Some Researchers are Trying Mass Testing for Covid-19 Antibodies (wired.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes Wired:
Next week, blood banks across the Netherlands are set to begin a nationwide experiment. As donations arrive — about 7,000 of them per week is the norm — they'll be screened with the usual battery of tests that keep the blood supply safe, plus one more: a test for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Then, in a few weeks, another batch of samples will get the same test. And after that, depending on the numbers, there could be further rounds. The blood donors should be fairly representative of Dutch adults ages 18 to 75, and most importantly, they'll all be healthy enough for blood donation — or at least outwardly so...
Identifying what proportion of the population has already been infected is key to making the right decisions about containment... [B]ecause no Covid-19-specific serological [antibody] tests have been fully vetted yet, the FDA's latest guidance is that they shouldn't be relied upon for diagnoses. But in epidemiology circles, those tests are a sought-after tool for understanding the scope of the disease. Since February — which was either three weeks or a lifetime ago — epidemiologists have been trying to get the full scope of the number of infections here in the U.S... [A]s the disease has continued to spread and a patchwork of local "stay at home" rules begins to bend the course of the disease, projecting who has the disease and where the hot spots are has become more difficult for models to capture.
Instead, you need boots-on-the-ground surveillance. In other words, to fill the gap created by a lack of diagnostic tests, you need more testing — but of a different sort. This time you have to know how many total people have already fought the bug, and how recently they've fought it. "Of all the data out there, if there was a good serological assay that was very specific about individuating recent cases, that would be the best data we could have," says Alex Perkins, an epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame. The key, he says, is drawing blood from a representative sample that would show the true scope of unobserved infections... Another motivation to develop better blood tests is the potential to develop therapeutics from antibody-rich blood serum.
Wired is currently providing free access to stories about the coronavirus.
Identifying what proportion of the population has already been infected is key to making the right decisions about containment... [B]ecause no Covid-19-specific serological [antibody] tests have been fully vetted yet, the FDA's latest guidance is that they shouldn't be relied upon for diagnoses. But in epidemiology circles, those tests are a sought-after tool for understanding the scope of the disease. Since February — which was either three weeks or a lifetime ago — epidemiologists have been trying to get the full scope of the number of infections here in the U.S... [A]s the disease has continued to spread and a patchwork of local "stay at home" rules begins to bend the course of the disease, projecting who has the disease and where the hot spots are has become more difficult for models to capture.
Instead, you need boots-on-the-ground surveillance. In other words, to fill the gap created by a lack of diagnostic tests, you need more testing — but of a different sort. This time you have to know how many total people have already fought the bug, and how recently they've fought it. "Of all the data out there, if there was a good serological assay that was very specific about individuating recent cases, that would be the best data we could have," says Alex Perkins, an epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame. The key, he says, is drawing blood from a representative sample that would show the true scope of unobserved infections... Another motivation to develop better blood tests is the potential to develop therapeutics from antibody-rich blood serum.
Wired is currently providing free access to stories about the coronavirus.
Re:This will expose the hidden pandemic (Score:5, Interesting)
An antigen test is the most critical not just because it characterizes the profile of the disease itself but because we need to identify the population which is already immune. These will be ones who can go back to work first.
Can't go back to work if the antibodies do nothing (Score:2)
Having antibodies seems to do little for a person: about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again. [npr.org]
In other words, the reinfection rate is much higher than the original infection rate. (Only 0.12% of the population of Hubei province has tested positive. If you can believe the numbers coming out of China.)
Am I missing something?
How soon before the homeopath quacks show up (Score:3)
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My doctor's approach to the common flu is, "with treatment, you'll get well in 7 days, without - in a week" - and that is true for most patients.
Since we have a sufficiently large group of people who don't get symptoms or don't get very sick from sars-cov-2, it is unavoidable to also have charlatans who'll say "I cured them".
For a lot of people properly establishing causal relationship is just too much work.
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The funny thing is that viruses are pretty much the only known type of illness (other than seasonal allergies) in which something resembling homeopathy kind of works. Get a large dose of a virus, and it makes you sick. Get a very, very small dose of the virus, and it often makes you immune for a season, because your body has enough of an immune reaction to it so that it creates antibodies, but not enough that you actually get sick.
Re: How soon before the homeopath quacks show up (Score:2)
That isn't resembling homeopathy at all. First of all, typically you're introducing either antibodies or fragments or dead virus, injecting live virus at any amount would be potentially giving you the disease.
Homeopathy is where you dilute the active substances so far that you might as well have chucked it in the ocean in the US and scooped it out in Europe and expect to get amplified medicinal effects against the virus.
Re: (Score:1)
Actually, the first vaccinations (called variolation) were exactly that — parents deliberately exposing their children to live smallpox viruses in small quantities, which caused a relatively mild case of the disease and prevented worse cases in the future. And with COVID-19, the severity of illn
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were exactly that — parents deliberately exposing their children to live smallpox viruses in small quantities
Not at all - the first vaccinations were deliberate exposure to the cowpox virus, because it was noticed that the people who cared for cows and had the (mild and not deadly) cowpox did not get smallpox.
Please do not pull things out of your ass when you can easily google it.
There is an example of what happens when some people exposed other people to "live smallpox virus in small quantities" deliberately by distributing contaminated blankets.
The result was genocide.
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By the time Jenner did that, the Chinese had been doing variolation [nih.gov] using partially scabs from smallpox victims for at least a century.
The cowpox-based vaccine was the first safe, effective smallpox vaccine, not the first smallpox vaccine. There's a difference.
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Get a very, very small dose of the virus, and it often makes you immune for a season,
Where do you people come up with this bullshit? Mithridatism doesn't work with viruses and bacteria because - guess what - they make your body produce more of them when you're infected.
Immunization/innoculation/vaccination or whatever you call it does not expose you to a small dose of the active, live viruses because that will very likely give you the disease and kill you.
Vaccination exposes you to a specifically prepared, weakened version of the virus that cannot kill you easily, or to a different but si
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, viruses do make your body produce more of them when you're infected. However, it takes a decent number of most viruses to actually make you sick in any meaningful sense. Below a certain threshold, a healthy person's immune system stomps the infection into the ground before it can cause any illness at all. At some high
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and claim developing therapeutics from the blood of survivors proves it works; even if it a completely different approach.
It won't be just homeopaths and quacks. Convalescent plasma (blood products from people who have recovered from an viral illness) is already a treatment that is used for Ebola with some success.
https://www.thelancet.com/jour... [thelancet.com]
https://www.who.int/csr/resour... [who.int]
Tests are underway in the US, and presumably many other places already against SARS-COV-2
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25... [cnn.com]
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I'm not saying they are related, but my crystals have kept me from getting coronavirus.
Hey man keep that on the down low!
If everyone has crystals they are not as special!
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I have a magic crystal that heals most people in 8 days, once they let me out of quarantine I can sell you water that has touched the crystal for an extended period of time and has absorbed its healing vibrations.
Two takeaways (Score:4, Informative)
Two big takaways from that story:
1. Even if not yet approved, at least one antibody test is in sufficient production to be used! Yay!
2. Great idea using it on blood donors:
- You can get a broad sample while test kits are still scarce, (It will be biased, because people aren't supposed to donate when feeling sick, but it should spot some asymptomatic carriers as well as those recovered from an asymptomatic or very mild case, and thus spot silent clusters.
- No extra risk of infection to those sampled to collect the sample: It's collected from the donation post-processing.
- There are already samples being pulled and tests run, so the extra work is a small increment on the current process.
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Re: The country formerly called Holland... (Score:4, Informative)
Same here. Haven been beyond my own yard for weeks. Had groceries delivered once and thatâ(TM)s where real world interaction ends. Not sure why some foreign media insist we donâ(TM)t have a lockdown. We do.
But rather than push people into schemes where they walk the neighbors dog or drag around grocery bags everywhere they go, we accept that people need their 10 minute outside and allow it as long as they donâ(TM)t group with others.
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Social safety nets, obviously. Never heard of them?
Re: The country formerly called Holland... (Score:2)
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EU nations stayed wide open to the world for tourism and education spending for too long.
"Two weeks" now is many weeks too late.
Singapore, Taiwan and other advanced nations worked out what to do about wuflu much more early that EU nations that finally did their "Two weeks".
The results of staying wide open to the world of tourism, education and travel can be seen in Italy, France, Spain.
The EU should have been closed, but used to that time to tell the world it wa
Re:The country formerly called Holland... (Score:4, Informative)
While the prime minister did discuss herd immunity some time ago, this is not the strategy. Lockdown isn't too strict, but that's true for many places.
There are various controls in place though: no groups larger than 2, schools closed, restaurants, cafes, hairdressers, etc closed, events are banned, etc.
It's also compulsory to keep at least 1.5m distance from others in the public space.
Herd Immunity Accomplishes No Liability (Score:1)
A clinical condition in a public space...through boots.
FTS: Of all the data out there, if there was a good serological assay that was very specific about individuating recent cases, that would be the best data...
One might invent to provide data points to be given deductive conclusion instead of the pants-on-stupid inductive reasoning he's selling.
FTS: The key, he says, is drawing blood from a representative sample that w
Really? (Score:2)
"The blood donors should be fairly representative of Dutch adults ages 18 to 75,"
Fairly old, in other countries the age limit for blood donors is 60.
Re: Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
We (Netherlands) raised the age to 79 in 2018. But you must give your first donation before age 65. New donors over 65 are not accepted.
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awesome, but hopefully, test for virus as well (Score:2)
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I would not be surprised to see that a number of ppl are regular carriers of it, and it is not bothering them in the least.
I would be. Around here we are only testing people with symptoms. The vast majority of those tested do not have SARS2, just a common cold or flu. If only a very small percentage of sick people actually have it, it seems unlikely that a huge number of outwardly healthy people do.
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No, the reason there is such a push for an antibody study, is that some epidemiologists appear to suspect (such as the UK's CMO) that the virus is probably much more widespread than confirmed testing has shown. There have been a few indications of this (the fact that children are so mildly affected is a big clue to start with), but the only way to know for sure is if we had a test for who has had it and start sampling the population at large. As the Oxford University study last week showed, there are scenar
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As the Oxford University study last week showed, there are scenarios where we may in fact have widespread population infection already, much of it mild or asymptomatic, and the present observational data on severe cases/deaths would still fit. If this was shown to be the case, then the virus is significantly less deadly than it appears (though importantly not to all groups), and herd immunity may be achievable in a very short period of time with little loss of life among low risk groups.
This is by far the best-case scenario.
Blood? No! Just stop eating unclean meat! (Score:1)
Updated FDA Guidance (Score:2)
On Thursday the FDA updated is guidance for serological (blood) tests that detect COVID-19 antigens, allowing more than two dozen for diagnostic use. Though none of the tests have been fully tested and do not have "FDA approval". This is a big change and great progress.
The allowed tests and guidelines (under 'what serology tests') are listed at:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-medical-devices/faqs-diagnostic-testing-sars-cov-2
The Netherlands is also testing sewage (Score:2)
Should we be testing garbage pickup? (Score:2)
That would help isolate at-risk areas and possibly alert residents that they may have it before they know to test themselves ..
Re: (Score:1)
Ask for tests for the entire regions of the nation?
EU nations are having issues with enough masks, health care and looking after their police, gov workers masks.
Re 'alert residents".. who then all demand to be tested.
A mass of people at the local hospital
That would have needed EU nations to have the test kits, masks and workers ready for mass testin
Analysis Paralysis (Score:2)
Identifying what proportion of the population has already been infected is key to making the right decisions about containment...
This is a classic case of the Analysis Paralysis anti-pattern. You keeping wanting more information and delay making crucial decision out of fear of being wrong.
Do you think China had any idea how many people were infected when they locked down Wuhan? They just knew the virus was spreading faster than wild fire and they had to stop it immediately. And so they acted. If they had insisted to know "what proportion of population has already been infected" before they acted, they would have had 100 times mor