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I don't quite understand why this is even a question. Unless, of course, the question is concocted for political reasons like most everything else today.
Put simply, I thought the presence of antibodies produced (at least a degree of) immunity essentially by definition. Antibodies fight off the infection, no?
If we're not sure about antibodies, how could we be sure about a vaccine (that we may or may not ever see)?
I think this is pure (actually anything but) politics used to expand political damage to the greatest extent possible.
There you go. This post should be memorialized as "What Not To Do."
Simply because, even after your visits to these forums, probably daily, you still do not understand the difference between producing antibodies and developing immunity, you have fallen to making the claim that it must be politics. It's not; it's ignorance.
If the problem was attacked as the scientific, medical problem that it is as early as possible, with the full force necessary on any number of fronts we might not be discussing it at all today. Instead, we have not only allowed politics to rear its ugly head, we have rewarded it for doing so by choosing sides, based not on facts but on rhetoric.
It appears that the first indication of our late start in defending ourselves was the politics played by the Chinese government in filtering the dissemination of pertinent information about the virus. Then we began our own asinine political polka. Actually it began a few years ago when the NSA office for pandemics was closed because the current leader didn't want to admit that there was anything of value done by his predecessor. Ditto the shelving of the "pandemic playbook."
Politically viewing a natural occurrence as part of a ploy to tilt the coming election was more partisan nonsense but it was enough to ignore or deny even the existence of the growing crisis while the scientists were clamoring for action. We are now engaged in the red state - blue state quandary of when to reopen, again not based on scientific fact but on pandering to noisy ignorance.
It must be politics - at least to those who have no clue what they are talking about.
oklazuna was the only one that guessed at my question! Disappointing...thought it'd be more of a surprising point.
You're right, 1 to 2%.
That's right - all of this was to prevent just 1 to 2% of us getting infected over the same three week period.
We weren't trying to stop HALF the country, or MOST of the country - nope - we were trying to stop 98% of the country from catching this thing. Tall order. We did it anyway.
I'm not talking about dying. I'm talking about JUST catching it, detected or not.
We were going for 99%. Why? Because if 2% of us caught it at once - every - single - hospital in the USA would be completely full - and the next gunshot wound is sleeping in the street. At 3% - several hundred thousand people would sleep in the street - requiring medical care that they are not getting.
When you look at it that way - when someone says: "Mr President" or "Mr Governor" or "Mr. Mayor" - if you don't have a plan to stop 99% of the folks from getting infected - we'll have piles of people suffering with no place to put them - what is your response? "Eh, let it ride! Let's see what happens!"
Yep. 1% is all it would take. Please don't argue it unless you do the math. 1% is the answer.
Now - looking at New York - do you think there is ANY chance in hades that LESS than 1% of their people were infected that first month? So they lost that bet. Most places won. It was - and remains - THAT close.
At ANY point in the near future - if 1% of us get sick at once - we'll be shut down. I don't mean by our leaders - I mean by a simple lack of willingness to watch your loved ones suffer with no place to put them.
THAT close. It was. And it is.
This is not about dying, or age. I'm sorry it's taking so many of you so long to figure this out. It's about resources, and that has never changed.
The Kawasaki syndrome is making me nervous because it was thought that kids were immune to the virus but as we are getting more and more cases of this problem. It is shedding new light on what this virus could do in your body even if it doesn't causes ARDS it has the ability to put serious inflammation into your system.
Adults who get the blood clotting issue could be fatal if not treated in a short period of time.
This is why it's important to be protected from the virus and not try to get herd immunity until we have the data which can take more than a year to prove what are the serious risk and remedies.
The worst part is that people are not taking precautions for the sake of others. You may not have any symptoms but you can easily spread the virus to those around you and kill them. Even if you are not infected, you can get the virus on your hands and contaminate surfaces around your home or other places and make other people get infected.
At ANY point in the near future - if 1% of us get sick at once - we'll be shut down. I don't mean by our leaders - I mean by a simple lack of willingness to watch your loved ones suffer with no place to put them.
THAT close. It was. And it is.
This is not about dying, or age. I'm sorry it's taking so many of you so long to figure this out. It's about resources, and that has never changed.
The other thing about this is people are putting off elective surgery. They are putting off regular doctor visits and important checkups. And apparently they are not even going to the hospital if they have a heart attack in many cases. The ER numbers for heart attack victims are way down.
I have thought about what I would do if I had a medical emergency. The last place I want to go now is the hospital. For me it would have to be life and death. It seems like lots of others are feeling the same way.
No, not all of them. Antibodies bind to a protein (which might be on the capsule of the virus, or expressed on the surface of a cell infected by the virus), but not all of them fix complement (which is what is needed for an antibody to directly destroy an infected cell). Antibodies which fix complement and directly destroy an infected cell are called 'neutralizing antibodies;" those are what is needed for humoral immunity. (There is a second pathway, cellular immunity, which doesn't directly depend on antibodies destroying an infected cell, which the body can also use to fight infection. In cellular immunity, T-cells and natural killer cells destroy the cells infected with the virus; antibodies may help T-cells recognize an infected cell, but the T-cell actually carries out the destruction.)
Having antibodies to HIV, for example, doesn't help you become immune to the HIV virus.
That is why clinical trials of any potential vaccine are required. (Also longitudinal clinical trials following people who are known to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2; that's how you get the answers as to what types of antibodies are being produced and how long they persist following recovery.)
So say that someone is considered a nonresponder to vaccines because they don't develop lasting antibodies after vaccination.
Not the first time, the second time, third or fourth (when only two doses are recommended to begin with).
But yet this person seems to be immune because they never get sick despite repeated exposure to the pathogen they never developed antibodies for.
Is this person's immune system functioning completely from cellular immunity?
oklazuna was the only one that guessed at my question! Disappointing...thought it'd be more of a surprising point.
You're right, 1 to 2%.
That's right - all of this was to prevent just 1 to 2% of us getting infected over the same three week period.
We weren't trying to stop HALF the country, or MOST of the country - nope - we were trying to stop 98% of the country from catching this thing. Tall order. We did it anyway.
I'm not talking about dying. I'm talking about JUST catching it, detected or not.
We were going for 99%. Why? Because if 2% of us caught it at once - every - single - hospital in the USA would be completely full - and the next gunshot wound is sleeping in the street. At 3% - several hundred thousand people would sleep in the street - requiring medical care that they are not getting.
When you look at it that way - when someone says: "Mr President" or "Mr Governor" or "Mr. Mayor" - if you don't have a plan to stop 99% of the folks from getting infected - we'll have piles of people suffering with no place to put them - what is your response? "Eh, let it ride! Let's see what happens!"
Yep. 1% is all it would take. Please don't argue it unless you do the math. 1% is the answer.
Now - looking at New York - do you think there is ANY chance in hades that LESS than 1% of their people were infected that first month? So they lost that bet. Most places won. It was - and remains - THAT close.
At ANY point in the near future - if 1% of us get sick at once - we'll be shut down. I don't mean by our leaders - I mean by a simple lack of willingness to watch your loved ones suffer with no place to put them.
THAT close. It was. And it is.
This is not about dying, or age. I'm sorry it's taking so many of you so long to figure this out. It's about resources, and that has never changed.
We still need a valid/reliable antibody test to figure out how many people have caught it. At this point it does not matter how long immunity lasts for this test, but for observational purposes to see how many people have been exposed and are asymptomatic or thought they just had a cold/allergies. If 50% of us have been exposed already, then this is an entirely different situation than if only 2% have been exposed.
The virologists can tell from the RNA of the virus when and where it started. That was in China in November or December. The earliest confirmed onset of symptoms was in a patient in China on December 1.
If the virus had been circulating in The US before February there would have been many more cases and deaths in early 2020. In a study done in Seattle the first identified case of community transmission was from a swab obtained February 24, 2020.
Also, the x-ray findings for COVID-19 pneumonia are very different from other pneumonias.
In early January I was hospitalized on the 7th with one primary symptom, shortness of breath and very low 02 in the blood. I was walking up the stairs with a small dog and each step was a real challenge. CT looked for clots, I was put on blood thinners because they could not figure it out. They ER doc was very honest with me, telling me she had no idea what this was, but for an admission dx I was labeled COPD. Out of the blue I suddenly had emphysema? I spent 4 days in a private room, all personnel were already in masks due to the flu going around. Breathing treatments every 4-6 hours. I was very close to going home with oxygen, but was spared when I passed a walking test. I have since "seen" 3 doctors since CV19 hit. (One was a virtual appointment). 2 of the 3 say my experience warrants antibody testing - one is totally convinced I had CV. The third says my CT would have shown it, but the other 2 say not everyone got the fever with pneumonia. In fact, that is what makes this virus so hard to dx, everyone is different.
So, I don't know yet. I have orders for the antibody test, that is if the orders are correctly written. That's another rabbit hole altogether. But today I feel great and I guess that's all that matters. But I do believe this has been among us much longer than we thought and I really believe that is what I had.
Thank you & that is interesting but I had a specific scenario in mind.
I have taken a COVID antibody test. I don't know how accurate it will be, given that I don't make (or keep) antibodies to other viruses. I actually have the HLA-DRB1 and HLA-DQB1 variants the article mentioned.
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