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Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - May 1
This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
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The volume of comments in these threads has slowed down a lot as this has all become a lot more routine, so I think I'm going to make this the last daily post and switch to a weekly one starting Monday.
Definitely, now that testing has stagnated, politics has soured and economies have been locked it seems everything that could happen in the short term has already happened and now we only have the long term stuff like the US elections or social relationships.
I paid out of pocket for COVID antibody test and am waiting for the results. I got sick back in March but it wasn't bad enough to go to the hospital and tests were in short supply then. Now it seems tests are finally becoming available.
Although it hasn't been confirmed yet, evidence from other coronaviruses suggests there should be some immunity from reinfection, so I'm hoping the test is positive.
Be careful who you trust. The leading german academic on Covid-19 has said that there's a lot of questionable tests on the market.
It's the Abbott antibody test given emergency approval by the FDA last week. While it hasn't gone through the normal process, Abbott is a major pharmaceutical company that has been making tests like this for a long time. It's not quite a fly by night thing.
The reputation of the company isn't really the issue. The problem is that there is limited data about accuracy (risk of false positives and false negatives) for all antibody tests. Normally there is real-world testing on actual people that takes months, but this has been waived by the FDA. They have an alternate way of validating them that's quicker, but it's somewhat contrived and might not correspond to what happens with real-world testing.
Also, very little is known about COVID immunity. So the question is, what could you do differently based on the results of this test? You still won't know if you're immune or not. Is it just for fun?
To be fair, the parent comment was "be careful of who you trust", which is actually questioning the reputation of the company, so that's what I was responding to.
I understand the skepticism, but the situation isn't as black and white as "they're completely reliable" or "they're completely worthless". They give you some information, obviously not as much as we'd like or enough to recommend the test broadly as a public health measure, but it's not nothing.
Evidence from other coronaviruses does suggest that having recovered from the virus probably confers at least some limited immunity. The proper scientific null hypothesis at this point would be that there is immunity until we have better evidence.
I agree that it's not worthless, in theory. But I'm having trouble envisioning practical decisions that you can make differently if you think the test might be wrong, versus not testing at all.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/495519-maryland-governor-says-coronavirus-tests-acquired-from-south-korea-under
This article mentions the tests are at an undisclosed location to prevent seizure by Federal agents. But it also says that the Maryland governor worked with multiple groups at the Federal level (State Department, FDA, Border and Customs). Is the location being kept secret in order to just make it more difficult for other parts of the Federal government that weren't involved to know; in case the various Federal groups aren't sharing information with each other? Or is it saying that after the tests came in, everything was handled entirely at the State level, so no one at the Federal level has any idea where the tests went after arriving state-side?
Announced today: no new cases for 14 days in NB, Canada. All active cases have recovered as well - two huge milestones on the same day. No deaths.
Not to say it can't come back, but I am so grateful we've weathered the first wave like this. From our first case to having zero active cases was 53 days.
TBF, having had to wear a very improvised mask the other week for my grocery run, I had a bad headache after I was done. I didn't waste any time either getting out of that, but my way home was also not busy at all.
All in all not a big fan of having to improvise a mask. We've DIY'ed something that should be a good bit more comfortable, but I'll see soon how well that works.
Safeway to Limit How Many Meat Products Customers Can Buy
City of Stillwater, Oklahoma drops mask requirement after businesses threatened