A new nightmare — extracts from a long thread:
COVID Update September 19: SCOTUS edition.
A massive impact on our ability to fight the pandemic and on those effected by it depends on the Court. 1/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) September 19, 2020
Because that damage can be immediate, chronic, recurring, or hidden in the body only to show up years later, COVID-19 is the ULTIMATE pre-existing condition. 3/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) September 19, 2020
If you are one of the 20-40 million who has a case that hasn't been diagnosed, if you get a condition in the future, and you can be checked for anti-bodies, the insurance company could cancel your policy & refuse to pay your claims. 6/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) September 19, 2020
Mandatory disclaimer: Slavitt is very much an interested party here, but while he may overstate, IMO he’s not wrong.
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Cheryl Rofer recommended this info-rich article from UCSF Magazine — “We Thought It Was Just a Respiratory Virus. We were wrong.”
… When UCSF researchers tested people for SARS-CoV-2 in San Francisco’s Mission District, 53% of those infected never had any symptoms. “That’s much higher than expected,” says Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, a UCSF professor of medicine with expertise in HIV. Surveys of outbreaks in nursing homes and prisons show similar or even higher numbers. “If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and 80% of cases,” Gandhi says. Millions of people may be spreading the virus without knowing it, she points out, making asymptomatic transmission the Achilles’ heel of efforts to control the pandemic – and highlighting the importance of universal masking.
“The majority of people who have COVID-19 are out in the community, and they are either asymptomatic or only mildly ill,” says Sulggi Lee, MD, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor of medicine. When the coronavirus pandemic hit San Francisco in early March, Lee conceived a study to investigate why. She scrambled to assemble a team and procure funding and equipment. She borrowed a colleague’s mobile clinic – a van outfitted with an exam table and a phlebotomy chair – so that her team could drive around the city, collecting samples from infected people. Lee hopes data from the study, called CHIRP (COVID-19 Host Immune Response Pathogenesis), will show how people’s immune systems respond as SARS-CoV-2 starts to gain a foothold in their bodies.
“A lot is riding on that initial response,” she says. If Lee and her collaborators can figure out the biological processes that allow some infected people to stay relatively well, they can perhaps use that knowledge to prevent others from falling severely ill…
Wrap Up the Weekend: Some Longer Pandemic ReadsPost + Comments (124)