Lots of good news at the moment!

[FrugiFan]

www.bbc.com/news/health-53467022
A trial of a drug which could reduce ICU admission by 79%, and is already in use for other things so doesnt need human trials for side effects etc.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53469839
Promising news about one of the many vaccines in production.

Hospital admissions have not increased, more than 2 weeks after pubs and restaurants reopened.

Lots of reasons to think positive at the moment

Positive article. www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-53951764?__twitter_impression=true
The points I took away are:
We will see an increase in cases but I don't think it's inevitable that we will have the level of hospital admissions and deaths we saw back in April," she says.

"We know enough now about our own individual risks that we can protect older people and those with significant health problems, whilst allowing the rest of the population to get on with their lives."

I Pinched this off karol sikoras twitter

"In England, there are now 305 Coronavirus patients in hospital with 33 patients on ventilation. At the peak those numbers were around 17,000 and 2,800.

No sign of any increase in hospital admissions too.

It's so important to look at the whole picture, not just reported cases."

This is going back a fair bit in the thread but there was a interesting theory circulating in Japan about why they had such low cases. Scientists had found a that a type of coronavirus that obviously wasn’t covid but had some similarities had been circulating the winter before the covid outbreak and may have conferred immunity to covid to those who had had this previous, mild coronavirus.

Cannot for the life of me find the article so it may have come via in-laws who live over there but it would perhaps explain why they had low case numbers despite so many links with China. That, and of course they do love a mask!

I think that’s good news in the sense that an immune response looks very possible and relatively easy, which I hope will match up with the info coming out of vaccine trials.

Oh and a personal good news one if that’s allowed? Ds (11) had covid back in March and has been ill since with a weird and painful variety of symptoms. (Gp and consultant diagnosis of long covid) The good news is his latest blood test has come back with good levels of inflammatory markers, and his recurrent infections have eased off. He feels normal for the first time in 5 months which is a massive relief for us and him both! Fingers crossed that he just keeps improving from now on (but if he does relapse I promise I won’t post on this thread )

@TaxTheRatFarms

Oh and a personal good news one if that’s allowed? Ds (11) had covid back in March and has been ill since with a weird and painful variety of symptoms. (Gp and consultant diagnosis of long covid) The good news is his latest blood test has come back with good levels of inflammatory markers, and his recurrent infections have eased off. He feels normal for the first time in 5 months which is a massive relief for us and him both! Fingers crossed that he just keeps improving from now on (but if he does relapse I promise I won’t post on this thread )

That's great news, so pleased he is feeling better. What symptoms has he had if you don't mind me asking x

@TaxTheRatFarms

Oh and a personal good news one if that’s allowed? Ds (11) had covid back in March and has been ill since with a weird and painful variety of symptoms. (Gp and consultant diagnosis of long covid) The good news is his latest blood test has come back with good levels of inflammatory markers, and his recurrent infections have eased off. He feels normal for the first time in 5 months which is a massive relief for us and him both! Fingers crossed that he just keeps improving from now on (but if he does relapse I promise I won’t post on this thread )

Definitely allowed I'd say!

Very pleased to hear

@Jrobhatch29

I Pinched this off karol sikoras twitter

"In England, there are now 305 Coronavirus patients in hospital with 33 patients on ventilation. At the peak those numbers were around 17,000 and 2,800.

No sign of any increase in hospital admissions too.

It's so important to look at the whole picture, not just reported cases."

Good to get those figures. Really reassuring!

Thanks tobee

Jrobhatch29 How long have you got! I think the only symptom he didn’t have was covid toes! Ok, if you’re sitting comfortably:

Sore throat & headache for a week (no idea if related or not though)
Then fever (39.5-40.1) for 5 days with one episode of vomiting, and a cough that started the day of the fever and went on for 2 weeks-ish, with chest pain. Then after the fever had gone down, he got a rash that looked very similar to chicken pox (and equally itchy!) but disappeared after a day, along with red, swollen painful watery eyes, cracked lips which ended up in cold sores for a couple of weeks, exhaustion, loss of appetite (all the way through so he’s lost a lot of weight and was skinny to begin with!) Then rashes on and off, recurrent nose and throat infections which didn’t respond to antibiotics, more exhaustion (if he played at the park for a couple of hours he would need to lie down for the whole of the next day) which has eased off over the last few weeks. Sore throat most days since March, frequent headaches and stomachaches, high inflammatory markers on blood tests. Oh, and elevated heart rate for the first month or so post infection, but that is back to normal levels now.

I think that’s everything! He’s previously been super healthy, skinny, no underlying conditions, so this was all a bit of a surprise. None of the rest of us got ill, including ds2 who is really prone to chest infections and the like, despite us all being in close contact. This virus is an absolute weirdo.

I hope you survived that long and boring list of symptoms

Wow! That's awful! Even more glad he's feeling better.

God that's awful. The poor thing. You must be so relieved he is feeling better!

@TaxTheRatFarms

Oh and a personal good news one if that’s allowed? Ds (11) had covid back in March and has been ill since with a weird and painful variety of symptoms. (Gp and consultant diagnosis of long covid) The good news is his latest blood test has come back with good levels of inflammatory markers, and his recurrent infections have eased off. He feels normal for the first time in 5 months which is a massive relief for us and him both! Fingers crossed that he just keeps improving from now on (but if he does relapse I promise I won’t post on this thread )

Great news,I'm pleased for you and your family. Can't imagine how scary it must have been.

Nice thread op, thanks 👍

Lovely thread Op in amidst the gloom of the past 5 months it’s easy to forget that there’s an army of scientists and healthcare professionals across the globe working tirelessly to help us all😊

This seems like a positive development:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/02/large-scale-study-coronavirus-fighting-antibodies-offers-hope/

Good report, thanks Sunshine

Thanks tobee jrob and laylady
He’s been an absolute trooper throughout it, and my stress levels are almost back to normal!

Did we ever hear any more about the llama antibody research? That was a lovely combination of good news and adorable ness!

Did you see and or read the Sky News piece on Covid at Northwick Park Hospital?. They have several wards deliberately left vacant waiting for the second wave. I went back to the NHS to work on a Covid unit but I'm not gonna do it again, nor are a lot of my colleagues that I served with. They are all leaving Critical Care Nursing. I also know of quite a few clinical staff who are being treated for PTSD. Hopefully Oxford/Imperial will develop an effect vaccine but I wouldn't confuse blind optimism with the reality of it. Oh, and the youngest patient I cared for was 17 and the eldest was 55, and I haven’t had a full night's sleep since.

@VesperLynne

Did you see and or read the Sky News piece on Covid at Northwick Park Hospital?. They have several wards deliberately left vacant waiting for the second wave. I went back to the NHS to work on a Covid unit but I'm not gonna do it again, nor are a lot of my colleagues that I served with. They are all leaving Critical Care Nursing. I also know of quite a few clinical staff who are being treated for PTSD. Hopefully Oxford/Imperial will develop an effect vaccine but I wouldn't confuse blind optimism with the reality of it. Oh, and the youngest patient I cared for was 17 and the eldest was 55, and I haven’t had a full night's sleep since.

Trying to keep this to positive news please. So to counter that my good friend is an intensive care nurse, they are very quiet - theyve even closed a ward down so for the whole of Sheffield there is now only one unit. She is very confident that we are on top of it.

Yep the clue is in the thread title ^

@palacegirl77 That's good news!

I'd be a bit worried if they weren't preparing for the potential of a second wave?! They'd be mad not to surely! Doesn't mean it's definitely going to happen. Even if it does we are in a very different place to where we were in March.

Trying to keep this to positive news please. So to counter that my good friend is an intensive care nurse, they are very quiet - theyve even closed a ward down so for the whole of Sheffield there is now only one unit. She is very confident that we are on top of it.

ICU quiet , really ?. That maybe so where you are but my eldest , who's in her final year , is flat out treating patients in the Clean Zone as students are not allowed in the Red Zone , which in her Hospital is FULL and they have no plans in closing it. I wish I shared your "friends" confidence, perhaps I could get some sleep if I did.

Fortunately there are only 60 people in the whole UK on ventilators so your daughters hospital not does reflect the vast majority

There are 472 people in hospital in England with Covid now as I understand it? Does your daughter work in a particular hot spot for cases?

Non Covid ICU admissions are presumably not connected to Covid and are therefore to be expected in any event.

I also know of quite a few clinical staff who are being treated for PTSD.

I'm sorry to hear that. Just for anyone else who is reading who wants a positive given the nature of this thread, it definitely isn't a given that if you experience difficult things, you will get PTSD (in fact I think only a considerable minority do). There are also some pretty good treatment options such as EMDR - I've had it and it made a significant difference to me to give one example. I think we are going to have to make the government consider the needs of healthcare staff as they come to terms with what happened this year (or, those who were caught up in it. So many weren't and were sat twiddling their thumbs) but lots and lots of staff will have come through this ok too and aren't traumatised.

And yes a local nurse (friend) I know is also working in a very quiet hospital with no COVID cases right now. I have caught up with her on Zoom in the last few months and in person last week and she was calm, relaxed and happy and had just been on holiday. That's an ITU nurse who went back to that job specifically because of the virus.

Hopefully Oxford/Imperial will develop an effect vaccine but I wouldn't confuse blind optimism with the reality of it.

Oxford and Imperial are working on separate vaccines. Oxford/AstraZeneca’s will probably have results fairly soon. UK government has also paid for doses of Pfizer’s vaccine which Pfizer are still saying will have results by October. Both of these have done well in early trials, most vaccines which make it to the Phase III trials they’re both in now do make it to approval, so that’s all looking pretty good.

Surely people are allowed to be happy that the vaccine quest is going fairly well? Much better than it could have been? It’s fine if you’re not interested in any of this but why come into a thread that’s specifically for good news and mutter about ‘blind optimism’ as though everyone’s just making stuff up?