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Coronavirus


Bjornebye

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8 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I think it might have just reached a tipping point where the prevalence is low enough that transmissions can't really take hold. We had a few weeks in Scotland where the daily infections were halving each week. The 7 day rolling average is still around 600 a day though, and the figure yesterday was artificially low due to the weekend lag.

 

If they are missing cases due to lack of testing, then it won't go well for them, and they'd be really stupid to do that.

Weekend lag doesn't apply to infection rates in the same way as deaths. Mondays are not traditionally low days. You're definitely about not reading too much into one day, but the 7-day rolling average is plummeting though.

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8 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

Weekend lag doesn't apply to infection rates in the same way as deaths. Mondays are not traditionally low days. You're definitely about not reading too much into one day, but the 7-day rolling average is plummeting though.

It's both usually, deaths rise more dramatically though. Today's UK figures-

 

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Fuck's sake, what is the matter with these people- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/07/frontline-workers-in-uk-set-to-pay-extra-tax-for-covid-19-tests

 



Frontline workers in UK set to pay extra tax for Covid-19 tests
Rishi Sunak is told treating employer-bought tests as a ‘benefit in kind’ will deter key worker checks and reduce pay

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, came under pressure to reverse a decision to force frontline workers to pay income tax on Covid-19 tests purchased by their employers, as he was warned that it risked deterring people from getting checked for the coronavirus.

HMRC guidance published this week states that workers will face a taxable benefit in kind when their employer pays for coronavirus testing. The taxation will cause a reduction in take-home pay.

The chair of the Treasury select committee, Mel Stride, said employees, such as healthcare and hospitality workers, who had to have regular testing, could face mounting tax bills and be discouraged from getting checked.

Testing has been a hugely contentious strand of Downing Street’s response to the pandemic. Following criticism that the government had been too slow to roll out the tests, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, pledged that 200,000 would be carried out daily by the start of June.


On Monday it emerged that the government would no longer publish daily testing data, after five weeks of failing to release the statistics.

Stride, who is urging the Treasury to look into the HMRC testing guidance, said: “Many employees, especially healthcare and hospitality workers, are required to undergo regular coronavirus testing. This new guidance is unclear and will worry a large number of workers.

“If these tests are to be treated as a taxable benefit in kind, the tax bill for workers could soon mount up. Many of our key workers could be faced with the perverse incentive of avoiding employer-sponsored tests in order to reduce their tax bill. This cannot be right. I’ve asked the chancellor to look into this as soon as possible.”

Guidance published by HMRC states: “Coronavirus testing kits or tests carried out by a third party which have been purchased by you to provide to your employees, are treated as a taxable benefit in kind on the employee.”

Benefits in kind are those which workers receive from employers which are not included in their salary, such as cars. Employees have to pay income tax on these benefits; the tax is calculated based on the benefits’ value, then deducted from wages through PAYE. The guidance makes no mention of NHS staff, or other key workers, being exempt from the tax.

In a letter to the chancellor on Tuesday, Stride, the Conservative MP for Central Devon, said the decision to treat tests purchased by employers as a benefit in kind was not “a helpful policy at this time”.

He added: “As you know testing for Covid-19 is an essential precaution and supports our contact-tracing systems, and it is vital to carry out as much testing as possible to ensure we can return to a normal economy.

“I think this policy risks deterring workers from taking employer sponsored tests. Many of those affected will be in frontline jobs in hospitals and other similar settings, and it seems wrong that a disproportionate tax burden should fall on them at this time.”

Sunak, asked by Stride, during Treasury questions on Tuesday, whether he would investigate, replied: “Of course we will look into it very quickly.”

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What the fuck is the matter with these people, part 2-

 

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jul/07/almost-one-in-six-britons-say-would-refuse-covid-19-vaccine

 



Nearly one in six Britons would refuse Covid-19 vaccine – survey
Campaigners say social media firms behaving irresponsibly over anti-vaccine material


Nearly one in six Britons will refuse a coronavirus vaccine if and when one becomes available, and a similar number are unsure whether they will get one, according to a survey.

The findings come amid a significant rise in anti-vaccination sentiment on social media, and represent a threat to efforts to contain the disease.

“Our hope for a return to normal life rests with scientists developing a successful vaccine for coronavirus,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit organisation that commissioned the research. “But social media companies’ irresponsible decision to continue to publish anti-vaccine propaganda means a vaccine may not be effective in containing the virus. The price for their greed is a cost paid in lives.”

According to the polling carried out by YouGov for CCDH, 16% of British adults “probably” or “definitely” will avoid a Covid-19 vaccine. The poll of 1,663 people found differences between those who get the majority of their news from social media and those who rely more on traditional media: the latter were nine percentage points more likely to say they would definitely or probably get the vaccine.

The 150 largest anti-vaccination social media pages and YouTube channels tracked by CCDH have collected about 8 million more followers since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, and the 400 outlets in the sample have a combined 55 million followers.


Some of those pages have published false conspiracy theories including that Bill Gates created the pandemic, that vaccines cause Covid-19, and that tests for a coronavirus vaccine have caused women to become infertile.
The majority of the followers are on Facebook, despite the company officially opposing anti-vaccination content. In July 2019 the company announced policies to reduce the spread of posts with “exaggerated or sensational health claims”.

A Facebook product manager said at the time: “People come together on Facebook to talk about, advocate for, and connect around things like nutrition, fitness and health issues. But in order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it’s imperative that we minimise health content that is sensational or misleading.”

As well as so-called organic sharing, both Facebook and Twitter have enabled advertising opposing vaccination, despite bans on such promotions on both sites. Those adverts come from influencers including David Wolfe, described by the CCDH as “an anti-vaccine wellness guru”, who promoted a popular panacea, colloidal silver, as “my #1 recommendation under the current crisis”.

The group said: “Other adverts featured Judy Mikovits’ anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, who featured in the notorious Plandemic film, and adverts placed by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Children’s Health Defense campaign that promote health misinformation about both vaccines and 5G mobile phone signals.”
Advertisers can target their promotions at users who Facebook’s algorithm has decided may have interests such as “vaccine-preventable diseases” or who have liked the page “Talk About Curing Autism”. On Twitter, advertising categories such as “antivaxx” and “natural immunity” are available for all to use.

“This sophisticated ecosystem has grown by exploiting weaknesses in each social media company’s policies on anti-vaxx and health misinformation,” Ahmed said. “Each platform plays a role in feeding and growing the whole.

“Full-time anti-vaxx campaigners doubled their reach by broadcasting their message on YouTube channels that peddle conspiracy theories and false cures. In turn, these campaigners lend their brand and audience of activists to a thriving industry of anti-vaxx entrepreneurs using Facebook as a shopfront.”

Ahmed added: “Both groups have benefited from the reach of professional conspiracists on YouTube and from a network of Facebook groups that turns vaccine sceptics into true believers using psychological hacks like the dopamine hit for ‘likes’ and the fear of abuse for nonconformity.”
In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We are working to stop harmful misinformation from spreading on our platforms and have removed hundreds of thousands of pieces of COVID-19-related misinformation. We reduce vaccine misinformation in News Feed, we don’t show it in search results or recommend it to you on Facebook or Instagram, we don’t allow it in ads, and we connect people with authoritative information from recognised health experts.”

 

If and when we get a vaccine for this, anyone who refuses to take it without a good reason should be forced to self-isolate indefinitely. We've had enough shit with the MMR Wakefield bollocks, although that was hyped up by the likes of the Mail too.

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47 minutes ago, Mudface said:

What the fuck is the matter with these people, part 2-

 

If and when we get a vaccine for this, anyone who refuses to take it without a good reason should be forced to self-isolate indefinitely. We've had enough shit with the MMR Wakefield bollocks, although that was hyped up by the likes of the Mail too.

I've got no objection to a vaccine but there's no fucking way I'd be getting injected with anything that hasn't got a clinical trial of at least ten years behind it.

 

This whole thing has been people supposedly in charge of our welfare stumbling from one cluster fuck to the next. I'll take my vaccine ten years after they've taken it.

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1 hour ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

I've got no objection to a vaccine but there's no fucking way I'd be getting injected with anything that hasn't got a clinical trial of at least ten years behind it.

 

This whole thing has been people supposedly in charge of our welfare stumbling from one cluster fuck to the next. I'll take my vaccine ten years after they've taken it.

I agree, I wouldn't take it either.

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2 hours ago, Special K said:

Is it too much to hope Bolsanaro is killed by it?

No more than hoping Trump contracts it. I assume Trump is the 2nd most protected man in the world at the moment after Putin in his bunker? It's a bigger bunker than Trumps converted basement too.

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2 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

Thread on the antibody/T-Cells stuff. 

 

 

Cautionary stuff. Here's the full version at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1280257221587320835.html , this is the text-

 

1. Since there was a huge discussion about T-cell mediated immunity following the Lancet comment on seroprevalence by @EckerleIsabella and me, I'd like to share my thoughts on this in the following thread:


2. There are 2 different points that are discussed at the moment:
First, there are some studies, i.e.
Targets of T Cell Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and Unexposed Individuals
An analysis of immune cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 from recovered patients identifies the regions of the virus that is targeted and also reveals cross-reactivity with other common circulating coronav…
https://tinyurl.com/y8zzf8tw
, that show a cross-reactive T-cell response in sample taken before the pandemic, due to previous infection with common cold coronaviruses.
3. While I do trust these studies, as the authors pointed out themselves, it is in my opinion quite unclear what this cross-reactive T-cell response means in terms of protection. We know that despite having this specific T-cell response against common cold CoVs, we do
4. get regularly infected by them (every couple of years). So it obviously does not prevent infection in the upper respiratory tract and also not transmission of the common cold CoVs, otherwise they should have died out long time ago. Therefore, I think it is save to assume that
5. if the specific T-cell response cannot prevent infection and transmission, the cross-reactive response against SARS-CoV-2 cannot prevent it either. However, the cross-reactive T-cell response might or might not play a role in the protection of patients against severe disease.
6. Yet, as of today we do not know whether this is true or not and we need to investigate it further.
Second, it has been descriped that people exposed to SARS-CoV-2 only mount a T-cell response but do not produce any antibodies. From this, some people like to conclude that
7. seroprevalence rates are vastly underestimating the true exposure rate and that we are closer to herd immunity that we think. While I do believe that these patients exist, I don't think that they comprise a large proportion that dramatically changes the exposure rate.
8. In a recent paper from us,
Validation of a commercially available SARS-CoV-2 serological immunoassay
To validate the diagnostic accuracy of a Euroimmun SARS-CoV-2 IgG and IgA immunoassay for COVID-19.
https://tinyurl.com/yb9388be
we found only 1 out of 44 mild (outpatient) cases after 21 days post onset that did not mount an antibody response. And all asymptomatic patients in another study
Clinical and immunological assessment of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infec
The clinical features and immune responses of asymptomatic individuals infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have not been well described. We studied 37 asymptoma…
https://tinyurl.com/y9f39twv
mounted neutralizing antibodies.
9. These findings indicate, that we do not miss many exposed individuals in the current seroprevalence studies. In conclusion, I think we should not fall back into wishful thinking that an underestimated T-cell immunity will resolve this pandemic.
10. In the absence of more data on the potential effect of cross-reactive T-cells on the severity of COVID-19, it is dangerous to lower our guard and loose certain measures such as wearing masks and social distancing.

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2 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Is the gist that if you've had a cold in the last couple of years you've got enough defensive shit floating around in there to blunt covid's worst effects.

Possibly, yes, but they also found nearly all mild and asymptomatic patients that were part of a study had antibodies, which doesn't look good for a widespread T-cell immunity theory. If that is the case, then we're clearly nowhere near herd immunity, this thing's just getting started.

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5 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

Is the gist that if you've had a cold in the last couple of years you've got enough defensive shit floating around in there to blunt covid's worst effects.

A couple of years ? I can't get through a couple of months these days without some sort of cold symptom.

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