Coronavirus

[pilowsky]

If you want to see how Trump and his cavalcade of crooked criminal cronies have comprehensively corruscated a country,Click the arrow at the bottom left to start. You can change the scale from log to linear at the top left.

It looks more impressive linear.

https://tinyurl.com/y3hvkves

 

Watch how the USA comprehensively stuffs it up with a combination of incompetence,

and generally poor governance and a worthless health insurance system along with an obesity and diabetes epidemic.

This is what a 3rd world country truly looks like.<br style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">

[Zelandakh]

If you want to see how Trump and his cavalcade of crooked criminal cronies have comprehensively corruscated a country,Click the arrow at the bottom left to start.

 

This link is better. You get most of the key stats one one graph by changing the selections across the top.

 

It should also be noted that the American stats are significantly under-recorded. By comparing with the previous year death figures Arend provided I would estimate at least 40% extra needs to be added - and that value has almost certainly increased since the WH changed the way that the US figures should be collected and reported. In any case, it does not take long perusing these graphs to see that the US has not succeeded in plotting an optimal course through this.

 

What is notable is the way that the USA has been unable to bring the pandemic under control, in a way that is generally absent outside of Central and South America. Given the level of resources available, that is an absolutely clear indicator of mismanagement and poor leadership. It is well worth comparing the responses of Dodgy Donald and Angela Merkel to see the difference a competent leader can make, and that despite the fact that Germany had to face it earlier with almost no preparation time and much less information available.

[pilowsky]

It's the same source. "Our World in Data" - I constructed the original link to show how badly the USA performed vis a vis a collection of other comparable and not comparable countries.

It's a great resource.

You can tailor-make all kinds of graphics. I really recommend exploring it.

Your illustration is also excellent - there are many ways of showing how uselessly corrupt this administration is.

The availability of great data in the modern era compared with previous disasters is astonishing. Appalling advice and behaviour has occurred for decades but without the current ability to see it so easily.

To me, the remarkable thing is that he may yet get away with murder.

[Zelandakh]

It's the same source. "Our World in Data"

It is the same site but a different chart. You are linking to the specific chart for the stat you want to emphasise. The chart I am suggesting has access to most of the data by selecting different options built in to it. You can access the specific charts for all of the various statistics from either.

[pilowsky]

That's exactly what I said. Good job.

[awm]

Apparently our Covid testing in Switzerland is very different from the US. We've only done about 100k tests per million people (half the rate of the US). But our tests are available to everyone with no wait and no charge, and results are available within 24 hours. If people do test positive, they are immediately quarantined and contact traced (in fact about 25% of the population has downloaded our contact tracing app which can immediately warn them to get tested if they had recent contact with someone who tested positive).

 

It seems like the US is doing a lot tests, but they take so long to get processed that the results are not really useful.

 

Oh well, at least Putin has a vaccine.

[Cyberyeti]

I don't know where Cybyeryeti got the factor 15-20 from, but it's definitely wrong. Maybe confusing percentage of symptomatic cases among all cases with percentage of "positive cases found without population screening among estimated no. of total cases in the population"?

 

I got it because most of the rest barely had symptoms and would not have thought they had it without the test - that was indeed the way the testing was structured, they specifically excluded people with any serious symptoms from that part of the test.

 

The summary of that that I read suggested they didn't have symptoms, rather than had no serious symptoms.

[johnu]

Oh well, at least Putin has a vaccine.

If you didn't have to do Phase III trials, there might be several dozen vaccines available right now. I don't think it is against the odds to predict that Typhoid Donald will do an October Surprise by signing an executive order suspending Phase III trials in the US and announcing that vaccines currently in trial are immediately available for distribution. To hell with the CDC and NIH and any concerns about the safety, effectiveness and correct dosages of the vaccines.

[pilowsky]

If you didn't have to do Phase III trials, there might be several dozen vaccines available right now. I don't think it is against the odds to predict that Typhoid Donald will do an October Surprise by signing an executive order suspending Phase III trials in the US and announcing that vaccines currently in trial are immediately available for distribution. To hell with the CDC and NIH and any concerns about the safety, effectiveness and correct dosages of the vaccines.

 

He won't need to do that.

By October it will have completely disappeared and all of America will be fit, healthy, six feet tall, blonde, and ready to vote in person. Carrying an exposed handgun. No problem.

The corn will be as high as an elephants eye.

Just in time for COVID20.

[y66]

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

 

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

 

[johnu]

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

 

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

 

https://twitter.com/...654256763609090

Won't work in the USA if Typhoid Donald succeeds in destroying the US Postal Service. You have to mail in your samples but the Manchurian President's plan is to delay mail deliveries (i.e. vote by mail ballots) until after the election and he has won. If he loses, he will destroy every part of government that he can in a fit of rage and who knows when USPS will be back to normal.

[cherdano]

SalivaDirect received approval this morning from the @US_FDA.

 

This could be one the first major game changers in fighting the pandemic. Rarely am I this enthusiastic. Here’s why.

 

https://twitter.com/...654256763609090

 

This is really great news, but only if governments move to take advantage of it on a huge scale. Instead of closing pubs and restaurants, and banning indoor gatherings in Aberdeen for two weeks, you could just have tested the entire population of Aberdeen at a cost of 1 million $. To put it differently, if every inhabitant of Aberdeen had contributed $, they wouldn't have had to go back into lockdown for two weeks (and counting). Seems a pretty good trade-off?

 

Which will be the first country to use this systematically? The UK has been running a pilot in Southampton since late June, but I haven't seen any news on its results.

[y66]

Anne Wyllie (Yale, @awyllie13) and her team validated saliva tests back in April.

 

So no problem with US research/technology.

 

But then of course, we had to wait while the FDA slowed things down. Took months and $100k’s to get the FDA out of the way.

 

https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/24224/

[Winstonm]

You mean the report with the big section titled

 

SARS-CoV-2 infected persons without symptoms can also infect others

 

 

 

No. Your specific quote was

 

 

 

What you are doing now is lying about your original claims.

 

The fancy word for what you are doing is a motte-and-bailey argument

 

https://heterodoxaca...rategy-to-know/

 

But, it really boils down to you're lying about your original claim

 

Richard,

Thanks for the link. I had been unfamiliar with motte-and-bailey argument so it was quite helpful.

[y66]

For Quick Coronavirus Testing, Israel Turns to a Clever Algorithm by David Halbfinger at NYT

 

Inspired by a mother’s question, the new method will be introduced across Israel this fall, just in time for flu season, and could be coming soon to the U.S.

Most pooling efforts elsewhere are relying on a simplistic approach developed to test World War II draftees for syphilis. That so-called Dorfman method, named for the economist who dreamed it up, calls for testing pools of samples from several people at once. If the pool tests negative, then all individuals are considered negative. If the pool tests positive, then additional samples from each individual must be retested to see which are positive.

 

The Israeli method, by contrast, is designed to only require one round of testing — a crucial savings in time, laboratory work flow and supplies.

 

It accomplishes that by building on a combinatorial algorithm that one of the three scientists, Noam Shental of the Open University of Israel, in Raanana, developed a decade ago to speed the detection of rare genetic mutations. It works much like error-detecting codes that filter out noise in telecommunications and computer science.

 

In one typical iteration, the Israeli team took samples of 384 people and divided them into 48 pools, so that each person’s sample wound up in a unique set of six pools.

 

Each of the 48 pools was then tested. If one person was positive for the virus, then each of the six pools containing that sample should test positive — resulting in a unique combination of positive pools revealing the identity of the person (or people) carrying the virus.

 

The algorithm optimizes the design of its pools according to the expected prevalence of the virus, making it possible to pinpoint all of the positive individuals in a batch, as long as the total number of positives does not sharply exceed the expected number.

 

Like all types of pooled testing, the usefulness of this method drops as a community’s “positivity rate” — the proportion of tests that come back positive — climbs.

[y66]

Covid-19 vaccine makers lobby EU for legal protection by Donato Paolo Mancini and Michael Peel at FT.

 

Tough call when trust levels are so low.

[pilowsky]

I don't know how many of you have access to The Lancet, so here is a copy of the recent report concerning the new vaccine from Oxford.

I have read it and it looks very promising.

 

Safety and immunogenicity of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2: a preliminary report of a phase 1/2, single-blind, randomised controlled trial

[Zelandakh]

I have read it and it looks very promising.

Let's talk after Phase 3 double-blind trials have concluded.

[pilowsky]

Let's talk after Phase 3 double-blind trials have concluded.

 

Let's keep the Trump administration far away from it.

[johnu]

Let's talk after Phase 3 double-blind trials have concluded.

Yes, too many questions are unresolved.

 

There was this story making the news cycle.

 

Some people can get the pandemic virus twice, a study suggests. That is no reason to panic

 

Maybe no reason to panic, but obvious reason for concern about what this means for vaccines.

 

Phase 3 trials need to confirm appropriate dosages, whether 2 (or more) doses need to be administered and how long between doses if more than 1 is required. Obviously if 2 (or more) doses are required, that will double the amount of vaccine that needs to be produced and that will have significant effect on the distribution and delivery chain.

 

There are several approaches taken by the hundred plus vaccine developers. Could taking 2 different vaccines that target different features on the coronavirus be substantially more effective, especially when the FDA has suggested that they would approve a vaccine that was only effective for 50% of those vaccinated.

[Zelandakh]

Some people can get the pandemic virus twice, a study suggests. That is no reason to panic

I honestly do not know why this is news now. It was reported already back in March or April that there were examples of people re-catching coronavirus and there have been plenty of cases documented since then. There was even a case fairly early on of a single patient getting it 3 times. Now it is possible that some of those cases were due to faulty testing - the early tests were not definitive - but the chances of all of them being down to that are vanishingly small, and obviously the more recently known cases come with the more secure tests now available. So it is great to have a study to document how often this happens and how long the antibodies provide immunity in the typical case but to suggest that at this point the headline is that it can happen at all is completely missing the point.

[cherdano]

I honestly do not know why this is news now. It was reported already back in March or April that there were examples of people re-catching coronavirus and there have been plenty of cases documented since then. There was even a case fairly early on of a single patient getting it 3 times. Now it is possible that some of those cases were due to faulty testing - the early tests were not definitive - but the chances of all of them being down to that are vanishingly small, and obviously the more recently known cases come with the more secure tests now available. So it is great to have a study to document how often this happens and how long the antibodies provide immunity in the typical case but to suggest that at this point the headline is that it can happen at all is completely missing the point.

I think you are missing the main difference for the new case. Normally, it's impossible to say whether a patient got sick again from the same virus still running around in his body, or whether they got re-infected from someone else. To put it differently, it is unclear whether the sequence positive test-negative test-positive test is just due to a false negative in the middle. (Just because you have the virus on your body doesn't mean you'll shed it on a throat/nasal swab.) But in the case of the Hong Kong patient, they had sequenced the DNA of his virus back in March; so now they could sequence the virus of his reinfection, and prove that they are different.

 

Having said that, I think everyone expected that a few people could get reinfected, and the main question was how often that might happen. I.e., on the larger point I agree.

[johnu]

I honestly do not know why this is news now. It was reported already back in March or April that there were examples of people re-catching coronavirus and there have been plenty of cases documented since then. There was even a case fairly early on of a single patient getting it 3 times. Now it is possible that some of those cases were due to faulty testing - the early tests were not definitive - but the chances of all of them being down to that are vanishingly small, and obviously the more recently known cases come with the more secure tests now available. So it is great to have a study to document how often this happens and how long the antibodies provide immunity in the typical case but to suggest that at this point the headline is that it can happen at all is completely missing the point.

You are the one missing the point. IIRC, there was always some doubt whether those "reinfected" were actual cases of reinfection, or if it they were cases of relapse where the virus had been suppressed to the point where the tests were negative (or maybe the test were giving false negatives) and had come roaring back where the test were now positive, or if the tests were picking up remnants of the virus that were no longer viable, etc.

 

Out of tens of millions of cases, there are always going to be anomalies. We know that ordinary flu shots are formulated for particular strains of flu (even though not everybody is actually protected from catching the flu) but that if a flu strain becomes prevalent that wasn't expected by vaccine makers then you will have limited protection from the flu shot. One of the unknowns has been whether a COVID-19 vaccine will protect against different strains of the virus. And of course, how long will you get protection from a vaccine. There are currently 6 strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus so how many more will evolve by the time the 1st vaccines roll out and will the vaccines protect against new strains (or all of the current ones)?

 

I think these are important questions.

[FelicityR]

Soap, alcohol-based sanitisers and now a derivative of lemon eucalyptus oil

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/26/citriodiol-based-spray-can-help-protect-against-covid-19-says-mod-lab

 

No doubt there's already a run of citriodiol products as I write...

[johnu]

You are the one missing the point. IIRC, there was always some doubt whether those "reinfected" were actual cases of reinfection, or if it they were cases of relapse where the virus had been suppressed to the point where the tests were negative (or maybe the test were giving false negatives) and had come roaring back where the test were now positive, or if the tests were picking up remnants of the virus that were no longer viable, etc.

 

Out of tens of millions of cases, there are always going to be anomalies. We know that ordinary flu shots are formulated for particular strains of flu (even though not everybody is actually protected from catching the flu) but that if a flu strain becomes prevalent that wasn't expected by vaccine makers then you will have limited protection from the flu shot. One of the unknowns has been whether a COVID-19 vaccine will protect against different strains of the virus. And of course, how long will you get protection from a vaccine. There are currently 6 strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus so how many more will evolve by the time the 1st vaccines roll out and will the vaccines protect against new strains (or all of the current ones)?

 

I think these are important questions.

Nevada man becomes first in the US to catch COVID-19 twice

 

He then tested positive for the coronavirus a second time. Another test revealed he had antibodies against the infection.

 

Dr. Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory, said in a statement that the fact that a person was reinfected “on such a short timeline” indicates “there may be implications for the efficacy of vaccines developed to fight the disease,” as well as for herd immunity.

 

The other notable fact is that the patient got sicker the 2nd time he was infected. Other cases of reinfection resulted in milder symptoms. Fortunately for vaccine studies, the Manchurian President and his sidekick from Brazil are doing everything they can do to keep infections rates high so that studies will have enough test cases to get significant results. Way to go Grifter B-)