Coronavirus

[Strontium]

15 minutes ago, Fluter in Dakota said:

They're closing down the nightlife. There's a clue in there somewhere...

 

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

 

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

after this, therefore because of this

 

the sun set in the west; the rooster crows immediately before the sun rises in the east; therefore the rooster causes the sun to rise.

 

the lockdown reduced the cases; the nightlife opened after lockdown; therefore the nightlife opening caused the increase in cases.

 

See the difference?

[Strontium]

Yes, that's exactly the sort of fallacious reasoning I had in mind when I wrote that.

[Mudface]

2 minutes ago, Fluter in Dakota said:

after this, therefore because of this

 

the sun set in the west; the rooster crows immediately before the sun rises in the east; therefore the rooster causes the sun to rise.

 

the lockdown reduced the cases; the nightlife opened after lockdown; therefore the nightlife opening caused the increase in cases.

 

See the difference?

Nah, it's fizzling out, that's why the cases have increased.

 

Hang on...

[johnsusername]

Did people really think it was a good idea to book holidays to Benidorm in the middle of a global pandemic? 

[Guest]

Just now, johnsusername said:

Did people really think it was a good idea to book holidays to Benidorm in the middle of a global pandemic? 

It was definitely a good idea for the travel industry. They've now go the money of the people who paid to go. Now the people have to decide whether they want to spend the money and get a holiday or spend the money and not get a holiday.

 

Unfortunately said people have fallen in to the money trap set by Master of Muppets.

[Tj hooker]

BREAKING: We have a new contender for the "you couldn't write this stuff" stakes

Transport Sec Grant Shapps is on holiday in Spain. He will, therefore, have to quarantine for 14 days when he gets home.

[Strontium]

My MIL flew out this morning for 11 days.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

Yes, that's exactly the sort of fallacious reasoning I had in mind when I wrote that.

So there is just as much chance of a rooster causing the sun to rise as there is of a bar causing infections during a pandemic? 

 

And one day a seahorse will win the Grand National. Why? Because it's a horse and horses win horse races.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

My MIL flew out this morning for 11 days.

Don't worry, the chances of her getting infected are infinitesimal. 

[Grinch]

7 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

My MIL flew out this morning for 11 days.

Getting rid of the mil for 25 days, that's a great result. 

[Strontium]

11 minutes ago, Fluter in Dakota said:

Don't worry, the chances of her getting infected are infinitesimal. 

 

I'm not worried. If there was a nuclear war, all that would be left would be cockroaches, rats and my mother-in-law.

[Bjornebye]

10 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

 

I'm not worried. If there was a nuclear war, all that would be left would be cockroaches, rats and my mother-in-law.

And you sticking solidly to your guns calling the whole thing an embarrassment because the flu kills more people than nuclear war. 

[Dougie Do'ins]

31 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

My MIL flew out this morning for 11 days.

Her isolation period when she returns will last longer than her holiday.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

Her isolation period when she returns will last longer than her holiday.

I've got a feeling coronavirus will be isolating from her.

[Strontium]

5 minutes ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

Her isolation period when she returns will last longer than her holiday.

 

I don't think she's going to have much of a holiday. She has a villa which was broken into months ago and she's not been able to sort it until now.

[lifetime fan]

14 minutes ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

Her isolation period when she returns will last longer than her holiday.

I’d send mine back out again the day she finished quarantine. 

[Mudface]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/26/britain-wins-rare-praise-for-leading-race-to-test-life-saving-coronavirus-drugs

 

Yaay, go us-

 

Britain wins rare praise for leading race to test life-saving Covid drugs
UK’s high infection rate and centralised NHS have enabled Recovery team to help victims across the world


Dexamethasone, a cheap drug found by Oxford scientists to dramatically cut death rates. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters
It has been a startling week for those following Britain’s response to the pandemic. Roundly derided for the lateness of its lockdown and its bungled testing programmes, the UK was the unexpected recipient of a sudden bout of lavish praise for its scientists’ efforts to combat the disease.

“The Brits are on course to save the world,” wrote leading US economist Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg Opinion, while the journal Science quoted leading international scientists who have heaped praise on British researchers’ anti-Covid work.

And the prime target for these plaudits has been the UK’s Recovery trial, a drug-testing programme that has involved input from more than 3,000 doctors and nurses working with 12,000 Covid-19 patients in 176 hospitals across the nation – from the Western Isles to Truro and from Derry to King’s Lynn. These trials were carried out in intensive care units crammed with the seriously ill, patients whose numbers were boosted to high levels because of the UK’s late pandemic lockdown. The results have nevertheless changed Covid-19 clinical practice across the planet.

A cheap inflammation treatment has been found to save the lives of seriously ill patients while two much-touted therapies have been shown to be useless at tackling the disease. No other nation has come close to matching these achievements.

“It has been an extraordinary four months,” says one of Recovery’s founders, Martin Landray of Oxford University. “And yes, it is something that the UK can be proud of.”

Landray is an expert in setting up large clinical trials while his co-founder, Peter Horby, also of Oxford University, is an infectious disease specialist who was involved in Covid drug trials in Wuhan last winter when the pandemic first emerged. However, these studies ended when case numbers plunged as the Chinese authorities applied their rigid lockdown. “At the same time, cases began appearing in Europe and I realised we need to start work here,” says Horby.

So he and Landray joined forces and set up Recovery, short for Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy. “We realised doctors would soon be looking for treatments once cases started pouring in to our hospitals,” says Landray. “If we didn’t quickly start trials, we would never know if the drugs that we used were any good. We had about two weeks to get a programme up and running before the tsunami hit the NHS.”

Peter Horby worked in Wuhan, then returned and co-founded the UK trials with Martin Landray.

The pair took nine days from drafting their first protocol to enrolling their first patient. “Normally it takes nine months to do that,” says Horby. “For good measure, we enrolled 10,000 patients within eight weeks.”

Randomised drug trials are the gold standard for pinpointing useful medicines, removing unconscious biases that can cloud clinicians’ judgments. Thousands of people are given a drug or a placebo. No one knows which they are taking. Then results are compared and the efficacy of the treatment is revealed.

Crucially, these trials need very large numbers of patients and no single hospital has enough for such research. Britain has one key advantage, however, in that it has a centralised National Health Service. Other nations, in particular the US, have health services that are fragmented. “It’s the infrastructure in this country – the NHS and the National Institute of Health Research, who funded Recovery – that has made this possible,” says Horby. Three months after setting up their operations, Recovery produced its first results. The first was for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which was then being widely touted by politicians such as Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Jair Bolsonaro as an effective Covid-19 treatment. All believed it could save the world.

The Recovery team disagreed, however. Their trials showed hydroxychloroquine provided no help to Covid patients of any kind. Ten days later, the drug’s Emergency Use Authorisation in the US was withdrawn – to the disgust of Trump.

It was an important development, says Landray. “It meant hospitals around the world no longer needed to waste resources on a useless treatment, and could stop falsely raising patients’ expectation.”

Then there was the combination therapy of lopinavir and ritonavir, two anti-HIV agents, which was also being touted as a powerful Covid treatment. Recovery compared 1,596 patients who were given the drugs with 3,376 who were not – and found no significant difference in death rates between the two groups. It was another disappointment.

Finally, Recovery turned to dexamethasone, a cheap steroid used to counter inflammation and treat arthritis. This was shown to reduce deaths by a third among patients on ventilators in intensive care units. “This is a drug that costs £5 a course – next to nothing – and is widely available,” says Landray. “It was an incredible surprise and a huge step forward.”

As a result dexamethasone has been added to the clinical guidance notes for treating severely ill Covid-19 patients in hospitals around the world while lopinavir and ritonavir as well as hydroxychloroquine have been removed. “Clinicians come up with all sorts of hypotheses about the usefulness of drugs,” says Landray. “But you’ve got to test these hypotheses and to do so you need large, randomised trials.”

The value of this approach has been noted on the other side of the Atlantic. Recovery’s three trials are the best to have been performed anywhere in the world, Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute told the journal Science this month.

Two other, far sadder, impacts have also influenced Recovery’s success, however. “Firstly, we had a very big epidemic in the UK and so had a lot of patients who we could recruit,” says Horby. “The other was the high death rate among those who were hospitalised, around 25%. If that mortality rate had been only 5% we would have needed an even larger trial to produce meaningful results.”

Current trials are now focusing on three other candidate treatments: an antibiotic called azithromycin, an antibody called tocilizumab and a treatment known convalescent plasma – blood plasma that is taken from people who have had coronavirus and which will contain antibodies that might help those who are seriously affected by the virus. However, Horby and Landray say it may take months to get results from these results. “Fewer people are now being hospitalised – which means fewer people are now being recruited to Recovery,” says Landray. “That means results which were rapidly achieved a few weeks ago will now take longer. It’s good news, really.”

[Shitty Arse]

The daily UK death toll seems to have vanished from the news. Can anyone tell me what it is like recently since lockdown has been eased?

[Mudface]

3 minutes ago, Soft Joe said:

The daily UK death toll seems to have vanished from the news. Can anyone tell me what it is like recently since lockdown has been eased?

All the figures are collated here- https://coronavstats.co.uk

[Sugar Ape]

6 minutes ago, Soft Joe said:

The daily UK death toll seems to have vanished from the news. Can anyone tell me what it is like recently since lockdown has been eased?

They’re still publishing the figures just not in the main dashboard. Top figures are yesterday and the same day a week earlier, bottom two are this week compared to last week. 
 

 

[Shitty Arse]

Ok thank you. So averaging around 70 deaths per day since lockdown easing. So obviously not good but lower than I was expecting 

[Mudface]

Just now, Soft Joe said:

Ok thank you. So averaging around 70 deaths per day since lockdown easing. So obviously not good but lower than I was expecting 

It's been pretty much static since, although weekly new cases in both Wales and Scotland will likely have doubled compared to a fortnight ago.

[suzy]

A bit of a chavvy girl I used to work with was moaning all over Facebook she wanted a holiday. Anyway she flew out to Malaga on Monday,  it was just for a few nights and she got back just before they announced the 14 day quarantine from Spain. Is it bad I was a bit gutted she didn’t have to go into quarantine?! I can just imagine her constant moaning if she had!

[Mudface]

16 minutes ago, suzy said:

A bit of a chavvy girl I used to work with was moaning all over Facebook she wanted a holiday. Anyway she flew out to Malaga on Monday,  it was just for a few nights and she got back just before they announced the 14 day quarantine from Spain. Is it bad I was a bit gutted she didn’t have to go into quarantine?! I can just imagine her constant moaning if she had!

A fella from work who's currently in Lanzarote has been on the department's WhatsApp group this morning moaning. Somebody sarcastically asked him where he was planning on going when he got back (he's commonly regarded as one of the most boring people on earth).