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Txzen

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Posts posted by Txzen

  1. A few weeks ago I was looking at air B&B rentals in southern Oregon to escape the smoke in the Bay Area. Jobs and school are remote, and we're all on our devices anyway. 

    Just awful to see it - looks like Paradise/Santa Rosa all over again. And still at least a month or two before we really start taking about rain in these parts. 

  2. Having just spent the long weekend along the Russian River up north (and the ocean beaches it reaches to), an additional issue right now is with the number of parks and beaches closed for COVID, the areas that are open get utterly swamped. PCH1 looked like the 405 on Sunday. 

    That area is one my favorites, and kayaking in that kelp field off the shore of the Aquarium in Monterrey is amazing. Just be prepared as to say the current situation is dynamic is an understatement. 

  3. Frankly, you might want to wait a bit - it's all on fire right now, from Santa Cruz to Healdsburg. Something like 1mil acres in a 100 mile radius of San Francisco. Air quality is unreal (except at the SF coast) all the way to Tahoe, there's no rain in the forecast until probably late October (if we're lucky). Most of our favorite wine spots in Healdsburg are closed now or had to evacuate.

    We have reservations in Guernville for Labor Day, and seeing as how the entire town is evacuated I seriously doubt we're going. 

    Looking at a two week rental in Oregon to try and escape the smoke. 

    Fuck 2020.

  4. It depends what you want, and it probably dependent on how this Fall goes. Likely no indoor attractions are going to be operational, and as noted other than sporadic sidewalk seating fine dining is a no-go. Some of the 'big' touristy stuff may be open - i.e. Pier 39 recently reopened. Outdoor tastings are popping up in wine country as well

    It could be a good time to do outdoorsy things, but the variable is you don't know if the parks will be open. For instance, some were closed to car traffic, but then access was pretty glorious by foot/bike. That said, San Mateo county was so fed up with people during the initial days of the lockdown they were stopping cars and asking for proof of residency in the area, and even cyclists were ticketed riding down from SF. In general, or at least at first, CA didn't suffer fools - we locked down. 

    You certainly could still walk around the city, and some sites will always be accessible, but boy these are strange time - a lot of what makes SF the tourist draw is not open at the moment. As noted, great for us 'locals', though. 

  5. 1 hour ago, GopherRock said:

    Anyone else seeing this "America's Frontline Doctors" shit? The fact that it was Breitbart that organized it immediately disqualifies it.

    Putting aside the source of the information (or at least the vehicle), I watched the first talk by the woman who is stated to be an ER doc in California. She recited results from a J of Virology paper which shows that chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronovirus, with the claim that as it was a 2005 publication that the 'cure' has been known for some time and it's all a coverup. 

    I read the paper. It's an in vitro study using immortalized neonatal monkey kidney cells with chloroquine - it's all on cells. The maximum inhibition of the virus achieved was with an in vitro concentration which bears little relevance to clinically relevant exposures in people actually taking the drug. Touting this as a proof of a cure shows such a meager understanding of science and medicine, it brings forth the adage 'do you know what they call the person who graduated last in medical school?'. Let's just say we cure cancer in a dish all the time - patients are a bit harder.

    Surprisingly, no zinc was included in the assay, which based on the current diatribe also is stated as being crucial. I guess when you effectively paste on chloroquine at supra-physiological levels you don't need it?

    • Hook 'Em 3
  6. I think that's what the Swiss paper is arguing - children rarely infected the household. But honestly, we're dealing with such minuscule information at this stage, I think it's hard to understand all the permutations. Maybe Orange County will be the test case. 

  7. Link to the above paper : https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2020/07/08/peds.2020-1576.full.pdf?download=true

    It's a study from Switzerland, looking at families and family transmission from March to April of this year, 'the clinical presentation of the first 40 pediatric cases of COVID-19 in our city'. 

    The positive read to the data is that  ~80% of the time it appeared that the adults in the household appeared COVID positive first, and 'only' 8% of the time were the children positive. Note that in Switzerland schools closed in March and only just reopened in May (link). The potential conclusion here is that children are less likely to be the primary vector of transmission, I suppose. But if the schools were closed, does this really tell us much? And 'only' 8%, in a situation where perhaps the children are mostly sequestered, may underreport the risk (and they ackloedge as much in the paper). 

    A longer rebuttal to my argument here, with additional global examples which may suggest that the potential transmission from child to adult is rare : COVID-19 Transmission and Children: The Child Is Not to Blame

  8. I'm hopeful as anyone else, mostly because mRNA vaccines may be the best approach from a scalability standpoint for a global pandemic. It's great to see there's a titer raised, but we don't yet know if it is effective (or protective). The adverse events with the 250ug injection mirror some of the moderate to severe reactions seen in previous trials with this approach in a cancer setting. Still a lot to understand with this system. 

    • Like 1
  9. Having rented a few boats on local lakes recently, none of them came with an anchor. I can somewhat understand it as there can be a bit of an art to property anchoring a boat in wind and current, let alone accounting for what it may be sticking in (sounds like this lake/reservoir had lots of submerged foliage). I'm going to guess she was not a super experienced boater, and it is often surprising how much even a big pontoon boat can drift in the breeze. Agreed the whole scenario has some strange components to it, though. 

  10. 4 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

    Sister in Law lives in Geneva.  Switzerland is pretty badass.  Starts to feel small but quick flight to some other amazing places.  

    Oh and it’s expensive af.  

    Lovely place, but (and no offense to your SIL) unfortunately it's full of Swiss people. 

    • Like 1
  11. That's probably a fair interpretation of the data, the question then is how many particles (and how unlucky) do you have to be to contract it. But it's measuring the actual number of viral particles (titer), and note that we're starting with a pretty large number, and that's a log scale graph. 

    These are all mechanically-generated aerosols, and there are other studies out there which say you've got measurable virus farther out to 16h link

    There's some additional consideration that aerosols are not always so easily generated in real life, and the dynamics of a normal room (like an OR) could be different: Link

    Quote

    “These are only generated under very specific circumstances during certain hospital procedures,” she explains, such as bronchoscopy or intubation. That could actually mean these findings – which saw COVID-19 aerosols created using a nebulizer – hold some good news for ongoing coronavirus treatment. 

    “This data suggests that aerosolized virus half-life is measured in hours,” Dr. Rasmussen suggests, “and aerosols generated by these medical procedures will not persist for days, for example in the hospital procedure rooms.”

    “Furthermore, both viruses also showed a 3-log decrease in infectious virus on stainless steel and plastic surfaces after 48-72 hours,” she added. “This suggests that, while viruses can stay on some surfaces for days, their infectious titer is greatly reduced (1000-fold).”

     

  12. On 6/22/2020 at 12:37 PM, jimmyjazz said:

    I'm sure I could dig back and find this, but maybe someone can provide a quick answer informed by current science:

    What is the expected "hang time" for aerosolized particles indoors?  One of my wife's best friends owns a dance studio and her employee who did routine after-class cleaning quit.  The owner can't do it all herself so she asked my wife to help out.  I'm just wondering how long is a reasonable amount of time to wait after classes before entering the facility.  All kids wear masks while in class . . . but, kids.  All are screened for fever before class as well, but that's certainly not diagnostically robust.

    We want to help her out, as she has always been super helpful to us, but I need to know the risks.

    I think the issue (for me) would be an indoor area where a lot of exertion has occurred. The more and deeper you breathe, the more droplets you will generate

    There's a fair amount of data out there on survival or aerosols of this coronovirus family. I think the time component of aerosol infectivity is still in the period of understanding, and it certainly depends on the size of the droplet, the temperature at least:

    • "...airborne coronavirus MERS-CoV exhibited strong capability of surviving, with about 64% of microorganisms remaining infectious 60 min after atomization at 25 °C and 79% relative humidity (RH) (9). On the other hand, rapid virus decay occurred, with only 5% survival over a 60-min procedure at 38 °C and 24% RH, indicative of inactivation. Recent experimental studies have examined the stability of SARS-CoV-2, showing that the virus remains infectious in aerosols for hours (12) and on surfaces up to days". link
    • "The SARS-CoV-2 virus has been found to remain viable in aerosols for 3 h, while it, in the form of droplets, is more stable on plastic and stainless steel, copper, cardboard, and glass with durations detected up to 72, 4, 24, and 84 h, respectively. In comparison, the SARS-CoV virus was also found to be airborne in the form of aerosols for 3 h, indicating that both SARS viruses behave more or less in the same manner in the air. Nevertheless, the SARS-CoV virus remains stable and viable in the form of droplets on plastic and stainless steel, copper, cardboard, and glass with durations (half-lives) lasting to 72, 8, 8, and 96 h, respectively." link, and the original NEJM paper which shows at least 3h of aerosol data: NEJM
    • Like 1
  13. 3 hours ago, Treefidy said:

    Not just speculation, let me help out with this line of thinking. 

    Therefore, we synthesized the SHC014 spike in the context of the replication competent, mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone (SHC014- MA15)

    here:  https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985.pdf?origin=ppub

    And here:  https://www.med.unc.edu/orfeome/files/2018/03/a-sars-like-cluster-of-circulating-bat-coronaviruses-shows-potential-for-human-emergence.pdf

     

    this is a scientific paper about how they were combining SHC014 which is the virus 96% similar to COV19 with SARS to create something that 

    And about SHC014

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151110115711.htm

    This virus is highly pathogenic and treatments developed against the original SARS virus in 2002 and the ZMapp drugs used to fight Ebola fail to neutralize and control this particular virus,

    i mean, it's not as good as YouTube for some people on here, but they were absolutely fucking around with bat corona viruses and making new ones that were both highly pathogenic, infects  the airways through ACE2, transfers straight from bat to humans, and resistant to known treatments.   We don't know for certain where this virus originated but all the coincidences surrounding the lab make it hard to think it instead came from the market a block away with no known intermediate host.  

    Seems a lot more likely it came out of the lab and the market turned out to be an early place for it to spread easily.  

    You cracked it, man - the virus came from UNC Chapel Hill (where most of the authors of those papers were from). 

    No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2

    Quote

    Some people have alleged that the human SARS-CoV-2 was leaked directly from a laboratory in Wuhan where a bat CoV (RaTG13) was recently reported, which shared ∼96% homology with the SARS-CoV-2 [4]. However, as we know, the human SARS-CoV and intermediate host palm civet SARS-like CoV shared 99.8% homology, with a total of 202 single-nucleotide (nt) variations (SNVs) identified across the genome [6]. Given that there are greater than 1,100 nt differences between the human SARS-CoV-2 and the bat RaTG13-CoV [4], which are distributed throughout the genome in a naturally occurring pattern following the evolutionary characteristics typical of CoVs, it is highly unlikely that RaTG13 CoV is the immediate source of SARS-CoV-2. The absence of a logical targeted pattern in the new viral sequences and a close relative in a wildlife species (bats) are the most revealing signs that SARS-CoV-2 evolved by natural evolution.

    Quote

    Another claim in Chinese social media points to a Nature Medicine paper published in 2015 [7], which reports the construction of a chimeric CoV with a bat CoV S gene (SHC014) in the backbone of a SARS CoV that has adapted to infect mice (MA15) and is capable of infecting human cells [8]. However, this claim lacks any scientific basis and must be discounted because of significant divergence in the genetic sequence of this construct with the new SARS-CoV-2 (>5,000 nucleotides).

     

    Quote

    Regardless, upon careful phylogenetic analyses by multiple international groups [5,14], the SARS-CoV-2 is undoubtedly distinct from SL-SHC014-MA15, with >6,000 nucleotide differences across the whole genome. Therefore, once again there is no credible evidence to support the claim that the SARS-CoV-2 is derived from the chimeric SL-SHC014-MA15 virus.

     

    • Like 1
  14. 56 minutes ago, ChiTownDoc said:

    Definitely next level shit. 

    It is, but this same approach for MERS and SARS didn't really get far as previously mentioned, though that may be more business driven than science driven. 

    I see early safety reports from this approach from Oxford for SARS and MERS, with similar findings that it appears that neutralizing antibodies were produced, and cellular immunity induced. Don't know if it actually provides immunity, yet. It sure needs to work. 

    • Like 1
  15. 1 minute ago, BabaYaga said:

    You willing to bet your entire life's savings on that?  Your house?  Your car?  Your job?  Your family?  All I'm saying is this can't continue.  Big pharma is not the light at the end of the tunnel.  If they are, we should all be scared.  Destroying generational wealth for a virus with a mortality rate of less than 1% isn't going to cut it for much longer.  

    Clearly I won't waste my time talking science with you. Carry on. 

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