OT: COVID-19 general thread part II (and final part - see closing post)

[FooteBahl]

This virus sucks. 4 of my family members had it recently, all pretty healthy people and they all struggled mightily and unfortunately one passed. I am flying down to Florida tomorrow for the services. I’m very nervous about traveling down there.

Sorry for your loss brother. How is your employer handing the whole quarantine?

 

[tr83]

It's pretty frustrating that there's not a concentrated and concerted effort internationally to force the well more than a dozen companies and universities to work together on a vaccine.

What the hell are you talking about? They are. There are over 100 clinical trials for COVID vaccines underway. One freaking hundred. Its completely unprecedented

 

[NjDevsRR]

Sorry for your loss brother. How is your employer handing the whole quarantine?

I thankfully have been working from home for years so no prob there.

 

[Jack Be Quick]

What the hell are you talking about? They are. There are over 100 clinical trials for COVID vaccines underway. One freaking hundred. Its completely unprecedented

So Johnson & Johnson is working with Pfizer and Takeda?

Pfizer is working with biontech, and takeda with novavax, and there are a few other examples. The projects underway centralized in MD being one of them. It still looks like a giant cash grab as I'm not sure why every single one of them (all 100+?) aren't collectively working together.

Par for with big pharma. They're all at the trough hoping for just a little bit more of that grant cash.

Also, once hiv really came into the mainstream consciousness I'd guess more money was poured into it. A lot more. So no, it's not neccessarily unprecedented. It may have taken longer, but it was no doubt a herculean effort.

So what the hell are you talking about?

 

[Maine Fan]

WOW, Dr. Fauci said on Monday he thought States with high infections should Mandate Masks, today, Thursday, he said all States should Mandate Mask Use. I agree since we hit a record of 80,000 cases today, 10-29-2020.

 

[Darkauron]

Whole country should have mandated mask use back in March. But the pandemic isnt real and is fake news

 

[Jack Be Quick]

This virus sucks. 4 of my family members had it recently, all pretty healthy people and they all struggled mightily and unfortunately one passed. I am flying down to Florida tomorrow for the services. I’m very nervous about traveling down there.

Very sorry man.

All the best.

 

[NJDevs26]

Whole country should have mandated mask use back in March. But the pandemic isnt real and is fake news

May would have been more realistic considering there weren't enough masks to go around in March, and they needed to go to the healthcare workers first. But during the winter they should absolutely be mandatory, especially since if you leave people up to their own devices, more often than not they'll be selfish (exhibit A: the World Series celebration).

 

[MadDevil]

Whole country should have mandated mask use back in March. But the pandemic isnt real and is fake news

Sadly even if we did have a mask mandate the same people not wearing them now probably wouldn't wear them then either.

 

[NJDevs26]

Sadly even if we did have a mask mandate the same people not wearing them now probably wouldn't wear them then either.

It depends on just how much each city and state is willing to enforce its own mandates. Mandates are useless if you just let people walk all over them, again exhibit A MLB last night. You can have protocols but what good are they if there's no teeth behind actual enforcement?

 

[Patrik26]

Has anyone heard about defunding the police? Think about it, then explain exactly how a mask mandate would be enforced and what exactly would the penalty be? SMH.

 

[tr83]

So Johnson & Johnson is working with Pfizer and Takeda?

Pfizer is working with biontech, and takeda with novavax, and there are a few other examples. The projects underway centralized in MD being one of them. It still looks like a giant cash grab as I'm not sure why every single one of them (all 100+?) aren't collectively working together.

Par for with big pharma. They're all at the trough hoping for just a little bit more of that grant cash.

Also, once hiv really came into the mainstream consciousness I'd guess more money was poured into it. A lot more. So no, it's not neccessarily unprecedented. It may have taken longer, but it was no doubt a herculean effort.

So what the hell are you talking about?

I have a Master's degree in biochemistry.

The reason why we might have a vaccine in only 9 months (the record for development to approval is 5 years) is that scientists predicted that coronaviruses would be one of the most likely viruses to cause a pandemic. We saw the potential with SARS. We saw the potential with MERS. The NIH and WHO funded research into coronaviruses, so the technology infrastructure was present. It only took a matter of weeks to characterize its genome and run tests to determine a vaccine's feasibility.

Search of: vaccine | Covid19 - List Results - ClinicalTrials.gov

271 trials. For the same disease. This includes vaccines, antibody therapies, small molecule repurposement, etc.

If you sink all your resources into ONE vaccine candidate and it fails, then you have nothing. What do you do? Go back and select the next candidate? That will take another year to be pushed through.

It's like the stock market. You can't sink ALL of your savings into one stock. If you do and an event you did not foresee comes, like a pandemic, you could lose ALL your money. Then you start from nothing. If you don't diversify, you will get crushed.

It was announced that a promising Eli Lilly/NIH antibody candidate bombed out of the clinic. It also turns out the Remdesivir, THE drug being touted by doctors, relayed by the media, for improving outcomes for COVID patients actually doesn't work. This is why clinical trials are done in the first place.

Furthermore, some candidates may be better at provoking an immune response than others. Some people might not be able to receive certain candidates due to pre-existing conditions. Formulations may be different for children than for adults. Some candidates have a very short shelf life (hours). Some candidates require extreme storage conditions (in dry ice).


HIV is a different beast. The good thing is that you need sexual contact, blood transfusion, or skin puncture by a contaminated foreign object to transmit the disease. Unlike COVID, HIV doesn't have the number antigens (targets) that coronaviruses have. Furthermore, HIV mutates just as quickly, so any target is too unstable to be continually recognized by the immune system. So vaccines, with current technology, is highly unlikely. Complicating things is that HIV invades a certain type of T-cell that is responsible for coordinating the immune response. As the cells multiply to mount an immune response, the virus multiplies. It's a feedback loop. When there are too many HIV particles in the blood, you get diagnosed with AIDS and your time on Earth is short.


Look, I don't defend the business end of the pharmaceutical industry, who do some very shady shit. Much more shady shit than you may be aware of. This is all at the behest of "shareholders" including yourself if you have a 401K. I do defend the scientists, academic and industrial, who are practically working themselves to death to make sure that you can go back to the gym and support your local restaurants. Our economy depends on it.

 

[MadDevil]

It depends on just how much each city and state is willing to enforce its own mandates. Mandates are useless if you just let people walk all over them, again exhibit A MLB last night. You can have protocols but what good are they if there's no teeth behind actual enforcement?

That's just it. They passed a mask mandate here just yesterday that they literally called unenforceable in the statement. What the hell is the point of a mandate you can't enforce? But then given how many people around here either think the whole thing is bullshit or "just the flu", I shouldn't be surprised. Since the beginning of the pandemic we've been through 3 state health officers and are currently in the process of looking for another. And I know at least the last two that quit wanted to take more measures but the governor didn't.

 

[Jack Be Quick]

I have a Master's degree in biochemistry.

The reason why we might have a vaccine in only 9 months (the record for development to approval is 5 years) is that scientists predicted that coronaviruses would be one of the most likely viruses to cause a pandemic. We saw the potential with SARS. We saw the potential with MERS. The NIH and WHO funded research into coronaviruses, so the technology infrastructure was present. It only took a matter of weeks to characterize its genome and run tests to determine a vaccine's feasibility.

Search of: vaccine | Covid19 - List Results - ClinicalTrials.gov

271 trials. For the same disease. This includes vaccines, antibody therapies, small molecule repurposement, etc.

If you sink all your resources into ONE vaccine candidate and it fails, then you have nothing. What do you do? Go back and select the next candidate? That will take another year to be pushed through.

It's like the stock market. You can't sink ALL of your savings into one stock. If you do and an event you did not foresee comes, like a pandemic, you could lose ALL your money. Then you start from nothing. If you don't diversify, you will get crushed.

It was announced that a promising Eli Lilly/NIH antibody candidate bombed out of the clinic. It also turns out the Remdesivir, THE drug being touted by doctors, relayed by the media, for improving outcomes for COVID patients actually doesn't work. This is why clinical trials are done in the first place.

Furthermore, some candidates may be better at provoking an immune response than others. Some people might not be able to receive certain candidates due to pre-existing conditions. Formulations may be different for children than for adults. Some candidates have a very short shelf life (hours). Some candidates require extreme storage conditions (in dry ice).


HIV is a different beast. The good thing is that you need sexual contact, blood transfusion, or skin puncture by a contaminated foreign object to transmit the disease. Unlike COVID, HIV doesn't have the number antigens (targets) that coronaviruses have. Furthermore, HIV mutates just as quickly, so any target is too unstable to be continually recognized by the immune system. So vaccines, with current technology, is highly unlikely. Complicating things is that HIV invades a certain type of T-cell that is responsible for coordinating the immune response. As the cells multiply to mount an immune response, the virus multiplies. It's a feedback loop. When there are too many HIV particles in the blood, you get diagnosed with AIDS and your time on Earth is short.


Look, I don't defend the business end of the pharmaceutical industry, who do some very shady shit. Much more shady shit than you may be aware of. This is all at the behest of "shareholders" including yourself if you have a 401K. I do defend the scientists, academic and industrial, who are practically working themselves to death to make sure that you can go back to the gym and support your local restaurants. Our economy depends on it.

I'm still not entirely sure why these companies can't be made to share ALL of their data with their competitors.

But since you're someone with intimate and extensive knowledge on the matter I concede. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to watch a layman argue the law with an attorney.

I definitely appreciate the insight.

 

[None Shall Pass]

So I'm curious: What are you all doing with regards to Trick-or-Treating? Both the giving and receiving end.

My brother said that in his neighborhood in Ocean County, houses are building little chutes to drop candy down to kids and stuff like that.

My apartment building is small and no kids live in it so I'm out of the loop on this.

 

[Devilsfan992]

So I'm curious: What are you all doing with regards to Trick-or-Treating? Both the giving and receiving end.

My brother said that in his neighborhood in Ocean County, houses are building little chutes to drop candy down to kids and stuff like that.

My apartment building is small and no kids live in it so I'm out of the loop on this.

I don't live in an area with kids, but if I did I would just leave a bowl out.

 

[Jack Be Quick]

So I'm curious: What are you all doing with regards to Trick-or-Treating? Both the giving and receiving end.

My brother said that in his neighborhood in Ocean County, houses are building little chutes to drop candy down to kids and stuff like that.

My apartment building is small and no kids live in it so I'm out of the loop on this.

That's what we did. A 7ft length of pvc out of the window and we're good to go. No idea how many parents will be taking their kids out on this stretch of the avenue as we just moved here, but we figured worst case we'll have candy for a while.

 

[britdevil]

Seems England is going full lockdown again. This sucks.

 

[MartyOwns]

So I'm curious: What are you all doing with regards to Trick-or-Treating? Both the giving and receiving end.

My brother said that in his neighborhood in Ocean County, houses are building little chutes to drop candy down to kids and stuff like that.

My apartment building is small and no kids live in it so I'm out of the loop on this.

i built a rube goldberg device to deliver candy. every time the doorbell rings, i turn my kitchen faucet on, and 3 minutes later a fun sized milky way falls into their bag. the hardest part is going to be resetting the dominoes for every kid.

 

[Devilsfan992]

I think this coming week will be really bad in NJ. Since bars and clubs did not have outdoor Halloween parties and many bars were capped inside, there were a ton of house parties. This is of course anecdotal, but within my group of friends there were 4 different parties.

 

[devilsblood]

Kind of a hockey covid mix, but I didn't want to bring covid talk into other threads.

But what leagues are playing, and have there been interruptions anywhere? More specifically how is it effecting our prospects?

I know that Sweden, once thought to be the flag bearer for the non mask/keep the economy open approach is seeing a legit spike in cases right now. Wondering if that is causing disruptions on the ice.

 

[devilsblood]

So I'm curious: What are you all doing with regards to Trick-or-Treating? Both the giving and receiving end.

My brother said that in his neighborhood in Ocean County, houses are building little chutes to drop candy down to kids and stuff like that.

My apartment building is small and no kids live in it so I'm out of the loop on this.

We went with a big dish with the candy layed out on it. We stayed out there to make sure kids didn't just grab handfuls of candy, which is what I would have done when I was a kid.

 

[Devilsfan992]

Kind of a hockey covid mix, but I didn't want to bring covid talk into other threads.

But what leagues are playing, and have there been interruptions anywhere? More specifically how is it effecting our prospects?

I know that Sweden, once thought to be the flag bearer for the non mask/keep the economy open approach is seeing a legit spike in cases right now. Wondering if that is causing disruptions on the ice.

In the OHL, there are discussions about banning body checking.

 

[devilsblood]

In the OHL, there are discussions about banning body checking.

That sounds fairly ridiculous.

 

[Devilsfan992]

That sounds fairly ridiculous.

Source below

Checking banned from OHL due to COVID-19