People Testing Negative For COVID-19 Antibodies May Still Have Some Immunity, Study Suggests (bbc.com) 56
Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: For every person testing positive for antibodies, two were found to have specific T-cells which identify and destroy infected cells. This was seen even in people who had mild or symptomless cases of Covid-19. But it's not yet clear whether this just protects that individual, or if it might also stop them from passing on the infection to others.
Researchers at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden tested 200 people for both antibodies and T-cells. Some were blood donors while others were tracked down from the group of people first infected in Sweden, mainly returning from earlier affected areas like northern Italy. This could mean a wider group have some level of immunity to Covid-19 than antibody testing figures, like those published as part of the UK Office for National Statistics Infection Survey, suggest. It's likely those people did mount an antibody response, but either it had faded or was not detectable by the current tests. And these people should be protected if they are exposed to the virus for a second time.
Researchers at the Karolinksa Institute in Sweden tested 200 people for both antibodies and T-cells. Some were blood donors while others were tracked down from the group of people first infected in Sweden, mainly returning from earlier affected areas like northern Italy. This could mean a wider group have some level of immunity to Covid-19 than antibody testing figures, like those published as part of the UK Office for National Statistics Infection Survey, suggest. It's likely those people did mount an antibody response, but either it had faded or was not detectable by the current tests. And these people should be protected if they are exposed to the virus for a second time.
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Thanks.
--
Your friends in Russia and China.
Re:How did this get through? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a swedish study. they have political pressure to have something to show that their herd immunity plan wasn't stupid as f.
Meanwhile in thailand there's 0 locally transmitted cases for basically weeks at this point. returnees from middle east in quarantine have been found to have been infected though. from kuwait, qatar etc. from kuwait 20% tested positive.
but what swedish head epidemilogist is looking for is some proof that he had attained at least _something_ by his tactic and that his tactic wouldn't be going very badly for the next year or so at least more.
also if you want to read "everything is fine now is the time to buy stocks buy buy buy everything is fine" suggest reading consumer economy news, which are desperately trying to hawk that buying stocks is a good idea now just like they were trying to tell people 6 months ago and also that you should leverage all your net worth and buy apartments for airbnb!
Really most of the world is still just normal. Although because of BLM they're trying to cancel basically all candy brands back in Finland.. because geisha chocolate bars are racist, apparently, said no-one ever. The thing is people in USA are rich enough to act like they do because none of them are _actually_ worried about _food_ and starving, they're all just worried about keeping up with the joneses and panic over non essential item hoarding seemingly not being accessible to them.
also because ataturk banned fez hats in turkey while on his genocide campaign the fez hats in product ad imagery are racist or some shit like that.
also please don't try to export BLM into countries that ... you know.. .have still actual slaves. it's incredibly dumb looking when people in social media call for blm action (for african american rights) to be done in countries that don't have african american ethnic groups and but have actual fucking slavery - and the human trafficking is used to produce products that are sold into USA - only way to make it look dumber is to drink pineapple juice while doing it while eating thai imported shrimp.
(also swedish economy is as fucked as any of it's neighbors if not even worse due to covid, because for some reason it's hard for people to grasp that BARS DO NOT RUN THE ECONOMY, it doesn't make you any more exports if you have people drinking in the bars and eating in restaurants unless the people drinking and eating are tourists from other countries)
Re: How did this get through? (Score:1)
That was the most awesome run-on I've seen here all week! I read every word. I was enthralled!
Re: How did this get through? (Score:1)
I don't post at zero. I have fan boys who down vote anything I post the moment they see it no matter how trivial my post is. If they have mods points, I eat them.
Since I added a sig they don't like the other day, they've gotten particularly aggressive about it.
But fear not, no amount of bad moderation will ever make me leave slashdot. I will be here as long as the site is up. I wouldn't disappoint my fans and I find it all far too entertaining and someone should counter all the lies and bigoted crap get
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Would you move to a similar site that has a (very) different mod system?
Re: How did this get through? (Score:1)
the AC who is so shit
It looks like your vocabulary's giving your IQ a run for its money - though it's hard to tell which is moving more slowly.
Re: How did this get through? (Score:2, Informative)
Lumping together crystals and vitamin D?
Someone else is the nutter here.
Vitamin D deficiency increases susceptibility to all respiratory diseases including C19. This is in fact old news.
See the UV light also turned out to be super effective. How many intubated people were killed worldwide because his Orangeness mentioned UV therefore hoax? And Twitter removing ads of a legitimate Biotech company who could save so many lives...
Repeat after me. Politicking on BOTH sides kills people.
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Sweden is still better off than the US. While keeping the bars open might not stimulate the economy, it does at least give people a sense of normalcy, which helps other aspects of the economy continue on with less impact.
I don’t quite “get” their rules, but it is no less random than anywhere else. It will be interesting to see what happens after people spread out on summer vacations.
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Sweden's hospitalization rate is certainly trending way down now. They're still ahead of the US in per-capita death rates, but I'm not sure it'll be that way by the end of this.
Sweden certainly however was a cautionary tale about how incredibly difficult it is to implement a herd immunity strategy against a disease like this due to the difficulty of keeping vulnerable groups isolated during the contagion period, while simultaneously the difficulty in getting low-risk people infected without deliberately in
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Hey now... without bars, you're not going to get as many random drunken hookups that lead to unplanned pregnancies! New babies are a HUGE part of the economy.
Re:How did this get through? (Score:4, Interesting)
COVID-19 is just a test run to see how the world can cope with a serious contagious airborne disease.
Answer: Not at all.
After all - we shouldn't rule out the possibility that there could be those that are genetically protected against the virus.
After all COVID-19 isn't as bad as the black plague. Imagine something with an incubation time of 30 days, being infectious during at least half that time and then have a mortality of 90%.
From a scientific point of view the data from Sweden compared to other countries on mortality is at least useful in providing information about if a strict lock-down helps or not, but we aren't through the disease yet, so there's no straight answer yet on which strategy that was the best. In a few years we will really know.
There have been so many screw-ups in the handling in this virus that it's a surprise that it's not worse.
- China suppressed the information about this virus for several weeks, first because it would make them look bad, then to "protect" the communist party convention.
- No actions taken until long after China admitted that "we have a problem".
- "The virus is not airborne" statement that was spread in the beginning. Now we know it's the primary path.
- Some infected people aren't even aware that they are or dismisses it as a general cold.
- Testing have been too limited in the beginning to determine the probability of infection. Even a test that's 80% accurate could give statistical significance even if it's not strong enough to determine if isolation shall be in effect or not for those that aren't tested positive.
- Constitutions in many democratic countries have provisions for preventing governments to take swift and effective actions, instead it has to come up for a vote on a subject that has to be prepared.
So the handling of this virus have in general been a FUBAR with a few exceptions like Taiwan, South Korea and New Zealand.
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I agree with every word of the above post, from the "this was our test run and we failed" part, to not having a full retrospective view yet, to WHO's consistent position of being wrong on everything possible about the disease (annoyed that I spent so long defending them because "they're the experts" :P).
Re:How did this get through? (Score:5, Insightful)
annoyed that I spent so long defending them because "they're the experts"
They're a bunch of celebrity doctors and grifting lawyers. That is the approximate demographic of essentially every "expert" institution to which you've been trained to defer. They don't have or want any actual practicing experts in their midst. Such people would insist on evidence and rigor to the great inconvenience of the many establishment narratives that must be affirmed.
They deal in narratives. Not data and not facts. That's why their conclusions are so often out of phase with reality.
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WHO have to deal with a balance between protecting the population and satisfy politicians.
So if a disease comes up that only takes out politicians then we sure would see swift and rapid actions.
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balance
There is no attempt at "balance." WHO delivers what the politicians and powerful interests pay it to deliver; affirmed narratives. If, on occasion, such a narrative happens to align with reality in some tangential manner then great, WHO got something right. Otherwise fuck reality; WHO parrots what the powers that be want parroted.
And that's fine. The world has always been thus. That's not the problem. The problem is the vast hordes of knuckleheads that don't understand the arrangement and swallow wh
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I've became deeply embarrassed by the field of epidemiology in general when I started reading the methodology sections behind the models being used. They're basically the epidemiological equivalent of "assume a spherical cow in a frictionless vacuum". Naive to the point of frequently assuming things like "everything will continue along a gaussian error function that these points fit to, far off the right of the graph", "every human has an equal chance of being infected and infecting others", "there is no f
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It's a great contrast to, say, climate models. When climatologists model the planet, there's thousands after thousands after thousands of feedback parameters, each of which gets modeled on its own, throughout a high resolution grid.
When epidemiologists model a disease, it looks like a Calculus 101 problem.
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My Provincial health officer (Dr Bonnie Henry) got her expertise in pandemics fighting SARS. At that, a few countries that are doing well in SE Asia are doing well from the experience of fighting SARS.
Do we have a ruling on this? (Score:2)
Sounds scientifically complex and yet indeterminate. Has that lawyer, after the necessary scientific putting on the black robe and sitting on a raised pedestal in Dover, ruled on the final science yet? [discovery.org]
Just want to make sure I'm following the True Lawyer Science.
Re:Do we have a ruling on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Immunology is complex and indeterminate. We know, for example, that the first flu virus you're exposed to as a kid confers partial immunity to that subtype of flu for the rest of your life, even across huge mutations. So if your first flu strain was an H3N1, you'll get a milder case of any H3N1 strain for the rest of your life [www.nhs.uk] than someone whose first flu as a kid was an H1N1 strain.
This is likely similar. Folks whose first coronavirus strain was in some way outwardly similar to this one might have a stronger immune response to this strain than folks who have never had coronavirus or whose first coronavirus strain was less similar.
This is, of course, pure speculation on my part.
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I'm not sure how strong the science on such a "first flu" effect is, but it's quite true that varying levels of immunity can last for a life time. When the "Asian Flu" hit, for example, the only people with any immunity were those who had caught the "Russian Flu" as children six decades prior.
It's important to note that this disease isn't just caused by "a coronavirus". Coronaviridae is a whole family. SARS and COVID-19 (but not MERS) are specifically caused by sarbecoviruses (the sane species, even, just
At some point, doctors... (Score:3, Funny)
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Are going to have to admit that they have no idea how anything really works.
I honestly believe that the pre-req for medical school should be a degree in physics.
That degree makes it so much easier to say you don't know how something works.
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Can someone explain the numbers? (Score:2)
I didn't want to submit a whole Ask Slashdot on this, but some of the Arizona numbers https://azdhs.gov/preparedness... [azdhs.gov] aren't making sense to me.
For example today's total cases (84,092) are several thousand larger than the number of positive tests (73,642, 721,985 tests with a 10.2% total positive rate). They are supposedly defining a case as an individual so any retesting of the same person should add to the total test count, but not the case count. It seems like the cases should be a smaller number tha
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Probably differences in reporting path. There are at least a couple of different ways that cases get reported, and one of those paths lags a couple of weeks behind the other one.
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I guess that's possible, but I would have figured the test results would be reported more quickly than case status. Case status has multiple variables to consider and the test outcome is a prerequisite. So if there was a significant delay in reporting, it should show tests leading cases, not the other way around.
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I would have thought so, too, but I try never to underestimate how slowly the wheels of the federal government can turn. :-D
But seriously, what may be compounding the problem is that test results for multiple patients have to be correlated to ensure that they aren't being reported positive more than once, and they only just started trying to do that recently. So that could be putting a serious kink in their reporting right now.
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I can’t speak to Arizona, and I am too lazy to try to figure it out... but based on what I see in Hawaii there are a number of different types of numbers that get reported.
The number of tests is likely the sum total of tests performed within the state. The number of cases will include Arizona residents tested out-of-state; the same can be the case for hospitalizations out-of-state.
There is also the fun fact that initially a positive test is generally assigned to in-state, but follow-up may reveal it
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Interesting. I don't exactly know what to make of that. Arizona definitely has a large contingency of part time residents (snow birds), so that could be a contributor. Not sure which way it would tend to move the numbers, though. It depends on how many people either didn't leave who were already here and how many didn't come due to the pandemic.
Unfortunately the CDC and azdhs numbers appear to be the best I can find so far. I'll have to dig into the less public epidemiology sources at local universitie
For every person testing positive for antibodies (Score:3)
two were found to have specific T-cells. That's amazing.
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I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Poe's law?
T8 "killer" T-cells are not identical. The immune system beaks the rule that all healthy cells in a person's body apart from germ cells have the same genetics. Narrow sections of the DNA are designed to shuffle rapidly under certain conditions, which allows the cells to create proteins in pretty much any arrangement, rather than being locked to a narrow subset (as would be the limit from a fixed genome). With T8 cells, they're "trained" (selected) in the th
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I think you missed that a mask does not STOP YOU GETTING IT by very much at all.
It stops you *spreading it* if you have it. Someone wearing a mask is doing *you* a favour, not themselves.
The analogy used:
If a guy is pissing on you, and you're wearing properly-zipped-up trousers (pants), you're going to get piss on you.
If a guy is pissing on you, but he's wearing properly-zipped-up trousers (pants), he's just going to piss in his own trousers and you'll stay dry.
Any fucking LITERAL moron who thinks that peo
Who tests the tests? (Score:3)
Any one looking at the numbers seriously must ask themselves:
- who tests the tests ?
- what is the share of false positives ?
- what is the share of false negatives ?
- how about the share of false positives/negatives with the known presence of a very similar virus ?
- how do we know that the specific antibodies are specific to this variant of the virus and universal across people with different immune systems and different prior exposures ?
- how can we exclude other antibody variants from interfering with this specific virus ?
Without these answers at best we can look at these articles as some kind of pseudo-scientific garbage-in garbage-out with unknown bias.
Get rid of Trump (Score:2, Troll)
Countries with a TB vaccine = less C19 deaths (Score:3)
https://www.zmescience.com/sci... [zmescience.com]
“We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Nederland, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies,” the study authors explain.
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Interesting.
Some countries had universal BCG vaccination but stopped doing so at some point. If BCG really has an effect, we should be able to see it on the age distribution. For example if BCG stopped being universal for infants in 1990, there should be a noticeable jump in the number of cases at age 30. It should work in reverse too: if vaccination campaigns started in 1950, there should be a jump at age 70.
Sigh (Score:3)