Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[mission27]

14 minutes ago, Mega Ron said:

I don't think so.

Edit. Not that you'd be shocked for it not to be the case. I just don't think the colds/chest infections that were floating about back then we're Covid-19.

Yeah you're right, saying I would be shocked is probably a little much.  We dont know if it was bad seasonal flu season, COVID, or something else.  Probably will never know although antibody tests would help us guess. 

I will say like @Nex_Gen I have two friends one in Orange County and one in the Bay Area who traveled to China separately in December / January, came back with illnesses that sound a lot like COVID, and spread them to a bunch of people including misison, and one of those friends ended up in the hospital from it.  This was before there was any testing in the US whatsoever and doctors generally laughed off the idea it could be COVID because 'that's only a few people in China'.  So I wouldn't be surprised if that was COVID and if mission alone can think of two people who brought COVID to the US and CA specifically I'm betting it was pretty widespread... although like you say its anecdotal and this wave of illness could have been something else... but R0 of 5 or 6 is pretty damn high

[mission27]

2 minutes ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

What the hell is an "accidental" BJ? You trip and fall @TLO?

A girl asks you to go into the bathroom with her, you think its a drugs thing, but then woops its just happening 

[ramssuperbowl99]

Just now, mission27 said:

A girl asks you to go into the bathroom with her, you think its a drugs thing, but then woops its just happening 

That's not an accident, she knew what she was doing. At best it's a surprise.

[theJ]

41 minutes ago, SlevinKelevra said:

I'm not interested in making one, but I will tell you what

1)  *IF* I did, I would disclose its methods so it could be scrutinized and improved.  If I were concerned about IP or the like I'd publish it to a preprint server for archival purposes and to stake my claim on its ownership

2) It would be conducted in a real scientific/math computing environment (not Excel with "look at me I guess you can't read a graph" conditional formatting)

3) It would involve construction of a set of 1000's of simultaneous coupled network/node spatially diffuse advective SEIR-type delay PDEs

4) it would actually have quantitative predictive capability

5) It would then be run in a Markov-Chain style MonteCarlo simulator for thousands to millions of runs so that it would have statistically valuable properties such

as confidence intervals, etc.

 

Wow, you took a glib comment about "orders of magnitude" very far.  Very far indeed.

[ramssuperbowl99]

Also, real talk here, conditional formatting is like interior decorating but for dudes. It's great. No more talking **** about conditional formatting.

[mission27]

2 minutes ago, ramssuperbowl99 said:

Also, real talk here, conditional formatting is like interior decorating but for dudes. It's great. No more talking **** about conditional formatting.

Good conditional formatting definitely gets me going

Bad conditional formatting is a real problem though and shouldn't be tolerated 

[Shanedorf]

3 hours ago, WizeGuy said:

https://www.todayonline.com/world/coronavirus-could-attack-immune-system-hiv-targeting-protective-cells-warn-scientists

On the surface, this looks like a major concern. COVID-19 invades T-cells similar to HIV, but with one key difference- it cannot replicate infected cells like HIV. That's huge. If that were true, we'd have a HARD time finding a cure for this virus + I believe that's what make HIV a lifelong disease, though someone much smarter than me will have to confirm) @Shanedorf. This may mean some HIV medications could be used against COVID-19, which is another +.

The major concern is- Coronaviruses will likely be a virus that will plague us in the future, and it's getting awfully close to becoming a super virus. Luckily, COVID-19 seems to mutate extremely slow, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit nervous knowing this virus can inhabit T-cells...

 

paraphrased from the article...
" The study gives rise to some new questions....But why and how the coronavirus triggers that,  remains poorly understood."

The work they report is in lab-derived cell cultures of T-cells, but those are only a model of what happens with real T -cells in the human body. Later in the article they state the work will have to be repeated in "primary" T-cells which are cells that come directly from your bloodstream. But those primary cells don't last very long in captivity, so the labs create immortal cell lines (models) that they can study.
And just like a virus mutates/changes each time it divides, so do cell lines. We call it genetic drift, but its similar to mutation and the more times you passage a cell line the further it drifts genetically from the primary cells you started with. So after awhile, you don't know how closely your model represents reality

Remember the mantra: "All models are wrong, some of them are useful"

The other part of this is that in your body, your T-cells are getting signals and protection from the other cells in the immune system. You can't truly assess the production of a ILB in the absence of DL keeping the blockers away - and the better the DL, the better the production from the ILB.

Taking a T-cell out of its environment and infecting it with corona is useful , but not necessarily predictive of that happens in a fully competent human immune system. In very general terms B-cells make antibodies to identify the bad guys, T-cells orchestrate the killing of the bad guys...
B- cells + T-cells = checks and balances. Neither one is judge, jury and executioner all in one and that's a very good thing.

As far as the HIV meds, every existing one has already been tested against corona (in test tubes) and any that show efficacy will be considered
Those anti-viral meds target a specific biological pathway in the virus, not the cells they infect... so any similarities to HIV, Hep C meds are virus-specific and not cells-they-infect-specific.

These guys in the linked article are on step 1 of a 10 step process and what they learn will help inform the subsequent steps. So, imo this is interesting and useful work and more will be done to figure out exactly what's going on, how it impacts our immune system, and how we can use that info to our advantage in the future.

[SlevinKelevra]

33 minutes ago, mission27 said:

I respect the smugness of coming at the MoL with a full on ****zkreig although I have hard time believing it comes from a base of any sort of justified smugness

You are new around here though so we will see, maybe you are smugger than you look

 

you can think or believe whatever you want.  It won't change my reality one way or another.  On the other hand, the fact that an epidemic is governed by the type of functional relationships that I described above does impact my reality.  So I'll continue to point out that anyone who claims they are "modeling" it without treating it as such is probably full of crap.

Let's say I asked you to predict the optimum launch angle of a projectile ?   Sure you could* "model" it with the equation y=2387x + 3/log(x) -238 tan(x)*x^(2398789234 sin(x))

Or you could actually use the appropriate equations of motion and solve (pardon the lack of vector notation) F=ma.  

 

[SlevinKelevra]

38 minutes ago, theJ said:

Wow, you took a glib comment about "orders of magnitude" very far.  Very far indeed.

I'm not the one self-back-patting about having a perfectly "accurate model" {and then, on top of it, not even having a model, just an "index"}

 

If someone tells you they are the best football coach of all time, and then they tell you Hank Aaron is a quarterback- and that they would trade Peyton Manning and 5 years of 1st round draft picks to get him,  you might just question whether they understand what they're talking about.

 

Edited April 13, 2020 by SlevinKelevra

[WizeGuy]

14 minutes ago, Shanedorf said:

paraphrased from the article...
" The study gives rise to some new questions....But why and how the coronavirus triggers that,  remains poorly understood."

The work they report is in lab-derived cell cultures of T-cells, but those are only a model of what happens with real T -cells in the human body. Later in the article they state the work will have to be repeated in "primary" T-cells which are cells that come directly from your bloodstream. But those primary cells don't last very long in captivity, so the labs create immortal cell lines (models) that they can study.
And just like a virus mutates/changes each time it divides, so do cell lines. We call it genetic drift, but its similar to mutation and the more times you passage a cell line the further it drifts genetically from the primary cells you started with. So after awhile, you don't know how closely your model represents reality

Remember the mantra: "All models are wrong, some of them are useful"

The other part of this is that in your body, your T-cells are getting signals and protection from the other cells in the immune system. You can't truly assess the production of a ILB in the absence of DL keeping the blockers away - and the better the DL, the better the production from the ILB.

Taking a T-cell out of its environment and infecting it with corona is useful , but not necessarily predictive of that happens in a fully competent human immune system. In very general terms B-cells make antibodies to identify the bad guys, T-cells orchestrate the killing of the bad guys...
B- cells + T-cells = checks and balances. Neither one is judge, jury and executioner all in one and that's a very good thing.

As far as the HIV meds, every existing one has already been tested against corona (in test tubes) and any that show efficacy will be considered
Those anti-viral meds target a specific biological pathway in the virus, not the cells they infect... so any similarities to HIV, Hep C meds are virus-specific and not cells-they-infect-specific.

These guys in the linked article are on step 1 of a 10 step process and what they learn will help inform the subsequent steps. So, imo this is interesting and useful work and more will be done to figure out exactly what's going on, how it impacts our immune system, and how we can use that info to our advantage in the future.

Very informative, per the usual. May I ask what you do for a living? Do you have your PHD in *insert science related field here*? My wife has a PHD in Genetics. I learn a lot from her. It's interesting stuff, but I know she has to dumb it down a lot for me. She presented her defense in front of me a couple of times for practice, and I was lost about 30 seconds in, haha.

 

I'll be asking you for advice every now and then when I find interesting stuff. Feel free to tell me to piss off if I become annoying! 

Edited April 13, 2020 by WizeGuy

[theJ]

15 minutes ago, SlevinKelevra said:

I'm not the one self-back-patting about having a perfectly "accurate model" {and then, on top of it, not even having a model, just an "index"}

 

If someone tells you they are the best football coach of all time, and then they tell you Hank Aaron is a quarterback- and that they would trade Peyton Manning and 5 years of 1st round draft picks to get him,  you might just question whether they understand what they're talking about.

 

Ah, i see you haven't met @mission27 and @TLO previously.

[mission27]

19 minutes ago, SlevinKelevra said:

 

you can think or believe whatever you want.  It won't change my reality one way or another.  On the other hand, the fact that an epidemic is governed by the type of functional relationships that I described above does impact my reality.  So I'll continue to point out that anyone who claims they are "modeling" it without treating it as such is probably full of crap.

Let's say I asked you to predict the optimum launch angle of a projectile ?   Sure you could* "model" it with the equation y=2387x + 3/log(x) -238 tan(x)*x^(2398789234 sin(x))

Or you could actually use the appropriate equations of motion and solve (pardon the lack of vector notation) F=ma.  

 

Our model is perfectly accurate and I've heard from a lot of people it is very helpful tbh

[mission27]

17 minutes ago, SlevinKelevra said:

I'm not the one self-back-patting about having a perfectly "accurate model" {and then, on top of it, not even having a model, just an "index"}

Its called smugness and its always served us right

[SlevinKelevra]

1 minute ago, mission27 said:

 I've heard from a lot of people

Ok, Donald.

 

[TLO]

1 minute ago, mission27 said:

Its called smugness and its always served us right

I mean we called the peak here. Called the bottom in the market. Called that the NY hotspot likely originated from Europe, etc etc etc. I’d say our track record of being right is more important here tbh