Hahahaaha!!
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
As they have stopped giving out information to avoid constantly missing targets and apparently also "it isn't a race" so it might as well be the goal.
Why are they so slow with the roll-out, Wibs? Is he a Covid denier or something?
Incompetence. They bought vaccines with politics rather than health in mind. For example we didn't bother ordering any Modetna until last month. In their heads the envisaged a press conference with 12 huge Australian Flags behind them when they announced that the UNI of Queensland vaccine and the AU manufactured vaccine (AZ) would have us all full immunised by October.
UQ failed and AZ is now only for over 60's with a very limited supply of Pfizer for everyone else. They also gave big logistics companies huge contract for transporting vaccines but that has been bit of a shambles as the bit after transport wasn't at all well planned or coordinated. Laughably they have now made some retired General the face of logistics for no apparent reason or improvement. To stop stories of vaccine shortages they haven't sold getting vaccinated very hard and combined with mixed messages and bumbling with frequent changes to the ages to get AZ vaccine, hesitancy has risen hugely. And they now just refuse to even talk about vaccine supply.
That's terrible. They don't have any excuse, it's not as if the pandemic has hit Australia hard. They had the time for upstream planning.
Interestingly Italy has also had a General co-ordinating the vaccine campaign, but he actually seems to be efficient. I wonder if Australia nicked the Italian model. He looks reassuring sitting behind a desk in his uniform, it's partly psychology I think.
They couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. The State governments have gone a great job as best they can handicapped by the idiots at the Federal level.
Wholly psychological in our case as I'm not sure if he actually has to do anything other than wear his old uniform.
This could be major plot twist on SARS-CoV-2 origin story. I wish I knew enough about genetics to understand it better
@berbatrick?
This could be major plot twist on SARS-CoV-2 origin story. I wish I knew enough about genetics to understand it better
@berbatrick?
not got sleep all night so i skimmed it. the analysis seems simple enough, the deletion very suspicious.
i also skimmed the paper where the sequences were initially reported: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smll.202002169
interestingly the (old, chinese) paper (cited as wang 2020b in the preprint) also discusses the mutation T28144C talked about in the preprint ... and the chinese paper reports:
By contrast, it seems the new preprint says that it (the T28144C, or "S type" is present 6 of 13 samples (Table 1), reversing their relative abundance.
So uhhh i don't know what's up. i think the new pre-print is using a less strict criteria to include or exclude sequences. but table 1 also has fewer total sequences analysed compared to the old paper's table 1, though less stringency should give more samples.
i'll probably need some time and properly awake thinking to figure out what's going on. i suspect it's either that the chinese paper includes a mix of samples from different places analysed together and the new one chooses what it sees the most relevant. or that the new one's different cutoffs have led to changes in the result.
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That’s a very impressive review in a short space of time on not much sleep! Thanks.
Apparently a delta "plus" variant now in India and parts of Europe. You wonder if this will ever end.
@massi83
This was what I was getting at with my comment re a surge of delta variant cases in Russia during the Euros. Might be misremembering but don’t you live in Finland?
They made a mistake at the border and for some reason only had 4 people working there. However we are very good at following rules. So, most people will isolate for 72h and then have a test. It is hardly a disaster. The person making the tweet is an idiot.
I went to Copenhagen as I knew how much delta there was and didn't go to Russia.
Do I think it is a little selfish to go to Russia, yes. Is it a big disaster, no.
Helsinki area was already at 30% anyways.
He’s far from an idiot. He’s the head of the institute tracking variants in the UK. He’s also one of most consistently balanced and pragmatic commentators on these new variants you’ll find on Twitter. Have a look through his feed. It’s the exact opposite of hysterical.
The wording of the tweet clearly makes him an idiot. I know nothing else about him.
Well you know more about him now. Which you could easily have discovered for yourself by clicking on his profile. Nothing in the wording of his tweet makes him an idiot. Unless you confuse the word “could” with “will”.
The change is literally zero. So it could not be disaster. Ok, his tweet is idiotic and he is very knowledgelable man otherwise
The change is literally zero. So it could not be disaster. Ok, his tweet is idiotic and he is very knowledgelable man otherwise
The risk is that same slightly selfish fans who chose to travel to Russia might also be selfish enough to decide they don’t need adhere to the 72 hours self-quarantine. Which could potentially see this much more transmissible new variant seeding multiple new outbreaks all over the country, almost simultaneously.
Then we get into a debate about what “disaster” means. I note that you’re quite bullish about the delta variant not being a major issue in the weeks/months ahead due to vaccines. My personal opinion is that there’s a pretty fine balance between continued reopening as planned vs possible lengthy delays or even reversals, with hospitals up to their knees in covid again at the expense of routine care. And I would consider the latter a “disaster” after all the shit we’ve already endured.
So, it was couple of hundred people. Over 90% of them will do the test. That leaves let's say 50 people, maybe 10% of them are positive. So 5 extra cases.
But Finland hasn't really endured those things. Most we had in hospital was less than 300. And there is no reason to think we won't continue to manage this better than most European countries.
Big jump in cases in the UK today (+16,000), and deaths doubled from last Wednesday.
Things seem to be accelerating over the last couple of days it seems.
Things seem to be accelerating over the last couple of days it seems.
Ffs… do they breakdown the data to show where the numbers are increasing? I’d be hopeful if the older/double vaccinated groups aren’t seeing a large increase & the jump is in younger/unvaccinated groups.
It looks like it's being driven regionally - Scotland rising, whilst England's hospital admissions appear down. Either way, it's hardly promising.
Big rises in young males over the last week.
Hmmm... I wonder what a lot of young men are getting together for at the moment.
Anyway, at least with Scotland being knocked out, that might bring their numbers back down again.
Need to see the excess deaths numbers to see if anything to be bothered about. The latest ones I can see from the beginning of June for England are negative, e.g less people died than you would normally expect in total.
That really isn't the problem though. The problem is that because there are infections you're going to get recombination / mutation of new clades / variants which will ultimately defeat the present vaccines. The big problem, is that even if you fully vaccinate 100% of the population, you will still get a lot of infections as they are seeing in the US. Even if they're asymptomatic or very mild.
Without sterilising vaccines, you're going to get seasonal evolution of new variants indefinitely. There is likely very little we can do about that, other than live with it and create seasonal vaccines adjusted to whatever nature is evolving at us.
That really isn't the problem though. The problem is that because there are infections you're going to get recombination / mutation of new clades / variants which will ultimately defeat the present vaccines. The big problem, is that even if you fully vaccinate 100% of the population, you will still get a lot of infections as they are seeing in the US. Even if they're asymptomatic or very mild.
Without sterilising vaccines, you're going to get seasonal evolution of new variants indefinitely. There is likely very little we can do about that, other than live with it and create seasonal vaccines adjusted to whatever nature is evolving at us.
Excess deaths are only useful in retrospect. They’re useless when it comes to predicting the future, which is what’s most important now. Hospitals can end up in deep deep shit long before we’ll get any useful insights from excess deaths data.
Agree with the rest of your post. Although I’m optimistic that vaccines will be a great help against all future variants, especially when it comes to taking the pressure off hospitals.
Are we really worried about hospitals being overwhelmed in the middle of summer with the vulnerable groups vaccinated as best they can be? That's ridiculous surely? If anyone is really concerned about that, what about this winter?
Lots of cases, quite a lot which must be asymptomatic in younger age groups should be of little concern in mid summer other than from an evolutionary perspective.
DeltaPlus is now a variant of concern in India
Yes we are worried and no it’s not ridiculous. Based on this variant being definitely more transmissible, probably causing more serious illness and probably vaccine resistant the experts that model these things are predicting hospitals getting at least as busy as they were during spring if this current surge really gets going. Warm weather won’t be enough to stop it in its tracks in the same way that didn’t help in India.
Winter’s a whole new ball game but, on the plus side, there will be many millions more people fully vaccinated then there are right now.
The trouble is that we don't know how many cases will turn into hospitalisations and that ratio is massively dependant on vaccination status. In the last wave cases to hospitalisation ran at something like 8% (hospitalisation 10 to 12 days behind test). Currently the rate looks like it's around 4% and falling. In fact (like the rate of growth in cases) there's some early evidence that over the last month as vaccinations increased that hospitalisation rate may now be heading towards 3%. Time in hospital seems to be falling as well, reflecting the fact that the hospitalised are mostly younger and recover faster.
For 10,000 cases per day that's currently best guess 300 hospital admissions (and a lot more A&E visits) and roughly 2000 in hospital. For 40,000 cases (expected in July) 1200/8000 and that's worse than the winter hospitalisation peak we see in a bad flu year and it's back where we were in March this yea. That means A&E is a covid triage zone and the hospitals are stopping non urgent surgery and outpatient visits. Not overwhelmed in the "no oxygen in the tanks" sense, just an unsustainable burden on the system. The only obvious way for us to stop that happening (without another round of restrictions) is with vaccinations - which will hopefully be simultaneously reducing the case growth and the rate of hospitalisation amongst the cases.
So no, it's not of little concern. It should be of enough concern that it encourages people to get vaccinated.
I was watching local news for Bristol/Bath yesterday and I’m pretty sure it said about 60% of new cases in this area were 20-29 year olds. Im not sure what the time frame was, maybe for last week.
The dominant age group is in the 20-29 age range, then the 10-19 age range, and then 30-39. It tallies well with those that have only had vaccinations opened up to them.
https://assets.publishing.service.g...994577/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w24.pdf
He has a twitter thread up which seems to explain why the number of sequences analysed are different, it does have to do with stringency.
He was more stringent with one criteria (reconstructing the full sequence), they with the other (getting a lot of depth for the available sequence, they chose 10, he chose 3X coverage).
So they ended up with 50 sequences and he with 13.
I do not do nanopore sequencing, which was used for this, but I'm vaguely familiar with it. Compared to typical modern sequencing, it sequences longer and continuous fragments at the expense of sequencing depth. I don't know if one set of criteria is better than the other for nanopore. For my sequencing we are generally happier with better depth.
And I still feel too stupid to figure out what it means when you get opposite conclusions by using different cutoffs for your data quality.
Plus in a “normal” year the summer is a chance to work through elective waiting lists while the seasonal illness burden is relatively low. And those lists are longer than ever, after the shit show of the last 18 months. This was supposed to be a summer where the health services could get back on an even keel and right now that is looking very much in the balance (to put it mildly!).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57580118
You can understand why some people dismiss experts when this is how they're presented in fairness
Not sure what you mean by last sentence? With a surge of cases in young men the idea that watching the Euros together might be a factor isn’t the craziest hypothesis, surely?
I don’t think we need a “behaviour expert” to draw that conclusion! Of course it’s what we’re all thinking. There is no concrete evidence of it, but it’s the common sense assessment.
So they have an expert saying what most people are thinking, but in the interest of appearing balanced, they bring in another expert that says it might be that, but it also could be this, and then another expert that says it’s too early to say anything, but it is something to keep an eye on. If you assign equal weight to all experts there then you come out knowing less than what you came in with!
That amalgamated view of expertise is such a caricature of what actual expert analysis is that when people roll their eyes at experts, really they’re rolling their eyes at that caricature. I don’t agree with a lot of criticisms of mainstream media but that’s among their biggest failings!