This happened faster than I expected, and I’ve been anticipating major upswings. We’re unfortunately just at the beginning
Going into fall w 60k cases/d means winter may well dwarf the spring and summer peaks
It’s up to us to change the course. But won’t w/out proper leadership
I’m referring to the fact that we are right back to our summertime peak. So early into this long winter.
This makes me mad as hell and really really sad. Not just for the ppl who will die (1000/d right now) but for the stores that will close, the families that will lose jobs, the health effects due to COVID and as important as anything else, the mental health effects that will occur
This figure depicts one persons different B cells (x axis) across 3 different weeks in time, and how they react to SARS2 spike (y axis - broad categories) and how the secreted antibodies from those B cells reacts with other seasonal coronaviruses (y axis - smaller categories)
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What is remarkable is the change over time from day 9 to day 16 in the binding of antibodies to the seasonal coronavirus OC43 by B cells elicited by exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike ectodomain (S ecto).
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NEW! research shows rapid antigen tests can work in a real world setting - with asymptomatic and symptomatic people. The rapid "paper-strip" antigen test called the BinaxNOW detected >90% of people with high viral loads who are likely to be infectious nytimes.com/2020/10/15/hea…
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I've written about the BinaxNOW from @abbottnews before and why these types of tests can be 'game changers' for our ability to combat this virus
The authors evaluated a number of different tests against PCR positive and culture positive specimens. (Culture positive is generally appreciated as representing likely transmissible virus).
They find a large disparity across different tests...
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Against culturable virus, they find that the Abbott PanBio Test and the SD Biosensor (Neither available in the US right now) perform very well. An additional 3 tests were evaluated 2, also looked quoted good but the rapigen performed quite poorly.
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Can we create a brand new metric to know if #COVID19 is increasing/decreasing without staring at case counts & fractions positive - both greatly obscured by test practices.
In this incredible Tweet thread 👆 @jameshay218 describes the new work - we hope will lay new groundwork for public health authorities to track this/future viruses & if control strategies are working
One piece that is so cool about this method is we do NOT need a time series of case data to create a trajectory (those little bars on @nytimes website or google that we’ve all stared at for the past 9 months to see trend up vs down in cases). We can do it from a single day!
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Re-exposures are essential to build our immune system. This is not in question. They are like training.
But like anything, when enough people get a re-exposure, there are going to be rare cases here and there that go awry and someone gets more sick the second time.
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But this is rare and should NOT be interpreted as people will not build protective immunity and that vaccines will not work.
The take away from this piece should be “In a rare event, a person in the US gets a severe second infection with SARS-CoV-2”