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[Jay Park]

This is something else

'Once upon a virus': Chinese video takes swipe at US response to COVID-19

A Chinese state media outlet releases an animated video using Lego pieces to mock the US response to the novel coronavirus.

www.abc.net.au

the last line is delivered well

 

[Supine]

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Form an orderly queue. 2 metre distance.

 

[Doodler]

What's the state of play with serum therapy?

Is it not the most promising measure so far to mitigate the illness short of a vaccine? Each donor can yield enough antibodies for 2-3 people a time. They can go back and give more at a later date too, it's not a one off. Donating serum leaves donors feeling less tired than with blood (afaik you get your red blood cells infused back into you).

Yet all the excitement seems to revolve around possible drug therapies instead. Maybe it's because serum therapy can't be patented.

 

[elbows]

What's the state of play with serum therapy?

Is it not the most promising measure so far to mitigate the illness short of a vaccine? Each donor can yield enough antibodies for 2-3 people a time. They can go back and give more at a later date too, it's not a one off. Donating serum leaves donors feeling less tired than with blood (afaik you get your red blood cells infused back into you).

Yet all the excitement seems to revolve around possible drug therapies instead. Maybe it's because serum therapy can't be patented.

Its had some attention recently because there are NHS trials and the likes of Hancock were keen to be photographed donating blood.

The NHS stuff:

Plasma programme

We have now completed two major trials for convalescent plasma for people in hospital with coronavirus and no longer need convalescent plasma donors to come forward to donate.

www.nhsbt.nhs.uk

 

[Doodler]

The likes of Hancock were keen to be photographed donating blood.

That threatens to do for serum therapy what Dee Dee Ramone might have done for blood transfusion.

 

[weltweit]

What's the state of play with serum therapy?
..

I saw a report of an NHS bod who was collecting serum from willing donors but at that time there were fewer patients volunteering to take it.

 

[sideboob]

Japan`s P.M. just announced that the state of emergency is extended till May 31.
Another month off of work for me, the dog will be happy.

 

[elbows]

An interesting article about differences between the north of the Netherlands and other parts of the country.

Coronavirus: North Netherlands stopped following national advice. Here’s what happened

Starkly different outcomes in some regions of Europe indicate how better to fight the virus

www.irishtimes.com

Different holiday timing, lack of carnivals, doing more testing not less, including a proper programme of screening healthcare workers seem to be the obvious differences.

 

[frogwoman]

Subscribe to read

www.ft.com

Jesus

Tanzania hiding true number of COVID-19 deaths

'Tanzanians, she said, had been shamed into not admitting they had caught Covid-19, which had been stigmatised by a government that said only weak people died from the illness. “They want to own the numbers and the statistics,” she said, adding that a lawyer who had urged more transparency had been arrested.

Ms Karume said people were referring to Covid-19 by a euphemism in Kiswahili, the national language, of “kutopumuwa”, which roughly translates as the “hard-to-breathe” disease.

She said she blamed Mr Magufuli for retreating to his home village of Chato on Lake Victoria. “He basically told us to go back to work and pray, then he got on his private presidential jet, went to Chato and left us to it.”'

 

[frogwoman]

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As other African leaders reacted swiftly to coronavirus, closing their frontiers and preparing for lockdown, Mr Magufuli made a point of attending crowded church gatherings, telling people that the “satanic” virus could not survive in the bodies of the faithful.

 

[Petcha]

Meanwhile New Zealand appears to have almost completely beaten it. Still not quite sure how they've managed that. But can we have their scientists and PM please?

New Zealand records ZERO new coronavirus cases for the first time

The number of 'confirmed and probable' infections remained at 1,487 after one suspected case 'already known to us' tested positive, New Zealand's health ministry said.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Meanwhile New Zealand appears to have almost completely beaten it. Still not quite sure how they've managed that. But can we have their scientists and PM please?

New Zealand records ZERO new coronavirus cases for the first time

The number of 'confirmed and probable' infections remained at 1,487 after one suspected case 'already known to us' tested positive, New Zealand's health ministry said.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Oh, it's not a mystery how they've done it. They decided to do it, for starters, and at the right time, when infection levels were still such that effective testing and tracing could be done - every single case has a case history attached to it indicating where it was caught, with only something like 2 per cent labelled unknown last time I checked. And they promptly closed borders, imposing quarantine on any new arrivals.

 

[weltweit]

UK Gov seemed loath to shut down air travel seeming - to my mind at least - to prefer it to peter out as the virus became established in countries. I recall wondering at the time if Gov was scared of lawsuits from UK airlines and airports. NZ closed borders and airlines very easily and they had a much smaller issue than the UK.

Border closing and a significant shutdown are key aspects to NZ's approach and reasons for their success. How much the UK could have done the same I am not sure.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

UK Gov seemed loath to shut down air travel seeming - to my mind at least - to prefer it to peter out as the virus became established in countries. I recall wondering at the time if Gov was scared of lawsuits from UK airlines and airports. NZ closed borders and airlines very easily and they had a much smaller issue than the UK.

Border closing and a significant shutdown are key aspects to NZ's approach and reasons for their success. How much the UK could have done the same I am not sure.

UK could only have followed this kind of policy if it had acted at the same point in the infection curve, though, ie right at the start. That bird flew some time in early March.

 

[teuchter]

New Zealand is also a tiny country and has no large cities and the cities it does have are pretty low density.

We could (and at least with hindsight should) have stopped all incoming flights at the same point in the curve but that would not necessarily have meant the same result.

Also, we don't just have flights arriving from elsewhere but large numbers of road vehicles, with drivers, coming in and out, which I assume NZ doesn't. We would have had to also shut down ferries and Eurotunnel, or have some system of exchanging lorry trailers or suchlike.

Edit to add some numbers:
Looks like there are about 30M passenger arrivals by plane into the UK per year.
12M by road through the port of Dover.
11M on Eurostar.
2.6M lorries (presumably each with driver) through the port of Dover
1.6M lorries (presumably each with driver) via Eurotunnel.

(btw if more of our freight arrived by rail, there would be hardly any issue to deal with. Far fewer drivers involved per tonne of freight, and drivers would change at the border anyway along with the locomotives meaning there would be no contact between them)

 

[littlebabyjesus]

New Zealand is also a tiny country and has no large cities and the cities it does have are pretty low density.

We could (and at least with hindsight should) have stopped all incoming flights at the same point in the curve but that would not necessarily have meant the same result.

Also, we don't just have flights arriving from elsewhere but large numbers of road vehicles, with drivers, coming in and out, which I assume NZ doesn't. We would have had to also shut down ferries and Eurotunnel, or have some system of exchanging lorry trailers or suchlike.

Realistically, I don't think a NZ-style response was possible here. What very clearly was possible was a Germany-style response.

 

[teuchter]

Realistically, I don't think a NZ-style response was possible here. What very clearly was possible was a Germany-style response.

Yes, but I think we still don't know enough to say for sure that it would necessarily have had the same result.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes, but I think we still don't know enough to say for sure that it would necessarily have had the same result.

We can be very confident that it would have had a better result than the actual result we had here.

The same information was available to both govts at the same time in their outbreaks. Germany is an equivalently sized country to the UK, so we're fairly comparing like with like. Germany and the UK both suffered outbreaks with a number of different original source spreaders, so the dynamics of the initial epidemic are sufficiently similar. It is as a fair a country comparison as you can get.

 

[Azrael]

UK Gov seemed loath to shut down air travel seeming - to my mind at least - to prefer it to peter out as the virus became established in countries. I recall wondering at the time if Gov was scared of lawsuits from UK airlines and airports. NZ closed borders and airlines very easily and they had a much smaller issue than the UK.

Border closing and a significant shutdown are key aspects to NZ's approach and reasons for their success. How much the UK could have done the same I am not sure.

We could've introduced travel bans from hotspots immediately, followed by 14 day quarantine of all incoming passengers. That many countries did this shows it's not a question of hindsight, but policy (the government explicitly said they were ending attempts to contain the outbreak, in-line with the flu pandemic plan).

 

[Azrael]

We can be very confident that it would have had a better result than the actual result we had here.

The same information was available to both govts at the same time in their outbreaks. Germany is an equivalently sized country to the UK, so we're fairly comparing like with like. Germany and the UK both suffered outbreaks with a number of different original source spreaders, so the dynamics of the initial epidemic are sufficiently similar. It is as a fair a country comparison as you can get.

We can go even further: Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea were all much closer to the epicenter, at a much earlier stage in the epidemic, yet all have managed to crush the outbreak (Hong Kong says new cases are now too low to calculate the R rate, while S.Korea's had several days of no community transmission).

Thanks to geography, distance and delay, Britain had even more natural advantages than those countries, and squandered them.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We can go even further: Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea were all much closer to the epicenter, at a much earlier stage in the epidemic, yet all have managed to crush the outbreak (Hong Kong says new cases are now too low to calculate the R rate, while S.Korea's had several days of no community transmission).

Thanks to geography, distance and delay, Britain had even more natural advantages than those countries, and squandered them.

I'm being charitable and comparing the UK to other big countries in Europe. There are a maximum of six countries of comparably big size in Europe: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Four of those six really fucked things up, and of those four, the UK was last, and slowest, to act. If the UK had acted as well and in as timely a fashion as Germany, I wouldn't be criticising the govt for not having reacted as well as places with the experience of previous virus epidemic scares.

Point for me is that, even being generous about failings, the UK still comes out smelling of shit.

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

We can go even further: Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea were all much closer to the epicenter, at a much earlier stage in the epidemic, yet all have managed to crush the outbreak (Hong Kong says new cases are now too low to calculate the R rate, while S.Korea's had several days of no community transmission).

Thanks to geography, distance and delay, Britain had even more natural advantages than those countries, and squandered them.

And more than that, they said they were taking action. At the end of Feb they kept saying they were testing and tracing, banging on about their excellent tests and their top-quality labs, but they weren't. Not really. I flew into the UK from South Korea on 29th Feb, and they didn't even send someone to meet the plane. They didn't even take our contact details. For at least a month prior to that, you couldn't enter South Korea without a local mobile phone number. They'd help you buy a SIM there and then if necessary, but you had to be traceable.

I just can't get my head round it.

 

[Azrael]

I'm being charitable and comparing the UK to other big countries in Europe. There are a maximum of six countries of comparably big size in Europe: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Four of those six really fucked things up, and of those four, the UK was last, and slowest, to act. If the UK had acted as well and in as timely a fashion as Germany, I wouldn't be criticising the govt for not having reacted as well as places with the experience of previous virus epidemic scares.

Point for me is that, even being generous about failings, the UK still comes out smelling of shit.

Yes, fair point, on the most generous assessment, Britain's response is still disastrous. One look at the foreign press outside America shows just how bad. The Australian press holds us up as a cautionary tale, and their CMO called the situation here "carnage". The government is furiously gaslighting for good reason.

 

[Azrael]

And more than that, they said they were taking action. At the end of Feb they kept saying they were testing and tracing, banging on about their excellent tests and their top-quality labs, but they weren't. Not really. I flew into the UK from South Korea on 29th Feb, and they didn't even send someone to meet the plane. They didn't even take our contact details. For at least a month prior to that, you couldn't enter South Korea without a local mobile phone number. They'd help you buy a SIM there and then if necessary, but you had to be traceable.

I just can't get my head round it.

It makes sense on its own terms -- controlled spread, as dictated by the flu plan -- but it's still not clear why this plan wasn't junked.

Politicians overruling scientific and medical advice to keep the economy going would make most sense, but there's been no sign that the advisors were urging suppression. Just the opposite: all the investigative journalism to-date reports that the advisors were promoting the flu plan.

Unless it's all wrong, the crucial question's why?

 

[MrCurry]

The EU launches an online fundraiser scheme, to fund research into a vaccine... popped up in my feed five mins ago.

Well fuck me! It’s May and they just came up with that idea... How about in February when we could all see this thing coming?

 

[2hats]

Royal Society evidence paper on the wearing of masks in public:

Summary: Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid19 within the general population. Evidence supporting their potential effectiveness comes from analysis of: (1) the incidence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission; (2) the role of respiratory droplets in transmission, which can travel as far as 1-2 meters; and (3) studies of the use of homemade and surgical masks to reduce droplet spread. Our analysis suggests that their use could reduce onward transmission by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic wearers if widely used in situations where physical distancing is not possible or predictable, contrasting to the standard use of masks for the protection of wearers. If correctly used on this basis, face masks, including homemade cloth masks, can contribute to reducing viral transmission.

Face Masks for the General Public

Face masks could offer an important tool for contributing to the management of community transmission of Covid19 within the general population. Evidence supporting their potential effectiveness com...

rs-delve.github.io

 

[elbows]

Regarding NZ, its partly orthodox attitudes again. One of those is that small island nations have a better chance to keep new inections out, or minimise them. This affects the impression of what is practical and achievable, which in turn affects policy.

When coupled with the fact the UK establishment sees itself as some kind of champion of global trade etc, an international hub, and all the related economic ideology that follows from this, it never even occurred to me that we might do things differently with this pandemic, which is why I carried on describing the orthodox flu pandemic approach right up until mid March.

The extreme adherence to, predictability and slow evolution of our orthodox approaches is also illustrated by the fact that I didnt actually read any pandemic planning documentation that was done after 2009, nor anything about pandemic exercises conducted after 2009. And I was still able to predict most UK responses and failings right up until mid-March when the traditional approach lost its crown. Not that this lead to a totally unknown world, they just had to go back further in time to a much older orthodox approach to epidemics that pre-dated the modern era of vaccines etc.

When comparing various places to New Zealand, we also have to keep in mind the pollution aspect. Studies in this area are rather tentative and as usual it is hard to tell the difference between actual cause, and correlations of another sort. All the same, I wouldnt want to leave possibilities in this area out of the comparison.

 

[William of Walworth]

Not sure whether this has been posted about yet, apologies if it has. It's from Saturday.

Looks like the US military is investigating the value of an early-diagnosis test for Covid-19 :

US germ warfare research leads to new early Covid-19 test

Exclusive : Test has potential to identify carriers before they become infectious

Possibly significant? In that this test appears to identify pre-infectious Covid-19 carriers?
Need help from the science-savvy Urbans on how good or not this might be ....

 

[teuchter]

We can be very confident that it would have had a better result than the actual result we had here.

The same information was available to both govts at the same time in their outbreaks. Germany is an equivalently sized country to the UK, so we're fairly comparing like with like. Germany and the UK both suffered outbreaks with a number of different original source spreaders, so the dynamics of the initial epidemic are sufficiently similar. It is as a fair a country comparison as you can get.

I don't think we know enough to say that for sure.