If I understand Johnson's witterings it means 1 metre plus other measures such as mask wearing.shpalman wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:11 pm If you stay 1 metre from me plus I stay 1 metre from you that's 2 metres, right?
Well I assume that's what '1 metre plus' means.
The return of the bendy plastic straw!JQH wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:53 pmIf I understand Johnson's witterings it means 1 metre plus other measures such as mask wearing.shpalman wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:11 pm If you stay 1 metre from me plus I stay 1 metre from you that's 2 metres, right?
Well I assume that's what '1 metre plus' means.
I'm not clear how I drink a pint while wearing a mask.
People are, generally speaking, rubbish.gosling wrote: Tue Jun 23, 2020 2:56 pm If the rest of the country is anything like my corner of that there London, no-one seems to know what 2m looks like anyway. Usually get people standing a metre apart, if lucky. With the reduction to "1m plus", everyone will just be standing next to each other.
On my cycle ride to the supermarket yesterday - a large group of guys playing 5-a-side football, another large group of guys sitting close together on the narrow pavement outside a cafe, and my personal favourite sight: the guy at the pedestrian crossing who took his mask off so he could spit on the ground
People can spread the virus before they develop symptoms, and thus before they know they have the virus*. This is one reason it has spread so quickly. Where people get ill before they become really contagious, they tend to spread it less as they stay at home and go to bed where there are fewer people to infect instead of going about life as normal. There's debate about how much spread happens because of people who never get symptoms*, but spread by people before they get symptoms is a key detail in the spread of this disease.Zelot wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2020 8:19 am I have a simple Covid question, but I feel like I should know the answer. My understanding is that there are people who carry the virus but have no visible symptoms, is that right? Are they the super spreaders that could be unknowingly spreading the virus accidentally?
In theory I could be a carrier of the virus, but have no way of knowing unless I get tested, but I don't feel I need to be tested because I have no symptoms.
If this is the case, how many potential super spreaders are there?
Thanks for your help.
the Guardian wrote:China's military approves vaccine for use on its soldiers
China’s military has approved a coronavirus vaccine for use within its ranks that has been developed by its research unit and a biotech firm.
More than half of 17 candidate vaccines identified by the World Health Organization that are in clinical evaluation involve Chinese companies or institutes.
Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics said in a filing to the stock exchange that data from clinical trials showed the Chinese military vaccine had a “good safety profile” and potential to prevent disease caused by the coronavirus.
CanSino said China’s central military commission approved the use of the vaccine on 25 June for one year.
The vaccine was jointly developed by CanSino and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.
Its use cannot be expanded without further approvals, the listing said.
It was not clear how widely it would be used within China’s enormous military forces, and the ministry of defence did not reply to an AFP request for further information.
CanSino added that it cannot guarantee the vaccine – which had its phase one and two clinical trials done in China – will ultimately be commercialised. Another 131 candidate vaccines listed by the WHO are in the pre-clinical phase.
None have yet been approved for commercial use against the coronavirus.
According to medical journal the Lancet there have already been more than 1,000 clinical trials on dozens of pharmaceutical treatments for the virus but no totally effective medical intervention has been found.
• Failure to build up capacity to perform mass tests for COVID-19.
• Deciding on a narrower definition of COVID-19 than used by the World Health Organization and other countries.
• A decision to abandon testing of most people who didn't require hospitalization, and failure, early on, to create any way to track infection.
• A decision to abandon a programme of widespread “contact tracing,” in which people in contact with an infected person were traced and told to isolate to stop the outbreak spreading.
• Deciding to share almost no details about the location of infections with local public health officials or the public.
• Fragmenting local responsibility for public health.
“Every mistake that was made did, unfortunately, cost lives,” said Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London.
One case yesterday, four cases today.
I feel like he was in a bad mood when he wrote that.jimbob wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2020 7:42 pm Blog by Mikeh
https://medium.com/@michael.g.head/ther ... e3cfffdd95
They eventually got published. Pillar 2 data is now in the local totals* apparently but the national total has been revised down by about 30,000.shpalman wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2020 6:44 pmOne case yesterday, four cases today.
Meanwhile https://twitter.com/DHSCgovuk seems very late publishing today's numbers.
I thought SA had a good start to the pandemic (once the black market got going so people could at least get booze and fags). Did they drop the ball over time, or was it never as not-too-bad as they made out?JQH wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:54 am According to the in-laws it's getting pretty bad in South Africa. Doesn't help that conspiracy theories abound: Covid is caused by 5G etc
The worst of it is is that the government tried an early lockdown and was roundly ignored. You'd think the HIV epidemic would be a warning about what an incurable viral disease can do but it would appear not.
Sorry to hear that.JQH wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 8:45 pm A friend of MrsH's in South Africa has died of covid-19. She was 53.
Here's a link to the article: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30820-5.pdfFor months, scientists have debated whether a variant of the coronavirus that has come to predominate in much of the world did so partly because it is more transmissible than other viruses.
On Thursday, a team of researchers reported new evidence that is likely to deepen the debate rather than settle it, experts said; too many uncertainties remain, in a pandemic that changes shape by the day.
The new report, posted by the journal Cell and led by investigators at Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that the variant did have such an advantage. Other researchers said the findings were not yet definitive.
[...]
The underlying question is as important as ever, both for understanding the early phases of the pandemic and anticipating how it will progress in the coming months. If the genetic glitch that defines the variant, known as D614G, imparted even a slight increase in transmissibility, it would help explain why infections exploded in some regions and not in others with similar density and other attributes. Others experts argue that it is far more likely that the variation spread widely by chance, multiplying outward from explosive outbreaks in Europe.
Last month, virologists at Scripps Research, Florida, found that viruses with the D614G mutation were far more infectious than those without it, at least in cell culture. Those differences are necessary for higher transmission to occur in the real world, but hardly sufficient; there is no evidence that the D614G variant makes people sicker.
The new paper, led by Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist, presents evidence in the form of lab findings, tests of infected patients and a broad statistical analysis of the pandemic as the D614G variant repeatedly took over in cities, regions and countries. “The consistency of this pattern was highly statistically significant, suggesting that the D614G variant may have a fitness advantage,” the authors concluded.
In an interview, Dr. Korber said that the three lines of evidence “all support the idea this is quite likely to be a more transmissible virus” than other variants. She added: “It is the dominant virus in the world, it only took about a month for that to happen, and it’s now the one we should be looking at.”
The report also acknowledged that other alternate explanations were possible, including so-called founder effects — an advantage rooted in chance, and in the dynamics of transmission in regions where the variant first took off. Other research has found no evidence of increased transmissibility for D614G, and for many scientists the question remains an open one.
