SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

I was looking at the figure from the worldmeter website. Regardless of it's "now", or total, it doesn't bode well in comparisons, assuming the criteria in European countries are similar. Looking at the Portuguese numbers, in our case I'm almost sure it means now.

It’s total who have received ICU for Sweden mate, since it began.
Worldometers is a crap site for that, as it is for death days.

We haven’t had an increase in ICU entries for 3 weeks. That curve is as flat as a pancake which I thought was what every country wanted to do when this kicked off, flatten the curve.
Somewhere that curve has been forgotten and all that matters is a death toll in the first 6 weeks of a pandemic which is likely to be with us for a year or more.

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

If you want an example of a country that is absolutely terrible at keeping coronavirus out of nursing homes, look at Ireland. The vast majority of our clusters are in nursing homes or other residential communities. Thankfully, we’ve been pretty good about stifling spread in society as a whole. Which keeps our overall mortality/ICU admissions relatively low.

To be honest, I don’t think any country has done a brilliant job at keeping the virus out of nursing homes. It’s just not possible. Not with agency staff working in multiple centres and limited supplies of PPE being prioritised for use in acute hospitals.

Around 450 nursing home deaths here Pogue, almost all in Stockholm.

And as I said earlier even countries that had a lockdown have got it into the nursing homes because people who are locked down are still getting this. IItaly is proof of that when five weeks after lockdown they are still getting 4000 cases a day. So lockdown doesn’t completely stop cases which means without it being completely stopped people who work in nursing homes will still get this and bring it into nursing homes.

Declaring Sweden getting it into an insane amount of Stockholm nursing homes as a “win” for lockdown seems really strange.

And whilst I don’t think this is true for Sweden’s neighboring countries, there have been lots and lots of reports of nursing care home deaths missing from other countries statistics.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Not really. We were making progress on a SARS vaccine but it disappeared on its own and the impetus went with it. There were a few promising vaccines that were awaiting various stages of trials at the time. MERS suffers similarly, neither have warranted massive research efforts.

Milestones for a Covid19 vaccine have been reached far sooner. The genome sequence was published 10 days after China acknowledged the virus even existed. SARS took 4 months. Human trials are due to begin this month. By the time a SARS vaccine entered human trials 2 years had passed, the virus had burnt itself out and the epidemic was over.

I work in pharmaceuticals. So, unfortunately, I’m well aware of the huge rate of attrition of “promising” compounds in early stage development as they get closer to approval. Many a slip twixt cup and lip.

Vaccine development isn’t something I know a whole lot about but - from what I’ve read - this is one of the toughest nuts they will ever have to crack. And we can all think of examples of viruses that we have never managed to develop a vaccine against, despite many years of trying.

 

[Lentwood]

Relax some measures, keep others. Ramp up testing and contact tracing so we can respond very quickly to those who show symptoms and get them and their contacts isolating. Those who can work from home keep working from home. Widespread use of face-masks once enough have been produced and supplied. Contact tracing apps. Try to find the best treatment options. Then hope for the best.

Not sure what more there is that could be done.

Maybe staggered easing of restrictions for those statistically proven to be less vulnerable?

 

[Hound Dog]

A possibility that nobody seems to want to acknowledge is that we may NEVER develop a vaccine that is safe/effective enough to roll out globally. We still haven’t got a vaccine for any other type of coronavirus (e.g. SARS or MERS) that’s good enough to be used on the scale we need. And that’s despite several years of trying.

If the 18 + month estimation is correct than it does not make that much of a difference as we will develop herd immunity by then.

Anyone believing people en masse will stay locked down for a year plus is deluded.

 

[nimic]

Speaking of Sweden, a Swedish author/journalist, Elisabeth Åsbrink, had an interesting theory that Sweden was peace-damaged. A quick google shows that she's been saying it in Sweden, but she was also recently interviewed by Norwegian state TV (we're always somewhat interested in what's going on in Sweden).

The general idea is that Sweden was not psychologically prepared for this disaster due to the general lack of natural disasters, wars, famine, etc. in Sweden for a good long while now. Compare that to the other Nordic countries which were all somewhat traumatized by WW2, for example (except for Iceland, but that's a funny little country).

She also said Swedes are perhaps too trusting of the authorities, which is funny because trust in the authorities is something Norway has scored "highly" on for years.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Around 450 nursing home deaths here Pogue, almost all in Stockholm.

And as I said earlier even countries that had a lockdown have got it into the nursing homes because people who are locked down are still getting this. IItaly is proof of that when five weeks after lockdown they are still getting 4000 cases a day. So lockdown doesn’t completely stop cases which means without it being completely stopped people who work in nursing homes will still get this and bring it into nursing homes.

Declaring Sweden getting it into an insane amount of Stockholm nursing homes as a “win” for lockdown seems really strange.

Your last sentence doesn’t really make sense to me. I’m not talking about a “win” for anything based on Sweden’s experience. I’m just saying you can’t put nursing home infections/fatalities to one side, when assessing the overall effectiveness of a government’s strategy. Which you seem to be keen to do here. If anything, nursing home residents are the canary in the coal mine.

 

[RK]

I've been experimenting with data, looking at the virus spreading last month in London, specifically after 14th March when there were ~300 confirmed cases until 20th March by which time there were ~1600 confirmed cases.
Before the earlier date there weren't really enough cases. After the later date, it seemed to gradually homogenise.
Not really drawing conclusions. There's plenty of footnotes if interested.

 

[Alabaster Codify7]

Maybe staggered easing of restrictions for those statistically proven to be less vulnerable?

This is what I'm expecting and what makes at least some sense. I'm 37, for example. My employer has been great so far in terms of WFH but there are departments within my employer that havent had that luxury due to the nature of the work they do - some of them are likely to be considered vulnerable in some way, even if just based on age. I am expecting, by late May, to have to go into the office 2-3 days a week (WFH the rest) because it's simply not fair on those who have no choice. I'm sure everyone will be judged on a case-by-case basis on their age and health, but I will be one of the very first expected to start slowly goign back to the office.

 

[Feed Me]

A possibility that nobody seems to want to acknowledge is that we may NEVER develop a vaccine that is safe/effective enough to roll out globally. We still haven’t got a vaccine for any other type of coronavirus (e.g. SARS or MERS) that’s good enough to be used on the scale we need. And that’s despite several years of trying.

So how does something like SARS stop / die down to a level that it doesn’t really impact people day to day anymore?

 

[Lentwood]

22 Swedish scientists have lambasted the government for their “failed” tactic.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/...digheten-har-misslyckats-med-sin-coronastrate

One key point I have taken out of that though is the chief epidemiologist highlighted the fact that they believe this is a medium-long term strategy

They might look very bad if the rates of infected people/people who have died in the next two months trends up against the rest of the world or they might look like they made a great decision if the rates of infections/deaths are broadly similar to the rest of the world without such severe economic consequences

As I alluded to earlier, what we’re doing isn’t a medium or long term strategy. It’s a holding measure whilst we work out that strategy

 

[Pogue Mahone]

If the 18 + month estimation is correct than it does not make that much of a difference as we will develop herd immunity by then.

Anyone believing people en masse will stay locked down for a year plus is deluded.

We’ll most likely swap back and forth between lockdown and less extreme social isolation measures until we have a vaccine or herd immunity. I’d say there’s about as much chance of having a vaccine in 18 months as there is of getting herd immunity over the same period of time without a vaccine.

 

[Di Maria's angel]

813 deaths today. We'd have killed millions if we had gone with herd immunity. I've been out of this thread for a while. I wonder if those who were in support of herd immunity and this stupidly delayed lockdown have admitted it was insane.

 

[blue blue]

Honestly, from what I've seen, the information coming out of the Chinese medical community and being published to the world at the beginning of January seems to of been first class. To a point where I doubt any western country would do any better.

Its flu season, there's god knows how many cases of pneumonia doing the rounds, a perfectly normal thing. Yet they managed to identify something odd about 20 or so cases in 3 separate hospitals in Wuhan, identified they could all be linked to the same food market and this is what has raised the alarm. I dunno what is involved in sequencing the genome of a virus, but they manged to identify it was a completely new virus, sequence it, and publish everything they knew about it to Lancet in a report on 11th January. Honestly, my impression of China has quite improved since this started.

There was a Governor in Wuhan who tried playing it down at the beginning (sound familiar?) and this is what the western world seem to be concentrating on when they say China covered it up.

There is very little we know now that wasn't already known at the end of January, yet there was still world leaders in March, including our own, trying to play it down and hold back any restrictions. Can't blame China for that.

Well how did they manage to contain SARS so much better and why haven't they done so this time?

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

The general idea is that Sweden was not psychologically prepared for this disaster due to the general lack of natural disasters, wars, famine, etc. in Sweden for a good long while now. Compare that to the other Nordic countries which were all somewhat traumatized by WW2, for example (except for Iceland, but that's a funny little country).

How many survivors of WWII in the Nordics? It finished 75 years ago.

 

[Lentwood]

So how does something like SARS stop / die down to a level that it doesn’t really impact people day to day anymore?

SARS is less infectious/harder to transmit, in answer to that specific question

In general though, the only long term solution is herd immunity. A vaccine is a manufactured method of creating and accelerating herd immunity

 

[Pogue Mahone]

So how does something like SARS stop / die down to a level that it doesn’t really impact people day to day anymore?

Containment strategy. Identify and isolate cases as soon as they arise. Which is easier to do as SARS is only contagious when people are symptomatic and symptomatic people tend to be extremely sick.

 

[balaks]

813 deaths today. We'd have killed millions if we had gone with herd immunity. I've been out of this thread for a while. I wonder if those who were in support of herd immunity and this stupidly delayed lockdown have admitted it was insane.

I think we will still go for herd immunity but in a relatively managed (and therefore very lengthy) way - nothing else for it other than a vaccine happening really.

 

[nimic]

How many survivors of WWII in the Nordics? It finished 75 years ago.

Yeah, that's not really the point though, is it? It still most definitely had a lasting impact on the national psyche. Never again, and all that.

 

[Bojan11]

SARS died down before they could even launch a vaccine. Why would someone invest money into something that had died out? Thankfully with SARS, China acted very quickly.

This is totally different scenario and it’s on a bigger scale. The demand is going to be huge as this has impacted too many countries for it to die out.

 

[FootballHQ]

This. If we could find some drugs that could treat those who are actually infected, that could tide us over until the vaccine.

Just read in the independent that Ireland expects restrictions until the vaccine is found. That is going to impact the economic system hugely.

Isn't there some promising talk on the ebola drug. There certainly needs to be a sticky plaster for the summer months just to give us all a bit of respite so hopefully it remains effective when the treatment groups gets scaled up.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

One key point I have taken out of that though is the chief epidemiologist highlighted the fact that they believe this is a medium-long term strategy

They might look very bad if the rates of infected people/people who have died in the next two months trends up against the rest of the world or they might look like they made a great decision if the rates of infections/deaths are broadly similar to the rest of the world without such severe economic consequences

As I alluded to earlier, what we’re doing isn’t a medium or long term strategy. It’s a holding measure whilst we work out that strategy

If nothing else, the rest of the world should be pleased that Sweden adopted this strategy. We need a control group. We learn very little when everyone takes the same approach.

 

[Arruda]

It’s total who have received ICU for Sweden mate, since it began.
Worldometers is a crap site for that, as it is for death days.

We haven’t had an increase in ICU entries for 3 weeks. That curve is as flat as a pancake which I thought was what every country wanted to do when this kicked off, flatten the curve.
Somewhere that curve has been forgotten and all that matters is a death toll in the first 6 weeks of a pandemic which is likely to be with us for a year or more.

Yeah, I wouldn't put much trust in those specific numbers. It's still a number significantly bigger than our total ICU though. So you're saying your ICU units are stable, i.e., admissions are balanced with recoveries/deaths and there's no concern of overload yet?

Good news indeed if true, but given your bias on this since the early days I'm a bit hesitant to trust what you say (rather the selection of opinions you chose to base your knowledge on).

My bet is still that we will never see the long term impact of Sweden's policy because it will be changed to something more similar to the rest of Europe far before that "long term" comes.

 

[11101]

I work in pharmaceuticals. So, unfortunately, I’m well aware of the huge rate of attrition of “promising” compounds in early stage development as they get closer to approval. Many a slip twixt cup and lip.

Vaccine development isn’t something I know a whole lot about but - from what I’ve read - this is one of the toughest nuts they will ever have to crack. And we can all think of examples of viruses that we have never managed to develop a vaccine against, despite many years of trying.

We've never come remotely close to the effort going into this one, though.

That's not a guarantee at all but you can't use past examples here. Everything is new.

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

Your last sentence doesn’t really make sense to me. I’m not talking about a “win” for anything based on Sweden’s experience. I’m just saying you can’t put nursing home infections/fatalities to one side, when assessing the overall effectiveness of a government’s strategy. Which you seem to be keen to do here. If anything, nursing home residents are the canary in the coal mine.

Arruda was though, not you.

And I’m not putting them aside, they are an extremely important part of the figures of course And some thing that needs to be considered a mass failure in the countries they get hit hardest there.

Something that is not surprising and what is completely forgotten here when people try to discuss Sweden strategy is that Gothenburg which has a population similar to Dublin Lisbon Copenhagen Oslo has a very low death rate.

Why is that the case if the Swedish strategy is so wrong? Is it not just the case that more populated cities like Stockholm end up more fecked because they were already on the ”pretty fecked” path once Italy kicked off.

Or can anyone explain to me why Gothenburg, a city of 590,000 has had it so well considering Sweden’s non lockdown strategy is so poor?

 

[DavidDeSchmikes]

 

[Ekkie Thump]

Updated graph of deaths in England by day of death. 823 new deaths as of 5pm yesterday -43 from the day before but it's a weekend. Orange is a 5 day trailing average (last 5-7 days will see large to moderate upward changes):

Spoiler: graph

Updated graph of deaths in England by day of death. 744 new deaths as of 5pm yesterday. Orange is a 5 day trailing average (last 5-7 days will see large to moderate upward changes):

Spoiler: graph

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

Good news indeed if true, but given your bias on this since the early days I'm a bit hesitant to trust what you say (rather the selection of opinions you chose to base your knowledge on).

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/y3rdeA/coronaviruset-har-ar-de-senaste-siffrorna

Don't trust me @Arruda

But considering how negative you have been to Sweden’s strategy which has seen the winter flu and winter tummy bug completely drop off a cliff since mid March, (something we are all arguing is proof that we are social distancing very well and that this is having a massive affect)... Why is Gothenburg, a similar size city to Lisbon doing so well and still only now has 66 people in the ICU?

Västa Götaland is Gothenburg - 55 deaths

Malmö shares a fecking bridge with Copenhagen, and yet have 24 deaths and 23 in ICU.

And it’s not about being ”biased” pal it’s about seeing things in the Swedish strategy like Gothenburg and other areas that show that this is absolutely possible to achieve without having to lock people in their homes and ruin us for the next 12 months, this is about being optimistic that we can get on with our lives and still keep this curve flat because we can all have better hygiene and we can all practice social distancing and be good citizens.
Stockholm is proof that allowing this into your nursing homes in a big populated city is going to feck you, we can certainly learn from that.

 

[nimic]

I'm beginning to think there's something to the claim that Swedes are very trusting of (Swedish) authorities.

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

I'm beginning to think there's something to the claim that Swedes are very trusting of (Swedish) authorities.

Well not being a Swede I’d hope you don’t include me.

 

[sullydnl]

Maybe staggered easing of restrictions for those statistically proven to be less vulnerable?

Yep. Some countries might even try easing different regions at different paces if they think it's viable.

 

[Balljy]

Not really. We were making progress on a SARS vaccine but it disappeared on its own and the impetus went with it. There were a few promising vaccines that were awaiting various stages of trials at the time. MERS suffers similarly, neither have warranted massive research efforts.

I read that too where we were very close, especially to a SARs vaccine until it became not necessary any more. SARs had a very high mortality rate (I believe > 10%) so would have been considered ultra dangerous at the time.

One thing I can't get my head around with this though is the coronavirus strains which cause the common cold. There must be a ton of money sitting there where people would happily pay to vaccinate themselves from the 2 weeks of illness per year, but the companies don't seem interested. There surely can't be any reason that a vaccine is not possible for certain coronavirus strains?

The reasoning that it's because there's so many strains also seems weird as that is exactly what they do with flu every year by developing a new one to hit the newer strains.

 

[Arruda]

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/y3rdeA/coronaviruset-har-ar-de-senaste-siffrorna

Don't trust me @Arruda

But considering how negative you have been to Sweden’s strategy which has seen the winter flu and winter tummy bug completely drop off a cliff since mid March, (something we are all arguing is proof that we are social distancing very well and that this is having a massive affect)... Why is Gothenburg, a similar size city to Lisbon doing so well and still only now has 66 people in the ICU?

Västa Götaland is Gothenburg - 55 deaths

Malmö shares a fecking bridge with Copenhagen, and yet have 24 deaths and 23 in ICU.

Gothenburg is in no way of a similar size to Lisbon. Lisbon's metropolitan area has 3 million people. Lisbon's airport moves 6 times more people per year than Gothenburg's.

You have yet to understand my line of reasoning in regards to Sweden, despite I having expressed it numerous times. Both the peripheral nature of the country and the "natural" social distancing provide a great advantage to Sweden in terms of how slowly the disease is spreading.

I think those advantages are being wasted.

The issue is that that "natural" social distancing is nowhere near to the "artificial" social distancing other countries have imposed. So I think your adopted country is in for a shock.

 

[stepic]

with all the oddities around timing of death rate figures, what is the key day this week? looking at just today it looks like we're in the process of levelling off but i know some figures on some days aren't always the most accurate.

 

[Regulus Arcturus Black]

The issue is that that "natural" social distancing is nowhere near to the "artificial" social distancing other countries have imposed. So I think your adopted country is in for a shock.

But you surely can’t believe that we can artificially social distance in our homes until the virus is gone? As I say this is about being optimistic that we can keep a flat curve whilst social distancing ourselves naturally. Or are you a pessimist and genuinely believe that we need to be locked in our homes for a year?

This in the beginning was always supposed to be about flattening the curve and yet now it seems to be about something completely different, like stopping deaths for a year by keeping ourselves in our homes.

 

[massi83]

This has been the case in a number of other countries, it's not exclusive to the UK. It's just not been possible to test everybody who needs it and testing the deceased outside of hospitals has not been a priority.

Yes. There was article in the economist on 4.4. about bergamo, quite similar findings.

By the way, is there data on deaths in bergamo somewhere. I can only find for Lombardy, not more specific.

 

[Arruda]

But you surely can’t believe that we can artificially social distance in our homes until the virus is gone? As I say this is about being optimistic that we can keep a flat curve whilst social distancing ourselves naturally. Or are you a pessimist and genuinely believe that we need to be locked in our homes for a year?

I believe, like @11101 has expressed earlier, we need to be locked until we know exactly what to do.

 

[Foxbatt]

Not really. We were making progress on a SARS vaccine but it disappeared on its own and the impetus went with it. There were a few promising vaccines that were awaiting various stages of trials at the time. MERS suffers similarly, neither have warranted massive research efforts.

Milestones for a Covid19 vaccine have been reached far sooner. The genome sequence was published 10 days after China acknowledged the virus even existed. SARS took 4 months. Human trials are due to begin this month. By the time a SARS vaccine entered human trials 2 years had passed, the virus had burnt itself out and the epidemic was over.

US newspaper/ TV station is reporting that China is in the 2nd phase of testing a vaccine. They completed the first phase last month. It's the safety phase. So now it's to see how effective it is. I think we should have some news of others testing for vaccines by the end of this month.
It's not a new vaccine I guess but trying to see from earlier research and testing of other vaccines if they can tweak those.

 

[Pogue Mahone]

This site is interesting.

Makes predictions re peak/duration of deaths/resources demand for various countries based on the data collected to date.

 

[Dr. Dwayne]

If you want an example of a country that is absolutely terrible at keeping coronavirus out of nursing homes, look at Ireland. The vast majority of our clusters are in nursing homes or other residential communities. Thankfully, we’ve been pretty good about stifling spread in society as a whole. Which keeps our overall mortality/ICU admissions relatively low.

To be honest, I don’t think any country has done a brilliant job at keeping the virus out of nursing homes. It’s just not possible. Not with agency staff working in multiple centres and limited supplies of PPE being prioritised for use in acute hospitals.

Yeah Canada is getting shellacked as far as nursing homes go.