Source for that?
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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I think you need to caveat with that the above hasn’t been conclusive yet, even the WHO are saying they don’t have an answer on it as it’s unknown still.
Source? Not sure I believe that.
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I’ve been making a similar point for a while. Permanent (or even long term) immunity by no means guaranteed after being vaccinated. Crucially, same caveat applies after being infected.
Although, annual booster jab might fix that issue. Or at least take the edge off.
They utterly fecked up this small test study by the way, some research gimp is defo getting the sack.
The person who collected the samples didn’t realise that some now healthy Covid-19 survivors were also in there as they have donated plasma.
Shouldn’t be possible, but happened. Now they have to do the test all over again after going out to the World with the results. One of the top medical research universities in the World.
You’d almost laugh if it wasn’t so serious.
His is warning that we haven't developed a vaccine for other human Coronavirus (we haven't but we have done for animals I believe) and that immunity from a vaccine may only last a couple of years. So he is correct that this may be an ongoing fight even if we get a vaccine.
Jaysus. That’s not good. I do have some sympathy for the researchers as everyone is doing their research in a crazy hurry, with good reason. Firing out press released based on tiny studied, with dubious design is bad form though. That’s on the health ministry.
The health ministry didn’t release it. Karolinska Institute did.
Yeah, his argument is that even flu vaccines which we have been developing for ages are not effective enough against the seasonal flu and it has a way smaller spread/severity compared to the coronavirus. So even if you have a first vaccine that reaches human trials and subsequent approval, it will only be semi-effective and considering the R0, the virus would still be a slightly lesser nightmare to contain.
The best case scenario is one where we do have a vaccine and make a quarterly trip to the hospital or a pop-up tent close-by to get a shot.
He includes a review paper on animal CoV vaccines. It’s not encouraging. They’ve been trying to make them for decades with very limited success.
Maybe this is a stupid qurstion but could we not get just get vaccinated every few years?
Ok. My bad. They’re a top class institute too. That’s unlike them.
I don't think anyone who knows something about it was expecting permanent immunity. The question is if we'll get immunity for 3 months or 3 years. If it is the former, then it is really bad.
Also, would be interesting to see what happens in the second infection. Would it be as bad as the first one (no immunity at all), worse (dengue fever), or not as bad as the first one? If it is the third case, then that is good news. Hard to know at the moment.
The guy from Karolinska who lead the study was on this morning apologising for it, felt so sorry for him. You could genuinely see the utter horror of what a feck up this was from them.
The flu vaccine comparison is a bit misleading as flu mutates much more quickly so is a much faster moving target. As per the first reply to his tweet, the low r0 for flu he mentions is probably down to existing herd immunity.
Another thing worth noting from Scott Gottlieb:
The high false positive rate for serology based antibody tests mean that using them to determine letting people back to normalcy is basically like tossing a coin at this point.
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The high false positive rate for serology based antibody tests mean that using them to determine letting people back to normalcy is basically like tossing a coin at this point.
Shit happens in every field. I have seen papers with totally amateurish mistakes (that wouldn't pass an assignment) in top venues of my field. The pressure is to high to do quick results, which also increases the chances of errors.
That's a good point regarding R0 for the flu.
We also don't have adequate time to determine the mutation rate of the coronavirus, or more specifically this particular strain.
One year of immunity from the vaccine wouldn't even be that bad. Just make mandatory vaccination every year (and combine it with the flu vaccine, providing no side effects).
We don’t but if we’re making negative assumptions based on previous CoV (which he does in that thread) we can make positive ones too. CoV just don’t have the same “drift” that flu viruses do. They never have done. Would be extremely unlikely for this one to buck the trend.
Another drum I’ve been banging! Immunity passports are a pipe dream. Serology will probably only be useful at a population, not individual, level.
Yes indeed as the strains are genetically quite similar. There's so very few of these that have made the animal to human transmission that it feels a little tricky to generalize how they react to selection pressure.
Couldn't the tests improve with more time and more data?
https://www.sccl.nhs.uk/letter-of-entrustment.pdf
What is this letter from Matt Hancock actually saying and are there any real world conflict of interests or things to be concerned about?
Two bits of interest:
How does the Health Secretary get to wholly own a company that manages NHS supply chains, procurement etc? Apologies if old news.
Edit: Plenty on a Twitter about this and how 5,000 public sector contracts were novated to this private company and that some of the procurement issues we are seeing now could be as a result of these supply chains being turned upside down.
What is this letter from Matt Hancock actually saying and are there any real world conflict of interests or things to be concerned about?
Two bits of interest:
And
How does the Health Secretary get to wholly own a company that manages NHS supply chains, procurement etc? Apologies if old news.
Edit: Plenty on a Twitter about this and how 5,000 public sector contracts were novated to this private company and that some of the procurement issues we are seeing now could be as a result of these supply chains being turned upside down.
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Could you sum up in a couple of sentences what you think is most likely to happen?
Not what could happen (it will be like Dengue Fever and end civilisation), but what you think will happen.
Publishing something on the back of 100 tests was always a bit ridiculous to be honest.
They could improve but the sort of reliability you’d need for this passport is very very unlikely. Even if the test has 99% specificity, which would be remarkable, one out of every 100 passports would be assigned to someone with no immunity. Scale that up to a population and that’s not a working proposition.
Depending on the cost of the test, one possible way is to do what the army does with HIV tests, basically doing it 3-5 times on the same person, requiring they pass all of them before giving them a green light.
That is if it ever reaches 99% specificity of course.
I think the most likely scenario is that this ends up as a perennial epidemic, peaking every year, for the next few years. Possibly indefinitely.
There’s a good chance it will get less lethal over time and I do think we’ll eventually develop medicines that reduce mortality. I also think we’ll eventually develop some sort of useful vaccine (which may need annual boosters) but this will take several years.
Yes. Good point. Hadn’t even thought of that! 99% specificity repeated several times would be pretty damn reliable.
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Has this been posted yet?
My partner has just learned that a good friend of hers died last week as a result of complications from coronavirus. He was only 38.
He suffered from a type of lung cancer when he was younger and (in spite of it) was a heavy smoker. But it's still devastating how a fit young man who from the outside looked healthy and full of energy not too long ago, succumbed to an infection where most people under 40 would only go on to have a mild version of it, if any.
He suffered from a type of lung cancer when he was younger and (in spite of it) was a heavy smoker. But it's still devastating how a fit young man who from the outside looked healthy and full of energy not too long ago, succumbed to an infection where most people under 40 would only go on to have a mild version of it, if any.
Agreed
Coronaviruses mutate much more slowly that influenza.
Sounds right to me. I do have some confidence that we will get a vaccine sooner than several years, with the proviso that it is far from a foregone conclusion.
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Yep, it's a scare-mongering headline. Of course infections are coming back when lockdown ends, anyone who thinks a country is going to hit zero deaths and zero infections then get on with their normal lives is a child, basically. I hate this type of scare-mongering journalism. We all know its here for a long time, that's not the point.
I don't know, I can only assume that it's because there isn't actually a travel ban in a lot of countries. It's something that's highly discouraged but not it's not exactly a ban. There was a poster in here a few pages back who flew home to the UK from Switzerland but a few posts before him, someone from Switzerland/Italy claimed the Swiss borders were completely closed apart from key workers. Which is clearly not completely true. Could they have possibly come over to Ireland on the ferry rather than flying? Perhaps they are dual citizens or something? (Unsure if that can actually be a thing with Ireland/UK, just asking).
Brilliant news, good on Lithuania.