[Mezla PigDog]

Yes. So much so that I kind of flinch. It is crazy how quickly it changes.

[QuickTidal]

Aptorian, on 21 April 2020 - 07:32 PM, said:

When watching TV or consuming any other kind of media, are you guys constantly reflecting on the characters actions in relation to Corona? I keep having this twitch every time I see an actor shaking hands or hugging somebody, drinking from a bottle, being in a crowd, etc. It's funny how quickly your perspective changes.

Mezla PigDog, on 21 April 2020 - 07:57 PM, said:

Yes. So much so that I kind of flinch. It is crazy how quickly it changes.

Not only that, I feel like it's fundamentally changed how I will approach social interactions myself after this is done. Like I won't want to shake hands AT ALL anymore, and even being close to people will feel weird.

[Mezla PigDog]

I think I'll bounce back to normal pretty quickly once it goes away. I've done projects on flu and I remember during the swine flu outbreak I trained myself not to touch my face on the London Underground but it never lasts. Plus I'm weirdly not that concerned for my own health. I only wash my hands more before I go out. I always forget when I get home or recieve deliveries. So maybe I'm going to come a cropper.

[Cause]

Aptorian, on 21 April 2020 - 07:32 PM, said:

When watching TV or consuming any other kind of media, are you guys constantly reflecting on the characters actions in relation to Corona? I keep having this twitch every time I see an actor shaking hands or hugging somebody, drinking from a bottle, being in a crowd, etc. It's funny how quickly your perspective changes.

Only once, can’t remember which show it was but when the character was like let’s go to the bar I was like what now. Oh it was the rookie. I think it felt weird because specifically they were cops%

[amphibian]

Aptorian, on 21 April 2020 - 07:32 PM, said:

When watching TV or consuming any other kind of media, are you guys constantly reflecting on the characters actions in relation to Corona? I keep having this twitch every time I see an actor shaking hands or hugging somebody, drinking from a bottle, being in a crowd, etc. It's funny how quickly your perspective changes.

We're watching Kim's Convenience and one of the trademark parts of the show is a short three shot montage of people walking around and doing things in Toronto. It's usually really calming and links the show heavily to the actual city, but since quarantine, we've gotten a bit envious of people interacting with each other and being outside in a major city.

Georgia reopening businesses and keeping the schools shut is one heck of a "working at cross purposes" thing. How the fuck do people who have kids and also need to work or go apply for jobs take care of their kids while they're out? It's going to make life so much tougher for people who aren't rich and don't have a huge family and friends network to rely on (even that's taking huge chances now).

It's a move to save $ while callously wrecking people's lives and killing yet more people. But it's cloaked in fake patriotism and "we ain't scared" so a certain crowd just eats that up.

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Briar King, on 21 April 2020 - 09:07 PM, said:

I’m almost fully trained to use my arms to scratch any face itch I have. I hate it! My digits are restless.

Get on my level — I scratch my itches by tensing muscles in my face!

[Mentalist]

Aptorian, on 21 April 2020 - 07:32 PM, said:

When watching TV or consuming any other kind of media, are you guys constantly reflecting on the characters actions in relation to Corona? I keep having this twitch every time I see an actor shaking hands or hugging somebody, drinking from a bottle, being in a crowd, etc. It's funny how quickly your perspective changes.

Nope.

But the only 2 news sources about it for me are this thread, and whatever news my parents dredge up and feel like sharing.

I haven't spoken to anyone that's not my parents face-to-face in over a month, (my last interaction was with a bank employee telling them I just need the ATM, so I can skip the line to the tellers), but I doubt I'd act any different once the quarantine is lifted.

[Cause]

Whisperzzzzzzz, on 21 April 2020 - 09:46 PM, said:

Briar King, on 21 April 2020 - 09:07 PM, said:

I’m almost fully trained to use my arms to scratch any face itch I have. I hate it! My digits are restless.

Get on my level — I scratch my itches by tensing muscles in my face!

Oh man, getting inside the full biosafety suit, and than your nose starts to itch. Uncanny how that happens.

[Malankazooie]

Sometimes I have to avoid watching the news. People are selfish pricks.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'UK "throwing everything" at developing vaccine
Mr Hancock told the No 10 briefing that "the best way to defeat coronavirus" was through a vaccine.

The process was "trial and error", he said, but the UK was at the "front of the global effort" and had invested more money than any other country.

[...] human trials for a vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford, [...] begin on Thursday. '

https://www.bbc.com/...PLdtluvY4S9qC3s

'UK scientist: "80 percent" confident a COVID-19 vaccine could be ready by September'

https://www.pennlive...hNbSn3MpRBqNZb4

[more details on study I mentioned earlier] 'Coronavirus has mutated into at least 30 different strains [...]

The study was carried out by Professor Li Lanjuan and colleagues from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China and published in a non-peer reviewed paper released on website medRxiv.org'

https://www.jpost.co...dy-finds-625333

Study: https://www.medrxiv....0160v1.full.pdf


'The Coronavirus Is Mutating. What Does That Mean for a Vaccine?

[...] Vaccines work by prompting the body to develop antibodies, which neutralize the virus by binding to it in a very specific way. Scientists are watching to see if mutations will affect this interaction. If they don't, then there is hope that a vaccine won't need constant updating."

"Measles mutates just as fast as flu and coronavirus, but the measles vaccine from 1950 still works today[" ...]

If the virus mutates in a way that prevents antibodies from binding, it could make a lasting, universal vaccine difficult to create.

Antibodies, which the body produces in response to a vaccine or an infection, work by binding to specific spots on a virus called antigens. If random viral mutations alter the shape of an antigen, it can make a vaccine less effective against the virus.'

https://www.nytimes....cine-covid.html

'We Might Never Get a Good Coronavirus Vaccine

[...] not all viral diseases are equally amenable to vaccination. "Some viruses are very easy to make a vaccine for, and some are very complicated," says Adolfo García-Sastre, director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "It depends on the specific characteristics of how the virus infects."

Unfortunately, it seems that COVID-19 is on the difficult end of the scale.

[...] COVID-19 could be a virus that proves resistant to vaccination. "This may be one," she says. "If we have one, this is going to be it, I think." The FDA has never approved a vaccine for humans that is effective against any member of the coronavirus family, which includes SARS, MERS, and several that cause the common cold.

Even if researchers do develop a COVID-19 vaccine that's effective at protecting animals, that doesn't necessarily mean it will do the same for people. "One of the things that they say in science is that 'mice lie, and monkeys don't tell the truth,'" Roper says. "You can get something that works in mice, you can get something that works in monkeys, and it still might not work in humans." So any animal tests will have to be followed by trials to demonstrate that the vaccines are safe for people to use, followed by trials to see if they protect against infection.'

https://nymag.com/in...-maybe-not.html

[from last week:] 'The first approved vaccine in China has started its second phase of the trial[...]

"A total of 500 people signed up to volunteer for that in the first phase, which looked at the safety of this vaccine, and the second phase has now introduced a placebo control group[" ...]

"Normally with vaccines you start off with small animals and then move to primates and then to the humans[...] It seems that with this one they have gone straight to the humans, which is a very bold decision."'

https://www.aljazeer...na8HXDPuZ-FrbwY

Unsurprisingly:

'Trump Dodges on Hydroxychloroquine After Study Raises Red Flags

Trump was grilled Tuesday about his flogging of an anti-malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment after a government-funded study showed it didn't help veterans and was associated with more deaths.

He dodged.

"I don't know of the report," he said at the daily briefing by the coronavirus task force. "Obviously there have been some very good reports and perhaps this one's not a good report—but we'll be looking at it."

[...] "Specifically, hydroxychloroquine use with or without co-administration of azithromycin did not improve mortality or reduce the need for mechanical ventilation in hospitalized patients," they wrote. "On the contrary, hydroxychloroquine use alone was associated with an increased risk of mortality compared to standard care alone."

The authors said it was not clear why the group that got the drug had a higher death rate, but they noted that a Brazil study on hydroxychloroquine was halted because some of the patients developed heart problems.'

https://www.thedaily...nds-more-deaths

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 April 2020 - 02:06 AM

[Cause]

I wouldn't despair just yet. HIV has proven difficult to develop a vaccine for because it mutates very rapidly, however at the same time a virus has limits to its mutability before the mutations effect its function. The antibody might recognize the virus's receptor proteins for example. So they recognize a protein that clamps to a receptor and allows it to bind to, and than enter a cell. That protein can mutate but only so much before the clamp itself no longer works. So we need to isolate those parts of the virus that mutate the least and target them specifically.

Also its true to say that HIV doesnt get the funding and time it needs because it kills poor people. The antiretrovirals for HIV work better on the european and American strain of the disease more so than the African strain even thought the numebrs in Africa are an order of magnitude higher. The brainpower and treasure being dumped into this issue must be staggering,

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Cause, on 22 April 2020 - 04:20 AM, said:

I wouldn't despair just yet. HIV has proven difficult to develop a vaccine for because it mutates very rapidly, however at the same time a virus has limits to its mutability before the mutations effect its function. The antibody might recognize the virus's receptor proteins for example. So they recognize a protein that clamps to a receptor and allows it to bind to, and than enter a cell. That protein can mutate but only so much before the clamp itself no longer works. So we need to isolate those parts of the virus that mutate the least and target them specifically.

'The transmembrane spike (S) glycoprotein mediates viral entry into host cells through homotrimers protruding from the viral surface. The S protein includes two domains: S1 for binding to the host cell receptor and S2 for fusion of the viral and cellular membranes, respectively[...]

The receptor binding domain (RBD) in the S protein is the most variable genomic part in the betacoronavirus group [...] and some sites of S protein might be subjected to positive selection[...]

adaptive mutations are highly enriched in the interface between the S protein and the human ACE2 receptor'

https://www.medrxiv....0160v1.full.pdf

I know next to nothing about this subject though. Hopefully there will be antigen locations which won't mutate in ways that make vaccines ineffective.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 April 2020 - 04:42 AM

[Morgoth]

Cause, on 22 April 2020 - 04:20 AM, said:

I wouldn't despair just yet. HIV has proven difficult to develop a vaccine for because it mutates very rapidly, however at the same time a virus has limits to its mutability before the mutations effect its function. The antibody might recognize the virus's receptor proteins for example. So they recognize a protein that clamps to a receptor and allows it to bind to, and than enter a cell. That protein can mutate but only so much before the clamp itself no longer works. So we need to isolate those parts of the virus that mutate the least and target them specifically.

Also its true to say that HIV doesnt get the funding and time it needs because it kills poor people. The antiretrovirals for HIV work better on the european and American strain of the disease more so than the African strain even thought the numebrs in Africa are an order of magnitude higher. The brainpower and treasure being dumped into this issue must be staggering,

We have some really cool HIV research going on. There's a lot of out of the box kind of thinking in finding a vaccine.

[Aptorian]

Briar King, on 21 April 2020 - 09:07 PM, said:

I’m almost fully trained to use my arms to scratch any face itch I have. I hate it! My digits are restless.

Every time I walk into a supermarket I suddenly need to scratch a dozen itches around my eyes and mouth, right after handling a food item.

[Primateus]

Aptorian, on 22 April 2020 - 10:33 AM, said:

Briar King, on 21 April 2020 - 09:07 PM, said:

I'm almost fully trained to use my arms to scratch any face itch I have. I hate it! My digits are restless.

Every time I walk into a supermarket I suddenly need to scratch a dozen itches around my eyes and mouth, right after handling a food item.

Yup, same here.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'We've never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it's so difficult

[...] coronaviruses have historically been hard to make safe vaccines for, partly because the virus infects the upper respiratory tract, which our immune system isn't great at protecting.

[...] "It's a separate immune system, if you like, which isn't easily accessible by vaccine technology," Professor Frazer told the Health Report.

Despite your upper respiratory tract feeling very much like it's inside your body, it's effectively considered an external surface for the purposes of immunisation.

"It's a bit like trying to get a vaccine to kill a virus on the surface of your skin."

Your skin, and the outer layer of cells in your upper respiratory tract act as a barrier to viruses, stopping them getting into the body.

And finding a way to neutralise the virus "outside" of the body is very difficult.

This is partly because only the outer layer of cells (the epthelial cells) get infected, which, compared to a severe infection of internal organs doesn't produce the same immune response, so is harder to target.

It's hard to produce a successful vaccine if the virus isn't activating a strong immune response.

And if a vaccine elicits an immune response that misses the target cells, the result could potentially be worse than if no vaccine was given.

"One of the problems with corona vaccines in the past has been that when the immune response does cross over to where the virus-infected cells are it actually increases the pathology rather than reducing it," Professor Frazer said.

"So that immunisation with SARS corona vaccine caused, in animals, inflammation in the lungs which wouldn't otherwise have been there if the vaccine hadn't been given."

[...] Professor Frazer's prediction is that the most likely candidate will be a vaccine that uses a part of the virus attached to a chemical to induce an immune response, or "subunit" vaccine.

"That [vaccine type] has been successful in animal models for coronaviruses in the past and that is of course where the money is being put in large measure at the moment," he said.

"Another sort of vaccine would be just antibody transferred from somebody who had been infected already and had got rid of the infection.

"Which would be an immunological means of preventing infection, and could probably be more quickly developed than an actual vaccine."

This sort of vaccine was tested with SARS in 2003 and resulted in reinfected lab monkeys having a nasty immune response, which is why many groups working on a vaccine for Sars-CoV-2 are going for a very specific antibody response.

Professor Frazer said the narrow, targeted approach is fine, unless you pick the wrong specific antigen — the substance that stimulates an immune response which antibodies bind to — in which case you could end up with the same problem.'

https://www.abc.net....NjIMOuFacFsJ9xI

'French researchers are planning to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients and frontline health workers after a study suggested smokers may be much less at risk of contracting the virus.

[...] However, the researchers insisted they were not encouraging the population to take up smoking, which carries other potentially fatal health risks and kills 50% of those who take it up. While nicotine may protect those from the virus, smokers who have caught it often develop more serious symptoms because of the toxic effect of tobacco smoke on the lungs, they say.'

https://www.theguard...cmNGXiRqrlDRZoQ

Could it just be that they were outside more?

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 April 2020 - 04:31 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'If you’re hoping a vaccine is going to be a knight in shining armor saving the day, you may be in for a disappointment. SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. A vaccine will need to induce durable high level immunity, but coronaviruses often don’t induce that kind of immunity[...] There’s a nice preprint just out on antibody responses to SARSCOV2. Lots of people don’t develop much of an IgM response and the IgG response fades noticeably after just two months [...]

The experience with veterinary vaccines for coronaviruses is also not great. There are economically important coronaviruses infecting farm animals and we’ve been trying to develop good vaccines for decades. Most on these vaccines are putzy[...]

The problem is that SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. [...] That means a vaccine will need to be quite effective if it’s going to stop the spread of SARSCOV2. [...] Seasonal influenza vaccines are only ~50% effective meaning there is still a 1 in 2 chance you’ll get the flu even if you got the vaccine. But don’t get me wrong, the flu vaccines still save thousands of lives. That’s because flu isn’t that contagious, R0 in 1.4-1.7 range 7 [...] But R0 for SARSCOV2 is 3 to 5 so a vaccine that fades to 50% effective would still leave the infectivity at 1.5 to 2.5. And that’s assuming 100% vaccination. If only half the population accepted vaccination, the infectivity would be 2.3 to 3.8. That’s quite contagious'

https://twitter.com/...698777296797698

[Gorefest]

My PhD project was actually about developing novel vaccination approaches to Infectious Bronchitis Virus, which is a coronavirus in poultry. At the time I thought I was failing miserably because of sheer incompetence. I sort of feel vindicated a bit now😁

[Imperial Historian]

Gorefest, on 22 April 2020 - 06:11 PM, said:

My PhD project was actually about developing novel vaccination approaches to Infectious Bronchitis Virus, which is a coronavirus in poultry. At the time I thought I was failing miserably because of sheer incompetence. I sort of feel vindicated a bit now😁

I mean if feeling like you are failing miserably because of sheer incompetence is not a key part of most PhDs I don't know what is!

[Malankazooie]

Trump last month: "What do you have to lose?".

This pos is a carnival barking, snake oil selling, charlatan.