COVID-19

[JQH]

"Let out teachers die" in other words.

They do want to go back. Provided it's safe. And AIUI the traditionally non-militant unions are onside too.

[Lew Dolby]

and Unions aren't saying teachers can't go back. They're saying no individual teacher can be forced to go back - they have the right to refuse if it's unsafe.

AIUI H&S legislation says employees mustn't put themselves in positions of danger. Similarly, employers mustn't put employees in such positions. Or have H&S laws been suspended during the epidemic ??

[Fishnut]

Absolutely raging at the front page of the Mail this morning.

E9D0E70C-7266-4F1A-8713-0CC4733A05E5.jpeg

f.cking hell. NO-ONE SHOULD HAVE TO BE A HERO. This isn't a war, this is a public health crisis. If we want things to get back to normal (and tbh 'normal' wasn't that great for a vast number of people) we need to stop pretending that this pandemic will be over if we just wish hard enough.

[Little waster]

So are our children going to be heroes too?

Are we expected to have a 2 minute clap every Thursday as a sign of respect for all the Year Ones who’ve bravely laid down their lives to allow Mummy and Daddy to earn minimum wage bussing restaurant tables and answering the phone in a call centre?

That’s right up there with the NRA’s suggestion that school shootings should be tackled by training kindergarteners to “human wave” the shooter in an attempt to exhaust his ammunition, while still campaigning for larger magazine sizes too.

Srsly did I miss a memo where the right wing announced they were ceasing to be the “home of hard truths” in favour of becoming a death cult?

[Vertigowooyay]

It’s not often you see such a glaring typo error on a national newspaper front page, but if you look carefully the Mail has spelt ‘Cannon Fodder For The Libertarian Right And Tax Dodging Business Interests’ as ‘Heroes’.

[JQH]

I'll just leave this here:

[TopBadger]

I'm no fan of the mail - but how else would you crop that picture to fit the page format?

[Vertigowooyay]

And the Telegraph today. This is absolutely a coordinated effort by the right-wing press.

833103E8-2337-4449-A52F-7B38483506E4.jpeg (515.48 KiB) Viewed 3746 times

[JQH]

I'm no fan of the mail - but how else would you crop that picture to fit the page format?

Didn't need to crop at all since they clearly weren't trying to avoid the headline running over the picture

[Bird on a Fire]

Srsly did I miss a memo where the right wing announced they were ceasing to be the “home of hard truths” in favour of becoming a death cult?

Probably just jealous that more millennials joined ISIS than the Conservative party and want to get in on some hot eschatological-scatological action.

[Little waster]

And the Telegraph today. This is absolutely a coordinated effort by the right-wing press.

833103E8-2337-4449-A52F-7B38483506E4.jpeg

Lest we forget, here's the footage again of "Liberty or death" herd immunity advocate Cummings on finding out Johnson had coronavirus.



Worst form of moral cowardice, forcing others to risk their lives with inadequate equipment and preparation for your own personal political beliefs while under no circumstances ever putting yourself knowingly at risk.

Cf Gulf War 2 advocates passim.

[Gentleman Jim]

In The Lancet, Yeming Wang and colleagues1 report a randomised trial of remdesivir (200 mg on day 1 followed by 100 mg on days 2–10, in single daily infusions) versus placebo for adults with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in ten hospitals in Wuhan, China. The authors report on 236 patients (140 [59%] men and 96 [41%] women; median age 65 years [IQR 56–71]), with inconclusive findings on the primary outcome of time to clinical improvement, defined as a two-point improvement on a 6-point ordinal scale,2 a hazard ratio of 1·23 (95% CI 0·87–1·75; favouring remdesivir), and median observation times of 21 days (IQR 13–28) in the remdesivir group versus 23 days (15–28) in the placebo group (a non-significant difference).

In the meantime, how can the findings of Wang and colleagues be interpreted? The statistical reporting is clear, stating that the main findings were not statistically significant and acknowledging that the trial was underpowered (their post-hoc calculation indicated a power of 58% given the 236 participants with available data). However, a trial is not just its primary clinical outcome—there are important data on safety, viral load, and secondary outcomes. 22 (14%) of 158 patients on remdesivir died versus ten (13%) of 78 on placebo, and there was no signal that viral load decreased differentially over time between remdesivir and placebo groups. Furthermore, there were no differential signals on safety. Analyses were very similar under both the intention-to-treat and per-protocol principles.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanc ... etoc_email

Perhaps not the breakthrough some had hoped for

[Little waster]

"For christ-sake someone get Simon Jenkins enrolled in a basic statistics course before he dips his toe into anything sciencey again" #43 in an occasional series.

Tl;dr. Sweden and the UK originally didn't lockdown, Norway and Denmark did. Partially-locked down Sweden has had 10-times the deaths of it's comparable completely-locked down neighbours but only 70% of the deaths of the partially-locked down UK, it is almost as if one is a vast sparsely-populated backwater and the other is one of the densest-populated and most globalised places on Earth. Therefore the Swedes (and incidentally myself) were right.

[Fishnut]

What a surprise, the R rate is nearly at 1 after just a few-days of the ill-advised easing of the lockdown.

[Trinucleus]

Why are only people arriving by air subject to quarantine? Are people travelling by boat somehow immune?

Who said that? It's completely untrue, as is the vicious lie that French people are exempt

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52682411

[Bird on a Fire]

Why are only people arriving by air subject to quarantine? Are people travelling by boat somehow immune?

Who said that? It's completely untrue, as is the vicious lie that French people are exempt

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52682411

I really would like to visit my family as soon as it's safe, as I haven't seen them since Christmas and we've all had to cancel travel. One of the things putting me off is the need to isolate somewhere. If the authorities really will have sufficient accommodation, as this article implies, that'd be dope.

One of my friends mentioned "entering via France" today as a way of getting around the restrictions, as if the problem was the UK government's too-little-too-late lockdown rather than the actual pandemic. Ho hum.

[Fishnut]

This piece makes a convincing argument that we've left quarantining international travellers too late and it'll do bugger all now.

The source told the Guardian the plans would only reduce risk if the UK had lower rates of infection than the countries from which passengers were arriving, which is no longer the case for most nations in the European Union.

Speaking anonymously, the government adviser said: “There was really no scientific advice to inform the latest announcement. It also doesn’t really make sense for countries which have lower per capita current Covid case numbers than us; for example, most of the EU.

“That sort of policy only reduces risk in the situation where we have very low case numbers and origin countries have much higher numbers.”

[Bird on a Fire]

It's really not looking good from a population perspective.

OTOH my mum lives alone, and runs sheltered housing for old folks. She's taking it very seriously, and hasn't seen friends or family since Portugal started lockdown two months ago (as she recognised the uselessness of the UK government's guidance, and that of the "social" housing corporation she works for). She's definitely finding it incredibly hard. I'd happily fly over there just to give her a hug but really don't want to risk spreading the virus and rendering the whole thing moot - most of the nursing homes (not quite the same thing I know) in my hometown are already post-apocalyptic wastelands and I'd rather not be responsible for my mum's gaff becoming the next one. International travel, especially to places like the UK and USA, just seems like a totally irresponsible risk in 99% of cases.

[Fishnut]

I just watched Charlie Brooker's Antiviral Wipe (highly recommended) and it did a fantastic job of reminding me of how absolutely f.cking useless the UK government has been at responding to this pandemic. While other countries were locking down and closing their borders our Prime Minister was going around shaking hands with as many people as possible, including coronavirus patients and generally acting like it's no big deal. We're going to be dealing with the consequences of that lackadaisical approach for years.

[Grumble]

What a surprise, the R rate is nearly at 1 after just a few-days of the ill-advised easing of the lockdown.

Considering they said it was at 0.9 in places, I wonder what the error bars on that figure were?

[Woodchopper]

Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals

Epitope pools detect CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in 100 and 70% of convalescent COVID patients
•
T cell responses are focused not only on spike but also on M, N and other ORFs
•
T cell reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 epitopes is also detected in non-exposed individuals

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S009 ... 20)30610-3

[Woodchopper]

"For christ-sake someone get Simon Jenkins enrolled in a basic statistics course before he dips his toe into anything sciencey again" #43 in an occasional series.

Tl;dr. Sweden and the UK originally didn't lockdown, Norway and Denmark did. Partially-locked down Sweden has had 10-times the deaths of it's comparable completely-locked down neighbours but only 70% of the deaths of the partially-locked down UK, it is almost as if one is a vast sparsely-populated backwater and the other is one of the densest-populated and most globalised places on Earth. Therefore the Swedes (and incidentally myself) were right.

The other thing about Sweden is it’s partial lockdown started earlier than in Britain. People wanting a ‘Swedish strategy’ tend to neglect the part which would have required that Boris Johnson took it seriously in February.

[dyqik]

This report suggests that there's some f.cking bad science going on from people who should know better.

JetBlue’s Founder Helped Fund A Stanford Study That Said The Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly
A Stanford whistleblower complaint alleges that the controversial John Ioannidis study failed to disclose important financial ties and ignored scientists’ concerns that their antibody test was inaccurate.

[sTeamTraen]

"For christ-sake someone get Simon Jenkins enrolled in a basic statistics course before he dips his toe into anything sciencey again" #43 in an occasional series.

Tl;dr. Sweden and the UK originally didn't lockdown, Norway and Denmark did. Partially-locked down Sweden has had 10-times the deaths of it's comparable completely-locked down neighbours but only 70% of the deaths of the partially-locked down UK, it is almost as if one is a vast sparsely-populated backwater and the other is one of the densest-populated and most globalised places on Earth. Therefore the Swedes (and incidentally myself) were right.

Quite a large number of people seem to imagine that the number of physical interactions and other opportunities for infection that people have with others in any given day is a near-linear function of the national population density, as if everyone in the UK walks around 2 metres from each other and everyone in Sweden has a nice save 50 metres between individuals. In practice I suspect that a commuter on the Stockholm metro at rush hour gets a lot more virus particles in their face than someone on a bus in Newark.

[Woodchopper]

This report suggests that there's some f.cking bad science going on from people who should know better.

JetBlue’s Founder Helped Fund A Stanford Study That Said The Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly
A Stanford whistleblower complaint alleges that the controversial John Ioannidis study failed to disclose important financial ties and ignored scientists’ concerns that their antibody test was inaccurate.

It gets worse:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/st ... arya-email