StrangeSox

UIUC has pioneered a saliva-based rapid test. Everyone who needs to be on-campus will be tested twice a week. And now they're making the technology available nationally. https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7815/1904934500 T This test only costs $10 per, only needs some kind of test tube-like receptacle and a plastic ziploc type bag to seal it in, doesn't require any expensive or hard to get reagents, can be run in a high school science lab (they repurposed a vetmed lab at this university to exclusively run tests), and if you know how to spit in a tube you can self-administer in a matter of minutes, which reduces the need for PPE for collectors to gloves and masks. If this can become the new standard (its 88.9% accurate, retest of samples brings it up to 100%, which is better than the nasal swab) we could really speed up testing and get a handle on how widespread it really is. Without cheap, rapid, point-of-care or at-home testing, we can't safely reopen schools or other large gathering places. If we can get enough testing in place, we can. Getting to millions of tests per day isn't an easy hurdle, and we wasted the last four months doing essentially nothing at the national level to get there, but we still have a chance to greatly improve our public health safety.

It'll depend on how long-lasting either naturally acquired or vaccine-induced immunity turns out to be, but it could basically become a "childhood" disease like roseola. The liklihood of it being completely eliminated from people and animal reservoirs is very, very low, but if it's just a thing that infants and toddlers catch that barely does anything at all to them, that's not such a big deal. The flu vaccines aren't very effective because influenza viruses mutate like crazy. They have to make a guess months ahead of time what the most prominent strains will be and what they might mutate into over the course of a flu season. This virus so far seems to be pretty stable overall, and coronaviruses in general are much more stable than influenza ones. This is a key part of the question, imo: 35% of Americans would not get free, FDA-approved vaccine if ready today If the FDA were to somehow suddenly approve and distribute a vaccine today, I'd be very, very skeptical of exactly what was behind that approval. How many of us are eager to get the Russian government-approved vaccine right now? When you ask a question like that, it's not easy to get to the root of why people might be answering the way they're answering. So if you asked me that question, I might be part of the "no," and if not I'd be part of the "maybe." If instead you asked me about a vaccine available in, say, early January, I'd be a cautious "yes."

Yikes

Good breakdown on TWiV this week of all the possible 'morbidities' that COVID can cause--it's not just a binary live/die disease. Hair loss, rashes, "covid toes," neurological impacts (confused, delusion, GBS), long-term concentration and attention span issues, acute and long-term myocardial issues, pulmonary issues and others.

Yep, that's been the message from political leadership across the board since late may or late june, depending on the state. Reopen indoor activities and then yell at people for going out.

The CDC estimated 10x as many cases as currently reported on the high side. That would mean that we finally have gotten to about 50m infected over the past 8 months. That is only 15% of the US population, and it's going to be lumped around rather than evenly spread. 15% is a long, long, long way from any sort of natural immunity tamping down the spread to manageable levels. That is still hundreds of thousands of more deaths until we get to 80% or higher. That will take many more months if not years and we'll have substantial economic damage and suffering along the way. NYT write-up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/health/coronavirus-antibodies-asymptomatic.html CDC data: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/commercial-lab-surveys.html Meanwhile, Illinois continues to trend the wrong way. It's downstate that's leading the rising positivity.

That is incorrect, as has been pointed out to you several times in this thread. France, Spain, and parts of Italy and the US have done serology surveys and found consistent results.

It's not talked about because there's not evidence that it is that widespread and some evidence that it isn't from multiple countries and regions. Since all indications are that it isn't widespread and a whole lot of the population still have naive immune systems, it doesn't make sense to speculate. It could make people drastically change their risk evaluations for the worse and engage in more risky behavior likely to spread the disease if they think they've already probably had it and so have most other people. It's just been wishful thinking from the start that we don't actually have to worry about this or take it all that seriously.

DIVOC-91 out of UIUC uses the JHU dataset but gives you some more controls over the visualizations https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries&highlight=United States&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=left#countries We have been hovering at just over 1k deaths/day in the 7-day average for most of this week.

The source is AFP, a french newswire service akin to the AP here. Here is their original tweet: They may have either misreported or they may be reporting on a different 24-hour time window. Note that they do say "in 24 hours" rather than "in a single day," so they may be looking at the data differently than the 830pm-830-pm window cited in your article. edit: based on the Barron's link ss2k5 posted, it reads like AFP misreported or that there was maybe a temporary glitch in the JH data that was fixed, but not before they sent out their report. No, it's time to acknowledge that the people who have said this was a serious issue that could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country if we didn't take strong and immediate steps to control the spread were right, and that the people insisting it was no big deal and we all probably already had it were dead wrong. The IMHE model, which has been very conservative compared to other models out there, is still saying 300k dead people in the US by the end of the year. The 2M dead model that finally got our government (and the UK) to take this seriously made that prediction with the assumption of zero mitigation efforts, which is what the UK government's policy was at the time.

Just shrugging off 1,000-2,000 dead Americans every day for ???, normal times and country

Don't worry 50-100m Americans definitely already had it by mid March

and a thread on this picture from Georgia that's been going around:

not sure how you avoid this in thousands of classrooms across the country

IFT and IEA announced last week that they'd fully support any locals that wanted to strike over health and safety.

"take this disease head on" It isn't some sort of ideological or national enemy. It's a virus. It doesn't give a shit about how brave or tough you are. Is Notre Dame going to be testing everyone weekly at a minimum?

Seems to me that if you have to put out signs like this, it's not actually safe to be doing in-person learning

this is going to rapidly accelerate in the next couple of months

More good discussion of using less-sensitive, low-cost rapid testing. They wont' pick you up at low, low, low levels, but they'll pick you up before you become infectious. So maybe these cheaper tests would take an extra day or two to pick up, but if we can drastically increase testing volume and turnaround time, we're going to catch and quarantine far more cases early on. This is the way out of this until we get widespread effective vaccination and/or treatment.