A New Mexico native and New Mexico State University alum has developed a test that allows individuals to see if they are infected with the coronavirus. Bobby Brooke Herrera is the interim CEO and chief science officer at E25Bio, a company he helped co-found in 2018 with career MIT researcher Irene Bosch and MIT professor Lee Gehrke.
In a news release, the E235 Bio DART is described as a less expensive, paper-based test that is able to deliver COVID-19 results in 15 minutes or less. The test is said to be similar to a pregnancy test as it provides results in a visual readout and doesn’t have any moving parts or machinery.
Hopefully this 15 minute test will be widely available sooner rather than later.
What I have read it about it, is that although it's not as accurate, it's good at detecting how infectious you are. The standard test is extremely sensitive, and some scientists think it's too much so. So when they test positive on the standard test, they might not be infectious at all (in fact, the window of infectiousness only lasts a couple of days, unless you become sick enough to be hospitalized, then it's a few days more).
So having a simple test you can take at home or at work or school (heck, even on admission to a concert) will be extremely useful in the real world. As the important thing is to test to see if you are currently infectious or not, rather than simply having covid.
This test will be a game changer for having events not otherwise possible. But first it has to be cheaply available (the former is very likely, but the question is, how long before widely available).
A New Mexico professor with a long history of studying viruses, believes students should be returning to campus for school. She even wrote an op-ed on the matter.
The New Mexico State University biology professor says being back on campus is what students really want and thinks keeping them away from a traditional college experience will do more harm than good. “People have a genuine need for social connection and interactions and I think campus is able to satisfy that in a safe way as per se going to a bar to have your interactions and then making foolish decisions about taking off your mask and then having a cluster of infections associated with the bar,” says Dr. Kathryn Hanley, Regents Professor of Biology.
Despite the rising number of cases among the college-age population students are set to return to campus for in-person classes in mid-August. They’ll also do online studies. Dr. Hanley sites a modeling study done by researchers at Cornell University that says if the right safeguards are in place students would be safer on campus than out in the community.
Hanley says this semester they are requiring masks at all times, they’ve reconfigured classrooms to allow for social distancing and they plan to screen and test students to look out for the virus. “We don’t expect to have no cases of sars coronavirus on campus that’s not a realistic expectation our goal is that campus doesn’t act as an engine of infections we don’t see rates of infection that are higher than rates of the surrounding area,” Hanley says.
Hanley says a lot of the responsibility will fall on students, especially those who live off-campus. “What we need from the students and what we hope to have the students is real buy-in, where they are acting responsibly because they recognize that they really love being on campus and they want to retain that privilege of being on campus and they understand they have to act responsibly to retain that,” Hanley says.
Right now Dona Ana county is seeing one of the biggest spikes in the state, with one COVID case for every 105 people for context, in Bernalillo County, there’s only one confirmed case for every 152 people. The University of New Mexico also plans on doing a hybrid learning model when school starts on August 7.
A few seconds into the video, and there’s plenty of kids not observing social distancing, as expected. And at the end of the video, the kid wearing the mask under his nose. This isn’t going to end well.
Well I’ll tell ya Detroit, if some districts have gone ahead and made the decision to reopen, then every little bit safety measure helps and Corinth’s is markedly better than doing it the Jefferson, Ga. way….validated with this scientifically uneducated excuse from the district supervisor in Georgia from The Great Owl’s link-
“The reason they were not being mandated had nothing to do with politics, she said, but because students with disabilities or other medical conditions may not be able to wear them.”
In spite of quacks who claim the government is working on a secret vaccine with the intent of preventing people from being religious and publicly promoting other bizarre public health and therapeutic assertions,
with all the recent legitimate vaccine buzz, something flying under the radar are therapeutics like the two monoclonal antibody cocktail REGN-COV2, the investigation of which includes two ‘uninfected’ populations in its clinical program - https://investor.regeneron.com/news-...viral-antibody
Wearing masks might help you avoid major illness even if you get coronavirus, experts
The importance of masking up is huge, not only in preventing you from getting Covid, but also in reducing the severity in case you get it anyway.
Quote:
Q: What’s the point of wearing a cloth face covering if it doesn’t filter out everything?
A: Cloth face masks still provide a major protective benefit: They filter out a majority of viral particles.
As it turns out, that’s pretty important. Breathing in a small amount of virus may lead to no disease or a more mild infection. But inhaling a huge volume of virus particles can result in serious disease or death.
That’s the argument Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is making about why — if you do become infected with the virus — masking can still protect you from more severe disease.
“There is this theory that facial masking reduces the (amount of virus you get exposed to) and disease severity,” said Gandhi, who is also director for the Center for AIDS Research at UC San Francisco.
Quote:
the reason a small amount of virus often leads to a less severe illness is because when the virus starts to replicate it is a race between it and your immune system- if your immune system can produce enough antibodies first you win, if you get a larger dose the virus has a leg up and it can win.
Humidity also weakens virus so that can help as well. They have known about the small dose being more survivable for centuries-going back to smallpox. They used to give a tiny amount of virus to people through insufflation through the nose. The death rate was then 1 percent versus 25 percent for a person encountering smallpox from another person.
There was thus 1 death for every 25 when comparing small doses to large- this was all they had till they developed a vaccine for smallpox. Another factor besides number of virus is if the virus is weakened enough-one polio vaccine relied on weakened virus but it also had issues with that virus reactivating itself.
Masks both reduce the amount of virus and may weaken it as well by keeping your airways more humid as moisture is not expelled as well
All I know is if our governor doesn't change the health order after the 31st to exclude masks from running I'm going to start sending her like 40 emails a day complaining lol.
All I know is if our governor doesn't change the health order after the 31st to exclude masks from running I'm going to start sending her like 40 emails a day complaining lol.
Maybe it varies per state but for the most part I believe you only have to wear a mask when social distancing isn't feasible. If you're running you likely won't be close to others.
Maybe it varies per state but for the most part I believe you only have to wear a mask when social distancing isn't feasible. If you're running you likely won't be close to others.
The only exceptions here if you leave your property now are eating, drinking and swimming. So I take that to mean you have to wear a mask while running, even outside. If that turns out not to be the case I will be very happy because I suck quite a bit at masked running.
Herd Immunity Seems to Be Developing in Mumbai’s Poorest Areas
Regarding India. More evidence that cases fell sharply in NYC and Sweden due to herd immunity developed in the dense, poor areas of the cities, where social distancing is impossible (and indeed some neighborhoods of NYC did reach 60-70% antibody levels). When the most dangerous areas are neutralized, it slows spread everywhere.
Quote:
Around six in ten people living in some of India’s biggest slums have antibodies for the novel coronavirus indicating they’ve recovered from infection, in what appears to be one of the highest population immunity levels known worldwide.
The findings, from a July serological survey of 6,936 people across three suburbs in India’s financial center of Mumbai, may explain why a steep drop in infections is being seen among the closely-packed population, despite new cases accelerating overall in the hard-hit country.
“Mumbai’s slums may have reached herd immunity,” said Jayaprakash Muliyil, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of India’s National Institute of Epidemiology, and the retired head of one of its premier medical colleges. “If people in Mumbai want a safe place to avoid infection, they should probably go there.”
The findings of the study, which was conducted by municipal authorities and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, suggest that despite efforts to contain its spread, Mumbai’s poorest places may have unwittingly pursued the controversial strategy of herd immunity. This describes an approach in which infection is allowed to run through a population to faster neutralize the pathogen’s threat.
About 57% of surveyed people in the slums of Dahisar, Chembur and Matunga had antibodies in their blood, compared to 21.2% found in an April study in New York City, and 14% reported in Stockholm in May.
A “hands-off” approach has been criticized in places like Sweden, where it appears to have resulted in more deaths than neighboring countries that implemented lockdowns. But the findings from Mumbai’s slums, where the population is young and less pre-disposed to severe cases of Covid-19, may support public health strategies more focused on protecting the vulnerable without trying to suppress the virus completely.
With social distancing more or less impossible, Mumbai’s slums are singularly well-suited for the coronavirus’s spread. Dharavi, the largest, packs a population as big as San Francisco’s into an area the size of New York’s Central Park, with as many as 80 people often sharing a public toilet, and families of eight regularly packed in a 100-square-foot room.
Yet the slums have seen steep drops in infections in recent weeks after cases first erupted in April, even as India’s overall cases grow at the fastest pace globally. Credit has largely been given to the intensive containment measures officials implemented in the slums, like door-to-door health screenings and rapidly-erected quarantine facilities.
The serological findings suggest another possibility: the crisis may be largely over because the virus has spread efficiently, not because it was stopped.
“One explanation is they did an excellent job containing it, the other is that herd immunity has been reached,” Muliyil said. “The virus does its work. The virus doesn’t worry about your quarantine and it is much more efficient than your efforts to contain it.”
He does, however, credit the government’s containment measures with keeping mortality rates low in the slums, because the proactive surveillance ensured that cases were caught early and given high quality care. Of a population as big as a million people, Dharavi has recorded 253 deaths.
Growing herd immunity may also be behind the dip in cases in the capital city of New Delhi, said Muliyil, where a study in early July found that a quarter of the population had been exposed.
Epidemiologists generally believe that infection levels must reach 60% to create herd immunity. But exposure concentrated in the populations least able to socially distance could still slow the overall spread of infection.
In Mumbai overall, new cases dropped to the lowest tally in almost three months this week, although the July antibody survey found only 16% had been exposed to the virus among those living in places where social distancing is more feasible, like apartment buildings and houses.
Plus, as cruel as it sounds, it killed off the weakest people first and thinned the herd so the people who are getting it now are less prone to being killed by it.
Plus, as cruel as it sounds, it killed off the weakest people first and thinned the herd so the people who are getting it now are less prone to being killed by it.
It said 253 people died of covid in an area with about a million people. So not that bad. If 600,000 of them were infected, that a mortality rate of only 0.04%.
Again, with all due respect. As horrifying as the numbers are, the deaths are actually not that high against the infected numbers. That is a rather binary way to look at it but for the sake of discussion that's what I'm doing.
Also you have to wonder, with the very low amount of testing. How many people have had this thing and they did nothing but become carriers? 5? 10 times as many as the reported cases? Means it's probably harmless to most people.
Yeah, as callous as it sounds, it's probably time for the shutdown to end for those of us who are in the under 60 demographic. Still continue to have social distancing and masks and so forth but re-open businesses before this recession becomes worse than it already is.
The US needs to reset its response with policy actions at the federal, state and local level to get control of the Covid-19 pandemic, scholars at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security said in a new report today.
“Unlike many countries in the world, the United States is not currently on course to get control of this epidemic,” the report says. “It is time to reset.”
The report includes 10 recommendations that include universal mask mandates, federal leadership to improve testing and, in places where transmission is worsening, stay-at-home orders.
stuff like that. This weird conspiracy stuff and people thinking they are "in the know" is why places like the US are alas where they are right now and that includes my many friends in the US and their families. Some people should just stay away from social media for a while.
Just a few weeks ago a co-worker of an friend of mine from Colorado literally said the he saw a Youtube video where an "ex-colleague" of Fauci said that Fauci created the virus and how my friend's co-worker thought he has it all figured out now. I mean....what do you say in a case like that? You try to be friendly but that is just crazy BS. The kind of crazy BS that is killing people right now. And it's just sad, really. Because none of this needed to happen this way. Bullshit is literally killing people right now.
I don't understand why the OP didn't want any political or social commentary. How can you talk about something so politically and socially impactful without political and social commentary?
I don't understand why the OP didn't want any political or social commentary. How can you talk about something so politically and socially impactful without political and social commentary?
The thread title was changed by administration due to the overwhelming focus on politics and other social issues on the fringe of the virus. Both of those topics are not inline with the focus of the website.
There are a lot of other website forums to discuss politics or social issues.
For me personally, I think taking politics out of the discussion helps focus on information concerning the virus and keeps the "noise" level down. Plus, when you add those subjects into the mix, it creates a slippery slope. I see that at another HT site, I wish they had incorporated this rule into their pandemic forum.
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