Extremly important news. It seems that lookdown measurements are not really working, and I don't mean that as a bad thing. Even standing 1.5 meter away and working in a place with descent ventilation decreases the r(n) below 1.
Here is the source on how r(n) progressed in Germany (look at page 14). As you can see in the graph closing all major events and work together gradually puts the virus below the tendency of potentially r(1). Take into account that the illness takes a week or two to incubate and view the general tendecy in the decrease. With this in mind, you can see that rendering the last "shutdown everything" measure most likely useless, because the decrease already happened before this measure was taken.
The longer these measurements take to happen, the higher the r(n) becomes for a while as virus attack rates are constantly increasing. The reason why SARS-CoV-2 is so severe in the US is because government reaction was too late. In Austria however, the attack rate is extremly minimal as their government reacted early. In Germany, we took a week time to look into things and having fun before reacting properly, which is why the infection rates are high. Not to mention that many germans are living in crowded places and they like to hug each other, things are different then in countries like Sweden, a crountry that doesn't really care it seems (
yet research also shows that the country will get through this without it ending in a catastrophe just by not-standing-too-close-together).
This means that simply not-being-too-close all the time and with proper ventilation is enough. After the rate of active infected people is at least verified, the government can then trace and warn the population so they can quarantaine. Threatment is also on the way,
I heard that Remdisivir is actually exceptional. This indicates that Ebola vaccines could maybe work, even if doubtful?
Anyway, theres also the reason Germany is so successful in combating the general attack rate is that our health care system is able to mitigate a lot of potential damage, while also performing some critical tasks for the world, such as research. Every country who is witnessing a full catastrophy due to SARS-CoV-2 has to change their healthcare plans after this. Germany is also considering a full optimization of their system. SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 is bad and has to be prioritised, but I consider something like cancer treatment just as important. If your healthcare system focused on one thing many people will die gruesomely due to other illments, perhaps in an even worse fashion.
Let me repeat myself in different terms to be as clear as I can, restricting human contact to 1.5 meters or about 5 feet and working in spaces with proper ventilation completely makes the virus infection rate alone drop to r(0.9). You potentially can even have a human to human conversation with an infected person who is as close as 1 meter (or about 3 feet) in open space and not get infected for 15 minutes while risking a 15% (or very high) infection rate. With a gap of at least 1.5 meters while being outside its impossible to get infected regardless, at least according to the general R(n) projections.
What also matters a huge amount is the way to communicate this to the population. If the population doesn't care, even the best containment measurement in the world does not matter.
There is another thing I want to say. Those simulations you probably saw on how the virus spreads while you're running outside while breathing or shopping don't take dispersion, circulation and atmosphere into account. We also don't know how many virus is with aerosol of medium level consistency and if its infectious. There are some huge indication that the virus is not infectious if a small amount of it enters your body. So your body may even handle tiny amounts of this new virus with ease.
Regardless, any of these proper measures require physical distance at all times in order to succeed. Its also known that in open spaces, infection rates are extremly low even if you stand as close as 1 meter from each other. This changes in closed spaces obviously.
If any of the GOG-staff reads this, working inside any office can only continue if work can happen without physical contact and inside an office with good ventilation. Any cases where workplaces became severely infected are in places where the atmosphere basically "stands still". Right now, even infected people inside discounters and other food shops never became infected here. There is no case I know off in Germany where this is the case, and there is some very close contact between costumers and the cashiers but only for a very short while.
What I'm saying next is just from myself and not what the experts and research centers say, but all of this indicates that this virus is actually really weak. The high infection rate, lethality and lasting damage it can perform on your metabolism is only because its a new unknown virus. I also do believe that risk of relapse is very high, as with about all corona viruses, such as the "endemic" 229E, which also causes millions of mild to severe cases every month, through to a much lesser extend.
kharille: Blood cell damage? From what I recall they lose their nucleus and don't act like normal cells, and they get replenished by the bone marrow every 3 days after the ... liver removes the old ones from circulation. If theres damage to those erythrocytes.... you'd have a lot of free haeme floating in the blood stream.
I thought the malaria drug chloroquinone thingy moderated the immune system, less holes in your lungs?....
True, pretty sure that increase in case mortality is linked to ACE2 reception as most/all coronaviruses do (AFAIK). Also you have to keep in mind that people in hospitals are not always well threated as well, which may also be a cause of some lasting damage (stress also may be a huge factor and so does some medication). This virus is still new, it takes time to figure out how long the lasting damage may be.
Some of the holes in the lungs caused by SARS-CoV-2 are used due to IL-6 re-/misinterpretation (people call it "Cytokyne-Storms" every now and then but its a pretty weird descriptor, the immune system does not fully understand how to handle the illness and sometimes overshoots, there is lots happening inside your body during the course of this because of many factors). An immune system cannot simply eat dead cells with pinpoint precision of 100% accuracy, it takes quite a lot of energy and care for antibodies to detect dead cells due to several protein compound factors any of the cells are composed off.
In this case, the antibodies overshoot a little too much. This does happen with a lot of illnesses though and is not new. It also depends on how the virus RNA is structured. Right now it seems that this virus shares a lot of traits of HIV and especially Ebola, which is good because Ebola is very well understood and even treatable (there is a widely produced vaccine that completly can halt the spread of Ebola called rVSV-ZEBOV-GP, basically halting and curing Ebola whenever it is used with a 100% rate AFAIK). This vaccine probably will not work on SARS-CoV-2 however, but perhaps it might? Dunno, I'm not a professor working on it.
At any case, regarding the worry about potentiality of organ damage. The largest study on the lasting effects of COVID-19 is conducted in germany right now regarding how the body is affected during and after the illness has run its course, theres around 2000 or so parameters the conducters do consider. Since there is lots of stuff to check so it will take time. Its so massive that two of the biggest research centers here are working together on this, with several ten thousand professors and doctors, with some of them even specializing with only SARS and MERS for over a decade now, so they know whats up.
The reason people want to do this is to publicise ways on how to threat the long lasting damage of the illness. Besides understanding the virus, people want to mitigate the lasting effects after the illness has to run its course. The most common threatment of fibrosis is stem cell insertions but this stuff is not researched in a wide fashion. I'm fairly certain that experiments are being accelerated so expect some damages to become mitigated and therapy options getting used like its a science fiction movie. I do expect huge and good things out from this situation.
EDIT: I wanted to write several other important things, such as
this but then the post would be three times as long. Huge indication that herd immunity may work regardless of what the WHO said (because they don't conduct studies, they've only listened to 3 countries.) If what they say was the case, then people who survived COVID-19 would die due to sudden reinfection at all times because families relapse worldwide and reinfect each other again and again ad infinitum and such info would spread a whole lot. This has not happened. Its also known that SARS-CoV-2, while mutating, does so slowly for both good and bad reasons.
What we know is that NAb threatment works, because some patients do produce NAbs and you can use that. The WHO is stating that they simply can't confirm anything because they don't know.
I also let an AI translate the RKI results and converted them again, if someone wants the translation of the document in english as a source hit me up in chat.
