Coronavirus

[Section_31]

Wuhan having pool parties and clubbing with no local transmissions since May. The fuck?

 

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/nightclubs-wuhan-packed-coronavirus-epicentre-22712888.amp?__twitter_impression=true

[M_B]

43 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

42,000,000 people have died worldwide this year. 

So we should accept that Covid victims will die and get on with our lives?

 

If we go down that path, should we even bother treating them in hospital? And if we go further down that path, should we bother treating cancer victims? Or people with smoking related issues? or alcohol related problems? Or premature babies? In fact, why bother treating anyone if 42 million die every year - that's life (and death) right? We'd save a shit load of cash.

 

The idea is that we try to prevent death wherever we can. The genuine dilemma with covid is whether our response to the virus is allowing more people to die from other causes than we are actually saving. I have time and sympathy for that argument.

 

What I dont have time for is the argument that old people are the problem rather than victims. Its a dangerous narrative that does nothing but split society. The line that 'old people are going to die soon anyway' is bordering on sociopathic. The debate should be about how we change our society to protect the vulnerable if we accept lockdown is doing more harm than good, but so far I don't see that debate.

[Bjornebye]

I wouldn't believe China for all the tea in China 

[Spy Bee]

This is interesting. The 'second wave' seems to have started spontaneously across all regions. Yes children went back to school, but earlier in Scotland than England an Wales. There's nothing that really explains it. Being a suspicious bastard, I reckon a change in testing methodology is the most likely thing. Any other ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

[Elite]

Just now, Bjornebye said:

I wouldn't believe China for all the tea in China 

Yeah, they are pretty much Jay from The Inbetweeners.

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, M_B said:

So we should accept that Covid victims will die and get on with our lives?

 

If we go down that path, should we even bother treating them in hospital? And if we go further down that path, should we bother treating cancer victims? Or people with smoking related issues? or alcohol related problems? Or premature babies? In fact, why bother treating anyone if 42 million die every year - that's life (and death) right? We'd save a shit load of cash.

 

The idea is that we try to prevent death wherever we can. The genuine dilemma with covid is whether our response to the virus is allowing more people to die from other causes than we are actually saving. I have time and sympathy for that argument.

 

What I dont have time for is the argument that old people are the problem rather than victims. Its a dangerous narrative that does nothing but split society. The line that old people are going to die soon anyway is bordering on sociopathic. The debate should be about how we change our society to protect the vulnerable if we accept lockdown is doing more harm than good, but so far I don't see that debate.

The humanitarians amongst humans agree with this and its a second nature reaction in any walk of life. Unfortunately not every human feels the same. 

[Bjornebye]

1 minute ago, Elite said:

Yeah, they are pretty much Jay from The Inbetweeners.

Like a bull in a China shop when it comes to chatting proper Wuhan. 

[Elite]

3 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

This is interesting. The 'second wave' seems to have started spontaneously across all regions. Yes children went back to school, but earlier in Scotland than England an Wales. There's nothing that really explains it. Being a suspicious bastard, I reckon a change in testing methodology is the most likely thing. Any other ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

Or it's being strategically released.

 

I'm not into conspiracies but this one is definitely not all it appears.

[Elite]

1 minute ago, Bjornebye said:

Like a bull in a China shop when it comes to chatting proper Wuhan. 

They'd be ace on Goldenballs.

[Bjornebye]

4 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

This is interesting. The 'second wave' seems to have started spontaneously across all regions. Yes children went back to school, but earlier in Scotland than England an Wales. There's nothing that really explains it. Being a suspicious bastard, I reckon a change in testing methodology is the most likely thing. Any other ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

The easing of lockdown restrictions, eat out - help out, schools... Its no coincidence. Everyone pretty much went back to normal last month. 

[Spy Bee]

6 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

The easing of lockdown restrictions, eat out - help out, schools... Its no coincidence. Everyone pretty much went back to normal last month. 

That doesn't explain such a definitive line. Eat Out' started on August 3rd, it would make no sense that the virus spontaneously began to increase significantly a month later. It's very, very odd.

[Bjornebye]

1 minute ago, Spy Bee said:

That doesn't explain such a definitive line. Eat Out' started on August 3rd, it would make no sense that the virus spontaneously began to increase significantly a month later. It's very, very odd.

Not everyone went out on 3rd August though. if anything it took a couple of weeks for people to understand it. I work in town and witnessed the difference in the amount of people about , it got noticeably more and more by the day. 

[Spy Bee]

3 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Not everyone went out on 3rd August though. if anything it took a couple of weeks for people to understand it. I work in town and witnessed the difference in the amount of people about , it got noticeably more and more by the day. 

So gradual increase in people using the EOTHO offer, also wouldn't explain a spontaneous increase in cases in every region either. Something changed suddenly and pretty much instantly for this to happen. It can't be weather, because that has been so variable across the country.

[Sugar Ape]

51 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

Well, that's not what this is referring to. It's referring to someone having a positive test, then perhaps a few days later having another positive test.

 

There have been isolated cases of people being reinfected it seems. On these incidents, the people were asymptomatic, so it appears having been infected, your immuno-response is much stronger the second time. I don't think the cases have been validated yet though.

Evidence for that? I’ve only seen a few cases where they’ve said that someone was confirmed as reinfected. One was the Hong Kong one, think one was in Belgium or Holland and one was this one below where they ended up in hospital:

 

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/17/nevada-reinfection-case-highlights-mysteries-covid-19

 

US reinfection case raises question: how long does Covid immunity last?

 

A man in Nevada was infected with Covid-19 in March. He recovered and then tested negative for Covid-19. His would have been an unremarkable story amid a pandemic that has infected millions of people in America – if he had not been infected again less than six weeks later.

 

The 25-year-old male from the American south-west became what appears to be only the second published case of Covid-19 reinfection in the scientific literature, alongside a case of reinfection in Hong Kong.

 

The man, a long-term care home worker in Reno, quarantined at a family member’s home while he was ill. Researchers believe he was reinfected when a family member, also an essential worker, brought a slightly different coronavirus strain home in early June.

 

“We had an outbreak occur in a long-term care facility, and they were in a position that does work with patients,” said Heather Kerwin, the epidemiology program manager for Washoe county, Nevada, who worked directly with the case.

 

The man had to be hospitalized on his second bout with Covid-19, but eventually recovered. He is still suffering side-effects. “They are kind of experiencing some of the lingering effects of fatigue and brain fog,” said Kerwin.

 

Virologists largely expected reinfection could occur. But experts said the US reinfection case highlights the enduring mysteries of the coronavirus, including how long a person’s immune system protects against the virus after an infection and the virus’s interaction with individual biology. Reinfection cases are important also for the development of vaccines and assessing their impacts as the world’s medical community races to develop them.

 

“If we don’t get reasonably long duration of protection to natural infection, then we probably will not get that from a vaccine,” said Dr Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Michigan school of public health. “Most of our vaccines do not do better than natural infection in terms of protection.”

 

Two cases alone cannot solve these mysteries. Experts said scientists will need population-level studies to begin to untangle that question. These case studies represent the very beginning of that work.

 

“Whether there’s immune control of the virus is a critical question and these cases are going to allow us to figure it out,” said Dr Rajesh T Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist at Massachusetts general hospital, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the chair of the HIV Medicine Association.

 

More broadly, the Nevada case also reveals the power that can be brought to bear by robust testing, contact tracing and public health expertise at a time when all three are under attack. Public labs and contact tracing programs have had funding decimated in the decade since the Great Recession.

 

Per-capita funding for state health departments dropped 16% since 2010, according to Kaiser Health News. Many are now beleaguered – overburdened by Covid-19 outbreaks and the subjects of suspicion or outright conspiracy theories. Until recently, Kerwin headed a team of just two other epidemiologists (sometimes called “disease detectives”) who had to trace all of Washoe county’s more than 8,000 cases.

 

“We are spending upwards of 10, 12, 14 hours a day, four to six days a week, because we are running a seven-day operation,” said Kerwin.

 

Washoe county epidemiologists, the Nevada public health lab and university scientists went to great lengths to confirm the case in Nevada, and even ran a “paternity test” to ensure samples came from the same person.

 

“A lab has to take an extremely concerted effort to do more right now,” said Mark Pandori, the director of the Nevada state public health laboratory, and an associate professor of pathology at the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine. Pandori was a co-author on the case study.

 

His lab was alerted to the case by one of Kerwin’s epidemiologists, who was in touch with the patient. When the patient began reporting Covid-like symptoms, again, Kerwin notified the lab.

 

The lab was able to retest the initial sample because technicians laid out a plan to look for anomalies in the beginning of the pandemic. They had kept more than 100,000 specimens, which filtered in from every corner of Nevada except Las Vegas. Those specimens included those of the 25-year-old from Reno.

 

When Pandori’s lab found the man was positive for Covid-19, bioinformatics analyst Richard Tillett from the University of Nevada Reno was asked to sequence the genome of both the old and new sample.

 

“I started with cautious alarm,” said Tillett. He said he “wanted to be absolutely sure this was real, and that this could be found by others and we were not making a mistake”.

 

Tillett ran the panel a second time, then asked Joel Sevinsky of Theiagen Consulting LLC to validate the result. The scientists had the same findings – same patient, two distinct infections. 
 

Tillett notified Pandori of the results, and Pandori sent a Washoe county sheriff to the man’s house to get a DNA sample so the team could “sort of do paternity testing” to ensure they were not two different people.

 

“They’re both Covid-19, and they’re both even within the dominant North American strain, but there are snips – mutations that occurred in the first infection that are not mutated in the second infection,” said Tillett. “And the second infection has some of its own characteristic mutations.”

 

But this too can lead to questions. Did Nevada’s lab find a needle in a haystack, or could many more such cases go unidentified because of fractious public health infrastructure?

 

Experts said the case helps illustrate the constraints public health workers in the US operate under, and how their work can explore fundamental questions about a little-understood virus.

 

“Defunding public health nationwide is one of the things I really worry about,” said Mary Pittman, chief executive officer of the Public Health Institute, which advocates and aids in public health initiatives globally. “It’s one of the things we have to recognize and ameliorate, because this is not going to be our last pandemic.”

 

The case study of the man’s reinfection was published in the Lancet’s pre-print service, or non-peer-reviewed publication, in late August. The case is now undergoing peer review for further publication. The first case of reinfection was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in August by researchers at the University of Hong Kong.

 

Like in Hong Kong, researchers in Nevada sequenced the genomes of two samples from the same person, and looked at what was different in the genetic code of the two infections. The findings point to a grab bag of mysteries which have surrounded the coronavirus since nearly the moment it was identified.

 

How long does natural immunity last? How common is severe illness during the second infection? Does a person’s individual biology play a role in reinfection?

 

“You really need many, many cases to say – people are going to get sick the second time around,” said Gandhi. “You can’t do it with just a couple of cases because you don’t have enough to sink your teeth into.”

 

Importantly, the Hong Kong patient, a 33-year-old man, was reinfected but was asymptomatic upon his second infection. In Reno, the 25-year-old man had a worse outcome, was hypoxic and was briefly hospitalized.

 

The CDC is beginning to run longitudinal studies examining these questions of immunity, said Monto, and so is the University of Michigan, with a 300-household program originally designed to assess influenza vaccines.

 

“If you have to work this hard to confirm it, to me, it says that it hasn’t happened that often,” he said. “But, and here’s the caveat, we haven’t had very much time since people first got infected to see it.”

[Mudface]

16 minutes ago, M_B said:

What I dont have time for is the argument that old people are the problem rather than victims. Its a dangerous narrative that does nothing but split society. The line that 'old people are going to die soon anyway' is bordering on sociopathic. The debate should be about how we change our society to protect the vulnerable if we accept lockdown is doing more harm than good, but so far I don't see that debate.

I'm not entirely sure we can. This was in the Guardian this morning- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/covid-ban-on-care-home-visitors-risks-premature-deaths-experts-warn

 

Given that care home residents are amongst the most vulnerable, how do you protect them? If it's going to be an 'aggressive' protection- and let's face it, it's pointless otherwise- then keeping them completely isolated for an unspecified period is going to cause the problem outlined in the Guardian article. What do you then do with the people who work in care homes and their own families and close contacts- do they have to be isolated along with the residents? If not, how do we stop them potentially passing on the virus? And that's just one vulnerable group, people over 60, the obese, people with asthma and some groups within the BAME umbrella also appear to be particularly susceptible. Pretty soon, you're running into potentially tens of millions of vulnerable people, their families and close contacts that have to be isolated from everyone else. It's just not workable.

[Spy Bee]

2 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I'm not entirely sure we can. This was in the Guardian this morning- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/covid-ban-on-care-home-visitors-risks-premature-deaths-experts-warn

 

Given that care home residents are amongst the most vulnerable, how do you protect them? If it's going to be an 'aggressive' protection- and let's face it, it's pointless otherwise- then keeping them completely isolated for an unspecified period is going to cause the problem outlined in the Guardian article. What do you then do with the people who work in care homes and their own families and close contacts- do they have to be isolated along with the residents? If not, how do we stop them potentially passing on the virus? And that's just one vulnerable group, people over 60, the obese, people with asthma and some groups within the BAME umbrella also appear to be particularly susceptible. Pretty soon, you're running into potentially tens of millions of vulnerable people, their families and close contacts that have to be isolated from everyone else. It's just not workable.

This cannot be beyond the whit of man. You may have to arrange more testing of care staff, ask for care staff to work on live in shift patterns for a period of time. Provide proper PPE for care staff. 

 

5 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

Evidence for that? I’ve only seen a few cases where they’ve said that someone was confirmed as reinfected. One was the Hong Kong one, think one was in Belgium or Holland and one was this one below where they ended up in hospital:

The Hong Kong guy was asymptomatic on reinfection. I thought the guy you spoke about had been confirmed as a relapse, not a reinfection. There will always be exceptions that prove the rule, but when you get a coronavirus generally, you would be immune from that virus for a fair period of time and when reinfected would likely fair better. I don't have links, it's just what I have read.

 

For me this is going to end up just like the Russian Flu (actually a coronavirus). Arrived in 1889, killed a million people, is still here now, but today just causes a common cold. 

[Spy Bee]

Not much evidence to support the 10pm curfew. Apparently the idea came from Belgium, where it hasn't worked too.

 

 

[Spy Bee]

36 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

This is interesting. The 'second wave' seems to have started spontaneously across all regions. Yes children went back to school, but earlier in Scotland than England an Wales. There's nothing that really explains it. Being a suspicious bastard, I reckon a change in testing methodology is the most likely thing. Any other ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

This also shows the massive instantaneous uptick

 

[Bjornebye]

Nobody has been or can be re-infected with it. Someone on here told us that the other day. 

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Bjornebye said:

Nobody has been or can be re-infected with it. Someone on here told us that the other day. 

I don't believe any cases have been validated yet.

[Section_31]

Could conceivably get reinfected with covid as there's multiple strains already, just like the flu vaccine has to be tweaked every year. 

 

A covid vaccine would in theory neutralise all strains though if it works, as most of them target the protein spikes which they all possess.

[Sugar Ape]

2 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

The Hong Kong guy was asymptomatic on reinfection. I thought the guy you spoke about had been confirmed as a relapse, not a reinfection. There will always be exceptions that prove the rule, but when you get a coronavirus generally, you would be immune from that virus for a fair period of time and when reinfected would likely fair better. I don't have links, it's just what I have read.

 

For me this is going to end up just like the Russian Flu (actually a coronavirus). Arrived in 1889, killed a million people, is still here now, but today just causes a common cold. 

I think the Nevada guy has picked up a sightly different strain; but the point is we don’t yet know how long immunity lasts, and if you get reinfected whether you will be asymptomatic, get a mild illness or be very sick again like the case in point. 
 

My own personal feeling is that the vast majority will either be asymptomatic or just have a mild illness if they’re reinfected but the truth is we don’t know, and until we do know it would be foolish to go with a herd immunity plan. There are plenty of other reasons I think herd immunity is a load of shit but that’s a pretty big one. 
 

With regards to it eventually growing weaker and becoming more like a common cold, then yeah I can see that happening. It seems to have happened with a lot of pandemics in the past. I don’t really see how they helps us much in the here and now because I don’t see any evidence it’s about to imminently become less virulent. 

[Spy Bee]

9 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

My own personal feeling is that the vast majority will either be asymptomatic or just have a mild illness if they’re reinfected but the truth is we don’t know, and until we do know it would be foolish to go with a herd immunity plan. There are plenty of other reasons I think herd immunity is a load of shit but that’s a pretty big one. 

I genuinely don't see an alternative strategy, that doesn't do more harm than good?

 

We're also ten months in now, so you would probably expect many validated cases of reinfection. 

[Bjornebye]

3 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

I genuinely don't see an alternative strategy, that doesn't do more harm than good?

 

We're also ten months in now, so you would probably expect many validated cases of reinfection. 

When we were all told from the start that re-infection doesn't happen I suspect many just haven't been re-tested and or are asymptomatic. Plus the testing system across the board is a fucking shambles. 

[Section_31]

10 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

With regards to it eventually growing weaker and becoming more like a common cold, then yeah I can see that happening. It seems to have happened with a lot of pandemics in the past. I don’t really see how they helps us much in the here and now because I don’t see any evidence it’s about to imminently become less virulent. 

I think that's the best hope at the moment pending a vaccine. People talk about 'waves' but from what I've read (obviously I'm no expert) but coronaviruses aren't seasonal like flu,  they tend to fizzle out like SARS and MERS or they become less dangerous as they mutate (I think one of the four strains of cold virus doing the rounds used to be pretty lethal). 

 

That's why the 'second wave' thing is a bit misleading IMO, it's the first (and probably only) wave that's been restrained by artificial lockdowns. Arguably if it hadn't been artificially stifled (it had to be IMO, due to pressure on health services) it might all be over quicker than it probably will be.