New York is starting to trial them for treatment of the virus.
If this works, it’s good news on at least two fronts: It will help save lives, and it would indicate that getting infected and recovering does confer immunity.
[Monday-morning update]
Germany is going to issue certificates of immunity. We should be doing this as well, once we get the antibody testing going; it will allow people to go back to work. Knowing who has antibodies will be even more important than knowing who is infected.
[Bumped]
It’s not for detecting antibodies, but Abbot now has a device that can detect positive for the virus within five minutes, and all clear in fifteen. Would have been nice to have it a couple months ago, but better late than never.
[Update late morning]
None of this is new, but it’s nice to see it laid out in one place.
We really need an antibody test ASAP, because that would allow those immunized (assuming that it confers immunity) to go back to work. As noted above, it may be that in order to work in or eat at a restaurant, at least for a while, one will have to present their papers.
[Update a couple minutes later]
WW III is a war against infectious diseases.
We’ve been at war with them since the beginning of civilization, but we’re developing much better weapons now.
[Update just before noon]
We have a difficult five weeks ahead of us. Also:
To Paraphrase Rumsfeld, You Go into a Crisis with the President You Have
“I realize complaining about President Trump’s Twitter feed is like complaining about the existence of rain in Seattle. But in recent days, as the country has faced a worsening viral epidemic that has claimed an increasing number of lives and brought commerce to a halt, the president has found time to repeatedly tweet about how great the television ratings of his briefings are, made up a new nickname for the governor of Michigan, retweeted Gateway Pundit’s claim that ‘Fox News fired Trish Regan for telling the truth about President Trump,’ — this was over her ‘Coronavirus Impeachment Scam’ segment — boasted about how high his poll numbers are and how the Washington Post is understating his public support, declared that the U.S. government would not pay for the security protection of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and also retweeted a two-year-old tweet from Florida governor Ron DeSantis about Andrew McCabe. He tweeted that he was thinking about instituting a quarantine of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which is probably the perfect way to get people to leave a particular area in expectation of a quarantine. A few hours later Trump announced, via Twitter, that a travel advisory was sufficient.
Perhaps most egregiously, President Trump tweeted that he had ‘much respect’ for Chinese president Xi, who is probably more responsible for this worldwide pandemic than any other human being on earth.
This president cares about what he chooses to care about, and he prioritizes what he prioritizes, even amidst a global pandemic that is killing several hundred Americans per day and stands as the greatest challenge to this country in at least a generation. We will have to get through this with a president who simply cannot stop obsessing over television ratings, what’s being said about him on television, Fox News personnel moves, whether governors are giving him sufficient praise, minor decisions involving the royal family, and how nice the leader of China is.”
[Early-afternoon update]
Yes, we should random test the general population ASAP.
It should work. I’ve had it myself, successfully, against a far worse disease: rabies.
The modern rabies series involves four shots in the upper arm (at one week intervals), much like a flu vaccination. But accompanying the initial shot, at least for post-exposure prophylaxis, is a hefty set of immunoglobulin injections. These are the antibodies for rabies taken from humans with immunity. If you’ve have a recent wound from a rabid animal, they concentrate the injections around the wound site. I had an enormous scratch inflicted by a raccoon – but I had waited more than a week to seek treatment, so they distributed the five antibody shots to various places on my extremities.
Rabies is 100% fatal, and I had developed the early symptoms of an infection. Though we didn’t have the animal, the ER doctor assessed my wound and my symptoms and said “You have to have the rabies series, because if you get rabies, you die.” The symptoms (flu-like) disappeared almost immediately – within single digit hours – after the immunoglobulin injections.
It came at a price. The whole series was over $17,000. But I suspect the number of donors available for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies will be much larger than the donor base for rabies, so it may be less expensive – maybe a lot less.
I’m glad to see this happening. For one thing, it will encourage much, much wider testing, and we can finally get a handle on the actual mortality rate.
I was attacked by a rabid raccoon once. The score was me 1, raccoon 0, in a quite shocking display of brutality on my part that involved a garden hoe. Unfortunately I didn’t know to cut his head off and send it to our state lab, so I just buried him in the yard.
Later, a crazy hairdresser housemate with a drug habit and clinical narcissism threatened to call the police if I didn’t call the city department that comes out to dig up small wild animals that were buried in people’s yards, despite my assurances that neither our city, nor any city, has such a department.
Anyway, a half dozen or so people have survived rabies with the Milwaukee protocol, which has failed more often than it has succeeded, but prior to it everything failed. New Scientist article.
Corona virus has me thinking about heat instead of cold. It’s destroyed in five minutes at 158 F and in 30 minutes at 130 F. Humans can breathe air that’s up to 160 F without killing all their lung cells, and 130 F is not that uncommon for people in certain desert areas. A 1930’s study on miners found that resting workers could breathe 130 F air for hours, and found the resting tolerance limit was 140 to 150 F. Note that this wasn’t their body temperature, or the air temperature around their bodies, just the air being piped to their lungs. I don’t know what the final air temperature in the lungs would be, due to cooling on the way in, but would breathing really hot air help kill the virus that’s attacking the lungs?
I wish I had more data at hand, but unfortunately every web site referencing humans and air temperature limits is about how a 2 degree global increase will wipe out all of human civilization.
*The paper I pulled up was “Physiological Response to Breathing Hot Air” by by Esther M. Killick, University of Leeds, 1931.
On the radio the other day, they were laughing at some guy that claimed that breathing in through the nose from a hairdryer would kill all the virus. Amid various degrees of burn to the nasal cavities.
That’s quite an idea, George. It seems like a simple thing to add a heater to a ventilator, and have a fast-response platinum resistance thermometer at the tube exit to maintain close control over the temperature.
My wife and I were traveling through Kentucky, and spent the night at a big chain motel. After we got home, we discovered that we had picked up bedbugs from that motel. We then discovered an outfit that does bedbug extermination in one day, with no insecticides. They heat up the affected room to 140 F. Bedbugs, their larvae, and eggs all die at 130 F. Doing the job with insecticides requires several separate treatments, one for the bugs, others for eggs and larvae.
It was quite an operation, and did the trick. A bit pricey, but less than the multi-treatment fumigation approach.
Human trials of human plasma would be preferable to humanizing chimeric monoclonal antibodies I saw in a previous study, (see “Virus” and “Seattle” threads) although probably all approaches should be followed-up. The bad news here is that we are getting more and more cases of COVID-19, the good news is that there are plenty of survivors from which to draw plasma and human antibodies to treat the sick.
I was wondering why the TV and radio are starting to bombard the listeners with blood donation ads… Preparing the battlespace for mass plasma drives?
There is also a shortage of blood due to social distancing, just because hospitals normally need blood not because of the epidemic.
Mass plasma drives would not be effective. You need plasma specifically from survivors, preferably ones that had been symptomatic and recovered. A positive test for antibodies known to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 might also make a viable plasma donor candidate. Those who test negative would not.
Hey Rand, here is something that you might want to look at.
How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/26/821688981/how-south-korea-reigned-in-the-outbreak-without-shutting-everything-down
Other news websites are also talking about that.
Trump is doing as well as could be expected from any President. He is attacked by the media and Democrats for successful policies when they aren’t creating carefully crafted deceits about him. Am I supposed to get upset that he fights back and should I listen to some low information bubble head that gets suckered by his peers into believing manipulated stories about what Trump says? How is it that someone gets paid to form opinions on something as simple as the current event surrounding politics and can’t do basic research to put anything in context? Oh, too much time letting Twitter do his thinking for him I’m sure.
Our media are trash.
Rapid and repeated testing. I think one sector of our economy that needs this implemented immediately is the fast food industry. I have refused eating fast food until this is put in place. I want these people tested and tested repeatedly to know they are not spreading disease, esp. in light that the contagious can be asymptomatic.
A-when there’s no one else in sight,
A-in crowded lonely night
Well, I social distance for disease resistance
And I’m shopping with myself