692 students are not ill with Covid 19 at Northumbria University.

[Treesofwood]

78 have symptoms. We must lock them all in their rooms.

So when someone has been found to have a contagious illness, we don't expect them to limit the chance of exposing other people to it?
Maybe its me who lives on another planet 🤷‍♀️

@Treesofwood

Bitheby Can we be well and ill at the same time?

Of course. It's possible to have terminal cancer and not know you have it. It's possible to have a heart defect that you don't know about until you collapse with a cardiac arrest.

@bitheby

What are you talking about? They are ill. They've tested positive for a disease. Just because they don't feel ill, doesn't mean they don't have it.

I think you're confusing what being ill means. It means infected and therefore capable of being infectious.

Actually that's not the definition we usually use for being ill. In pretty much all other illnesses, ill means exhibiting symptoms.

I think it's perfectly clear what the OP means even though I don't fully agree with it.

And it's gone well past the stage where this is just about "saving lives".

Dumplingsandstew Noone put you under house arrest with the threat of 10k fines to limit it before did they? And yet this is the not the first disease we have come across capable of killing people.
Besides these students are well. They've been tested asymptomatically, a fair number of them are probably false positives, or the PCR amplified so much that they've got a positive despite the fact they are not infectious.
We are also asking their contacts to isolate. Again, not something that happened before.

@amicissimma I agree about Japan. A lot to be learnt there.
Just because this disease was Chinese in origin doesn't mean we should emulate them in dealing with it and its consequences.

@cbt944

It boggles the mind how people have the energy to post these numerous threads of a similar nature, hop all over each other's threads clapping each other on the back for their 'insightful thinking' and lamenting the poor general public, and all the world leaders and virologists and epidemiologists and economists who lack their brain power - and yet who, in however many fucking months this has been going on, haven't managed to educate themselves on the basics of this pandemic or grasp why restrictions of movement are important.

Exactly this 👏

Morsmordre I can't actually work out how you got the clapping hands. Where do you get them please, I have some applauding to do.

It is annoying when a city is not really near any extra restrictions, but then students turn up at the start of term, massively increasing the infection rate, causing the city to go on the watchlist quickly followed by enhanced restrictions. So thanks to a few students, hundreds of thousands of citizens have their freedoms curtailed.

The link below shows coronavirus cases at ward level. In the city I monitor, two weeks ago only one ward had a raised level (just over 20 cases) and it has since fallen back to be 10 or less like most wards in the city. This week the three wards with a lot of student accommodation have suddenly shot up to 35 or more cases in each. Other cities I know show a similar pattern. Try it with a university city you know.

www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=47574f7a6e454dc6a42c5f6912ed7076

My son started his first term at Northumbria last week. Luckily he lives at home and not in halls as we are just minutes away. Im recovering from breast cancer and this is bloody scary. Everyone on here reducing this to statistics and conspiracy theories wants to remember this is effecting real people.

I agree with you Trees

We are delaying the inevitable. Effectively there is a new environmental change to human life. Eventually we must adapt. This will take decades, but until then it makes sense to protect the vulnerable with extremely high intensity, whilst allowing others to gain what resistance they can via repeated infections during youth, which will protect them to middle age and old age.

Also the genetic research regarding vulnerability (other than obvious things like diabetes, male sex) needs to be better established.

Many can eat wheat, but some cant. Many can cope with covid, others cant. Off the top of my head there are vulnerabilities to blood group A and presence of certain Neanderthal alleles. Blood group O is protective. These are not strong effects, but it is really useful to know your risk of death.

The point is that the virus was so virulent when we had no measures because of asymptomatic spreaders.

The asymptomatic transmit the disease as much as the symptomatic. As do the pre symptomatic.

We’ve been repeatedly told this.

The universities’ testing is revealing just how many are asymptomatic and infectious. A huge amount!

If they weren’t tested they wouldn’t have known. They’d have kept on infecting others unknowingly

A school in Liverpool tested everyone and found 40 asymptomatic cases. With no testing, we wouldn’t have known.

Schools and units in areas with cases likely have many asymptomatic cases. We need more testing.

It’s good that testing shows how this spreads. We need to learn from that. Not ignore it.

Herd immunity and shielding everyone else is a pie in the sky idea.

Immunity lasts for mere moths.

It’s impossible and inhumane to shut so many off completely from carers etc.

Immunity lasts for mere moths.

That’s not established at all and is a conclusion based only on antibodies, while ignoring the hugely important T cell response.

Getting Covid twice in the timeframe we have for analysis is vanishingly rare and has thus far only resulted in asymptomatic cases.

Ok. I’ll rephrase more clearly. There is much evidence antibody immunity only lasts for months so taking the risk of going for herd immunity is a huge gamble unless we have a more informed idea of how long antibodies last and how many have the hallowed T cells. As none of the scientists are sure of this yet I don’t think we are qualified to urge “herd” immunity based on it either. Herd immunity requires a vaccine.

Fetaliving
Do we have vaccines that can create antibodies even when having the actual virus apparently doesn't?

There is much evidence antibody immunity only lasts for months so taking the risk of going for herd immunity is a huge gamble unless we have a more informed idea of how long antibodies last and how many have the hallowed T cells.

Quite far from what you said in your previous post then. Accuracy is always something to be prized.

As none of the scientists are sure of this yet I don’t think we are qualified to urge “herd” immunity based on it either

Personally, I’m not urging anything. You should heed your own advice on terms of being careful what you say with certainty. We still know very little.

@Treesofwood

Many scientists have said that the fact antibodies don’t last wouldn’t stop a vaccine working.

We have a flu vaccine even though antibodies don’t last - one of the four it protects against is swine flu. So antibodies not lasting doesn’t stop vaccines on general.

We can but wait and see and hope.

Getting Covid twice in the timeframe we have for analysis is vanishingly rare and has thus far only resulted in asymptomatic cases.

Vanishingly rare, yes, but of an admittedly tiny sample group of confirmed reinfections, the majority were not asymptomatic on secondary infection.

bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-tracker/

@Fetaliving You are wrong about this.
"The asymptomatic transmit the disease as much as the symptomatic. As do the pre symptomatic.

We’ve been repeatedly told this."

The propaganda has led us to believe this to be true, but it's not.

Scientific studies are propaganda now?

Oh ok.

Contact tracing and analysis had shown this.

We’re all entitled to our own opinion but not our own facts.

I’m not wasting any more time here.

World Health Organisation would not agree with your facts.

"Available evidence from contact tracing reported by countries suggests that asymptomatically infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms. A subset of studies and data shared by some countries on detailed cluster investigations and contact tracing activities have reported that asymptomatically-infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.

Comprehensive studies on transmission from asymptomatic patients are difficult to conduct, as they require testing of large population cohorts and more data are needed to better understand and quantified the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2. WHO is working with countries around the world, and global researchers, to gain better evidence-based understanding of the disease as a whole, including the role of asymptomatic patients in the transmission of the virus."