flu, with or without the vaccine, that I don't really appreciate its severity.

I got both the current flu shot and the pneumonia vaccine a week ago. I'm amazed that I haven't gotten sick more often in almost seven years of an intensely public contact occupation. I'm not ready to start wearing a mask, but I am going to increase my hand washing routine, and start hitting the hand sanitizer, that's all over the place at work, a lot more.

[a1call]

A Google search is the only thing I can do.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Trea...od+transfusion
Perhaps it can somehow help.