Premier League Suspended - Returns June 17, First Liverpool Game June 21

As long as 1) people stay safe and healthy, and 2) we finish the season which seems like most people know must happen.

 

I wouldn’t expect games to resume until June in any case.

 

stolen from twitter or rawk - can't recall where -

The coronavirus started on the other side of the world but put up a better title challenge than any of the other 19 domestic clubs.

 

Don't need antibody tests. It's much quicker and easier to use PCR (polymerase chain reaction). You isolate RNA from a nasal swipe and then use a pair of short pieces of DNA (called primers) that bind to the viral sequence and then amplify this in a specialized block incubator called a PCR thermocycler. This can be done in a matter of hours and if there are even low levels of virus in the patient you'll have a black and white answer as to whether they have caught the virus.

What they are probably talking about is developing passive immunotherapy. This is where you can use the serum from someone who has been infected with the coronavirus and developed antibodies against it to transfuse it into someone currently infected with it. This can be used in an emergency to try to temporarily increase someone's immune system. The old way to do this is to use the whole serum, a new technique which may end up being used is to clone the gene from the immune cells of the person that makes the antibody and then produce and purify it from tissue culture. This then provides you with a specific neutralizing antibody (you've probably seen commercials for various antibodies that are used to combat a ton of different diseases - e.g. psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, certain kinds of cancer, etc.)

Realistically, probably about 70% of the global population is either going catch this virus in the next year, or we will restrict it long enough to do mass immunizations on the timescale of about a year from now. After that, there will be no need to test whether people have had it or not.

 

No the PCR test is what is being used right now, but it will only detect presence of the virus itself in an active case. A successful immune response will clear your system of any remaining virus. They may institute a point of service test if this goes on for a long time (years). That would be one where they place purified viral proteins, like the protein which binds the virus to the host cell, and then test a drop of blood for antibodies. This would be a lot like a pregnancy test, and could be as short as 10-15 minutes. The problem is that they need to know which proteins people typically raise antibodies to, and they'd need to do a lot of testing to make sure that it was effective and doesn't give false positives and/or false negatives. My guess is by the time these are widely available, we may be well on the way to a vaccine and drug therapies. Once everyone is immunized (either by infection or by vaccination), this sort of test is less useful.

The PCR test is really quite basic to design (we do similar types of experiments daily in my lab - although we work with plants not humans - but the principle is the same for every type of organism). The main bottleneck at the moment is hospitals need to use specialized viral RNA extraction kits to isolate and purify the coronavirus genomic RNA. These are apparently very limited - hospitals in MI have been asking researchers to donate kits because they are running out. If you don't have the RNA isolation kits, you can't run the PCR test... Just another example of how superbly screwed up the US response to this viral outbreak has been. There are reports that the intelligence community had been warning since Dec and Jan that we needed to begin preparing for this to spread to the US. Ramping up production of these testing kits and RNA isolation kits should have been done back then - but apparently folks high up in this administration believed that simply cancelling flights from China would be enough. This frankly flies in the face of everything epidemiologists know about how epidemics spread. Really amazingly short-sighted mistakes that will unfortunately lead to more sickness and mortality than might have happened if things had been handled properly.

Hey Stilts, I'll echo what Zaq has written. Its important to remain positive and calm. I think everyone should understand that this is likely with us until we develop effective vaccines. Until then, for those who are older or have underlying health conditions it is really important to remain isolated as much as possible. Look into grocery delivery, or pre-ordering so they can simply come out and pack the groceries in your trunk. But remember, awareness and avoiding places where you might come into contact with infected people, and effective hand washing will go a long way to keeping you healthy. Just because you can't see the virus doesn't mean it has superpowers. Staying away from others by ~6 ft and religiously washing hands regularly and especially whenever you come home from being outside will dramatically reduce the chances of becoming infected. Good hygiene will beat this virus every time - it's not rocket science!

If our public health mitigation strategies work, we will see the numbers of infections flattening or dropping in the next couple of weeks (probably we've got another week or two of these cases going up rapidly, but after that we hopefully will see things stabilize). Further, we may see the speed at which future outbreaks amplify become significantly slower as we move into the warmer months due to people being outside more, and more adverse conditions (higher temps, more sunlight, more humidity in the air) affecting the length of time the virus particles remain infectious in the environment.

Life is going to be different for the next several months... but we are an adaptable species and we'll learn to cope and overcome this just as we have for millions of years.

 

Speak for yourself.

Nah, stay healthy Stilts,