Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

Main findings: Republicans become a little more acquainted with reality. (But still not much.)

I am beginning to wonder if there will even be a Republican party when this is all over. They have a leader who is working, really hard, to make sure that happens and a membership determined to screw up by following their leader to complete and utter failure. Our nation has become the laughing stock of the rest of the world and the Dear Leader is, basically, ignored as a genuine living human jackass voted in by an ignorant American voting public.

Those who survive all of this are not going to be kind to the idiots who made us the laughing stock of the entire world.

I see Trump as more of a Jim Jones Death Cult leader than a jackass. Jackasses are actually useful, since they can father mules. And mules are very cool.

Just viewed an interesting YouTube video: "Why Is My Serology Negative But I had Symptoms?"

Apparently very common. There are a lot of people who tested positive by PCR, but never develop antibodies. One theory is that their innate immune system cleared the virus before their adaptive immune system got around to making antibodies. Antibody production actually takes more than 10 days, and if your mild infection only lasts 5 days antibody never happens.

He showed a preprint of a study that found some people with symptoms who had positive PCR tests, and then some of their family members who did get symptoms but were never tested. Hardly any of them had antibodies, but when they tested their T-cells against SARS-COV2 antigens, they were all activated. This is the path in the immune system that is quicker and does not make circulating antibodies. It is also the path that does not lead to memory B-cells.

But their T-cells were still testing as activated by SARS-COV2 80 days after their first symptoms. So this is a form of immunity. Anyway, it seems that people who have mild or asymptomatic infections will often not get a positive antibody test. (Like me.) It's kind of reassuring to know my responses to the virus are not unusual.

Of course, there are complications: Some vaccine guys say a good vaccine will have antibodies against several virus proteins, not just spike protein. Moderna is "spike only". Imperial College is quite like Moderna, but presents four different virus proteins (including spike). And what if you have antibodies against one or more of those other proteins, but not spike? Would you fail a very specific spike antibody test, but still be immune? If some of those other proteins were also in other corona viruses that circulated as common colds, could cold victims have partial immunity to SARS-COV2? Is that why kids usually don't get it, but a few die?

Vaccine production is tricky: Making antibodies against multiple pathogen proteins is good (because of viral mutation), but you have to make sure you don't make antibodies to something that is a normal part of the human body. The result would be an artificial autoimmune disease and possibly death.

I've been waiting for the Tulsa data to come out. Now it has.

The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, had been enforcing social-distancing rules, and for good reason. From June 1 to June 15, new COVID-19 cases in the state jumped from 67 in a day to 186. In advance of Trump’s rally in Tulsa on June 20, city employees affixed do not sit here please stickers to every other seat in the stadium venue. Trump campaign workers were captured on video removing the stickers so that Trump could cram attendees closer together. On June 26, Oklahoma reported 396 new infections in a single day.

The second Covid-19 spike, in June, is Trump’s own doing. This is Trump’s plague now.

Of course, Trump’s rally does not directly account for all those new cases. But Trump’s elevation of the needs of his own ego over the well-being of even his strongest supporters is profoundly implicated in the virus’s powerful June comeback.

I have never had one childhood disease. Not one. In January 1995, i got the newly developed chicken pox vaccine because I just graduated from college and I was just hired by the Berkeley School District and I was concerned about getting chicken pox as an adult.

Four of five exes developed HIV after we broke up and has since passed away. Still negative on my part.

I often wonder if my own immune system has kept me safe from harm.

Some people do have really good immune systems. You might be one of them.

You could have the gene for HIV immunity. This is a gene that was in English people who survived the Black Plague. In some small villages the only survivors were people with this gene. They interbred, and the result is pockets in the English countryside of people with a high occurrence of this gene.

HIV uses the same route to get into cells as plague, so the gene protects against both. People with a single copy never get very sick, though they may test positive. People with two copies never test positive. In one case a man with HIV+ got a bone marrow transplant (for another reason) from a donor with two of these genes. His HIV went away, and he started to test negative.

More likely you are just lucky, though. After they broke up with you, they hit the clubs, screwed everyone in sight, and picked up the virus. Exclusive couple sex is a lot safer than random hookups.

That was my thinking too. When we were done, they were like MLK, "Free at last. Thank God Almighty...I'm Free At Last" and joined the Someone, Anyone and Everyone Club.

Then again, on my dad's side...we're very English.

My wife (the pathologist) has a theory: We haven't seen a lot of cases of kids getting Covid-19 with symptoms because parents are afraid and isolate well to protect their kids. Send them all to school and we will see massive spikes because maintaining personal protection the whole school day will prove impossible. Wearing masks in class may not be difficult, but what happens when they need to use the bathroom? What happens when they eat lunch?

School cafeterias don't have the room to maintain social distances. Are they going to hire cleaners to sterilize bathrooms after each kid uses it?

When kids start to die, parents will figure out schools are a death trap for the stupid.