[modi123_1]

Fun fact - associate was recently tested and was positive on the antibody test.. or which everyone shows you had it. Thinks he snagged it early March in Phoenix. It's weird knowing one of the affected.

[jon.kiparsky]

It seems pretty obvious (given what we know about asymptomatic transmission) that a surprisingly high number of people will test positive for antibodies. Remains to be seen what that implies for susceptibility going forward, AFAIK we have still got a lot of uncertainty on this. (which is why the talk of "immunity badges" seems to me incredibly premature, to the point of lunacy)

[ge∅]

When we mention antibody testing, are we talking about the majority of rubbish tests that is out there or only the minority of good ones? Because the worst ones can be almost 50% accurate, which gives you as much information as if you had tossed a coin.

I learned today that in some countries researchers have been testing wastewater (because the virus' RNA can be found in faeces - but not the shell, that's good news, you can't be infected this way). So far the results confirm the ones acquired with direct testing, with one big difference: people take a shit every day and all the logistics around the test itself (bringing the sample to the lab) is already laid out in the form of waste pipes, so we can get results faster because we don't wait for people to have symptoms, to go to the hospital or to die.

Some claim that it could be used as a form of group testing because of the way pipes networks are laid out: it's clearly a tree structure, so you could test a bunch of well-chosen nodes and know very quickly which city or part of a city is more exposed, where it is more urgent to test people, etc.

[jon.kiparsky]

Yes, researchers at MIT did some early work on this. Their conclusions as I recall were something like 5X the number of cases as compared to official numbers. Of course, that was an early run in one community, I don't have the most current data.

In any case, yeah, it does seem like a pretty good way to at least get broad numbers on infections in particular localities.

[ge∅]

They've used it in Paris to confirm that the numbers were going down, and the EPFL in Switzerland has implemented it in several places and they were successful at predicting infections days and sometimes weeks before traditional testing could catch them.

I think at this stage it's the only reliable information it can give you : the evolution of the shit. Because it doesn't give you the number of infected people, it gives you the viral load of their load (#poetry), and quite indirectly because a portion of the RNA is probably degraded along the way (people dump bleach and other aggressive stuff in the pipes), it's probably difficult to quantify how much of it is lost, and this degradation is probably not uniform between cities or neighbourhoods.

[NeoTifa]

AAAyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy sloth long time no see. Glad to hear you're alive and well.

Yeah I'm decently sure I had it like 6 weeks ago. Meh

[ArtificialSoldier]

There's a chance I had it a while ago also, and now cat #2 out of 4 has a sneezy cold.

[ArtificialSoldier]

Just so people know where Americans are at. Like I expected, any opposition to common sense safety measures are being represented by a vocal minority, and probably amplified by groups outside of the country to help cause division:



https://xkcd.com/2305/

[Skydiver]

I had 6 of the 8 symptoms listed here over a span of 6 weeks in January to mid-February:
Eight signs you had coronavirus Covid-19 before the outbreak - including symptoms

[ArtificialSoldier]

I smoke, so I cough anyway. And they need to chill out with that tummy ache illustration.

[supersloth]

Skydiver, on 12 May 2020 - 03:26 PM, said:

I had 6 of the 8 symptoms listed here over a span of 6 weeks in January to mid-February:
Eight signs you had coronavirus Covid-19 before the outbreak - including symptoms

also mostly signs you just had the normal flu. did you have the loss of taste and smell? if that one is missing from anyones self-diagnosis i am very skeptical when they say they believe they had it, unless confirmed by an actual doctor. i was sick in february but that one never happened.

[ArtificialSoldier]

I appreciate that people are willing to confuse their children for my amusement.

https://imgur.com/gallery/oPVVmQo

[Skydiver]

Yup had the loss of taste and smell, but not the stomach aches or the dry cough. It began with a dry cough but quickly became an extra productive wet cough with little tinges of blood in the mornings. The doctor gave me a flu test twice: the first time I came in and the second time when I came back the following week still not feeling better. (Yes, I got my flu shot last year.) Got chest x-rays the second time, but it was clear. At that time, the clear chest x-rays that made the doctors believe that I just happened to have the flu or some other viral infection that I got from the kids or the wife who were also coughing a few weeks before. I told the doc that I felt like I already got the flu and a sinus infection to boot before Christmas and it wasn't as exhausting as this second pass.

Anyway, I guess a reliable antibody test should tell, assuming the lifetime of the antibodies in system is about 5 months or more.

[DarenR]

i havent been able to smell for years -- something about breaking my nose multiple times while playing hockey -- but that's not here nor there

[h4nnib4l]

ArtificialSoldier, on 12 May 2020 - 03:43 PM, said:

Just so people know where Americans are at. Like I expected, any opposition to common sense safety measures are being represented by a vocal minority, and probably amplified by groups outside of the country to help cause division:



https://xkcd.com/2305/

Yeah, but those numbers in the left column are misleading if you're talking about the whole country. I have a feeling that NPR polls aren't hitting a lot of Fox News viewers, and even fewer Brietbart readers (using "Brietbart" and "readers" in the same sentence seems weird...).