Late July start for Tour de France according to latest reports

Fat chance of TDF really happening this year, but if anyone has an explanation of how COVID-19 could magically be defeated withint the next 12 months I'd love to hear it.

It's not magical, but it requires huge effort, and it's public health, you test, a lot and you trace.  It's how the WHO, and other agencies, have massively reduced tranmission of MERS and SARS, both coronoviruses, and how most Ebola outbreaks don't become worlwide outbreaks.

MERS and SARS and Ebola were easy to trace because people got sick fast with those. COVID-19 is a bit more tricky with it being contageous before symptoms appear and some people don't even get symptoms. And to add insult to injury it has a habit of recurring, my work mate got better and then a bit ill again. I stayed the f*** away from work, I'm risk averse even 1% chance of dying doesn't sound good to me. And I have a lack of air phobia

It looks like most countries simply don't have enough of the necessary equipment to do very large scale repeated testing. It's not surprising that the two countries that are doing the most testing are Germany and South Korea.  Germany manufactures testing machines, maybe S Korea does too or maybe they were just better prepared because of the previous outbreaks.

We're only doing selective testing here in the UK, France has done a bit less testing than us. I have heard nothing about the UK gov't gearing up to do extensive tracing, it sounds like they just gave up at the start and never bothered to get back on track.

It might be tricky but it's the only way we might get back to any sort of normality, before a useable vaccine becomes massively available.  The higher ups seemed to be initially obsessed with the rapid "herd immunity" thing, anyone heard about that recently?  It was alright that only the old would get really ill and maybe die, how's that going? Dom? Boris?

We have many machines, just my last small reasearch group had 4 96 well pcr machines to use, with several more older ones mothballed in cupboards and storerooms, the UK just never had the will to make use of the facilities it has.  Maybe PHE wanting to keep things in house?

It can be done.

It can't be done.

About 50% of cases are asymptomatic according to the Icelandic data.

There is no guarantee a vaccine will ever be available.

Herd immunity is the only other way out of this.

Economic damage kills people too, lots of people, perpetuating the economic damage any longer than absolutely necessary will likely cause more harm than it will prevent.

Except that the latest scientific papers are showing half of people who had Covid-19 didn't develop any antibodies... so no immunity. This is going to be hard...

matthewn5 wrote:

Except that the latest scientific papers are showing half of people who had Covid-19 didn't develop any antibodies... so no immunity. This is going to be hard...

Interesting. Could you share some links please? All I can find on Google are studies finding that half of cases are asymptomatic, which isn't the same thing.

Study from the Netherlands showed that 25 times more people had antibodies than were officially diagnosed with Covid-19.

Indicates a lot of asymptomatic spread and a good degree of immunity.

The samples were taken in the first week of April when The Netherlands had approx 20,000 confirmed cases.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-netherlands-study/...

I hope that there is a good correlation between antibodies and immunity, but that's not necessarily the case: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/immunity-covid-19-antibodies-not-certain-hiv-co-discoverer-cautions-n1183631

Dr Robert Gallo wrote:

But that's not always the case. Sometimes the antibodies are positive and the person is still very infectious. So, you have to remember that.

I'd like to say there are antibodies and there are antibodies and there are antibodies. Some are nothing at all. Some are protective indicators. And sometimes, though not so commonly, they can make matters worse.

For example, dengue fever — if you get infected and have antibodies and then get infected again, you do worse. Another one is in babies, the respiratory syncytial virus. They can have antibodies that make things worse.

Edit: Just seen a very similar article on the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52335210

It's true that we don't know yet what level of immunity the antibodies represent.

If they don't represent protection then we are in big trouble.