For those wondering about reinfections, antibodies etc, CNN has a good piece - regarding what's going on in South Korea.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/04/17/health/south-korea-coronavirus-retesting-positive-intl-hnk/index.html 

My own thoughts are that this is just a coronavirus - a nasty one, to be sure, but a relative of the well-known flu and cold viruses. We should therefore expect antibodies etc to be produced in a similar fashion, and thankfully it seems they are.

There's one bit though which sticks out to me: "there was always the possibility of outliers who did not develop antibodies to the virus. "Those outliers always exist, but right now we don't have (any) evidence that that's a common thing that we see,"

I wonder what the age is of those outliers? From other articles we know younger people don't develop antibodies as they don't need to, the virus gets deactivated by other methods...

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Do we know what these methods are? I had always assumed (wrongly it seems) the development of antibodies was the requirement to control or deactivate a virus. 

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And ominously he also pointed out that you cannot keep countries confined for ever, either. Somewhere like Taiwan which has got by so far with only a handful of deaths will eventually have to cope with its citizens travelling to other countries as tourists, and commercial contacts coming to Taiwan, during an era when the virus is likely to be rife in other parts of the world.

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From the other day:

"There are reports of other immune mechanisms – NK cells, and local cytokines deactivating the virus without the need for an antibody response in younger people"

One good thing from all this is that I've learnt a heck of a lot about how viruses work over the past couple of weeks!

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Indeed that is true. However, the hope Taiwan has is that a working and available vaccine is possible within a realistic timeframe.

 

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Short of testing everyone dead and alive in care homes, there is only one trusted method for establishing COVID-19 death rates in those establishments - statistical analysis. Because statistical analysis can only be done retrospectively, that means we won't know the true figures until a few weeks later.

 

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"Japan's virus response criticised".
From the BBC ticker:
"In a stark warning, doctors in Japan have said the country's medical system could collapse.
According to two medical associations, the coronavirus outbreak is reducing the ability of Japan's hospitals to treat other medical emergencies.
While the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 remains relatively low compared with other countries, hospitals are turning away patients.
Doctors have complained of a lack of protective equipment, which suggests Japan has not prepared well for the virus. This is despite the fact it was the second country outside China to record an infection, in January.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been criticised for not introducing restrictions to deal with the outbreak sooner for fear they could harm the economy".

Criticism, It's not just here then!

Coronavirus lockdown protests has broken out across America, with some featuring flags and guns, according to this:-

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/16/release-us-anti-lockdown-protests-break-across-america-featuring/.

Surprised this hasn't been posted on UIA before!

 

What has been allowed to happen in many care homes is both sad and scandalous. Both workers and residents were left without PPE, without testing and they were even asked to take back patients from hospitals without a test and to make it even worse, until 6 April there was no entry in the death forms for CV19. 

It's beyond awful.

I thought it had.

 

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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pot-calling-the-kettle-black

Indeed. Jeremy Hunt has also been much better (shame that he hasn't stayed in his post). He had criticised (at the time) the decision to stop community testing and contact tracing on 12 March (it could have continued in areas with few cases) and he keeps pushing for it now. Yesterday he was recommending that councils should be involved too as this has to be done at local level.

Ouch!

😀😀

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This hasn't been posted for a while :-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhnAZFR1po

 

 

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99% of protesters (usually regardless of what they are protesting about) piss me off. Entitled whiners blabbing about first world problems.

Munchkins that can't stay inside for 10 minutes.

 

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 It may well turn out to be the biggest medical scandal in the UK's history.  It will quite possibly be worse than the infected blood scandal of the 1980s.

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Hancock may constnatly claim to be ramping up testing but if this table is correct the UK is now in 20th place - out of a grand total of 20. 

 

The international league table of countries ranked by percentage of population tested, compiled by Julian Ozanne. The UK comes 20th out of 20 #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/itXdKMWpTj

— Jon Jones (@JonJonesSnr) April 17, 2020

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A comparison of how fast different European countries acted. Those that acted fast have now (relatively) few deaths, e.g. Greece (108), Hungary (172), Czechia (176) Poland (339), Portugal (687), Austria (443) etc. No particular hindsight was needed, they just reacted fast to what was happening in Italy.

 

While the govt bears some of the blame, PHE also needs to shoulder its fair share. Much of this mess is due to NHS dogmatism and a failure to involve the private sector early enough.

The most sucessful countries, vis a vis testing, had one thing in common; very strong cooperation between the public and private sector. PHE outright refused, initially, to accept any tests or labs outside its remit.

 

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Here's a different take on things from Professor Johan Giesecke - https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/

• UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based


• The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only


• This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”


• The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better


• The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact


• The paper was very much too pessimistic


• Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway


• The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown


• The results will eventually be similar for all countries


• Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.


• The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%


• At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available

To be fair they also have poor infrastructure and population density which does play a role.

Also will add that those countries went stronger and harder with border closure. Meanwhile in the UK the police are arresting people for posting 'far right' messages saying things like 'pubs closed, borders open' which is ridiculous.

Border closures wouldn't have stopped the problem in the UK but it would have delayed it, probably given us an extra two weeks or so of breathing room. Not that we would have used those two weeks productively.

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Not quite, Greece has higher lived density than the UK, 55% of its population lives in Athens (mostly in flats). They also had >100 schools visiting N.Italy in February.

It's certainly a different take and I'll watch the interview, but I think he will be wrong in those 2 points above.