Coronavirus Pandemic Information- Local and Worldwide

greysides

https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/0513/1138197-reopening-school-childcare/

The Taoiseach has said that the emerging evidence suggests that reopening schools and childcare facilities over the next couple of months is "among the safest things" to do.

However, he said that it needed to be done so safely.

Speaking at a contact tracing centre in Dublin city centre, Leo Varadkar said: "I think there is a lot to learn about the virus and we are learning more about the virus all the time.

"But if you take for example what HIQA has said today and what Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization said to me and the Minister for Health today... the emerging evidence is that among the safest things that we can do over the next couple of months is to reopen our schools and to reopen our childcare facilities to allow children to return to education and to return to normal life."

Mr Varadkar said that it was encouraging that there is growing evidence that children are the least risk from the virus and that they do not appear to be super spreaders.

"I think that is very significant," he said.

In addition Mr Varadkar said that everyone wanted grandparents to be able to hug their grandchildren and said that "assuming everything went in the right direction it will be one of the actions that will be possible over the course of the summer".

greysides

Time will be judge .....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/a-tale-of-two-epidemics-scientists-in-sweden-and-the-uk-fight-over-who-took-the-right-public-health-path/2020/05/07/104f60be-8a5b-11ea-80df-d24b35a568ae_story.html?utm_source=acquisition&utm_medium=fb&utm_campaign=INTL_Engagement_Clicks+EEA&utm_content=Europe_Analysis_A+tale+of+two+epidemics_05082020


A tale of two epidemics: Scientists in Sweden and Britain fight over who took the right public health path.

LONDON — Now that the first waves of infections and deaths have peaked and lockdowns are being lifted, scientists around the world have begun to skirmish over which countries have pursued the best strategies to protect their people. One of the most contentious confrontations has been between leading infectious-disease specialists in Sweden and Britain, who each claim their approach is right.

The two countries went in two very different directions. After a weeks-long delay, Britain ordered a strict lockdown in late March. Sweden has glided along with much more relaxed, voluntary guidance, trusting its citizens to use their common sense and maintain reasonable social distancing.


See link for full article.

Water John

This is an interesting article on how Kerela State in India which has a pop of 35M has had a total of 4 deaths. The Health Minister is a Secondary School teacher. she saw an article on The new virus in Wuhan on the 20th Jan and she had her teams organised by the 24th Jan.
Worth a read of how it should have been done.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/the-coronavirus-slayer-how-keralas-rock-star-health-minister-helped-save-it-from-covid-19

greysides

Most of the discussion around the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has concentrated on the average number of new infections caused by each patient. Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three. But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm, Lloyd-Smith says: “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”

That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people. In a seminal 2005 Nature paper, Lloyd-Smith and co-authors estimated that SARS—in which superspreading played a major role—had a k of 0.16. The estimated k for MERS, which emerged in 2012, is about 0.25. In the flu pandemic of 1918, in contrast, the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.

Estimates of k for SARS-CoV-2 vary. In January, Julien Riou and Christian Althaus at the University of Bern simulated the epidemic in China for different combinations of R and k and compared the outcomes with what had actually taken place. They concluded that k for COVID-19 is somewhat higher than for SARS and MERS. That seems about right, says Gabriel Leung, a modeler at the University of Hong Kong. “I don’t think this is quite like SARS or MERS, where we observed very large superspreading clusters,” Leung says. “But we are certainly seeing a lot of concentrated clusters where a small proportion of people are responsible for a large proportion of infections.” But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.

That could explain some puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including why the virus did not take off around the world sooner after it emerged in China, and why some very early cases elsewhere—such as one in France in late December 2019, reported on 3 May—apparently failed to ignite a wider outbreak. If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself, Kucharski says. If the Chinese epidemic was a big fire that sent sparks flying around the world, most of the sparks simply fizzled out.

More..

Water John

A few churches that opened in the US have closed again, because of a spike of positives in the congregations.

wrangler

Water John wrote: »

A few churches that opened in the US have closed again, because of a spike of positives in the congregations.

Yea, I wonder when the mission statement here is going to go from saving the people to saving the economy . It'll surely flare up again here too now. it'll have to rattle through the whole population eventually and there's only a tiny percentage affected yet

Water John

There's a study of a random sample of the public here going to be tested for antibodies next month. That will give us a good picture of the true level of infection. That will tell us how many are positive who never had symptoms.

longgonesilver

New test for current infection.much faster than PCR Invented by an Irish company.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/covid-test-developed-in-ireland-can-give-positive-result-in-30-minutes-1000709.html

Buford T. Justice XIX

Not good news in Britain.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1263871062196080648?s=19

yosemitesam1

Buford T. Justice VI wrote: »

Not good news in Britain.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1263871062196080648?s=19

The big problem with these models is that they are based off massively incomplete data and assume that everyone has equal chance of being infected and equal chance of passing on infection.

There is no complete data or understanding to back up the assumptions that drive them and the figures we do have come largely from the most susceptible parts of the population.

alps

It's no longer a high consequence infectious disease in England

Buford T. Justice XIX

alps wrote: »

It's no longer a high consequence infectious disease in England

That's probably because they've killed off most in the vulnerable categories already:(

Buford T. Justice XIX

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

The big problem with these models is that they are based off massively incomplete data and assume that everyone has equal chance of being infected and equal chance of passing on infection.

There is no complete data or understanding to back up the assumptions that drive them and the figures we do have come largely from the most susceptible parts of the population.

Here's some complete data on death rates over the previous years in the UK.

https://twitter.com/bovinetb/status/1263778401409732608?s=20

Buford T. Justice XIX

Well done Sligo.
https://twitter.com/higginsdavidw/status/1264245507540561926?s=19

mandrake04

longgonesilver wrote: »

New test for current infection.much faster than PCR Invented by an Irish company.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/covid-test-developed-in-ireland-can-give-positive-result-in-30-minutes-1000709.html

Yeah but it only does 4 tests per hour, and works best in patents that are well loaded and showing symptoms. So its ideal for determining cause of death rather than for contact tracing.

The test developed by HiberGene works best for patients with moderate or high viral load – those who have been displaying symptoms for some days.

The company is working with partners in Queen’s University Belfast, Genoa in Italy and China to examine its efficacy in other patient groups – particularly those who are not yet showing any symptoms associated with the virus.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/rapid-covid-19-test-by-irish-group-hibergene-gets-eu-approval-1.4257587

Your normal PCR setup that Ireland is using like an MP96 and LC480 does 96 tests simultaneously in 3 hours and a Cobas 8800 does about 4000 per 24 hours.

PCR can also determine a positive result a few days before showing symptoms or in asymptomatic patients.

paddysdream

Been a while since I looked at this thread.

Have people seen much change over the past 2/3 weeks?

To be honest the only difference's I have seen since this all started are;
young lad has no school/soccer/football/swimming etc
no pub open
bit slower in merchants/hardware etc.

As regards everything else it seems to me people are just getting on with things ie no problem with calling to houses,going for a drive,giving dinner for silage crew.
Have been around the midlands 3 days last week looking at machines(probably 200km plus each day) and no checkpoints .Roads quieter but starting to get busier each day.
Must say local town was quiet Saturday morning but then its usually not too busy in the town centre where I was as all the supermarkets are on the outskirts.
Been at 5 funerals since Easter Sunday and last 2 had no social distancing at all.Ok only small crowd,under 50, in church but graveyards were full enough.No handshaking but no effort to keep apart.Last one had cousins home from UK at it.

Think at this stage people are starting to realise that all the scare stories are a bit"Irish" to say the least.
Know a lot of people and am yet to hear of anyone under 70 dying from Covid or even being sick with it.Actually only know 2 people who actually were diagnoised with it.
Apart from nursing homes has it really affected the general populace that much?

Water John

Fairly careful here in Cork still. No major groups at funerals. Sometimes a social distance type of guard of honour.
Know 3 patients. But probably a good few more around. Of the 100 positives last Thursday, 36 in Dublin and 22 in Cork. Don't know if they were in the community, nursing homes or meat factories.

Fred Daly

A good few people under seventy died from it the two health care workers in kilkenny several more, as people getting dinner as usual find that hard to believe my crew bring there own grub have cut 2,500 acres the last six weeks .

_Brian

Met a local shop keeper when out walking today along with another lady.

He just banged on for 10 minutes about it was all a hoax and that it was a stunt to force house arrest on the nation and remove cash from circulation.

He was fairly silent when the lady asked my wife about the local hospital where she works. He couldn’t accept that people had tested positive, been sick and died from Covid19.

It’s the first time I’ve met in person someone denying it so vehemently. Really lost any respect I had for him and I’ll probably never stand in his shop again.

wrangler

Water John wrote: »

Fairly careful here in Cork still. No major groups at funerals. Sometimes a social distance type of guard of honour.
Know 3 patients. But probably a good few more around. Of the 100 positives last Thursday, 36 in Dublin and 22 in Cork. Don't know if they were in the community, nursing homes or meat factories.

50 yr old that died is the youngest I know with a family of early teens, no underlying conditions, not even overweight

yosemitesam1

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.108308v1

Just blood testing for antibodies could be underestimating the total amount of people exposed and real IFR might be lower than the estimates from antibody surveys

Interestingly,
however, we found evidence of S protein-specific IgA and IgG at mucosal sites of
individuals with mild COVID-19. There, mucosal S protein-specific IgG levels
appeared to mirror the systemic, i.e. serum, titers of these antibodies. Mucosal S
protein-specific IgA levels, however, were even detectable at several mucosal sites of
about 15–20% S protein-seronegative individuals. Interestingly, mucosal S protein-
specific IgA levels correlated inversely with patient age.

Reggie.

Heard today on the radio that the government is considering skipping to phase 3 as we are doing so well.

Abit early to be calling a victory I reckon

Bass Reeves

Reggie. wrote: »

Heard today on the radio that the government is considering skipping to phase 3 as we are doing so well.

Abit early to be calling a victory I reckon

It not about calling victory but about trying to get the economy back to work. While some are still irresponsible most people are making an effort to be as safe as possible.

You can now see the effort being made by the construction sector. We might not go to phase 3 but to phase 2+. In that we may pick and choose sectors to reopen . They may allow more shops to open and allow hairdresser to start putting plans in place to reopen in June rather than July. Allow people to start going to Holiday homes provide they socially distance etc

Look at Cork market closed down on Friday as people were not socially distancing, but I think it has reopened again after shoppers got the message. A lot of this is about business's policing the change in practice's

Buford T. Justice XIX

A bit more information coming out about about the effects on the circulation system, pretty severe effects in a good proportion of the victims.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/52760992?__twitter_impression=true

Buford T. Justice XIX

59 new cases today and no deaths related to COVID19.
https://twitter.com/MichealLehane/status/1264963808713474063?s=19

Gawddawggonnit

Buford T. Justice VI wrote: »

59 new cases today and no deaths related to COVID19.
https://twitter.com/MichealLehane/status/1264963808713474063?s=19

Absolutely fantastic!!
Credit to each and every person in the country.

whelan2

Gawddawggonnit wrote: »

Absolutely fantastic!!
Credit to each and every person in the country.

How's covid in France?

yosemitesam1

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/25/were-all-in-the-big-numbers-now/

Worth a read

greysides

https://www.timesofisrael.com/scientist-posits-wild-hypothesis-that-cross-immunity-could-slow-pandemic/

PARIS (AFP) — Could exposure to the coronaviruses that cause the common cold help protect against COVID-19? Is herd immunity closer than previously thought?

Ever since it became apparent that children were less vulnerable to COVID-19 early in the pandemic, scientists have speculated that the regular spread of benign viruses in places like schools could have bolstered their immune response to the latest coronavirus.

In a recent post on Twitter, Francois Balloux of University College London noted an “intriguing” lack of an immediate resurgence in COVID-19 cases following the easing of lockdowns in several countries.


Francois Balloux (Twitter)
Among the possible explanations, he noted, were seasonality and enduring social distancing practices.

But he posited a “wilder” hypothesis as well — that a “proportion of the population might have pre-existing immunity to #SARSCoV2, potentially due to prior exposure to ‘common cold’ coronaviruses.”

greysides

Interesting as it shows the development of knowledge of Coronavirus epidemiology.


https://bbc.in/2MgL2V6