Is COVID strategy moving towards herd-immunity?!

[North_Sky]

It's already happened. ~45 people returned to BC after a faith event and took the virus with them back home.

You are reading the same important stuff than I do. Like me you are a concerned Canadian citizen.

 

[Doodski]

You are reading the same important stuff than I do. Like me you are a concerned Canadian citizen.

It's the only way we are going to get through this and not be bankrupt and dead... to collectively put in the effort.

 

[North_Sky]

I have a major issue with the masks causing fogging of my prescription lenses and when the cool weather hits it's going to get way worse. I'll endure and wear my mask but it is a pain in the derriere. I am waiting to see how other people handle the issue too.

If your mask has a metal bar inside for nose adjustment, play with it for a tight fit, so that the air doesn't escape above, and your glasses go above your mask of course. I also wear prescription glasses and I'm still asking advice for the exact same reason you just mentioned.
One of my sisters living in Quebec she's the mask expert right now, she also wears prescription glasses. It takes some practice, she told me...adjusting, bending that small metal bar by making a hermetic fit around the nose.

 

[Doodski]

If your mask has a metal bar inside for nose adjustment, play with it for a tight fit, so that the air doesn't escape above, and your glasses above your mask. I also wear prescription glasses and I'm still asking advice for the exact same reason you just mentioned,
One of my sisters living in Quebec she's the mask expert right now, she also wears prescription glasses. It takes somd practice, she told me...with that small metal bar making a hermetic fit around the nose.

I bought a designer fabric mask from Amazon.ca for $22.00 and I wash it and then rinse it in Lysol sterilizing laundry additive. It has no metal bar... I suppose I could do a MOD on it.

 

[North_Sky]

I have different masks, the ones that are best are the N95 (without a valve) and the surgical (blue) ones. They have metal bars. They are non-reusable but they only cost roughly a dollar or less each...London Drugs (box of 50) for about $40.

Big grocery stores they give them free @ the entrance (not the box, just one mask) for your day shopping convenience. It's the least they can do to help their business. And business is extremely good with say Wal-Mart stores...surpassing Amazon.

The best financial stimulus cheque we can get is to buy Wal-Mart shares, and Amazon shares, and Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, IBM, ...
Three to six months from now they'll be worth much more. That's where our economist leaders should invest in, so that they have more money to give and stimulate the poor and the ones who lost their jobs.

 

[Doodski]

stimulate the poor

Speaking of the poor we have a tent city in a smallish park and it's up to about 350 tents now... Really tightly spaced tents. No idea how many people there are. I see them they are not wearing masks and are mingling as they get food and hang out around the campfires. That's a like a petri dish of Covid just festering away. They should be supplied with masks amongst other things.

 

[North_Sky]

They should open all the castles and luxurious hotels in Alberta and with room service for the poor. And no problem during winter...oil heated.

 

[Doodski]

They should open all the castles and luxurious hotels in Alberta and with room service for the poor. And no problem during winter...oil heated.

The gov already opened up the convention center with a couple hundred beds for people to isolate for 2 weeks if they had symptoms and also rented a entire hotel and filled it with homeless people. The issue is bigger than that. I can imagine what they go through when the cold windy weather hits. Running shoes and jean jackets in -30C is not good for one's psyche and body. I took in a couple of natives for a night because they where going to spend the night in the bus shelter near home and it was C O L D . A couple beers and some food and they where sleeping.

 

[North_Sky]

You're a good man, I can tell. And now Amir (ASR) is in Wiki, with his ki (key) man.

 

[Doodski]

Alberta should send them to California where the temperature is warmer (tubes and all).

That's another topic. You remember when BC evicted all the people from the insane asylums? Well I was in California visiting and they did the same thing in California and evicted something like 180,000 people and they all where living in boxes and in the grass on the side of the freeway and wherever they could and gang bangers where killing them sometimes I was told.

 

[mansr]

Have you been infected or if not doing anything to hasten it for the benefit of all? If not why not?

We're all going to die eventually. Why haven't you killed yourself yet?

 

[lashto]

...
How would you proceed if you would be the main planet's chief in charge, with your expert associates in epidemics/pandemics?
Are we on the right tracks, or are we derailing? Is it a country by country issue or is it a universal issue? What is the strategy?

good questions but maybe you forgot that I am just some engineer on an audio forum !?

Generally, I do not think that an unified world-wide strategy is possible. The conditions are way too different per country/region: e.g. Sweden's strategy probably won't be applicable anywhere outside Scandinavia/NorthernEU, NZ's isolation can only work on an island, etc...

 

[DDF]

One of my sisters living in Quebec she's the mask expert right now, she also wears prescription glasses. It takes some practice, she told me...adjusting, bending that small metal bar by making a hermetic fit around the nose.

Wide coffee bag ties work well as a mask nose clip. In a nod to audio DIY, I've also made nose clips from 16ga solid core copper stripped out of an ac cable, with electric tape as a holder to form into a strip. Both work very well and I find provide a much better seal than no nose clip.

 

[Harmonie]

Hello all and North_Sky still there ?

Consider also the fact that each country conducts (more or less) their own strategy and rules.
But Covid concerns our whole planet.
How long will you avoid people from travelling (massively) and how will you prevent infected people to enter.
With a negative certificate dated less than 48 hrs ? Make me LoL
It's time to find a global solution.

PS- In France they are ramping up the testing up to 1 million tests per week. Though the number seems big it still means several months before having tested people who feel concerned and more than a year if everyone had to be tested ...

 

[Vasr]

We're all going to die eventually. Why haven't you killed yourself yet?

What an ugly post.

Because I have not proposed dying as a solution to anything to embrace it myself?

Moreover, unlike dying, "inevitable infection of all" is just a conjecture of convenience.

False equivalence - staple of bad internet arguments.

 

[North_Sky]

That's another topic. You remember when BC evicted all the people from the insane asylums? Well I was in California visiting and they did the same thing in California and evicted something like 180,000 people and they all where living in boxes and in the grass on the side of the freeway and wherever they could and gang bangers where killing them sometimes I was told.

You probably saw the movie 'Scarface' (@ the beginning of the film).

 

[Doodski]

You probably saw the movie 'Scarface' (@ the beginning of the film).

It's been a long time since I watched Scarface. I don't remember the beginning.

 

[North_Sky]

good questions but maybe you forgot that I am just some engineer on an audio forum !?

Generally, I do not think that an unified world-wide strategy is possible. The conditions are way too different per country/region: e.g. Sweden's strategy probably won't be applicable anywhere outside Scandinavia/NorthernEU, NZ's isolation can only work on an island, etc...

I know, my question was in a general philosophic/scientific mode, like a speaker talking to an audience.

And because you are the OP with a subject of great actuality (herd immunity) and utmost importance to all scientists and Earth populations in the reality we are living right now for the last eight months and counting, the interest is very present, the stakes are very high.

I agree with you that each country has its own culture and way of life (its economy, autonomy, set of laws, etc.). And same for each state of the US, each province of Canada, each Euopean country.
And there is also a universal way of life; because we all travel and visit each other, live with one another, adapt, import/export products, contributing to the world economy, bringing closer the inequality between classes and races, respecting human rights, ... we're all in it together affecting and effecting each other universally...cause and effect.
What one do in one country affect another one in another country; this is a global pandemic. The adaptation is much closer now all together. That's my view.
Because closing our borders lead to boredom; we weren't meant to live separately but unified.

It's the responsibility of each country first to contain the virus, to slow it down the best as they can to a full halt. Those actions contribute to the global containment.
We go hand in hand, all for one and one for all...like three musketeers.
That's my view again.

I am siding with the expert scientists on epidemics and pandemics; measures of containment, testing, contact tracing, masks of course, ... everything to not let this Coronavirus escape widely and destroy virulently.

Antibodies, nobody knows exactly as this virus is a novel one bringing more discoveries every single day as we switch seasons.

* In audio as in medicine as in investments ... we have our good common sense guides.
Right now people like Dr. Anthony Fauci is a good common sense guide, unbiased and for human health. In the UK there are also good expert guides like him working all together with a common good human interest. It starts @ home and develop universally automatically. My view again.

 

[North_Sky]

It's been a long time since I watched Scarface. I don't remember the beginning.

The Cuban immigrants were all living under a freeway bridge (Miami) in homemade cardboard shacks.
That's all.

 

[ctrl]

If we look at the data, the pandemic has run its course in Sweden (and in most of the rest of Europe). It is the same in hard hit pre shutdown states in the U.S. It is running its course in the western U.S. states that have gone through their curves this Summer. Overly protective policies and rules have nothing to do with the reality of the situation, which is this: We are all forced to follow a "herd immunity" strategy whether we like it or not. The deaths per million figures will be roughly the same in all Western countries regardless of policy choices.

No, that will rather not be the case. Every day that passes there is new knowledge about the virus.
Even now, the treatment of Covid-19 patients is very different than at the beginning of the pandemic. Every day that people are not infected will most likely reduce the total number of deaths in the long run.
Every day there is a chance that an effective treatment option for Covid-19 will be found, significantly increasing the chances of survival of elderly people or people with pre-existing conditions infected with SARS-CoV-2.

For example

Blocking cellular communication stops SARS-CoV-2 - Patent on signaling inhibitor for COVID-19 treatment

Dr. Christian Münch from the Institute of Biochemistry II at Goethe University explains: “The signaling pathways of the growth factors can be blocked precisely at the point where the signal from outside the cell docks onto a signal receiver – a growth factor receptor. There are, however, a number of very effective cancer drugs that interrupt growth factor signaling pathways slightly further down the cascade, through which the signals of different growth factor receptors are blocked. We’ve tested five of these substances on our cells, and all five led to a complete stop of SARS-CoV-2 replication.”

Source: https://idw-online.de/de/news752977
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276520305499?via=ihub

Since SARS-Cov-2 mutates permanently, there is a chance that the virus will cause less fatal disease progression over time, similar to most known human corona viruses - of course, the reverse path would also be conceivable (SARS-CoV 2002 and MERS-CoV 2012).

We can have policies that distort the curve (with severe consequences), but the curve will happen. Government officials and cable news talking heads will pretend otherwise because this is what people want to believe. A vaccine will cause peace of mind, and that will be its main benefit. The virus's ability to rapidly spread will be done deal in almost every corner of the developed world well before we have one.

SARS-CoV-2 will most likely not disappear. What was possible with SARS-CoV thanks to the containment measures and lower infectivity will not be possible with version 2.

But the protective policies are working and have saved many, many lives by this time. As current studies show:

We find that across 11 countries 3.1 (2.8–3.5) million deaths have been averted owing to interventions since the beginning of the epidemic; Extended Data Fig. 5 compares the actual total deaths to the counterfactual total deaths. The counterfactual model without interventions is illustrative only, and reflects the assumptions of our model. We do not account for changes in behaviour; in reality, even in the absence of government interventions we would expect Rt to decrease and therefore would overestimate deaths in the no-intervention model. Conversely, we do not consider the effect on the infection fatality rate as a result of an overwhelmed health system in which patients may not be able to access critical care facilities, which would underestimate the number of counterfactual deaths. In the Supplementary Information, we show further counterfactual estimates under differing assumptions of the generation distribution and onset-to-death distribution and all scenarios broadly show the same trends. Given this agreement across differing scenarios, we believe our estimates for the counterfactual deaths averted to be plausible.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122030655X
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7

No studies are known to me that come to the result that a herd immunity caused by the virus is inevitable. Any infection that can be prevented now will save lives in the long run.
The myth of the "inevitability of herd immunity" is primarily politically and economically motivated. It is meant to distract from wrong political decisions that have cost and will cost hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

This "become immune or die" approach that many people take is deeply disturbing. Here in Germany there are actually politicians who argue that the deceased would have died soon anyway (which is a clear lie and is refuted in studies - see my previous posts) and remind me too much of "our" past where there was "Life unworthy of life".