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Coronavirus (Stay on Topic)

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Rain Cold said:
Hope they're right. Just out of curiosity, why can't we develop vaccines for other types of Coronaviruses? If you say money, I'd have to counter that with the decades that we've had to be able to do it.
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Demand because the SARS outbreak was contained and the other coronaviruses just cause common cold? What’s the incentive?
 
Rain Cold said:
You mean to tell me that there's no demand or money in curing the common cold?
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Oh sure. Curing may be hard to accomplish. There’s definitely no money in making a SARS-COV-1 vaccine we can agree there right? Common cold viruses include more than the coronaviruses, and they also mutate more. They’re also not novel. So I’d postulate a vaccine targeting coronaviruses that cause the common cold would likely be worthless. The fact that it doesn’t kill or cause severe disease, like covid, makes it hard to justify mass vaccination for common colds as well.
 
It could indeed be a mirage, but it does seem that we might be seeing US cases max out now. We’ll see if they start declining on the other side of the curve soon enough. Even if cases are topping out, hospitalizations and deaths will likely continue to increase for a few more weeks.

Unfortunately, we are probably going to see a confusing picture soon with the Christmas holiday coming up, and we’ll likely get a fake decline like we did around Thanksgiving that will make any potential real decline harder to tease out.

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Jon said:
Oh sure. Curing may be hard to accomplish. There’s definitely no money in making a SARS-COV-1 vaccine we can agree there right? Common cold viruses include more than the coronaviruses, and they also mutate more. They’re also not novel. So I’d postulate a vaccine targeting coronaviruses that cause the common cold would likely be worthless. The fact that it doesn’t kill or cause severe disease, like covid, makes it hard to justify mass vaccination for common colds as well.
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I guess I probably just don't understand viruses. It seems like that if there's a predominant virus type that causes the cold that's been around forever, it would be a lot easier to develop a vaccine for it vs. one that just came out last year. Also, if the Coronavirus that causes the cold mutates such that it renders a vaccine useless, I don't see why the Covid one wouldn't have the potential or even likelihood of doing the same.

Also, and I know this won't go over well, but the rapidity with which this vaccine was developed makes me think it's been known about for longer than 1 year. There has never been a vaccine developed even close to the short amount of time that this one was, that I'm aware of. It's hard to believe that it's just a simple matter of money.
 
Rain Cold said:
I guess I probably just don't understand viruses. It seems like that if there's a predominant virus type that causes the cold that's been around forever, it would be a lot easier to develop a vaccine for it vs. one that just came out last year. Also, if the Coronavirus that causes the cold mutates such that it renders a vaccine useless, I don't see why the Covid one wouldn't have the potential or even likelihood of doing the same.

Also, and I know this won't go over well, but the rapidity with which this vaccine was developed makes me think it's been known about for longer than 1 year. There has never been a vaccine developed even close to the short amount of time that this one was, that I'm aware of. It's hard to believe that it's just a simple matter of money.
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I guess it’s not that it the common cold currently mutates so much it’s that it already has for hundreds of years. Covid hasn’t even had a year. The thing is, the older it is, the more complicated these viruses get. There’s like 100+ strains of rhinovirus and coronaviruses, and coding for all of them in one vaccine would be impossible. Maybe we can get there with machine learning...but this vaccine will likely be effective because Covid-19 is novel so the vaccine only has one strain to account for, versus the currently flu vaccine which is quadravalent. And there’s a reason we don’t jam pack the flu vaccine with more than 4 strains. People would need a larger dose, definitely need a booster, and it’s just not as deadly. Now compare that thinking to common cold, we simply aren’t there, medically, to vaccinate against it.

Because Covid-19 is novel, it’s only circulated in the population for a year basically...plenty of antigenic drift but we still haven’t had a strain resistant to vaccine (not yet anyway we’ll see with this UK virus). Because of this, with adequate vaccination and eradication it’s not likely to continue to mutate and produce new strains.

The longer the virus is in the body, the harder it is to vaccinate against because it mutates and “learns” from you and transmits to another host. This is why this UK virus seems to be more infectious, it learned how, by living in a immunocompromised person who couldn’t fight it off, presumably this person had chronic Covid and either died or was very sick. This is why HIV is impossible to vaccinate against, it’s a chronic illness and by the time you figure out the genome sequence it has changed.

I think Covid-19 is screwed. We figured it out and with a global effort, have a good chance to eradicate it. This UK strain is worrisome but I have faith the vaccine will be proven to work against it, and we will get enough immunity to go back to normal.
 
Nerman said:
December already the deadliest month in North Carolina. Another record number of cases and another record high number of hospitalizations (2,864). I don't know how "beds available" is going unchanged over the last month unless they are adding new beds each day as they are adding new patients.

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The number of available hospital beds (non ICU) have increased in the past few days from around 4,500 to 5,000. However, the number of available ICU beds has dipped below 400.
 
Nerman said:
December already the deadliest month in North Carolina. Another record number of cases and another record high number of hospitalizations (2,864). I don't know how "beds available" is going unchanged over the last month unless they are adding new beds each day as they are adding new patients.

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I would think that some patients are going home at some point and opening beds back up. I would like to know what the average length of stay in the hospital is once admitted. I am sure not all cases end up in ICU or have to spend more than a few days once admitted...
 
Poimen said:
The number of available hospital beds (non ICU) have increased in the past few days from around 4,500 to 5,000. However, the number of available ICU beds has dipped below 400.
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Why do you think that is? With the number of Covid-19 hospitalized patients continuing to increase it must mean other patients are taking up less beds. That's the only logical sense I can make out of it. Maybe back to putting off surgeries, etc.
 
Tagat said:
I would think that some patients are going home at some point and opening beds back up. I would like to know what the average length of stay in the hospital is once admitted. I am sure not all cases end up in ICU or have to spend more than a few days once admitted...
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Yes, most go home. That figure was for current hospitalized patients.
 
My understanding is that hospital beds are somewhat fluid, so as demand increases the number of beds available for use increases to meet said demand. Obviously, at some point there are hard limits, though.
 
Both my kids are MDs (one in TX and the other in FL) and they both got the vaccine this past week. My son who usually has a mild reaction to the flu shot had no side effects except for a sore arm for 2-3 days. My daughter did have 99.6° fever the night after the shot and body aches. Felt better the next day but still some slight body aches so she did experience side effects
 
Poimen said:
Is the SA variant different from the new UK variant that has been in the news lately? I can't keep up.
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It's different from the UK variant. It has the same N501Y mutation but it emerged separately from the UK variant. Both variants are more contagious than original strains.
 
ghost1 said:
Both my kids are MDs (one in TX and the other in FL) and they both got the vaccine this past week. My son who usually has a mild reaction to the flu shot had no side effects except for a sore arm for 2-3 days. My daughter did have 99.6° fever the night after the shot and body aches. Felt better the next day but still some slight body aches so she did experience side effects
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My couple doctor friends who got it had no side effects that I know of. ?
 
superjames1992 said:
I’m sure the UK variant is all over the world by now. It’s been circulating for a while. There’s no containing it at this point.
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Erick Erickson talked about it this week on his show how the UK has the tech to find variants better than anyone. This strain has likely been widespread for some time. He also mentioned that these RNA vaccines target the protein surrounding the virus and those should not differ between strains.
 
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