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simFox

Corona Virus

By simFox, in General Chat

Mark
Message added by Mark

No political discussion in this topic. That is complaining about a country, a politician, a party and/or its voters, etc

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Izzy

Izzy

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6 minutes ago, RowlattsFox said:

Went out to small number of shops near me and it's quite surreal, streets aren't empty by any means but it all seemed calm and sensible. Shops monitoring customer levels, and stock reasonably full. Nice weather is making it easy for me, although do feel guilty sitting in the garden with a beer whilst there's chaos within hospital walls. To be fair though, I am on my honeymoon. 

Congratulations mate and enjoy your beer.

 

Enjoy it cos married life goes downhill from now on :thumbup:

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MPH

MPH

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1 hour ago, Strokes said:

1st day of home schooling going ok, I think there is a slight chance I might actually enjoy this.

Bear grylls survival training tomorrow, let’s see how the cadets get on with that.

 

we have been trying to add some interesting  activities to the day, as well as some of the usually stuff.

 

On Monday our boy learnt how to make a water filter from nothing.. rocks, sand, charcoal, ect... the water was then boiled and we all drank it. no one died. 

 

Yesterday he learnt how to make soaps. i got a very nice green and white one made with spearmint from my wife’s essential oils collection!

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BKLFox

BKLFox

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7 minutes ago, MPH said:

 

we have been trying to add some interesting  activities to the day, as well as some of the usually stuff.

 

On Monday our boy learnt how to make a water filter from nothing.. rocks, sand, charcoal, ect... the water was then boiled and we all drank it. no one died. 

 

Yesterday he learnt how to make soaps. i got a very nice green and white one made with spearmint from my wife’s essential oils collection!

Have you looked ahead to see which day your sucking the moisture out of elephant dung  :celebrate:

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Guest MattP

Guest MattP

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Apologies if already posted.

 

Some optimism from Imperial College. (Thread when you've clicked it)

 

 

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Izzy

Izzy

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Fackin el.

 

Just coached an Italian manager on VC who's based in Dublin. His Mum is a front line nurse in Lombardy where the outbreak is at it's worst and his Dad died of Covid-19 last week but he wasn't allowed go to the funeral :(

 

Some of the stories he told scared the shit out of me. Poor bloke can't go home to Italy and is stranded in a foreign land. Really bought it home to me...

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Strokes

Strokes

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16 minutes ago, MPH said:

 

we have been trying to add some interesting  activities to the day, as well as some of the usually stuff.

 

On Monday our boy learnt how to make a water filter from nothing.. rocks, sand, charcoal, ect... the water was then boiled and we all drank it. no one died. 

 

Yesterday he learnt how to make soaps. i got a very nice green and white one made with spearmint from my wife’s essential oils collection!

That’s a great idea, we are building a fire in the back garden tomorrow but I think we could do the water filtration thing later in the week.

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EastAnglianFox

EastAnglianFox

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13 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

Go on sale on the high street! How’s that gonna work then

 

Bit of a stab in the dark but i think they may be put out on the shelves and customers will walk in and purchase them

Edited by EastAnglianFox
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st albans fox

st albans fox

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9 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

Go on sale on the high street! How’s that gonna work then

people will buy them just in case

 

i was told that one celebrity bought 15 kits from the Harley street clinic !

 

so these kits will just be bought by people that don’t actually need them and there will be none left for those that do - families of health service workers , those living with the vulnerable - I mean surely after all the cock ups the govt can think their way around this one - buying millions of kits for them to just sit unused in the bathroom cabinets of the country would just about top it all! 

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ClaphamFox

ClaphamFox

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Obviously there's no room for complacency, but the article below, published in today's Wall Street Journal, offers some interesting analysis.

 

Is the coronavirus as deadly as they say?

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

 

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases. 

 

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

 

Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.

 

Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.

 

In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.

 

The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.

 

How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors. 

 

The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.

 

This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.

 

If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. 

 

A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns. 

 

Dr. Bendavid and Dr. Bhattacharya are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article. 

Edited by ClaphamFox
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The Horse's Mouth

The Horse's Mouth

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"

NHS workers or anyone else will be able to know if they have had the virus and are therefore immune, which means they could resume their normal lives, no longer having to work from home or keep their distance from other people. It is widely thought that having Covid-19 makes people immune to the disease or that if they get it a second time, they do not transmit it."

absolute gamechanger

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Xen

Xen

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1 minute ago, The Horse's Mouth said:

"

NHS workers or anyone else will be able to know if they have had the virus and are therefore immune, which means they could resume their normal lives, no longer having to work from home or keep their distance from other people. It is widely thought that having Covid-19 makes people immune to the disease or that if they get it a second time, they do not transmit it."

absolute gamechanger

Thought, but not confirmed. There are lots of things which are 'widely thought' which have later proved to be demonstrably false.

 

The last thing we need is for everyone to think they're safe because they've had it, then a new strain to mutate or re-infection to be a possibility and we'll have the same problems all over again. Even if the majority of people have already had it without knowing about it, this lockdown will need to continue beyond that point so we can develop a proper vaccine for it so that the vulnerable who haven't been infected yet will still be safe. Convincing people to stay inside over the summer months when they think they (and everyone else) are safe is going to be incredibly difficult...

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theessexfox

theessexfox

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7 minutes ago, Xen said:

Thought, but not confirmed. There are lots of things which are 'widely thought' which have later proved to be demonstrably false.

 

The last thing we need is for everyone to think they're safe because they've had it, then a new strain to mutate or re-infection to be a possibility and we'll have the same problems all over again. Even if the majority of people have already had it without knowing about it, this lockdown will need to continue beyond that point so we can develop a proper vaccine for it so that the vulnerable who haven't been infected yet will still be safe. Convincing people to stay inside over the summer months when they think they (and everyone else) are safe is going to be incredibly difficult...

Good news so far on the mutation front - albeit early days.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-coronavirus-isnt-mutating-quickly-suggesting-a-vaccine-would-offer-lasting-protection/2020/03/24/406522d6-6dfd-11ea-b148-e4ce3fbd85b5_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3J75hX9b_MVUNK5HF8fPIeP_FHWumkvEb_snVPQievp2aly0N6e6HX60U

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st albans fox

st albans fox

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6 minutes ago, Xen said:

Thought, but not confirmed. There are lots of things which are 'widely thought' which have later proved to be demonstrably false.

 

The last thing we need is for everyone to think they're safe because they've had it, then a new strain to mutate or re-infection to be a possibility and we'll have the same problems all over again. Even if the majority of people have already had it without knowing about it, this lockdown will need to continue beyond that point so we can develop a proper vaccine for it so that the vulnerable who haven't been infected yet will still be safe. Convincing people to stay inside over the summer months when they think they (and everyone else) are safe is going to be incredibly difficult...

You’re not going to continue to lock everyone up in case it mutates and comes back ..... if we get on top of this and the strain on the ICU’s is within tolerance then not only will lockdown go but social distancing soon afterwards.  The data from these antibody tests will be crucial for the govt in making their calls.  We won’t be locked down until a vaccine is found - that’s simply not feasible.  If the tests reveal a v low number of COVID cases then clearly we have a big problem ! 

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Izzy

Izzy

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17 minutes ago, StanSP said:

Prince Charles is isolating at Balmoral with Covid-19.

 

Prince Andrew is isolating at Windsor with Jennifer-14.

Shamelessly stolen from @Facecloth on the joke thread earlier!!!

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