Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic

[TanaNari]

Hey man, call it whatever you want. I was just expressing concern because I think you're cool and I'd hate to lose you anytime soon.

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To be absolutely clear: I didn't say (nor think) you did anything wrong. Giving valid medical advice is not the same as saying that you have to speak a very specific way to avoid hurting other peoples' feelings.

 

[Evillevi]

I think Aleh's point is, that so many people have been using 'Flu' to down play it and it's potential effects... and the fact that Aleh is a practicing medical practitioner who constantly gets to see the effects of that mislabeling on those who are fundamentally alot more ignorant than you are...

Its perhaps better to NOT be an asshole about it and insist on the right terminology to keep people from thinking it's JUST a Flu even if the word Flu is something we tend to use for 'Any generic respatory viral infection'.


I mean respecting the Medical practitioners who are having it super rough, and the people who in the thread itself have had parents die of it shouldn't be too hard right?



I mean it's good you recovered from it, and fuck yeah on you getting through it better than those times you had an actual flu, but at the same time, spare a little extra though to be considerate. I mean I KNOW you post in here enough to know why Greenson and Aleh are on you about this.

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For people who don't think it's so bad even with the 99.X% of Death(terms and conditions applied) Bear in mind that in places who both don't do well and keep public records, we can see 10+% increases in deaths per month compared to last year.

That terms and conditions carries a lot and analysis is hard because fo that.

 

[Aleh]

the fact that Aleh is a practicing medical practitioner

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Umm, no. "Medical practitioner" has a specific meaning, and I don't have an M.D. or a license. Me practicing medicine would be a crime.

who constantly gets to see the effects of that mislabeling on those who are fundamentally alot more ignorant than you are...

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This, however, is quite true, if incomplete. The effects of that sort of mislabeling and the attitudes it produces are not limited to the people who hold said attitudes.

Imagine, if you will, someone who goes out and ignores the virus because it's "just the flu". They get sick for a week or so... and so do their parents, their kids, their spouse, several innocent people who they just happened to brush by in stores... and the others aren't nearly as lucky as the asshole who infected them.

This is not a hypothetical example. The ICUs in my area are flooded with the victims of people like that.

That is true. "Flu" is generic slang limited to many types of influenza and numerous other viruses that typically have seasonal cycles and come with symptoms typically including (but are by no means limited to) nausea, numerous forms of respiratory distress, and fever.

Not unlike the word 'cold', which also doesn't name a specific disease. But having 'a cold' is typically interpreted to mean 'less severe' than a flu.

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I am well aware of the common use of "the flu" to reference flu-like illness. COVID does not qualify, except superficially in the less severe cases. To call it a "flu" is to ignore the fact that it really doesn't look like that in the cases that we actually worry about... or, more commonly, to simply ignore said cases all together.

In other words, the situation is the exact opposite of this:

It isn't accurate to use 'flu' to describe food poisoning, but it is accurate to describe more extreme covid expressions as such.

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Flu-like symptoms are generally the result of the body's immune response, notably including the release of cytokines. (And yes, that last bit is a popular-level overview. I do not want to get into biochemistry here.) This response can be elicited by damn near anything, including food poisoning, meaning that yes, flu-like illness can indeed be an accurate description for food poisoning.

That's why there's that overlap that some people have pounced on in their efforts to trivialize the plague.

Edit: Or, to put it another way, we use the term "flu" or "flu-like illness" to describe sicknesses in which the symptoms are primarily those of cytokine release. While COVID does produce that sort of immune response, you're very fucking lucky if that's all you have to deal with from COVID.

I could go on about things like the differences between upper respiratory infections, lower respiratory infections, and SARS-type clusterfucks, but I think I've already said enough... and, honestly, the only thing you really need to know about them is that treating one like another tends to result in dead patients. Besides, I've ranted enough already and I really need to get back to sleep.

The point here is that I do not insist on avoiding calling COVID a "flu" as a form of "crybullying" or to spare people's feelings; I insist on not calling it a "flu" because the term is simply wrong -- medically, ontologically, and morally.

 

[TanaNari]

Whelp, just got back from my checkup (pretty much perfect health, huzzah!) and... I gotta say, that nasal test is easily the single most unpleasant thing I have ever allowed happen to myself. I would rather get blood drawn, at least that's just pain... I know how to handle pain... I don't know how to handle the feeling of something trying to poke me in the brain while I just sit there and allow it to happen.

That alone is the second worst part of my covid experience.

 

[me-meboi]

Whelp, just got back from my checkup (pretty much perfect health, huzzah!) and... I gotta say, that nasal test is easily the single most unpleasant thing I have ever allowed happen to myself. I would rather get blood drawn, at least that's just pain... I know how to handle pain... I don't know how to handle the feeling of something trying to poke me in the brain while I just sit there and allow it to happen.

That alone is the second worst part of my covid experience.

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I can undwrstand, friend. Also recently had that done (yesterday) as part of the recent steps being taken by my college to finally open up and restart classes and do exams. I have never felt anything solid go so far up my nose. Though they also poked where I felt my uvula was in my mouth as a second part of test.

Antigen testing says I'm COVID negative. So, good for me, even though the utter pain dwarfed anything I've ever felt so far.

 

[zup]

Whelp, just got back from my checkup (pretty much perfect health, huzzah!) and... I gotta say, that nasal test is easily the single most unpleasant thing I have ever allowed happen to myself. I would rather get blood drawn, at least that's just pain... I know how to handle pain... I don't know how to handle the feeling of something trying to poke me in the brain while I just sit there and allow it to happen.

That alone is the second worst part of my covid experience.

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I can undwrstand, friend. Also recently had that done (yesterday) as part of the recent steps being taken by my college to finally open up and restart classes and do exams. I have never felt anything solid go so far up my nose. Though they also poked where I felt my uvula was in my mouth as a second part of test.

Antigen testing says I'm COVID negative. So, good for me, even though the utter pain dwarfed anything I've ever felt so far.

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Considering they claim we exhale the virus to infect other people, I wonder why they cannot diagnose it off that.

 

[evildice]

Considering they claim we exhale the virus to infect other people, I wonder why they cannot diagnose it off that.

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You mean something like having you exhale through a tube for a few hours and collect the residue on the tube?

Spoiler

That's exactly what they do. The tube is your nasal cavity or throat, and you've already been breathing through it for hours before you show up at the test.

 

[TanaNari]

Whelp, suspicions turned out correct. I am now officially a covid survivor. I assume my free t-shirt is in the mail.

Also had the scare of a lifetime last night- my grandmother had to go to the hospital because of pneumonia, and I spent all night freaking out because if she had covid, it was almost certainly me who gave it to her. I found out this morning that she came back negative (because apparently they can get the test done quick if they feel the need to).

So now I'm torn between relief that I didn't kill my grandma, and worried as hell because pneumonia is still one of the deadlier diseases out there.

Considering they claim we exhale the virus to infect other people, I wonder why they cannot diagnose it off that.

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My guess would be because they have trouble getting enough sample material (re: viruses) that way to do rigorous testing. They don't just have to detect 'do you have an infection', they have to identify a specific disease that they can't simply grow a culture of in a lab.

And having undergone the test once, I really don't want a doctor calling me up and saying 'your test was inconclusive, come in so we can do it again.'

 

[evildice]

Whelp, suspicions turned out correct. I am now officially a covid survivor. I assume my free t-shirt is in the mail.

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Grats on surviving.

Unless you're in a protected class (billionaire, senator, policeman, talk show host, retired boomer in a swing state), you're probably supposed to use your stimulus check to buy your own T-shirt.

 

[TotalAbsolutism]

Considering they claim we exhale the virus to infect other people, I wonder why they cannot diagnose it off that.

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Using the word 'claim' in this context is the sort of thing that's going to make me real testy. Please watch your language.

 

[OverMaster]

Whelp, suspicions turned out correct. I am now officially a covid survivor. I assume my free t-shirt is in the mail.

Also had the scare of a lifetime last night- my grandmother had to go to the hospital because of pneumonia, and I spent all night freaking out because if she had covid, it was almost certainly me who gave it to her. I found out this morning that she came back negative (because apparently they can get the test done quick if they feel the need to).

So now I'm torn between relief that I didn't kill my grandma, and worried as hell because pneumonia is still one of the deadlier diseases out there.


My guess would be because they have trouble getting enough sample material (re: viruses) that way to do rigorous testing. They don't just have to detect 'do you have an infection', they have to identify a specific disease that they can't simply grow a culture of in a lab.

And having undergone the test once, I really don't want a doctor calling me up and saying 'your test was inconclusive, come in so we can do it again.'

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Now expose yourself again and test for us how soon we can get reinfected, and whether the second time's actually worse.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

Now expose yourself again and test for us how soon we can get reinfected, and whether the second time's actually worse.

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Ha ha.


Does anyone actually know what studies show on that issue?

 

[Aleh]

Considering they claim we exhale the virus to infect other people, I wonder why they cannot diagnose it off that.

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This is a bit complicated. The short version is what evildice just said, but the actual, technical details depend a bit on just what test you're talking about despite distinct parallels.

The first-line (and still best, going just by accuracy) tests are/were based on PCR -- polymerase chain reaction -- methodology, which is a method used to rapidly make millions or billions of copies of a piece of DNA (or, indirectly, RNA). The problem with them is that PCR is a hilariously finicky method that requires strict laboratory conditions to run due to its ridiculous levels of vulnerability to random contamination (which is a problem for reasons that you can probably figure out from the above -- just think about what happens when random bacteria get into the sample you're running through the "make millions of copies of this" reaction, then multiply it by everything *else* that could get in there). Even with said laboratory conditions and the strictest guards against contamination possible, it's not at all uncommon for random bits of fluff -- including whatever you're looking for -- to get in there anyway.

This is -- assuming a competent lab, and I know this stuff because I had to spend several months dealing with lawsuits involving incompetent ones, several years writing about the deliberate use of said incompetent labs by scientific frauds in various forms, and close to a fucking decade after that explaining said writing's contents over and over again, usually to the same people as they ignored me and instead listened to hucksters -- mostly fine; labs have a very simple way to deal with this. Simply put, there's usually going to be a shitton more DNA in that sample from legitimate sources than from contamination.

Thus, you run the sample through the process a strict number of times (with the DNA in the sample theoretically doubling each time). While you don't really (directly) look at the quantity curves in methods used for a COVID test, there's a related method called quantitative PCR which does, and it produces quantity curves like this:

Spoiler

It's worth noting that DNA other than the target DNA (transcribed SARS-CoV-2 RNA in this case) can set off the detection instruments if there's enough of it... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Anyway, now that I've probably lost my mental place due to taking the time to find the above image (which was a bit harder than you'd think), let's get back to what happens more realistically thanks to the fact that there are almost certainly multiple types of DNA in that sample (due to it being taken from somewhere outside a laboratory). Specifically, you have multiple curves developing, producing a figure that looks something like this:

Spoiler

Where the "earlier" curves are the things we originally had a lot of in the sample, and the "later" curves are things that we originally had less of in the sample.

(And yes, that's a real test curve. Here is another one, that's far more realistic for an actual sample in this context, despite being of something else entirely.)

All of this means that the main trick when using PCR to search for viral D- or RNA is to run the process through enough cycles that the thing you're searching for will show up if it's meaningfully there, but not enough that random contaminants will throw out false positives if it's not.

But... levels of viral RNA vary a good bit between samples, even from people with the disease. They vary between individuals, between sample types (a saliva sample might have virus particles, but far fewer of them than you'd get from a nasal swab), and even between individual samples where the above are identical. Heck, they even vary depending on how the samples are stored.

And that means that there's a trade-off: The more cycles of the chain reaction are run, the more likely it is that you'll find the disease in a sample has it... but more cycles also mean the test is more likely to throw up a false positive.

(This trade-off between sensitivity and specificity is not exactly going to be new to anyone who's familiar with test design... but I'm focusing on PCR-based testing here.)

Someone who wants an accurate test generally wants to run as few cycles as possible without sacrificing accuracy... which means that you want as virus-dense a sample as possible from the people you're looking for.

Breathing on a collector or the like simply wouldn't be dense enough, especially since the collection device itself wouldn't be taken or stored in a laboratory. You could, I suppose, sterilize a clean room before collection, drop the patient off in there, have them open the collection device (alone in there), have them seal the thing themselves in an environmentally-controlled container meant to preserve as much virus as possible, and test things that way... but the practical and logistical issues with that should be obvious, and the results wouldn't be nearly as good.

And yeah, the other test methods have the same sort of issue. I just don't know them as well.

COVID transmission, meanwhile, follows what I jokingly like to call the "rule of sperm": Each particle is hilariously unlikely to do much on its own... but it really only takes one to make you into a virus baby factory.

Edit: On reflection, after posting this, a lot of the detail above isn't really needed. I thought of a better, and simpler, way to phrase things shortly after posting it. Still, the above details should be interesting/useful to the people reading, so I'm leaving the post intact.

 

[TanaNari]

Now expose yourself again and test for us how soon we can get reinfected, and whether the second time's actually worse.

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Well, I do work in an industry that has higher odds than average of exposure, so there's a nonzero chance I'll be able to personally answer this question some day.

 

[Ragnarok]

Oh, I'm aware... but I refuse to let crybullying control my behavior... I consider that sort of self-censorship to be a far greater threat than any plague could be in the modern world.

I will continue referring to it as whatever the fuck I want, and being told not to is only going to make me want to do it more.

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Christ but you have thin skin. You equate people asking you to stop downplaying a plague to cyberbullying? How do you even function in everyday life? Are you a Karen?

 

[TanaNari]

Damn. Been over a week and you're still butthurt?

You should really see a therapist. Or a debugger.

 

[Ragnarok]

Living rent-free in your head

 

[TanaNari]

You know... "Accuse others of what you, yourself, are guilty of" is not actually a good way to live your life.

 

[MadGreenSon]

You know... "Accuse others of what you, yourself, are guilty of" is not actually a good way to live your life.

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Oooh! That reminded me of something funny! It's a bit Rule 8 so I'll PM you the link.

 

[Generic_Generica]

Jesus Christ, enough already.

TanaNari, throughout the entire history of this thread, you've consistently attempted to downplay just how bad COVID-19 has been, even after being requested to stop multiple times by other people in this thread up to and including people who work in the medical field and people who've lost loved ones to this fucking virus.

Enough's enough. This isn't rants, we're holding you to some fucking semblance of decency here. You get a permathreadban. If you don't like that, quite frankly, take it up with alethiophile, tehelgee or ultima333.

Ragnarok, we have a report button for a reason, use it instead of engaging in a pissing contest in-thread.

Back on topic. Now.

 

[evildice]

I had originally typed some clever quips to nudge us back on-topic but there's no point in nudges when the thread's been hit by a re-railgun.

Spoiler: Topical Memes, Apply Directly to Anus

 

[Ragnarok]

I know a guy at work that keeps saying he refuses to take any sort of vaccine until Elon Musk takes it. He says it's because Elon Musk is a lot smarter than him. And while I have no doubt that is true, Elon Musk's area of expertise lies in electronics, not the medical field. But the dumbass (the coworker) refuses to acknowledge this, sounding like a broken record and saying "it doesn't matter, Elon Musk is still smart." It's kind of infuriating.

 

[me-meboi]

I know a guy at work that keeps saying he refuses to take any sort of vaccine until Elon Musk takes it. He says it's because Elon Musk is a lot smarter than him. And while I have no doubt that is true, Elon Musk's area of expertise lies in electronics, not the medical field. But the dumbass (the coworker) refuses to acknowledge this, sounding like a broken record and saying "it doesn't matter, Elon Musk is still smart." It's kind of infuriating.

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Maybe he's just trolling you? Like, joking and stuff? A false front of confidence and trying to put his mind off the daily death toll either directly or indirectly thanks to SARS-COV-2?

 

[Ragnarok]

In the history books, any discussion of Covid-19 should start with the 2019 Chernobyl HBO series and how a group of smug, self-righteous pundits came out and proudly said that there was no way something like that could happen in the United States, that we would respond to a disaster with such appalling mismanagement.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

I know a guy at work that keeps saying he refuses to take any sort of vaccine until Elon Musk takes it. He says it's because Elon Musk is a lot smarter than him. And while I have no doubt that is true, Elon Musk's area of expertise lies in electronics, not the medical field. But the dumbass (the coworker) refuses to acknowledge this, sounding like a broken record and saying "it doesn't matter, Elon Musk is still smart." It's kind of infuriating.

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I mean, knowing your limitations and trusting those smarter than you isn't a bad way to live your life, but you need to be at the very least selective about who you trust to know about each subject. Steven Hawking was also 'a lot smarter' than him, but he probably shouldn't be getting his political, financial or sports related opinions from the guy.

 

[alethiophile]

Also, there's the technical quibble that Elon Musk already had the virus (and recovered), so probably wouldn't take a vaccine anyway.

 

[MadGreenSon]

Also, there's the technical quibble that Elon Musk already had the virus (and recovered), so probably wouldn't take a vaccine anyway.

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There's some evidence that recovery doesn't give immunity.

 

[evildice]

I mean, knowing your limitations and trusting those smarter than you isn't a bad way to live your life, but you need to be at the very least selective about who you trust to know about each subject. Steven Hawking was also 'a lot smarter' than him, but he probably shouldn't be getting his political, financial or sports related opinions from the guy.

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In the UK, they seem to treat their royalty like tabloid celebrities.

In the USA, we seem to do the opposite.

 

[alethiophile]

There's some evidence that recovery doesn't give immunity.

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So far it seems really unclear. There are a few known cases of reinfection, but given the attack rate we've seen in the US, if there were no immunity we should have many thousands right now and it'd be obvious. (Immunity is not binary; conventional immunity in this case might well be similar to one of the vaccines that are 95% effective but not 100%, say.) And there are some biochemical results suggesting that stuff like antibody count drops off a few months after recovery, but the degree to which this relates to actual immunity against infection isn't known.

In any case, though, given the limited supply of vaccines and the evidence that recovery provides at least some immunity, people who have had it and recovered are going to be low on the vaccine priority list. So Musk probably won't be taking any vaccine for quite some time anyway.

 

[Eisen]

A fatality (as in died from the virus instead of the virus exacerbating existing issues) appeared in my neighborhood. The city is back into lockdown state, and yet as the end of the year arrives people began flocking to many places outside because reasons.

This is making my head hurts.