10 weeks of aggressive lockdown quarantine will make new cases near zero. The cases that do exist will be the young and mobile as the old and ill isolate (in Belgium for example 9% of people have antibodies but only 3% of the old). So the later cases will appear milder.

I don't believe there is any evidence, nor does the doc have any evidence, that "the strain of the virus is much weaker". The hospitals have just stopped filling up and it's no longer a neverending shitshow of corpses and suffocations because the cases are dropped so much with lockdown and no doubt the viral loads received are way lower. That's not to say it can't be a new strain, but there is zero evidence of it.
There was never an "end of world" scenario. Hell, humanity has lived with 30-60% death rate highly contagious smallpox for >3000 years. There was however a >10 million dead scenario without lockdown. As it is (with aggressive 8 week global lockdowns) we have >500K dead including uncounted around the world, and it's far from done.

There are obviously ramifications for not opening the economy. It was all about getting tbhis virus under control first and then opening up in a step by step manner while monitoring.

What would you do?

Ouch, sick burn.

Will the protests in the US cause a 2nd wave of COVID?

Not clear extent of participation, the large number of people complying with control measures not as headline grabbing as tear gas and fire.

Not sure, but I'm guessing someone itt has a pen and the back of an envelope ready to jot some numbers down and then die on a hill defending them.

Not going to doom us all. Just doom 1-2 million of us and leave a bunch of us with reduced lung capacity.

Is the Pope a catholic?

It seems plausible that if two strains exist, the weaker will go under the radar and continue to spread while the stronger symptomatic strain continues to get identified / quarantined / stamped out, then over time weaker disease should be more prevalent.

It is also possible that some people are just more susceptible, and those quickly caught the disease / were symptomatic, and now some areas on average have a sturdier population, either due to lack of preexisting conditions or genetic makeup of the individual

I've watched the protests on cable news for several nights. It kind of goes without saying that right now, if you plan to come to a mass gathering where you'll be in extremely close proximity to at a minimum hundreds of other people, for several hours, who are shouting and singing most of that time, then fear of a pandemic is not the first thing on your mind. Especially when everyone is endlessly messing with their ill-fitting masks and/or taking them off.

I understand that for those participating the protest is more important than CV, but the timing is pretty terrible. It's literally the one thing you shouldn't be doing and tens of thousands are. Fingers crossed we don't see major CV outbreaks from it.

So is it pretty much a fact at this point that the bigger the viral load you're originally exposed to the worst the symptoms?

Or is that still a "meh theory" at this point?

I tried google but it's so hard nowadays to find legit info with all the click bait bullshit people put out nowadays. I miss the old internet when it was mostly us nerds

I'm acting under the assumption that this is the case, but there isn't overwhelming evidence that it's true for SARS-CoV-2. No ethics board would allow a study that deliberately infected participants with varying viral doses the way we have with other coronaviruses (which do exhibit dose-dependent severity). But if we could get a handle on contact tracing and we asked patients the nature of their interaction with the likely source, it should start to become clear. I don't know of any concerted effort to do that, however. And it's taken for granted that there's an infectious dose (the minimum number of virions required to infect) of at least hundreds of virions, although I'm always skeptical of those numbers since it seems to me it should be a stochastic effect (one virion could theoretically infect you if you were extremely unlucky). So anyway, my guess is that getting infected from talking to someone for ten minutes would impart a much higher chance of survival than getting infected from someone you had sex with. Personally I've been turning down a lot of threesome offers during this lockdown.

Masked sex is underrated.

By who?

Ok first off sick brag, but also at the same time that's a big fail, turning down threesomes is a losing life strategy, "pandemic" or not. Just not something any red blooded american should do.

Speaking of "big viral load", I did notice more women messaging me on these dumb apps during quarantine, something tells me it's not for socially distant bible studies


@wotpeed

the only time masked sex is acceptable is if it is some weird type of orgy (remember eyes wide shut?), otherwise it's very lame.

You died in a swamp getting shot from the hill with superior firepower. Just because numbers aren't firm doesn't mean we can't do a good job estimating them in a rational way and come to a high probability conclusion, or a lower bound. I've been doing that since the start of this thread, successfully.

"Not sure" is a silly answer. Protests should make little difference to covid spread. There just aren't enough of them vs 330 million people not rioting but going about daily life working, hooking up, sharing indoor spaces with others. If anything the effects of riots in locking the US down are probably helping.

This just makes mathematical sense. The bigger your initial investment the faster your money reaches some goal x at a given interest rate.

This may raise a few eyebrows

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52894638

I thought NSAIDS were bad? That was wrong and now they're potentially good?

I think it was just an association (in France) early on that saw people who had reported taking NSAIDs fared worse than those who hadn't reported taking them. The most plausible mechanism is that some NSAIDs are fever reducers, and fever is beneficial for fighting pathogens. I would think taking them once the fever has broken anyway may be beneficial, to stem runaway inflammation. Also, early on we thought fever was a much more common symptom than it now appears to be. (Only 30-some percent of patients experience fever, I think.) So maybe NSAIDs are beneficial when used in the right circumstances. My guess is they probably have a negligible effect either way in standard doses.

It was the French Health Minister.

There isn't enough data to back the NSAID issue conclusively but there is evidence of similar effects for the flu. Doctors I've spoken to basically told they really just aren't sure but since there are non-NSAID meds to lower fever, they rather just use those.

Since it now seems accepted that you have to be exposed for some time to get it, I ask:

What, if anything, do we know about people who were exposed to the virus for not quite enough time to contract the disease?

Same question for those who were exposed for slightly more time than necessary.

Certain answers would suggest certain strategies.

david you got a source for that?

i think you're conflating increasing risk with increased exposure vs arbitrary threshold that needs to be crossed

diseases don't work in binary fashion like time travel

Longer exposure = greater viral load = greater probability of infection and greater average severity

You don't need to be exposed for "some time". If an infected person sneezes on your face as you're breathing in, you will get infected.

The implication is what we already know: we should physically distance, wear masks, ventilate indoor spaces well, use plexiglass dividers, etc. Basically everything helps. Too many people think it's binary (masks either work or they don't). If people were capable of thinking in terms of probability distributions, we could easily make this thing go away.

As somisogaden says, it's very logical that early NSAIDS = bad (reduces early functional/protective inflammatory response), late NSAIDS = good (reduces late destructive runaway inflammatory response). Whether that's reality who knows.
Probably. If there was a bookie who offered even money bets on "anything doctors and researchers claim in a new field is bullshit", it'd be easy to get rich Kellying the yes on every case.