Wuhan Flu Truth and Big Brother Narratives

[robinson]

And he thinks he is the voice of reason

[Anaxagoras]

Asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is 'very rare,' WHO says

Coronavirus patients without symptoms aren't driving the spread of the virus, World Health Organization officials said Monday, casting doubt on concerns by some researchers that the disease could be difficult to contain due to asymptomatic infections.

Some people, particularly young and otherwise healthy individuals, who are infected by the coronavirus never develop symptoms or only develop mild symptoms. Others might not develop symptoms until days after they were actually infected.

Preliminary evidence from the earliest outbreaks indicated that the virus could spread from person-to-person contact, even if the carrier didn't have symptoms. But WHO officials now say that while asymptomatic spread can occur, it is not the main way it's being transmitted.

"From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual," Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO's emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency's Geneva headquarters. "It's very rare."

This would seem to an additional reason for reopening the economy? (With precautions to keep people with symptoms isolated, of course.)

Anyway, I think we've passed the point where the benefits of shutting down the economy outweigh the damage it is causing.

[Anaxagoras]

I'm a little suspicious of this one:

Coronavirus: Lockdowns in Europe saved millions of lives

Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates.

The team at Imperial College London said the "death toll would have been huge" without lockdown.

But they warned that only a small proportion of people had been infected and we were still only "at the beginning of the pandemic".

The researchers used disease modelling to predict how many deaths there would have been if lockdown had not happened. And the work comes from the same group that guided the UK's decision to go into lockdown.

They estimated 3.2 million people would have died by 4 May if not for measures such as closing businesses and telling people to stay at home.

That meant lockdown saved around 3.1 million lives, including 470,000 in the UK, 690,000 in France and 630,000 in Italy, the report in the journal Nature shows.

"Lockdown averted millions of deaths, those deaths would have been a tragedy," said Dr Seth Flaxman, from Imperial.

In essence, they seem to be crediting their models with having saved millions of lives in Europe alone, based on what their models say would have been the outcome absent lockdowns.

[Doctor X]

Yeah.

Ironically, this is a subject ripe for a skeptic board.

– J.D.

[The Atheist]

In essence, they seem to be crediting their models with having saved millions of lives in Europe alone, based on what their models say would have been the outcome absent lockdowns.

I meant to say in the other thread on the subject of bad modelling.

NZ operated on models showing 80,000 deaths this year from Covid. That would require an infection rate of 70% of the population, with a mortality rate of 2.25%, which is plain bullshit. As far as I'm aware, the Ministry of Health is still using that model.

[gnome]

I'm a little suspicious of this one:

Coronavirus: Lockdowns in Europe saved millions of lives

Lockdowns have saved more than three million lives from coronavirus in Europe, a study estimates.

The team at Imperial College London said the "death toll would have been huge" without lockdown.

But they warned that only a small proportion of people had been infected and we were still only "at the beginning of the pandemic".

The researchers used disease modelling to predict how many deaths there would have been if lockdown had not happened. And the work comes from the same group that guided the UK's decision to go into lockdown.

They estimated 3.2 million people would have died by 4 May if not for measures such as closing businesses and telling people to stay at home.

That meant lockdown saved around 3.1 million lives, including 470,000 in the UK, 690,000 in France and 630,000 in Italy, the report in the journal Nature shows.

"Lockdown averted millions of deaths, those deaths would have been a tragedy," said Dr Seth Flaxman, from Imperial.

In essence, they seem to be crediting their models with having saved millions of lives in Europe alone, based on what their models say would have been the outcome absent lockdowns.

Far too many things are unknown to put numbers to it. Even initial conditions are quite a bit ambiguous.

[Pyrrho]

https://www.abc15.com/news/state/adhs-d ... gency-plan

The Arizona Department of Health Services director sent out a letter this weekend, informing hospitals in our state to "fully activate" their facility emergency plans.

In doing so, the hospitals are going to be preparing surge beds, cross-training staff, and possibly reducing or suspending elective surgeries to "ensure adequate bed capacity for both COVID and non-COVID admissions."

The Saturday letter states the hospitals need to identify additional ICU and inpatient beds to meet the 50 percent additional bed increase.

The state's hospitals now must determine whether or not to move their facilities from conventional care to contingency care, and also prepare for crisis care.

The letter was dated the same day that ADHS director Dr. Cara Christ told ABC15 that her department's staff had made errors and reported incorrect hospitalization numbers since April on the Arizona Department of Health Services coronavirus dashboard.

[Doctor X]

Awesome.

Get that barn door while you are at it.

– J.D.

[robinson]

The Arizona Department of Health Services director sent out a letter this weekend, informing hospitals in our state to "fully activate" their facility emergency plans.

Why the fuck, and how the fuck, does some single entity control all of a sates hospitals? This is fucking central planning. This is communism

[sparks]

You want legislators to take a fucking vote?

[Surprise]

In essence, they seem to be crediting their models with having saved millions of lives in Europe alone, based on what their models say would have been the outcome absent lockdowns.

I meant to say in the other thread on the subject of bad modelling.

NZ operated on models showing 80,000 deaths this year from Covid. That would require an infection rate of 70% of the population, with a mortality rate of 2.25%, which is plain bullshit. As far as I'm aware, the Ministry of Health is still using that model.

Those figures are meaningless, without more information on what they actually came up with in full. Worst case scenario, overloaded hospital system, error spread? That model will be a lot more complex in how it works than just spitting out three numbers.

[robinson]

[The Atheist]

I bet a mate yesterday that you'd be posting that story.

Thanks! You just won me $10.

[robinson]

You promised me 20%

[Pyrrho]

Link: https://twitter.com/whmullally/status/1271109120997933058

Link: https://twitter.com/whmullally/status/1271109221975838720

[Pyrrho]

Press release. About to enter Phase 3 vaccine trials for COVID-19.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/ ... 3-COVID-19

Article "pre-print" about vaccine development.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 1.145920v1

[Pyrrho]

[Anaxagoras]

Widespread mask-wearing could prevent COVID-19 second waves: study

LONDON (Reuters) - Population-wide face mask use could push COVID-19 transmission down to controllable levels for national epidemics, and could prevent further waves of the pandemic disease when combined with lockdowns, according to a British study on Wednesday.

The research, led by scientists at the Britain’s Cambridge and Greenwich Universities, suggests lockdowns alone will not stop the resurgence of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but that even homemade masks can dramatically reduce transmission rates if enough people wear them in public.

“Our analyses support the immediate and universal adoption of face masks by the public,” said Richard Stutt, who co-led the study at Cambridge.

He said combining widespread mask use with social distancing and some lockdown measures, could be “an acceptable way of managing the pandemic and re-opening economic activity” before the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.

In this study, researchers linked the dynamics of spread between people with population-level models to assess the effect on the disease’s reproduction rate, or R value, of different scenarios of mask adoption combined with periods of lockdown.

The R value measures the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to. An R value above 1 can lead to exponential growth.

The study found that if people wear masks whenever they are in public it is twice as effective at reducing the R value than if masks are only worn after symptoms appear.

In all scenarios the study looked at, routine face mask use by 50% or more of the population reduced COVID-19 spread to an R of less than 1.0, flattening future disease waves and allowing for less stringent lockdowns.

Just think if the WHO hadn't spent months discouraging mask use.

[robinson]

I fucking hate wearing a mask.

[Anaxagoras]

I don't like it either, but I think it beats having a bad case of the Wuhan flu.

[robinson]

Yep

[Anaxagoras]

There's an idea being discussed called "cross-immunity". The idea here is that maybe prior exposure to, for example, a different kind of coronavirus might confer some resistance to this version. Does this seem plausible?

Experts suspect cross immunity explains Japan's low coronavirus death rate

TOKYO -- Some experts say cross immunity is the reason for the low death rate among novel coronavirus patients in Japan and other parts of Asia compared to that in Europe and North America.

When viruses that an individual has never been infected with enter the human body, the body makes antibodies, or proteins that combat the foreign substances. The first antibody to appear is Immunoglobulin M (IgM), while Immunoglobulin G (IgG) is produced later. While IgM antibodies disappear fairly quickly, IgG antibodies remain for a prolonged period and continue to protect the body from the same viruses.

When a team of researchers including Tatsuhiko Kodama, leader of the cancer metabolism project at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, studied the blood samples of coronavirus patients, IgG antibodies had increased in volume faster than IgM antibodies for some.

Kodama says this proves such people have immunity, since they were infected with a virus similar to the novel coronavirus that may have spread across Asia before. "Cross immunity may have worked when those people got infected with the new coronavirus," he commented.

A team of researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in the United States has also pointed out that cross immunity may have worked for some people. According to a paper released by the American scientific journal Cell, researchers found immune cells that reacted to the new coronavirus from about a half of the blood samples collected from 20 people in the United States between 2015 and 2018.

Could differences in immune response, possibly because of prior exposure to different coronaviruses explain why some people get very sick, while others not so much, or not at all in some cases?

It reminds me of the story I heard a long time ago about how vaccines were invented. Someone observed that a person who had been infected with cow pox had some resistance or immunity to small pox. Cow pox was a milder disease than small pox. From that the idea was born that maybe you could give people immunity or resistance to small pox by first intentionally giving them cow pox. That would be a kind of "cross immunity" would it not? Exposure to one virus could thereby provide some immunity to another virus, no?

[Witness]

Could differences in immune response, possibly because of prior exposure to different coronaviruses explain why some people get very sick, while others not so much, or not at all in some cases?

Not about coronaviruses, but the idea isn't really new:

Edward Jenner (1749-1823), an English doctor, became interested in the idea that previous illness with a disease called cowpox could protect a person from later becoming ill with smallpox. Jenner's biographer claimed that Jenner heard this folk wisdom from a milkmaid: having caught cowpox from a cow, she believed herself, and her smooth skin, safe from smallpox.

Cowpox is an uncommon illness in cattle, usually mild, that can be spread from a cow to humans via sores on the cow. During an infection, dairy workers may have pustules on their hands. Sufferers can spread the infection to other parts of the body.

We know now that the cowpox virus belongs to the Orthopox family of viruses. Orthopox viruses also include horsepox virus, monkeypox virus and variola viruses, which cause smallpox.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/conte ... -infection

[Doctor X]

Well . . . yes.

– J.D.

[robinson]

The term vaccine derives from the Latin word for cow

[The Atheist]

But, what about hydroxychloroquine??!!??

FDA withdraws emergency approval.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5 ... hloroquine

[Pyrrho]

Link: https://twitter.com/bkailkhu/status/1272619636710752256

[Pyrrho]

Link: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1272899557467271169

[sparks]

That cat is the spitting image of my 20 pounder Max when he was that age. Fucking amazing. Been well over a year and I still miss the little shit.

[Anaxagoras]

They are doing some testing in Japan for antibodies. Looks like herd immunity still remains a long way off, but whatever measures are being taken to contain the spread seem to be working..

Tokyo has 0.1% positive rate for coronavirus antibodies: gov't

Antibody tests for the novel coronavirus suggest a 0.1 percent infection rate in Tokyo, health minister Katsunobu Kato said Tuesday, as the government seeks to better grasp the scale of the pandemic's spread in Japan.

The health ministry earlier this month began testing for coronavirus antibodies in Tokyo as well as in Osaka and Miyagi prefectures. The positive rates for Osaka and Miyagi in the country's west and northeast were 0.17 percent and 0.03 percent, respectively.

Samples were collected from a total of about 8,000 people in the three regions. The presence of antibodies indicates a person has been infected with the virus, regardless of whether the person developed symptoms.

The results show only a very limited spread of the virus and, while different testing kits can yield different results, they compare with positive rates of some 20 percent detected in antibody tests in New York City and 5 percent in Spain.

But the figures are still notably higher than the 0.015 percent infection rate based on the 18,261 people confirmed to have caught the virus in Japan as of Monday out of the country's total population of roughly 125.9 million.

A rough estimate of course, but at face value it suggests there may have been something on the order of 7 times more cases than were captured in the official count of confirmed cases. But about 99.9% of the population has not had the virus yet.

[The Atheist]

twitter.com/angie_rasmussen

Worth noting that it wasn't a release by press, but a release by UK's Chief Medical Officer.

I pick it being sufficiently important factual news to be released as a general release than in a medical journal.

[Pyrrho]

SURE it does.

Link: https://twitter.com/TheNBACentral/status/1273667511788109829

[robinson]

Wouldn’t antibody testing be required if anyone does a vaccine trial?

[robinson]

I just recalled the HIV vaccine trial they were going to do back in the late 90s

Except they wanted to try it on chimps first, using a SIV vaccine (SIV being almost the exact same virus)

They had spent a lot of money getting enough chimps to do a big study. Before starting the experiment they tested all the chimps to make sure they didn’t have SIV

Turned out every chimp tested already had SIV

That was the last I heard of that study. Seems every chimp in captivity has SIV, which was interesting, considering how often and how many times in the old days medical people used chimps, baboons and monkeys to transplant organs into people

But that is another topic

[robinson]

And yeah, I already know about SV40 and how it got into the general human population

[Anaxagoras]

rt.live has updated their model as of June 19th, and it shows significantly higher rates of reproduction than the last time I looked at it.

https://rt.live/

Worth a look.

[Witness]

how often and how many times in the old days medical people used chimps, baboons and monkeys to transplant organs into people

Good question: how often? Do you have sources?

[robinson]

Mostly print, but most people remember the baby with the baboon heart

And the infamous chimp kidney transplant disaster

Well, OK probably only really old people like me

[robinson]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3246856/

[robinson]

I know

shocking considering how many problems we now know can happen from cross species virus transfers