Post by sagobob on Apr 23, 2020 18:32:08 GMT -8
"On many minds: Maybe I’ve already had Covid-19"
"Now that we can be pretty sure the coronavirus was loose in the U.S. much earlier than anyone previously knew, quite a few Americans are recalling that nasty bug that walloped them over the winter and asking, could that have been Covid-19?
And it’s not just civilians. Doctors are thinking back to unexplained respiratory cases among their patients. Medical examiners are looking for more misattributed deaths like the ones in California that rewrote the U.S. virus timeline this week. And local politicians are demanding investigations.
Researchers now say that hidden outbreaks were seeping through cities like Chicago, New York, Seattle and Boston in January and February, as unaware residents were going about their lives with no restrictions on their movements.
Public health experts now believe that for every known coronavirus case in the U.S., there are 5 to 20 more unknown ones — people who either had no symptoms or chalked them up to some other illness, and were never tested.
Could you be one of them — and now possibly immune to the virus? It’s complicated, experts say.
If you got over it a while ago, the virus probably won’t show up in a diagnostic test now. The way to spot past exposure is with an antibody test — but the tests presently being used to survey large populations do not yield reliable results for individuals.
More accurate antibody tests are on the way, but even if yours comes back positive, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re protected. Scientists don’t yet know how much immunity the antibodies offer, or how long it lasts.
'Everyone desperately wants to be immune to this thing,' said Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, 'and they’re projecting the hope onto the data.'
More likely: Keep in mind that for all the focus on the coronavirus, it was also a bad winter for seasonal influenza. So if you felt lousy in January or February, that’s probably what it was, not Covid-19.
High rates: Antibody screening tests are finding surprisingly high rates of coronavirus exposure in some states, including New York. Out of about 3,000 grocery shoppers who were checked, 14 percent statewide — and 21 percent in New York City — were positive.
Experts warned against reading too much into preliminary results, noting that the sample was far from representative. Even so, the results raised hope that many people who never became ill may now have some immunity."
My take is that the experts are still trying to sort this out and the rest of us need to stay the course. I've read some unsettling things about the accuracy of the swab test and the blood test only tells you whether you've had the disease or not.
And from The Guardian, here's some discouraging news about a potential treatment: "Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.
The drug is in short supply globally because of the excitement it has generated. It is one of the drugs Donald Trump claimed was 'promising'.
In a 'gold standard' trial of 237 patients, some of whom received remdesivir while others did not, the drug did not work. The trial was also stopped early because of side-effects.
News of the failure was posted on a World Health Organization clinical trials database, but later removed. A WHO spokesman said it had been uploaded too soon by accident."
For clarity, my are words formatted in italics