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General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat

Supine said:
Well I'm stuck standing up on a hot train in a mask; surrounded by teenagers who are maskless shouty sweary twats. If anyone cares to tell me I'm the problem to my face I'll f ckin lamp them one. And I'm a pacifist in normal circumstances :D
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You would have more than just cause :D
 
Badgers said:
Stats and links please :)
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Have you not been following the whole story of how Covid spreads? :hmm:

SARS-CoV-2 transmission appears to mainly be spread via droplets and close contact with infected symptomatic cases. In an analysis of 75,465 COVID-19 cases in China, 78-85% of clusters occurred within household settings, suggesting that transmission occurs during close and prolonged contact.(6) A study of the first patients in the Republic of Korea showed that 9 of 13 secondary cases occurred among household contacts.(70) Outside of the household setting, those who had close physical contact, shared meals, or were in enclosed spaces for approximately one hour or more with symptomatic cases, such as in places of worship, gyms, or the workplace, were also at increased risk of infection.(7, 42, 71, 72) Other reports have supported this with similar findings of secondary transmission within families in other countries.(73, 74)
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www.who.int

Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: implications for infection prevention precautions

Scientific Brief
www.who.int www.who.int
 
Badgers said:
Stats and links please :)
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Come on mate. All the info is out there if you want to find it, just google covid-19 transmission indoors v outdoors. It also just follows to reason. Outdoors is significantly safer than indoors.

Its just very unfortunate that this virus thrives when people are in close proximity indoors. The virus is probably prevalent in a lot of houses without those inside knowing but most people get tested when they get ill and you are more likely to get ill from it if you're old and / or have certain existing conditions.

When I got it the only other person in my house was my partner who promptly got it. Both of our sets of parents live miles away. My mum is very high risk but she lives in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere not in the bedroom next door, using the same living room, kitchen etc.

It is the government's fault that we are in this situation and they must own the blame but there is a difference between recognising risk and apportioning blame. Multi-generational living to my mind is most often a cultural thing which originated in countries without much of a welfare state. Family is all important and and every generation has its role to play. That is not always the case for white western families.

As I say its just very unfortunate that the virus exploits this situation to a massive degree. Of course the government is racist, of course they are Islamophobic, of course Johnson is unashamedly and openly both but pointing out the virus exploits certain living arrangements is not in-itself racist or deflecting blame. Its just something that has to be dealt with and urgently to stop even more people dying needlessly and pointlessly.
 
Teaboy said:
Come on mate. All the info is out there if you want to find it, just google covid-19 transmission indoors v outdoors. It also just follows to reason. Outdoors is significantly safer than indoors.

Its just very unfortunate that this virus thrives when people are in close proximity indoors. The virus is probably prevalent in a lot of houses without those inside knowing but most people get tested when they get ill and you are more likely to get ill from it if you're old and / or have certain existing conditions.

When I got it the only other person in my house was my partner who promptly got it. Both of our sets of parents live miles away. My mum is very high risk but she lives in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere not in the bedroom next door, using the same living room, kitchen etc.

It is the government's fault that we are in this situation and they must own the blame but there is a difference between recognising risk and apportioning blame. Multi-generational living to my mind is most often a cultural thing which originated in countries without much of a welfare state. Family is all important and and every generation has its role to play. That is not always the case for white western families.

As I say its just very unfortunate that the virus exploits this situation to a massive degree. Of course the government is racist, of course they are Islamophobic, of course Johnson is unashamedly and openly both but pointing out the virus exploits certain living arrangements is not in-itself racist. Its just something that has to be dealt with and urgently to stop even more people dying needlessly and pointlessly.
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Badgers said:
You can continue going to the pub, and into your workplace on a bus, but you can’t have one mate round to yours for the cup final on Saturday.

You can go out for tea with them though. Be sure to use the ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. But also, remember you’re all still obese so cycle to McDonald's.

:thumbs:
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OK, that's just whataboutery though and doesn't contradict anything I've been saying. I'm with you on the opening of pubs and the silliness of half-price McDonalds.

ETA: I get that you're absolutely furious with the government and rightly so but the data doesn't lie. The top 4 areas where infection rate is highest is Blackburn, Bradford, Oldham and Leicester. Something is going on in these areas that isn't happening elsewhere in England despite the rules being the same (well not anymore I guess).
 
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Badgers said:
For some communities multi-generational households are a norm. A late lockdown and mismanagement of the crisis by our disgraced government put us all at risk. Blaming peoples 'living habits' is inexcusable. I know 'we are where we are' but the late lockdown and appalling travel sanctions have caused this. If there needs to be more lock-downs they HAVE to be better communicated and managed.

Doubt that Disgraced Prime Minister Johnson or Death Secretary ManCock were even away of the issue until the last minute. Too busy looking after their own and their friends wealth.
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I'm not that interested in blame right now, given that I was using up my energy blaming the goernment for various things before most people had even noticed that this country was in a very bad pandemic position and heading for woe as a result of a large collection of failings both recent and long-term.

I am interested in controlling the virus. This means identifying all the ways in which it is spreading, and dealing with those. If people insist on seeing it through the narrow prism of blame then I will just have to ignore them just like I ignore those who think we cannot talk about anything that could also be a potential dog whistle. We can do better than that, and not reduce everything to this level of cynicism and suspicion.
 
But on occasions where I do find some energy to cast blame, I will always blame those who have created the conditions that leave certain groups and communities far more vulnerable than others. And this isnt a distant issue for me, I have been happily living in the part of Nuneaton where the muslim community are largely located for the last 20 years, and the mosque is just doors away from me. And sadly it was no suprise at all that when very local figures for infections came out, it was this ward which had the most positive cases over the course of this pandemic so far. I see it as another indicator of the need to deliver suitable support, and long-term change in the direction of equality, than blame or acrimony.
 
Its also still early days for me and probably plenty of other people in figuring out the most appropriate aspects in this sort of conversation. It was possible to dodge some of the detail before and thats not looking sustainable now so we'll have to work through this.

So far all I think I have settled on is to make sure to describe whichever group is being discussed as being especially vulnerable to the virus, and then reeling off a bunch of reasons why, all of which should increase understanding and empathy towards that group rather than direct hideous blame in their direction.
 
Badgers is so furious at the government (mostly rightly) that some of the criticisms and issues he raises are a bit all over the place and sometimes incorrect, and often are coming from an emotional position rather than a factual one.
 
Well I dont want to put anyone off their fury, but I will try to redirect it at times.

I looked at some of my pandemic posts from the early months recently and there seem to have been times where I was much closer to making statements that stood the test of time when I was getting angry and ranting than when I was trying to be overly balanced and reasonable about every possibility at that moment. And a lot of the shit the pandemic has revealed isnt really new shit at all, its shit we've long known about and suffered but the amounts of energy including the energy of anger to deal with those issues in the past were not sufficient to overcome the forces that sustained the status quo. So I would not want to put anyone off finding a new degree of anger and motivation on any of those fronts as a result of the government handling of the pandemic so far.
 
elbows have you seen this paper on Swine Flu? It says that deaths from the pandemic were >10 times higher than what was confirmed by the WHO. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean anything to do with the current pandemic as testing was very limited then compared to now.

journals.plos.org

Global Mortality Estimates for the 2009 Influenza Pandemic from the GLaMOR Project: A Modeling Study

Lone Simonsen and colleagues use a two-stage statistical modeling approach to estimate the global mortality burden of the 2009 influenza pandemic from mortality data obtained from multiple countries. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
 
frogwoman said:
elbows have you seen this paper on Swine Flu? It says that deaths from the pandemic were >10 times higher than what was confirmed by the WHO. Of course this doesn't necessarily mean anything to do with the current pandemic as testing was very limited then compared to now.

journals.plos.org

Global Mortality Estimates for the 2009 Influenza Pandemic from the GLaMOR Project: A Modeling Study

Lone Simonsen and colleagues use a two-stage statistical modeling approach to estimate the global mortality burden of the 2009 influenza pandemic from mortality data obtained from multiple countries. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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No, there are some very large gaps in my swine flu knowledge because it was hard to sustain my own interest in that pandemic once most other peoples interest had waned. And because the levels of death involved were modest, it was not possible to get a pretty clear picture from the most obvious excess mortality data in the way we've been able to with the current pandemic.

There arent necessarily all that many lessons from 2009 that are useful in this pandemic. I've used it in the past to demonstrate what our governments default approach to a pandemic would be, what role schools can play in transmission, why its not a good idea to think seasonal aspects apply very strongly to novel viruses in their initial pandemic phase. But I could also use it as an example of the attitudes towards getting the balance of doing too much/too little right in a pandemic and how events from just over a decade ago could have factored in. Because at the time, once it became clear that the number of deaths would be limited, there were plenty of wankers complaining that the government overreacted and did too much. I consider this to be a load of shit because our response mostly consisted of early clinical studies, a very limited testing campaign that was not designed to continue once a big wave arrived, chucking a shitload of tamiflu at the problem, a fairly vigorous public health information campaign, and eventually a vaccination programme. I considered that the bare minimum they should have done then (although the tamiflu was a bit pointless the way they used it to try to smother outbreaks) and it was no surprise that they tried to get away with a variation of that plan with this current pandemic and were forced to change plans by mid March because it was nowhere near enough and their timing was also crap due to poor surveillance and generally ending up behind the reality curve. I dont recall there being any dramatic examples in 2009 of the government of being so overtly inadequate and behind the curve in a manner obvious to the public, not like we had this time with the obvious u-turn, idiotic statements about being 4 weeks behind Italy when we were 2 weeks behind, comments about 20,000 deaths being a good result and then the icing of the cake of members of that team such as Johnson and Whitty testing positive within weeks because their own distancing behaviours were also behind the curve.

Anyway the reason for that rant paragraph was because that paper you link to, in the section that explains why the study was done, mentions this context:

Why Was This Study Done?
The modest number of laboratory-confirmed H1N1pdm09 deaths has caused commentators to wonder whether the public health response to H1N1pdm09 was excessive. However, as is the case with all influenza epidemics, the true mortality (death) burden from H1N1pdm09 is substantially higher than these figures indicate because only a minority of influenza-related deaths are definitively diagnosed by being confirmed in laboratory.
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Oops I forgot to say why else there were only limited lessons from 2009 to help with this pandemic.

I have every reason to think that due to the crap testing capacity and other planning details of the time, if the 2009 pandemic had affected older people much then the same hospital infections and care home outrage that happened in 2020 would have happened then too. But the pandemic 2009 virus turns out to have had enough similarities to a strain of influenza that older people had tended to meet earlier in their lives, that they had some immunity and so the whole thing panned out very differently. Certainly no thanks to the plan of the time, and as that bullet was dodged back then it left those lessons unlearned/deliberately overlooked.
 
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blogs.bmj.com

Nisreen A Alwan: What exactly is mild covid-19? - The BMJ

We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure It is the morning after. I went out for a [...]More...
blogs.bmj.com
It seems common in many countries that anyone with symptoms, but not hospitalised is counted as a “mild” case, but the degree of covid-19 severity must be defined by the duration of ill health, not just the need for hospital admission. If symptoms last for more than a month and are debilitating to usual activities, it is unreasonable to call this a “mild” case.
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As a public health doctor and epidemiologist, I strongly think we must now clearly define and measure “recovery” from covid-19. This way we can quantify non-death health outcomes and monitor long-term implications of the virus. The definition needs to be more sophisticated than just hospital discharge or testing negative for the virus. It must take into account symptom duration, fluctuation, overall functionality and quality of life in comparison to before infection. If we do not have enough information to define “mild” at this stage, then let us not use the term loosely, otherwise it is detrimental to pandemic control.
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What is now becoming clear is that mortality is not the only adverse outcome of this infection and our surveillance systems must keep up and reflect that. I am advocating for precise case definitions for covid-19 morbidity that reflect the degree of severity of infection and allow us to measure moderate and long term health and wellbeing outcomes. At this stage of the pandemic, it is vital that we accurately measure and count all degrees of infection, not only in research cohorts, but as part of population-based routine surveillance systems. This includes people like me who were not tested at the time of their initial infection. Death is not the only thing to count in this pandemic, we must count lives changed. We still know very little about covid-19, but we do know that we cannot fight what we do not measure.
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