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COVID-19 / Is CoV2 finding new ways to kill?

« on: 05/08/2022 19:52:22 »

See from 4 minutes in to 5 minutes in

deaths within 28 days of a positive covid test are high, higher than for instance during the Delta wave. But deaths with covid on he death certificate are up but not nearly so much - below Delta levels (in the UK).

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus excess mortality is also higher, now, than during the BA.2 wave but "covid" deaths lower for BA.5 compared to BA.2. Excess mortality looked like it was lagging behind covid deaths during BA.2, but I may be reading more than is justifiable into the graphs in this last instance.

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COVID-19 / How could we say if omicron variants are intrinsically less pathogenic?

« on: 27/06/2022 04:33:38 »

Seropositivity to CoV2 is about 99% in the UK... ie virtually everyone has been infected or vaccinated. The ratio of hospitalizations to infections is greatly reduced compared to 2020 & 2021. Is there a way to distinguish between immunity and reduced virulence as the cause. It seems quite feasible that immunity could be entirely responsible.
North Korea isn't going to give us the data we would need.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / What's the lowdown on thorium reactors?

« on: 17/01/2022 02:11:21 »

I read an article on them. It said they were a lot safer than the reactors we currently use and had been shunned in the past because they didn't yield weapons grade material. I presume that there's much more too it than that.

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COVID-19 / Do the new cases by test reveal the whole story on Omicron in South Africa?

« on: 02/12/2021 20:29:42 »

This 9 minute video from Medcram compares reported new cases to RNA  testing of sewage in Gauteng without jumping to coclusions.

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Energy loss in electrolysis

« on: 10/11/2021 22:28:21 »

Supposing you electolyse a chemical and then recombine what you get to produce electricity. The main energy loss is in the recomnination? What is the % loss in each process?

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New Theories / Why herd imunity hasn't stopped the delta variant

« on: 05/10/2021 01:20:15 »

With over 90% seropositivity among UK adults and 88% among US blood donors, what happened to herd immunity?

The reason why delta still infects the vacccinated and the previously infected and the reason why around 90% seropositivity has not given us herd immunity against the delta variant is that the delta variant has mutated to shorten the incubation period to two days. It doesn't evade the antibodies if there are enough already circulating, but if there aren't enough it does evade the memory response by its short incubation period. By the time the memory B cells start churning out antibodies, the delta variant has already started shedding and infected new hosts.

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COVID-19 / What do you make of this paper?

« on: 05/05/2021 02:06:35 »

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&

More than 8% of the samples from the first week in september 2019 had CoV2 antibodies. If that were representative of the whole country, then 5 million Italians would have had covid by then, 23 doublings from the first case. Obviously, from the rest of the data, the regions where the first samples were taken isn't representative of the whole country. But in some places it was well established by the beginning of september.

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COVID-19 / Are any viruses known to make a quick exit once they're rumbled?

« on: 30/04/2021 16:24:30 »

I'm thinking of a strategy like this:- infect, multiply and as soon as a specific part of the immune system is detected by the virus it multiplies less and sheds more - to get into a new host and produce a lesser immune response in order to make reinfection of the same host, at a later date, easier.

What made me ask this?
The virus has often been said to be good (by viral standards) at evading the immune system - it seems to use more tricks than most. Generally, most symptoms of viral infection are actually caused by the immune system rather than the virus itself, but the viral load of CoV2 is high before any symptoms are noticed. The viral load peaks at about day 6: perhaps the T-cells quickly deal with CoV2 once detected but it would be unusual, even exceptional to start getting the better of a virus in just two days - it would be two days if symptom onset was indicative of infection recognition, especially one that is adept at evading the immune system.

If a strategy can work, then there will be organisms using that strategy.

Bonus points available for spotting the pun in the question.

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Chemistry / How are the wheat flakes in Weetabix stuck together?

« on: 16/04/2021 19:37:49 »

I could guess by starch or it just happens as it drys and or cools. But does anyone here actually know?

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COVID-19 / Vaccination or loackdown?

« on: 16/04/2021 19:09:05 »

Boris (and presumeably SAGE) says the fall in cases is largely due to lockdown.
Tim Spectre (and presimeably Blofeld) says it's vaccination.
What does our motley crew have to say?

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COVID-19 / Useful resource for variants

« on: 25/03/2021 12:36:34 »

Sorry not a question.
https://covariants.org/per-country

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COVID-19 / What's the difference between the German and British?

« on: 21/03/2021 00:36:23 »

When daily cases are at 8,000 the Brits say we must open everything up, the Germans say - time to start closing things.

Is this some kind of joke?

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COVID-19 / Clots and low platelet count - is there a connection with disease?

« on: 18/03/2021 13:33:36 »

Professor Roger Seheult, MD. (of Medcram) reported individual patients who had bleeding in some parts of the body and clots in other parts. The timing of this in vaccinees may suggest spike debris after it has been attacked by the immune system.

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New Theories / The cytokine storm in covid 19

« on: 14/03/2021 05:51:09 »

This is just an idea - it may well be a load of rubbish but there may be something in it.

There are lots of viruses coexisting with us in our bodies. Many seem harmless others beneficial eg they produce useful proteins. All of them, along with the nasty ones have to contend with an immune system trying to eliminate them. There are numerous strategies that they use.

I'll just look at one, which the literature tells us is one of the ones CoV2 uses. A human cell invaded by a virus presents viral proteins on it's surface to attract the attention of white blood cells to its plight. CoV2 codes for a protein which hitches a ride into the nucleus where it downgrades the protein presenting response.

The immune system does encounter the viral proteins after virus particles leave an infected celland from viral proeins secreted from infected cells or released when viral numbers rupture infected cells, so it can fight and eliminate the infection, which is what hapens with most people. But for some, the immune system goes a step further. It's fighting the virus but it can't find infected cells - because they aren't presenting viral proteins on their surface. So cytokines are released to up-regulate the protein presenting mechanism. This is when the trouble starts. Because, among the peacefully cohabiting proteins, there will be plenty which use the same tactic as CoV2 to stay safe. Suddenly their proteins are being presented on cell surfaces and the immune system thinks cells all over the body are under attack by viruses, and the cytokine storm kicks off. What looks like the immune system attacking its own cells in multiple organs is more precisely the immune system attacking some of cells hosting benign viruses.

That's just a likely example, a similar line of reasoning could be used for other anti-immune mechanisms employed by CoV2 such as suppressing interferon production or preventing apoptosis.

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Physiology & Medicine / Do infectious diseases get milder as they run through a family?

« on: 06/03/2021 00:15:58 »

I remember getting (or possibly not getting) mumps as a child. If I got it I was the last of 5 brothers and sisters to get it  - we were on holiday in a cottage at the time.If I had it then I had a mild case. My father said at the time that these illnesses tend to get milder as they run through the family. Is there any truth in this or is it an old wive's tale, or in my father's case an old pharmacist's tale?

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COVID-19 / What's going on with the spike in cases in the first week after vaccination?

« on: 02/03/2021 23:50:35 »

Both Israel and the UK report a 48% increase in cases amongst vacinees during the first week after their first jab. The obvious reason is change in behavior. I'm not sure I believe that - it would be shocking if people weren't properly informed. Could the vaccine or the immune response awaken a latent infection?

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COVID-19 / Do we know how important memory cells are in the vaccine response?

« on: 26/02/2021 13:51:26 »

The classic explanation we have obout how vaccines work includes something like "so that our immune system knows how to deal with a real infection when it arrives?" But there is also, levels of antibodies remaining at the time of actual infection. Do we know which - memory or extant antibodies are more important with covid? Is there any evidence that memory is involved?

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COVID-19 / When should people be revaccinated against Covid-19?

« on: 26/02/2021 05:08:21 »

There seem to be two seperate factors.

1) Variants are escaping our immunity (by the way anyone know why virologists don't say "are becoming resistant"?). One of the common coronaviruses changes enough to reinfect after 2 years and changes beyond recognition in 8 years. Can we plan for this or is by gosh and by gum all we can do?

2) Waning immunity. However important t-cells may be, they are hard to measure, so it looks like we are left with antibodies as markers of protection. An alternative might be to measure the time between fisrt infection and reinfection - a bit difficult when we undertested by about an order of magnitude in the first wave. We could say the variants of concern started emerging about 6 months after the first wave and this must have occurred in reinfected people. Then we would need to keep the interval between jabs to no more than 4 or 5 months.

Personaly I favour 4 or 5 months as a maximum - I think it would be just dumb to have another wave and another lockdown starting in late summer or the autumn because we didn't boost soon enough. I just wonder why we aren't being told what the state of planning is?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / How dense is flat space?

« on: 19/02/2021 19:09:01 »

If the space where we live is positively curved by gravity and the nearly empty deep space is negatively curved then this suggests that there is a particular density of unit mass per unit vilume which would be flat. Are there estimates of what this density is, It might turn out to be an illuminating value.

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COVID-19 / Should we treat a fever if we get one after the Oxford astrazeneca jab.

« on: 19/02/2021 15:35:14 »

a) No, fever is a positive part of the immune response.
b) Yes, the fever specifically helps the immune response against the vector (adinovirus) but we want the adinovirus to do its thing.