How will people react if Covid-19 flares up when the lockdown ends?

The Technology Review article about possible short-lived immunity from coronavirus was interesting … and frightening. Especially since high human populations and high mobility may make novel coronaviruses an ongoing problem.



[quote="Elmer_J.Fudd, post:11, topic:852805"]

... It’s ridiculous that the first priority of the trillions being spent to ameliorate the effects of this virus on the economy isn’t to eliminate the economy’s worst enemy; uncertainty. Is it really beyond the capacity of American industry to turn out enough test kits to test every person in the country?
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My wife sometimes spends a few minutes studying which brand of toothpaste to buy.  It's a shame that a little more effort wasn't devoted to planning best benefit from the Trillions.  IMHO, high priority should have been given to tests, medical needs, and delivery of *food*.  I see on the news gargantuan multi-hours queues of struggling Americans waiting for food.  *Shame on America*.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, did FDR drop billions of dollars from helicopters and say "the American people will know what to do"?  When JFK decided to go to the Moon did he just give money to his business cronies and say "Go for it, fellas"?  Yet when the Covid-19 crisis hit, post-rational America was found wanting.

Yes, the famous poem about marital law was quoted in the recent thread about short-selling:
He who pricks what isn’t his’n
Must chop his off, nor go to heav’n.

No! I thought you’d be here all week. :slight_smile:

Plenty of people under 50 have conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma that mean they are at far greater likelihood of getting really, really sick if infected. That doesn’t mean that under normal circumstances, they are too sick to work.

It seems to be more associated with serious underling conditions than it does age. I think as we get older we tend to have more conditions. To me it is starting to look like the best indicator of current infection rates might be how many deaths per million each state has reached. Hopefully most states won’t be going over the 1,000 per million number but it does appear that might be pretty close. If that is the case each 100 per million might represent about 10% infections.

If you’re sick you stay home just like any other illness.

Right. Scientists understand that “there is no evidence of immunity” is a way of saying we don’t know, not the same as “the evidence shows a lack of immunity” which would be the thing to fear.

I’ve said it before: It’s way too early to draw many conclusions. Studies disagree all the time, and until enough data are collected you can ignore the headlines about treatments working or not, immunity developing or not, animal transmission being a thing or not, etc.

We will get to an understanding of these things (which are rarely binary) but we don’t know yet.

I think it depends on what a “flare up” is. If the hospitals are overwhelmed, then I think there will be a bad reaction.

I think if more people get sick and more people die, I don’t. Not collectively. Anybody that knows anything knows that we’re going to have more cases and more deaths if lockdowns are lifted. That’s just the way it works. I also think people are starting to get restless and a little numb to these charts.

It’s all going to depend on whether certain subgroups of humans are disparately effected or not.

monstro is probably the most correct.

You’ve never been poor, have you? A lot of people do not have the luxury of staying home when sick and finding their job waiting for them when they recover. There is a lot of pressure, much of it legal, that pushes mildly ill people to come in to work.

And since asymptomatic people who don’t know they’re carriers will not be staying home, and since this seems especially contagious in indoor environments, you’ll have a lot of opportunities to see this in action over the next few months.

Hell, when I was working service jobs, I can remember being told that if I didn’t come in for my shift, don’t bother coming in ever again. And that was in a job handling prepared food.

This is an important point. Even if they open the economy, no one can MAKE people go to bars, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, etc. So if cases continue to flare up, people are going to freak out and not go to those businesses.

Sort of like HIV?

IANAV[sup]*[/sup]. There are a class of viruses that remain perpetually persistent in the human body. They can hide where our immune system can’t find them, or morph frequently enough that the immune system cannot keep up. These include HIV, HSV, HPV, chicken pox, if I understand correctly, among others. On the other hand, there are viruses that our bodies clear after a while - influenza and most common colds. We often don’t catch those again, because our immune systems know to look out for them in the future. The fact that coronaviruses fit in this second category is what would prompt comments like RickJay’s that it would be unusual to not develop some level of immunity to it after clearing it. But the study posted upthread suggests that perhaps, for some reason, we do not develop strong immunities to coronaviruses.

[sup]*[/sup]Virologist… or virus.

Others have already made the point about folks lacking sick leave and being pressured to come into work with mild to moderate illnesses anyway, so they can spread it to their coworkers.

At a plant where dozens or hundreds of workers have been diagnosed, however, if they all stay home who is operating the plant?

Yes, and that’s exactly what I said. Note the rest of my post:

What I was responding to, again, was this:

which does not appear to me to say either that we don’t know yet, or that it’s possible immunity doesn’t occur. It appears to me to be claiming that of course we’d be immune, immunity’s as certain as the law of gravity.

Indeed. Let me quote from that article:

They don’t appear to think this is a particularly extraordinary finding, let alone one as extraordinary as finding out that gravity doesn’t exist in stucco houses. In fact, the preliminary report linked to in the article says:

Now that doesn’t mean “we’re all dead” even if it does turn out to be true of covid-19 – though it may mean that a lot more of us are going to be dead than if it doesn’t. People who got non-symptomatic or minimally-symptomatic cases the first time may continue to get that type of case even if re-infected; we may come up with a vaccine, even if it’s a vaccine that needs to be repeated frequently; we may come up with effective treatments. But, while (as I said before) we don’t know yet whether a case of covid-19 produces long-term immunity, it’s perfectly possible that it doesn’t; and, if it doesn’t, that would not overturn all the rest of our medical knowledge of immunity.

If that is the case, and we have to live in a world with a highly infectious virus that kills mostly old people at a high rate, but can kill anyone, be prepared for a radical restructuring of how we live. As radical as the invention of the car or modern air conditioning.

People will spread out, the movement of people out of the cities will accelerate, and everyone who can work from home will.

Several restaurant and business owners I’ve seen interviewed said that reopening is difficult and expensive, and if there is a new flare up requiring them to shut down again (or driving away customers) they will be closed for good. Reopening is not as simple as turning on a light switch and the oven.

So in other words, get used to it.
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Would we really be worse off if instead of lifting restrictions we instead locked things down much tighter for a month? Say we’re given time to prepare and a serious concentrated effort is made to make sure everyone has a month of food/medication/toilet paper and then everyone is absolutely locked down for the month of June. No leaving the house at all, not even to take a walk, unless you are in healthcare, a cop, a fire fighter, or work in utilities. After 4 weeks of 99% of people not mingling with people outside their household the virus would run out of new people to infect, would it not?

Sure, international travel might bring it back, but hopefully we’ll be much better at testing and contact tracking by then so we could then sequester just those people immediately instead of allowing it to silently spread like during midwinter.

It is totally going to depend on things we just don’t know right now.

If this virus is like the various other coronaviruses, it might lay dormant in people for a long period of time, then flare up. Imagine shingles or HPV, except much, much more contagious and dangerous.

It may simply be that no matter how much we lock down, as soon as we ease the lockdowns the thing comes roaring back as strong as ever. Worst-case scenario is that even getting sick only provides temporary immunity, in which case this thing could become a ‘super flu’ that we simply have to learn to live with. Social distancing at least would not be temporary, but a permanent feature of life. Living in a crowded city or taking mass transit wold be a constant struggle just to remain uninfected.

On the other hand, someone living in a small town, or on a farm, or on an acreage out of town could get by just fine, and live a normal life. I live in the suburbs, and social distancing and locking down for us is much, much easier than for the poor folks living in apartments and needing mass transit, and who have to negotiate crowded sidewalks and infected hallways just to get food.

Given the disparity in pain between those two lifestyles, a world of permanent lockdown would likely empty out the densest cities, or at least reduce the population enough so that people can spread out.

But if you are working from home, why bother being in a big city at all? Especially since the social aspects which make city living enticing becomes threats, not features.

One new enabling technology is coming along at just the right time: Starlink. Having high speed, low latency internet available anywhere on the globe will really facilitate population sprawl, allowing people to work from home from any rural location - or any country.

This is an important enough subject to dig into the article in some detail, at least for those who are interested in a bit of a deeper dive.
214 subjects enrolled, 191 who completed at least six separate nasopharyngeal samples in the same season. “Infection” defined as a group of positive weekly samples, allowing for a one week gap for possible false negatives or transient low level shedding.

Subjects consisted of convenience samples of high exposure individuals: children in daycare along with their siblings and parents; high school students and their teachers; workers in the emergency department, and other medical system workers. Not stated in the article but these are groups that should reasonably be expected to be exposed to a variety of common cold causing coronaviruses many times a season each.

Of those 191 in those high exposure groups 105 had no episodes of any coronavirus infections.

Of the 86 who had at least one documented infection as defined 12 were infected with the same germ more than once.

There were no repeat infections with NL63, one repeat of 229E, two with HKU1, and nine with OC43.

9 of the 12 who had repeat infections were in the 1 to 9 year old group, the other 3 were n the 24 to 34 year old group.

3 individuals had infections 3 times: 2 were asymptomatic each and every of the three infections, one listed mild symptoms concurrent with the first episode and no symptoms the two next episodes.

No one had three symptomatic infections.

Of the 191 individuals studied in these high exposure environments 5 had more than one (two) symptomatic infections.

There is (understandably) no data on whether or not those with asymptomatic infections were contagious.

There is (understandably) no data on whether or not the 105 of the 191 who had no episodes of infection had evidence of past infections.
Put another way 2.6% of those in these high/frequent exposure environments, demonstrated more than one symptomatic infection with the same germ in a season. 97.4% did not.
Individuals are free to interpret that as they will, but I personally read the word “frequently” used in the description as a bit inaccurate. The majority of people (55%) in a high exposure environment get no infections at all, 39% got one infection, 6% got infected more than once in a season, and only 2.6% more than once with any symptoms, despite what should presumptively be understood as frequent re-exposure. It is unclear if that 2.6% have some difference in their innate or cellular systems compared to the general population.
Also in the discussion section are some interesting additional mentions:

Studies have previously shown that those experimentally inoculated with 229E and re-exposed a year later DO often get reinfected but with decreased symptoms and with decreased shedding.

In SARS IgG seems to decrease dramatically by 5 years but memory T-cells persist.
I have stated this elsewhere but if natural disease does not provide decent degrees of protection to an individual (and so far, as the article points out, it seems to in at least the short term) then there is very little chance that immunization will do better. Neither should be reasonably expected to provide 100% protection from re-infection, and each re-exposure is a chance to become infected anew, even when the chance of infection is low with each exposure.
Sam Stone Huh? No coronaviruses are not like shingles or HPV and the class does not “lay dormant in people for a long period of time, then flare up” … where did you get that idea?

You don’t know. No one does. That’s his point.