Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

[SvennoJ]

Trumpstyle said:

SvennoJ said:

More and more stories are emerging of the virus being around since last year in Europe and the US, brought back from Wuhan from the Olympic military games at the end of October. (First known case in China was traced back to less than 20 days after the games ended) That fits the timelines much better, explaining high results from immunity tests while the spread seems to be slow after testing caught up with the build up mountain of cases. Earliest community case in France has already been traced back to late December.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/europes-first-coronavirus-case-was-in-december-scientists/

Young fit people bringing the virus back for it to slowly spread until it reaches enough vulnerable people to become noticeable makes more sense than the supposed accelerated spread in February and March to reach the high numbers we have now. It also fits in with how Sweden is going down despite not doing all that much to contain the virus and how it can take a while to see numbers going down since testing still has plenty cases to pick from to fill the test capacity. And it would explain why the early models were predicting a lot more needed ICU beds than we actually ended up needing. Slower spread than assumed based on early unreliable/incomplete data.

Every time I tried to make sense of anti body tests and wild claims that it must be 10 to 50 to 100 times worse already together with all the later indications of observed doubling rates, it always ended up needing the virus to be around much much earlier than the first detected cases. Now the first community case has been pushed back to December in France, all the puzzle pieces start to slide into place.

Going forward, easing restrictions shouldn't trigger steep resurgence of the spread. Some, but not back to panic mode after a month.

So countries like Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, S. Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia never did a good job containing the virus as the international media has been saying, the virus hit them in ~February.

Meanwhile it hit several EU countries and New york State already back in Oct/Nov. But we never saw it intill it exploded in march.

As you already corrected, Australia and New Zealand were not in the games, and yep the out breaks were detected and happened much earlier in Japan and South Korea. South Korea was already getting over their super spreader out break before Australia started charting.


There is also some concern that a mutation could have made the virus more contagious, no evidence of it being more or less dangerous, but showing up more in samples.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/has-the-new-coronavirus-mutated-to-be-more-contagious-experts-weigh-in-1.4930666

The study’s authors said this one particular mutation, named D614G, appears to be more contagious than its predecessors because it has quickly infected more people than earlier strains of the virus that first emerged in Wuhan, China.

The scientists came to this conclusion by analyzing more than 6,000 coronavirus sequences from around the world, which were collected by the German-based organization the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID).

They tracked the virus across different regions since its emergence and said they identified 14 mutations related to the now-infamous spike protein that is visible on the surface of the virus. They focused their attention on the spike protein because this is what allows the virus to enter human respiratory cells.

Of the mutations they discovered, the researchers said D614G appeared to be of the most concern because it became dominant wherever it was spread, although they said it’s still unclear why that is.

What’s more, the study didn’t show that the mutated strain of the virus actually made people sicker. The team studied data from 453 hospitalized patients in Sheffield, England and found that, while people with the particular mutation had higher viral loads in their samples, they weren’t sicker or in the hospital for longer periods.

It could tie in with covid19 spreading slower at first from November, then accelerating when it hit Europe. However it's all still very hypothetical and needs a lot more research:

Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases physician and scientist with the Toronto General Hospital, said the study didn’t prove that the mutated strain is more virulent just because it was more common in their sample size.

“It’s not to say it can’t happen. It’s not to say it won’t happen, but they don’t provide the level of proof to determine that this has happened,” he said.

“It’s not that a mutation didn't occur. It’s not that there aren’t different variants of this virus around. But does this mutation confer some special advantage over other strains of this virus? And the answer is maybe, maybe not, but they don’t show that in this paper.”

It can be important for vaccine development though

As for the study’s potential impact on vaccine development, the team from Los Alamos National Laboratory explained that was why they published the results of their research before it had been peer-reviewed.

“These findings have important implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission, pathogenesis and immune interventions,” the authors wrote.