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

Heardy said:
I am going to sound like an absolute prick for questioning this but why is Tom Moore’s family to be at his bedside in hospital while he battles pneumonia and covid whilst most peoples families are completely banished from hospital whilst their loved ones receive treatment?

I know he’s become a national treasure for his fundraising efforts but why does his family get special treatment...?
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I thought exactly the same. Having said that, the exception to the rule is when the patient is at "end of life" but is normally restricted to a couple of family members one at a time which the stories don't seem to insinuate the latter.

Edit- I'm not sure if the end of life rule includes coranavirus patients or not?
 
Balljy said:
I thought exactly the same. Having said that, the exception to the rule is when the patient is at "end of life" but is normally restricted to a couple of family members one at a time which the stories don't seem to insinuate the latter.

Edit- I'm not sure if the end of life rule includes coranavirus patients or not?
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Yeah I’d heard a lot of stories of families having to say goodbye via iPad/video call etc.

I feel like shit trying to say he shouldn’t have his family by his side, but I am totally against people flexing rules because of his status, especially when mainstream media can then report that he has family at his bedside when others are simply deniedthat right. It just doesn’t sit well.
 
Balljy said:
I thought exactly the same. Having said that, the exception to the rule is when the patient is at "end of life" but is normally restricted to a couple of family members one at a time which the stories don't seem to insinuate the latter.

Edit- I'm not sure if the end of life rule includes coranavirus patients or not?
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How many 1000s of families have had to put up with an iPad for a few minutes, or just a phone call? Rightly or wrongly he'll be getting preferential treatment. Same at Christmas when he was apparently in tier 4 and others there had Christmas alone whilst he went on holiday with his family.

It is possible to both wish him all the best but also say he shouldn't have preferential treatment or gone on holiday..
 
Balljy said:
I thought exactly the same. Having said that, the exception to the rule is when the patient is at "end of life" but is normally restricted to a couple of family members one at a time which the stories don't seem to insinuate the latter.

Edit- I'm not sure if the end of life rule includes coranavirus patients or not?
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It does now.
 
Heardy said:
Yeah I’d heard a lot of stories of families having to say goodbye via iPad/video call etc.

I feel like shit trying to say he shouldn’t have his family by his side, but I am totally against people flexing rules because of his status, especially when mainstream media can then report that he has family at his bedside when others are simply deniedthat right. It just doesn’t sit well.
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I've also read about families being allowed into hospital with no celebrity or wealth status. Must depend on some other factors like age, location and the doctors and nurses etc. If particularly moved they could make an exception if able. A couple of the cases I read were very old patients.
 
Heardy said:
Yeah I’d heard a lot of stories of families having to say goodbye via iPad/video call etc.

I feel like shit trying to say he shouldn’t have his family by his side, but I am totally against people flexing rules because of his status, especially when mainstream media can then report that he has family at his bedside when others are simply deniedthat right. It just doesn’t sit well.
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The closing of ranks around him r.e. the Barbados trip is another particularly good example of how the media reacts differently depending on who did it. It might not have been illegal at the time, but he was 100 years old and the advice since March has been to avoid all but essential travel. It's a monumentally stupid risk.

There needs to be some degree of nuance between 'this isn't illegal, therefore it's fine' and 'there's a fecking global pandemic on, maybe we shouldn't pack our 100 year old relatives onto aeroplanes and fly them to the Caribbean'.
 
dannyrhinos89 said:
How accurate is that nhs covid app?

Its just pinged this morning saying I've been in contact with somebody that has covid and need to isolate for 8 days.

I've only been to work, the same people I've worked with for the whole pandemic with no issue.
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The mother in law got pinged. They've been pretty much in since March. Only going to the shop once a week.
 
jojojo said:
"The eight postcode areas are W7, N17 and CR4 in London, WS2 in Walsall, ME15 in Kent, EN10 in Hertfordshire, GU21 in Surrey and PR9 in Lancashire."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...iant-of-covid-found-in-eight-areas-of-england
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I'm in ME15, waiting for the knock on my door. But I don't think were going to get one. The boundary they've put up on the Kent website doesn't cover us. Mad though that there's a Morrisons, smack bang on the border of the boundary, surely people from both side will have been going in
 
gormless said:
Well that’s not ideal. According to the BBC article it’s mutations are now resembling the SA and Brazil variant
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That’s the E484K mutation. The one they’re blaming for the vaccine resistance in South Africa. Makes banning travel from South Africa irrelevant if you can grow your own identical mutation at home!
 
Jimble said:
I'm in ME15, waiting for the knock on my door. But I don't think were going to get one. The boundary they've put up on the Kent website doesn't cover us. Mad though that there's a Morrisons, smack bang on the border of the boundary, surely people from both side will have been going in
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Yeah, I guess they will gain useful information from the tests on numbers and spread but it would take a far stronger lockdown to actually contain it. And too late now anyway I would think.
 
711 said:
Yeah, I guess they will gain useful information from the tests on numbers and spread but it would take a far stronger lockdown to actually contain it. And too late now anyway I would think.
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I just had a message from the management company of the block where we have a flat. Everyone there's about to get a test kit, but it didn't suggest you should self-isolate until the result comes back. Might have been sensible, under the unusual circumstances.

Of course, those blocks for older people are at risk because there are a good number of people who receive visits from carers and nurses every day. There are people coming in and out all the time.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
That’s the E484K mutation. The one they’re blaming for the vaccine resistance in South Africa. Makes banning travel from South Africa irrelevant if you can grow your own identical mutation at home!
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That is concerning. This data was drawn from 26 January (at which stage the E484K spike protein mutation had been detected in 11 B1.1.7 sequences), so one might assume that, a week later it could be more widespread than we know.
 
Jimble said:
I'm in ME15, waiting for the knock on my door. But I don't think were going to get one. The boundary they've put up on the Kent website doesn't cover us. Mad though that there's a Morrisons, smack bang on the border of the boundary, surely people from both side will have been going in
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My office is in the ME15 postcode. It’s at about 40% capacity with people going to Morrison’s at lunch etc. This variant will be all over Kent if it isn’t already.
 
Penna said:
I love it there. The people are a bit weird, but the countryside is great. I did once upset a local by referring to "the mainland" instead of saying "across."

I would imagine that it's relatively easy to close off a tiny island from the rest of the world.
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In what way? I've always been curious about the place.
 
Penna said:
I just had a message from the management company of the block where we have a flat. Everyone there's about to get a test kit, but it didn't suggest you should self-isolate until the result comes back. Might have been sensible, under the unusual circumstances.

Of course, those blocks for older people are at risk because there are a good number of people who receive visits from carers and nurses every day. There are people coming in and out all the time.
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And carers make a lot of visits. Zero hours contracts, just paid for an hour's work with each client, not travelling time, not paid if they're sick, and afraid that if they don't take up a job when they're offered one then the next one will be offered to someone else. They go from one visit to another even if they're unwell, because they're so poorly paid they've no savings and absolutely need the money. Depressing ain't it?
 
Raoul said:
Yes, i think this is the first step in easy mass availability. There are vending machines in NY now as well...

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Great idea, go and put your hands on the buttons of a vending machine that scores of covid riddled people have been touching
 
SARS-CoV 2 is just evolving around the immune response placed in front of it. We already saw B.1.351 from SA and P1 from Brazil with the same or very similar fitness evolutions in them. Classic antigenic drift / shift similar to what we see with Influenza. Though the mechanism is obviously very different.

The most concerning point: How can this then be a surprise to anyone?
 
UnofficialDevil said:
Very good news. This could stop the spread and make it die out. Then again a thousand machines for the whole country isnt much. If it takes more than a year then the vaccines might beat them to it.
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Who is cleaning these machines every day after covid zombies have been touching them?
 
golden_blunder said:
Great idea, go and put your hands on the buttons of a vending machine that scores of covid riddled people have been touching
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I would hope the people running the machines would've thought about this before proceeding to deploy them.
 
Mb194dc said:
SARS-CoV 2 is just evolving around the immune response placed in front of it. We already saw B.1.351 from SA and P1 from Brazil with the same or very similar fitness evolutions in them.

How can this then be a surprise to anyone?
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It’s literally the same mutation. And the reason it’s a surprise is that coronaviruses are supposed to be relatively stable. Mutating much less slowly than other similar viruses. To get so many mutations with so many important, clinically relevant implications all in quick succession is seriously bad luck.
 
Lockdown extended until at least end of Feb in Scotland .
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s literally the same mutation. And the reason it’s a surprise is that coronaviruses are supposed to be relatively stable. Mutating much less slowly than other similar viruses. To get so many mutations with so many important, clinically relevant implications all in quick succession is seriously bad luck.
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Hundreds of millions of infected people is a nice way to speed up the mutation rate. It’s still slow relative to the number of transmissions, I think.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s literally the same mutation. And the reason it’s a surprise is that coronaviruses are supposed to be relatively stable. Mutating much less slowly than other similar viruses. To get so many mutations with so many important, clinically relevant implications all in quick succession is seriously bad luck.
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Could that not be due to the sheer scale of the pandemic though? The only other coronavirus I can think of which spreads worldwide is some of the cold viruses and a good percentage of the population will have levels of immunity against them. This is a novel virus and worldwide so is bound to get more mutations just due to how many people it infects?
 
Had a bit of a breakout in one of the schools I've been at, was there quite a bit last week.
Started with both the cleaner/caretaker testing positive. 3 lunch staff tested positive over the weekend and 2 further staff tested positive on Monday morning.
I'm isolating due to contact with one of the positives.
Local authority got us all to have proper tests, just started using the lateral flow ones this Monday I was negative on that, waiting on the PCR which I went to this morning.
Since that 2 more have tested positive.

I just don't get the logic of only closing a few of the classes when 5 of the 9 staff go all over the building. What happens when someone was in contact yesterday with the ones that tested positive this morning? I doubt they'd test positive within 12 hours of exposure?

Not forgetting that zero kids will of had a test due to this.. I don't think this is on the school despite being in the trust. LA advice should surely of advised closing?
Baring in mind this is a 1form school, with a rota with half ta's/teachers at home last week... who will now be in this week.. -.-
 
MikeUpNorth said:
Hundreds of millions of infected people is a nice way to speed up the mutation rate. It’s still slow relative to the number of transmissions, I think.
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The relatively slow mutation rate is supposed to persist despite millions of people being infected (e.g. common cold coronavirus) The smart money is actually on this variant being hot-housed in a single patient. The theory is that it was an immune compromised patient who had a persistent infection for weeks and weeks. The interaction with their faulty immune system (and possibly monoclonal antibodies) helped the virus become more and more efficient without ever getting wiped out. That’s what caused a huge number of beneficial mutations to accumulate in a short period of time.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s literally the same mutation. And the reason it’s a surprise is that coronaviruses are supposed to be relatively stable. Mutating much less slowly than other similar viruses. To get so many mutations with so many important, clinically relevant implications all in quick succession is seriously bad luck.
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It's not bad luck, it's by natures design. SARS-CoV 2 does have slower regular mutation rate than Influenza. It's recombination that is it's evolutionary advantage. We can see from the hard evidence in front of us, it is adapting.

I don't think the number of infections is that important, we've seen this mutation in SA, Brazil and now here in the UK because the people in all these places have a similar immune response. That is not a coincidence, it's the nature of SARS-CoV 2.

What this is telling us, is that as with Influenza there is little we can do. SARS-CoV 2 isn't going anywhere and will come back every year just as Influenza does. Even if some countries have kept it out for now, vast areas of human population won't be able to do that and it'll continually spread back to the rest.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
The relatively slow mutation rate is supposed to persist despite millions of people being infected (e.g. common cold coronavirus) The smart money is actually on this variant being hot-housed in a single patient. The theory is that it was an immune compromised patient who had a persistent infection for weeks and weeks. The interaction with their faulty immune system (and possibly monoclonal antibodies) helped the virus become more and more efficient without ever getting wiped out. That’s what caused a huge number of beneficial mutations to accumulate in a short period of time.
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I don’t think a virus has any sense of ‘time’, it’s just a random chance of mutation in each copying of the virus. The more copying (infections), the more mutations. Whether a mutation becomes dominant is largely due to its effect on fitness.

I saw that theory about the single patient seeding many simultaneous mutations, but it seems not to be that important given the key mutations have evolved independently in SA, Brazil and the UK (and probably loads of other places we don’t know yet).
 
Jimble said:
You must be very close to me
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I used to live on the new estate between Morrison’s and the police headquarters but moved to Vinters Park a few years back.

Peopke from all over Kent are travelling to my office every day. It bloody annoys me because we have all been told we can work from home if we want.
 
golden_blunder said:
Hope. I personally don’t hold out much hope for thinking that far ahead
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Its also the responsibility of those using such a machine. I would never touch anything like that without gloves or hand sanitizer nearby.
 
MikeUpNorth said:
I don’t think a virus has any sense of ‘time’, it’s just a random chance of mutation in each copying of the virus. The more copying (infections), the more mutations. Whether a mutation becomes dominant is largely due to its effect on fitness.

I saw that theory about the single patient seeding many simultaneous mutations, but it seems not to be that important given the key mutations have evolved independently in SA, Brazil and the UK (and probably loads of other places we don’t know yet).
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I think the issue is that when the virus is happily hoping from host to host there isn’t the same evolutionary pressure that you get with prolonged replication in an immune compromised patient. They’ve been tracking mutations from day one and the rate is usually one or two per month. For some reason there was an unusually large number of mutations in a short space of time, with the rate normalising before and afterwards. Hence the single patient hypothesis.

The selective pressure of partial immunity is why I’m shitting it about the decision to not use Pfizer vaccine in accordance with its license.
 
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