Coronavirus, Covid 19 Discussion and How It Has Affected Your Daily Life Chat Thread

[Ruthster55]

Just a little bit of insight into the recent visitors to this thread.

They breed beautiful and ancient breeds of chickens that have had thousands of years of selection for disease resistance. The selection happened because this type of chickens had repeated physical contact with each other to entertain anyone from ancient Sumerians to Abraham Lincoln.

Modern egg layers and broilers have a much smaller genetic pool than either jungle fowl or game fowl. Heritage breeds and mixes have a broader genetic pool, but only a few hundred years of selection toward disease resistance.

Yes, it is possible to raise a few hundred gamefowl with zero medicines and no vaccines. The breed has existed for thousands of years and has been already selected for disease resistance.

The human intervention with gamefowl usually needed involves building materials and fencing to keep the adult roosters from tearing each other up.

You could probably do a similar thing with Fayoumi and African village chickens. These are also ancient breeds or landraces that have been selected over time for disese resistance in a warm climate where pathogens occur year-round.

You could have 1000 Fayoumi running wild all over a farm and they probably don’t need any medical interventions whatsoever. Can’t guarantee that they won’t roost in trees....

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2019.00376/full

It might be possible to do something similar with heritage Mediterranean breeds like Leghorns and Anconas. This depends on the strain and its history, but the breeds are several hundred years old.

When you’re dealing with heritage American or South American chickens, some breeders vaccinate but others don’t. Small producers and backyard flocks rarely vaccinate, but an acquaintance who raises a few thousand chicks per year does.

I would definitely not recommend to not vaccinate a lot of 1000 or 10000 broilers. Modern hybrids probably don’t carry a lot of the disease-resistant genetics from anciant chicken breeds or even Mediterranean ones.

And, I would vaccinate humans. If you lose a chicken to disease, it’s a monetary or property loss. When you lose a person, it’s a tragedy.

Yes, it is better to select chickens over hundreds of generations for disease resistance. The luxury of that time availability isn’t available with a new virus like the ‘rona.

William Shakespeare just had his vaccination!

It might take a while to get past patient 2B or Not 2 B from the 1560s to early 1600s... but let this winter of my discontent end ....

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-...are-receives-a-covid-19-vaccine-idUKKBN28I109

 

[deidreg]

I'm so sorry to hear about your father!

My best wishes to you and your family, @MROO .

 

[IamRainey]

A bit of sobering news this morning from the NT Times:

The vaccine as a fire hose​

Margaret Keenan became the first patient in Britain to receive the vaccine. It was administered on Tuesday by May Parsons in Coventry, England.Pool photo by Jacob King​

The vaccine news continues to seem very encouraging. Britain started its mass vaccination effort today, and the U.S. isn’t far behind.​

But there is still one dark cloud hanging over the vaccines that many people don’t yet understand.​

The vaccines will be much less effective at preventing death and illness in 2021 if they are introduced into a population where the coronavirus is raging — as is now the case in the U.S. That’s the central argument of a new paper in the journal Health Affairs. (One of the authors is Dr. Rochelle Walensky of Massachusetts General Hospital, whom President-elect Joe Biden has chosen to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)​

An analogy may be helpful here. A vaccine is like a fire hose. A vaccine that’s 95 percent effective, as Moderna’s and Pfizer’s versions appear to be, is a powerful fire hose. But the size of a fire is still a bigger determinant of how much destruction occurs.​

I asked the authors of the Health Affairs study to put their findings into terms that we nonscientists could understand, and they were kind enough to do so. The estimates are fairly stunning:​

At the current level of infection in the U.S. (about 200,000 confirmed new infections per day), a vaccine that is 95 percent effective — distributed at the expected pace — would still leave a terrible toll in the six months after it was introduced. Almost 10 million or so Americans would contract the virus, and more than 160,000 would die.

This is far worse than the toll in an alternate universe in which the vaccine was only 50 percent effective but the U.S. had reduced the infection rate to its level in early September (about 35,000 new daily cases). In that scenario, the death toll in the next six months would be kept to about 60,000.

It’s worth pausing for a moment on this comparison, because it’s deeply counterintuitive. If the U.S. had maintained its infection rate from September and Moderna and Pfizer had announced this fall that their vaccines were only 50 percent effective, a lot of people would have freaked out.​

But the reality we have is actually worse.​

U.S. data, as collected by The New York Times.​

How could this be? No vaccine can eliminate a pandemic immediately, just as no fire hose can put out a forest fire. While the vaccine is being distributed, the virus continues to do damage. “Bluntly stated, we’ll get out of this pandemic faster if we give the vaccine less work to do,” A. David Paltiel, one of the Health Affairs authors and a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, told me.​

There is one positive way to look at this: Measures that reduce the virus’s spread — like mask-wearing, social distancing and rapid-result testing — can still have profound consequences. They can save more than 100,000 lives in coming months.​

 

[cheepteach]

we in my family will continue to wear masks and keep ourselves separate---it's getting crazy again!

 

[IamRainey]

And now a report that after the first 100million doses are distributed there will be a delay until approximately June before any more vaccine is available since Trump declined the opportunity to buy additional supply over the summer.

But there may be a different opportunity to get vaccinated.

 

[hispoptart]

I am officially welcomed into the corona country club! I tested positive today. I don't really feel to bad, It's basically a head cold with a sore throat. I've had it for a few days but didn't think anything of it until this morning when I couldn't smell anything and I mean anything! Not even an extremely strong onion. Other then that I feel fine. Had I not tested positive I would have been still at work. Plus side all my co-workers tested negative. The worst part is I have no clue where I got it from. I very rarely go anywhere and when I do I wear my mask and sanitize the hell out of my hands. I'm just praying my husband doesn't get it. He has severe COPD. This will not be good for him.

 

[IamRainey]

So sorry, hispoptart.

Are you able to isolate from your husband? That sounds like a perilous situation.

 

[hispoptart]

So sorry, hispoptart.

Are you able to isolate from your husband? That sounds like a perilous situation.

We already do for the most part. I don't sleep in the same room cause his oxygen machine is so load. He spends most his time in the basement in his office. But I did kiss him good by yesterday morning and last night we danced in the kitchen and ate dinner together. He's going to get tested tomorrow.

 

[EmmaDonovan]

I'll keep ya'll updated. Hopefully it's in like a lion out like a lamb and all that and nobody gets seriously ill but I like to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

I don't know if this is helpful but here is the treatment protocol from the Eastern Virginia Medical School. They seem to keep up on the latest research and adjust their protocols accordingly. We are following their prophylaxis protocol very closely.

https://www.evms.edu/media/evms_pub...cine/EVMS_Critical_Care_COVID-19_Protocol.pdf

 

[ChickenCanoe]

I've read that even after getting immunity once one has their second vaccination, it will still be necessary to wear masks. So we still won't be back to normal till at least 2022. Obtaining humidity doesn't prevent one from inhaling the virus and expelling it with breath, coughs and sneezes.