George Church (biotech genius with over two dozen companies several with multi-billion valuation) says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. He believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his protégés, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” he says.
The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.
There is a white paper that people can choose to follow to mix their own DIY Vaccine.
There is a vaccine that might work. The BCG vaccine for tuberculosis. I think there are some clinical trials going on now. But people have noticed that countries were the TB vaccine given was the BCG vaccine seem to have much lower rates of COVID deaths.
Not all. There are some success stories.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1283743/
Dr Jekyl was an outlier and shouldn’t have been counted.
The Stockholm metro area has a population density of 336 people/km². The New York metro area has a density of 2053 people/km². Those seem… not exactly comparable to me. (In case you’re planning on claiming that only the urban cores need to be compared, Stockholm: 4862 p/km². Manhattan: 26,822 p/km².)
But the charts in your libertarian-outlet-masquerading-as-a-foundation article are actually for New York State and all of Sweden. Let’s do that one: New York: 159 p/km². Sweden: 23 p/km².
Hmm. New York is 7x more dense than Sweden, and yet according to that chart it had only 4x the peak per-capita death rate of Sweden. I wonder what caused that?
Their death rate is effectively nothing now. That is what matters, not cases. Stockholm has an extremely high density so it is absolutely worth comparing. https://fee.org/articles/why-sweden-succeeded-in-flattening-the-curve-and-new-york-failed/
The US does considerably better (I get about 3.2% up through yesterday), but deaths per age group is much more instructive. Here are California’s numbers ( https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COVID-19-Cases-by-Age-Group.aspx ):
<5 years: 0.0%
5-17: 0.0%
18-34: 1.4%
35-49: 5.7%
50-59: 9.9%
60-64: 7.6%
65-69: 9.7%
70-74: 11.2%
75-79: 11.4%
80+: 43.1%
First, of the 37 countries in the OECD, Sweden’s current case/person/day rate is the eleventh worst. So, no, they’re not done.
Second, using a country with a population roughly the same as Michigan as a model for how to run public heath in a country with 330M people and two metropolitan areas that are bigger than all of Sweden is the silliest thing I’ve heard in a while, and there’s been a fire sale on silly recently.
I’m a bigger fan of federalism and local control than most, but this is a time for a real federal response. There’s one big reason:
Ramping testing to where it needs to be to execute a containment strategy instead of the current mitigation one requires a massive set of coordinated incentives to get the manufacturers and labs to invest in what’s required. It’s taken the US 6 months to get to 0.24% of tests per person per day. IMO, you can do containment if you drive cases down and you can get that number up to about 2% tests/person/day. But individual states aren’t going to magically increase testing by a factor of 8 or 9.
Trump was right about one thing: This is a situation that most closely resembles wartime. And there’s a reason why countries get real serious about coordinated industrial policy during wartime.
Mind you, I don’t think this is going to happen, because of the aforementioned freakin’ idiots. But it’s not like there isn’t a playbook on how to do this stuff, and the US wrote it. States can’t execute it; the feds can.
A great deal of the division over this could be avoided if our local and state leaders would just A: Spell out a clear set of exit criteria( With a fairly solid timeframe) for coming out of lockdown, and B: Start going through their legislators after a month or so as _required_ in various state Constitutions.
Behind the politicization of this virus is a deep unease at how out of order the lockdowns have been handled as well as the motives of the politicians and press pushing for them. The way it’s been handled almost by definition turns it from a matter of law and policy to something personal.
No story ever went south when it starts off with scientists trying out their own potions on themselves.
No wait, they all do.
Oh, yeah: I almost forgot to respond to your Fun Facts About Death, not that they have anything to do with the “normality” that you (and I) so crave. You missed a big one: Covid will likely be the third leading cause of death in the US in 2020. Heart disease will be #1, cancer #2, and accidents will be #4.
Sweden proves you wrong. No lockdown, no masks. They are done. We are going to easily pass their deaths per million. If they had treated their nursing homes like bio containment facilities the media wouldn’t have been able to spin them as a failure. They are the model that should have been followed.
Your main point above was that the “normal” people needed to go about their lives. I support that. So why are you making arguments that preclude that return to normality?
You insist on believing that the people at risk are completely separate from your “normal” people. But the at-risk and the “normal” live together. Little kids get covid, which does almost nothing to them, but they also transmit it to everybody in the family–some of whom are not “normal”.
So you have lots of families who are going to hunker down because they don’t want to kill Grandma. The don’t send their kids to school or daycare. Because they don’t have childcare, they don’t go back to work, or they work at reduced output and productivity. They don’t make as much money. They don’t buy things. That leads to more “normal” people being laid off.
On top of that, when businesses can’t contain outbreaks amongst their “normal” employees, they shut down or suffer huge productivity declines. In some cases, they shut down completely, because the liability exposure of operating with active outbreak exceeds the value or maintaining operations.
We both want the same thing. The difference is that I’d like to take steps to actually achieve that goal, while you apparently just want to stamp your foot until the problem magically fixes itself.
Given that almost every developed country (with the exception of the UK) has driven their cases down to the point where containment actually works, what you said is demonstrably untrue.
Flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system is indeed one reason for the lockdown. Creating enough time to develop effective treatments and vaccines are still other reasons. But if you want the economy to recover, then getting infections down to the point where individual businesses can control outbreaks without sending everybody home for a couple of weeks is essential. Kinda hard to get the economy to grow when parts of it are shutting down, piecemeal, over and over again.
Oh look, one of those deflective ‘whataboutisms’.
Worldometer stats are showing worldwide death rates at 6%. That’s pretty bad odds if you ask me for biting the big one.
Thank you.
No changing the death toll is in the cards when you flatten the curve. If you overwhelm your hospitals, then some people receive inadequate treatment resulting in increased mortality. Same goes for developing treatments/therapeutic measures. When the disease is new its harder to treat due to lack of experience and time is needed to try available options, if you slow it long enough it buys time to figure out what works best. It’s only been a few months and most doctors worldwide dealing with this are saying treatment outcomes are improving, now that they have experience with it and have identified therapeutic drugs and measures that improve outcomes. If you just let it go then you run the risk of overwhelming doctors, nurses and medical supply chains and that will impact treatment negatively and lead to higher mortality.
The only justification ever for the lockdown was to flatten the curve. Flattening the curve has nothing to do with preventing a single case, it was merely trying to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed all at once. Changing the total death toll was never in the cards, that is a complete lie.
Interesting, but I don’t have a polypeptide synthesizer.
I’d be much more interested in a live vaccine based off the 4 “common cold” coronaviruses that have shown cross-immunity with Covid 19. It might or might not work, but the downside risk is fairly small: Getting a cold.
And there are over 60000 dead from flu this year. More children under the age of 5 have died from bathtub drownings. Should we ban tubs and water? Millions will die from the effects of alcohol and tobacco. Are you crusading to save people from themselves from those two substances? And yes, there are groups at higher risk than others. Over 40% of deaths are in care homes for older folks. Morbidity increases if you have heart and lungs issues. I don’t want people dying, but life is terminal.
This has not been verified. There are a couple of comments (intended as letters to the editor) published on Medical Hypothesis and similar journals. But the peer reviewed material on the subject is scarce. I can cite “Routine childhood immunization may protect against COVID-19” by Salaman et al in which it is suggested that the general childhood immunizations might be the reason for lower impact on children, But it is again an hypothesis, not a documented fact. If you have a verified source on the subject please let me know
Dose dependent severity of infection matters. Early bioscientists were resourceful and took advantage of what they knew. Something has gone wrong with the training.
Fear is everywhere. But is the fear warranted?
I hear this argument all the time, and it makes me want to slam my head repeatedly into a wall to make it stop.
There aren’t “people in a risk group” and “normal people”. There are just hundreds of millions of potential disease vectors, and the at-risk people will continue to get sick and die until enough of those disease vectors realize that all that’s required to break the cycle is a lockdown that’s long enough to bring infections down to the point where standard public health containment measures (i.e., having enough testing to detect outbreaks when they’re still small enough to do contact-tracing and quarantine) are effective.
We had that lockdown, and it was working quite well. If the idiots who purport to be our leaders had simply stuck with it for another couple of weeks and mobilized testing properly, this would be all over. Instead, we have the worst of all possible worlds: widespread, uncontained infections, and an economy that’s been crippled for months or years instead of weeks.
I sympathize with your need to get on with your life and support your family. But if we’d all collectively just behaved like grownups and done the necessary thing for just a little bit longer, we wouldn’t have to have this argument over and over and over, because it wouldn’t be needed anymore.
Instead, there are more than 120,000 people dead who’d be alive if we weren’t all collectively a bunch of freakin’ idiots, being led by even bigger idiots.
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The vaccine is likely to be safe, but there are issues. The main one I would worry about is Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). That is, the vaccine is making antibodies that bind the virus but actually enhance its entry into the target cell. I.e. make the disease worse. It is hard to assess this (you need to test the antibodies in cell culture with the actual virus and see if they enhance cell entry) – basically, you need a PC3 level lab.
The other issue is something like ‘immunological masking’. So, this vaccine might be somewhat effective at protection, but prevents a future vaccine from being effective. Alternatively, it may skew the immune response down a path we don’t really want – like an IgE response instead of an IgA response.
Now those above examples aren’t likely, but at least one person has sprayed themselves eight times with this vaccine. If the immune response is one of the above outcomes, they could actually get themselves killed pretty quickly.
no particular opinion – though i heard that 5-8% of ALL people are considered vulnerable (of which 30% would likely die in a total exposure/ nobody cares, low-moderate health care availability scenario, rather than the 200-250k that will die per current). Anyway, I am more interested in the world I want to live in and the path of policy and social dynamic (work, play, wealth, tech, travel) that accomplishes that. My instinct is that a rich, productive world will most likely bring a world of high tech, life-changing discoveries, and intense experiences (and probably more health successes (read: vaccines and cures) along the way) – the bigger the wealth pie, the more that ALL get what they need/ want. A total/ part lock-down world does not lead to such a world and should be eschewed as much as possible. I regret that my ‘intellectually-curious but ultimately apathetic tone’ somehow reads as pro-lockdown – as that is not my instinct.
You mean, the 5-8% of vulnerable people should segregate and protect themselves when necessary just as they do already when necessary?
People with comorbidities often social distanced well before COVID. This is just another viral infection people with compromised health will need to avoid. It’s not the end of the world, nor an undue, additional burden for people with comorbidities.
People not working and a huge reduction in economic activity IS far more compromising to the health of a nation and its people than a virus that kills less than 1% of healthy people who get it.
so that’s the big issue: is the ‘onus of effort’ on the A) 5-8% of vulnerable people (with a > 30% chance of dying) to segregate and protect themselves so the rest of us can function normally?-or- B) for all people to lock-down so that spread and exposure is minimized so very few of those 5-8% are infected early? How early is to early? If we have a few cases at each major airport/ urban centre, what is the spread after the likely 2 weeks (full employment scenario) to get the vast majority of those people who live ‘mixed in’ to protective facilities (abandoned motels, army bases, etc. – likely pre-planned)?? – maybe 10 to 20%. How many of the 5-8% will get caught in that early flood – and will the cause of death be due to too-slow-Joe? -or- overwhelmed ICUs (which now means regular disasters such as car crashes and accident victims are not serviced?) If we use the three main metrics of pandemic failure (economic loss, pandemic life loss, dysfunctional infrastructure (no beds or paramedics…) and run it over time with 3 scenarios (nobody cares, everybody locks, vulnerable segregate) how does it look? Methinks its like the reaction of the public when they hear they have 90 minutes to live, somewhere but who knows, after nukes have been launched. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.
It actually has been established that people who have been exposed to those get some immunity to Covid 19.
He’s way overstating the disease, if you look at the stats so far. Again, if you’re in a risk group, take steps to not die. Self preservation should be a good motivator, but real people don’t have the luxury to stay at home for 5 months. It’s a dumb way for normal people to go about life. If you add the various ways one could die on any particular day, you would never leave your house.
He or she, of course
Estep! Doesn’t he deserve at least to be quoted with name and surname?
The are 4 strains of corona virus amongst the 200 or so of viruses that are responsible for the common cold. It is a bit fascinating that nobody bothers to check if exposing healthy individuals to one of this strains at a minimal dosage that has to be determined after naturally activating their immune system so they may not experience any symptoms at all can be used as means to increase immunity to Covid 19 and help increase the herd immunity of the entire population when done en masse.
How nice of them taking the first bullet for the rest of us.