Corona Virus: How Are We Doing?

[Andy in Germany]

Schools are reopening here, if slowly. Middle Son is in the penultimate year before exams so he's going to lessons again from today. Younger Son is still at home, which is unfortunate because he really needs the routine at the moment.

 

[marinyork]

I have heard lots of people reporting similar, but I wonder if that was a different illness. If COVID-19 was circulating widely in January, why was there no spike in acute cases and excess deaths? We are all being so vigilant that run-of-the-mill winter colds or even hay fever become candidates. I’m not a medical doctor, just asking in the hope someone may have answers.

The only pointers in that direction seem to be a genetic study in Iceland that pointed out that bits of the population acquired it originally from people from the UK and Germany. There's the nursing home aspect, was it circulating in low numbers in nursing homes in Jan/Feb just like say Washington State?

We now know the first death in the UK wasn't the first death and there had been a week earlier and a few more.

We may find out in 3-4 month's time when some people are likely to have taken a kit or a full serology test.

My father has colds, infections and vague covid-19 type and does so throughout the winter. He's had 3x the last ten weeks and none are the virus (including the current infection). He's never had the virus though and I know so because he's had 2 serology tests and 3 nose jobbies.

 

[fossyant]

Yes that has come out of a Spanish report.

Like many of us you are wondering if you’ve had it in mild form. Many are in this position but lack of testing means we don’t currently know.

Roche may have an antibody test very soon. I came down bad in mid December - bad enough for the Doc to send me for lung xrays as I was struggling to breath and stats were around 92-94 for a few days.

Now we have an office in Wuhan, so chances are some staff could have brought something back, but I won't know until I can buy a test. We had quite a few staff off around that time, but it could also have been seasonal bugs. I'd had 'flu' in October, and this was different.

 

[marinyork]

Roche may have an antibody test very soon. I came down bad in mid December - bad enough for the Doc to send me for lung xrays as I was struggling to breath and stats were around 92-94 for a few days.

Now we have an office in Wuhan, so chances are some staff could have brought something back, but I won't know until I can buy a test. We had quite a few staff off around that time, but it could also have been seasonal bugs. I'd had 'flu' in October, and this was different.

It definitely exists already. Roche already has a reliable antibody test. It needs to run in a lab though. I think the media calling it a test kit is highly unhelpful though. There may well be a few tens to hundreds of thousands of these given to people in the UK in the next 3-4 months depending on what the UK can get hold of, but it'll be dished out by the government most likely. Be interesting if other companies can get hold of them and flog them though, where do you buy in the lab capacity to send it back to if you're selling them?

 

[glasgowcyclist]

Had she been eating bats in China to have caught it last year?

There is a claim from a French doctor that samples from a patient who presented with respiratory symptoms in December 2019 tested positive for Covid19, so it may have been around (in the West) far earlier than previously believed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52524001

"... an intensive care chief in the Paris region has told local media that the virus was present in France on 27 December - a month before the first cases were confirmed.​

​

Yves Cohen told broadcaster BFMTV that his team had revisited negative tests for flu and other coronaviruses on 24 patients who had been in hospital with respiratory symptoms in December and January.​

​

"Of the 24 patients, we had one positive result for Covid-19 on 27 December when he was in hospital with us," he said, adding that the test had been repeated several times to confirm the result.​

​

Dr Cohen said he had reported the case to the regional health authorities and called for other negative tests from the same period to be re-examined."​

 

[snorri]

Bored with the monotony of lockdown?
Why not take a trip through a trainwash?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbS0NHIKvJE

 

[Andy in Germany]

Masks are now mandatory in shops, public transport, banks and government offices etc here. I handed over my ID card twice yesterday, once to register my address, and once when asking about my account.
Obviously my ID has my photo on it, but they never asked me to remove my mask for a second or two to check that what was underneath was the same. I wonder how long that will last?
As an aside, it means we are all now walking into banks with our faces covered, which feels very weird.

 

[newfhouse]

As an aside, it means we are all now walking into banks with our faces covered, which feels very weird.

It’s amusing to see some of the people who claimed that Muslim women with covered faces were a security risk are now vocally in favour of compulsory masks.

 

[glasgowcyclist]

Masks are now mandatory in shops,

They’re also mandatory in shops in Michigan where, sadly, a security guard was shot dead for refusing entry to a woman who wasn’t wearing one. It wasn’t even a heat of the moment thing, the family left then returned to murder the guard, shooting him in the back of the head. There are some pretty farked up people in this world.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52540266

 

[winjim]

It definitely exists already. Roche already has a reliable antibody test. It needs to run in a lab though. I think the media calling it a test kit is highly unhelpful though. There may well be a few tens to hundreds of thousands of these given to people in the UK in the next 3-4 months depending on what the UK can get hold of, but it'll be dished out by the government most likely. Be interesting if other companies can get hold of them and flog them though, where do you buy in the lab capacity to send it back to if you're selling them?

You send it to any accredited clinical laboratory with a suitable Roche immunoanalyser and which is willing to verify the assay, which could include NHS laboratories. Non essential work has been scaled right back so labs are actually pretty quiet just now.

But all the major manufacturers will be working on their own Ab tests. I know at least one other company claims to have one ready to go. As for 'reliable', I don't know about that, have Roche published any data on diagnostic sensitivity and specificity?

Edit: I just looked it up and they're claiming 100% sensitivity and >99.8% specificity.

 

[cookiemonster]

Schools re-opening slowly from the end of this month. with Primary 1-3 (who I teach) back on 15/06.

Gyms re-opening from Friday!

 

[IaninSheffield]

Source: https://xkcd.com/2302/

Wonder what a UK-centric version might look like? 🤔

 

[marinyork]

Edit: I just looked it up and they're claiming 100% sensitivity and >99.8% specificity.

Minimum to be accepted by the MHRA is 98% for both. Given the arguments that are looming about health and safety at work and the government weren't exactly forthcoming on telling the truth on the best available actual test kit as opposed to a lab kit, to me they're clearly waiting to use it for health workers returning to work and wait to beat down the prevalence score (see below). These are nice things to do, but we're still in the dark about the percentage of the population that's had it and it doesn't help the huge number of care and health workers that have died or suffered very bad symptoms.

The FDA approved it. If you believe that as studies in New York City have said that 25% of the city population have had covid-19, that's a very different tool for passports/assessing risk for say Germany which the Bonn study reckoned 2% of the German population had had it.

 

[PaulB]

 

[Andy in Germany]

The french-German border is currently largely closed at the moment. Yesterday I was cycling through Breisach, which is right on the German side of the Rhine, and saw these, up high on the old fortress where they can be read from France:

(L) FRiendship and (R) "Togehter we are strong" in German and French.