Coronavirus: More than 80% of patients have mild disease and will recover

Started by dsanchez, February 23, 2020, 23:47:08

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SueC

An actual live performance upside during the pandemic:  In Western Australia, it's been a good 12 months for local artists - because music concerts have gone ahead with certain crowd density rules for most of that year, but national and international acts have been unable to come in due to border closures.

QuoteCOVID-19 has provided a silver lining for WA musicians and audiences as more local artists take the stage, filling the gaps left by a lack of national and international tours...

...There have been more opportunities for local players — whether in cover bands or playing originals — at the Indi Bar, Mojos, Freo Social, Rosemount, Clancy's, Rodney's, The Milk Bar, The Bird, The Aardvark or regional venues.

For Andrew Ryan, managing director of Mojos, it's a perfect moment for any new act with more than half an hour's worth of good songs.

"It's been an extremely good time to start a new band," Mr Ryan said.

"There's still no national or international acts, so it's been actually positive as a breeding ground [for talent].

"You might hear people talk about COVID babies, but there's a lot of COVID baby bands."

The next national or international success from WA could emerge out of the pandemic.

"Gyroscope, Jebediah, Tame Impala, Sleepy Jackson, Katy Steele, Stella Donnelly, [they] all started in the small rooms," Mr Ryan said.

Artists have welcomed the ability to say they've sold out a gig, even if audience numbers have been slashed due to restrictions.

from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-24/wa-live-music-scene-boosted-during-covid-19-pandemic/13085590
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SueC

And now sadly, the down side at the moment...

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jun/09/its-hard-to-have-hope-will-australias-music-industry-ever-truly-recover

QuoteAmid the stress and unknowability of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic – which continues to wreak daily havoc and decimate arts industries around the world – there was a moment when some Australian musicians actually felt lucky.

"A lot of my friends overseas weren't getting any sort of stimulus or funding from [their] governments, and we were," recalls Harriette Pilbeam, who records as Hatchie. After months of lobbying, the state and federal governments had begun drip-feeding the industry with rescue packages, and some musicians found themselves eligible for fortnightly jobkeeper supplements (although many working behind the scenes were not).

"We were so grateful to be here – for [nearly] a year, we thought 'God, we're so lucky'," she says. "It felt like it would be silly [to complain] while everyone else was so much worse off."

Fast-forward to June 2021, and that moment has passed. Where Australian musicians may once have felt protected from the worst of the global crisis, they now feel left behind by a government that has botched the vaccine rollout, scrapped jobkeeper, and allowed sporting matches to continue while the music equivalents – stadium shows and festivals – have been cancelled repeatedly, often with no insurance.

Those who would ordinarily make their money from touring internationally or locally are faced with the worst of both worlds. While the US and Europe tentatively look forward to the return of live music later this year, some artists in Australia feel shut out from career-making global tours and festival slots. Meanwhile, the local touring circuit has been made unsustainable due to snap lockdowns, capacity reductions, and little ability to forward plan.
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dsanchez

Seems never ending at this point:


More:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1402062059890786311.html
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

Ulrich

At the moment it's looking good in Germany:

QuoteDie Gesundheitsämter in Deutschland haben dem Robert Koch-Institut (RKI) binnen eines Tages 652 Corona-Neuinfektionen gemeldet. Zum Vergleich: Vor einer Woche hatte der Wert bei 1204 Ansteckungen gelegen. Die Sieben-Tage-Inzidenz gab das RKI am Dienstagmorgen mit bundesweit 15,5 an (Vortag: 16,6).
(...)
Generell müsse man aber wachsam bleiben, mahnte Walger. Den Sommer sollte man nutzen, die Erfahrungen der dritten Infektionswelle zu analysieren. Der Experte verwies auf die sich in Großbritannien ausbreitende Delta-Variante des Virus. Dort sei der Fehler gemacht worden, möglichst früh vielen Menschen eine Erstimpfung zu geben und die Zweitimpfung weit rauszuschieben. Das habe eine Lücke im Impfschutz verursacht. Diesen Fehler habe man im Deutschland aber nicht gemacht.
https://www.morgenpost.de/vermischtes/article232473985/corona-news-deutschland-aktuell-rki-maskenpflicht-spahn-impfausweis.html
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

We've been doing this over a year, have we learnt nothing?

This is the toilet paper alley in a Sydney supermarket after it was announced that four central areas were locking down for a week (Delta strain got out and has now infected dozens of people in Sydney).



Do people still expect to crap more during lockdown? Maybe do they normally wait till they're at work to save on the household budget?

Or are they getting stress-related IBS en masse?

Or is this what they're doing???


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SueC

Something amusing reported from current Australian lockdowns - this sign on a door:

Dear Customers, We will be closed for the foreseeable future because Scott Morrison is a useless dickhead who only ordered enough vaccine to vaccinate 4% of the population 18 months into a pandemic.
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Finally have a date for my first vaccination - Australia's rollout has been atrocious; worst of the OECD countries thanks to government mismanagement (we've got the extreme-neoliberal-party in charge here, and if you ask me that's because there's a lot of stupidity, prejudice and greed in the population - so slogans like "Stop The Boats" and "No Carbon Tax" work, as do appeals to people's individual wealth, rather than things like egalitarianism, social justice, looking after the much-abused planet).



I'm getting the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, which I preferred from the outset to AZ (because I remembered my biochemistry and physiology courses - I reckoned the AZ delivery vehicle was always going to be more likely to cause problems that using straight mRNA) - next Tuesday, yay, and the second shot three weeks later. Brett has to wait until September for his first shot, even though he works in a medical setting - this is how bad the vaccine rollout has been here. The only reason I got in this "early" (months and months after other countries were vaccinating widely with Pfizer) is because I'm susceptible to aspiration pneumonia, and therefore a bad risk if I got infected with SARS-CoV-2. Even ordinary colds and flus are a problem for me because I've got a paralysed laryngeal nerve that interferes with swallowing, particularly when asleep and ill (because my system can't deal with a lot of mucus while horizontal and unconscious).

Had my flu shot last month. Don't forget to get your flu shots as well, people!  :) I don't know about you, but this is the longest time I've ever gone without a cold or flu - haven't had anything like that since the pandemic started. While that's wonderful, and while I hope people are going to keep some of the behaviours that stop respiratory viruses from spreading after the pandemic as well, one down side to that is that many people who are now catching cold or flu tend to have worse symptoms than normal - because their bodies haven't dealt with respiratory infections in yonks. So influenzas are likely to hit people worse than usual if they get them - and influenza still kills a lot of people every year too (it's just we were used to that, and it wasn't a good thing to get used to...).

SARS-CoV-2 immunisation obviously offers huge protection against hospitalisation and death from acute cases - but here's another thing people often forget:

QuoteNo, we can't treat COVID-19 like the flu. We have to consider the lasting health problems it causes — Zoë Hyde (The Conversation): "Many people who have had COVID-19 and survived haven't returned to their previous state of health ... A Sydney study found one-third of people with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 were left with persistent symptoms lasting at least two months, including fatigue and shortness of breath. More than 10% had impaired lung function."

"The UK's Office for National Statistics has calculated about one in seven people who contract COVID-19 will experience persistent symptoms lasting at least 12 weeks. They estimate nearly one million people are currently living with long COVID in the UK, and 40% of them have been living with the condition for over one year."

from https://theconversation.com/no-we-cant-treat-covid-19-like-the-flu-we-have-to-consider-the-lasting-health-problems-it-causes-164072
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SueC

Something cute shared be our ABC this morning to help us cope with Australia's outbreak of the Delta strain. The two most populous states are in lockdown and ours has a hard border again after quickly eliminating Delta when it crossed from NSW two weeks ago. I'm really looking forward to my vaccination next week.

https://images.scribblelive.com/2021/7/16/bddac779-4fcd-4aed-8a4e-2463bb229d79.gif
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Ulrich

https://www.gmx.net/magazine/wissen/wissenschaft-technik/kampf-corona-alpakas-helfen-36056040

Quote from: undefinedGöttinger Forscher des Max-Planck-Instituts vermelden Vielversprechendes: Sie haben Mini-Antikörper entwickelt, die das Coronavirus und seine Varianten binden und neutralisieren.

Die Baupläne dafür haben Alpakas geliefert. Die Vorbereitungen für klinische Tests laufen bereits.

Last year I watched a movie, in which it was said: "Alpacas are the animal of the future".  :beaming-face
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

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Ulrich

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/oct/12/covid-response-one-of-uks-worst-ever-public-health-failures

QuoteBritain's early handling of the coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history, with ministers and scientists taking a "fatalistic" approach that exacerbated the death toll, a landmark inquiry has found.

"Groupthink", evidence of British exceptionalism and a deliberately "slow and gradualist" approach meant the UK fared "significantly worse" than other countries, according to the 151-page "Coronavirus: lessons learned to date" report led by two former Conservative ministers.
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

From Crikey's Cam Wilson, via email news.

QuoteHow five guys and a Google Doc killed ivermectin

Last week was the nail in the coffin for the idea that COVID-19 deaths can be prevented using ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug lauded by the right, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

The BBC reported that recent analysis shows none of the 26 major trials of the drug revealed promising results, and a third of those trials showed serious errors or evidence of fraud. The source of this analysis was a handful of guys spread across the globe — an epidemiologist, a medical researcher, a student, a data analyst and a chief science officer —  who have been using Google Docs, Dropbox and Twitter to tackle and expose bad science in their spare time.

The idea that anyone can debunk bullshit is cool. On the other hand, it feels a bit grim that the burden of overturning evidence for the biggest problem in the world right now fell to five guys and not, like, the World Health Organization. I spoke to two Aussie members of the group, Kyle Sheldrick and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who explained to me how the world wide web changed everything about how science works now.

It used to be that you would submit something to a publication like Science and, after jumping through enough hoops, your research could be published. If you had doubts about a published study, you could respond by writing a letter to the publication. Months would pass before anything happens, if something happens.

When the internet killed the gatekeeper, it opened the floodgates. Publishing your research became as easy as uploading it the internet — the eggheads call these "pre-print publications"— without the need for something as time consuming as a "peer review".

Since the beginning of the pandemic, dodgy preprint studies have been going viral online as people search for answers. (Peer-reviewed work still happens and is important to legit journals, but it suffers from being too slow.)

People — like misinformation super-spreader Craig Kelly — can then shop around for a legit-looking PDF that "proves" what they already believed.

"There's hundreds of papers coming out a day. If you were to publish fake ivermectin research, the chance of ever being found out is quite low," Kyle told me.

The flipside is that a ragtag team of medical research mercenaries can shape scientific knowledge using a shared spreadsheet of studies to coordinate their checks on study methodology, and some nifty statistical analysis based on publicly available results and data requested from research authors.

Once they've done this work, they publish on Twitter and on their personal blogs. They engage with people on social media to explain what they did and review other people's work. All this took was a bit of knowhow and curiosity on their parts.

Their reward? "I get no financial incentives, there are no career incentives. You get paid in hate mail and death threats even if you're successful getting fraudulent research looked at," Gideon said.

Whether this model of "a good guy with a spreadsheet is the solution to a bad guy with the spreadsheet" trumps our pre-internet scientific publishing model is moot — the internet genie is well and truly out of the bottle — and also a false choice. That's because gate-kept science had its problems with fraud too! It's just that the traditional methods of gatekeeping aren't screening for fraud like Kyle and Gideon's crew are.

This is a major problem with scientific rigour and the internet. How are we supposed to know what's real? What chance does a mere mortal have to understand medical research when the world's top experts haven't been spotting fraud? Even with Kyle and Gideon's analysis, I'm just taking their critique in good faith. They are transparent, but all the details are gobbledygook to me.

And in case you didn't realise, this same problem is happening in just about every other domain of life too.

But their story gives me hope. The world could have ignored Gideon and Kyle's analysis. Instead, the world's most read publishers are reporting that the reputation of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment is in tatters because of their work.

Sure, the internet is the problem here. But it's offering us solutions too.
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Ulrich

QuoteDrugmaker Merck asked U.S. regulators Monday to authorize its pill against COVID-19 in what would add an entirely new and easy-to-use weapon to the world's arsenal against the pandemic.

If cleared by the Food and Drug Administration — a decision that could come in a matter of weeks — it would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19. All other FDA-backed treatments against the disease require an IV or injection.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/11/1045005513/merck-asks-fda-to-authorize-promising-anti-covid-pill?t=1634123312372
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

dsanchez

Just tested positive for covid, probably Omicron, I have no symptoms whatsoever. Will update!
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

Ulrich

Sorry to hear, hope you will get through without too much trouble!  :cool

According to science, sooner or later, we will probably all catch Omicron (German version only):
QuoteAber die Prognose ist: Omikron wird durchrauschen, es findet also derzeit eine Durchseuchung statt.

Ja, über kurz oder lang wird jeder mit dem Virus in Kontakt gekommen sein. Entweder geimpft oder ohne Schutz infiziert.
https://www.t-online.de/gesundheit/krankheiten-symptome/id_91523482/corona-pandemie-soll-in-einem-jahr-zu-ende-sein-prognostiziert-ein-experte.html
The holy city breathed like a dying man...