Coronavirus Pandemic

[zip accident]

You take a prick of blood and then the device will give you a result in 10 to 15 minutes. People will be able to do this themselves at home.

That sounds uncomfortably similar to the Warfarin blood testing kit that turned out to be a total scam five or so years ago. This one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it will be real, but blood tests are generally difficult, for the INR tests associated with Warfarin they needed something like 3 or 5 ccs, which isn't a lot, but is beyond mere home testing. I am aware that diabetes tests are nearly that simple now, but glucose is a simple molecule and easy to test for, where antibodies for particular diseases aren't.

[gilesgoat]

You take a prick of blood and then the device will give you a result in 10 to 15 minutes. People will be able to do this themselves at home.

That sounds uncomfortably similar to the Warfarin blood testing kit that turned out to be a total scam five or so years ago. This one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it will be real, but blood tests are generally difficult, for the INR tests associated with Warfarin they needed something like 3 or 5 ccs, which isn't a lot, but is beyond mere home testing. I am aware that diabetes tests are nearly that simple now, but glucose is a simple molecule and easy to test for, where antibodies for particular diseases aren't.

So in pure theory, that test should be able to tell one if he's been already affected by the virus and now is immune to it ?

Do they really know it actually works like that ? Weren't many doubts about :

- they are not sure yet if you can really get immunity with exposure

- mutations

[Cloudane]

I hope the testing kits are distributed sensibly. The last thing we want is a bunch of idiots panic buying dozens of them, or getting a load to mark up and sell on...

[zip accident]

So in pure theory, that test should be able to tell one if he's been already affected by the virus and now is immune to it ?

Do they really know it actually works like that ? Weren't many doubts about :

- they are not sure yet if you can really get immunity with exposure

It would be exceedingly strange if you didn't get immunity with exposure, you do with anything else. The only case I can think of where you don't is botulism, because the poison produced by the bacteria is so violent that you don't need the bacteria, the poison will get you even if the bacteria are already dead.

- mutations

Colds and flu mutate at least once per year, most other bacteria and viruses do it more slowly, if you have mumps as a child you're generally safe for life, tetanus you need boosters every so often, but mostly you're okay even without the boosters (ideally you should have them, a lot of people seem not to, it's a rarely lethal disease now).

[(o)(o)]

[(o)(o)]

[KlaxonCow]

At today's daily briefing, the antibody tests were mentioned.

They're testing them for reliability this week. With urgency, but both the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientist stressed that they're making sure the tests are good - because a bad test could make shit worse than having no test at all. Telling people who have it that they don't, or telling people who don't have it that they're now immune. Yeah, the reliability absolutely has to be there, or they'd be worse than useless.

And to stress that, they actually explicitly emphasised that it's better to delay to be absolutely sure of these tests. They won't sanction them until they're sure of them.

But the hope is that one of them - because what was interestingly mentioned was that they're looking at multiple different kits, as there's more than one becoming available, which might give some hope that this improves the odds that at least one of them is good (or maybe they all are, so we'd be looking at which one is the best) - proves good and reliable enough to be rolled out soon.

(Also, other countries in Europe and Asia have purchased and ordered these kits too. So, implicitly, they'll independently be doing their own medical testing - on different populations, against different standards - and that will provide a secondary layer of "peer review" to this.)

I hope the testing kits are distributed sensibly. The last thing we want is a bunch of idiots panic buying dozens of them, or getting a load to mark up and sell on...

Indeed.

Though the government purchased kits would be going through the NHS - and be "free at the point of use", of course - following medical necessity. The stated priorities being NHS staff first, then those in self-isolation and, moving forward, you're also implicitly going to get a wider picture of how many might be out there who're asymptomatic - the big "known unknown" - and they'll be issuing tests with that in mind too.

Basically, the government kits are going to be a new tool in the hands of the NHS to address medical needs or wider data modelling to understand this virus and its spread way better.

But, yeah, as to the commercially-available kits that you might individually purchase from a high street chemist, that's another matter and I share your concern that this could turn into "toilet roll hording 2.0". Mind you, if they're fulfilling many millions of kits for multiple countries, when the "buy over the counter" version even appears is another question.

(But, as always, there are many "known unknowns" here, this is a brand new virus, Boris is ultimately in charge and fuck knows what'll actually happen.)

[PFVA]

I had a quiet day.

Watching the news now. Ouhfffff.

2995 official cases 43 people died.

It seems one of the biggest problems is the nursing homes and residential care homes and their employees. The infected people in some of those are being taken to military hospitals. Military had already offered their hospitals a while back saying they were ready to help.

Private hospitals also joining to take infected people that cannot stay at home. 80% are staying at home and only 20% are in the hospitals.

Lisbon, Porto, and Aveiro districts on orange alert because the number of cases.

Cases numbers now broken by municipality. We have 17 in ours, which is better than the other muncipalities surrounding us, Lisbon, Cascais (40+), and Sintra (40+)

[PFVA]

It's over here in frogland that you're not allowed to cycle. Which is pretty fucking stupid, really, as the roads are far safer now than they have been for years - there's pretty much no cars around.

Meanwhile, as I type this, the TV news are talking about whether it's safe to take public transport...

I haven't been able to understand that paper, people go on line to get to state they are going to walk, or to jog, or run. What's the point of that?

[tufty]

It's over here in frogland that you're not allowed to cycle. Which is pretty fucking stupid, really, as the roads are far safer now than they have been for years - there's pretty much no cars around.

Meanwhile, as I type this, the TV news are talking about whether it's safe to take public transport...

I haven't been able to understand that paper, people go on line to get to state they are going to walk, or to jog, or run. What's the point of that?

When / if the Police stop you, you have a piece of paper made out and signed beforehand saying what you are doing. Dated and with a time on it. If you're not doing what you've said you were going to do, or you've left the house 6 hours ago to go and do some shopping, you get fined.

It's one way of allowing people to do the things they need to do, but stopping them taking the piss, which I think is fair enough.

[noodles]

It's over here in frogland that you're not allowed to cycle. Which is pretty fucking stupid, really, as the roads are far safer now than they have been for years - there's pretty much no cars around.

It's only for leisure cycling. If you're going to do your food shopping, you're fine.

[(o)(o)]

So the UK is going it alone in terms of reporting the death count..

First they are requiring family consent for the anonymised number
Secondly those dying OF coronavirus are being counted, whereas in Italy those dying WITH coronavirus

Never trust a Tory...

[gilesgoat]

So the UK is going it alone in terms of reporting the death count..

First they are requiring family consent for the anonymised number
Secondly those dying OF coronavirus are being counted, whereas in Italy those dying WITH coronavirus

Never trust a Tory...

Someone just told me "if UK drank its own brain" I told her "well, since Brexit and how people voted YES, FULL STOP! "

[KlaxonCow]

So the UK is going it alone in terms of reporting the death count..

I fear they're rightly shitting themselves that, if you superimpose the growth rates of various countries on top of each other, the UK's rate is worse than Italy's.

Boris and Cummings are probably hoping that we'll all forget that they first openly proposed the sheer insanity of "herd immunity" - which besides being sociopathic is NOT an effective strategy, as tens of millions infected makes mutation much more likely and if the virus mutates, the entire planet goes back to square one and the vaccine efforts get reset - and then spent a week with a half-arsed half-lockdown.

They fucked about for two weeks, give or take, and when dealing with exponential growth, you can't afford even a fraction of a delay.

Looking at the graphs, the UK is heading to have one of the worst death counts of them all - and they're preparing to fudge the figures to pretend otherwise, basically.

Mind you, the whole Western world is guilty of deadly delay - when China sounded the alarm, that's when the planning should have started and international travel should have been locked down and everyone tested and quarantined. Sure, the airlines wouldn't have liked that but, hey, look where the world's airlines are right now. In hindsight, I bet they wish the world's governments had only inflicted some temporary economic damage on them like that, because this is vastly, vastly worse for them. That is, those of them who'll even survive this at all.

This has been criminally mismanaged. They took schadenfreude in China's outbreak, rather than correctly shitting themselves that it only takes one plane flight to land that shit on your doorstep.

There's reason why I'm tracking the progress on antibody tests and hoping for drug treatments and such. The politicians are dangerously useless, so I'm desperately hoping that the scientists can bail our arses out of the fire here. Because the "tax shufflers" clearly can't.

[Harlequin]

So the UK is going it alone in terms of reporting the death count..
First they are requiring family consent for the anonymised number
Secondly those dying OF coronavirus are being counted, whereas in Italy those dying WITH coronavirus

Ah, yes. The old "if we cannot directly fiddle the statistics we can fiddle the definitions" trick. Last seen, IIRC, in unemployment and homelessness figures. I do suspect, though, that we are by no means alone in reporting fiddled figures.

… and then spent a week with a half-arsed half-lockdown.

It still seems pretty half-arsed to me. For starters, many people are travelling in crowded reduced service public transport to perform entirely non-essential work.