NWR new zero tolerance covid thread

Steve Slatcher said:
More seriously, I am baffled by how I managed to get a couple of colds in the seemingly continuous lockdown
Manchester has suffered since the first wave.
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Hmmm... it is now looking likely that I have had Covid.

My wife has just tested positive for antibodies (without vaccination), so presumably I have had it too. Both of us have been asymptotic, apart from mild colds that did not show the classic Covid cough.
 
Steve Slatcher said:
But "social distancing, lockdown, hand washing, sanitising. masks" doesn't stop viruses - it's just a hoax to ruin our economy.

More seriously, I am baffled by how I managed to get a couple of colds in the seemingly continuous lockdown
Manchester has suffered since the first wave.
Click to expand...

Yes, well my throat is notoriously susceptible to winter infections, but this winter is the first I can remember where I have sailed through unscathed (so far - I suppose it is only early March!). I am certain it is down to lack of social contact and I suspect the mask wearing might have helped too.
 
Steve Slatcher said:
Hmmm... it is now looking likely that I have had Covid.
My wife has just tested positive for antibodies (without vaccination), so presumably I have had it too. Both of us have been asymptotic, apart from mild colds that did not show the classic Covid cough.
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It is weird to want to congratulate someone for having antibodies...but I guess that is good news?

Anyway - from what I have read it is not unlikely that you escaped infection - it seems that many people don’t spread the virus, but a few people do, and they spread it a lot. Classic power law stuff - which incidentally is very hard for human intuition to process. Another article from the wonderful Zeynep Tufecki on this topic.

www.theatlantic.com

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

It’s not R.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
 
Leon Marks said:
It is weird to want to congratulate someone for having antibodies...but I guess that is good news?

Anyway - from what I have read it is not unlikely that you escaped infection - it seems that many people don’t spread the virus, but a few people do, and they spread it a lot. Classic power law stuff - which incidentally is very hard for human intuition to process. Another article from the wonderful Zeynep Tufecki on this topic.

www.theatlantic.com

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

It’s not R.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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That looks like an interesting article, thank you - I'll return to it when I can give it more time. (But in my skim read I saw nothing to suggest you are ulikely to pass the virus on to someone you share a smallish house with pretty much 24/7.)

I'm not sure congratulations are exactly in order, but I suppose it is good news of a kind. It also makes me feel better about my decision to avoid in-person contact with my eldery parents for almost a year.
 
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I remember when, in the first phase, Germany death toll did not reach 10000. Everybody was wondering what the Germans were doing right in order to copy. In the current phase, the death toll has reached over 70000 and I have no clue what they do wrong now which they did not before. The most worrying are the unknowns indeed...
 
I don't normally post up here with other than rather flippant horror stories of my family's ignorance. However, just received an email from a friend who is working in a hospital in Chicago. He says they currently have 1 COVID patient.... and that their traffic in COVID patients has fallen massively over the last 2-3 weeks (I've asked him for stats)...

He is no MAGA anti-vaxxer but was very much of the opinion "CDC are overplaying this". Interesting that this is the first time I've heard him flip to that message - previously he was very concerned

I am merely relaying the message.....
 
Antoine Singer said:
I remember when, in the first phase, Germany death toll did not reach 10000. Everybody was wondering what the Germans were doing right in order to copy. In the current phase, the death toll has reached over 70000 and I have no clue what they do wrong now which they did not before. The most worrying are the unknowns indeed...
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I think there's no way psychologically to get people to accept a phased return to being fully open. Once you loosen the belt, people go hog wild, and the longer this goes on, the wilder the get. As a totally uninformed observer, I expect we're going to see a fourth wave in UK/EU/US and then by fall vaccinations and previous infections will start to produce herd immunities.
 
Claude Kolm said:
I think there's no way psychologically to get people to accept a phased return to being fully open. Once you loosen the belt, people go hog wild, and the longer this goes on, the wilder the get. As a totally uninformed observer, I expect we're going to see a fourth wave in UK/EU/US and then by fall vaccinations and previous infections will start to produce herd immunities.
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The first point was very evident in Hyde Park today with teams of 10+ on each side playing football!
 
Paul J a i n e s said:
I don't normally post up here with other than rather flippant horror stories of my family's ignorance. However, just received an email from a friend who is working in a hospital in Chicago. He says they currently have 1 COVID patient.... and that their traffic in COVID patients has fallen massively over the last 2-3 weeks (I've asked him for stats)...

He is no MAGA anti-vaxxer but was very much of the opinion "CDC are overplaying this". Interesting that this is the first time I've heard him flip to that message - previously he was very concerned

I am merely relaying the message.....
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Well this is just from Chicago. Which does seem to be having the same sort of rapid drop we're experiencing here.
 
Leon Marks said:
Anyway - from what I have read it is not unlikely that you escaped infection - it seems that many people don’t spread the virus, but a few people do, and they spread it a lot. Classic power law stuff - which incidentally is very hard for human intuition to process. Another article from the wonderful Zeynep Tufecki on this topic.

www.theatlantic.com

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

It’s not R.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
Click to expand...
Hmm, very interesting. I've yet to read the article but this brings to mind Tuberculosis. From what I understand about it, having had to look after a girlfriend overseas who reacted very badly to the first set of medication she was given, was that there were two types, open and closed. The closed type was not contagious because it resided deeper in the lungs while the open type was contagious. In the early days there was talk about a "super spreader" in Lombardy or Northern Italy.
 
Tom Cannavan said:
Totally apropos of nothing much, but just back from a walk along the Fife coastal path which goes through many historic fishing villages, and was very surprised to see Phil Jupitus sitting having a coffee outside one of the sea-front cottages. Curious to know if he was doing a serious bit of Covid rule breaking (pure curiosity - no intention of shopping him to the comedy poice) I couldn't resist a google when I got home, and wikipedia quickly informed me he has lived in Fife since 2018. Never presume....
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Back in summer I was having a bike ride in London and saw a grumpy man. I was told that he's Peter Hitchens.
'Who? Never heard of him.'
'Lucky you.'
I shouldn't have Googled him after; I should have kept ignorant.
 
Leon Marks said:
Based on absolutely no evidence at all, I have a sense that one side effect of all this is that we will end up diagnosing a lot of allergies which were previously believed to be seasonal viruses.

It’s also of course the case that many viruses are just incredibly contagious.
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I have recently been unwell and got cold sore twice within two weeks. I even lost my sense of touch on upper lips.
(Luckily not sense of smell or taste... but it was a weird feeling, like a dentist mis-jab your lip instead of gum. And embrarrassed to say that I had food dropping out from the lips in one occasion)
As some know cold sore is from a virus that live with us from young age... some virus you can never get rid of.
 
Leon Marks said:
It is weird to want to congratulate someone for having antibodies...but I guess that is good news?

Anyway - from what I have read it is not unlikely that you escaped infection - it seems that many people don’t spread the virus, but a few people do, and they spread it a lot.
Click to expand...
Yeah, we've seen this in different virus. Sorry for using HIV as example again, but we know many HIV carriers having HIV negative partners and their partners haven't got the virus for a rather long period of time, even some of them do not use condom and not always on treatment. There are many reasons; some people are less easy to get the virus, some people are less easy to pass the virus. The virus shedding also has it's own peak; in HIV's case, the first two weeks of infection are the most infectious, in Covid's case, days before and after symptom onset (if they have symptom at all). Sometimes it's simply that when the person was most infectious he or she didn't contact many people.
 
Indeed... but one can test positive for much longer than he/she is infectious. We got our mild symptoms on Feb 3rd ... and Isabelle tested positive last week, a month later. We took a new test today and fingers crossed may make it back if we both test negative (I was negative last week... ). Government rules do not deal with such cases...
 
Re Antoine:
The problem is that we don't really know how infectious people are. You will need to grow the live virus from the sample in live cells to see if those sample (aka the person whom the sample taken from) is still infectious, and that requires special lab and skills, also casts a much higher risk on people who perform that compared to doing PCR, as you can imagine. Also there can be many reasons why the virus doesn't grow; maybe the sample was not kept well rather than it is really not infectious. Generally the data suggests that people would be much less infectious 7 days after symptom onset, but you never know. The straight forward and simple solution is to treat anyone who still tested positive in PCR test as infectious.

Re Alex:
Theoritically, samples with high virus titre are supposedly more infectious (or people generate those high virus titre are more infectious). Saying that, some people keep giving high titre after 7 days, and they might or might not be as infectious as it seems. On the other hand, some people might actually have high virus titre but their sample titre seems low due to technical reason. Again, wide virus infectivity test is not practical; the simple solution is the same, to treat anyone testing positive with significant titre as a super-spreader.
 
True to an extent. If someone tests positive, they could be re-tested to see how positive and that data used to work out how hard to do contact tracing.

This seems worthy of investigation of itself to me, though - the idea that virus titre isn't always related to infectiousness. I guess it might be other things such as the details of the nasal/buccal cavities that make some better able to create longer lasting aerosol or such like.
 
Mahmoud Ali said:
Hmm, very interesting. I've yet to read the article but this brings to mind Tuberculosis. From what I understand about it, having had to look after a girlfriend overseas who reacted very badly to the first set of medication she was given, was that there were two types, open and closed. The closed type was not contagious because it resided deeper in the lungs while the open type was contagious. In the early days there was talk about a "super spreader" in Lombardy or Northern Italy.
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I wonder if having had TB was in any way connected to the fact I tested positive more than a month after having had Covid.
 
Alex Lake said:
Do we really still have so little knowledge about the biology of super-spreaders? Being able to identify them would be pretty useful.
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In the case of Covid, do we know for sure that it is related to a person's biology, or could it just be that person's environment?

I have certainly seen a super-spreading event (as opposed to person) described - in a restaurant with an aircon system pumping virus-containing aerosol around an otherwise poorly ventilated room.
 
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