Year of the Rat fears over new Corona Virus

[Mossling]

This is all why I tend to only trust data on definitely known CV19 fatalities - where it was the main observable factor involved. If the victim had diabetes, though, or a 'diabetes level' type comorbidity, then it lessens the 'fatality due to CV19' potential. Perhaps seasonal influenza could have tipped them over the edge also?

So in order to 'get a handle' on the CV19 crisis - in as empirical way as I can muster; so that I can make rational life choices NOW - not in a year or so's time when all the data has come in - when it'll be too late, basically, I follow the reported trend of 80% of CV19 case deaths over 65 years, and ~70% all case deaths having comorbidities.

This means that if a person under 65 years catches CV19, and the mortality rate is 2% of all cases (moderate figure), then mortality rate for under 65 years is 20% of 2% = 0.4%, and for anyone under 65 years lacking comorbidity, then it's 30% of that 0.4% = 0.12%.

Since I am under 65 years and lack a comorbidity, then I assume that my chances of dying from CV19 are, at most, 1 in a 1000 - pretty slim.

I assume that is why so many under-65s are happy to go out in the sunshine - on Weston promenade, for example, without masks and in close proximity to other people.

Because firstly they have to catch it, and then they have at most 1/1000 chance of dying, which was, for example, apparently the death rate of expectant new mothers in US/UK in 1950s.

As regards 'save the elderly,' well, perhaps there are clear divides between the 'boomer' generations and the younger groups of today, for example Brexit/Conservative voting:







Perhaps many young people could be thinking they're doing themselves and their country 'a favour' by spreading CV19 around....

[Serpent]

Yubbut, the whole rest of us aren't just concerned about your chances of catching it, needing to be hospitalized, needing ICU, dying or developing life-long complications. We're concerned about how many other people - some of whom may be more susceptible, some of whom may be high risk, some of whom may be dynamic vectors of transmission - you might inadvertently pass it to.

Perhaps many young people could be thinking they're doing themselves and their country 'a favour' by spreading CV19 around....

I wouldn't be a bit surprised. They're thinking it, but hardly anyone is discussing seriously.
S'okay, your grandpa's 88, had a good run and you inherit all his stocks, his RRSP, pension fund, his life insurance and savings - which is nice for you if he snuffs it: you can cash in, pay off your student loans and buy a bigger house.
(Think about this for minute: If the last generation that actually paid all their debts and owns something outright dies off, do the banks inherit the earth? Should they?)
But then, there's the volunteer work he did at the local library, his weekly contribution to the Food Bank, his fund-raising efforts for veterans' mental health. And then there's his monthly haircut, bi-weekly chiropractor visit, poker club membership, perscription drugs and supplements, grocery and liquor store purchases, flowers sent to female relatives for spacial occasions, gifts to kids and grandkids, Saturday treat at MacDonald's with the great grandkids, once a year jaunt to Disneyland or Vegas...
Multiply that by a million or two and see what happens to the precious economy!

[Mossling]

Yubbut, the whole rest of us aren't just concerned about your chances of catching it, needing to be hospitalized, needing ICU, dying or developing life-long complications. We're concerned about how many other people -

I was giving an example applied to myself.
I do have beloved elderly family members and friends just like everyone else.

My point was that we can only really follow clear deaths with no comorbidities, it seems. Everything else is so fuzzy.

[Serpent]

I was giving an example applied to myself.

I realize that it wasn't personal. You were speaking on behalf of the callous young people on the beach, and I was responding to them in the same spirit.

I do have beloved elderly family members and friends just like everyone else.

Ah, but not everyone does! The report just came out about conditions in some nursing homes in Ontario very likely applies to nursing homes all over Canada and the US: an awful lot of old people seem not to have any relatives who care what happens to them.
But I'm not following the emotional argument now: I'm trying to explore the societal and economic effects of letting the old die off all at once. Many younger people see the old, especially the sickly ones, as a burden on society (and on themselves), who drain resources without contributing: a liability. (Yet, some of those same legislators refuse those same old people the right to die. An epidemic sweeps away the moral dilemma: Goddoneit.)


Simplistically viewed, that's true... ish.
OTH, if nail salons and car detailers are important to the economy because they employ people -- try to count the number of care-givers, retailers, manufacturers and service providers who would be redundant overnight if everyone over 80 were allowed to die. (And it doesn't stop at 80; it works its way down through the active seniors who frequent restaurants, golf clubs, gyms, hair salons and vacation resorts. What would happen to the hospitality industry in Florida?)
The economic implications go even deeper than that - to what remains of financial stability when the old, cool-headed shareholders have no part in decision-making? What happens to families when the unpaid child-minders are gone? What happens to the churches? The charities? The real estate?
I'm sure some actuary on the underside of a glass office tower has calculated the odds of various outcomes and made a graph, but nobody wants to discuss it objectively. Public figures (with a deplorable exception) have to pretend concern for the elderly, whether they feel it or not.

My point was that we can only really follow clear deaths with no comorbidities, it seems. Everything else is so fuzzy.

Everything is fuzzy. You can get lots of numbers, but you can't know how accurate they are, how well they fit together, what's been left out and what factors they'd been adjusted for. Don't try to rely on fresh data, except as an approximation of trends: for graph-making. It won't really be informative until it's matured.

[TheVat]

This is all why I tend to only trust data on definitely known CV19 fatalities - where it was the main observable factor involved. If the victim had diabetes, though, or a 'diabetes level' type comorbidity, then it lessens the 'fatality due to CV19' potential. Perhaps seasonal influenza could have tipped them over the edge also?

...

This imponderable is why ED may be a better metric. For example, this guy found pneumonia deaths in Florida went up 1300 above the average for the previous few years....

https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/27/i ... ious-five/

None were recorded as coronavirus caused. If it were just influenza tipping them over the edge, then there shouldn't be this spike, since flu was around the previous five years.

Not trying to make a definitive statement, but if we have cities with cleaner air (smog dropped massively in LA, NY, Miami, etc. for example), which consistently goes with drops in death rates from pneumonia (and stroke and heart attack), then a sudden upward spike is quite unexpected.

[Serpent]

Agree 100% Look at what's changed, especially what's changed suddenly and counter to expectations.
With general lock-down in place, I would expect traffic accidents to decline sharply from March 20 to April 20. If I noticed a sharp increase in car crashes in a particular locality, I would naturally assume that something novel was going on there and ask: besides rush-hour and harried commuters, what causes MVA? I'd alert the local police to watch for road-racers, just in case, and then collect more data.

[Mossling]

Could nearly half of those with Covid-19 have no idea they are infected?
The Guardian, 30 May 2020

Epidemiological studies are now revealing that the number of individuals who carry and can pass on the infection, yet remain completely asymptomatic, is larger than originally thought. Scientists believe these people have contributed to the spread of the virus in care homes, and they are central in the debate regarding face mask policies, as health officials attempt to avoid new waves of infections while societies reopen.

But the realisation that asymptomatic people can spread an infection is not completely surprising. For starters, there is the famous early 20th century case of “Typhoid Mary”, a cook who infected 53 people in various households in the US with typhoid fever despite displaying no symptoms herself. In fact, all bacterial, viral and parasitic infections – ranging from malaria to HIV – have a certain proportion of asymptomatic carriers. Research has even shown that at any one time, all of us are infected with between eight and 12 viruses, without showing any symptoms.
[...]
However, when Covid-19 was identified at the start of the year, many public health officials both in the UK and around the world failed to account for the threat posed by asymptomatic transmission. This is largely because they were working on models based on influenza, where some estimates suggest that only 5% of people infected are asymptomatic. As a result, the large scale diagnostic testing regimes required to pick up asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were not in place until too late.
“I warned on 24 January to consider asymptomatic cases as a transmission vehicle for Covid-19, but this was ignored at the time,” says Bill Keevil, professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton. “Since then, many countries have reported asymptomatic cases, never showing obvious symptoms, but shedding virus.”

[TheVat]

I just saw that in TG, and was wondering if I should link it here. Ya beat me to it. Thanks, Moss.

Current events in the US have caused me to not think much about CV19 for a couple days. I would say that was a nice respite, but having a building burned to the ground next door to where my father lived in his final years, peaceful protestors gassed and shot at in the town where my daughter lives, and other unenchanting developments involving a public extrajudicial killing in Minneapolis have put something of a cloud over things. And put me in the improbable position of writing: I sorta missed the good old days when all we had was imploding democracy and viral pandemic.

[Mossling]

Well, if there's one thing this pandemic has taught us, it's not to think we know what's around the corner.

At the darkest point of the night, the dawn begins to break.

Unless it's the end of the whole universe somehow, of course, which is also not something worth worrying about...

This virus seemed to take the whole world by surprise.

Maybe aliens will arrive next and alleviate much of our suffering ;P

You never know...

[toucana]

Police cordon at one of the main gates of the Xinfadi market area in Beijing.

China is facing a serious new outbreak of COVID-19 after 36 new cases were reported in a single day among users of the Xinfadi market in Beijing [北京新发地农产品批发市场].

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/15/asia/coronavirus-beijing-outbreak-intl-hnk/index.html

This is the largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Beijing and probably the largest food market in asia. It’s located on a 112 hectare site in the southern Fengtai district of the city. It normally provides more than 90% of Beijing’s fruit and vegetable supply amounting to 20,000 tons of fruit, 18,000 tons of vegetables and 1,500 tons of seafood per day. Around 10,000 people work in this densely populated area.

Public health authorities temporarily closed the Xinfadi market down on 13th June after a COVID-19 outbreak was detected, and another 10 surrounding districts have been put under a renewed lockdown as the authorities invoke what they are calling ‘wartime measures’. Anyone who used the market in the last 14 days has now been ordered to self-isolate

The novel coronavirus was apparently detected on chopping boards used by a seller of imported salmon at Xinfadi market that had come from the nearby Jingshen seafood market in the same district.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3089042/coronavirus-beijing-market-outbreak-cases-rise-79

According to Beijing Daily, Zhou Yuqing, deputy head of Fengtai district, where the Xinfadi market is located, Wang Hua, party secretary of Huaxiang township, and Zhang Yuelin, the market’s general manager, were all sacked on Sunday for negligence.

At a meeting of the State Council, China's cabinet, late on Sunday, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan who has been placed in charge of China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic said the risk of the latest outbreak spreading was "very high," citing the market's dense and highly mobile population, according to state news agency Xinhua.

The outbreak has already spread to the provinces of Liaoning and Hebei, where a total of five new cases were found to be close contacts of patients in Beijing.

[TheVat]

Was ruminating over the argument that society shouldn't worry about, or change its habits due to, CV because at most only a fraction of one percent will die from it. While cancer, stroke, and major organ failures (heart, lungs, kidneys, etc) will take out most of us in due course.


What I arrive at is the futility of numbers in addressing human fears - the "tiny fraction of the population" thing underscores that it's HOW people die. We know a couple million die each year in the US from cancer, stroke and organ diseases. But our daily habits and emotional responses are directed at far less frequent forms of death because they are sudden and often grisly. It's why we fasten seat belts, or feel alarm at terrorism and mass shootings. Everyone pictures their deathbed at a certain distance in the future. A car crash or a bomb or a sudden onset of severe respiratory distress seems more capricious and "not what I signed up for." (it's why a lot of healthy Americans don't bicycle for transport, even though biking deaths are relatively few - tangled up in someone's grille sounds so awful, that the odds aren't reassuring)

Strokes are capricious and sudden, too, but people buy into a consensus that the risk is as managed as possible, that hypertension and clots are treated and what else can be done. And most of the major causes of death aren't contagious (unless you want to call fast food and not walking contagious habits) -- the general feeling is that one's risks are one's own. The problem for a lot of Americans in really grasping that they put others at risk with a virus like CV is that they have yet to lose a granny or an aunt or any older person in their social circle. Unless you happen to live in one of a couple dozen hotspots in the US, you are unlikely to know anyone close who has suffered or died from CV. (neither my spouse or I know anyone in this category) Which make the "business as usual" arguments even easier to swallow.

[TheVat]

Mutation D614G has become quite the popular fellow. It's that rakish spike protein that seems to make cell membrane bouncers and doormen nod and say "go right in, sir."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/ ... rc404=true

(should load for you, since covid-related articles are offered free at The Post) (if not, they just ask for an email address, then give you a couple free articles)

[TheVat]

Here is a free website that reprinted the Post story....


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-BB166pjJ?

[toucana]

Nick Cordero with his wife Amanda Kloots and their son Elvis last year

The Broadway actor Nick Cordero has died in a Los Angeles hospital after contracting COVID-19. He was just 41 years old.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-broadway-actor-nick-cordero-dies-aged-41-after-serious-covid-19-complications-12022130

The star died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles on Sunday surrounded by his family, his wife Amanda Kloots said.

Cordero had spent more than three months in hospital and suffered a series of mini-strokes, blood clots and septic infections after testing positive for COVID-19 at the end of March.

The Waitress star was on a ventilator in intensive care for 95 days, and had his right leg amputated in April. He also had to have a temporary pacemaker fitted as his condition deteriorated.

Cordero, who was originally raised in Canada had moved to California with his family to star in the musical Rock Of Ages, and was also known for his roles in A Bronx Tale and Bullets Over Broadway, which saw him nominated for a Tony Award.

He is survived by his wife and fellow actor Amanda Kloots, and their one year old son Elvis.

[toucana]

"I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it's not."

Those were the final words of a 30-year-old patient who died at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio this week after attending a so-called "COVID party," according to the hospital.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/30-year-man-dies-attending-covid-party-thinking/story?id=71731414

Dr. Jane Appleby, chief medical officer for Methodist Hospital and Methodist Children’s Hospital, said in a recorded statement that the unidentified patient told nurses about the party, which she said is hosted by someone diagnosed with coronavirus.

"The thought is people get together to see if the virus is real and if anyone gets infected," Appleby said.

Appleby said she shared the story not to scare people, but to make sure they understand that the virus can affect anyone.

Per HIPAA laws, Appleby could not identify the patient.

Bexar County, where San Antonio is located, currently has 18,602 confirmed cases, with an increase of 923 on Friday, according to the Department of Health.

The age range with the most cases were in people aged 20 to 29, making up 24%, and 30 to 39, making up 20%, according to the department.

[Mossling]

Lots of useful info here:

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-muc ... 39118e1196

And some graphs, some from elsewhere (see below).

It will be very interesting to see the situation after all this data is crunched after a year or so.

[doogles]

A radio interview in Australia yesterday revealed that a triple treatment appears to be curing covid-19 cases.

"Dr Borody along with other scientists in Australia and America have been researching a treatment for the coronavirus and have discovered that treating an infected person with a combination of Ivermectin, Doxycycline and Zinc will see the person fully recovered within six days."

Ivermectin, by the way, is a parasiticide. A single dose will knock out most external and internal parasites.

Professor Borody is a Gastroenterologist whose Centre of Excellence apparently developed a successful combination treatment for Helicobacter pylori, as well as a cure for Crohn's Disease in the past.

The interview was sketchy, but he claimed a 46% cure rate of serious cases and a failure to cultivate virus after 6 days.

He said all drugs are in common use, readily available, and can be prescribed immediately. His advice was to treat clinical cases and to put front line staff on to half dosages as a prophylactic.

A few key words will bring up the audio on Google.

Chris Smith was the name of the interviewer.

[TheVat]

viewtopic.php?nomobile=1&f=129&t=17205

Please. This is not the Science Rumour Forum. A link, and something pointing to randomized double-blind clinical trials is helpful.

[doogles]

Apologies TheVat.

I could not find a publication to cite. The work is too recent.

I stretched a point here because of the reputation of Professor Borody who was being interviewed directly.

His publications take up at least the first 50 pages of a Google Scholar Search of T BORODY -- https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?s ... as_sdt=0,5 .

[toucana]

An interesting update on the progress of two scientific teams in USA who are conducting research into heavy chain antibodies (a.k.a. nanobodies) derived from camelid animal species, notably from llamas.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/12/1968682/-Go-thank-a-llama-Teams-develop-synthetic-nanobodies-to-fight-COVID-19

But on Tuesday, a preprint of a paper from a team from the University of California at San Francisco (USCF) announces that they have created a synthetic nanobody that can be turned into a fine powder, which can be used for “inhaled sprays to the nose or lungs.” Like the very much not tested homemade vaccine being shared around by MIT researchers, the UCSF inhaled treatment could be self-administered. Meaning that it might be possible to pick up an inhaler, take one or two shots over a period of a couple of weeks, and secure immunity to COVID-19. This has multiple advantages over coming into a doctor’s office or clinic for an injection, including reduced need for medical personnel to administer the vaccine, less exposure to other people in getting vaccinated, and potential distribution in areas where ordinary vaccines are hard to deliver.

(There was a previous post by me from 12 May in this thread about a team in Belgium who are also working with llama derived nanobodies).

[TheVat]

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/05/93172620 ... oronavirus

It's not known if this mutated strain poses a greater threat than the most prevalent strain. Or if a future vaccine would be less effective towards the mutant strain. An abundance of caution, as they say.


(Serpent, I "bumped up" covid threads so as to assemble them together atop the science news forum and place "stickies" on them. That way, they don't get lost down the long thread list, and separated from each other)

[Serpent]

Yes, I can see that it's relevant and continues to be so.
This is one tough, mean, clever virus!

[toucana]

Ugur Sahin & Ozlem Tureci - Married couple who founded BioNTech


A new Pfizer vaccine that is 90% effective against COVID-19 has been heralded as a turning point in the global fight against the virus.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-the-married-couple-behind-the-successful-pfizer-covid-vaccine-12128862

The vaccine has been bankrolled by the American pharmaceutical giant, but the science itself is the work of BioNTech, a German company founded by married couple and dedicated physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci who are children of Turkish immigrants.

Chief executive officer of BioNTech, Mr Sahin was born in the Turkish city of Iskenderun, moving to West Germany at four-years-old. His father was a Gastarbeiter, a migrant worker at a Ford factory in Cologne.

Dr Tureci, who is the company's chief medical officer, was born in Germany and is the daughter of a Turkish physician who migrated to the country from Istanbul.

They originally founded a company called Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001 to research the possibility of using modified genetic code, or Messenger RNA (mRNA), to trick the body into fighting cancer and develop cancer-fighting antibodies.

They sold this business in 2016 for $1.4b (£1bn). By then, they were already busy building BioNTech, founded in 2008, to pursue a much broader range of cancer immunotherapy tools.

The couple's work on the potential of mRNA proved to be vital in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

In January, Professor Sahin came across a scientific paper on a new coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

It struck him how small the step was from anti-cancer mRNA drugs to mRNA-based viral vaccines.

BioNTech quickly assigned about 500 staff to project "light speed" to work on several possible compounds, winning pharma giant Pfizer and Chinese drugmaker Fosun as partners in March.

Now trials have shown the vaccine, which uses mRNA genetic material to prompt the body to produce antibodies, is 90% effective.

There are still considerable logistical problems to overcome in deploying the new vaccine at scale. It needs to be stored at very low temperatures of around -70C (-94F)

https://de.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccines-distribut/why-pfizers-ultra-cold-covid-19-vaccine-will-not-be-at-the-local-pharmacy-any-time-soon-idUSKBN27P2VI

[TheVat]

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-ap ... d234aba07b

Moderna said Monday its COVID-19 vaccine is proving to be highly effective in a major trial, a second dash of hope in the global race for a shot to tame a resurgent virus that is now killing more than 8,000 people a day worldwide.

The company said its vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective, according to preliminary data from Moderna’s ongoing study. A week ago, competitor Pfizer Inc. announced its own COVID-19 vaccine appeared similarly effective — news that puts both companies on track to seek permission within weeks for emergency use in the U.S.

The results are “truly striking,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious diseases expert. Earlier this year, Fauci said he would be happy with a COVID-19 vaccine that was 60% effective.


[...]

The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company’s vaccine is among 11 candidates in late-stage testing around the world, four of them in huge studies in the U.S.

Both Moderna’s shots and the Pfizer-BioNTech candidate are so-called mRNA vaccines, a brand-new technology. They aren’t made with the coronavirus itself, meaning there’s no chance anyone could catch it from the shots. Instead, the vaccine contains a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognize the spiked protein on the surface of the virus.

Another steep challenge: distributing doses that must be kept very cold. Both the Moderna and Pfizer shots are frozen but at different temperatures. Moderna said that once thawed, its doses can last longer in a refrigerator than initially thought, up to 30 days. Pfizer’s shots require long-term storage at ultra-cold temperatures.

[Serpent]

They sound very promising. By the time it's ready for distribution, our respective governments should have their acts together, army ready to roll with refrigerated trucks.
I expect to be in the third or fourth call-up: health workers, essential workers, food handlers, old people.

[TheVat]

I'm sort of on the edge of a couple categories, but not officially in any of those, so I keep taking immune boosters and hoping to not get too sick. I live in what's currently Covid Central, the Dakotas.

This article gets into the details on messenger RNA and why it has special preservation challenges in a vaccine....

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-sho ... antarctica

[Serpent]

There is another one, rumoured to be just as good, coming from the UK, and i wouldn't be surprised if they were soon joined by several more. There is an awful lot of intensive effort going into this all around the world.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01247-2
I really like this article about how it works.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01221-y
(apologies if I missed a Nature citation farther up-thread)

[TheVat]

https://apnews.com/article/astrazeneca- ... dc002ff028

The vaccine uses a weakened version of a common cold virus that is combined with genetic material for the characteristic spike protein of the virus that causes COVID-19. After vaccination, the spike protein primes the immune system to attack the virus if it later infects the body.

The vaccine can be transported under “normal refrigerated conditions” of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit), AstraZeneca said. By comparison, Pfizer plans to distribute its vaccine using specially designed “thermal shippers” that use dry ice to maintain temperatures of minus-70 degrees Celsius (minus-94 degrees Fahrenheit).

Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, said the finding that a smaller initial dose is more effective than a larger one is good news because it may reduce costs and mean more people can be vaccinated....

[charon]

a smaller initial dose

An initial dose... how many are we supposed to have?

[TheVat]

After the vaccine has entered the bloodstream and its antigens have caused the body to recognize an invader, the production of antibodies begins. With a vaccine that is weakened form of the virus, these weak buggers can replicate and prompt the body to generate plenty of antibodies. After the action is over, a small number of cells that would recognize the invader remain and circulate throughout the bloodstream; these are known as memory cells.

But some vaccines just have a string of virus protein (like the spike protein of coronavirus) to generate antigens, and so the vaccine itself doesn't continue to replicate in the body, and only a small number of antibodies are created. And very few memory cells are created.

So dosage depends on how robustly the vaccine will cause the production of memory cells. The trick is to have enough antigens in the dosage to generate memory cell production, but not so many as to cause actual illness. Sometimes the best approach is to underdose a couple times, rather than give too much at once. So the end result is you don't get sick, and you have sufficient memory cells to handle the real bug if it shows up.

So, to get back to your question, I would imagine 2-3 doses is likely. Since the vaccine in question uses the weakened form of a common cold virus as a transporter of a CV spike protein, it will replicate somewhat, but apparently not enough to build a full immunity in one go. (could that be because the transporter is a common cold virus, and most of us have immune systems that crush those rapidly? further research needed...)