SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

lynchie

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There is absolutely no evidence that the virus has weakened. A random doctor saying so does not hold more weight than a random person in Facebook saying so.

Only a detailed, data-driven peer-reviewed large-scale study can shed light to it, and give an answer with confidence.
There is some evidence, although probably not enough to make the sweeping statement that the Italian doc made at this stage.

 

11101

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There were also experienced doctors who were using hydroxychloroquine. Obviously, their opinions might hold a bit more value than mine and those of the average Joe, but still, to actually have something that is somewhat conclusive, there need to be large-scale studies and peer-reviewed from professionals. Anecdotal evidence is all good, but it should not hold any value when deciding how to proceed.
It really depends. Not everything that comes to light is immediately published, if a group of doctors in a particular area are noticing something different about the virus in that particular area, of course they are going to look into it.

Remember these people are not saying 'the virus is weakening', they are saying 'the virus that is turning up in their hospital is weakening'.
 

SteveJ

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Guardian said:
Boris Johnson told Italian PM he wanted 'herd immunity', Italy's health minister says
Another day, another of the hundred things that would normally bring down a government...oh well.
 

SteveJ

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'Following the science':
The decision for England’s official coronavirus alert level to remain at four despite this week’s easing of some lockdown restrictions was made by the chief medical officer, Downing Street has said, indicating he vetoed the government’s wish for it to be lowered.
 

Heardy

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Is it fair to say that as time goes on, these numbers become increasingly meaningless? By that, i mean that we are still testing far too few people to draw any conclusions on fatality rate?

40k deaths of 288 positive tests suggests a 15% death rate, which is surely far far higher than any true fatality rate - right?
 

Irwin99

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324 UK deaths still seems much higher than I thought it would be by now. I presume most of the other big European countries are still in double digits for daily death totals?
 

Maagge

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A bit of good news from Denmark:
We reopened our schools two weeks ago for all ages (still with certain precautions in place) and while the decrease of new cases slowed down it's still decreasing, as seen from the below plot of a rolling seven day mean. The three red, dashed lines represent the initial lockdown, the first phase of reopening our schools and the second phase two weeks ago, respectively. As you may or may not know we're opening our borders (with some limitations) to Germany, Norway and Iceland. Not to Sweden yet. The reason for that might be seen in the right plot below. Anecdotally we have a group of 12 Danes going over to a summer house or something in Sweden recently only to return with five of them testing positive. Bloody idiots. (Note the y-axes aren't shared below).



It seems like Sweden are testing more than they did initially as the amount of daily deaths are gradually decreasing whereas the amount of daily cases is around the same level as before.
 
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decorativeed

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Boris is too busy buying more water cannons and sourcing the best riot gear for his loyal stormtroopers to release any piffling report.
He's still dotting the i and crossing the t on the Russian election interference report, to be fair. He's had a lot on his suppression plate recently.
 

redshaw

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Have you ever seen the active cases stats for the UK? It could be the answer behind those relatively high death figures in early June?
Not really, they've shown graphs the odd time. North West and some other areas peaked a bit later so there's a bit of lag. Also Tuesday is usually the highest number of the week and deaths last week were about 500 lower than the week before so we could see lowish numbers in the coming days.

Is it fair to say that as time goes on, these numbers become increasingly meaningless? By that, i mean that we are still testing far too few people to draw any conclusions on fatality rate?

40k deaths of 288 positive tests suggests a 15% death rate, which is surely far far higher than any true fatality rate - right?
For fatality rate they have always been useless as the cases are far higher. When looking at blood tests for antibodies and deaths it seems to be about 0.5 to 2% fatality rate for hard hit countries. Spain has about 5% of population with antibodies and 43k excess deaths ~1.7%.
 
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Hanks

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Serious question and I wish I don't get jumped on over this.

if there isn't a massive outbreak in US in 2 weeks after last week full of protests/riots with zero social distancing....doesn't it put the whole SD narrative under massive scrutiny?

interesting times ahead.
 

Dr. Dwayne

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Serious question and I wish I don't get jumped on over this.

if there isn't a massive outbreak in US in 2 weeks after last week full of protests/riots with zero social distancing....doesn't it put the whole SD narrative under massive scrutiny?

interesting times ahead.
Not necessarily, no. It could exemplify that those measures were very effective. Could also be a good proof on the effectiveness of masks.
 

Organic Potatoes

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Serious question and I wish I don't get jumped on over this.

if there isn't a massive outbreak in US in 2 weeks after last week full of protests/riots with zero social distancing....doesn't it put the whole SD narrative under massive scrutiny?

interesting times ahead.
No, there are too many variables. Warmer weather, protests being outdoors, protestors are of the sort that are more likely to wear masks, those groups would often consist of many of the same people repeatedly so it is not a completely random mix.

Also with the lag times and inefficiencies in reporting from individual states, 2 weeks is not a sufficient timeframe to judge anything.
 

Pogue Mahone

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A bit of good news from Denmark:
We reopened our schools two weeks ago for all ages (still with certain precautions in place) and while the decrease of new cases slowed down it's still decreasing, as seen from the below plot of a rolling seven day mean. The three red, dashed lines represent the initial lockdown, the first phase of reopening our schools and the second phase two weeks ago, respectively. As you may or may not know we're opening our borders (with some limitations) to Germany, Norway and Iceland. Not to Sweden yet. The reason for that might be seen in the right plot below. Anecdotally we have a group of 12 Danes going over to a summer house or something in Sweden recently only to return with five of them testing positive. Bloody idiots. (Note the y-axes aren't shared below).



It seems like Sweden are testing more than they did initially as the amount of daily deaths are gradually decreasing whereas the amount of daily cases is around the same level as before.
Or the average age of people getting infected is coming down. Their herd immunity strategy finally working as it was intended.

On a side note, is this the first time since the virus hit Europe that this thread dropped off the front page?! Covid fatigue is real.
 

Port Vale Devil

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Or the average age of people getting infected is coming down. Their herd immunity strategy finally working as it was intended.

On a side note, is this the first time since the virus hit Europe that this thread dropped off the front page?! Covid fatigue is real.
Trump and Protests took back over after a 4 month hiatus from the top of the recent posts page.

Was nice to see this thread not at the top for once and cannot wait to see it really drop.
 

horsechoker

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Or the average age of people getting infected is coming down. Their herd immunity strategy finally working as it was intended.

On a side note, is this the first time since the virus hit Europe that this thread dropped off the front page?! Covid fatigue is real.
It's fizzing out in terms of interest due to the events in America. Furthermore, it's playing less of a role in people's lives as countries reopen and numbers continue to decline. Covid won't be over but it will fizzle out unless a new wave emerges.
 

Pogue Mahone

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Is it fair to say that as time goes on, these numbers become increasingly meaningless? By that, i mean that we are still testing far too few people to draw any conclusions on fatality rate?

40k deaths of 288 positive tests suggests a 15% death rate, which is surely far far higher than any true fatality rate - right?
Absolutely. UK figures have been distorted by very low community testing from day one. Big bias towards testing only very sick (hospitalised) patients, which explains high fatality rate.
 

Maagge

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Or the average age of people getting infected is coming down. Their herd immunity strategy finally working as it was intended.

On a side note, is this the first time since the virus hit Europe that this thread dropped off the front page?! Covid fatigue is real.
That could be the case as well. I haven't looked at their numbers with regards to people admitted to a hospital, so it should probably be reflected there as well.

And yeah, I was thinking that too earlier. Either people are tired of it, there's other things to pass the time (Trump) or not much is really happening in places we care about.
 

Pogue Mahone

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Weird way to interpret his own graph. I’d say that shows an obvious VE day spike, exactly where you would expect to see it, May 17th - 23rd.

Less dramatic when you go with 7 day average, which was never going to be the best way to identify the consequences of just one day of stupid behaviour.
 

Berbaclass

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On a side note, the use of “Karen” as a term of abuse for anyone you don’t agree with is incredibly naff. Especially coming from people who probably fit the original meaning of the meme pretty well...
Yeah, it's pretty tiresome and childish.
 

Virgil

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Hmmm. Now I may be mistaken - I usually am - but it would seem that the Italian Government is no more clued in than the British in respect of COVID-19. As I understand it Italy is going to welcome tourists from the U.K. as soon as they reopen flights. At least Spain is taking a sensible approach by indicating that visitors from our isles will not be welcome until we have a better handle on the pandemic. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that the Italian decision is purely economic. Understandable but a real gamble at this juncture IMHO if true.
 

Massive Spanner

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Hmmm. Now I may be mistaken - I usually am - but it would seem that the Italian Government is no more clued in than the British in respect of COVID-19. As I understand it Italy is going to welcome tourists from the U.K. as soon as they reopen flights. At least Spain is taking a sensible approach by indicating that visitors from our isles will not be welcome until we have a better handle on the pandemic. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that the Italian decision is purely economic. Understandable but a real gamble at this juncture IMHO if true.
Worth noting that Italy was a few weeks ahead of the UK and currently has better numbers. They also had a much stricter lockdown.

But yeah, it does seem a bit premature, yet sort of understandable. I don't think any other European country, bar Spain, is so reliant on tourism. I think the issue is that a lot of countries those tourists come from (US, UK, Ireland) won't have anyone going there for a while.

Plus the Italian economy was already in tatters.
 

Penna

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Hmmm. Now I may be mistaken - I usually am - but it would seem that the Italian Government is no more clued in than the British in respect of COVID-19. As I understand it Italy is going to welcome tourists from the U.K. as soon as they reopen flights. At least Spain is taking a sensible approach by indicating that visitors from our isles will not be welcome until we have a better handle on the pandemic. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that the Italian decision is purely economic. Understandable but a real gamble at this juncture IMHO if true.
They were testing incoming passengers' temperatures at Italian airports as far back as mid-Feb - my sister had a weekend in Rome then and was checked.

From today in Italy we are free to travel anywhere in the country, having been confined to our own regions for the last couple of weeks. They waited until today because it was a public holiday here yesterday. Personally, I would have like inter-region travelling to have excluded Lombardy and one or two other northern regions, but there's been a lot of pressure exerted on the government by the bosses of those regions. Some southern regions have said they'll bring in their own measures to ban people coming from high-risk areas.
 

africanspur

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They were testing incoming passengers' temperatures at Italian airports as far back as mid-Feb - my sister had a weekend in Rome then and was checked.

From today in Italy we are free to travel anywhere in the country, having been confined to our own regions for the last couple of weeks. They waited until today because it was a public holiday here yesterday. Personally, I would have like inter-region travelling to have excluded Lombardy and one or two other northern regions, but there's been a lot of pressure exerted on the government by the bosses of those regions. Some southern regions have said they'll bring in their own measures to ban people coming from high-risk areas.
Is Italy a lot more federalised than the UK?

I'm just wondering if the SW in the UK could do similar for example and, even if they wanted to, how would they even do it? And who?
 

11101

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Is Italy a lot more federalised than the UK?

I'm just wondering if the SW in the UK could do similar for example and, even if they wanted to, how would they even do it? And who?
Yes, much more so. It is also a lot more split North v South which has led to further controversy with these reopenings. The Northern regions probably should stay closed a little longer, but the 4 worst hit regions in the North contribute 50% of the national GDP and their governors are saying we pay for you all so you have to let us in.

I think most of Europe is pretty stable at a couple of hundred new cases per day, and the testing/treatment infrastructure is all there to quickly get on top of any outbreaks. I don't see a huge difference in moving between countries vs moving between regions. The only countries i wish would be excluded is the UK and possibly Sweden as neither seem totally on top of things yet.