Maybe? There have been reports of at least two people getting it twice, but they’re not sure if this is a new infection or a resurgence of one that hadn’t been completely overcome. Apparently, the virus can linger for a couple of weeks in the body even after symptoms disappear.
Twice? Oh, Jesus fuck a shit soufflé! C’mon, Universe, play fair!
elucidator, you use your keyboard prettier than a twenty dollar whore.
You are wrong. You haven’t been reading up on the virus and its modes of transmission, and what it does once it’s transmitted.
If you look at the spread of the virus, there is a point, usually once testing becomes widespread and consistent, the number of cases shoots up dramatically. This is what happened in Italy, Iran, and South Korea. Iran has a poor public health system, but South Korea has one of the best in the world, as does Singapore. In fact, both Singapore and South Korea have dealt with this and limited both the spread and the death toll precisely because they have chosen to test widely and they’re far better at reporting than the United States. CDC has absolutely been caught flat-footed, and we’ve not even come close to realizing just how badly flat-footed they’ve been caught.
I can almost guarantee you that we will be dealing with this for another several weeks, and once we start testing on a wider scale, we will see the number of cases skyrocket. It’s probably already in the thousands, not the hundreds that we’ve seen. People are not being tested. They’re taking public transit. Healthcare workers are not protecting themselves in ways that can be taken seriously. In one nursing home - just one - 11 people are dead, and another dozen or so have now been taken to the hospital. Something else you may not know: when people have to be ventilated…the odds are that patient is not going to make it.
I’ll repeat: we’re just getting started.
You may have some immunity to one strain, but there are other strains that develop. There are other strains coming out of China already - the good news is that the sharp drop in travel is probably going to limit the global spread, though new strains could develop here, too.
As for transmission, you can still have antibodies, which might make you test technically positive, but there comes a point at which you’re probably no longer contagious. I’m less familiar with how long one remains contagious post-symptoms, but probably 7-14 days, with a sharp drop after a week.
But, one of the problems with a virus that makes 80-85% percent of its victims barely symptomatic or feel like they’ve just got a bad cold is that they become great disease vectors. They become super transmitters, which means they take it and pass it on to scores of people who are a lot more vulnerable. The fact that it’s less deadly than SARS or MERS is what has made it a global virus.
It’s a matter of time before Trump, the GOP, and fake news orbit start declaring this a tandem of a Chinese and Democrat conspiracy to take down the president. I wish I were joking when I trot out the possibility that he could declare a state of emergency and assert wartime, anti-insurrection, anti-terrorism powers…but I’m taking that threat seriously. This administration is authoritarian, engages in recreational misinformation, perpetual fearmongering, and would be awfully tempted not to let an opportunity to exploit an existential public health crisis go to waste.
It’s highly doubtful that they were reinfected with the same virus strain. Your body produces antibodies to fight off the virus - that’s how you recover and develop immunity. What’s likely in cases of “reinfection” is that the body never fully rid itself of a stubborn infection, or perhaps got infected with another strain - or got infected with something else completely different, like flu or cold.
Mick Mulvaney is out as White House Chief of Staff. Congressman Mark Meadows is in.
ETTD
Time once again for the ceremonial Changing Of The Crooks.
Does anybody remember when we still used to care who the Chief of Staff is? Somebody to rein in the crazy a bit? Hahahaha (manical laughter)
If we’re done dealing with it after only several more weeks, then we’re done. Because that would mean a tsunami of cases - millions, quite possibly tens of millions - over such a short interval that there simply will not be enough health care infrastructure to meet demand. There won’t be enough ventilators for sure.
The hope is to slow the spread of infection so as not to overwhelm the system. But that means it will continue percolating through the countries of the world, and their states and provinces, for months and months.
The administration touted being able to test 1 million people per week once production ramps up on the testing kits. At that rate, it will take more than 6 years to test the entire US population.
Especially a crisis that they created themselves, through sheer ineptitude.
I think they’re up to about 200 tests per day now.
But trust in Pence. He’s praying for you.
1 million people per week?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!! OH MY, FER FUCKS SAKE! FUCK ME! A million per – BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!!! We’re up to 100-200 tests now, but we’ll get to 1 million…per week. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Nice one, Cyril! Nice one, son. Nice one, Cyril! Let’s have another one!
And Pence praised the governor.
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article240938526.html
Will Mulvaney now obey the House subpoena?
I can’t come to a conclusion about just how dangerous this virus is or whether the hype it is getting is warranted. Given the uncertainty, I guess the hype is the safer bet. This thing definitely has a “denominator problem”- we know the number dead, but we really don’t know the number of cases. At 3300 dead and 100,000 cases, yeah, that looks like a 3.3% fatality rate. But if only 1 in 6 infected people get tested, obviously it is way lower.
The lower bound I am seeing is .5%, which would make this 5x deadlier than the common flu, which I would consider very serious. Or it could be even worse. The clusterfuck here is, what exactly is the major malfunction at the CDC that we are still hardly testing anybody? Wtf? Wtf?
Maybe I am just feeling angry which is why I am bouncing this off of you guys. The response in this country strikes me as inexcusable. We’re just gonna let this thing run to prop up the stock market for… a month? two months? before this fucker takes off and makes millions sick and tens of thousands dead? What in the everlasting fuck? What exactly is the major malfunction?
Pence was in Washington state on Thursday.
Trump said his dumb shit today.
“The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. This was not a perfect as that, but pretty good.” – is Trump referring to the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president here?
““I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship” – Trump explains that he doesn’t want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn’t want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up”