Westministenders: Peak something

[BigChocFrenzy]

Westministenders: Peak something

The story so far

COVID has changed the world for the next few years, like a slowly exploding nuke:

• killed well over 100,000 people
• made many people afraid to leave their home
• caused a Global Depression

Countries locked down because they needed the extra time to

Raise the Line while Flattening the Curve:

1. Flatten the curve of the numbers needing healthcare to a level the system can manage

2. Raise the capacity of their health services and public health systems - their testing and tracking process

Also, scientists desperately needed time to find out more about COVID:
how to avoid it, how to treat it

What happens next ?

Research teams around the world are working to produce a vaccine,
will become hopefully available within the next couple of years

In the meantime, treatment procedures are being developed to better treat COVID sufferers.

Also in the meantime, countries will need to gradually exit lockdown to rescue their economies from complete catastrophe.

Timing & measures for each country will be dependent on:

Death rate after peak,
health service capacity,
testing & tracing capacity etc

....and also what their govt and public deem an "acceptable" level of extra deaths & serious illness.

Possibly some countries will need to cycle in and out of lockdown,
whereas others will be able to accept the death toll with lesser social distancing measures.

The first few countries are already relaxing lockdown,
so the UK will watch, wait and hopefully learn what works and what doesn't

..... then copy these the correct way round

Ever since the crisis really hit, my social circle have been hoping for a repeat of last year's long (horrendous) 40C heatwave There is a belief / prayer that weeks of v strong sun could kill off most of the virus and also make it less transmittable (I'm neutral on this, insufficient data)

I thought UV(B ?) light is sort of kryptonite for chemical bonds ? So any viral load in the wild will quickly die ? Plus the simple dehydrating effects of heat ? So we're getting more of that by the day ... and isn't the usual reason for winter prevalence of bugs based around us spending more time indoors together ?

What would concern me much much more (if for no other reason than it isn't something that is being woven into the COVID response) is that we have no idea if any changes we are currently seeing to the environment is reversible from whatever unknown place it's going to go. We already know the Earths climate is a chaotic system. We may unwittingly have triggered off a cascade of climatic changes, not all of which are necessarily to our advantage. Even the growing oil crisis (TL;DR - too much oil, nowhere to put it) could lead to changes in the environment. (Plus some permanently closed wells ...).

It's just a constant cycle of shit.

None of us here are surprised about that surely?

Sir Simon McDonald's retraction is most interesting.

IMO it was all about Brexit, and how we don't need the EU. Until Johnson and Co realised that they had made a complete and utter !&^%$* up as a result of their policy, so they had to back track smartly. Now a Senior Civil Servant has spilt the beans. This is not good. Brexit is a SUCCESS, remember, so it must not be associated in the public eye with failure.

If the Cummings/Johnson plans had all gone swimmingly, then you can be 100% certain that they would have laid it on with a trowel about how "We didn't need the EU. Look how much better we have done than Spain or Italy."

I don't have the necessary qualifications to do anything more than speculate on the science of the immunology. Just put up what seemed an interesting and fairly trustworthy article for consideration.

However, I am much more qualified - and empowered - to ask questions. And it's the questions that aren't being answered that are most interesting.

Incidentally, "UK to start human vaccine trials Thursday (tomorrow)". Who believe a word of that, after the EU ventilator and PPE stories ?

I bet we'll discover there's a piece of paper with "23/4/2020 [St. Georges day, fancy that ]" which authorises human trials when there is a suitable candidate. Which does spin seamlessly into "UK to start human trials on Thursday".

I'll punt a bottle of hand sanitiser on it ...

The Guardian is not yet completely useless.

Here's Marina Hyde giving it to Beardy with both barrels.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/21/richard-branson-bailout

Is anyone watching PMQs?
Keir Starmer asking good questions and getting good responses from Dominic Raab.
Nice to see the House of Commons quiet and orderly.

"We are guided by the science..."

Yes, that'll be it. It's the Science's fault. Bad Science.

Hope MPs work from home more often and are More available to their constituencies

They never ask which science though

"We are guided by the science..."

That'll be a first. When did things change ?

@JustAnotherPoster00 not surprised, no. Just bored of the tedium and predictability of the uselessness of a bunch of middle aged, over priveliged white men who have never had to plan for anything in their lives playing out on the lives of people who thought/think they were the bees knees. I think it's the "consent" my Conservative voting friend insists I gave Bozo when the country elected him that is making my eye twitch more than usual.

JeSuis Amen to that

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/eu-turns-up-pressure-on-matt-hancock-over-covid-19-ppe-scheme?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

Just bored of the tedium and predictability of the uselessness of a bunch of middle aged, over priveliged white men who have never had to plan for anything in their lives playing out on the lives of people who thought/think they were the bees knees.

I think the thing that is really making itself felt right now is the way that politicians (Tory in particular) have been clothing themselves in the reflection of private sector operations to posture and make out that public sector is useless and needs to be reformed by them to their ideas, when they do not actually have any private sector operational experience themselves.

"Private sector" experience is not all created equal. You wouldn't get someone from sales or marketing to jump in and redesign a supply chain, or someone from customer services to take a brand new prototype to market (including getting the skus in and setting up the manufacturing line). But in government, any "private sector" experience is held up as being worth more than knowing health care operations. It's insane.

FFS there are not 30 strains of this coronavirus. That study is from 11 patients and found 33 mutations from the original reference genome sequence including 19 that hadn't previously been seen in the GISAID database as of 24 March (I'm willing to bet most of these are now present in other samples in the DB). 8 mutations were silent - no change to the encoded protein. 13 were not clonal, that is, they were only present in some of the viral particles sequenced. These mutations may never have left the patient in question if they were replicating deep in the lungs.

Now, viral load in the cells they infected with each of the 11 isolates did increase at statistically significantly different rates, but that doesn't mean that those rates differed much at all in terms of actual numbers or pattern, look at Figure 3a (attached) to see what I mean. This is a plot of a metric that inversely corresponds to viral load, hence why it goes down.

It's a well done piece of work at first glance, though I note the supplemental methods are missing (lead author says they've now been submitted and will show up shortly). But claims of multiple strains (yes I know they use this word in the paper but they shouldn't) and the need for multiple vaccines are massively overblown. I blame the academic press office on this one.

Liz Truss leaving herself wide open to ridicule, again.

mobile.twitter.com/jonlis1/status/1252943693314691072

I blame the academic press office on this one.

If they slip up, what hope us ?

Dick by name ...

Is anyone watching PMQs?
Keir Starmer asking good questions and getting good responses from Dominic Raab.

I've just been catching up. Starmer was terrific - he absolutely skewered Raab. First time I've enjoyed an exchange in the Hoc for months.

Liz Truss leaving herself wide open to ridicule, again.

Isn't that a tautology ?

^I blame the academic press office on this one.

If they slip up, what hope us ?^

Oh they're serial offenders when it comes to over promoting their institutes. And the papers just cut and paste.

You know that totally useless thought "experiment" that some people liked to derail talk of autonomous cars with ?

I wonder if the same people would care to focus their same immense intellects on the similar dilemma about knowing "going back to normal" is going to cost more lives than lockdown is saving ? Admittedly foreign lives, so probably not quite as equivalent as nice western lives. But even so ....

Thanks for link to NY Times article Maxnormal interesting and alarming.

When I was in the middle of the worst of the virus I looked up getting one, but as the usually £25 oximeters were going for £85, I opted not to buy. If I knew then what this ER physician was saying about silent hypoxia, I probably would have paid the money.

Plus, his comments about patients being found to have covid by 'accident' when x-rayed for unrelated reasons, makes you wonder about the wisdom of separating out the covid from the non covid unwell.

Maybe we need primary care to be taking real leadership on this one.

30 days later, still with symptoms, I am too well for hospital but yet still can't get seen by a GP... Reading about how well Germany has managed the pandemic fills me with despair about the uk system.

Ooh skewered kebaab...I think I'm hungry.

MShip thanks for the explanation. Re the viral load then, even though they follow the same pattern, does it not look as though that might influence the affect that certain cases are more moderate than others? If this connected to the ACE2 receptor that seems to be playing a role in severity? I understand it's not an issue for vaccination but could it be worked on to see which strain might affect certain risk groups more than others, for example?

Or am I at the bottom of a tree barking at a squirrel that's actually in the tree behind me?

JeSuisPoulet yes that's essentially what the paper was about, but first there needs to be some serious replication (the consortia I'm part of will be in a position to do this among many other things) to see if the mutations they observed associated with higher viral load in vitro (in cells) are doing so in vivo (in patients) and more importantly does that correlate with patient outcome and disease severity. Then it needs functional studies to understand why.