It's mad to see countries like Spain and Italy already opening stuff back up yet here in Ireland we won't be able to travel more than 5k away til mid June. It's a pretty damning indictment of our health service that we have to take such cautious measures over the summer in our roadmap compared to other, far worse affected countries.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Jeez... I watched The Lighthouse yesterday. I feel cabin fever setting in.
I'd think it's partly inspired by the game Plague Inc. The more dire the virus is, the more scientists focus on finding a cure/vaccine.
Id like to apologise for the Irish civil war I have triggered here.
Its Mccarthy v Keane all over again
Its Mccarthy v Keane all over again
Tbf the differing approaches in ROI and the UK have rather more practical policy implications when you consider that both are present on the same small island, separated only by a near non-existent border which will be extremely difficult to ever restrict and control in the way other European countries might restrict and control theirs.
If you're comparing Ireland to Sweden, say, then it's a debate about abstract approaches that can become pointlessly tribal and difficult to accurately compare. In the case of ROI and the UK though there are potential real-world consequences to having different approaches. There is also a need to be able to make direct and accurate comparisons in terms of data.
If you're comparing Ireland to Sweden, say, then it's a debate about abstract approaches that can become pointlessly tribal and difficult to accurately compare. In the case of ROI and the UK though there are potential real-world consequences to having different approaches. There is also a need to be able to make direct and accurate comparisons in terms of data.
Basically its down to the fact that its hard to know if somebody didn't suffer from the disease because they're immune to it or the fact that community transmission is so low that they just weren't exposed to it
So if you have a scenario in lockdown if I vaccinated somebody and they hardly left home and I restudied them in a year time to see they didn't suffer from COVID it may have nothing to do with a vaccine its just that they weren't exposed, similarly even if they were going out, they just simply never were exposed to the virus
However if covid is rampant in a community and you vaccinate somebody who you study in 1 year's time and they were in a disease hotspot , loads of people getting COVID around them and they didn't then you can attribute that more likely to vaccine efficacy.
I think to overcome that challenge you need a large sample size, efficacy of vaccine in terms of virtually non-existant COVID rate, study them after a long period of time and ideally the control group who got placebo vaccines have a similar covid rate to rest of the community population
Yes just watching it now, yer man's not very charismatic but presents well and makes excellent points. Good use of precedents as well with regards to Ebola, shingles etc. One shocking thing also is about remdesivir dosable intravenously, wonder how many of Gilead's shareholders are aware of that at the moment.
@Wolverine thanks for the detailed reply
I've been worrying about what's been said on the second tweet for weeks, they have terrified a significant number of the population into thinking they'll drop dead if they leave the house or get close to another human being. The government coms stragtegy has backed them into a corner.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this but it looks like NI’s deaths per million is 200 whilst Ireland’s is 260. Maybe NI is behind on care home deaths or something but there doesn’t seem to be a profound difference.
We're not really opening things up. The only change from Monday will be that some people (builders mostly) will be able to work again, you can visit family members who live in the same region as you (whilst observing social distancing, masks etc) and you can exercise outside - at the moment you can only walk 200 metres from your home.
You still need a good reason for leaving your area of residence and have to fill in a form. Other shops aren't opening yet, bars and restaurants aren't opening, hairdressers will be shut for ages yet. I would have been very happy to have been able to travel 5km during the last 2 months!
The way to test a vaccine is to give a group of people a vaccine and a matched control group a placebo. You wait and hope that less people in the vaccine group end up infected. The more people in each group get exposed the quicker you’ll be able to show a difference. At the most extreme, if you have no community spread at all you will never be able to prove the vaccine works.
This thread reads like a parallel universe to me regards to peoples behaviour. I can’t remember any kind of rule breaking in nearly a month, save for a few questionable groups of kids and a couple of oldies shoving past me in the supermarket.
I think a lot of people don’t know how far 2 metres is
I think a lot of people don’t know how far 2 metres is
I’m from NI so I get to slag off both
And living in Dublin and seeing Ireland’s response, I can tell you genuinely it was not anything like the U.K. reaction.
I think once time allows it to settle, there will be a lot of recriminations
That's 5000 people demonstrating in Stuttgart today. This comment from the police made me laugh: "By and large, the demonstrators kept to the rules of distance."
If they allow that, they may as well let people in football stadiums again.
The difference lies in how those deaths are tested and compiled. ROI's figures include hospital deaths, community deaths, deaths at home and "probable" coronavirus deaths. Which hasn't been the case in NI, which until recently was only testing in hospitals.
This thread goes through some of the comparison and difficulty in comparing stats directly:
Apparently he’s on the spectrum. Being an actuary means there’s pretty much a 50:50 chance of this!
Apologies if this is a dumb question but if someone is an asymptomatic carrier (for as long as five weeks in the case of Dybala) then surely asking people to take their temperatures before travelling to work won't be enough to stop another potential wave? I get that checking peoples temperature will reduce the numbers but it doesn't seem entirely safe.
Not a dumb question at all. Asymptomatic transmission is the elephant in the room when it comes to this idea that really aggressive testing and tracing can stop transmission after lockdown. You can’t test and trace people who have no idea they’re infected.
This was raised with the case of that youtuber as well about 4-5 weeks ago.
There's a lot to be investigated such as :
a. Is testing positive after such a long time without symptoms = still contagious
b. What's actually the medium long term thing with this virus - does recovering from it mean you get rid of it for good, or does it stay dormant in your body at a low enough viral count
Those excess mortality stats posted by Ed Conway show NI barely out of the normal range for excess deaths so wouldn’t it be reasonable to only expect a modest rise in NI’s overall stats? I know some people had a problem with the expression of his data though.
When they say that a vaccine's efficacy is 70% - does that mean that the other 30% have the same distribution of symptoms/outcomes as someone who is non-vaccinated? Or will mortality rates be reduced on the 30%?
How would a group of doctors know how many tests are carried out nationally?
That’s a good question but I’d be fairly sure that the other 30% have been infected, without taking severity of disease into account. Although the final report would have all sorts of detail on severity in the two arms.
Yes that's fair. We have had it easy in contrast to you guys. Maybe that's why people here are getting frustrated, because we haven't suffered the same pain to our health system or per capita so the full effect of it, if left untamed, is lost on a lot of us.
Like I said before, people are easily influenced (brainwashed). They'll simply change the messaging now to influence people to do what they want next - travel to work on public transport with masks (the ones they've been saying are useless) with social distancing etc.
You haven’t suffered the same sort of strict lockdown as Italy but you have suffered a very similar death toll.
That’s something I’ve noticed about the UK media. They immersed us with footage of crying Italian doctors and reports of a completely overwhelmed health service in Italy, when their crisis was at its peak. But now an epidemic of almost exactly the same scale is happening in the UK it’s getting reported on in a far less emotive manner.
Why do you think they want to do that? Its literally the only way to fight this thing.
The only way to gain the publics trust is proof you are conpetent at tracing and that the cases and deaths are under control.
You cant have this shitshow about fudging numbers and lack of ppe then expect the public to come out in their droves.
Our health service in the UK hasn't been overwhelmed at all, it's barely been whelmed. We've got huge field hospitals lying empty and staff I know (not in Covid wards) have been playing cards to pass the time in their shifts as it's so quiet.
The health service didn’t get battered in the same way here though. There were stories of dead bodies not being collected from houses for days in Italy and pictures of really shoddy make-shift overspill hospitals and so on, things like that. That hasn’t happened here. The Nightingale hospitals have barely been used, some haven’t at all and they may all be decommissioned in the next few days altogether. One thing they were successful in was expanding the capacity at hospitals and in other related services to cope better.
We have every right to be worried when the government has lied to us multiple times and handled this shockingly in many ways. From not taking it seriously enough in the first place to senior people that were involved in the advertisements shown to be ignoring the rules to just yesterday when they lied about tests. The whole thing has meant I'm doubting everything and my mental state regarding the situation isn't great.
I have friends working in ITU departments in the Uk. They absolutely feel overwhelmed. They’ve never seen anything like it. They’ll probably be traumatised for life. You might be better able to bury your dead than Italy but the impact to your health service (and health workers) has been similar. Look at the number of dead. You’re very close to the Italian toll and several weeks behind them. You will 100% end up with a much worse first wave, unless they have some sort of massive outbreak in the next few weeks.
I think it might be down to the Italian outbreak being restricted to one region for so long. Which meant they had a small number of hospitals pushed a long way past breaking point? Which made good tv for the 24 hour news vultures.
Still, though, the tone of coverage in the Uk is strangely bloodless in comparison to how they covered Italy when you consider they’re reporting on an outbreak that is already on the brink of passing out the Italian experience. Which is presumably how you can make a comment like the one above, telling someone from Italy how you’ve “had it easy” compared to them. When that’s not true at all.
Im not atall saying their shouldn't be appropriate caution but things have gone well too far the other way in my opinion.
I'm Irish!
You could have read the post Penna was responding to
I'm Irish!
You could have read the post Penna was responding to
That was me getting you and @Classical Mechanic mixed up. Again.
Is that even true though? Those excess death figures in the FT show that Italy’s excess deaths are the highest in Europe by a distance don‘t they? Excess deaths in Lombardy are at 3 times the level of deaths attributed to Covid there officially according to the article. This would explain why we haven’t scene the kind of devastation that came out from there, in part at least.
There wasn’t even that much coverage of Italy here either. People applauded Sky News when they did cover some of the more shocking stuff some people felt the press were not taking it seriously.
No one is saying that they NHS haven’t been overwhelmed and suffered. It’s literally in the press everyday. Where do you think the massive outpouring of gratitude and support for the NHS comes from? Every third house on every street has tributes in their windows the NHS.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/hea...king-down-coronavirus-frontline-a4430196.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...tressed-anxious-usual-coronavirus-crisis.html
https://metro.co.uk/2020/04/06/fron...onavirus-battle-inside-nhs-hospital-12518964/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hjq4
.
Aren‘t the Nightingale hospitals set up for a very specific kind of treatment? Can they even be effectively used as he wants?