06-22-2020, 07:12 AM
Given the pandemic is now accelerating faster than ever, we will hit the 10,000,000 global confirmed infection mark by I'm guessing Saturday. At the same time we'll also likely be at 500,000 confirmed deaths reported. So that's about a 5% CFR. Yes, the deaths are bad and sad. However, my much greater concern is not deaths as much as infection and the fact we just don't know enough about this virus to have any real sense of how it is going to impact individual and population health over the long haul. I just read today that Mexico is now experiencing a 50% (!!!!!) positive test rate. This thing is now just exploding, and we haven't even come close to even 1% of the global population. We'd need 78,000,000 positive infections to reach that, and we are just nearing 10,000,000.
There was this conventional wisdom that everyone who gets mild symptoms would develop antibodies and immunity. Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence suggesting that not only do some people not develop enough antibodies to fight the infection, but even those who do have shown evidence of antibodies decreasing over time, like 3 months. That means reinfection is likely and calls into questions efficacy of a vaccine even if one is developed. Then there is evidence that even those who never present clinical symptoms suffer lung damage that logically is going to lead to longer term health issues even when the virus is no longer detected in body. I saw one scientist say he's studied hundreds of diseases and SARS-CoV-2 is the "weirdest" one he's ever seen. I'm no disease scientist, but it sure seems believable based on what has been documented.
So with this as a backdrop, what is y'all's take on this thing from a macro perspective? We've talked about mitigation, clinical features, NPIs, economic considerations as discrete topics, but not much on a sort of global perspective of what we think about the implications of this virus for us as individuals, a country, and global species. If everyone gets infected, does life expectancy drop to I don't know, medieval times because the long-term lung damage is going to result in many more health complications for the average person who gets it? Do we have to re-prioritize health care as a top priority? Might we have a need to cut fossil fuel emissions not just for climate change purposes, but also to make the air cleaner so we can breathe easier with diminished lung capacity? These are some of the things going through my head. I'm curious what others think, because my assumption is our perspectives on this pandemic have changed quite a bit since this board was started at the end of February.
There was this conventional wisdom that everyone who gets mild symptoms would develop antibodies and immunity. Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence suggesting that not only do some people not develop enough antibodies to fight the infection, but even those who do have shown evidence of antibodies decreasing over time, like 3 months. That means reinfection is likely and calls into questions efficacy of a vaccine even if one is developed. Then there is evidence that even those who never present clinical symptoms suffer lung damage that logically is going to lead to longer term health issues even when the virus is no longer detected in body. I saw one scientist say he's studied hundreds of diseases and SARS-CoV-2 is the "weirdest" one he's ever seen. I'm no disease scientist, but it sure seems believable based on what has been documented.
So with this as a backdrop, what is y'all's take on this thing from a macro perspective? We've talked about mitigation, clinical features, NPIs, economic considerations as discrete topics, but not much on a sort of global perspective of what we think about the implications of this virus for us as individuals, a country, and global species. If everyone gets infected, does life expectancy drop to I don't know, medieval times because the long-term lung damage is going to result in many more health complications for the average person who gets it? Do we have to re-prioritize health care as a top priority? Might we have a need to cut fossil fuel emissions not just for climate change purposes, but also to make the air cleaner so we can breathe easier with diminished lung capacity? These are some of the things going through my head. I'm curious what others think, because my assumption is our perspectives on this pandemic have changed quite a bit since this board was started at the end of February.
