@edps
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Actually Taiwan (almost predominantly Han Chinese, who are racially very similar to Japanese/Korean — you can recognise Han by their ‘long’ faces) had the highest CFR at 27%. However I would not argue the toss on this one as the Nature paper looked very preliminary, and almost prematurely rushed to publication.
Thanks for the comments on surgical masks, I wondered why they were bicoloured! I’ll start my 3M N95 mask-wearing next week, but I’ll skip the goggles as I wear spectacles. As an aside, if anyone is tempted to purchase an N95/100 half mask, do read the comments as some masks appear badly made and correspondingly ill-fitting.
The Guardian article I linked earlier has one extremely interesting comment in it by Health Workers – the NHS hospital system will grind to a halt if schools are closed, as staff will have to leave the hospitals to look after their children. An interesting ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ as the BBC/ICL Pandemic study showed that schools are a hot-bed of virus transmission. (the latter is a finding I’ll personally endorse as we always come down with a bug following a visit by the grandchildren).
I’m sure that Dan will not need it but for others a how-to for RPi3 can be found here:
A couple of things to note. First the build will not work on a P1 or Pi2 as they have the wrong architecture. Second, I’m also reasonably certain it will not run as shown on a Pi4 because it has different boot code. For the pi4 you should start on the git hub 64 bit kernel instead
Unless you have a bit of background in microbiology you probably don’t want to delve too deeply into this paper in Nature. Even the over-view is a bit turgid, but what it implies is that because ACE2 is expressed differently in different genetic backgrounds that the Covid-19 virus attacks certain races worse than others. It appears to show that those from an Asian descent are more badly affected than any other race with those from an African descent being least affected. The study even shows differences for the races within China (as an aside there are 50 or so visually different peoples within China, with Han being the predominant one) .
A word of caution, this data looks to be very preliminary, but it partially explains why some people get the virus worse than others. It also pretty much nails the lie that the Chinese developed this as a bio-weapon. Who (other than the idiots in OUR Government) would develop a weapon that preferentially attacks themselves!
The Guardian has broken ranks with an article that could have been titled – ‘The lies the Government have told about the virus!’. Nothing new for those who have read VFM’ posts, but interesting to see that the media have reached the point of ignoring the D-Notice that has obviously been placed on them.
One thing that was slightly new to me was their statement about face masks: “… some studies have estimated a roughly five-fold protection versus no barrier. “.
If our Government of fools had even the slightest bit of sense they would be recommending masks should be worn by anyone whose job entails serving the public”
Interesting article in Reuters about the Korean outbreak.
If the facts in the article are accurate, then covid-19 is very like SARS in that it seems to be spread by superspreaders who infect 10 or more people, and that many people are nowhere near as infectious. Apart from the obvious incentive to quickly identify and quarantine such super-spreaders, the main finding in the SARS case was to eliminate large gatherings of people e.g. football matches, churches, schools and other public gatherings.
Why do I have to go to the Singapore Straits Times to get good UK news – link.
If we did not have such a bunch of thickos in charge of the country they should have been using this to say that this is why it is important to delay the onset of the virus etc etc
I cannot argue with the premise that a measure of fear is required. There is however a very real danger if too much change is done too quickly.
When I was a lot younger I was involved in some very real crisis management, and as usual we had a ‘consultant’ to help us. Unusually, he was actually quite useful and said that humans en-mass can be modelled by chaos theory or classical instrument control. If you suddenly move from a constant base to a new position you can pretty much bet there will be an overshoot. i.e Mushroom Matt’s complacency to having to do something can easily move into panic.
From a crisis management standpoint it would have been much better to eliminate the complacency, and start with small measures that are steadily evolved based on news from the rest of the world (feed-forward control). Instead our bunch of Governmental lightweights are pretty much ignoring everything that has been learned about crisis management!
Our useless Government had better start taking proactive action quickly. I see that South Korea has hit the tipping point with 813 new cases. It seems to take only a short time to go from a handful of cases to thousands.
Although I cannot dispute those numbers, the world has to keep going. Someone has to man the hospitals, run the delivery trucks, or the factories. We cannot all self isolate. We therefore need to find a compromise way of coping that minimises the spread of the virus. Panic does no-one any good, and because the majority of people are of average intelligence to some extent the truth needs to be sugar coated. However Mushroom Matt Hancock went far too far by burying the reality of the situation in pabulum.
The Government now has the very tricky task of managing public perceptions and changing habits to reduce the rate of spread. There are simple measures that they should be encouraging e.g. work from home or super-flex time for City Workers. Encourage people to use home delivery of food via Internet Shopping (stores would need to shift check out staff onto picking). There are a whole variety of simple measures such as *encouraging face mask use that could be taken that would cut down actual transmission rates.
- Although surgical face masks do little to stop viruses they do discourage people touching their mouth/eyes.
Unfortunately this bunch of Government incompetents are not even making noises about such moves, and are even discouraging the wearing of masks.
In the BBC documentary ‘Contagion’, patient zero (the unknown source of the pandemic), wandered around in Haslmemere Surrey. In a strange imitation of fiction, the actual Patient One first went into the Haslemere Surgery and was diagnosed with Covid-19.
The R0 of the simulated disease is very similar (perhaps a bit lower) than covid-19. If you therefore want to get an idea how long it will be before covid-19 hits your area – watch the BBC IPlayer version!
I shall don my mask and goggles for outside trips towards the end of next week!
The brown stuff just hit the fan in the UK, the latest covid-19 victim from Surrey caught the disease within the UK apparently from an unknown source.
“It is unclear whether this was “directly or indirectly” from someone who recently returned from abroad, England’s chief medical officer said.”
Good thought – if MAH corresponds to a manufacturing facility, then Alliance is our sole manufacturer. France and Germany may have more. link to pdf
[edit] Maybe not, as some of the products just look like different packaging.
Out of interest I tried to find out where chloroquine is produced. The only links I could find lead back to Bayer and Merck, so lets hope Cummings does not upset the Germans or Swiss too much. I still do not know where the world’s manufacturing units are situated – loads of web pages on the medical side and Safety, but naff all on chloroquine production.
I do not think Glaxo-Smith-Kline in the UK make it, but maybe one of the smaller specialist companies does. I suspect some small pharma company is now wondering how it can ramp up production.
Strange omission from any data given its place on the WHO list of essential safe medications. (wider medical uses than anti-malarial).
I’m not sure that it is ‘new’ as 400K in 11 MM is only about 4% far less than the 20% who would we are told fall into the severe category, but close to the number you would expect to be critical – maybe the tough choices of who do you save are starting to bite. (I’m assuming Wuhan is at or close to the 60% saturation point for infections)
What is however new is that they are running out of medication – not too surprising as it will take some while to resuscitate mothballed/dismantled chloroquine production. (not an ‘easy’ process as it has multiple steps even assuming precursors are easily available – my guess one to three months to ramp up from zero). A previous link said that China were resurrecting an old Bayer plant, but even that could take a month to effect.
Advice (albeit US Centric and a bit dated) that the Government should have given can be found here:
Perhaps the key advice for the unprepared is given at the end –
It doesn’t matter what viruses are circulating; shortness of breath is a concerning condition, and so is chest pain. Seek medical care if you have these symptoms. Maybe it’s coronavirus, maybe it’s something else threatening your health.
If you have a runny nose then you can be 95% certain that you do NOT have covid-19 even if all the rest of the flu symptoms are there. AFAIK no cases of runny noses have been noted for covid-19 cases. Common or garden flu is the likely diagnosis, especially if you have children who go to
Play school/KinderGardenPorton Down’s labs.Mushroom Matt should be publicising this to alleviate understandable public concerns, but I doubt that they will!
For clarity subs + ads is ok with me. I would however prefer product sponsorship ads from companies that forumites are happy to use. e.g. Microdream etc. (For the record I would guess that companies like Microdream have had £1-2K as a result of personal forum recommendations, It may pay to drop them a line!)
A question from ignorance – in what manner is covid-19 tested when saying a patient is ‘free’?
As I understand it covid-19 makes its attack via the three three routes in which the ACE2 protein is found, i.e. in the lungs, liver and kidneys, and these are subsequent replication sites. If only a sputum test is used will this only pick up lung secretions, and could not a low level replication still be taking place in the kidneys and liver? If that logic is correct then both urine and stool samples should also be tested before declaring someone ‘free’.
If I take the Diamond Princess as an example, the Japanese do not appear to have a good track record with their covid-19 testing.
As the media is in cover-up mode, I think it behoves the better informed to try and disseminate the unbridled truth and allow people to behave maturely and sensibly in reaching their own conclusions. For those who are statistically or scientifically blind then I would hope the Government will issue simple guidelines and ways of getting medication (chloroquine) to those who must self isolate.
At this stage I would not unduly panic over the apparent Japanese reinfection. The person almost certainly will still show markers for covid-19, but may have subsequently contracted a ‘normal’ corona-type flu with all the lung markers that goes with it.
One of the medical challenges will be to triage covid-19 cases from flu, bad colds etc.
-
AuthorPosts