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Rational CoViD-19 Discussion Thread: Science vs. Politics

News on the vaccine front..... here's an "Establishment" institutional take..... It's gotta be a year before we can do anything because we gotta do business the way business is done" sort of article....

https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/covid-19-vaccine-development/

It does note the Israeli vaccine that the developing company says can be available in six to eight weeks, because it has been in development already for a long time, for a virus that is very closely related to c20.

If it works, we'll use it. And we won't wait a year, either.
 
So a couple of weeks ago I was posting in the China c20 thread about how the Chinese got the genome published, and how labs all over the world are using the genome to make the proteins that could be targeted as antigens. Whatever proteins are on the surface can be targets as antigens. Issues like structure, or conformation, as I used to call it when I worked in this exact scientific procedure, can't be expected to absolutely correlate with what is presented on the surface in a structural formation, but there is some hope we can luckily get a positive win, and do it very quickly, with this State-of-the-Art technique.

It's a huge advantage to produce a vaccine this way because you don't have to "clean up" all the extraneous proteing materials of a tissue culture or live host in a petri dish or production tank. Less need for cross reaction testing, side effect worries and such.

So as of Jan 10, the genome was out there, and the best labs all over the world were working with it to produce a vaccine. An early hope came from a lab in Australia. In Washington, using state of the art methods, a vaccine has been developed and is being tested.... the animal test running in parallel with a small human trial. They will soon know if they are getting antibodies produces.... the first sign of success....

With the genome as the starting point, labs will be producing vaccines based on the antigen values of every protein present in the c20 virus.

Just a sort of rational expectation...… we could have a hundred different vaccines being tested on animals----and humans----with parallel time frames, within a couple of months. And the ones that look best will be rushed on into production, first to protect front-line workers dealing directly with patients, and patients too...… and then a few months later available to the general public.

That's the rational hope.

And that's part of the equation that reasonably means if we reduce travel and spread of the virus, we can tremendously reduce the serious effects on the population. Economic impacts..... sure.... it's a hard bump in the road. But we can save the lives, and then people can go back to work.
 
Please lock this mods.
Why lock it? Let's hear what Babe has to say. No one here is an expert on this, and neither are the experts sure about what has happened and what's going to happen next. Why stop the flow of information? That is really ignorant. Are we stopping Trump from saying all the dumb and false crap that he's saying?
 
Why lock it? Let's hear what Babe has to say. No one here is an expert on this, and neither are the experts sure about what has happened and what's going to happen next. Why stop the flow of information? That is really ignorant. Are we stopping Trump from saying all the dumb and false crap that he's saying?
This... This thread has far more intellect and thought put into it than most of the other thread even if someone disagrees. The same thread that predicted with absolutely zero thought that there will be 150,000,000 sicknessess and that weather doesn't effect viruses.
 
This is the scientific study that both the British government, and now the American government, are using as a basis for their response.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

I have reposted both this study, and a summary of its findings, over in the Coronavirus in China thread.

I read down a bit. This is quite similar to the general news and policy decisions we see, so it is pretty much the plan being used.

I am frustrated because I think I know more than the experts.... lol...… specifically about things we could do...….

For example, "sheltering in place" becomes objectionable, say, when forcing "clear" folks to just sit next to a "carrier", like on a cruise ship sitting offshore. We have the knowledge..... well maybe the experts don't want to see the facts...….to do better. When we have located a site where a carrier has been, or where a patient has been, we can do whole-site decontamination within a few hours, with some pretty simple measures.

We can treat a car, a bus, a plane, a train.... quite effectively...…. in pre-emptive or prophylactic manner..... a flush of the HVAC system with disinfectant vapors/mists..... some effective treatments could be done with people in place, but say you evacuate the place, really disinfect it, and screen people coming back in. Social distancing and good hygiene is almost the same in terms of what I'd expect as the result.

People can disinfect their little den or home or workspace on practically the same terms. We've run outta bleach in the stores, and sanitary wipes, though. We need to let the gov make some loans to companies who can re-start some plants and make stuff like that. And masks, respirators, filtration cartridges.

I started reading your link and was just disappointed they weren't talking about immediate practical common-sense stuff like that.

Did I say one of my nephews, a HVAC technician, is building units to put in homes which will electrostatically clean the air, and produce ozone for disinfecting the whole house to boot. I'd add in a little swimming pool dose of chlorine vapor. You'd still need some social distance, but it'd pretty much kill all the virus on household surfaces and air, and even virus in your nose and throat.....

Patients should be treated with regular timed doses of chlorine or ozone, just a tad beyond the comfort level. It'd cut into whatever virus is moving in the fluid layer. I guess the experts just don't like simple things we can do.
 
So anyway, I have been all over California and in places.... a good idea for me to self-isolate. My wife has been checking my temperature because every now and then for a few minutes, I get itchy eyes, a bit of a cough or runny nose. She says it's allergy..... lol.... but hey.... I have some concentrated Clorox, and I don't mind huffing a bit. But I'm off to the ranch for a few days, I think, at least until the call of the tax man lures me back to turn in my tax return..... lol
 
So I still haven't broken camp with this c20 topic yet. I saw a site that was arguing, with some reasons, that c20 will have a mortality rate like 3%

I don't think we can count on much yet.

First of all we need to test and meaure several parameters. People with antibodies to c20, proving a "base" of the exposed population. People who've noticed a symptom, and ignored it, just don't get into the stats unless they're tested that way. Another item that can only be investigated in a statistical manner, is a determination of infective "carriers", and a measure of the time they remain "carriers" capable of passing the virus.

The people who turn up to get counted, either with light symptoms or serious symptoms, do not form a mathematically valid "Prediction set". Some viruses do a double take on the population, infecting them on a second pass when they already have some antibodies to one variant of the virus, but not another variant.

I am seriously concerned about places like Iran, and other countries without much health infrastructure or reliable information sources. So much potential for really serious outbreaks. I see in the official publication Red linked here a debate about the pros and cons of serious mitigation efforts, and other measures. The really serious fact of c20 is the severity of secondary infections beginning in the lungs and spreading from there to other vital organs.
 
Well, I am going to take a long break from this. The site that was arguing 3% mortality rates had some arguments against other projections. It is fair enough that we should consider, and act, on the basis of worst-case scenarios, as a sort of doubly-cautious or doubly-vigilant attitude.

The "authorities" have produced early estimates like 2%. My first posts on the topic set it at 2.4%. With no real idea of how to prioritize our resources or actually treat it. A few weeks ago, I said we'd be doing human vaccine studies in a few weeks, with health care front-liners getting vaccinated by May. On track with that. And anyone who wants the shot in this country getting their shot by July. I also said we could slow it down with public health measures. All that is today's authoritative chatter.

Today, with public health measures and some basic notions of how to treat the patients, the mortality rates projected by authorities are like 1% The difference is knowing what to do.

South Korea's study there with extensive testing being done, exposing a better count of the exposed population, set mortality at 0.7%, even though treatment was not so good.

When I come back, I'm gonna make the case for effective treatments, and project stuff like a 0.2% mortality rate, and a much reduced total population getting exposed due to "dead-end carriers" whose infective careers just don't get passed on to the next person. That is what public health measures like a few weeks of travel restrictions, lots of social distance, lots of work and study from home can do, along with a lot of folks like me taking the break to get away solo for a while.
 
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