Son of Mathonwy wrote:
I can't read the ft, but I think the article is here:
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/cor ... st_5465580
If true* new infections should slow down soon rather than grow exponentially. But with the sudden shutdown, hopefully new infections will slow down anyway, so how can we tell? Someone needs to do some random testing of the population soon!
* Seems too good to be...
As they say, "neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity", would provide that data, but these are not trivial assays. I've done lots of them for viral gene therapy vectors. You would need to collect serum from an appropriately sampled population, expose cultured cells to the serum then expose those cells to live, virulent coronovirus (you could use a pseudotyped attenuated viral capsid but given the virus is new to science, this would take as long as a vaccine), then assay for the viral genome inside the cells some days later. The idea being pre-existing antibodies to the virus in serum will block entry of the capsid into cells. There are so many technical variables here I don't know where to start. What cell type most closely models the cells infected by the virus in humans (vital for the structure-function relationship between a viral antigen, the host cell surface entity that antigen binds to, and an antibody), and on and on and on. All of this technical variance combined with the unknown natural variance in host immune response in an infected population that has arisen mere months ago would make it outrageously difficult to determine the sample size (number of patients needed to be sampled to give a true representation of the actual population mean) required to give the data appropriate statistical power (i.e. minimise the chances of a false negative result). More pointedly, all of this relies on an
assumption that seropositivity confers resistance to infection. That is a fucking big gamble in the middle of an exponential rise in deaths and, frankly, not something that resources should be allocated to.
- something else UK wusnae ready for; it's worked well in SK etc to get important info. out there, just need peeps to be wary of spammers, scammers, scummers etc.
