Tripps wrote: ↑05 Jun 2020, 09:47
I don't think (from memory ) that he confused the two tests. He defined them quite clearly, and correctly.
He did at the beginning but then went on to use them incorrectly later in the interview.
Tripps wrote: ↑05 Jun 2020, 09:47
The time the tests are given in the infection cycle, and the possibility of false positives and negatives in both tests complicates matters.
Agreed. Again, these are issues that More or Less and Inside Science have been tackling every week. The politicians should listen to the programmes. On More or Less, Tim Harford has had great fun with Matt Hancock and his targets!
Nullius in verba: On the word of no one (Motto of the Royal Society)
PanBiker wrote: ↑05 Jun 2020, 08:59
If the government now admit that face masks are beneficial in helping to stop the spread of the virus why weren't they compulsory from March onwards? We might have a few less than 40,000 deaths if we had adopted what just abut every other country had done.
Because most of the research on masks has happened since then. Many scientists including me still think they have very little effect , having read most of the research articles.they have more effect in public transport than outside or shops because there is static long duration contact, this is the only beneficial effect. Masks with replaceable filters in are more effective than home made cotton masks. The mesh on the cotton allows viruses through rather lie a midge going through the hole of a football goal net. Double layers are better
, three layers better still but they really need the viral filter, normally forming the third layer
Last edited by Sue on 05 Jun 2020, 10:31, edited 2 times in total.
Many people doing most of the spreading will be those who would be most careless with a mask, i.e. those out partying and crowding together and ignoring social distancing. Even the best masks are only effective if they're used properly.
Nullius in verba: On the word of no one (Motto of the Royal Society)
Tizer wrote: ↑05 Jun 2020, 10:27
Many people doing most of the spreading will be those who would be most careless with a mask, i.e. those out partying and crowding together and ignoring social distancing. Even the best masks are only effective if they're used properly.
Agreed completely. I believe media pressure is once again the driving force in this case on the use of masks irrespective of evidence
As I understand it - masks have two modes. Transmit and Receive.
On the receive side against a virus (I love the flea through a goal net analogy) they are of no value.
On the transmit side they seem to have some value in stopping aerosol / droplet spread from infected people to others. Countries which used them clearly had less infections.
As in the difference between the two types of test, we need people to understand the difference. I'm sure most do not 'get it'.
Talking of blood tests, I have been asked by UK BIOANK of which I am a participant if I am willing to give a few drops of blood every month for 6 months to track and do research on COVID antibodies. Of course I have accepted .
20000 people will be selected based on post code, age and sex and I have to wait to see if I am one of the 20000
After the UK Government changed policy and recommended face 'coverings' on transport then in hospitals etc. Coverings was used deliberately to avoid a sudden demand for medical grade face Masks which would deprive the NHS of supplies.
Now tonight, - the WHO changed its policy, from saying masks should only be used by those who had symptoms , and care staff looking after Covid patients, and now said that over 60's should wear 'medical grade' masks in situations where distancing cannot be achieved.
So our requirement within just a few hours don't meet the requirements of the WHO, and medical grade masks will be hard to source, and expensive. With the R number on the rise again this is quite a mess.
**********************
Here's an account by racehorse trainer Mark Johnson who trains at Middleham in Yorkshire, and is also a qualified veterinary surgeon. i think it's worth reading. Make you think a bit. I saw him on TV today and he is a lot thinner.
If Shamardal hadn’t died on April 16, I might just have got away without the whole [racing] world knowing that I had contracted Covid-19. At that point, when journalists started calling and I started agreeing to take their calls, I was on day 9 of isolatio and day 12 since I first noted symptoms of respiratory disease. I was about to ‘turn the corner’. In fact, I think I just had. I took my last dose of paracetamol, specifically for the purpose of fever control, at 4.30am that morning, although I have still been taking it occasionally since then for lingering
joint and muscle pain.
Now, having read James Willoughby’s piece on Bayesian Inference (page 8), I am back to wondering whether I had it at all, although I did have fairly classical symptoms, as far
as we know them; I did test positive with a test that claims 95%+ accuracy; and I did, for the first time in my life, get vaccinated against influenza in November which, while far from foolproof, reduces the chances of my having had that, similar, disease.
Not having had it is my biggest concern at present as many learned commentators on the virus are suggesting that there will be a reasonable amount of immunity after first infection. If I haven’t had it, I am as likely as everyone else to get it and that is pretty likely, whether we like to admit it or not. And I really don’t want to go through that, or anything like it, again.
Temperature
So, for those who haven’t yet experienced this disease and are still lapping up the mountain of information (and misinformation – thank you Mr Trump!) on the subject, and particularly for the hypochondriacs who are counting their coughs and taking their temperature every morning, I’ll tell you what it was like for me.
On Saturday April 4 I started coughing. There was no doubt that it was a new cough and that it was reasonably persistent although, in my desperation to convince myself that I didn’t have the dreaded virus, I counted the coughs and managed to decide that it didn’t quite meet the
definition of ‘persistent’ which was circulating in the media. I took my temperature several times that day and it was hovering around the 38°C mark, one degree above normal.
Again, I managed to convince myself that this could not be Covid-19. I continued with what had become ‘business as usual’ for me although I, without making a point of it, extended my
social distancing. I avoided people altogether where I could and otherwise I tried to turn two metres into four metres. I continued with my afternoon exercise on my bike in the belief that fresh air would help and wondered if the exercise would help ‘blow it out’ of me as sometimes seems to be the case with horses which develop a chronic cough and don’t stop coughing until you eventually give up on all treatments and return them to fast work.
It didn’t help and, after cycling on the Tuesday afternoon, I was feeling pretty awful. I anaged to smash my old thermometer to bits, hitting it on my desk when trying to shake down the mercury as far as possible so that it couldn’t get back up further than I wanted it to go. I called our vet John Martin and asked him to drop in one of his smart digital ones that he uses for the horses. Preferably a new one
.
It registered 39.1°C and I was done with denial. I went off to bed and left Deirdre, Angus and Mikaelle to plan their isolation from me and the world outside. I then entered a nine-day cycle of fluctuating temperature and flu-like symptoms. I had pain in my back which would build to a peak along with my rising fever and I would start to shiver and feel cold. I took paracetamol – at first well beyond guidelines on the packet and then, when I realised the potentially serious side-effects of the amount I was taking, limited myself to the maximum recommended 24-
hour dose but, of course, for way beyond the recommended three days. Within 15-20 minutes the pain would subside and, within an hour, I would start to sweat to the point of saturating the bed but I would feel much better and could sleep for two to three hours. This was a four-times-a-day cycle (paracetamol every six hours) for more than a week. I would say that, for me, it was very much like the last time I had flu, but that only lasted three or four days. I was
certain, with the flu, that I was going to end up in hospital but Deirdre made the mistake of telling the doctor that my temperature was 37.9°C, when it was in fact 39.7°C, and they said that I’d be fine and should ‘just keep taking the tablets’. Thankfully, I was fine.
Having had a few weeks of hearing the horror stories of the death rates in hospitals, I was determined to stay away from those places if at all possible. I did and, in the end, it subsided.
One good thing – I lost a lot of weight, but I am left with joint and muscle pain and I am hobbling around like an old man (who just said, ‘he is an old man’?). I’m sure I’ll get
back to normal when I can get back on my bike and/or our horses can get back on the racecourse.
Born to be mild Sapere Aude Ego Lego Preferred pronouns - Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine My non-working days are Monday - Sunday
Here's something for those who wonder if the bad cough they had late last year was covid-19. I've mentioned elsewhere the reasons why that is very unlikely. Now Professor David Brown suggests what it might have been. He is a molecular virologist, retired from running the UK Enteric, Respiratory and Neurological Virus Reference Laboratory and worked on coronaviruses for 20 years. His wife got pneumonia over Christmas, with a very bad cough and loss of taste and smell. He thinks she and many others probably had a different coronavirus, known as OC43, which can also cause respiratory illnesses. He says: "OC43 can be really severe. It can cause recurring infections in your lifetime like other coronaviruses. There's no surveillance of it, and it's impossible to go back and check".
There are 4 human coronaviruses that can cause such symptoms (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1), they are permanently circulating in the human population and are therefore `human viruses', not `animal viruses'. They are responsible for some of worst flu-type illnesses that we get during the flu season. The other important coronaviruses that we know in addition to covid-19 are SARS and MERS which caused epidemics in recent times. They come from animals, cause very serious illness but don't spread as easily among humans.
Nullius in verba: On the word of no one (Motto of the Royal Society)
The debate about whether Corvid 19 was endemic before the official January starting point rumbles on. Corvid The suggestion is that corvid 19 may have been brought to the UK as early as November 2019. suspicious about her husbands death, Andy Gill - guitarist and co-founder of Gang of Four who became ill in late November started asking questions....
"The key question is, could this have been the coronavirus Covid-19?" asks Prof Tom Solomon, director of the UK Emerging Infections Research Unit at the University of Liverpool. "I think the simple answer is yes, it could have been. We now know the virus was around longer - new viruses are always around before you spot them."
This doesn't answer the question 'was the cough / flu that large numbers suffered a precursor to covid 19'? Water under the bridge now or is it? Will whatever it was confer some resistance to the current corvid 19 or is that just wishful thinking? Until there are reliable test to look for specific antibodies we will never know. I'm not suggesting that there has been a cover up by the scientists but the government appears to be reluctant to disclose all the information they hold.
Thanks for the posts, saves me adding the links, for now
Meanwhile reverting to notes on the previous posts.
Facemasks/coverings : I thought the home made version is suggested as cotton/paper/cotton (Still think there is scope for Bancroft to do some special weaving)
Covid-19 Transmission and assorted R numbers and outside gatherings - we shall see by end of June any effects. School re-opening got going well - assortments and pockets of staff testing positive.
Late 2019 Respiratory Illnesses - indeed most reports do not mention the very high temperature that seems a feature of infection by (SARSr-CoV2) (have I got the name right this time) and if it was earlier one would have expected noticeable increases in infections earlier around the world unless the trigger was the Chinese new year travels to a wider spread. - is it worth opening another thread to discuss at simplified line away from medical matters and here some of the other virus types Corona , Alpha, Beta and Gamma Viruses and their re-combinationing and infection methods. It is quite interesting and does/can/will impact on the solution for a vaccine (or throw up why an effective, safe , vaccine might not be found).
Scotland Odd BBC report that once again in commentaries on the figures shown does not make sense. Scotland reports incoming persons to hospitals were tested and a raw re-evaluation of numbers was that 950ish (in total, or additional?)(timeframe?) had positive tests and 218 of those , died. Question I would have is any of those re-admissions following a despatch( forgot the right word ) from a stay in hospital longer than 24 hours?) Comments non-SNP politicians appear to ask/blame Scottish Government were about despatches from Hospitals to Care Homes and Community with Positive or No Tests. - which is a fair question but is not of itself helpful or relevant to the statistics released. Maybe the BBC cannot get the staff to check or report clearly on their web pages, it is annoying though when reading.
Interesting posts but the main point is that there is a Flu bug out there that is serious and has no effective treatment of vaccine. The only thing the individual can do is everything he/she can to avoid contact with it. I am particularly vulnerable according to the doctors hence my policy of self isolation until there is a vaccine. If anyone has a better idea I'd consider it but up to press that's the only route I can see.
Something else has cropped up in the news this morning. Scientists have been examining the genetic structure of the virus and report that there are many variants but many have died out quickly, they say that at the moment there are 21 different ones and say that for instance the strain affecting Scotland is different from the one in London and the SE. A further complication for the vaccine programme.
By the way, I heard a man with Autism on R4 the other day saying that social distancing was a godsend to him and people like him as it relieved them from many of their problems in social situations. Even the darkest cloud can have a silver lining for some.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
An example of unscrupulous behaviour from some who seek to turn a coin out of any situation. Sally found out from the group she is sewing for that instead of supplying on demand to organisations in an emergency situation, they are gong to have to start asking for signed requests on headed notepaper from anyone requesting PPE. It has come to their attention that some deliveries have not gone to who they purported to be and are being sold on at extortionate prices to those in dire need of protection. These are garments made using crowd funded materials and freely given labour by thousands of home machinist. All I can say to that is, thieving bastards!
Yesterday we handed out over twenty masks to folk that requested them, all will be put to the declared use. Sally is sewing another batch this morning that she cut out last night. She finished the pre-cut scrubs that she had passed to her and they are now on their way into storage. She has just had new material delivered for the next batch so back to her pattern with jolly pockets.
Stanley wrote: ↑07 Jun 2020, 03:10
the main point is that there is a Flu bug out there that is serious
I hesitate to get involved here but it isn't a 'flu bug' it's a coranavirus. That should be clear by now. I suggest that your acceptance of the situation is conditioned by the fact that (like myself) your income has not been affected at all, your family has been fortunate, and your everyday life is also much the same.
You have been 'predicting' unspecifed doom on and off,for a long time now - maybe this is it? Not all stories have a happy ending.
Born to be mild Sapere Aude Ego Lego Preferred pronouns - Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine My non-working days are Monday - Sunday
The covid-19 dashboard of Johns Hopkins University, USA. Worldwide there have been about 7 million confirmed cases of infection and 400,000 deaths... LINK
Nullius in verba: On the word of no one (Motto of the Royal Society)
Thanks Sue, I am a simple minded bugger! Not sure about the rest of your post David, I realised exactly how serious it is when Mick and Susan got it and only narrowly missed being but in ICU. As for income, actually the virus has affected me badly but I'm not going to specify how.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley wrote: ↑08 Jun 2020, 02:14
Thanks Sue, I am a simple minded bugger! Not sure about the rest of your post David, I realised exactly how serious it is when Mick and Susan got it and only narrowly missed being but in ICU. As for income, actually the virus has affected me badly but I'm not going to specify how.
No problem Stanley and I think everyone has been financially affected in some way, the true impact will take some time to manifest itself. With Brexit thrown into the mix its a double whammy for many of us.
Whether we like it or not this Corvid-19 pandemic has altered everybody's lives. Its becoming evident that so little is known about this novel virus that predicting a specific outcome is impossible. Although at times the feeling is that the government is being economical with the truth the reality is that neither the scientists or the government are in a position to be 100% certain about any course of action they take. What we do know is that the 'risk' factor can be put into groups with vulnerable and older people at the top of the list followed by BAME and smaller groups not far behind. And then there comes the unknown unknowns which could affect everybody. The sad thing is after months of death rates making the headlines and the enforced lockdown its impossible not to be concerned about how it it affect each and every individual on a personal level. Even on this OG site where we have been lucky enough to having been given some very sound scientific explanation there's a feeling of despair of having enough of it. Unfortunately it looks like this virus is something we will have to live with and as in Monty Python. 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'.
I noticed a medic's letter to the newspaper saying that he's now seeing an increasing number of people on the street wearing commercial masks (N95) and he warns that many of these are dangerous because they are the type with exhalation valves. The incoming air is filtered but the outgoing air bypasses the filter. The mask protects the wearer but can spread viruses and bacteria into the environment, endangering other people. Here's a web page mentioning the masks: LINK
Nullius in verba: On the word of no one (Motto of the Royal Society)
plaques wrote: ↑08 Jun 2020, 07:37
'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'.
So far i have had an extra 13 weeks of life on the sofa, hardly the positive contribution to my community I was aiming for after I left hospital a few years back.
and I think everyone has been financially affected in some way, the true impact will take some time to manifest itself. With Brexit thrown into the mix its a double whammy for many of us.
