COVID-19 - On the Ground

[sdoyel]

Humans aren't doing themselves any favors trying to pretend we are removed from nature. Instead of allowing it to run its course at little risk, we are setting ourselves up to be more and more dependent on artificial medicine

Well, when Covid 36 comes around I guess we are all just fucked. We are gonna die anyway, right?

[randylahey]

Humans aren't doing themselves any favors trying to pretend we are removed from nature. Instead of allowing it to run its course at little risk, we are setting ourselves up to be more and more dependent on artificial medicine

Well, when Covid 36 comes around I guess we are all just fucked. We are gonna die anyway, right?

Either allow our immune systems to naturally evolve along side it forever. Or become completely dependent on government medicine forever

[PhDhawk]

Adaptive immunity isn't heritable.

[PhDhawk]

The antigens produced by the vaccine are made on the same ribosomes, by the same RNA polymerase, using the same amino acids as those produced during viral infection. There is no difference in the peptides. The vaccines boost your immunity just as naturally as a virus.

[jhawks99]

Facebook is down. Randy is gonna run outta material.

[PhDhawk]

Facebook is down. Randy is gonna run outta material.

POTD

[PhDhawk]

Fact: old people dying doesn't improve our gene pool.

[Mjl]

Seems like we could have been better off not taking any precautions at all. No masks no distancing no nothing. A lot of people would have died (a lot did anyways) but everyone would've been exposed and developed natural resistances. The sick/weak/vulnerable would have died off, strengthening our gene pool and natural resistances. And we wouldve put an end to all these games, and given the virus less chance to linger and mutate

Says the guy who accused others of acting like Hitler.

Look up eugenics you evil piece of shit.

[PhDhawk]

The only useful information in Randy's posts is confirmation that he doesn't understand immunology, genetics, or evolution.

[Overlander]

The only useful information in Randy's posts is confirmation that he doesn't understand.....anything.

[randylahey]

Fact: old people dying doesn't improve our gene pool.

Immunocompromised does. Natural selection plays a big part in keeping species strong

[randylahey]

Seems like we could have been better off not taking any precautions at all. No masks no distancing no nothing. A lot of people would have died (a lot did anyways) but everyone would've been exposed and developed natural resistances. The sick/weak/vulnerable would have died off, strengthening our gene pool and natural resistances. And we wouldve put an end to all these games, and given the virus less chance to linger and mutate

Says the guy who accused others of acting like Hitler.

Look up eugenics you evil piece of shit.

Huge difference between something naturally dying off and being deliberately killed off

[randylahey]

Facebook is down. Randy is gonna run outta material.

POTD

Lol. Didnt even realize it was. Since I haven't used Facebook since I was like 16. Maybe you guys are the crowd thats always on it

[randylahey]

Adaptive immunity isn't heritable.

Didnt say that.. but immune systems 100 percent adapt and evolve through time and genetics.

[jfish26]

Adaptive immunity isn't heritable.

Didnt say that.. but immune systems 100 percent adapt and evolve through time and genetics.

But not on the kind of timeline that is remotely relevant here.

[PhDhawk]

Fact: old people dying doesn't improve our gene pool.

Immunocompromised does. Natural selection plays a big part in keeping species strong

Not if they've reached reproductive age. 95% ofcovid deaths were in people 45+. Not if their immune issues were from smoking, type II diabetes, HIV or other infectious disease, any lifestyle or environmental reason, down syndrome, alcoholic, pregnant, or really the vast majority of comorbidities that increased the chances of dying.

You clearly don't understand how evolution works. You're trying to apply the wrong definition of fitness. You don't understand the rate of change in allelic frequencies. You don't recognize the necessity of heritability.

[PhDhawk]

When an individual is exposed to a new pathogen, that doesn't confer immunity to their offspring. If both your parents had chicken pox, that doesn't make you more immune to it. Your adaptive immune system develops independently over time, based on your exposure to different antigens.

Moreover, the role genetics do play in specific immune response that benefitted individuals during this pandemic might not benefit for the next one, and could even be deleterious.

[Overlander]

Man, this RandyLobster really seems to know what he is talking about.
He brings undisputable facts, and this PHd clown just keeps puking up rhetoric.

[Deleted User 863]

PhD: have you seen this?



Back in the spring of last year, a 45-year-old man went to the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston because of a coronavirus infection. Doctors treated him with steroids and discharged him five days later.

But the infection never went away — for 154 days. "He was readmitted to the hospital several times over the subsequent five months for recurrence of his COVID-19 infection and severe pneumonia," says infectious disease doctor Jonathan Li at Harvard Medical School, who helped treat the man.

"So this is an extraordinary individual," Li says.

So extraordinary in fact that this man's case is offering scientists surprising clues about where the new coronavirus variants emerged and why they're causing explosive outbreaks on three continents.

To be clear here, the man wasn't what doctors call a "long hauler," or a person who clears a coronavirus infection and then continues to have health problems for months. This man had living, growing virus in his body for five months, Li says. The same infection lasted for five months.

"That is one of the remarkable aspects of this case," Li says. "In fact, he was highly infectious even five months after the initial diagnosis."


This man had a severe autoimmune disease that required him to take drugs to suppress his immune system. So his body couldn't fight off the coronavirus infection as well as a healthy person could. He would get better for a while, and then the virus would counterattack. He would fall sick again. Eventually, he ended up in the intensive care unit. He passed away five months after the initial diagnosis.

Throughout the man's infection, Li and his colleagues ran an illuminating experiment. Every few weeks, the team extracted coronavirus from the man's body and sequenced the virus's genome.

Li couldn't believe what they found. "I was shocked," he says. "When I saw the virus sequences, I knew that we were dealing with something completely different and potentially very important."

The sequences showed Li and his team that the virus was changing very quickly inside the man's body. The virus wasn't picking up just one or two mutations at a time. But rather, it acquired a whole cluster of more than 20 mutations. Scientists had never seen SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, mutate so quickly during the whole pandemic.


Furthermore, laboratory experiments have shown that some of those mutations help the virus bypass detection by antibodies.

"Toward the very end of his life, he was treated with monoclonal antibodies, from Regeneron," Li says. "And shortly thereafter, we saw evidence that suggested the virus was developing resistance or escaping from these antibodies as well."

Li and his colleagues published their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine in early November 2020 with little fanfare. Then about a month later, the pandemic took a surprising turn — and this peculiar case in Boston took on a new importance.


Scientists in the U.K. and South Africa announced they had detected new variants of the coronavirus. These variants were causing huge surges of COVID-19 in these countries.

When researchers looked at the genes of these variants, guess what they found? A cluster of mutations that looked remarkably similar to the mutations found in the virus from the Boston patient. The sets of mutations weren't exactly identical, but they shared important characteristics. They both had about 20 mutations, and they shared several key ones, including a mutation (N501Y) known to help the virus bind more tightly to human cells and another mutation (E484K) known to help the virus evade antibody detection.

Since Li and his colleagues published their findings, several other teams have reported similar cases in which the virus evolved rapidly inside an immunocompromised person with a chronic coronavirus infection.

"So we have a number of examples, around the planet, in which patients' viruses suddenly have a whole mess of new mutations all at once," says virologist Jeremy Luban at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. And other cases have likely gone undetected, he says.

So scientists are starting to think the two phenomena could be related. That perhaps the new variants arose inside people similar to the man in Boston — that is, people who are immunocompromised and have long-term coronavirus infections.

"I think that's the leading theory," Luban says.

In other words, perhaps the coronavirus uses long-term infections as a mutational testing ground. While inside one person, the virus can try out all these different combinations of mutations and figure out, through trial and error, which ones are best at evading the immune system or helping the virus become more infectious.

Most of these viral versions probably don't spread beyond the chronically infected patient. But every once in a while, as the theory goes, a variant gets lucky, infects a large number of people and launches a new whole stage of the pandemic.

And this process is likely happening again right now, worldwide, in other immunocompromised patients. Eventually, these new variants could mutate again and create even more dangerous forms of the coronavirus.

[Overlander]

So, my aunt died of Covid this morning.
I was never a fan of hers, she was a super religious freak.

I remember my cousin and I saved up change to buy some of that fake vampire blood for Halloween. She jerked it out of our hands, called us devil worshippers, and set it on fire. My cousin got a serious whipping over it.

So, I just found out she was sick last night when my cousins' wife IMd me and said that she was in "comfort care". Her husband is on a ventilator.

Last year, she was busy telling my dad that he wouldn't need a vaccine if he accepted Jesus into his heart. He started telling me he was considering starting to go to church.

Well, he hasn't gone to church, and I suppose Jeebus was really busy this morning.