Coronavirus

[Jennings]

Yeah. Really sorry to hear this mate. I am shit at knowing what to say, so I just rep posts, but thinking of you.

 

Best.

[Colonel Bumcunt]

5 hours ago, Grinch said:

Unborn child, missus was working in a hospital that became a hot spot.  No idea and never will know if covid played a part. 

 

You will never know, so don't carry that around with you.  None of you deserved that to happen to you, neither of you did anything wrong, it just wasn't meant to be, this time. x

[Juniper]

6 hours ago, Grinch said:

Unborn child, missus was working in a hospital that became a hot spot.  No idea and never will know if covid played a part. 

 

We've all been badly affected by it and I'd say most, especially on here will have made sacrifices.   Don't come across too many wankers saying they don't believe in it on here for instance,  something I can't say about irl. 

 

Completely fucked off with it now.  Feels like nothing I do is gonna make a blind bit of difference. 

 

 

Really sorry to read this, Grinch

 

Horrible to read this so I can't Imagine what you're going through. Keep your chin up (easy to say I know) but sending condolences to you and your partner. 

 

Hope things improve for you soon.

[Strontium]

That's terrible Grinch. I am truly sorry for your loss.

[TheBitch]

[Moo]

Regarding the R Rate in the north west, does anyone know what it's been throughout?  I'm sure it's "starting position" was higher than many places in the country, particularly in Liverpool, so might be interesting to see what direction it's going in. 

[J-V]

15 hours ago, Grinch said:

Cheers for the thoughts, not gonna quote everyone.  A good amount of time has passed now and we're lucky enough to know that we both can have children.  I spent five years with a young woman who never could   now, that would be hard to accept for her, I'll her over this 

 

It fucking sucks, biggest kick in the balls I've ever had, going into a 12 week scan, bouncing expecting to see our child.   Lockdown hit not too long after and I finally got to the wee grave a few weeks ago.  I think that helped her some what  but realistically the pain will pass when we hold our future child.   Worrying, I'm looking around me again, thinking it'd be a curse and not a blessing to bring a child into this shit show.  A selfish act even. 

 

Once things blow over and I get to see my family and friends again, I'll be in a better place.   Have a job interview coming up too that'll get me away from dealing with the public, bloody cunts everywhere. 

Sorry to hear that mate.  Condolenses to You and the Mrs.

[Mudface]

Gang of Four way ahead of the curve as usual-

 

Could Covid-19 have reached the UK earlier than thought?
WHO is urging countries to investigate any suspicious deaths so virus can be better understood


 The death of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill in February could have been caused by Covid-19, says his widow Catherine Mayer (pictured with Gill in 2015). Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock
Aday before the first confirmed fatality from coronavirus outside mainland China was reported on 2 February this year, the death of the influential guitarist and musician Andy Gill was announced. The 64-year-old, who fronted the post-punk band Gang of Four, died of pneumonia after two weeks in St Thomas’ hospital in London.

The trajectory of Gill’s illness, which took medics looking after him in January by surprise, is now familiar – sudden deterioration, low oxygen levels and organ failure. He had fallen sick after his band returned from a trip to China in late November. A short time later, his 26-year-old tour manager was taken to hospital in Leeds with a severe respiratory infection.

As images started rolling in of wards in China and then Italy overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, Gill’s widow Catherine Mayer – an author and co-founder of the Women’s Equality party – couldn’t shake the suspicion that her partner of nearly 30 years may have been an early victim of the virus.


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In a blogpost written last month, Mayer said she emailed Gill’s thoracic specialist to ask the question. “His response winded me,” she wrote. The consultant said: “It seemed to me at the time of Andy’s illness that we had not fully understood why he deteriorated as he did. Once we learned more about Covid-19, I thought there was a real possibility that Andy had been infected by Sars-Cov-2.”

Genetic analyses of the new coronavirus suggest that the virus emerged in humans in China in late November to early December 2019. While China’s official submission to the World Health Organization (WHO) states the first infection was recorded on 8 December, government data seen by the South China Morning Post suggests the first known case was observed on 17 November.

In the UK, the first confirmed cases of coronavirus came on 31 January when two Chinese nationals staying in a hotel in York tested positive. But as the crisis has rolled on, and the virus’s range of distinctive symptoms become more widely known, many – some in letters to the Guardian – have asked themselves if they or their loved ones could have had it earlier.

“People are on heightened awareness about any sort of respiratory infection and it is easy to retrofit stories to things,” said Dr Stephen Baker at Cambridge University’s Infectious Diseases Institute. Colds, influenza and even pneumonia are, after all, common in the winter months.

However, without clear information about what was happening in China in the final months of last year, it is hard to know how likely it is to have arrived in the UK earlier than the first confirmed case, he said.

“Let’s say it was kicking off fairly substantially in Wuhan and people weren’t being informed: could there have been people travelling to and from China at that point who may have been infected by coronavirus? That is completely possible. Is it then possible that they transmitted the virus to other people when they were in the UK? Yes, of course that’s possible.”

Earlier last month, the news emerged that a swab taken from a man treated in a hospital near Paris on 27 December for suspected pneumonia tested positive for Covid-19, raising the prospect that the virus arrived in Europe a month earlier than previously thought.


Data gathered through the Covid-19 symptom-tracking app developed at King’s College London also suggests that people were falling ill from coronavirus in the UK from the beginning of January. “The reports I am getting are from people who were ill from early January onwards and strongly suggest they had Covid-19 but were not recognised as such,” the epidemiologist professor Tim Spector said last month.

Recently released minutes from the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) show that in January that the group felt unable to plan for “the worst case scenario” because of the uncertainty around the data coming out of China. On 13 March, over a week before lockdown was introduced, the group concluded “there are more cases in the UK than previously thought and we may therefore be further ahead of the epidemic curve”.

The WHO has urged countries to investigate any other early suspicious cases, so that the circulation of the virus can be better understood, encouraging doctors to check records for pneumonia cases of unspecified origin in late 2019. Public Health England has also acknowledged that it “cannot exclude the possibility that Covid-19 was in the UK in December or early January”.

Andrew Soppitt, a retired hospital consultant from West Sussex, is convinced he became infected with coronavirus on a skiing trip to Austria in late January. The ski resorts he visited, St Anton and Bad Hofgastein, were the suspected locus of many subsequent infections. “I was really ill. I felt like death. I just couldn’t get out of bed. I could barely get up the stairs. I lost my sense of taste and smell. I started having sweats,” he said. Soppitt made repeated requests to be tested through the NHS 111 service, but was refused.

Earlier this month, the former intensive care specialist, who is in his mid-50s, got the results back from a privately-bought antibody test, which showed he had had the disease at some point but can’t pinpoint when. He says he is certain, though. “It absolutely confirms that I had it February after the trip to Austria in January. It is now blindingly obvious that it was about before people admitted it.”

But if there were cases in the UK earlier than previously thought, then why did the virus only start to escalate when it did? The answer, says Baker, is that it probably took an influx of infected people before the epidemic really started to grow in the UK.

“It was around February half term, people coming back from skiing holidays in northern Italy – that’s probably what brought back a bulk of the [first] cases. It’s really at the point when you get a number of introductions in one go that onward transmission is more likely to happen … as soon as you get a certain number of the population infected in one go then you make that expansion of an epidemic [more likely].”

Not everybody who has coronavirus is equally infectious and, if there were cases earlier in the year, they may not have had enough contact with others to form significant outbreaks, said Baker. “When you’re ill, you tend to stay at home, so people may have been self-isolating on the basis that they didn’t feel very well.”


Another possibility, says Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at King’s College London, is that the virus was “smouldering under the surface for a long time and we weren’t necessarily identifying it”. If, as some research suggests, a large proportion of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic, then the virus could have been spreading silently and gaining access to more vulnerable sections of the population.

“The elderly population, generally speaking, are a little bit less likely in the first place to come into contact with it, because they are not in a workplace where they are having frequent contact with people. They go out, but it might be more limited … So maybe it took a while to get to widespread community transmission and to start affecting our older population.”

The idea that coronavirus was spreading in Europe as early as December and January has serious public health implications, a fact that has propelled Catherine Mayer to look for answers after her husband’s death. She and the specialist who treated Gill hope to be able to do antibody tests on samples from him and his tour manager to establish whether they had the disease.

“How many hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths might have been prevented by greater transparency and quicker and better public health responses, and not just in China but elsewhere?” wrote Mayer.

[johnsusername]

1 hour ago, Moo said:

Regarding the R Rate in the north west, does anyone know what it's been throughout?  I'm sure it's "starting position" was higher than many places in the country, particularly in Liverpool, so might be interesting to see what direction it's going in. 

Accordingly to the Echo, "a few weeks ago" it was 0.7. 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

Absolute fucking selfish gobshites. 

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=195966108617034&id=110889460458033

[Mudface]

1 minute ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Absolute fucking selfish gobshites. 

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=195966108617034&id=110889460458033

Sarah Grey this is gunna happen wen you have been on lock down for 10 weeks and your government talk crap and lie to you av had enough of this covid now and I work in a care home me self are they talking about wat its doin to people mently health goin crazy locked up coz are Government didnt do wat they was meant to do at the start

 

If anyone has relatives in Sarah's care home, I'd suggest you move them out quickly.

[Spy Bee]

Liverpool Rave was trending earlier on Twitter.

 

I don't read too much into fluctuations in the R Rate. They tested a care home near us and out of 31 tests I think 26 were positive. Things like that have a massive impact on R Rate now that numbers of infections generally are lower. If it remains above 1 for any length of time, then you have a bigger problem. But you could have 1 in a million people, passing it on to one other person and that is a rate of 1. 

 

If the death rates, admission rates and infection rates are falling, then we're generally moving in the right direction.

 

Spain are fudging the figures by the way. They are only reporting deaths that occurred and were registered in the prior 48 hours. Due to the devolved nature of Spain's political/healthcare system, this hardly ever happens, as there is a lag between death and central registration. Their number are still circa 150 per day and falling... so we remain about 10 days behind them, from what I can gather.

[Pureblood]

On 14/05/2020 at 13:58, TK421 said:

Bit of a coincidence, isn't it? The country is ordered back to work and the very next day Public Health England say there's a 100% antibody test.  

 

I remain skeptical of this. Where is the report certifying that it's 100%? Keir Starmer should insist that this is published to ensure transparency and to enable the methodology to be scrutinised. 

 

Matt Hancock has fucked up before with antibody tests.  I note that none of these tests have been ordered by the UK government yet (the Guardian reports).  If they are 100%, what is the delay for?  I would not be surprised one bit if reports of false positives emerge once this test is rolled out for widespread use, in fact I think it's highly probable. 

Oh look. 

 

https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests-accuracy/

 

The claims in the media about the 100% accuracy of the Roche test was based on an evaluation of the test undertaken by Public Health England (PHE), although the evaluation reports themselves were not published until a week later. This evaluation showed that the Roche test had a specificity of 100%, but a sensitivity of 83.9%—increasing to 87% if the sample was taken 14 days or more since a person had developed symptoms. This means that, of the 93 samples taken—a relatively small sample size—from people who did have Covid-19, the test incorrectly said 15 were negative. 

[TheHowieLama]

Terrible to read that Grinch man - do what you do for yourself and the others around you.

Best of luck moving forward.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

That's heartbreaking Grinch. Deepest sympathies to you and yours. 

[TheHowieLama]

2 hours ago, Spy Bee said:

 

I don't read too much into fluctuations in the R Rate.

Good man - it will take care of itself.

 

Globally, confirmed cases are now rising at a rate of more than 100,000 a day over a seven-day period. In April new cases never topped 100,000 in one day. But confirmed daily cases have topped that number in nine of the past 10 days, reaching 130,400 cases on Wednesday.

[Spy Bee]

3 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Good man - it will take care of itself.

 

Globally, confirmed cases are now rising at a rate of more than 100,000 a day over a seven-day period. In April new cases never topped 100,000 in one day. But confirmed daily cases have topped that number in nine of the past 10 days, reaching 130,400 cases on Wednesday.

That's not what I said. 

 

The global cases have little relevance to the situation in the UK.

 

Anyway, if we are going to see a significant increase in infections, it will be this week. Looking at the images of protests all around the country, we should in theory see huge increases.

 

[TheHowieLama]

1 minute ago, Spy Bee said:

 

The global cases have little relevance to the situation in the UK.

 

So not only are you pulling out of the EU but leaving the rest of the world as well.

 

That may be the most blinkered statement on this I have heard yet.

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, TheHowieLama said:

So not only are you pulling out of the EU but leaving the rest of the world as well.

 

That may be the most blinkered statement on this I have heard yet.

What do you mean?

 

The R Rate in the rest of the world has little relevance to the R Rate in the UK. That's a fact.

[Pureblood]

Q.  Why did the pirate become infected?

 

A.  Because of the Rrrrrrrrr number.

 

A.  Because he and his crew weren't wearing face masks.

 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

5 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

That's not what I said. 

 

The global cases have little relevance to the situation in the UK.

 

 

They will if they continue to rise and no vaccine is found, it will affect international travel/trade and suggest that Covid is far off from burning out and could easily lead to a second and even third wave across the Globe. Always best to look at the bigger picture mate. 

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Pistonbroke said:

 

They will if they continue to rise and no vaccine is found, it will affect international travel/trade and suggest that Covid is far off from burning out and could easily lead to a second and even third wave across the Globe. Always best to look at the bigger picture mate. 

Well, it's rising most in areas where it has not previously existed, in areas where it has been for a while, rates continue to fall.

[Numero Veinticinco]

6 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

So not only are you pulling out of the EU but leaving the rest of the world as well.

 

That may be the most blinkered statement on this I have heard yet.

I don’t get the point you’re making here, Howie. The global R rate, where different measures are in place, is not relevant to here in the UK. That’s not making any sort of statement on the importance, just the impact that somewhere like SK or Germany has on the Uk. It will impact the global economy, etc. Jut not our rate of infection, etc. If I’m missing something, I’m open to it. 

[Spy Bee]

Just 75 infections across Norn Iron, Scotland and Wales yesterday.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

2 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

Well, it's rising most in areas where it has not previously existed, in areas where it has been for a while, rates continue to fall.

 

Which tells you it isn't dying out and cases in countries where it is less prevalent due to lockdown could easily start rising again as the World starts to exit Lockdown for various reasons. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. Considering the amount of misery it has caused and the fact there's no vaccine I'd have thought erring on the side of caution would be common sense.