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tealinI swore to myself yesterday that today's blog post would not be about food. So it was fortuitous that I found this very interesting article on the BBC News site this morning:
Coronavirus: What It Does To The Body
Mostly it's a user-friendly overview of the course of any viral respiratory infection: the virus gets into your body; it spends a while multiplying in secret (the 'incubation period'); it reaches a detectable level and your body triggers an immune response with inflammation and mucus; the virus either is defeated, or overwhelms your body's immune system and gets into everything, causing multiple organ failure and eventually death.
The major thing that's different about this strain of coronavirus – Sars-CoV-2 to be precise* – is that it has never been present in human populations before, so there is no resistance to it. Remember those stories about how smallpox and measles wiped out swathes of Native Americans after first contact because they'd never been exposed before? Yeah, that. We are very lucky Sars-CoV-2 is less contagious and far less fatal than those illnesses.
*the common cold is a type of coronavirus, so just saying 'coronavirus' is like identifying a particular species of waterfowl as 'duck'
The other thing that's different about Sars-Cov-2 is that it has a very long incubation period, and in many cases (50-75% depending which study you're looking at) symptoms don't manifest at all, so it spreads through a population undetected, until suddenly cases start popping up like mushrooms. Hence the lockdowns: you can't just stop the spread by avoiding people who are sick, you have to avoid everyone, in case they are sick without knowing it.
Now, this is so much Coronavirus 101, which you probably already know if you've been following the news at all. You probably also know that the classic symptoms are a fever and a persistent dry cough, with aches and a sore throat optional extras. What I found particularly interesting about this article is its link to a German study which has found that Sars-CoV-2 has, in some cases, triggered an upper respiratory immune response (nasal congestion) in addition to, or instead of, the typical lower respiratory one (cough), so many people may have thought they had a cold when in fact it was the dreaded plague. It was a very small study, of nine people who had tested positive in hospital, but seven had upper respiratory inflammation and two had only mild lower respiratory symptoms.
This was especially interesting in light of a discussion on yesterday's PM in which the host floated a theory that Covid-19 has been going around longer than we think, because he exhibited some mild but classic symptoms (cough, loss of smell) in January. The experts pooh-poohed the idea of an initial wave because there was no accompanying spike in mortality. But taken with the German study suggesting that Covid-19 can masquerade as a head cold, and indications that there may be two strains of the virus, one more severe than the other, there's a possibility that quite a lot of us may already have functioning antibodies, and if we can get those antibody tests up and running at capacity, those who test positive could keep the rest of society running while the uninfected and vulnerable remain isolated.
Beyond my default level of scientific curiosity (which remains high!) I have a personal interest in this because I have had FIVE COLDS this winter, and I would love it if one of them has left me with Sars-CoV-2 antibodies on the sly. It can't have been Big Trip Cold or the McMurdo Crud because I got those before Covid-19 emerged in China. Boxing Day Cold is possible but unlikely. However I did have a cold in late January – it was a feverless nasal one like usual, not the PM host's classic cough – and my housemates brought one back from Belgium in early March, which is more suspicious timing-wise. For both my housemates it followed the usual track of starting in the nose before turning into a cough, but they reported it to be exceptionally miserable. I caught Belgian Cold from them, but had a pretty easy go of it, possibly because I'd had four colds already so my body was used to fighting these things off. When I have a cold I usually end up coughing for a month afterwards, so the fact one of my housemates is doing so raised no alarm bells to me. I've skipped my usual post-viral bronchial irritation the last few colds, including Belgian Cold, because I forced myself to sleep through the early phases and have made liberal use of oxymetazoline hydrochloride to suppress nasal inflammation and mucus. But I travelled with Belgian Cold! And had people over! Should I let them know?
The UK government has ordered over a million tests – I don't know if they are antibody tests, I think they're just virus tests – which is a lot, but they're not going to give them to asymptomatic people who just really really want to know. I hope at some point they roll out antibody testing for the general population, especially if antibody transfusion looks possible. But for now I just have to sit here and wonder.
TL;DR:
EDIT 15:54 GMT
Ooooh, antibody tests should be widely available soon! SCIENCE!
Coronavirus: What It Does To The Body
Mostly it's a user-friendly overview of the course of any viral respiratory infection: the virus gets into your body; it spends a while multiplying in secret (the 'incubation period'); it reaches a detectable level and your body triggers an immune response with inflammation and mucus; the virus either is defeated, or overwhelms your body's immune system and gets into everything, causing multiple organ failure and eventually death.
The major thing that's different about this strain of coronavirus – Sars-CoV-2 to be precise* – is that it has never been present in human populations before, so there is no resistance to it. Remember those stories about how smallpox and measles wiped out swathes of Native Americans after first contact because they'd never been exposed before? Yeah, that. We are very lucky Sars-CoV-2 is less contagious and far less fatal than those illnesses.
*the common cold is a type of coronavirus, so just saying 'coronavirus' is like identifying a particular species of waterfowl as 'duck'
The other thing that's different about Sars-Cov-2 is that it has a very long incubation period, and in many cases (50-75% depending which study you're looking at) symptoms don't manifest at all, so it spreads through a population undetected, until suddenly cases start popping up like mushrooms. Hence the lockdowns: you can't just stop the spread by avoiding people who are sick, you have to avoid everyone, in case they are sick without knowing it.
Now, this is so much Coronavirus 101, which you probably already know if you've been following the news at all. You probably also know that the classic symptoms are a fever and a persistent dry cough, with aches and a sore throat optional extras. What I found particularly interesting about this article is its link to a German study which has found that Sars-CoV-2 has, in some cases, triggered an upper respiratory immune response (nasal congestion) in addition to, or instead of, the typical lower respiratory one (cough), so many people may have thought they had a cold when in fact it was the dreaded plague. It was a very small study, of nine people who had tested positive in hospital, but seven had upper respiratory inflammation and two had only mild lower respiratory symptoms.
This was especially interesting in light of a discussion on yesterday's PM in which the host floated a theory that Covid-19 has been going around longer than we think, because he exhibited some mild but classic symptoms (cough, loss of smell) in January. The experts pooh-poohed the idea of an initial wave because there was no accompanying spike in mortality. But taken with the German study suggesting that Covid-19 can masquerade as a head cold, and indications that there may be two strains of the virus, one more severe than the other, there's a possibility that quite a lot of us may already have functioning antibodies, and if we can get those antibody tests up and running at capacity, those who test positive could keep the rest of society running while the uninfected and vulnerable remain isolated.
Beyond my default level of scientific curiosity (which remains high!) I have a personal interest in this because I have had FIVE COLDS this winter, and I would love it if one of them has left me with Sars-CoV-2 antibodies on the sly. It can't have been Big Trip Cold or the McMurdo Crud because I got those before Covid-19 emerged in China. Boxing Day Cold is possible but unlikely. However I did have a cold in late January – it was a feverless nasal one like usual, not the PM host's classic cough – and my housemates brought one back from Belgium in early March, which is more suspicious timing-wise. For both my housemates it followed the usual track of starting in the nose before turning into a cough, but they reported it to be exceptionally miserable. I caught Belgian Cold from them, but had a pretty easy go of it, possibly because I'd had four colds already so my body was used to fighting these things off. When I have a cold I usually end up coughing for a month afterwards, so the fact one of my housemates is doing so raised no alarm bells to me. I've skipped my usual post-viral bronchial irritation the last few colds, including Belgian Cold, because I forced myself to sleep through the early phases and have made liberal use of oxymetazoline hydrochloride to suppress nasal inflammation and mucus. But I travelled with Belgian Cold! And had people over! Should I let them know?
The UK government has ordered over a million tests – I don't know if they are antibody tests, I think they're just virus tests – which is a lot, but they're not going to give them to asymptomatic people who just really really want to know. I hope at some point they roll out antibody testing for the general population, especially if antibody transfusion looks possible. But for now I just have to sit here and wonder.
TL;DR:
- Coronavirus is the family of viruses to which today's baddie belongs.
Sars-CoV-2 is the name of this particular strain.
COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes. (I shy from all-caps so I ... don't. But it is an acronym for COronaVIrus Disease [20]19 so I am technically wrong.) - Sars-CoV-2 has a very long incubation period, during which symptoms do not show but the virus is strongly transmissable.
- Symptoms typically are a fever and dry cough, sometimes with aches and/or loss of smell.
- A German study has found that several people who tested positive had runny noses and not necessarily other symptoms.
- Many – perhaps a majority – of carriers show no symptoms at all.
- There may have been an initial wave of infections in Europe in late January.
- There may be two strains of Sars-CoV-2 in circulation
- Was it one of my FIVE COLDS this winter? We may never know!
EDIT 15:54 GMT
Ooooh, antibody tests should be widely available soon! SCIENCE!
