Coronavirus: How dangerous a threat?

[jmdirt]

Boy, I don't know. Usually, these trials take years. You need to be so careful to identify any side effects or adverse reactions. The efficacy trials, phase 2 and 3, might be shortened a little, possibly, because in this urgent situation, determining the precise effect is less important than potentially saving lives. E.g., even if the vaccine only worked on a subset of people, and in such a short time there was no way to determine who those people were in advance, you might still go through with it as long as you were certain it wouldn't harm the people it didn't help.

By the way, when we do get a vaccine, will the anti-VAXers boycott it? Will they take their chances with the virus? Going to be interesting to see their response.



Better, thanks for asking. Can get into and out of bed on my own now, and sit on a toilet. Access to a pool has really helped, as i can get some exercise there. Just the freedom of movement does wonders for my state of mind. I think Froome made the same point, that it was a big turning point in his recovery when he could get into the water.

I've wondered the same thing. We have some regular antivaxers, but mostly we have the faith healing variety. They seem to be OK with letting their loved ones die so they may take their chances with C19 (hopefully that doesn't put some small communities at risk).

I'm glad that you are doing better!

 

[movingtarget]

4 metre spread

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...story/dac2063ff45efabfa5a71e90ded6d8ff#.cag7j

 

[jmdirt]

Has anyone read the research coming out about obesity and C19? I'll let you pick your favorite source for med info., but interesting IMO.

Edit: In light of the link that movingtarget posted, 15 feet instead of 6 now!

 

[djpbaltimore]

You're welcome. All the reports that I've seen about it have shown some positive indicators for it as a treatment.

This is another possible/hopeful treatment for Covid-19.

U.S. to Trial Japan's Anti-Flu Drug Avigan for Coronaviru...

The Japanese anti-viral drug is said to interfere with the virus replication process, which may help combat the COVID-19 virus.

www.newsweek.com

You were right. Remdesivir is not an immune modulator, so I thought they were talking about chloroquine which can be. It was tried for Ebola. That helps because it is farther along in the clinical trial timeline having cleared phase I previously.

4 metre spread

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...story/dac2063ff45efabfa5a71e90ded6d8ff#.cag7j

The problem with tiny particles is they can more easily penetrate into the lung.

 

[movingtarget]

Cookster, I'm not sure, it's possible to bring this virus to an absolute end any time soon. Australia will have to reopen its borders at one point? I don't know about Australian economy, but in our times of globalisation... new cases can't be controlled at a 100% rate, can they?

Interestingly there were three waves of infections in Australia during the Spanish flu outbreak. The third one was the worst after social distancing rules were relaxed............

 

[Cookster15]

Latest COVID-19 news in from Australia ….

"Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy says medical experts that advise the National Cabinet will only begin reviewing if and when to scale back social restrictions “within the next few weeks” as he warns “the thing that worries us most at the moment is complacency”.

Professor Murphy said as of Monday morning, there have been 33 new cases over the last 24 hours, bringing Australia’s confirmed cases to 6322, with 61 deaths"

So the new cases curve continues to flatten. 33 cases is the lowest count since March 12 so very promising.

But this will also heighten calls to start relaxing restrictions in Australia to allow the economy to breath. When the lockdown started all retail shopping basically stopped except essential food and supermarkets. Everyone who can work from home instructed to do so. Shopping centres and roads almost deserted. Hundreds of thousands of people, including casual workers lost their jobs overnight but this hasn't been reflected in official unemployment stats yet. How do we keep our foot on the throat of the virus and keep people in work? Initial fiscal response by the Australian government was a $A130bil ($US 82bil) package (in a ~$US 324bil total annual budget). In Australia the economic impact of COVID-19 is far worse than the late 2008/2009 GFC. On other news I note Australia's iron ore exports to China are at record levels although not sure if these numbers include the impact of China's lockdown.

 

[Cookster15]

Interestingly there were three waves of infections in Australia during the Spanish flu outbreak. The third one was the worst after social distancing rules were relaxed............

Thanks, this is more than a little scary. We are in the lap of our government and the relevant authorities. A long way to go before we can relax.

 

[movingtarget]

Are children the key ?

An expert in infectious disease modelling believes the key to bringing Australia out of lockdown could be allowing children to become infected by coronavirus.
More than 6,300 people are confirmed to have coronavirus in Australia as of Monday morning and it has claimed 61 lives.
Australians want to know when will lockdown measures be pulled back – when we’ll be allowed to go out and visit our friends – and what the long-term plan is for overcoming this global pandemic.

Professor Emma McBryde from James Cook University said we can’t be so risk averse that we just keep doing what we're doing because that has its own risks.
“If we do everything we possibly can to make sure that no one dies from coronavirus, people are going to start dying from other things,” the disease modeller told 60 Minutes.
She says one option is to carefully allow the infection to spread in select low-risk groups.
“Children could be the key to getting out of lockdown,” she said.
“They are not only less vulnerable to severe disease, they also may well be less infectious and less likely to become symptomatic”.
View photos

Australian National University microbiology expert Professor Peter Collignon added “all the available evidence” around the world is that children under the age of 15 “rarely” get the virus or suffer from complications.
Of Australia’s coronavirus cases, the lowest numbers represented are those from the group aged 90 and older. The second lowest numbers of cases is the group aged 0-9.
When asked by 60 Minutes if opening schools might be the way to go, Professor Collignon said it “might be the first good experiment”.


My question would be : what if your child has a lung disease or asthma. The rate of asthma in Australia is something like one in four ! What if your child has another disease with a weaker immune system ? I guess what they are saying is that children in that age group would never develop the symptoms that affect their breathing like some adults do. They will be carriers only.

 

[djpbaltimore]

How is opening schools going facilitate infection in only children? Are there going to be no teachers on site? Will kids stay in dorms away from their parents? Do they get a say in this experiment?

Voicing plans where you control the virus by making it infect the young or preventing it from infecting the old and infirm sounds nice, but it presupposes you have an agency over what the virus does. That is fantasy.

 

[Cookster15]

How is opening schools going facilitate infection in only children? Are there going to be no teachers on site? Will kids stay in dorms away from their parents? Do they get a say in this experiment?

Voicing plans where you control the virus by making it infect the young or preventing it from infecting the old and infirm sounds nice, but it presupposes you have an agency over what the virus does. That is fantasy.

The claim was made by an expert in infectious disease modelling. I am sure they considered your point and would not neglect to point this out to policy decisionmakers beforehand.

 

[Koronin]

Here's an informative article explaining why it takes so long to get vaccines out and approved. It also explains why for this virus they've been able to get human testing started as quickly as they have for at least 2 possible vaccines. That part actually does cut down the time needed to come up with a vaccine especially if one of these early vaccines does work.

When will a coronavirus vaccine be ready?

Human trials will begin imminently – but even if they go well and a cure is found, there are many barriers before global immunisation is feasible

www.theguardian.com

 

[Koronin]

Here's an interesting update from the German company that is saying they may have a vaccine ready by fall. From this article it sounds like they are pushing the human trial phases closer together instead of spacing them out to try to get the vaccine approved faster.

German company pushes to accelerate coronavirus vaccine trials

CureVac is one of more than 30 firms racing to find a vaccine.

www.politico.eu

 

[Cookster15]

Here's an informative article explaining why it takes so long to get vaccines out and approved. It also explains why for this virus they've been able to get human testing started as quickly as they have for at least 2 possible vaccines. That part actually does cut down the time needed to come up with a vaccine especially if one of these early vaccines does work.

When will a coronavirus vaccine be ready?

Human trials will begin imminently – but even if they go well and a cure is found, there are many barriers before global immunisation is feasible

www.theguardian.com

Thanks but this is also a little depressing. It says 18 months is considered fast when no significant setbacks. In reality it could take 10 years ! . But this time at least China has released the genetic code info for COVID-19 to the world to help find a solution faster.

 

[Koronin]

Thanks but this is also a little depressing. It says 18 months is considered fast when no significant setbacks. In reality it could take 10 years ! . But this time at least China has released the genetic code info for COVID-19 to the world to help find a solution faster.

Which is likely why there are two vaccines in human trials in the US, the one in human trials in German and I've read somewhere that there is another vaccine in human trials in China. My hope is that more than one of these vaccines is successful thus meaning more of the people who are getting it in these trials means more people are getting some immunity to it. The second US vaccine that has gone to human testing in one of the articles said that as long as the safety tests go well as they expect them to they will be starting to make large quantities of the vaccine for mass use by late 2020 or early 2021.

 

[movingtarget]

Thanks but this is also a little depressing. It says 18 months is considered fast when no significant setbacks. In reality it could take 10 years ! . But this time at least China has released the genetic code info for COVID-19 to the world to help find a solution faster.

Yes 18 months seems to be the ideal optimistic time range with a more streamlined approach to the testing of the vaccine. I heard that most vaccines take anywhere from 5-10 years to develop with the standard approach to development.

 

[movingtarget]

Why some doctors are moving away from ventilators

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...story/581590f94f8b9e59729f724fb55ed406#.zazgm

 

[jmdirt]

How is opening schools going facilitate infection in only children? Are there going to be no teachers on site? Will kids stay in dorms away from their parents? Do they get a say in this experiment?

Voicing plans where you control the virus by making it infect the young or preventing it from infecting the old and infirm sounds nice, but it presupposes you have an agency over what the virus does. That is fantasy.

Those were my thoughts as well: what about the adults in the educational process? What happens when the kids go home or go visit grams?

 

[jmdirt]

Why some doctors are moving away from ventilators

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...story/581590f94f8b9e59729f724fb55ed406#.zazgm

"perhaps by igniting or worsening a harmful immune system reaction." I've read similar things before (prior to C19) about anesthesia causing both exaggerated and suppressed (most common) immune response, which obviously neither is good.

“If we’re able to make them better without intubating them, they are more likely to have a better outcome – we think,” Habboushe said.

 

[Oldermanish]

Which is likely why there are two vaccines in human trials in the US, the one in human trials in German and I've read somewhere that there is another vaccine in human trials in China. My hope is that more than one of these vaccines is successful thus meaning more of the people who are getting it in these trials means more people are getting some immunity to it. The second US vaccine that has gone to human testing in one of the articles said that as long as the safety tests go well as they expect them to they will be starting to make large quantities of the vaccine for mass use by late 2020 or early 2021.

The US has finally....read Fed portion of gov'mint woken up to the fact that the trial periods are necessary to avoid heinous side effects and the rush by private copywritten cures to cash in. Fortunately they've accelerated several vaccine trials and anti-body testing protocols that will be Fed owned and open to commercial producers upon approval by Battelle labs and other smaller, non-profit based enterprises.
Trump has struggled here with his need for relevancy and being part of a solution he so seriously didn't consider and his more extreme followers considered a "loss of rights". It is now small thing that gun sales are soaring beyond the rate that occurred when....wait for it....a President of color was elected. He waited until yesterday to ask his "fundamental" religious base to not gather for en masse Easter, lest his feared negative numbers might go up. By numbers...I mean body count.
Fortunately our State Governors have authority over State level public access and have, for the most part pressed for less contact and a real litmus test before sending kids back to school or folks to work. They will be our buffer from a hasty urge to restart major employment without testing protocols. We have almost no testing available at all, despite whatever press you may see on your continent.
Meanwhile we have the Skeptical press suggesting that it will continue to just kill old people that were going to die very soon: see Foxnews with Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. They suggest we need to gauge that risk against the current economic consequences which would surely be dwarfed by a robust second or third wave of C-19.

I appreciate and admire that most country's medical officials are concerned with long term solutions and subsequent waves of infection, as well as inevitable mutations. Here, Donald just wants to get checks to people for a short term fix and some financial activity going so he can game his reelection campaign. I've survived recessions, stagflation, Vietnam and a lot of personal stresses that pale to the worldwide health and financial impacts we're seeing. I can only say the economic outfall will continue years past a vaccine and we need to prepare for that as much as the threats to health. We need serious fu*king leadership in the US and anywhere else.

Thank God on Easter the folks in New Zealand and a few other areas got it right.
Hopefully, really hopefully the US won't screw it up for everyone else.

 

[jmdirt]

Here's an informative article explaining why it takes so long to get vaccines out and approved. It also explains why for this virus they've been able to get human testing started as quickly as they have for at least 2 possible vaccines. That part actually does cut down the time needed to come up with a vaccine especially if one of these early vaccines does work.

When will a coronavirus vaccine be ready?

Human trials will begin imminently – but even if they go well and a cure is found, there are many barriers before global immunisation is feasible

www.theguardian.com

I'll have to look for it tomorrow (its past my bedtime already!), but Bill Gates said something to the effect of "we need to build X labs that are ready to go online as soon as the vaccine is ready". I think that he was willing to fund them with money from his foundation and contributions from his wealthy friends.

EDIT: Maybe this is it:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bil...ifferent-vaccines-to-fight-coronavirus-2020-4

 

[Oldermanish]

I'll have to look for it tomorrow (its past my bedtime already!), but Bill Gates said something to the effect of "we need to build X labs that are ready to go online as soon as the vaccine is ready". I think that he was willing to fund them with money from his foundation and contributions from his wealthy friends.

EDIT: Maybe this is it:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bil...ifferent-vaccines-to-fight-coronavirus-2020-4

Bill and Melinda live "down the street" and he is a serious player in the solution with his money and time. He also would know that this is not the last threat of this magnitude that will impact all of us. Perhaps not even the most threatening threat we'll see in years to come so his encouragement to rebuild the research base and international collaboration is not idle.

 

[Merckx index]

Baltimore's post about the Ab false positive actually helps solve a problem I was puzzling over. In the German study, 2% of the subjects were positive with the virus, but 14% with the antibody. Germany, like Austria, has close to an equal number of active cases and recovered, so the 2% figure can be doubled to 4%. This is the fraction of the population (in that town) who have tested positive and shown symptoms.

But that still indicates that asymptomatics are about 70% of the infected people: (14-4)/14. If we asssume 4.4% of the population are false positives, though, the true proportion of Ab positives is 9.6%. The proportion of asymptomatics drops to 5.6/9.6 = 58%. This is much closer to the 50% figure emerging from other data, such as Iceland.

However, this number would have to be revised upwards somewhat to account for the recent negatives that haven't yet developed Abs. For example, if half of the currently negative people haven't developed Abs. then the proportion of asymptomatics would be 6.6/10.6 = 62%. In fact, this may be the assumption, because according to one report, the 14% became 15% by "eliminating overlap between the two groups", IOW, they assumed that !% of the population tested negative but did not have Abs yet. I'd have thought that number was lower, but anyway, probably 60% is about as high a proportion of asymptomatics as this study would imply.

This makes me wonder how a mortality rate of 0.37% was calculated. Did they take into account some false positive rate? I assume they would, but if they did, the 14% or 15% rate reported would be inaccurate and misleading--unless the actual rate was higher than that, and they got that after subtracting false positives. But I haven't been able to find any information on this.

Edit: Yes, it turns out that some experts have questioned the sensitivity (false negatives) and selectivity (false positives) of the Ab test used in Germany. This suggests to me that they didn't make any correction for false positives. I don't even know what that 4.4% figure I used is based on. I went back to Levi's original tweet, and he throws it out as though it were some fixed constant. It depends on the Ab, and probably, the person doing the assay. Maybe he got it from the German group, but then again, why didn't the group point that out when they were reporting to the media?

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/...v-2-virus-in-residents-of-gangelt-in-germany/

I also wonder what they used as the mortality rate prior to taking into account the Ab information. According to a story in German, they used a Johns Hopkins estimate of 1.98%. But that is very worrisome, because it's very close to the naive mortality rate (deaths/cases), which is known to be an underestimate. For April 7, that rate was 1.87%; on April 8 it was 2.07%, so they do seem to be using that. But then how do they go from there to 0.37%?

 

[yaco]

For the record your attitude isn't necessary no matter what your point is, if I was you I'd review how you responded and how there might have been a more effective way to make your point. Also for the record I am wearing a mask to shops - plus wearing plastic disposable gloves, and maintaining social distancing where possible. I am also staying at home indoors as instructed by my government. A good way to get people to ignore whatever valid your points of view you might have is to be rude rather than respectful of differing opinions. During very testing times for all of us up to you if you take this on board.

I note Australia just recorded another fall in new cases yesterday - 65 new cases yesterday compared to a peak of 537 on March 22 prior to the current lockdown being implemented. This despite masks optional. That means the virus will die out on current trajectory assuming new sources of infection can be controlled. Impressive knowing Australia's source of infection was some cruise ships and our large Chinese university student population who brought back the virus after Chinese New Year and before incoming flights from China and other seriously affected nations were stopped by our government.

Very few Chinese students brought the virus to Australia - It's tough to do so when half of this cohort were already overseas at the end of January, and were banned from flying to Australia - You may have got some isolated cases from Mainland China before the ban on flights from Mainland China.

 

[yaco]

Yes but it could have been even better. When it was initially suggested flights from China should be stopped some claimed that was racist. So more sources of infection were imported prior to March. Then we had major source of infection from some cruise ships and quite a number of elderly passengers have already died from the disease. Very sad. But thankfully sanity has prevailed and after some initial complacency people got on board with closing the borders and implementing our lockdown. But this isn't economically sustainable so we will see where we go from here.

If countries were serious about the virus they would have all locked down their borders in the last week of January - My guess is Governments and their experts were hoping the virus would die out.

 

[MartinGT]

Australia are also not only known as the lucky country. As an island nation we have had an advantage in this scenario, and outside of our capital cities our population is scarce. We did have the cruise ship disaster, but that probably wasn't anything on the scale of such events as (don't take my 100% word for this, what I've heard):

Large number of people flying out of Wuhan shortly after the outbreak, direct to Italy.
European soccer match taking place in Italy between Spanish side; huge crowd.
Many people returning to Britain from Italy after holidays.

As for the USA, they probably didn't lock down early enough, but also it was always going to be more of a struggle to contain the virus there then it was in Australia.

The UK is an Island. yet we are soon going to become one with the highest number of deaths. But for rules on this board, that's down to politics that cannot be discussed.

I was curious last week and looked on a flight app to see the number of aircraft over the UK. I noticed a lot less, but Heathrow was still busy. I looked an saw a flight had come in from JFK. What measures are been taken at airports? I bet nothing at all.