Coronavirus thread

[RoyGBiv]

The negative tests are comforting, but she's not out of the woods at six days. I think the guidelines may have changed since last summer, but I pretty much kept to myself for two weeks after my July exposure. Regardless, I hope the next week is completely uneventful for her.

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Thanks for the correction. Much appreciated.

[Wondering Beard]

I don't see how this is any different than what has been happening in the United States (State and cities imposing their own restrictions vs the federal gov't), which has not been terribly effective to date.



That is already far more restrictive than anything that the US federal government has ordered AFAIK

That's why the absence of facts in the article is irritating.

Let's assume the Swiss have cut their numbers down as described (the Swiss are pretty serious, so it's a safe assumption). If they've just done more or less what the US did, that opens up a bunch of questions about why it works for them and not us (and the Swiss aren't monolithic culturally either so "average Swiss" behavior and culture is not enough to make a difference). If they did stuff that was not a harsh general lockdown but more specifically targeted policies (and the article doesn't say beyond generalities when it should look at things in detail canton by canton), I'd like to know what they were.

[karandom]

Daughter reported this morning that 2 of her friends tested positive. One yesterday, one today (got both calls today). She spent time with the first one this past Wednesday. Spent time with the second one on Thanksgiving. First one entirely outside, mostly masked, except for some time across a table drinking coffee outside. Second was mostly outside but also in a car, masked. Second friend had been tested the day before (Wednesday before TG holiday) as part of a university athletics program. Daughter was worried that she was the link between the two, and worried for us as well.

After shitting a brick for a few hours her rapid test came back negative. 6 days and 5 days post contact should be reliable from what I understand?

We'll use this as an opportunity to reinforce COVID protocols (that seemed to have been effective in this case) with both kids.

Too close for comfort.

Quick point of reference, rapid tests don't do a good job of clearing asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic cases. They have a high levels of false negatives.

A PCR test is a better determinant when your don't have symptoms to be safe.

[JAD]

The negative tests are comforting, but she's not out of the woods at six days. I think the guidelines may have changed since last summer, but I pretty much kept to myself for two weeks after my July exposure. Regardless, I hope the next week is completely uneventful for her.

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The CDC will revise their guidelines tomorrow to 10 days with no test, 7 days after a test. I presume PCR.

[pangloss]

Quick point of reference, rapid tests don't do a good job of clearing asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic cases. They have a high levels of false negatives.

A PCR test is a better determinant when your don't have symptoms to be safe.

Locally, the specificity of the antigen quick test is a little shy of 70%, so better than a coin toss but not by much. This value is within the lower bounds of what the manufacturer says to expect. Consequently, negatives are treated as presumptive negatives and followed up with a PCR test.

The CDC will revise their guidelines tomorrow to 10 days with no test, 7 days after a test. I presume PCR.

Hopefully this guideline is not too lenient. I'd rather them make more incremental changes. Why not try 12 days for while and see how that works out? Maybe going from 10 to 14 days only moves you from catching 95% of cases to 99%. I guess we'll know more soon enough.

[JAD]

Hopefully this guideline is not too lenient. I'd rather them make more incremental changes. Why not try 12 days for while and see how that works out? Maybe going from 10 to 14 days only moves you from catching 95% of cases to 99%. I guess we'll know more soon enough.

They’ll release the recommendation shortly and I’d appreciate a look at the supporting rationale. In terms of why, as a manufacturer of things, quarantine sucks. Every unnecessary day of quarantine takes a skilled worker out of the line, which means that either the thing that was supposed to get made doesn’t. This has huge impacts to efficiency, when we’re already trying to manage schedules that have had huge amounts of uncertainty introduced by the pandemic. Lots of us are losing our ass. The more skilled the position, the worse the impact. You can’t unfuck a robot on Teams.

We have had a full floor through the entire pandemic (save a 50% skeleton in April while we moved the line around to space stuff out) and we have had zero community spread. We’ve lost no floor time to the illness itself, but have really suffered from contact-related quarantine. This will absolutely cost jobs next year. I understand that lives are at stake but we are not seeing our workplace as a spreading vector.

[Bio]

They’ll release the recommendation shortly and I’d appreciate a look at the supporting rationale. In terms of why, as a manufacturer of things, quarantine sucks. Every unnecessary day of quarantine takes a skilled worker out of the line, which means that either the thing that was supposed to get made doesn’t. This has huge impacts to efficiency, when we’re already trying to manage schedules that have had huge amounts of uncertainty introduced by the pandemic. Lots of us are losing our ass. The more skilled the position, the worse the impact. You can’t unfuck a robot on Teams.

We have had a full floor through the entire pandemic (save a 50% skeleton in April while we moved the line around to space stuff out) and we have had zero community spread. We’ve lost no floor time to the illness itself, but have really suffered from contact-related quarantine. This will absolutely cost jobs next year. I understand that lives are at stake but we are not seeing our workplace as a spreading vector.

We're in the same place. There are HR and QA people that can work from home, but manufacturing, QC, and development need to happen in a lab. No amount of working at home makes up for it. So I got a Covid scare (son had a cold) a few weeks back and had to self quarantine for a couple days, according to company policy. We have the good fortune that most work is independent, so I was able to make up time by working weekends, I understand that most manufacturing can't do that.

[scw2]

Question for the scientists on whether the following claim/logic appears to be accurate, and whether that means we should still be cautious around others who may have received the vaccine prior to getting vaccinated ourselves.

The best way for getting herd immunity is first to get the vaccine, then second get exposed to it in your nose so that the IgG plasma cells in the armpit lymph nodes migrate to your nose. Downside being that 2nd step half of that process takes 3-10 days, so until then you're basically an asymptomatic spreader. After both steps have taken place, though, your nose and throat will have enough COVID neutralizing IgA to block transmission. So post vaccination there may be 1-2 months of silent spread which would not be good for those without the vaccine yet.

[pangloss]

Question for the scientists on whether the following claim/logic appears to be accurate, and whether that means we should still be cautious around others who may have received the vaccine prior to getting vaccinated ourselves.

The best way for getting herd immunity is first to get the vaccine, then second get exposed to it in your nose so that the IgG plasma cells in the armpit lymph nodes migrate to your nose. Downside being that 2nd step half of that process takes 3-10 days, so until then you're basically an asymptomatic spreader. After both steps have taken place, though, your nose and throat will have enough COVID neutralizing IgA to block transmission. So post vaccination there may be 1-2 months of silent spread which would not be good for those without the vaccine yet.

Not accurate. On a practical level, the safest thing to do is to assume you are susceptible until about a week after your second vaccination. I'll write more about the immune response when I'm not on my phone. Key considerations are the differences between infection and pneumonia and which antibodies are where and and for how long.

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[pangloss]

They’ll release the recommendation shortly and I’d appreciate a look at the supporting rationale. In terms of why, as a manufacturer of things, quarantine sucks. Every unnecessary day of quarantine takes a skilled worker out of the line, which means that either the thing that was supposed to get made doesn’t. This has huge impacts to efficiency, when we’re already trying to manage schedules that have had huge amounts of uncertainty introduced by the pandemic. Lots of us are losing our ass. The more skilled the position, the worse the impact. You can’t unfuck a robot on Teams.

We have had a full floor through the entire pandemic (save a 50% skeleton in April while we moved the line around to space stuff out) and we have had zero community spread. We’ve lost no floor time to the illness itself, but have really suffered from contact-related quarantine. This will absolutely cost jobs next year. I understand that lives are at stake but we are not seeing our workplace as a spreading vector.

I'm not sure I know what to tell you. My suspicion is that only a very small fraction of people actually become ill more than ten days after exposure. Quarantining for two full weeks might prevent 99% of transmission, while quarantining for 10 days might prevent 95% of transmission. I know that there are economists who study this sort of thing and the productivity lost in order to get than last 4% reduction in transmission is probably not worth the cost. The data used to make these kinds of decision doesn't isn't as firm as animal experiments run in a lab, but I'm pretty comfortable taking the CDC's recommendations at face value. I think they are unlikely to be significantly wrong about this.

Getting back to the question at hand, the data available last summer said that on average people shed the most virus on day 4 and become symptomatic on day 5. The biology that determines the quarantine time is how wide that curve is. I think that's difficult to know, especially for people who have asymptomatic infections. A secondary question is how much virus is shed by people asymptomatic infection. Layer these idea on top of population heterogeneity and you'll realize that if you could somehow accurately measure all of these things in people walking around in the world that the error bars would be huge. So, even if the CDC is "wrong" it's pretty much impossible to say what would be "right." Consequently, following CDC guidelines seems the best course for limiting any sort of liability.

The private schools around here have been making up their own rules and not reporting sick students to the state department of health. (I have it on good authority that some public schools aren't reporting appropriately either.) I can confidently say that a four day quarantine is not sufficient, but people are going to do what they want to do. I continue to be astounded at how politicized this has become. It's really very unfortunate.