If there is such a thing as herd immunity. The first cases of reinfection have been reported. Unlike other viruses, this one looks as if it doesn’t confer immunity after infection.

I've no idea where the basis for your comments comes from but it's very unscientific. If there's no such thing as herd immunity then an effective vaccine is impossible because that's how they work to reduce or eliminate spread.

The simple fact that a few cases (as normal with any virus) out of millions have reinfections shows exactly the opposite from no immunity after infection from the many scientific tests of the virus that show a strong immune antibody and T-cell response.

 

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/hong-kong-documents-man-twice-infected-by-covid-19/1951728

According to the university research team, the “genetic sequencing showed the virus strains contracted by him in April and August were clearly different.”

 

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/hong-kong-documents-man-twice-infected-by-covid-19/1951728

That doesn't mean that antigenic cross reactions would not be sufficient to prevent clinical disease. It all depends of on the antigenic epitopes. Antibodies are not against the RNA per se, but what the RNA codes for.

 

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/hong-kong-documents-man-twice-infected-by-covid-19/1951728

Looks like the very contagious but so far less deadly strain common in the US is now in Asia. I guess we will see if D614G reinfection is common with people that had the original strain in asia.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-virus-strain-that-s-10-times-more-infectious

Noor Hisham warned that the strain could mean existing studies on vaccines may be incomplete or ineffective against the mutation. That’s even as a paper published in Cell Press said the mutation is unlikely to have a major impact on the efficacy of vaccines currently being developed.

 

The high mutation rates of RNA viruses is a common theme:

Average mutation rates in RNA viruses are estimated to be about 100 times higher than those for DNA viruses. This rate is especially high because DNA viruses lack the sophisticated DNA repair mechanisms found in human and other animal cells.

https://sciencing.com/rna-mutation-vs-dna-mutation-3260.html

That seems consistent with the proposition that RNA preceded DNA in evolution, which I mentioned previously.

 

1) Isn't a second asymptomatic infection almost indistinguishable from a booster shot for, say, typhoid fever? I remember my "booster" when I moved to Baltimore in 1962. It was nowhere nearly as benign as a booster for tetanus. Not typhoid fever, but I was plenty sick.

2) How did they define the difference between "colonization" and infection? (Colonization is not usually applied to viruses since they are not free-living, but surely the analogy should apply.)

I saw something interesting about the immunity effect.
https://undark.org/2020/08/24/covid-19-infection-asymptomatic/

These experts are learning that the human body may not always wage an all-out war on viruses and other pathogens. It may also be capable of accommodating an infection, sometimes so seamlessly that no symptoms emerge. This phenomenon, known as disease tolerance, is well-known in plants but has only been documented in animals within the last 15 years.

Disease tolerance is the ability of an individual, due to a genetic predisposition or some aspect of behavior or lifestyle, to thrive despite being infected with an amount of pathogen that sickens others. Tolerance takes different forms, depending on the infection. For example, when infected with cholera, which causes watery diarrhea that can quickly kill through dehydration, the body might mobilize mechanisms that maintain fluid and electrolyte balance. During other infections, the body might tweak metabolism or activate gut microbes — whatever internal adjustment is needed to prevent or repair tissue damage or to make a germ less vicious.

A hallmark of these experiments — and something that surprised her at first — is that the half that survive the lethal dose are perky. They are completely unruffled by the same quantity of pathogen that kills their counterparts. “I thought going into this … that all would get sick, that half would live and half would die, but that isn’t what I found,” Ayres says. “I found that half got sick and died, and the other half never got sick and lived.”

Ayres sees something similar happening in the Covid-19 pandemic. Like her mice, asymptomatics seem to have similar amounts of the virus in their bodies as the people who fall ill, yet for some reason they stay healthy. Studies show that their lungs often display damage on CT scans, yet they are not struggling for breath (though it remains to be seen whether they will fully escape long-term impacts). Moreover, a small recent study suggests that asymptomatics mount a weaker immune response than the people who get sick — suggesting that mechanisms are at work that have nothing to do with fighting infection.

“Why, if they have these abnormalities, are they healthy?” asks Ayres. “Potentially because they have disease tolerance mechanisms engaged. These are the people we need to study.”

 

People have variable ID50 (or LD50) to a lot of things. Here's a lengthy review of the effect of blood groups on our susceptibility to various pathogens. Of note, people with Type O blood are relatively resistant to SARS-CoV (the original one). In fact, our common isoagglutinins (e.g., anti-A and anti-B in Type O individuals) are probably related to unrecognized infections.

I would say our ability to accommodate some infections without the drama of "waging an all-out war" has been known for quite awhile. It is being proved once again with SARS-CoV-2.

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/sci...chers-see-hope-coronavirus-treatment-n1238176

“It binds to the virus’ spike protein with an unmatched affinity — we’ve never seen anything like this in my lab before,” said Peter Walter, a molecular biologist and biochemist who is part of a team working to develop a potential coronavirus treatment using the llama-inspired compound. “It was absolutely beautiful to see.”

 

It can be costly!
Max.

• John Pennington was arrested and charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after officials said he breached Canada's travel rules during the coronavirus pandemic.
• Americans are currently barred from traveling through Canada unless they're driving to and from Alaska — people who spend the night must quarantine in their hotel.
• Pennington was initially fined $910 ($1,200 Canadian) on June 25 after hotel staff called police on him, accusing him of violating the quarantine.
• Instead of leaving Banff the next day, he went to Sulphur Mountain, where police arrested him and charged him with breaching the federal Quarantine Act in Canada.
• If he's convicted, he faces a $569,000 fine ($750,000 Canadian) or six years in prison.

 

If there is such a thing as herd immunity. The first cases of reinfection have been reported. Unlike other viruses, this one looks as if it doesn’t confer immunity after infection.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/coronavirus-reinfection-hong-kong-study.html

 

If the strains are different, "reinfection" may not be the best term to use. Infection with different strains of the "same" virus is not new. Happens millions of times a year with seasonal flu (Influenza A), nor is flu vaccine 100% protective (same goes for polio and other vaccines). In fact, as pointed out earlier, Sabin polio vaccine (live attenuated virus) can also cause polio.

Coronavirus is a single-strand, positive sense RNA virus. Rhino virus, which is one cause of the common cold, shares those characteristics and is often noted for the large number of stains that have been identified. It would be more surprising if SARS-CoV-2 were a single, stable viral strain that didn't mutate.

Shingles (varicella-zoster, chicken pox, herpes zoster) also is a potentially recurring viral disease. Of course, the mechanism of its persistence/dormancy may be different, but the phenomenon is not new.

Over dramatized ("all out war") reports to the point of melodrama seem to be more for gathering clicks than presenting facts. The current SARS virus is new to our catalog of infectious diseases. It is not unique among viruses and has changed in ways one might expect based on behavior of similar viruses. It appears the virus was adapted to human cell lines (previously cited published work from that laboratory) that was accidentally released to the public. Laboratory-adapted strains of infectious agents can revert to the wild strain if released to the environment. That may be happening with this agent.

 

Despite all claims every evening this week it seems it wasn't intentionally spread from China. https://sciencefeedback.co/claimrev...-it-could-have-been-intentionally-propagated/

 

Despite all claims every evening this week it seems it wasn't intentionally spread from China. https://sciencefeedback.co/claimrev...-it-could-have-been-intentionally-propagated/

I don't think it was intentionally or accidentally spread from a lab in China. What happened in China was a flat out misinformation operation of a typical communist dictatorship designed to deflect the seriousness of in the wild transmission of SARS-CoV2 by the intentional threats and intimidation of Chinese officials who could have greatly reduced the world-wide spread if they were allowed to act in a reasonable manner last year, in China, before it became a Pandemic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/15/china-didnt-warn-public-of-likely-pandemic-for-6-key-days.html

But what is clear, experts say, is that China’s rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for “rumor-mongering,” broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals.

“Doctors in Wuhan were afraid,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. “It was truly intimidation of an entire profession.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

Li Wenliang (Chinese: 李文亮; 12 October 1986 – 7 February 2020) was a Chinese ophthalmologist who worked at Wuhan Central Hospital.[2] On 30 December 2019, Wuhan CDC issued emergency warnings to local hospitals about a number of mysterious pneumonia cases discovered in the city in the previous week.[3][4] On the same day, Li received an internal diagnostic report of a suspected severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patient from other doctors which he in turn shared with his friends. He was dubbed a whistleblower when that shared report later circulated publicly despite him requesting confidentiality from those he shared the information with.[5][6] Rumors of a deadly SARS outbreak subsequently spread on Chinese social media platforms, and Wuhan police summoned and admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet about unconfirmed SARS outbreak".[5][7]

The outbreak was later confirmed not to be SARS but a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Li returned to work and later contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, from a patient who was not known to be infected. He died from the disease on 7 February 2020, at age 33.[8][9] A subsequent Chinese official inquiry exonerated him, and the Communist Party of China formally offered a "solemn apology" to his family and revoked the admonishment of him.[10][11][12] By early June 2020, five more doctors from the Wuhan hospital, since nicknamed the "whistleblower hospital", had died from COVID-19.[13]

 

What's the excuse for the reaction in this country? And no this isn't politically motivated. After other countries were seeing how it was easily spread, why the long wait to act here?

 

Because we are the "Land of the free and home of the brave" and no-one can tell us what to do unless we want to do it. Just plain outright bullheaded stubbornness with a huge heap of individuality thrown in for good measure.

 

What's the excuse for the reaction in this country? And no this isn't politically motivated. After other countries were seeing how it was easily spread, why the long wait to act here?

Actually, reaction in the US was largely appropriate or overdone based on the information at hand. Unfortunately, some governors chose to abuse the CARES act and monetize inflated positivity rates. Others, including some of the above, chose to return infected elderly patients to nursing homes, which resulted in deadly infections to the most at risk age group. Mid-pandemic, the death rate in NY nursing homes exceeded the death rate in the entire state of Florida -- a state known for having a disproportionate elderly population..

Sweden used "common sense," and we have yet to get the final numbers for excess deaths by age group in Sweden versus the US. If those numbers ever become available, I suspect there will be very little difference, but that time is at least 6 months from now.

 

What's the excuse for the reaction in this country? And no this isn't politically motivated. After other countries were seeing how it was easily spread, why the long wait to act here?

We decided as a union of states not to go full 'war' with the virus because full 'war' with the virus in a nation as big and diverse as the US is impossible.

Countries with very young populations with little restrictions like in Africa still have low numbers of excess deaths. It's because the prime driver for excess deaths from Covid-19 is age and underlying conditions not the actual viral infection. What happened in the US and with most countries is a failure to protect the at risk. A 'war' to prevent infection in the at risk groups was a failure but we have a lot of company in that failure.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...so-far-scientists-are-struggling-explain-why#

 

Unfortunately, some governors chose to abuse the CARES act and monetize inflated positivity rates.

There you go again, while giving no proof that it really happened.

 

We decided as a union of states not to go full 'war' with the virus because full 'war' with the virus in a nation as big and diverse as the US is impossible.

Same old line again. But it has been done for other things. There are laws now in effect because people thought they should be, to protect people from themselves and others. But not when it comes to this.

 

Just a stupid question. Why did they allow the people who were treating the first people to come back in the US with it to leave and go home repeatedly.
Brzrkr