Coronavirus News (200)

The Winter Will Be Worse When socializing outside gets harder in much of the U.S., daily life will get more dismal, and the virus might spread even further..........  “There really is no easy way to socialize during late fall [and] winter in large parts of the country if you're not doing it outside ........... Could I have people over in my house for two hours on a Sunday morning in December? Barring really good testing, probably not.” .............  and “if the space is heated, it can lead to dry air,” which is more hospitable to the virus. ..........  stay at least six feet apart, wear a mask, wipe down frequently touched surfaces, meet in a building with sufficient filters in its ventilation system, use a portable air purifier and a humidifier, and stay clear of crowded rooms ..............   the widespread use of cheap, quick coronavirus tests. “Imagine those tests get better and they become ubiquitous—could you go and hang out with a friend if you both tested negative that morning, in a community that doesn't have large transmission? I would feel comfortable” doing that, he said. But “I probably wouldn't give them a hug and sit right next to them.” ...........  “The winter could get a lot worse than even now,” Noymer said. “There’s plenty of room [in the population] for this thing to expand.” ..........  “Also, people are already feeling pandemic fatigue, and I think that'll only get worse.” Due to the combination of indoor transmission risk and that increased desire to gather, he thinks “there almost surely will be a spike in cases” this winter. ...........   that people spend more time indoors together, that the lower level of humidity suits the viruses better, that our mucous membranes get drier and more vulnerable to infection ...........  Making matters worse, the pandemic will, if it isn’t somehow neutralized, coincide with flu season, which usually starts in October and is at its worst December through February. ..............  “COVID compromises the respiratory system and so does flu, so each of them makes the other one worse” ........ because the two diseases have some symptoms in common, telling them apart can be difficult. .................. “It’s not [primarily] about summer or winter,” he explained. “It’s about outdoors versus indoors … Arizona in June is like Boston in December.” ............  “It’s always winter inside a meatpacking plant” ............ “I am more optimistic that November, December, January, February are not going to be some kind of apocalypse that looks like what life felt like in March or April,” Jha said. “I think we can do better than that. But it will require policy intervention.” Namely: widespread, affordable, and quick testing; strongly enforced masking mandates; and improved ventilation in classrooms and other indoor spaces. ...........  a “nightmare scenario” playing out, with people cooped up indoors, schools closed, a still-weak testing regime, and a bad flu season. Americans could be living like that for months. “I think it is wholly avoidable, but 150,000 deaths later, a lot of this was avoidable,” Jha said. “So I don’t put it past our nation to botch the next phases of the response.”    

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus. .........  An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.” ................  the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes........  Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists  ...........  Immunity, then, is usually a matter of degrees, not absolutes. And it lies at the heart of many of the COVID-19 pandemic’s biggest questions. Why do some people become extremely ill and others don’t? Can infected people ever be sickened by the same virus again? How will the pandemic play out over the next months and years? Will vaccination work? .........  T-cells do demolition; antibodies do cleanup. ........  “any virus that can make people sick has to have at least one good trick for evading the immune system,” Crotty says. The new coronavirus seems to rely on early stealth, somehow delaying the launch of the innate immune system, and inhibiting the production of interferons—those molecules that initially block viral replication. “I believe this [delay] is really the key in determining good versus bad outcomes,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale. It creates a brief time window in which the virus can replicate unnoticed before the alarm bells start sounding. Those delays cascade: If the innate branch is slow to mobilize, the adaptive branch will also lag. .....................  Immune responses are inherently violent. Cells are destroyed. Harmful chemicals are unleashed. Ideally, that violence is targeted and restrained ..............  “If you can’t clear the virus quickly enough, you’re susceptible to damage from the virus and the immune system” .........  three broad groups of pathogens: viruses and microbes that invade cells, bacteria and fungi that stay outside cells, and parasitic worms...........   why so many “long-haulers” have endured months of debilitating symptoms .........  surveyed 700 long-haulers and a third had tested negative for antibodies, despite having symptoms consistent with COVID-19 ............  The immune system’s reaction to the virus is a matter of biology, but the range of reactions we actually see is also influenced by politics. Bad decisions mean more cases, which means a wider variety of possible immune responses, which means a higher prevalence of rare events. In other words, the worse the pandemic gets, the weirder it will get. ...................  20 to 50 percent of people who were never exposed to SARS-CoV-2 nonetheless have significant numbers of T-cells that can recognize it. ...........  The immediate uncertainty around our pandemic future “doesn’t stem from the immune response,” Cobey says, but from “policies that are enacted, and whether people will distance or wear masks.” ............   The virus could cause annual outbreaks. It might sweep the world until enough people are vaccinated or infected, and then disappear. It could lie low for years and then suddenly bounce back. All of these scenarios are possible