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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Friday / Saturday, May 15-16

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Friday / Saturday, May 15-16

by | 63 Comments

This post is in: ,

H/t commentor Raven:

… The teams also asked whether people who haven’t been infected with SARS-CoV-2 also produce cells that combat it. Thiel and colleagues analyzed blood from 68 uninfected people and found that 34% hosted helper T cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2. The La Jolla team detected this crossreactivity in about half of stored blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018, well before the current pandemic began. The researchers think these cells were likely triggered by past infection with one of the four human coronaviruses that cause colds; proteins in these viruses resemble those of SARS-CoV-2.

The results suggest “one reason that a large chunk of the population may be able to deal with the virus is that we may have some small residual immunity from our exposure to common cold viruses,” says viral immunologist Steven Varga of the University of Iowa. However, neither of the studies attempted to establish that people with crossreactivity don’t become as ill from COVID-19…

Not good news:


Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers: 17 new cases*, including five foreign nationals, 11 from local infection and five “import” cases. Total 6,872 cases. 73 more patients recovered, total recovered 5,512 or 80.2% of all reported cases. Of 1,247 active cases, 14 are in ICU and five of them are on ventilators. One death, a woman who was coronavirus-positive but was also in end-stage cancer; total 113. Case fatality rate 2.01%.

    *Second lowest daily new case number since imposition of movement control order on March 18.

  2. 2.

    rikyrah

    Once again about Sweden…

     

    Take their 5 closest neighbors

     

    add up their death  totals

     

    TRIPLE that number.

     

    And, you have found Sweden’s death rate ALONE???

    stop bulshytting  me with Sweden ??

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    @rikyrah:

    Anti-lockdown libertarians have been touting Sweden’s policy as the one that least interferes with LIBERTEH!! But they always leave out this statistic because Swedes who had no choice in the matter paid for it with their lives.

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    @rikyrah:

    You asked me that yesterday, too. The answer is the same. Right now only Malaysian citizens are allowed into Malaysia, and they must undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine during which they are tested. If they test positive, they go to hospital for isolation and treatment; otherwise they get to go home. Foreign nationals are not currently allowed into Malaysia.

  6. 6.

    rikyrah

    Marah Gay,

    a 33 year old Black woman on the NYT Editorial Board got COVID-19.

     

    She was then, healthy, run 5 miles a day woman.

     

    Now, due to a ‘mild ‘ case of COVID-19,

    she can now only walk a few blocks before getting winded???

  7. 7.

    oldster

    I am glad that I am not the woman whose photo is featured in the BBC story about animal trials on vaccines. It sure looks like they are calling her a rhesus macaque monkey.

  12. 12.

    terben

    From the Australian Dept of Health:

    ‘As at 3:00pm on 16 May 2020, a total of 7,036 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Australia, including 98 deaths and 6,362 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19.

    Over the past week, there has been an average of 16 new cases reported each day. Of the newly reported cases, the majority have been from Victoria.

    To date, over 1,015,500 tests have been conducted nationally. Of those tests conducted 0.7% have been positive.’

    There has been an increase in new cases of 17 since yesterday. The number of tests has hit the one million mark. This is a tad under 4% of the population (3989/100,000)

  13. 13.

    New Deal democrat

    Wow! That Science Magazine Article is really encouraging. To beat this virus, we may not need a new vaccine, just an inoculation with a coronavirus that causes a common cold. We could still get infected, but just have a very mild case.

    BTW, one of my odd thoughts is that the first time the human race was exposed to one of the “common cold” coronaviruses 1000s of years ago, they probably caused pandemics just like this. Once the most susceptible slice of the population died, their descendants only got mild infections, I.e., colds. Not that I’m advocating “herd immunity,” just thinking that 100 or maybe even 25 years from now, that’s what outbreaks of this virus will look like.

  14. 14.

    John Barleycorn

    From the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/15/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-deaths.html):

    “Instead of imposing strict lockdowns, public health officials said that Swedes could be relied on to go out less and follow sanitation guidelines. That proved to be true: As a whole, Swedes visited restaurants, retail shops and other recreation spots almost as little as residents of neighboring countries, according to Google mobility figures.”

    Someone in another forum was mentioning the different spring vacation schedule between Stockholm (bad outbreak) and, for example, Skania in southern Sweden which has had a much lower Covid impact, may have seeded Stockholm with many more cases than if they had had vacation a week or two earlier. While Sweden hasn’t had enforced lock-downs, the issue with high mortality may relate more to how nursing homes are managed or other aspects of the society.

    Thanks again to AL for assembling this all.

  19. 19.

    Immanentize

    @John Barleycorn: Or maybe, just possibly, staying at home for a month saves lives?  Sweden is a very bad example of virus control.  But it is all those who want to get free refills at Hooters have to point to when they argue to open up. 

    “Data not dope dreams” is my motto these days.

  20. 20.

    Immanentize

    @New Deal democrat:

    just thinking that 100 or maybe even 25 years from now, that’s what outbreaks of this virus will look like.

    In the 1918 influenza (was that actually a Corona virus?) It was the young and relatively healthy (mostly workers) who suffered the most and died the most. One theory is that the older folks in the communities around the world may have been exposed to a similar illness in their youth (mid-1800s) and therefore had illness-specific antibodies.

    But sadly, if the Corona virus could be battled with common cold antibodies as suggested in the article, then it would be the older folks who would stand a better chance at waiving it off and young kids would be way more vulnerable. If you ever had a child — or were one yourself — you know that a kid’s “common cold” is often far more serious than those same colds in their parents.

  22. 22.

    Nicole

    Yesterday the better half and I both went for the free antibody tests NYC is offering- he in the afternoon, me in the evening.  The testing site was just about a mile from our  home, so we both walked.  The evening walk was… super stressful.  It’s the first really warm day NYC has had and the street was packed, and a lot of the younger cohort out socializing weren’t wearing masks.  I know the risk of outdoor transmission is lower, and as I had both a mask and wear glasses, my main entry points of infection were covered,  but it was really anxiety-inducing weaving among groups of late teens- early 20 somethings hanging out together.  And 125th Street was packed with automobile traffic and I realized it was the first time I’d seen a traffic jam in months.

    And then I got catcalled by some guy with a mask around his chin!  Good grief, dude; there’s a pandemic going on.  LEAVE ME ALONE AND PUT YOUR DAMN MASK ON.  I was not looking like anything other than a bespectacled mask-wearing middle-aged lady still pouring nervous sweat as a result of the lab nurses needing three goes to get my vein, so yeah, the catcalling was definitely not rooted in anything other than being obnoxious.  Not that it ever is.

    (I should add, the poking wasn’t the lab nurses’ fault; I have tiny veins that like to roll.  I apologized to them both about it.  They were super nice.)

  23. 23.

    Immanentize

    @Nicole: My son, the Immp, has considered walking with a five foot staff to push people away (or smack ’em).  It could be the newest fashion accessory — like wizards would be walking everywhere!

  24. 24.

    YY_Sima Qian

    The 100% mass screening at Wuhan is definitely in progress. The municipal government issued a command on May 11, leaving each district government to develop plans to collect samples from the residents in their respective districts. The district governments formulated the plans and coordinate the actions, but missions are assigned to sub-district committees, and the actual execution is carried out by the community offices and neighborhood committees, each responsible for several residential compounds. Testing for my compound’s residents have been pulled forward from Sunday to Monday. The mass screening is PCR only, no antibody tests (rapid tests have poor sensitivity and specificity, serology tests are too expensive and resource consuming). As it is, this mass screening effort in Wuhan will cost ~ US$ 150M for the testing alone, not including the manpower. Medical staff from hospitals across the city is fanning out to the neighborhoods and compounds for sample collection, and every lab in the city (including private ones) is enlisted to process the tests. Wuhan will likely rely upon lab capacity in the rest of Hubei Province, as well as other provinces, if the sample processing is to take a reasonable amount of time.

    Given the very short lead time from issuing of command to start of execution, and the fact that planning is left to the districts and execution is left to the community offices, it is unsurprising that there is a degree of chaos, confusion and inconsistency so far. I have heard that sample collection at several Compounds had to be stopped, likely due to poor distancing measures or inadequate protocol by the medical staff between sample collections to prevent cross-infection. It is Saturday evening in China, but the management office at my residential compound still does not know when are the medical staff showing up tomorrow, how many, and from which hospital.

    Prominent healthcare experts in China have not disguised their skepticism of this massive undertaking, believing it to be a waste of resources. The by now standard strategy of test, trace and isolate, supplemented by targeted mass screening of hot spot communities/groups, suffices to contain new outbreaks as they appear, and do the whack-a-mole. There is suspicion that the Wuhan municipal government is showing off to impress Beijing with a high profile effort. That is certainly in keeping with the bureaucratic culture of the CCP regime. The more charitable interpretation is that the local authorities are spooked by the recent cluster of that turned out to be symptomatic or pre-symptomatic, and thus are potentially very infectious. These are not the true asymptomatics, with very limited infectivity, that Wuhan has been finding for the past month and half. It may have been random luck that the cluster was detected before it ballooned to hundreds of cases, as has happened with the night club super-spreading event in Seoul. Perhaps the authorities want to proactively uncover any of the embers hidden in the ash, as opposed to passively waiting for the embers to burst into flames. I see more and more people without masks (still only occasional encounters) or exposing their noses and even mouths when wearing masks (more frequent though still a small minority). The population, even in Wuhan, is getting a little more complacent.

    Wuhan is unique in China in terms of the size of the outbreak and past prevalence of infection. There are certainly viral carriers or even mild symptomatic cases lurking below the surface, the mass screening is meant to expose any hidden clusters before they have a chance to explode into a sizable outbreak. This kind of brute force measure would not make sense for Jilin City or Harbin, for example, COVID-19 had not established a strong hold there in the past.

  25. 25.

    New Deal democrat

    @Immanentize: The 1918 flu was not a coronavirus. All of the modern influenza’s (H1N1 etc.) evolved from it. Like all influenza’s, it mutated very rapidly – roughly once every 10 days.

  26. 26.

    snoey

    @Immanentize:
    1918 was influenza – they’ve recovered enough from frozen graves to sequence it.  Most common colds are rinovirus, not corona.

  27. 27.

    Immanentize

    @YY_Sima Qian:. First, nice to see you commenting today!  Second, there seems to be some concern that the mandatory gathering of crowds with this massive testing effort might create super-spreader events.

    Does Wuhan have the virus sufficiently cabined to prevent such an unwanted side effect of mass gatherings?

  28. 28.

    Nicole

    @Immanentize: Between fancy social distancing sticks and masks, there could be a whole new industry; you’re right!

    I’ve started hunting Etsy for masks in cute fabrics.  I found one with mythical creatures on it and another in blue, with donkeys, that says “VOTE.”

  30. 30.

    New Deal democrat

    @Butch: interesting, but it looks like it can kill via secondary infection, generally bacterial pneumonia, for which there is a vaccine.

  31. 31.

    Immanentize

    @Nicole: When I was digging up part of the yard for my garden, I came across a big quartz crystal (dirty white) and I told the Immp I would cut it up and afix part to his staff if he wanted a more efficient, uh, persuader.

    I might have mentioned previously, but I found a bunch of my late wife’s fancy shoe bags — they are all nice thick cotton but with prominent logos. So, I made a mask I use when I bicycle that puts a big Prada logo across my face. It is an inevitable fashion next step, if I am home-making them. (Also have Miu Miu and Chu and Wang if I want to get sewing)

  33. 33.

    New Deal democrat

    @Immanentize: Interesting trivia about the 1918 flu. Wilson may have caught the infection during the Versailles Treaty negotiations, explaining his exhaustion at the sessions, and later contributing to his stroke.

  34. 34.

    Immanentize

    @New Deal democrat: Right now, there is a huge proliferation of studies based on extremely small sample sizes and often dealing with petri dish responses rather than any type of rigorous trials. One the positive side, lots of people are following many different possibilities hoping to find a solution (or maybe hoping to get rich quick?). A lot of today’s promising results are tomorrow’s forgotten false paths and bullshit.

    Did you read the article linked above about the Stanford Study? It’s an amazing piece of journalism and a real good expose on what can go wrong in funded research.

  35. 35.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Immanentize: It is definitely a concern, and likely the reason testing was halted in a few residential compounds, until protocols can be improved. The spots for queuing are spaced 1 m apart, which may be good enough For outdoors where people are just standing around and all wearing masks.

    Every resident is required to sign up on APPs ahead of time, so the medical staff should show up with each resident’s records and labels ready ahead of time. The swabbing itself only takes seconds, I have heard from relatives that the sample collection process moves at a very brisk pace. Swabbing of my compound’s 700+ residents is supposed to happen within one day.

    The current prevalence of COVID-19 is probably very low. From the end of the lock down on Apr. 8 to May 13, Wuhan tested 1.56M people, and found only 665 asymptomatic cases, and just the 6 confirmed cases. During the two days of mass screening so far, only 16 asymptomatic cases have been found, no confirmed cases. No data on the people tested during these days, but I assume nearly a million samples have been collected, and hundreds of thousands of samples processed. Part of the motivation for the mass screening is to assuage the lingering concerns that the rest of China still have toward Wuhan and its residents.

    No, I am not overly concerned with infection while queuing in line. If they tried to do this in mid-Mar., when there were still new confirmed cases each day, I would be much more worried.

  36. 36.

    Immanentize

    @New Deal democrat: I just read that the other day? The author was speculating that Wilson’s flu might have led him to capitulate to French demands for brutal post-war punishments which, as we know, were part of the mix for German resentment/rebuilding/warmaking. Interesting speculation!

  37. 37.

    Immanentize

    @YY_Sima Qian: Thank you.  That is so helpful.  Good luck and please both stay safe and stay in touch!  It is very comforting? to hear that there can be a reasonable back side to this pandemic.

  38. 38.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Immanentize: If your late wife had any Ferragamos or Ballys in her shoe collection, I may want to buy a cloth mask made out of the shoe bags from you! :-D

  39. 39.

    Nicole

    @Immanentize: That’s both funny and endearing about the shoe bags; I imagine she’d probably laugh.

    I have a beloved t-shirt with a graphic of a unicorn evolving into a narwhal that has worn holes in unfortunately inappropriate places, so I have set out to turn it into a face mask.

    The only bright side to it being so freaking hot and humid here yesterday was that, with less of a temperature difference between the air and my breath, the spectacles didn’t fog as much.

  40. 40.

    Keithly

    @Baud: Seems like free sex buddies should be a non-negotiable plank in the Baud! 2020 campaign platform.

  41. 41.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Immanentize: I try to post comments every 1 – 3 days, depending if there are any interesting developments. Plenty of countries and regions (in East Asia and Oceana) have shown that it is possible to achieve something halfway back to normality, especially China and South Korea, who had substantial outbreaks. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Vietnam did a good job keeping the importations at bay, and minimized community transmission, so they never developed the reservoir of viral carriers that can ignite new outbreaks.

    Parts of Europe have done really well flattening the curve, especially parts Eastern Europe, Scandinavia (minus Sweden), and Central Europe. Even Italy, France and Spain are well onto the downward slope. However, I am not sure European countries have established the contact tracing infrastructure to effectively do the inevitable whack-a-mole after loosening restrictions. To get back to semi-normal, a nation has to aim for suppression/eradication (which is a misnomer in epidemiological terms), and not just flattening to prevent collapse of the health care system.

    The US (and Russia, Brazil, Peru, Chile)…

    PS: I hate to be negative about the situation in the US, my parents are in the US right now, but the sh*tshow in there (and Brazil) is uniquely dismaying.

  43. 43.

    Brachiator

    I found this bit from Nate Silver to be somewhat odd:

    A lot of high-information news consumers seem to think the evidence for immunity to COVID is iffy, but while there are uncertainties the actual news has been pretty good as research has evolved.

    The question of immunity is ultimately about the science, not the opinion of news consumers. And since Silver is not a scientist, why is he even bothering to comment.

    However, the underlying article he linked to is interesting. But even here, I have a question:

    The results suggest “one reason that a large chunk of the population may be able to deal with the virus is that we may have some small residual immunity from our exposure to common cold viruses,” says viral immunologist Steven Varga of the University of Iowa.

    Hasn’t almost everyone been exposed to a cold virus over their lives?

    And as others have noted, the cold virus is not a corona virus.

    @YY_Sima Qian

    I hate to be negative about the situation in the US, my parents are in the US right now, but the sh*tshow in there (and Brazil) is uniquely dismaying.

    I have really been enjoying your very thoughtful remarks here. And your linking the US and Brazilian response is on the mark. I was just reading how Brazil’s authoritarian leader fired his second health minister in only a month! Both he and Trump seem to believe that the pandemic can be defeated by their manly willpower.

  44. 44.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Jilin City in Jilin Province added 2 new domestic confirmed cases yesterday, adding to the cluster there. One case is reported by the Chuanying District, which had not reported any infection before. Worryingly, this case works at a hospital, and has been taking the bus and tuk tuk to and from work. She was identified as a close contact of a close contact on May 12, and was asked to self-quarantine. She developed symptoms on May 14 and was sent to a fever clinic for testing, and confirmed  on May 15.

    The other case is reported by Shulan, a household cleaner. She was identified as a close contact and tested in the morning of May 13. For some reason her results did not become available until 36 hours later, in the evening of May 14, and confirmed on May 15. She was not quarantined during the waiting period, nor was she asked to self-quarantine, so she was out and about during that infectious period. In Wuhan the PCR and antibody results would have been turned around within 4 hours, and the case would have been kept at the fever clinic or some centralized quarantine, while waiting for the results.

    Clearly Jilin City needs to get its act together. The latest Shulan case is one of several household cleaner who have been infected. Their travel histories are nightmares of visiting different households in multiple residential compounds each day. Gatherings and dinner parties are also significant transmission events, just like at Harbin and Mudanjiang.

    Jilin City is under citywide lockdown, with mass transportation into and out of the city halted. Anyone leaving the city needs a negative PCR within 2 days of travel. All gatherings are prohibited, and schools and public venues/spaces closed. All restaurants are prohibited from providing dine in service. All residential compounds are placed under restricted access management.

  45. 45.

    Quiltingfool

    @Nicole: I put aside quilting the other day to make some masks.  I got a pattern from Pinterest and used quilt material and interfacing I had on hand.  I also had elastic from previous sewing projects, but I had to trim it to one quarter inch widths.  Anyway, I went with my cute fabrics!  One features Laurel Burch cat prints and another has tiny kittens on a yellow background.  They make my face hot, but who cares?  I’d rather have that than the virus!

  47. 47.

    Miss Bianca

    @Immanentize: Funny, I’ve been thinking “quarterstaff” myself. Out here in CO they sell very, very nice long stout walking sticks for hiking the mountains. I may just pony up for one!

  48. 48.

    Brachiator

    @Immanentize:

    My son, the Immp, has considered walking with a five foot staff to push people away (or smack ’em). It could be the newest fashion accessory — like wizards would be walking everywhere!

    Oh great! Well be hearing “You shall not pass!” echoing throughout neighborhoods.

  49. 49.

    Nicole

    @Quiltingfool: Do you have a link to a pattern that doesn’t require a seam down the center?  I got one like that, but it would spoil the unicorn-to-narwhal graphic so I need to do a simpler one that’s just a single piece of fabric (though I’ll double layer it when I make it since I read 2 layers of t-shirt fabric do a much better job than one). I’ve been googling, but all the face mask patterns I find are the ones with a center seam.

  50. 50.

    Brachiator

    @Baud:

    Forget free college or health care. Biden should propose free sex buddies.

    Free college and free sex buddies. Now that’s progressive policy!

  51. 51.

    Quiltingfool

    @Nicole: No, I haven’t seen one without the center seam, sorry.  I like the pattern I downloaded from http://www.stitchwerx.net.  It was easy to make and it fits very well.  They have a variety of sizes, too.  A straight mask should be easy to make, and I assume you don’t want folds, right?  If I were making what you want, I’d look at patterns of straight masks to get the dimensions, cut your pieces, and then follow sewing directions.  But, you might want to make a practice piece, work out the bugs, so to speak, before you cut your pretty fabric!

  52. 52.

    J R in WV

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    PS: I hate to be negative about the situation in the US, my parents are in the US right now, but the sh*tshow in there (and Brazil) is uniquely dismaying.

    If you think it is dismaying from 8,000 miles away, you should try watching it from ground zero~!~ There should be a nation-wide requirement to wear masks at all times when not at home, and masks should be sent to every household with a small check.

    Actually, I saw masks for sale at the last drugstore I shopped in the middle of last week, $14 for a dozen. Not n95 masks, but still, perhaps better than an old tee shirt. Or even equal to a tee shirt.

     

    ETA: Thanks so much for your on site commentary from far away!! Balloon Juice is lucky to have commenters from all over the world !!!

  53. 53.

    Fair Economist

    @rikyrah: I am astonished that NCAA official was so blase about athletes getting COVID. Ms. Gay’s hardships are bad enough for someone with a desk job, but for an athlete even a fraction of what’s she’s going through is the end of their career. Even if they eventually recover, lost practice and training could knock them out of competition.

  54. 54.

    Fair Economist

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    PS: I hate to be negative about the situation in the US, my parents are in the US right now, but the sh*tshow in there (and Brazil) is uniquely dismaying.

    Why? It’s an honest evaluation. Some states are even opening bars (WI, FL) where the epidemic isn’t remotely contained. And some areas (like mine) continue to see growth in new cases in spite of respectable public control measures.

  55. 55.

    Fair Economist

    @Brachiator:

    Hasn’t almost everyone been exposed to a cold virus over their lives?

    Yes, but the idea is that the immunity a person has developed to the cold virus doesn’t always cover epitopes shared with hCoV-SARS2. But it is a possibility that the observed immunity is not to the known coronaviruses but to a benign close relative of hCoV-SARS2 which has been circulating for a while. Serological testing of people living near bat caves in China show that a small fraction of them do have antibodies to bat viruses, so they do infect humans to some extent, and we have not found all the viruses that cause the “common cold”.

  56. 56.

    Fair Economist

    @New Deal democrat:

    BTW, one of my odd thoughts is that the first time the human race was exposed to one of the “common cold” coronaviruses 1000s of years ago, they probably caused pandemics just like this. Once the most susceptible slice of the population died, their descendants only got mild infections, I.e., colds.

    It’s not an odd thought at all. It’s even in the scientific literature. HCoV-OC43 came from bovine coronavirus, and crossed over in the late 19th century. It has been proposed as the cause of the 1889-90 “flu” pandemic, and if so, it was an initially lethal disease which now circulates widely but only kills the most vulnerable, and even then not often. The general thought is that people catch it once as children, and rarely die of it, and then later as adults are protected from a very severe case by immunity even though they still catch it (this is normal for respiratory viruses).

  57. 57.

    frosty

    From the Science mag paper on modeling in Germany: interventions got transmission negative, but only barely. Here’s one conclusion:

    “Therefore, it is important to consider lifting restrictions only when the number of active cases are so low that a two-week increase will not pose a serious threat to healthcare infrastructure.”

    WASF

  58. 58.

    Mike G

    The outsized COVID-19 epidemic in New York City appears to be traceable to the burst of movement surrounding Trump’s ban on European travel

    My friend in California caught the virus rushing home from Europe in the frenzied and overcrowded Trumpsterfuck few days after Trump’s sloppily-worded announcement. Exacerbated by ICE not adding any extra staffing at airports resulting in huge hours-long lines of coughing people. Fortunately he and his wife recovered OK.

  59. 59.

    different-church-lady

    “it’s a tiny percentage. The vast majority — many people don’t even know they have it.”

    It’s kind of amazing the way it only takes two consecutive sentences for the man to contradict himself.

  60. 60.

    Jay Noble

    @rikyrah:
    Something that seems to be missing from much of the Sweden story is who is dying. Their immigrant population has been extremely hard hit accounting for a very large pecentage of infections and deaths. The stuff I was reading was from Swede and they were very staight forward about saying they weren’t exactly sure why it was happening but attributed a lack of communication to the immigrant community – everything was in Swedish or English – and as everywhere communities that can’t social distance even if they wanted to

    As I said, I heard of this several weeks ago and then poof it was all Sweden is horrible.

  61. 61.

    Fair Economist

    @Jay Noble: The affected cities in Orange County indicate the worst problems are in poorer and immigrant communities. Here it’s probably a combination of fewer resources to isolate and limited communication.

  62. 62.

    Bill Arnold

    @Fair Economist:

    But it is a possibility that the observed immunity is not to the known coronaviruses but to a benign close relative of hCoV-SARS2 which has been circulating for a while.

    Yes, and in this scenario a recombination took place in one of those infected (with an undetected relatively benign variant of SARS-CoV-2) people, then a short chain of transmission a super-spreader at a Wuhan wet market, then it was off.
    The dangerous aspect of this virus (using ACE2) seems to also be related to its high infectiousness, but a R0 of a little over 1.0 (for the (hypothetical, so far) precursor virus) would be fine for keeping a endemic virus in circulation.

  63. 63.

    Neldob

    Maybe we could go with everyone wearing a 3 foot collar of shame when among crowds.

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