World Health Organization says no evidence that having had COVID makes you immune!

[thewayne]

And from the article, "...data reported from the world's early COVID-19 hot spots, such as South Korea and China, have shown that a growing number of recovered patients appear to have suffered a relapse of the disease."

Several countries, including the USA and France, are considering issuing internal passports or certificates that if you've tested positive for having coronavirus antibodies in your blood that you are now certified free and clear to move about the country and get on planes and such. That might not be a good idea. I talked about this in March about a woman in Japan who was sick in February, she was a tourist bus driver, she subsequently tested positive a second time and I believe she got sick again. The news was a little unclear whether she got sick a second time. Apparently it is now clear that people are getting sick on a repeat basis.

But there is a compounding factor. I have heard, though I haven't seen in print, that there are something like eight different strains of the coronavirus circulating. IF that is true, and that's a BIG IF, then it's possible that people may have complete or limited immunity to one strain and getting smoted by another.

That's a tough one to figure out and also a tough one to configure vaccines for!

Now, another compounding factor is that some diseases, like malaria and I think TB, can 'submerge' and re-activate at a later date. So you think you've recovered, but you're just in a temporary remission state and you'll occasionally get clobbered again. It is possible that COVID is like that, again, there's an awful lot that we don't know yet. Malaria isn't the best example as that is a parasite-based disease, but it still serves as an example.

So personally, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in these documents. We know that our "Leader" wants to get people back to work ASAP to try to get the economy rolling again ASAP, regardless of what it costs in human lives. And I personally side with the doctors and epidemiologists who say that's the wrong approach and will cost even more lives because there's going to be a lot more waves of reinfection if we don't lock down even tighter until we finally take this seriously in issuing PPEs and testing kits, doing full contact testing. And we're not doing that. If Our Beloved Leader gets his wish and some states start doing this piecemeal release, we're just going to have subsequent waves.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/25/844939777/no-evidence-that-recovered-covid-19-patients-are-immune-who-says

Comments

[graydon]

Coronavirus infections don't generally produce lasting immunity. (And a vaccine isn't going to give you more immunity than recovering from the disease will do; it's using the same mechanism, it can't.)

So this is looking more and more like the Uncommon Cold; absent anti-infection measures, you get it thereabouts of every year, there's no practical vaccine, and it has about a 1% chance of killing you when you do.

If the reinfection stuff gets confirmed, research priority ought to shift from vaccines (should keep about 30%, we might get lucky with a mitigating vaccine) to specific antiviral treatments. There's some of that going on already but those are much trickier and so considered a longshot vs a vaccine, which is a well-understood goal.

[thewayne]

I have seen that people testing positive a second time are now being reported as false positive testing, so maybe we are slowly developing herd immunity. That would certainly be nice! Also shows that we need much better testing, and gobs more of it!

[graydon]

"Herd immunity" for a R₀ of 6 (which is where the most recent spread numbers are coming out) is 1 - 1/R₀, or about 83%.

That's a scale of exposure where nobody's ever done it without vaccinations.

Which is the one gloomy thing; the other gloomy thing is we still have no idea how long immunity lasts.

Total, complete agreement on the more-and-better testing.

[silveradept]

That'll be an interesting sequence to have to deal with "here, get your flu shot, your coronavirus shot, and take leave if you feel like you're coming down with a cold." Although that last one would be good if the "everyone gets paid leave, no exceptions" thing were to actually get put into place, stay in place, and otherwise make it possible for people who are at the mercy of Amazon's robots to be able to keep themselves healthier.

[thewayne]

That's going to be the interesting stuff: we don't have universal healthcare, we don't have universal leave and we have the effing anti-vaxxers, though they seem to be changing their tunes now that they've seen photos of mass graves and have heard stories of friends and co-workers and celebrities dying.

So there's a chance of serious change happening when the next administration comes in to action. Nothing at all will change while Chump and his besties are in power.

[silveradept]

While it would be nice to believe that this entire four years has been sufficient indictment that any rational person would vote him out in a heartbeat, the last election proved how many irrational people there are.

[thewayne]

Among the many problems with the last election was that (A) too many people did not vote: not exercising your franchise is a vote for the opposition party, and (B) too many people took for granted that Trump was unelectable.  Even he didn't think he was going to win, he had no transition strategy, he didn't even have a victory speech!  He was in it to increase his public profile to launch a cable TV channel.  Clinton took it for granted that she had it in the bag and did not visit a number of key battleground districts that he hammered, and that could have made all the difference.  Instead she made multiple visits to areas that she had sewn up that made no difference to her electoral chances.  But as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Even though his poll numbers are dropping, Biden had better not take this election as a sure bet.

[silveradept]

This election threatens to be one where someone goes "why vote for the lesser evil when I know what I'm getting with the greater one?"

Plus, I'm sure there will be a lot of very desperate Rs trying to save their own asses by any means necessary that will try to prevent the people who would vote them out from voting at all, so it's going to be all kinds of fun.

[thewayne]

One of my hopes is that they Amendment 25 him in the next couple of months as he's demonstrating zero competence and leadership in the current crisis and remove him from office.  Pence is not liked in the Senate, and has zero ground game established.  It would be a cake walk for Biden.

[silveradept]

I wish I had that kind of hope. Given that they couldn't get all impeachment through with more than ample evidence to convict, unless Pence physically incapacitates him there won't be any invocation of the amendment.

And even then, Pence could still win because he wouldn't need a ground game. He'd have conservative media and any preacher that thinks Pence is one of theirs using the pulpit to exhort the congregations to vote for him. Plus all of those selfsame Rs trying to save themselves from a just election. There's already enough infrastructure in place that the campaign wouldn't have to spin up much at all and would still get all the favorable coverage they wanted, from conservative media and less conservative, theoretically mainstream media.