SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Yeah, but has he taken into account the timing of the ski holidays?
I shudder to think the number of deaths if Boris was allowed to go ahead with his ridiculous herd-immunity nonsense.
not heard that for years and wasn't even aware it was a thing that existed outside my circle of friends, we were doing it way before FIFA - way back in the days of sensible soccer and kick off 2!I was talking to a doctor the other day who said we should scrap the regional government level, and just have national government and comunes. I tend to agree with him. This crisis was handled best when there was a very specific response to outbreaks in defined areas, in my view, and mayors can be there doing what's necessary in the city, town or village they know best. It must also cost a fortune to have that layer of regional bureaucracy.
I'd say you're over-analysing the noise there. It's a similar daily variation to the rest of the graph.
I do think there's been a bit of over-excitied pronunciations of coming second waves with every picture of people outside, and I worry that we'll have wave-fatigue by the time any actual second wave does emerge (probably as we start going back to work, and spending more time on public transport and indoors with other people).
That's why it will never go away. Far too many people rely on it for employment, particularly older people who could not get other jobs, and the country is not organised enough to have such a distance between national government and comune level.
Having said this - there is evidence of some small local outbreaks that fit with the VE day timing. This page https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ngoddard/covid19/ is pretty good - if you look at the data for Bradford, for example, there's an increase of about 5 cases per day around the 13th, which are probably related.
Ha, no way people will surrender power especially Italians. They love a uniform and an office.
That's true, and as @11101 says, it provides thousands of safe government jobs. If you get a government pension here, it apparently isn't taken into account as income when you do your tax return. I only know this because I have an NHS pension which is classed in the same way here for our Italian tax liability. I was surprised.
It is honestly so demoralising that the gatekeepers to critical data in the UK that could genuinely go a long way to tackling this crisis effectively are pernicious propagandists
As per usual I did not make my point as well as I might have. I have no issue with countries that seem to be getting the pandemic under control welcoming foreign travellers. It just struck me as terribly idiotic for the Italian government to be welcoming U.K. residents at this stage given that we still seem to have a way to go before we have a handle on it. On an aside note was I mistaken or did I dream it but I thought I heard on today’s news - no links - that it was being suggested that temperature taking was is not now being considered effective which U.K. airports were banking on?
I remember the exchanges between yourself and RAB. Feels like ages ago - that's how intense the focus on covid has been i guess.Interesting news regarding Ibuprofen - a unique formulation is being trialled now in double-blinded multicentered randomised control trial with 230 patients due to "compelling" pre-clinical (as far as I can see unpublished) data that suggests benefits in terms of respiratory failure (and if it does lowers ventilation rate, hospital stay presumably)
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/trial-te...ation-of-ibuprofen-to-treat-covid-19-launches
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04334629
Really annoyed with how we jumped the gun earlier after that French Health Ministers advice and the BMJ and a few others expressing caution against it use. Which I was iffy about but went along with given how novel covid was. Ibuprofen is great for short term use as analgesia, anti-pyretic yet I remember the nightmare it was with calpol and paracetamol available nowhere at its peak yet the ibuprofen stacks were full when it may have provided feverish patients some symptomatic relief.
Not sure if the study will find much but good to keep an eye out on
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/trial-te...ation-of-ibuprofen-to-treat-covid-19-launches
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04334629
Really annoyed with how we jumped the gun earlier after that French Health Ministers advice and the BMJ and a few others expressing caution against it use. Which I was iffy about but went along with given how novel covid was. Ibuprofen is great for short term use as analgesia, anti-pyretic yet I remember the nightmare it was with calpol and paracetamol available nowhere at its peak yet the ibuprofen stacks were full when it may have provided feverish patients some symptomatic relief.
Not sure if the study will find much but good to keep an eye out on
The problem is the infectious pre-symptomatic stage. Plenty of infectious people won't have a temperature, so they'll pass right through. Ideally we'd have a test that you could turn around in a couple of hours, so you could swab people at check-in and know by the time they landed if they were infectious. You'd probably have to quarantine all their fellow passengers though, and maybe any airport staff that spent more than a few minutes with them - the check in desk, anyone in security who patted them down, the booze sample person in duty free...
You make your points very well! I don't see that temperature-taking at UK airports makes a massive difference really, because everyone's got to do a quarantine (allegedly), and will be randomly visited to make sure they're doing it. However, on the other hand you'll still be able to go out for food
shopping and medical visits, so if the authorities call and you're not there, what are they going to do about it?
Isolated aberrations like the VE day nonsense will cause noise. It’s only sustained changes in behaviour that will fundamentally alter the shape of graphs like this.
Fair point about “wave fatigue” There’s a lot of crying wolf going on and the more false alarms the more jaded people get about the social distancing guidelines. Which is a worry.
I don't think it really matters too much, as there are barely any flights running and the 14 day quarantine will stop anybody wanting to leave the UK.
Temperature checks have always been a bit pointless. I don't know why they thought it was going to be a silver bullet.
To complicate things even further, there’s a pre-infectious phase where someone who was infected very close to the day they travel won’t be shedding any virus yet, so won’t test positive if they’re swabbed.
They won’t infect anyone else passing through the airport but will start infecting other people a day or two later.
That is interesting. Would love to see the pre-clinical data. The cynic in me sees the way that SEEK talk about a “unique formulation” as them angling for a new patent on an established medicine, to sell it at a premium. It’s a pity they don’t include an arm in the study using ‘normal’ ibuprofen.
But what’s the betting BoJo scraps the need to quarantine before the 1st July. Too many potential votes in putting barriers up to U.K. residents who want to holiday abroad.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Apparently follows a lot of offices reopening.
Going back to cramped offices is the thing that most worries me. In Italy at least i just know there will be a laissez-faire attitude to distancing and cleaning rules.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
FFS.
I'm supposed to be working and that's a long read, but what is it saying? Surgisphere purposely manipulated the results for some reason or it was just a poorly done study that was jumped on by mass media?
My wife has a special interest in lupus and prescribes a fair bit amount of hydroxychloroquine to her derm patients for a few things and said never noticed arrythmias as a serious problem
I reckon hydroxychloroquine doesn't do much for covid but its not deadly and that the arrythmias observed were because of sicker patients having electrolyte issues or what we've observed with covid is raised troponins suggesting myocardial injury/myocarditis or sepsis/electrolyte-derangement induced atrial fibrillation
Concerning though if the dataset used to make extrapolations is suspect but important that they take it seriously and retract the papers if needed
Surgisphere are a small, recently founded, company which have developed a way to interrogate electronic health records in loads of different countries and generate data which can be used for research. They provided the data for a publication in the Lancet which “proved” that HCQ likely does more harm than good, which prompted regulators to halt a number of RCTs studying the drug.
The publication had some fairly important flaws anyway (didn’t control for disease severity) but people are now questioning the data itself, after noting discrepancies between the numbers provided by Surgisphere database and official covid stats from the countries involved. These same issue come up in another study, about a different drug, which also uses Surgisphere data.
So we have a load of HCQ investigators pissed off that important clinical trials have been put on hold based on what looks like potentially very flawed research. And The Lancet is getting all sorts of stick for its role in the shit show. This is happening a lot now. Peer review doesn’t seem to be functioning properly. Presumably because there’s such insane pressure to get these things published quicker than ever before.
There's more here
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
Basically some prestigious medical journals may have royally screwed up
Although you’ve got to hand it to their recruitment policies. Someone is living the dream.
To be fair to the adult model, the marketing team seems to be the most competent of the bunch.
Good to see The Lancet taken down a peg or two. People were deferring to its editor’s views with lax scrutiny at the start of the pandemic.
covid-19 should buy a lottery ticket
The RKI report for Germany overall is still suggesting that R is 0.9. Is there an explanation for why it would be so much higher in Berlin?
Re-Edit: Misread it twice. The latest report is saying 0.9 https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ...chte/2020-06-02-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile
Last edited:
Who'd have thought the Lancet would ever publish something that turned out to be dodgy?
They're idiots:
(Only half kidding, this sort of stuff has gone on more in Berlin than elsewhere, it being party capital prior to the virus and all)
Anyone who travelled to Lombardy in February could tell you that. I went mid February and temperature tests were being rigourously done in Malpensa airport and it turned out to be about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
Exactly, it only stops people who already have a temperature and usually those people stay home because they're sick.
During the PC just now, Sir Patrick Valance really emphasising that new case number is still high, and also that although the numbers are generally going down, there is a long tail, and they had hoped it had gone down quicker.
A further 359 deaths (reported) in UK (wouldnt be surprised if number is actually bigger)
Yet Boris looks so proud of that number.
Death rate is higher now than when we went into lockdown right?
Yet Boris looks so proud of that number.
Death rate is higher now than when we went into lockdown right?
About the same i think? At the start you had less cases from prior weeks in each reported total so on balance i reckon we're at a similar level. My bollocks view anyway
It's the hospitalization numbers that need to be kept an eye on but they're not as easy to find and probably less accurate.