COVID-19

Discussions about serious topics, for serious people
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monkey
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Re: COVID-19

Post by monkey » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:09 pm

jimbob wrote:
Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:14 pm
Snip
Thanks! That inconsistency I saw doesn't seem to be there in your posting. I was just wondering if the deaths have started rising too, and if something similar to the US was going on, where the deaths per case is lower for the current wave. I know there's several reasons this could be, better treatment, different testing criteria, and whatnot, I was just curious if the same thing was happening back home. You've given me more than enough to answer my question.

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Woodchopper
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:19 am

Great big UK survey shows that only 18% of people with COVID symptoms self-isolate, only 12% request a test and only 11% quarantine if contacted by test and trace.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf

No big changes over time, so there doesn't appear to be a Cummings effect. Actual behaviour is far below what people stated they intended to do. So the problem isn't due to a widespread lack of knowledge.

Main reasons appear to be financial constraints and caring responsibilities.

Much more in the discussion section of the paper.

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Trinucleus
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Trinucleus » Fri Sep 25, 2020 8:33 pm

You can't visit people in Leeds.


So not all bad then

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Gfamily
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Gfamily » Fri Sep 25, 2020 10:25 pm

From Mark Steele's indy column on Thursday...
about the PM's broadcast
Then came a heart-warming moment, when he said: “While the vast majority have complied with the rules, there have been TOO MANY BREACHES.” This was a record-breaking sentence in British history, causing the greatest number of people ever to say one person’s name at once. From the crofts of Shetland to the tower blocks of east London, the entire country shouted: “Oh, like Dominic Cummings.” It was a touching moment that brought us together as a nation.
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Meta? I'd say so!

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discovolante
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Re: COVID-19

Post by discovolante » Sat Sep 26, 2020 8:24 pm

I've moved a couple of my own posts and a reply to the Covid support thread, just because it seemed more appropriate than this one as this thread is more sciencey. In case anyone was wondering where they'd gone.
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Bird on a Fire
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat Sep 26, 2020 9:22 pm

discovolante wrote:
Sat Sep 26, 2020 8:24 pm
I've moved a couple of my own posts and a reply to the Covid support thread, just because it seemed more appropriate than this one as this thread is more sciencey. In case anyone was wondering where they'd gone.
Ah is that what happened? I thought I was going nuts.
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Little waster
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Little waster » Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:38 pm

Well this is fun, Mrs Waster is a MH nurse working in dementia.

All her consultants have been self-isolating since the first lockdown but the nurses have been compelled to maintain clinics and perform home visits through-out with limited PPE at the outset. With the second wave looking to top the first in the NE the order has been given to carry-on as normal. Just to underscore, the client base are predominately elderly people, living with other elderly people with a host of co-morbidities.

Thursday: Flu jabs, her team feel a bit fluey for the next few days.

Friday: she shared an office all day with her boss, socially distanced but no mask and closed door.

Saturday: her boss tested positive.

Sunday: the rest of the team carried on with their lives oblivious

Monday: the rest of the team was finally informed of the positive test; no you won't be tested, no you shouldn't self-isolate , no you can't cancel your face-to-face assessments. A disgruntled team carried out their visits and assessments including two for Mrs Waster.

Tuesday: she woke up headachey and achey but no cough no temperature so she was told to go in and perform another lengthy home visit with an elderly couple. By lunchtime she was running a temperature and had lost her sense of taste so she's finally going to get tested with the instruction to self-isolate for 3 days until the results are known having possibly spent the best part of a week spreading whatever she's got.

f.ck knows what the logic behind any of that was. Had she been sat next to her boss in a pub rather than a clinic they'd have probably told her to self-isolate and get tested from the Saturday but because she's front-line she's expected to go in and out of vulnerable peoples homes regardless.

Fingers crossed its just a reaction to the jab. :|
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discovolante
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Re: COVID-19

Post by discovolante » Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:50 pm

Little waster wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:38 pm
Well this is fun, Mrs Waster is a MH nurse working in dementia.

All her consultants have been self-isolating since the first lockdown but the nurses have been compelled to maintain clinics and perform home visits through-out with limited PPE at the outset. With the second wave looking to top the first in the NE the order has been given to carry-on as normal. Just to underscore, the client base are predominately elderly people, living with other elderly people with a host of co-morbidities.

Thursday: Flu jabs, her team feel a bit fluey for the next few days.

Friday: she shared an office all day with her boss, socially distanced but no mask and closed door.

Saturday: her boss tested positive.

Sunday: the rest of the team carried on with their lives oblivious

Monday: the rest of the team was finally informed of the positive test; no you won't be tested, no you shouldn't self-isolate , no you can't cancel your face-to-face assessments. A disgruntled team carried out their visits and assessments including two for Mrs Waster.

Tuesday: she woke up headachey and achey but no cough no temperature so she was told to go in and perform another lengthy home visit with an elderly couple. By lunchtime she was running a temperature and had lost her sense of taste so she's finally going to get tested with the instruction to self-isolate for 3 days until the results are known having possibly spent the best part of a week spreading whatever she's got.

f.ck knows what the logic behind any of that was. Had she been sat next to her boss in a pub rather than a clinic they'd have probably told her to self-isolate and get tested from the Saturday but because she's front-line she's expected to go in and out of vulnerable peoples homes regardless.

Fingers crossed its just a reaction to the jab. :|
WTAF

That's 'call a journalist' territory if she was so inclined (not saying she should)...I'm sure she is not alone.
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Little waster
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Little waster » Tue Sep 29, 2020 1:45 pm

discovolante wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:50 pm
Little waster wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:38 pm
Well this is fun, Mrs Waster is a MH nurse working in dementia.

All her consultants have been self-isolating since the first lockdown but the nurses have been compelled to maintain clinics and perform home visits through-out with limited PPE at the outset. With the second wave looking to top the first in the NE the order has been given to carry-on as normal. Just to underscore, the client base are predominately elderly people, living with other elderly people with a host of co-morbidities.

Thursday: Flu jabs, her team feel a bit fluey for the next few days.

Friday: she shared an office all day with her boss, socially distanced but no mask and closed door.

Saturday: her boss tested positive.

Sunday: the rest of the team carried on with their lives oblivious

Monday: the rest of the team was finally informed of the positive test; no you won't be tested, no you shouldn't self-isolate , no you can't cancel your face-to-face assessments. A disgruntled team carried out their visits and assessments including two for Mrs Waster.

Tuesday: she woke up headachey and achey but no cough no temperature so she was told to go in and perform another lengthy home visit with an elderly couple. By lunchtime she was running a temperature and had lost her sense of taste so she's finally going to get tested with the instruction to self-isolate for 3 days until the results are known having possibly spent the best part of a week spreading whatever she's got.

f.ck knows what the logic behind any of that was. Had she been sat next to her boss in a pub rather than a clinic they'd have probably told her to self-isolate and get tested from the Saturday but because she's front-line she's expected to go in and out of vulnerable peoples homes regardless.

Fingers crossed its just a reaction to the jab. :|
WTAF

That's 'call a journalist' territory if she was so inclined (not saying she should)...I'm sure she is not alone.
It's getting to the point that I can't even remember whether those actions are within the guidelines, to the guidelines or against the guidelines. :?

As I'm sure SAGE's behaviourists have expounded on at great length, when managing a crisis at the societal level it is vital that you maintain no message clarity and instead bombard the public with a daily blizzard of ever-changing and contradictory advice, with a slew of sub-clause exceptions and a kaleidoscope of "coulds to shoulds to musts" tweaks while the country's leadership pointedly and publicly break their own rules without the slightest hint of contrition.
This place is not a place of honor, no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
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Fishnut
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Fishnut » Tue Sep 29, 2020 2:36 pm

Little waster wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:38 pm
Well this is fun, Mrs Waster is a MH nurse working in dementia.

All her consultants have been self-isolating since the first lockdown but the nurses have been compelled to maintain clinics and perform home visits through-out with limited PPE at the outset. With the second wave looking to top the first in the NE the order has been given to carry-on as normal. Just to underscore, the client base are predominately elderly people, living with other elderly people with a host of co-morbidities.

Thursday: Flu jabs, her team feel a bit fluey for the next few days.

Friday: she shared an office all day with her boss, socially distanced but no mask and closed door.

Saturday: her boss tested positive.

Sunday: the rest of the team carried on with their lives oblivious

Monday: the rest of the team was finally informed of the positive test; no you won't be tested, no you shouldn't self-isolate , no you can't cancel your face-to-face assessments. A disgruntled team carried out their visits and assessments including two for Mrs Waster.

Tuesday: she woke up headachey and achey but no cough no temperature so she was told to go in and perform another lengthy home visit with an elderly couple. By lunchtime she was running a temperature and had lost her sense of taste so she's finally going to get tested with the instruction to self-isolate for 3 days until the results are known having possibly spent the best part of a week spreading whatever she's got.

f.ck knows what the logic behind any of that was. Had she been sat next to her boss in a pub rather than a clinic they'd have probably told her to self-isolate and get tested from the Saturday but because she's front-line she's expected to go in and out of vulnerable peoples homes regardless.

Fingers crossed its just a reaction to the jab. :|
f.cking hell, that's horrifying. I can't help but link it with the recent post from Woodchopper
Woodchopper wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 9:19 am
Great big UK survey shows that only 18% of people with COVID symptoms self-isolate, only 12% request a test and only 11% quarantine if contacted by test and trace.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.full.pdf

No big changes over time, so there doesn't appear to be a Cummings effect. Actual behaviour is far below what people stated they intended to do. So the problem isn't due to a widespread lack of knowledge.

Main reasons appear to be financial constraints and caring responsibilities.

Much more in the discussion section of the paper. [my emphasis]
It seems that most people know what they should be doing and don't flout the rules because they cba but because they have to. There's little incentive to self-isolate and many incentives to carry on as normal, not helped by companies and bosses who still haven't seemed to grasp the idea that not letting your staff get sick is better for everyone.
it's okay to say "I don't know"

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Little waster
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Little waster » Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:40 pm

Test came back negative which is good, she's still sick as a dog like.

Meanwhile another of her colleagues has come back positive and a further three are off with the same "generic viral infection" symptoms as Mrs Waster and at the other end of the country my CEO is in the same boat; bed-ridden with "something" but tested negative for COVID.

There's clearly something more trivial (hopefully) doing the rounds which is going to make it even more of a bugger to spot the genuine COVID-symptomatic and COVID-asymptomatic from the "Fresher's flu" symptomatic . :|
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What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

FlammableFlower
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Re: COVID-19

Post by FlammableFlower » Thu Oct 01, 2020 6:58 am

It's one of the reasons why we've taken COVID so seriously. MrsFF has pretty bad asthma and so respiratory illnesses really floor her. As mentioned in the sorry support thread we've all had a random virus that had very similar initial symptoms to COVID but then all the nose running and coughing up crap began. I'm just about shifting it, but for MrsFF it's gone onto her chest and she's back in bed. End of last year she had pneumonia twice.

I dread to think what the outcome would be with COVID.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by PeteB » Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:48 am


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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Thu Oct 01, 2020 8:27 am

Yep. Many of these things have been truly terrible. There was the one that claimed cases had halved when confirmed actuals had doubled, another had claimed for weeks that R=1 when cases were rising week after week.

In this case it's perfectly obvious R was never 1.7, nationally.

R=1.7 corresponds to approx 10% growth per day, a doubling in about 7 days. R=1.3 corresponds to approx 5% per day, around 1.4x in a week, doubling in about 14 days.

James Annan's twitter has a very simple chart that plots each day's cases as a multiple of the number a week previously. If cases were doubling every week, then the plots would be clustering around the 2.0x mark. If cases were static at R=1 then they would be cluster at 1.0x.

A brief eyeballing of the chart shows each day tends to average at 1.4x the previous week's figure, with the usual statistical noise around this. Most noticeably, it never reached the 2.0x level except for a single outlier. The coloured lines show it's never diverged from the 1.4x per week, 5% per day, approx R=1.3.

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sTeamTraen
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sTeamTraen » Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:15 pm

lpm wrote:
Thu Oct 01, 2020 8:27 am
R=1.7 corresponds to approx 10% growth per day, a doubling in about 7 days. R=1.3 corresponds to approx 5% per day, around 1.4x in a week, doubling in about 14 days.
How do you get from R to a doubling number? My understanding of R is it's the number of people that I (once infected) go on to infect in total; I'm not aware of it having any time units. Person A might be infectious for 3 days and pass the virus on to 20 people in a bar; person B might be infectious for a fortnight and only infect the ambulance driver whom I coughed on. Their mean R is 10.5.

Some people seem to be calculating a sort-of-R number by taking the logarithm of the doubling rate, but that's going to be lower than the real R because it's measured in (tested and confirmed) cases, not infections. I read somewhere that the weekly update of the R number in Scotland requires hours of CPU time on some very complex models.
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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:27 pm

It was from a table somewhere. Based on the infection timings of the particular virus? A general estimate should be sufficient because the R isn't used for anything, and the % increase per day or per week is readily available.

The above assumes the radio of Actual to Confirmed remains constant. Improvements or worsening in a nation's testing regime should be included in a proper model.
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sTeamTraen
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sTeamTraen » Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:37 pm

Something something hammer something something nail

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jimbob
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Re: COVID-19

Post by jimbob » Thu Oct 01, 2020 3:50 pm

sTeamTraen wrote:
Thu Oct 01, 2020 2:37 pm
I done a viral.
Nice. And it's not just the chance of dying.

To riff on one of your metaphors,
Think about 1,000 people accepting this deal. They're gathered in a room. They step up to the stage, one by one. They take the envelope and roll the dice. 995 people get cheered. 5 get led away. A muffled shot can be heard from behind the curtain.
Followed by another 90 being selected to be injected with a poison that ruins their lung function, for example.
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Woodchopper
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Oct 01, 2020 4:33 pm

SARS-CoV-2 viral load peaks prior to symptom onset: a systematic review and individual-pooled analysis of coronavirus viral load from 66 studies
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 20202028v1

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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Thu Oct 01, 2020 4:34 pm

Hmm.

There's a sizeable minority who are reckless with their lives and health. The immortality fallacy of the young, etc

If 1% of the population ride motorbikes, you'd easily find 1% who'd take the gamble. Ride motorbikes for 10 years and you're about at that 99.5% risk level. Some would risk 1/200 in return for the chance to go nightclubbing. Even on this forum there is a shocking number of people who do/have smoked, knowingly trashing their lungs. Go to Torremolinos right now to see sunburned obese diabetics smoking on sunbeds while getting steadily drunk having flown in on a Easyjet Covid flight.

People don't take as much of their own health as they should, and we on this forum are particularly prone to making excuses for them, with that Orwell carrots bollocks and handwringing over the evils of capitalism. 99.5% of people survive is an attractive slogan for those who'd take that for the pleasures of a return to normality.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Hunting Dog » Thu Oct 01, 2020 5:04 pm

I'm not sure how well the comparisons given work to persuade people to change their behaviour, as it also needs to factor in what they think their chance of getting/spreading the virus is. If you could show that 100% of people going to a certain nightclub would end up with Covid-19, and only 99.5% of them would survive I'm sure that would be a deterrent. But if they're assuming they've only got a 1 in thousands chance of getting it in the first place, then the further odds of ending up in the 0.5% may not seem as worrying.


(But still, anyone saying 'x' is nothing to worry about as only 0.5% of people affected die is a sociopathic a..eh.le, and the example comparisons are good for pointing that out)

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Woodchopper
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Fri Oct 02, 2020 8:57 am

SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein co-opts VEGF-A/Neuropilin-1 receptor signaling to induce analgesia
https://pdfs.journals.lww.com/pain/9000 ... .98244.pdf

Video here on how the virus relieves pain: https://vimeo.com/462006388

This explains why people done experience symptoms when they are shedding vast quantities of the virus.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by raven » Fri Oct 02, 2020 1:13 pm

Expert reaction from Science Media Centre to that REACT data.

tl;dr version:
1. It's an interim report, 9 days through the latest (5th) round of swabbing, so not all the data is in.
2. Estimate of R is 0.74 to 1.46, with 63% probability R>1.
3. Most notable result is the jump in prevalance to about 1 in 200 in the general population, and a very worrying 7-fold increase in prevalance in over 65yr olds.

Cool fact: my mum will be part of this data. She just casually mentioned she had to get up early one morning this week to do a swab for an 8am courier to pick up.

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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Sat Oct 03, 2020 7:52 pm

No UK stats today?
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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Sat Oct 03, 2020 7:59 pm

12,872.

Delayed because of a f.ck up - under counted previous days.
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