MERS Coronavirus warning

[stanley_bomb_squad]

I see the two Branch Covidian experts have been busy with their own version of Snopes, which is summarised as follows:

Those with an interest in the AstraZeneca press release may be interested in this:
The AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine Data Isn't Up to Snuff | WIRED

WARNING CONTAINS NON BRANCH COVIDIAN APPROVED SCIENCE AND CULT MEMBERS SHOULD ON NO ACCOUNT READ.

 

[terminal]

It turns out that the Oxford-AstraZenica vaccine result that found out that a half dose followed by a full dose worked better than two full doses was discovered by accident rather than design. A portion of the vials had a half strength dose in them rather than a full strength dose.
AstraZeneca manufacturing error raises questions about vaccine study results

In a surprise, the group of volunteers that got a lower dose seemed to be much better protected than the volunteers who got two full doses. In the low-dose group, AstraZeneca said, the vaccine appeared to be 90 per cent effective. In the group that got two full doses, the vaccine appeared to be 62 per cent effective. Combined, the drugmakers said the vaccine appeared to be 70 per cent effective. But the way in which the results were arrived at and reported by the companies has led to pointed questions from experts.

They are also running trials in the US, and may modify the US trial in order to try out the half dose there as well.

Moncef Slaoui, who leads the U.S. coronavirus vaccine program Operation Warp Speed, said Tuesday in a call with reporters that U.S. officials are trying to determine what immune response the vaccine produced, and may decide to modify the AstraZeneca study in the U.S. to include a half dose.

Because the half dose was discovered by accident rather than being an intentional experiment, researchers are still pouring over the data to try to figure out all the implications of it.

 

[terminal]

By my calculation you'd have to be necking 50 or more high-strength tablets a day to be at significant risk. I think most people would be careful enough to avoid that.

There should be some instructions that come with the tablets, and if they are from a reputable mainstream retail supplier then I would recommend following the recommended dosage. If you just buy a bottle of vitamins off the shelf from the grocery store and take as directed, you should be fine.

Taking vitamin supplements is not normally a problem, but there are certain "alternative health" groups who push the idea of taking massive doses and sell very high strength vitamin supplements over the Internet. Taking their stuff can be risky.

At one time it wouldn't have been necessary to say any of this, but these days there are some seriously dodgy and dangerous "health products" being advertised and sold over the Internet.

 

[stanley_bomb_squad]

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS FULLY APPROVED BY BRANCH COVIDIAN SCIENCE AND IS RATED PG

Oxford vaccine: How did they make it so quickly?

Good fortune and scientific brilliance were behind the Covid-19 vaccine being developed so quickly.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[stanley_bomb_squad]

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS FULLY APPROVED BY BRANCH COVIDIAN SCIENCE AND RATED PG


But Sweden.....

No signs herd immunity slowing coronavirus in Sweden

Over 25 per cent of Sweden’s total coronavirus cases were recorded in November alone

www.independent.co.uk

THE FOLLOWING GRAPH IS NOT BRANCH COVIDIAN APPROVED AND MUST NOT BE VIEWED.


Euromomo Deaths.

 

[terminal]

"The study was funded by the US Defence Health Agency and DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), and the purpose of the study was to see if quarantine rules that had been implemented in the US Marine Corps were effective at preventing spread of covid-19.
...
There are three other aspects of this study that I find interesting. The first is that it suggests that pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic spread does happen with covid, since anyone showing the slightest symptoms was immediately isolated, and in spite of this, the virus still spread.
...
The second is that it gives further credence to the idea that most people with covid are not very infectious, while a small number of people are “super spreaders”.
...
The third aspect that is interesting is that infection only happened within platoons, not between them. That is in spite of the fact that different platoons were using the same spaces, only at different times. To me this suggests that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t hang around in the air and maintain the ability to infect people who come in to the same space at a later time point..."

There seems to be a time window in which people are particularly infectious, often just before they start feeling any symptoms.

I posted a story previously in this thread which reported that the COVID-19 virus seems to hijack the body's pain receptors, so that people who are ill don't feel it in the initial stages until they get so much more ill that the virus's symptom dampening effect is overcome. As a result people are going around who are much sicker than they realise, and so are more infectious at this pre-symptomatic stage than they would be with other diseases.

This may possibly also explain why there are so many apparently "asymptomatic" cases. Many of them may not be asymptomatic in the normal sense. It's just that their body's pain receptors are buggered and they don't realise that they are mildly ill. If it had been a normal disease they may have been feeling crappy enough to be staying in bed until they recovered.

Here's where I posted it a bit over a month ago. I think it's worth going back and reading again if you are interested in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread.

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/mers-coronavirus-warning.214505/post-10324767

Here's a key snippet.

A Canadian researcher has found that the virus that causes COVID-19 can hijack a pain receptor on our cells, using it to get into the cell, but also blocking its ability to signal pain.

This could mean that the virus blocks the discomfort people would normally feel early in an infection, keeping them unaware that they're sick and spreading the disease.

Two other factors that correlated negatively with covid mortality were average temperature and average level of sunlight. Given that covid seemed to disappear in many countries during the summer, and now seems to have returned in autumn, the virus appears to act in a highly seasonal manner, so it makes sense that these correlations would exist. No correlation was seen, however, between humidity and death rate from covid."

New evidence on the effectiveness of lockdown - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

Two new studies have been published in recent weeks that shed light on the effectiveness of lockdown against covid. here is all you need to know.

sebastianrushworth.com

The seasonality of spread was expected from very early on in the pandemic, as this is normal with other respiratory diseases. This is why during the summer people were saying that this was, at the time, as good as things were going to get until we get an effective vaccine, and that rising infection rates were expected in the autumn and winter. This is also why alternative measures such as masks were being introduced (starting at the end of August where I am) in an attempt to try to mitigate some of the expected seasonality effects and avoid another lockdown.

Despite knowing in advance about the seasonality, it is still very useful to research into the details of this so that we know which factors are the most important so we can try to make use of them.

 

[terminal]

Hey, I just posted about 'super spreaders' in the tin-foil-hat post.

Japan works on this basis and their contact tracing doesn't put all their energy into trying to contact everyone who has been in the proximity of someone with covid; they go a stage further and try to work out who was the cause of any cluster.

The article I read threw in some 'plucked from the air' figures, such as 80% of the infected aren't drivers of the corvid, but it's the 20% who super-spread it. So they put their emphasis on looking for the source of infection clusters.

And given their population size/density/age, they've done very well.

Very little testing too; 3rd world countries have better testing levels.

I posted a video on this thread in which top public health experts were interviewed in Canada who talked about how most of the spread seems to come from a small proportion of the cases, and how it is important to try to trace back to the source of infection clusters and then trace outwards from there. They said that Japan does this very well, but South Korea and some other east Asian countries do as well.

To be clear on something, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the people at the centres of these "super-spreader" events. It's just that all the holes in the cheese lined up in their instances for them to spread it to a lot of people. They were at the right stage of infection and with the right people in the right place to infect them.

I can try to find the post with the video if you are interested. I don't know what you said on the other thread, but the idea that a small proportion of cases do most of the spreading is mainstream public health understanding with respect to COVID-19.

 

[terminal]

I posted a video on this thread in which top public health experts were interviewed in Canada who talked about how most of the spread seems to come from a small proportion of the cases, and how it is important to try to trace back to the source of infection clusters and then trace outwards from there. They said that Japan does this very well, but South Korea and some other east Asian countries do as well.

To be clear on something, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the people at the centres of these "super-spreader" events. It's just that all the holes in the cheese lined up in their instances for them to spread it to a lot of people. They were at the right stage of infection and with the right people in the right place to infect them.

I can try to find the post with the video if you are interested. I don't know what you said on the other thread, but the idea that a small proportion of cases do most of the spreading is mainstream public health understanding with respect to COVID-19.

@Whey_Aye_Banzai : I just found the post where I talked about this, and it turns out that I didn't post the video, I just summarised it in a reply to one of your posts. Here is my post:

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/mers-coronavirus-warning.214505/post-10341836

I can try to find the video if you are interested. It's from a well regarded public affairs program here in Canada.

 

[Winnet]

According to the World Health Organisation, Sweden has recorded 208,295 cases till now including 6,406 deaths. More than 50,000 cases, about 25 per cent of its total so far, have come in November alone.

No signs herd immunity slowing coronavirus in Sweden

Over 25 per cent of Sweden’s total coronavirus cases were recorded in November alone

www.independent.co.uk

 

[exbleep]

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS FULLY APPROVED BY BRANCH COVIDIAN SCIENCE AND RATED PG


But Sweden.....

No signs herd immunity slowing coronavirus in Sweden

Over 25 per cent of Sweden’s total coronavirus cases were recorded in November alone

www.independent.co.uk

THE FOLLOWING GRAPH IS NOT BRANCH COVIDIAN APPROVED AND MUST NOT BE VIEWED.


Euromomo Deaths.
View attachment 523797

Well, I tell you what. Why not move to Sweden and bore them with your obsessiveness?
You have become yet another bore, or possibly boor, that seems to plug themselves into a thread and go on and bloody on forever, saying the same cynical things over and bloody over.

What used to be a decent thread taken over by a few absolute experts who know they are right, everybody else is wrong and there is no point in listening to any advice because their basements have been turned into state of the art laboratories for testing this and disproving that.

Once or twice might have been rather interesting and funny but face nappies, branch Covidians and it's working better in Sweden a dozen times a day is probably a good reason for sticking you on ignore you boring sod.

 

[JCC]

There seems to be a time window in which people are particularly infectious, often just before they start feeling any symptoms.

I posted a story previously in this thread which reported that the COVID-19 virus seems to hijack the body's pain receptors, so that people who are ill don't feel it in the initial stages until they get so much more ill that the virus's symptom dampening effect is overcome. As a result people are going around who are much sicker than they realise, and so are more infectious at this pre-symptomatic stage than they would be with other diseases.

This may possibly also explain why there are so many apparently "asymptomatic" cases. Many of them may not be asymptomatic in the normal sense. It's just that their body's pain receptors are buggered and they don't realise that they are mildly ill. If it had been a normal disease they may have been feeling crappy enough to be staying in bed until they recovered.

Here's where I posted it a bit over a month ago. I think it's worth going back and reading again if you are interested in asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread.

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/mers-coronavirus-warning.214505/post-10324767

Here's a key snippet.



The seasonality of spread was expected from very early on in the pandemic, as this is normal with other respiratory diseases. This is why during the summer people were saying that this was, at the time, as good as things were going to get until we get an effective vaccine, and that rising infection rates were expected in the autumn and winter. This is also why alternative measures such as masks were being introduced (starting at the end of August where I am) in an attempt to try to mitigate some of the expected seasonality effects and avoid another lockdown.

Despite knowing in advance about the seasonality, it is still very useful to research into the details of this so that we know which factors are the most important so we can try to make use of them.

So the big win would be to have some sort of way to distingush between infectious asymptomatic and non-infectious asymptomatic.

There was talk of virus "loads" - if that is significant then surely Ct may be a possible indirect measure?

 

[Whey_Aye_Banzai]

View attachment 523784

Dr. Rushworth’s LinkedIn page shows that he works in a hospital north of Stockholm (Danderyds Sjukhus AB). He graduated as a doctor in January 2020 from Karolinska Institute. He is an “Underläkare” which is an “assistant physician.” A fully accredited doctor in Sweden is a “Läkare”.

He's been enjoying the attention his contrarian views have attracted with numerous articles and interviews since the summer.

He begins his spectator article (How dangerous is Covid? A Swedish doctor’s perspective | The Spectator) with "I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, and on living as a citizen in Sweden" and it ends with "If only 6,000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 per cent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for."

In September he announced: "So, to conclude: Covid is over in Sweden. We have herd immunity. Most likely, many other parts of the world do too, including England, Italy, and parts of the US, like New York. And the countries that have successfully contained the spread of the disease, like Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia, are going to have to stay in lockdown for at least another year, and possibly several years, if they don’t want to develop herd immunity the natural way."



Agreed on both counts. You should check out Alex Jones and David Icke.

I'll do an ad hom job later on Nial Ferguson, for a laugh.

Maybe I'll chuck in a picture of that Remain supporting married chubby lass he's banging - with permission of her husband.

 

[Norsemaid]

Oh Wye Aye you've beaten me to it .
Here's an alternative view for me some one called Ivor Cummings .
He's a don't lock down this time chap . He's been in demand recently on talk radio and other shows on YouTube etc.
He's a biomedical bodwho loves data and things thwt.
My own personal experience with the virus is that my daughter and niece have caught covid.
My daughter caught it in March at work despite masks and hand gel and my niece caught it last week from her boyfriends mum - who is a carer . Other than that I've not known anyone else with it .

 

[terminal]

So the big win would be to have some sort of way to distingush between infectious asymptomatic and non-infectious asymptomatic.

There was talk of virus "loads" - if that is significant then surely Ct may be a possible indirect measure?

As mentioned in a previous post, Ct can't really measure absolute values for a respiratory disease because how much virus is picked up by the swab will vary too much. Blood borne diseases are different, because blood samples are more homogenous. With a swab sample its only realistic to tell whether there is a detectable amount of virus there or not.

Think of it like this. Suppose you are inspecting a room for dust. You could put on a white glove and run your finger over various surfaces and look for dust on your finger tip. If there is a visible amount of dust you can say that the room is "too dusty". You can't however give an accurate measure of just how many grams of dust there are in the room in total.

The situation is similar with tests for respiratory diseases. You wipe a swab over the inside of someone's nose and you can tell that there is enough virus there to be "visible" by the test, but you can't get an accurate estimate of how many virus particles are in the body as a whole. There's simply too many variables.


There's also the practical aspect of putting testing into practice as well. Someone comes for a test, they get a swab stuck up their nostril, and the sample is sent off for testing. The test is done, and the results are given to the case. What has happened to the case in the mean time? Did they get better? Did they get worse? How bad is the infection going to be for them personally?

There's too many variables, and you can't give each case his own personal doctor to hover over him and monitor how he's doing. You can just tell him that he's tested positive, to self isolate for 2 weeks (or whatever the guidelines are in that area), and tell him to pay close attention to his breathing and contact the appropriate health care personnel if it becomes serious enough. He'll either recover on his own, or he won't. The focus at that point is to stop him from spreading it to anyone else. There's just too many cases to try to tailor treatment to the individual.

 

[Nick Dipples]

Those with an interest in the AstraZeneca press release may be interested in this:
The AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine Data Isn't Up to Snuff | WIRED

It turns out that the Oxford-AstraZenica vaccine result that found out that a half dose followed by a full dose worked better than two full doses was discovered by accident rather than design. A portion of the vials had a half strength dose in them rather than a full strength dose.

They are also running trials in the US, and may modify the US trial in order to try out the half dose there as well.

Because the half dose was discovered by accident rather than being an intentional experiment, researchers are still pouring over the data to try to figure out all the implications of it.

What's most extraordinary (to me anyway) about the emerging debacle with the astrazeneca trial is the dosing error... and then how they tried to handwave it away as a different dose level. Viral vectors like this are not that easy to make and the output you get from a batch of experimental vector is often quite variable. It's a very different vector, and different process, but at a previous company the outsourced lab would make enough vector for 15 - 30 patients per batch... but sometimes it just wouldn't work. Tens of thousands of USD down the drain.

But even then, it's not hard to know how much you've actually got per vial. It just seems like a complete QA failure and not very reassuring.

Looking at their protocol they do have a dose range (as you might expect) but it's not big enough to cover this.

Their odd pooling of data between cohorts does also smack of cherry-picking the results they want.

 

[Whey_Aye_Banzai]

Think of it like this. Suppose you are inspecting a room for dust. You could put on a white glove and run your finger over various surfaces and look for dust on your finger tip. If there is a visible amount of dust you can say that the room is "too dusty". You can't however give an accurate measure of just how many grams of dust there are in the room in total.

This lass does a fairly decent analogy with regarding PCR tests:

 

[Whey_Aye_Banzai]

I can try to find the post with the video if you are interested. I don't know what you said on the other thread, but the idea that a small proportion of cases do most of the spreading is mainstream public health understanding with respect to COVID-19.

Then we ought to find and nail those fvckers down by copying the Japanese/SK method of contact tracing.

 

[Nick Dipples]

https://sebastianrushworth.com

Well as predicted this guy is indeed a penis. I took a little time to look through his blog and the summary is that he's wrong about everything I've checked into. I think it's likely he's just trying to drive traffic to his blog by being a bit controversial. Another Sikora in the making I guess.

Is curcumin effective for knee pain? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

This article contains everything you need to know about using curcumin (turmeric extract) as a treatment for knee pain due to osteoarthritis.

sebastianrushworth.com

Is curcumin effective for knee pain?

LOL. Seriously this should tell you everything you need to know about this guy's ability to evaluate evidence. No, curcurmin is not biologically active and doesn't do anything for the many thousands of indications it's touted for.
Curcurmin Will Waste Your Time

How much do statins prolong life? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

How much longer can you expect to live if you take a statin? This article gives a precise answer, to within days, based on data from 90,000+ patients.

sebastianrushworth.com

Amongst his other pet issues, Sebastian is also a statin sceptic. I guess this is to appeal to the older reader who doesn't want to take their tablets. His interpretation of his cherry-picked data is as usual incorrect. Statins have a very clear benefit in reducing the incidence of cardiovascular events and studies are designed to explore this. The review he quotes tries to identify a survival benefit from these studies, and this causes a misleading under-estimate of the benefit from assuming the difference between survival curves stops at the end of the study period. The authors have subsequently recognised the errors in their analysis and in fact the benefit solely in length of life gained, per patient treated, is somewhere between 1 and 3 years, from that dataset.

What is long covid? - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

This article tells you everything you need to know about long covid, what the symptoms are, how long it usually lasts, and whether or not it is real.

sebastianrushworth.com

I’ve been generally sceptical of claims of long covid as some distinct entity for a couple of reasons.

Maybe it will turn out that long covid is a real entity after all (distinct from post-viral syndrome, PTSD, anxiety disorder, and so on) when better research is done down the line, but we can’t just assume it based on anecdote, fear-mongering, groupthink, and low quality science.

This is whataboutism and a distraction - people in the general population are calling long-term sequelae of having the infection "long covid", and I think the average punter is just not aware of post-viral syndrome. He kind of slides in the question of whether it represents a different clinical entity - it's not relevant to the rest of his article. The sheer number of people getting infected means this is inevitably going to be a major cause of morbidity in the coming years. He attempts to dismiss the NIHR qualitative research but it's completely valid in terms of triangulating this kind of data. Nonetheless the NHS estimates that 45% of hospitalised patients need ongoing support - that is a lot of morbidity, and cost.
Nature: The lasting misery of coronavirus long-haulers

Covid-19: New evidence on face masks - Sebastian Rushworth M.D.

A study was just published on the ability of face masks to prevent getting covid-19. It's the highest quality study to date. Here are the results

sebastianrushworth.com

Wearing face masks when out in public does not meaningfully decrease the probability that the mask wearer will get covid-19.

This is incorrect and shows he either doesn't understand the trial or is misrepresenting it. The study doesn't measure whether actually wearing masks has any effect. They asked one group to wear masks but the level of compliance is unknown.
The study was not run by a clinical trials unit, did not have ethics approval, and has no data monitoring board. The intervention period was 30 days which is too short to detect people who were infected at study entry or to detect people infected towards the end. The study is flawed in lots of other ways, but specifically looking at graduated-this-year Dr Seb's comments it just looks like he doesn't have the ability to interpret studies.

 

[Chalkythedog]

Get ready for the "New Pound" appearing in your account soon.

Ahh, the n£. That is a truly terrifying prospect to anyone with any savings. Fuelling the flames of inflation, in addition to the billions of profligate borrowing to date, is a horrible commodity crunch thundering down the tracks. There just isn't enough to go round, and Thatcherite selling of boxes to each other ain't going to cut it this time.

 

[3ToedSloth]

I'll do an ad hom job later on Nial Ferguson, for a laugh.

Maybe I'll chuck in a picture of that Remain supporting married chubby lass he's banging - with permission of her husband.

My post was actually more about you. You presented the Swede as a "balanced" and reputable doctor because it was sufficient for you that you liked the sound of his claims. Then there was your internationally respected cancer professor who actually gets cease and desist letters about his false accreditation claims. And so on.

You need to think more carefully about the source of your info. Who's writing it? Why are they writing it? Why should their opinion be trusted? What's their evidence and how reliable is it? Is there counter-evidence to their claims? Has/Is the work gone through a reputable peer review process? Where is it published? Has it been rejected by the scientific consensus, but latched onto by the conspiracy loons? Otherwise you may as well tune into this guy for your science updates: