After over 100 days of only having cases in quarantine facilities, New Zealand reported four community spread COVID cases in Auckland yesterday. Then, they reported four more probables today, all linked to that initial set of cases. Two things on that. First, a few hours after the report, a lockdown was announced and went into effect at noon on Wednesday in Auckland. Second, my God it’s so refreshing to watch competence in action. Jacinda Ardern is a top-notch leader and excellent politician — she can knock down bullshit with the best of them. Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, who is a local hero due to his central role in all but eliminating COVID in the nation, shows that he deserves a shrine or two. I must really want to see something work, somewhere, because I watched most of their initial news conference.
In addition to a pretty strict lockdown in Auckland, the rest of the country is going to “Level 2”, which is distancing, stay home if you’re sick, wear a mask if possible and no gatherings over 100 people. New Zealand is starting to distribute masks and will probably require them soon. They also have a COVID tracker app where people check in at places they visit using a QR code posted by the business. Then, if there are cases and they visited a place where you checked in, the app will notify you. Plus, they’re doing genetic testing on the strains of COVID which this family caught to try to trace it to the source. Just an all-out excellent response.
What’s the truth is stranger than fiction part of this outbreak is that one of those initially infected worked at a cold storage food plant, and there’s a possibility that the case was acquired from a shipment from overseas. That would be the first documented case of that kind of transmission that I’ve ever heard. I’ll channel my inner John Cole and tell everyone to wash your hands.
In addition to a possibly strange mode of transmission in “N Zed”, a strange COVID complication is COVID psychosis. My dad still gets his state medical journal (and reads it) and he pointed to a case report of a meat packer who suddenly began behaving very strangely and had a positive swab. That article is not online, but this man also had a seizure in hospital. Significantly, he had no other COVID symptoms and was tested as part of hospital protocol. Here’s another paper documenting a couple of cases in New York state.
The notion that we know a lot about this disease a few months in is just nonsense.
WV Blondie
My personal concern is that we’re not going to know for years, even decades, what the lingering effects of COVID-19 on children will be. These young athletes who’ve developed myocarditis, for instance – will it eventually clear up, or will it be permanent?
JPL
Early on I did read that the virus can live for a long time in the refrigerator and freezer. That’s why it’s important to wash everything before storage. I still have disinfectant wipes, so I was fruits and vegetables and wipe everything else down.
JPL
@WV Blondie: In FL young children showed lung damage.
Yutsano
I think it’s the second. The outbreak in Dalian in the northeast of China was suspected of coming from a plant similar to the one in New Zealand. I don’t think it’s an exact parallel but it seems similar to me. At any rate there does seem to be something odd about that transmission instance. I know virii can survive freezing.
Cathie from Canada
Way back in March, I believed that we all might get COVID someday, but hopefully with the lockdown this could be delayed until the doctors had better treatments.
Now, with everything we are finding out about COVID’s impacts on the human body, I am convinced it would be vastly better never to get COVID at all, and we should be doing anything we can to avoid it.
CaseyL
So surface transmission is a higher risk than they thought? Or is it a problem with soft organic surfaces, like foods?
JPL
@Cathie from Canada: yup At first I would use a rag or paper towel to collect my mail, and then let it sit overnight. I became lax and then I read about four of the local post office workers having the virus. Not a time to become lax.
gvg
@CaseyL: I think they are suspecting COLD makes it possible for surface to actually happen. I think.
VOR
@Cathie from Canada: I also agree, COVID-19 is so easily spread that it would be a miracle if less than 50% got it. But it is also so deadly that you are better off being late to the game when there is more knowledge and better treatments. And maybe an effective vaccine will come in time.
gkoutnik
@Cathie from Canada: From March on, my wife and I have focused our whole lives around: “Don’t get it.” We’re older, and with high blood pressure, so initially that was the reason – we didn’t want to die – but as the long-term and permanent effects began to become evident, we really didn’t want to get it. We’re still pretty much locked down, and for the duration.
BC in Illinois
Yeah.
My brother in Maryland has been hospitalized since Friday. Tested positive a week before that. Probably had it for the week before that. Picked it up from someone at work (now also hospitalized) in the week or two before that, where the trail probably goes back to a family gathering down south sometime in July.
So from my SIL (also tested positive, waiting out things at home), I get updates about oxygen levels, how he feels from day to day, etc. He can walk around the room, but he needs more oxygen than they would like. We try to take things on a three-day-rolling average; don’t get elated about a few good days, don’t get distraught about a not-so-good day.
The thing is, the reports/texts from Maryland have been talking about Remdesivir, experimental this and that, “convalescent plasma trials” (?), and the like. I have a nurse in Illinois who I call with all my medical questions, and she says that from week to week they get updates on “well, we used to do this, and now we’re going to do that.” They only have five months of experience/data to go on.
It makes it hard.
MoCA Ace
@CaseyL:
A handful of cases due to surface transmission (assuming they are valid) does not mean that mode of spread is “higher than they thought”. Unless they thought the threat was zero.
It’s still a fluid situation but most of the recent information I have read has been downgrading the threat due to surface transmission and upgrading the threat from airborne transmission. I don’t recall any dismissing surface transmission as a vector for the spread of COVID.
Jay Noble
From not even knowing it existed last December to what we do know now is a lot and pretty remarkable despite all the smoke that has been put out there. The things we don’t know we won’t and couldn’t know until Covid has been out there awhile. One of the mind numbing things is trying to get through to those who keep putting up annual flu deaths is that we are barely past a 1/2 a year and are eclipsing those numbers.
COVID psychosis whether that seen in positive patients or general population isn’t much of a surpise.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@BC in Illinois: That’s scary. I hope your brother continues to hold his own
Felanius Kootea
I read that PubMedCentral article. Three cases of psychosis in people who were COVID-19 positive but asymptomatic. That is truly weird. We definitely don’t know enough about this condition. I noticed one of the cases was given hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin but there were concerns about the potential impact on her heart.
scav
There is a distinction between acknowledging how quickly information about this new virus has been accumulating and assuming that we already know everything about the beast. And somebody’s going to have to borrow Obama’s Tardis if they want hard data on the long-term prognosis of survivors like, yesterday.
Steeplejack
@BC in Illinois:
Sending healing thoughts to your brother and his wife.
JPL
@BC in Illinois: Let’s hope he continues to heal. Walking around is suppose to help, as well as lying on your stomach. Supposedly by the fall, the treatment would improve. It could have been magical thinking though.
Yutsano
@Felanius Kootea: Correlation not being causation aside, that’s enough to at least start taking a peek at it. And maybe even get some insight as to the origins of psychosis.
Gravenstone
@BC in Illinois: Convalescent plasma is blood plasma taken from someone who has the antibodies you want, in this case covid-19. It’s something of a classic treatment that has gotten a lot of attention because it’s not reliant on a new vaccine or medication. I’ve seen mixed reports on its effectiveness but at least it’s unlikely to be detrimental.
Jeffro
So…covid psychosis becomes a thing just as QAnon becomes ascendant on the right…
BC in Illinois
@Gravenstone:
Thanks.
BruceFromOhio
@Jeffro: ikr??? How the heck do you tell the difference?
Brings new meaning to the word “covidiot.”
Aleta
Side effect of covid-19 related to NZ: the summer Antarctic research programs of the US and most other countries generally start in October, most people landing in Christchurch to fly to Antarctica. With NZ closed to all countries, this is going to shut down most of the research and the travel of support crews. A few people are said to be going in by boat. It’s also complicating the return and exchange of the very few who winter over to keep recording systems running or other systems. Some who were ready to leave after the isolated winter may have to stay on because there’s no one to take their place. (I don’t know anything about the research by boat or out of Argentina.)
Roger Moore
@CaseyL:
I don’t know if it’s higher risk than they thought, but it is not zero risk. If you are in the position of the USA, where there’s rampant community spread, the occasional case of surface-based transmission is unimportant. But if you’re in New Zealand’s case, where you’ve largely eliminated the virus and are doing a good job of preventing it from getting into the country by quarantining visitors, the occasional oddball transmission method becomes an important consideration.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: On the other side of the coin, the more infections you have in general, the more oddball rare cases will appear. The public discussion of this seems frustratingly dominated by anecdotes about things happening that perhaps do happen but are not common, and it all gets very confusing.
dr. luba
The coronavirus appears to attack endothelial cells–the cells that line your blood vessels. It can do so anywhere in the body, any organs. Damage to the vascular endothelium causes blood clot formation. That is why you see such a variety of symptoms.
The neurological effects of COVID-19 have been known for a while. From July: “Newly described case reports add to growing evidence that COVID-19 infections can result in severe, long-lasting neurological complications—including inflammation, psychosis, delirium, nerve damage, and strokes—even among patients experiencing mild cases of the virus with few other symptoms. In some instances, the new study claims, these neurological effects were the first manifestation of the disease.”
And this is the scary part:
germy
@dr. luba:
“Awakenings” by Oliver Sacks is an interesting book on the Sleepy Sickness.
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin:
We are so far away from understanding anything beyond anecdotal driven information. For what it’s worth, emerging evidence is pointing to the conclusion that viral load is correlated with case severity, all other things being equal. That would be consistent with earlier hot spots having a higher death rate because there were effectively no mitigation strategies in place.
@Matt McIrvin:
Soprano2
Like “get chicken pox when you’re 10, get shingles when you’re 50”? I’ve thought about that, too. We have no real idea of what the long-term consequences of having COVID-19 are.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
According to that article, “reports from the SARS CoV-1 epidemic identified a range of psychiatric complications in affected patients with SARS, including adjustment-related anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…”
How can anyone tell the difference between anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts due to covid vs. anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts due to running out of money because you lost your job and you can’t get a new one, losing your home, or just never being able to go anywhere except the grocery store and the park for the indefinite future? Everyone’s already feeling anxiety, depression, etc., covid or no covid.
I’m getting a whiff of the original catch-22 here.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
Sure. I’m not recommending that people abandon good hygiene. The point is that if the disease is running rampant, you get the most bang for your buck by shutting down the main forms of transmission. It’s only when you’ve done a good job of shutting down the main means of transmission that less significant ones become important.
Also, AFAIK, New Zealand has been so successful in excluding the virus from their country that they’ve been able to relax the rules about infection control in the population at large. Instead, they’ve focused on keeping the country from getting reinfected and on surveillance so they can figure out when something slips by. When you’re in “guard the borders” mode rather than “stop community spread” mode, unusual means of transmission that bypass your border guards are really important.
Roger Moore
@Soprano2:
Probably not exactly like that. Chicken pox- and other herpes viruses- actually incorporate themselves into the genome of our nerve cells so they can reactivate years or decades later. That’s what shingles is: a viral reactivation. There’s no reason to think SARS-CoV-II has that particular trick up its sleeve. But we know that viral diseases can cause permanent damage, e.g. paralysis from polio, and there’s a serious worry about how bad the permanent damage from COVID-19 will be.
Barbara
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: In some cases yes, in others no. We will not know for a long time if ever.
LongHairedWeirdo
@VOR: this is one of those weird things that gets distorted. Covid-19 is really not very deadly by itself.
Its danger is:
1) it can spread invisibly, for days, and
2) no one’s immune system had encountered it before.
Now, regarding 2), you’ll see stories that people have *some* immune response. It’s actually pretty common for there to be some cross-immune response, but it’s a roll of the dice. Have you been exposed to a different corona virus (remember: covid-19 was called the novel, or “new”, corona virus), that was similar enough to Covid-19 that your immune system can mount a defense?
If yes, IS IT ENOUGH? It might be… but it also might not.
And, obviously, if no, your body has to learn an invader from scratch, and if it doesn’t figure it out quickly enough, or, if other systemic issues reduce your ability to fight it off, then it will kill you. So Covid-19 isn’t an especially deadly virus, but it’s especially dangerous, because we have to assume that it *could* (not will, but *could*) kill anyone who gets it.
Basically, Covid-19 and its discussion is a perfect instantiation of the old quote from Alexander Pope:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
If you know just a tiny bit – it’s not too deadly as viruses go – you can come up with a bit of “drunken” idiocy that only an incompetent could believe for long.
WereBear
@dr. luba: That particular complication scares the wee out of me.
randy khan
@Jay Noble:
Oh, we passed the typical flu season in mid-April. When I tell the COVID-19 deniers that, they generally tell me that you can’t trust the numbers because, well, because they don’t like to hear them.
Amir Khalid
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Making a distinction between “deadly” and “dangerous”, as you are doing, is just pointless hair-splitting. How does it change anything that people have to do to stop it?
Taken4Granite
@Aleta: In June I heard directly from NSF (who sponsor Antarctic research in the US) in June that they were planning to cancel the 2020-21 summer field season. There was not any mention at the time of replacing the winter-over crews, who presumably would be quarantined before going there as medical evacuation in winter is difficult at best.
US Antarctic researchers usually go through New Zealand because the main US Antarctic base, McMurdo, is basically due south of NZ. People going to other US Antarctic bases usually travel via McMurdo. Getting in to coastal bases by ship is certainly possible (that’s how they send in things like fuel supplies), and in fact the way most other countries do it. Some of those countries may go via Argentina or Chile, particularly for bases on the Antarctic Peninsula. Other countries go in directly, especially to bases on other parts of the Antarctic coast. The US is, IIRC, the only country that operates in the Antarctic interior (the USSR used to do so, but I don’t know if their inland base is still open), so they depend on Herc flights from McMurdo.
White & Gold Purgatorian
I’ve worried about how to safely treat frozen and refrigerated foods for months. We just “quarantine” shelf stable groceries and mail at room temp for a few days and figure that will inactivate any virus that might be on the surfaces, but back in April I read that viruses, or possibly coronaviruses like SARS or MERS, had been shown to maintain viability for 28 days at 40 degrees F and essentially forever at 0 degrees F. At that time there was no data about COVID-19 specifically, and I still haven’t seen any, but it seems that frozen or refrigerated items might pose more risk of surface transmission than items at room temp. It would follow that cold workplaces or cold environments might be riskier.
So far I’ve also been washing fruits and veggies, repackaging non-washables like berries into saved “clean” packages, moving eggs from the store carton to a recycled one, wiping down cartons, bottles and plastic packaging with disinfectant. This may be unnecessary but it makes us feel more secure In our home and I can keep this up for a long time. However, when cold weather gets here, the trunk of my car will no longer be a usable “quarantine” spot so we’ll need to dedicate a little more living space to COVID prevention.
If the community spread here was low, we would probably feel safe without disinfecting frozen food and washing fruit with soap and water, but it is not low here in Alabama. New Zealand has done a remarkable job and their leaders and citizenry have earned our envy. What really burns me is that our local leaders — in government and the medical community — just talk about wanting to get the number of cases back to where we were in May and June. They don’t even aspire to going for zero. It has been one set of half measures after another, usually imposed too late and lifted too early. Any of us who are high risk or have high risk family are on our own to try and survive as best we can until adults get back in power. That is the really depressing part. I’ve always believed government existed to help people and, by and large, did help people. No more. It is failing at many levels for a lot of folks. As with his open racism, Trump’s attitude towards the ill, the dying, the economically devastated, seems to have emboldened Republicans at all levels to show their true colors: We don’t care, you are on your own.
Betty
@germy: The movie was good too.
Anoniminous
Sars-Cov-2 infects endothelium cells using the ACE2 receptor. Endothelial cells are omnipresent in the body and, so, comprise part of the blood/brain barrier. It has been fully established these cells can and do develop the Covid-19 disease causing bleeding in brain areas. This gives a range of mild mental health dysfunction to death and everything in between. It is suspected patients who have Covid-19 in the brain will suffer long term mental health and brain consequences. Your guess is as good as anyone’s what that will mean 10, 20, and 30 years down the road.
Wu, Yeshun, et al. “Nervous system involvement after infection with COVID-19 and other coronaviruses.” Brain, behavior, and immunity (2020).
Barbara
@Amir Khalid: Not just that, but “deadly” is a rather relative concept. No, it is not as “deadly” as untreated HIV, but it is deadlier than seasonal flu. I understand that the point here was that its impact is amplified because no one has immunity (or we must assume) so it is going to throw out horrific numbers just on that count alone. But still.
arrieve
@gkoutnik: I’m feeling the same. I was just thinking about how I still disinfect everything that comes into my apartment even though it appears the risk of surface transmission is very small. “Very small” does not equal zero. Clothes I wear outside still go straight into the laundry. Mail gets wiped down and then sits for 48 hours. Overkill? So what?
I got a virus in Africa two years ago. Nobody ever figured out what it was and had no idea about how to treat me, beyond “you’ll probably get better on your own.” It damaged my heart — it’s now about 25-30 beats slower per minute than it used to be — and it was a year before I felt like a reasonably normal human being. So I really, really, really never want to meet the SARS family. And whatever I have to do, I’ll do.
I don’t see how anyone thinks this is a risk worth taking.
Roger Moore
@Anoniminous:
Very minor nit: the protein is ACE2 (angiotensin converting enzyme 2). It is not a receptor and should just be called ACE2. Calling it ACE2 receptor makes it sound to a biologist as if it’s a protein that’s designed to detect and respond to a signal sent using ACE2. This kind of thing is very common, which is why there’s a standard naming pattern of signal protein/signal protein receptor.
ChrisS
There was something I saw the other day that discussed these weird cases and it was basically that these viruses are very simple, but can affect many different cells. And while SARS was limited to less than 10k cases, there wasn’t an opportunity for the 1 in a million type anomalies to show up, whereas COVID could have nearly 50m cases in the US and these freaky things start presenting.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Amir Khalid: You’ve got a really good point; it’s like…. well, it’s like, if you know a little bit, you can get things *completely* wrong, even if what you know is completely factual; when you learn more, you learn the deeper subtleties, and can understand where people have gone wrong by misunderstanding the implications of facts.
It’s like, see, like *a little* knowledge is a dangerous thing; you need enough knowledge to leave you firmly centered in reality. Why hasn’t anyone ever expressed that thought as a famous quote? I bet we could attribute it to someone famous, like Kevin Bacon or Alexander Pope.
evodevo
@randy khan: Yes. This. When I quoted the numbers of dead from the 1918 pandemic, a RWNJ Facebook acquaintance said he didn’t believe them….these people are such in total denial of EVERYTHING that would conceivably contradict their worldview, I don’t know how they make it through a day…
Royston Vasey
As I live in Wellington, NZ, it’s always good to see NZ mentioned on this site.
Under level 3, businesses are able to open, but should not have any physical contact with customers. Restaurants and bars are closed, but takeaways are allowed.
Auckland schools and childcare facilities are only open for children of essential workers.
Police have set up nine checkpoints in and out of Auckland to monitor who is entering and leaving the city.
Gatherings in Auckland are only permitted for weddings, funerals and tangihanga and are limited to 10 people. Physical distancing and public health measures should be maintained.
As I type this, a new confirm case has just been announced.
A student from Mount Albert Grammar has tested positive. Mount Albert Grammar is one of the biggest schools in the country.
TS (the original)
@Royston Vasey:
I have family in Auckland – thanks for the update.