Coronavirus Pandemic

[KlaxonCow]

Now the government has, much to the annoyance of SAGE, redacted a massive chunk of a report that SAGE issued:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... -19-advice

The scientists wanted to publish this to be open and transparent with the public about the scientific advice... and then the government redacts a big chunk of it. They're pissed off.

There's open warfare going on between the government's version of events and SAGE's version of events here - yet the government still try to tell us that they are following the scientific advice. Bollocks, they are and bollocks, they were.

Apparently, what's behind the redaction is the scientists and behaviourists rejecting more draconian measures that the government proposed as a bad idea, so they're redacting the very concept that the government could be disagreed with or have gotten anything wrong. Which, as I've covered, is absolutely NOT how science works. Debate is its bedrock - as, in fact, it should also be in politics and always used to be. But, these days, it's all unquestionable diktats from faultless leaders, we're lead to believe.

I'm waiting for the North-Korea-like propaganda that tells us Boris got 19 holes-in-one on his very first time playing golf because he's a magical superhero who's never made any mistakes ever.

[Harlequin]

I'm waiting for the North-Korea-like propaganda that tells us Boris got 19 holes-in-one on his very first time playing golf because he's a magical superhero who's never made any mistakes ever.

He is not really a clone of Trump, you know. Even if they were born in the same city.

[PFVA]

Wonderful way of doing things.

A factory of food products east of the capital detected possible cases of Covid 19 among its employees. Decided to take the initiative to test them. Up to it, right decision. Results started coming out Thursday and some employees were positive. Company forgets to inform the health authorities and the municipality. Anonymous phone calls start to be received by those. They intervened today after confirming the information. Employees now in quarenteen, factory closed for clean up, etc, etc.

On top of that most employees travel by commute train to the town.

And the result officially confirmed today 101 of the 240 employees infected in what's not really a factory, but a slaughterhouse of poultry meat . And 3 more in 3 other businesses of the same type in the same area. Apparently they concentrated a lot of those businesses out there plus the distribution for all the big supermarkets, all of it in a 7Km stretch.

Ten of the 101 live in the town where the factory is located. The rest commute mostly by train.The company is blaming the commute trains the employees use for the situation, which may be true because a ton of people travel on them to get to work but they knew about the situation for over a week and were keeping quiet about not closing the place or informing the authorities which is the last thing they should have done.

In my municipality no new cases today. Sintra and Cascais still increasing but less.

Will see how this ends

[KlaxonCow]

Also, regarding Prof. Neil Ferguson resigning for sneaking his lady friend past the lockdown, I'm suspicious that - even though he was guilty and honourably resigned - the government wanted to bump him out of SAGE and took full advantage of him making a misstep to push him out.

Because Neil Ferguson was talking directly to the press, his name was in the papers as "one of the leading experts" but he had that nasty habit, for the government, of actually just telling people the truth and NOT towing the party line - because, of course, as an independent expert on SAGE, he's not part of the Tory party, so he's not obliged to do so.

Yes, he fucked up and he rightly fell on his sword of resignation in acknowledgement of that, but I suspect that the government were overjoyed to discover his cock-up - maybe even sent folks to dig the dirt to find something to pin on him - because they could neatly get rid of him and his annoying habit of not being "on message".

I mean, his "sin" here was sneaking in his lady friend during lockdown. But he had previously tested positive for covid-19 and recovered, so he would have immunity now. Thus, really, his breach of lockdown - as he would well know, being an expert - was more of a technicality than a genuine risk of spreading the virus.

And I notice that all the newspaper reports on this are jumping up and down on the fact that his lady friend is, in fact, married to someone else. Just dragging in some "moral outrage" to bang some extra nails in the coffin. But, of course, whatever you feel about such infidelity on a moral level, it's got absolutely zero fuck all nothing to do with obeying lockdown rules and whether what he did was genuinely risking further spread of the virus. Which, really, it absolutely wasn't.

As mentioned, the lockdown has to apply to everyone right now, because we don't know who has and hasn't got this, who has and hasn't had it previously - which, it's to be noted, is very much related to the government's failures on testing and overt policy not to test anyone outside hospital (or, now, key workers), so you can't get tested to find out to resolve this. Even though they're repeatedly failing to do enough tests every day to match capacity, so tests are being wasted. When they could, for example, have a "waiting list" of people for testing and, if there's 20,000 tests still available that day, then get up to capacity by doing 20K of people off the waiting list. This would ensure we're always hitting 100K tests every single day and could start "sampling" from the wider population for us to get an idea if the moderate / severe / critical cases turning up at hospital represent, you know, 20% of cases, 10% of cases, 1% of cases or whatever. We could begin to work out how big the iceberg is under the surface. I mean, if they want to achieve their wild "herd immunity" nonsense, then how the hell are they expecting to measure if they've succeeded to reach 60+%? Maybe, for all we know, we've already got 30% of the population with immunity right now. Who knows? It's not being measured. It could be 1% or it could be 20% or it could be anything. It's not being sampled. Folks who get "mild symptoms" are told to just self-isolate at home and not even bother NHS 111 to register this fact, unless it starts getting hairy.

So the rules have to blanket apply to everyone, as we lack the means of targeting our isolation - but which, you know, something like "test, trace, isolate" is all about. If we were doing that, then Prof. Ferguson would be "cleared" by now and wouldn't be under lockdown anyway. Or, if we went as ham as South Korea did on the "test, trace, isolate" then there'd be no official lockdown at all, as we're 100% following a fully targeted isolation policy. If testing were universal, then the lockdown wouldn't have to be. South Korea shows this.

But the lockdown has to be a blanket ban, to make up for the testing failures. And the early testing failures specifically, as if we'd ramped up capacity of testing and contract tracing in February then we could have ramped that up to 100K tests a day and 18,000 contact tracers by March, and could have been - like South Korea, like Australia, like Germany - keeping the numbers low and attacking the exponential growth before it even happened. There was more than enough warning, as we sat watching China and Italy suffer for a few months, doing sod all for ourselves.

As always in politics, the decent bloke honourably resigns over an "indiscretion" - a technicality - while the criminally incompetent are negligently letting tens of thousands of people die, raising us to the worst death toll in Europe and the second worst in the world, yet they deny everything and broadcast bizarre propaganda that "everything is fine" and even dare call this logistical disaster "apparent success", with the absurd notion that any other country is looking at the UK and thinking "yeah, they succeeded so well there - we're so jealous of their success and totally want to learn how they did it" (indeed, the only country capable of that, with us being second worst in the world, is America - but that's run by the Trump administration, so you know that shit ain't happening with anyone at all).

I suspect that they were overjoyed to discover his "indiscretion" because they could push it to make an otherwise decent and honest bloke honourably resign - which then also gets them off the hook, in that he jumped, so they didn't have to push - as he was the chief "rebel" to their political messaging that the government is awesome, never made any mistakes and is having "apparent success" with all this so far, so bumping him off to not be able to speak with journalists was perfect for them.

Basically, as they've redacted from the SAGE report any notion that the government proposed anything that the scientific advice disagreed with, this incident let them "redact" Prof. Neil Ferguson from the picture completely. His "sin" was a technicality and there was a lot of pushing, I noticed, on the irrelevant point that his lady friend was married to get some "moral outrage" on their side, though this fact, whatever you think of it, is perfectly irrelevant to the lockdown rules.


Meanwhile, at Downing Street:

[Daniel]

In my municipality no new cases today. Sintra and Cascais still increasing but less.
Will see how this ends

The number of COVID deaths per day is now decreasing here in Sweden.
Let's hope it continues this way and there is no second wave.



As you can see in the chart above the number of COVID deaths per day peaked at 100.
To put that number in perspective, a typical day without a pandemic about 250 people die in Sweden.

[KlaxonCow]

Also, Brazil's numbers ain't looking good.

They're rising up to their peak, it seems, with over 800 deaths yesterday (higher than anyone, except America). And it's a country with 200 million population, so this could be very bad.

Which is the other worry. Countries are getting hit by this at different times. So, unfortunately, it's quite possible that the worst is yet to come.

[Harlequin]

… But he had previously tested positive for covid-19 and recovered, so he would have immunity now. …

People in multiple countries who have tested positive, then tested negative, and then tested negative again, have apparently been known to test positive again later. It is not yet known for how long recovery from infection grants immunity, or if it does at all for some people. The effects of the virus appear to vary wildly due, it seems, to genetic factors and possibly others such as viral load. Professor Ferguson should be aware of this. I do agree, however, that his minor misdemeanour has been blown out of proportion seemingly to force his resignation.

Which is the other worry. Countries are getting hit by this at different times. So, unfortunately, it's quite possible that the worst is yet to come.

And it is much poorer countries that are being hit in the later stages of this wave, with many millions living hand to mouth if not already in absolute poverty and/or dealing with other diseases as well, with governments unable or unwilling to financially support them and with far higher proportions of black and South Asian people for whom C19 is seemingly much more fatal. Yes, globally, the disaster is probably only just beginning.

As for Brazil:

Conservation groups have also urged greater protection of existing habitats. A recent Greenpeace report warned the Amazon could see the next spillover of zoonotic viruses because the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is putting a higher priority on opening up the forest than protecting people’s health.

“It’s unforgivable. His appetite for destruction is fuelling the current health crisis and will make future crises we face even worse,” Daniela Montalto, Greenpeace forests campaigner, said. “He must be stopped and forest protection prioritised. Without it, we will all pay the price.”

[F-ZeroOne]

Brazils president - a man who by most accounts makes Donald Trump look like a whinging liberal snowflake - has claimed publically that COVID-19 is "a hoax", so yeah, they're probably going to get it bad.

[KlaxonCow]

I do agree, however, that his minor misdemeanour has been blown out of proportion seemingly to force his resignation.

Which, yeah, was my actual point in posting there... the rest was just me rambling and ranting a bit.

[gilesgoat]

I do agree, however, that his minor misdemeanour has been blown out of proportion seemingly to force his resignation.

Which, yeah, was my actual point in posting there... the rest was just me rambling and ranting a bit.

@KlaxonCow specifically !

Ok "call me stupid" - I may well be - BUT .. *WHAT* is the point of all this "testing" IF , as they say, we don't even know for sure at all - almost actually "not at all" - that even if you got it does NOT mean you can't get it a second time and/or transmit it to someone else.

So ok "I am tested" I don't have it now , good, for now .. but 2 weeks later I may have it ..

"OK I got it" .. so what ?

Am I immune ? Does it mean I am not going to give it to anyone else any more ? Or that canI go among the virus and be ok ?

What do I get by "testing" ???

[KlaxonCow]

Right, if you've had it, then you have antibodies.

Remember, there is no vaccine, no cure, no drug treatments or anything for this virus yet.

So when people recover, this is 100% down to their own immune system fighting off the virus.

When they put people on oxygen, or ventilators, or ecmo (which is basically a lung by-pass, where a machine takes over oxygenating your blood entirely) in hospital, this is purely life support. Keeping them alive with oxygen, in the hopes that their immune system can eventually get the better of the virus, before it's too late.

So the point is that, yes, the immune system does fight off this virus and it does produce antibodies against it.

This is known fact. There are antibody tests to directly detect these.

(The UK government did order 3.5 million antibody tests - that were supposed to work like "pregnancy tests" with a blood sample - and then discovered that their reliability was awful. But this was the government being dumb and throwing money at a dodgy deal from scammers, who sold them useless shit that doesn't work. But there are other antibody tests which do work more reliably. Porton Down has one - but it's a lab-based test, so it can't be easily scaled up to millions - and they're using these tests to sample the wider population to try to work out how many people might have had this asymptomatically / "mild symptoms".)

It's also worth noting that there is one treatment - being trialled in America and talked about in the UK too - which is entirely about those antibodies.

It's where those who've had it give blood - as their blood will have those antibodies in it - and then they refine it into a "plasma" (basically, refined down to the white cells and stuff, which actually do the good immune system work), and then give this to patients suffering the virus.

This treatment idea ain't new. They also did this - giving patients blood from those who've recovered to "loan" them antibodies against the virus - with the Spanish Flu, over a century ago.

So, again, people's immune systems are fighting this virus off and are doing so by producing the antibodies against the virus.

(And what the antibody actually does, biologically, is that it adapts to the "shape" of the viruses spikes and then sticks to them. The spikes on the virus are how it attaches to receptors on cells and sneaks its way inside a cell to infect it - the body does have a membrane to protect and doesn't let any old thing inside the cell, but the virus's spike is like a hacker working out the chemical password to get the cell to open up. So, when the antibodies cling to the spike, what they're basically doing is blocking its entry point into any cells. The spikes are the virus's "key" to get into cells but the antibody is clinging to it and stopping the key fitting the lock. The virus can't infect the cells. The antibody has stopped the infection.

And then there's another part of the immune system - the "T cells" - and they work with the antibody. Not only has the antibody blocked the virus from infecting cells, it's also implicitly marked it. When these T cells find the virus "marked" by these antibodies, it's been marked for destruction. The T cells will destroy viruses, cells or anything else marked with the antibodies. The antibodies block and mark the virus, and the T cells come along as the "clean up crew" to destroy it. Again, I'm resisting saying "kill" because, technically, viruses are non-living, so they were never strictly alive to be killed. But "destroyed" covers it either way.)

Like, all of this is certain. People's immune systems are fighting this off. They are producing antibodies. Those antibodies do block the virus and "mark" it for destruction by T cells.

Indeed, as we have no vaccine, no drugs, no cure for this then if that wasn't happening - if the immune system wasn't producing antibodies to get rid of the virus - then no-one would be recovering. When, in fact, the majority of people - in all age brackets - survive this. Likely with only "mild symptoms" or even totally asymptomatically.

So people who recover definitely do have antibodies against this virus. There is no doubt about that at all.

What's not known is how robust this is. That is, for some invaders - such as, say, measles - the immune system remembers that one for life. If you have measles - or the vaccine for measles - then the immune system never forgets that. And it then has antibodies for life against it.

But there are other invaders that the immune system creates antibodies for and then eventually "forgets". You produce the antibodies for, say, a year or two but then the immune system eventually stops producing them. For some infections, the immune system "forgets" them after a while.

Some antibodies give you immunity for life. Others, not quite so long - maybe a good year or two. Where does the antibodies for this virus fall?

Well, that's the point. We don't know, simply because no-one's ever had this long enough yet.

Also, there's a question over whether the word "immunity" is too strong. Because the word "immunity" implies strong antibodies that immediately attack any invaders and don't let them get a foothold in you again. "Immunity" suggests that you could walk in the middle of people with covid coughing all over you, and you wouldn't get a single symptom.

We know that there's antibodies. But we don't know if they're that strong and aggressive and long-lasting to be classified as "immunity" - implying you totally can't catch this or be phased by it ever again.

But there is no doubt that the body produces antibodies against this thing - and what antibodies do is block and mark a virus for destruction, and because these people recovered, those antibodies are definitely working, as their immune systems did eventually get rid of the virus. And if the virus shows up again, those antibodies can do that same job again - at least for as long as these antibodies last, which is the bit we don't actually know.

There's also the simple statistical argument here. We've got more than 4 million confirmed infections globally. It's out there in the wild. If it was a likely possibility of re-infection, then we'd be seeing loads and loads of re-infections by now.

If there was no immunity at all then, with 4 million people and a virus running wild out there for months, we'd have many, many instances of some of those 4 million getting sick again.

That's the statistical argument. By now, we'd already have so many reports of re-infection - if this was at all likely - that it wouldn't be "we don't know", it'd be "oh, shit, there is clearly no immunity here, as these people are getting it again and again and again".

It has to be rare enough a possibility that if re-infection is a thing, then it can still manage to hide amongst 4 million cases over months without anyone being able to definitively show this. so if it is a thing, then it's not much of a thing - literally millions to one at not even properly showing it up yet.

And though we don't know, if we look to the other coronaviruses, then immunity to those tends to be good for a year or two. This is a different virus, but it's the same family and we've no reason to believe, as yet, that there's any reason why this one would prove to be so radically different from any of the other viruses out there in those terms.

Yes, there is plenty we don't know about this virus. But there is also plenty we do actually know and, through the scientific method, we're always learning more and the gaps always get smaller.

At no point in the entire history of science have we ever had a god or an evil bogeyman or a magical supernatural force or a "soul" or some deep profound philosophical magical mystery hiding in any of those previous gaps in our knowledge. The gaps have always, without fail, been filled by ordinary, mundane, naturalistic explanations. Nothing convinces me to alter my expectations on that in this, or any other, instance.


"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge."
- Confucius.

[PFVA]

Also, Brazil's numbers ain't looking good.

They're rising up to their peak, it seems, with over 800 deaths yesterday (higher than anyone, except America). And it's a country with 200 million population, so this could be very bad.

Which is the other worry. Countries are getting hit by this at different times. So, unfortunately, it's quite possible that the worst is yet to come.

Brasil most likely has higher numbers than the U.S. right now. Just Manaus is burying hundreds of people a day. São Paulo too, Rio too. And that doesn't even include other big cities like Belo Horizonte. They are doing the death certicates listing accute respiratory syndrom or unknow causes. They are not testing all the people who go to the public hospitals and die there. They don't have enough tests. And they do not have enough respirators either. And the most hit are the very poor and they have a lot of those.

Jair Bolsonaro is doing nothing to help, or minimize the situation. He doesn't care. Poor people dying is not a priority, most likely a way to solve social problems from his point of view. He should be trialed for genocide but i doubt very much that will happen.

And in terms of Amazonia it's not just the Brazilian side. Equador is the worst hit and other countries are having problems too.

[PFVA]

In my municipality no new cases today. Sintra and Cascais still increasing but less.
Will see how this ends

The number of COVID deaths per day is now decreasing here in Sweden.
Let's hope it continues this way and there is no second wave.



As you can see in the chart above the number of COVID deaths per day peaked at 100.
To put that number in perspective, a typical day without a pandemic about 250 people die in Sweden.

Sweden had an interesting way to deal with this since the beginning. I wonder if in the long run it won't be better.

[Harlequin]

What's not known is how robust this is. That is, for some invaders - such as, say, measles - the immune system remembers that one for life. If you have measles - or the vaccine for measles - then the immune system never forgets that. And it then has antibodies for life against it.

I am not certain that that is always the case. I have had measles twice (nearly dying the second time, according to my Mum) and I know I am not the only one:

… Symptomatic reinfections have been reported rarely. These individuals have had greater than or equal to 4-fold rises in measles HI antibody titers but have not had detectable measles-specific IgM antibodies in appropriately timed serum specimens. These rare symptomatic reinfections do not appear to be epidemiologically important.

As for SARS-CoV-2, we do indeed know that infected people who develop Covid-19 symptoms develop antibodies in what so far appears to be all cases, with the immune response sometimes even causing far more damage to the patient than the C19 itself. We might be less certain about immune response with asymptomatic infections, and those people testing positive soon after having "recovered" in hospital still appear to be a mystery (unless someone can source more recent information on the studies into those cases). As you point out, though, the prevalence of the latter phenomenon should statistically be very rare, as are some of the weirder symptoms such as the absurdly low oxygen levels in patients unaware of any breathing difficulty.

At no point in the entire history of science have we ever had a god or an evil bogeyman or a magical supernatural force or a "soul" or some deep profound philosophical magical mystery hiding in any of those previous gaps in our knowledge. The gaps have always, without fail, been filled by ordinary, mundane, naturalistic explanations. Nothing convinces me to alter my expectations on that in this, or any other, instance.

"When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it - this is knowledge."
- Confucius.

I would prefer to allow that we do not know (in an empirical scientific sense) what lies within the multitudinous gaps that have still not been filled with proven mundane explanations (or even non-mundane ones, such as the extremes of physics for which "common sense" utterly fails us). The existence of the gaps is of course not proof of any great intelligences creating and/or interfering with the minutiae of entire universes. Neither, however, is it proof that they will eventually be filled by such concepts as gravity, string theories, chemistry, neurology, dark energy or love. There are more things in Universe and Earth than can be dreamt of in any philosophy. That, though, is perhaps a subject for a different thread.

The number of COVID deaths per day is now decreasing here in Sweden.
Let's hope it continues this way and there is no second wave.

As you can see in the chart above the number of COVID deaths per day peaked at 100.
To put that number in perspective, a typical day without a pandemic about 250 people die in Sweden.

Sweden had an interesting way to deal with this since the beginning. I wonder if in the long run it won't be better.

That graph looks very different to the one at Worldometers. Even the worst peak three weeks ago (allowing for post-weekend accumulated reports) seems to be missing. The trend over the past week, according to the latter graph, also appears to be rising. Norway, though, appears to have had fewer than sixty deaths each day this week on a downward trend and Denmark, no more than ten per day. The current case fatality ratios according to Johns Hopkins are 2.71% for Norway (219 deaths), 5% for Denmark (526 deaths) and 12.42% for Sweden (3,220 deaths). Mind you, this may well be only the first wave and too early to predict the final tallies.

[gilesgoat]

Right, if you've had it, then you have antibodies.

Remember, there is no vaccine, no cure, no drug treatments or anything for this virus yet.

No, that's the point where "it seems NOT so clear cut", in fact there been cases of people getting ill with coronavirus, managed to pass through and get ill a second time.

They still don't know if "having it once" means "you are then safe forever" to that and possible mutations.

Hoping it's not going to be like that, but for example there are things like tetanus that even if you someway manage to get through it does NOT give you immunity at all because the immune system simply can't cope with that type of toxin.

That's why I don't understand "what testing can do" other than maybe saying "in this moment it appears you have it, isolate yourself" becuase even after that it's not guarantee your immune system can definitely make you immune.

I suppose "at very minimal" you may get listed as "someone that can get it and probably not die for it".

Also this would "appear" to say/imply that "the best possible outcome" is then NOT "never got it" but "got it and managed to pass through" because if you never got it you still are in danger to get it with who knows what outcome.

Which then kinda brings back to "herd immunity" because essentially "that is what you want" only "in a more controlled way".

At least not until there's a vaccine proven to really work and/or some treatments that at least can make it go like "just a cold, not a mortal thing".

Now given mutations and such I suppose "the second" is better than a vaccine that MAY be result "totally useless" after 1 year ?