Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

[K]

[K]

StatNews:

The world needs Covid-19 vaccines. It may also be overestimating their power

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/the-world-needs-covid-19-vaccines-it-may-also-be-overestimating-their-power/

"In the public imagination, vaccines are often seen effectively as cure-alls, like inoculations against measles.

Rather than those vaccines, however, the Covid-19 vaccines in development may be more like those that protect against influenza — reducing the risk of contracting the disease, and of experiencing severe symptoms should infection occur, a number of experts told STAT.

“We all recognize that flu vaccine, in a year when it’s efficacious, you have what, 50% protection? And in a year when it’s poor you have 30% or less than that — and still we use that,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, who is chairing a committee advising the French government on vaccines to prevent Covid-19.
...

A recently released study in which macaques were vaccinated with one vaccine candidate — this one being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca — showed the primates were protected from Covid-induced pneumonia. But the macaques still had high levels of virus replicating in their upper airways. (The paper was a pre-print, meaning it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed and published in a journal.)
...

“If we push the disease from pneumonia to a common cold, then I think that’s a huge step forward,” said Munster, chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont.
...

Michael Mina, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, thinks achieving sterilizing immunity with a vaccine will not be possible for Covid-19. Experience with human coronaviruses — and with multiple pathogens that cause colds — shows immunity that develops after infection with respiratory tract infections is not lifelong. In some cases, the duration is measured in months, not years.
...

Earlier this week Moderna, the Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech, said eight people in a Phase 1 trial of its Covid-19 vaccine developed neutralizing antibodies to the virus.
...

“Converting this infection to a upper respiratory illness would be, I think, quite a lot better than where we are today,” said Subbarao, who worked on vaccines for SARS, a closely related coronavirus that caused an international outbreak in 2003.

Subbarao said setting public expectations of what these vaccines will be able to achieve is critical."

[stui magpie]

The state of cases in Victoria by council.

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/coronavirus-victoria-covid19-cases-by-council-area/news-story/8a4e836bf2cec46bcbd20349d9658c94

Pretty happy, a few weeks back Banyule was not looking good but now only has 1 active (known) case from a total of 91 cases.

Assuming that 1 person is in lock down isolation somewhere, that means the chances of getting infected in this area are pretty damn low.

[Jezza]

Latest numbers

Confirmed (Deaths) - Recoveries

USA = 1,689,581 (99,381) - 451,745
Brazil = 365,213 (22,746) - 149,911
Russia = 353,427 (3,633) - 118,798
UK = 259,559 (36,793) - Unknown
Spain = 235,772 (28,752) - 150,376
Italy = 229,858 (32,785) - 140,479
France = 182,584 (28,367) - 64,617
Germany = 180,515 (8,404) - 159,818
Turkey = 156,827 (4,340) - 118,694
India = 141,228 (4,057) - 58,724
...........................................................
Australia = 7,118 (102) - 6,532

5,483,921 confirmed cases
347,198 deaths
2,268,967 recoveries

Australia:
- Confirmed cases = 7,118
---- New South Wales = 3,090
---- Victoria = 1,605
---- Queensland = 1,056
---- Western Australia = 564
---- South Australia = 439
---- Tasmania = 228
---- ACT = 107
---- NT = 29
- Deaths = 102
- Recoveries = 6,532
- Case fatality rate = 1.43%

Active Cases = 2,867,756
- USA = 1,138,455
- Russia = 230,996
- UK = 222,766 (maximum)
- Brazil = 192,556
- France = 89,600
- India = 78,447
- Peru = 66,708
- Spain = 56,644
- Italy = 56,594
- Chile = 40,236
............................................
- Australia = 484

**(Maximum) = Recovery numbers are not counted, so only subtracts the number of deaths from the total number of confirmed cases.

[Jezza]

[Jezza]

AUSTRALIA

Date = Confirmed Cases (New Cases) = Percentage of new cases

18/05/2020 = 7,060 (15) = 0.2%
19/05/2020 = 7,068 (8] = 0.1%
20/05/2020 = 7,079 (11) = 0.2%
21/05/2020 = 7,081 (2) = 0.03%
22/05/2020 = 7,095 (14) = 0.2%
23/05/2020 = 7,111 (16) = 0.2%
24/05/2020 = 7,114 (3) = 0.04%
25/05/2020 = 7,118 (4) = 0.1%

6,532 recovered, 102 deaths.

Cases doubling every 58 days.

617 cases of community transmission nationwide.

484 active cases.

South Australia, ACT and NT have no active cases.

Queensland numbers were revised down from 1,061 to 1,056 - https://7news.com.au/news/health/qld-virus-tally-cut-after-data-cleanse-c-1056753

VICTORIA

Date = Confirmed Cases (New Cases) = Percentage of new cases

18/05/2020 = 1,567 (9) = 0.6%
19/05/2020 = 1,573 (6) = 0.4%
20/05/2020 = 1,580 (7) = 0.4%
21/05/2020 = 1,581 (1) = 0.1%
22/05/2020 = 1,593 (12) = 0.8%
23/05/2020 = 1,602 (9) = 0.6%
24/05/2020 = 1,603 (1) = 0.1%
25/05/2020 = 1,605 (2) = 0.1%

1,520 recovered, 19 deaths.

Cases doubling every 56 days in Victoria.

180 cases of community transmission in Victoria.

66 active cases.

[K]

On a Scottish Isle, Nursing Home Deaths Expose a Covid-19 Scandal

At the Home Farm nursing home on the Isle of Skye, more than a quarter of its residents died and nearly all were infected with coronavirus. Families are furious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/world/europe/coronavirus-uk-nursing-homes.html

"On the Isle of Skye off the western coast of Scotland, residents thought they had sealed themselves off from the coronavirus. They shuttered hotels. Officials warned of police checks. Traffic emptied on the only bridge from the mainland.

But the frailest spot on the island remained catastrophically exposed: Home Farm, a 40-bed nursing home for people with dementia. Owned by a private equity firm, Home Farm has become a grim monument of the push to maximize profits at Britain’s largest nursing home chains, and of the government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

Today, all but seven of the residents have been stricken. More than a quarter are dead.

The virus has ravaged nursing homes across Europe and the United States. But the death toll in British homes — 14,000, official figures say, with thousands more dying as an indirect result of the virus — is becoming a defining scandal of the pandemic for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

By focusing at first on protecting the health system, Mr. Johnson’s strategy meant that some infected patients were unwittingly moved from hospitals and into nursing homes. Residents and staff members were denied tests, while nursing home workers begged in vain for protective gear."

[K]

We Are Living in a Failed State

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

"When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.
...

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.
...

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone."

[K]

WaPo:

'Practically from the outset of the pandemic, Republicans have been sending a message to older Americans, with varying degrees of subtlety, that their health is not as important as that of the economy. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick actually said it out loud: “Those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country.”

Patrick’s comment was reminiscent of an infamous statement back in the mid-1980s by then-Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm, a Democrat, who said that terminally ill older Americans have “a duty to die and get out of the way.” Instead of relying on expensive, life-prolonging machines, Lamm said, they should “let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” Lamm became known as “Governor Gloom.”'

.........

Patrick said much more than just "don't sacrifice the country". He also said this:

"And we’re crushing the average worker, we’re crushing small business, we’re crushing the markets, we’re crushing this country. And what I said when I was with you that night, there are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children, and my grandchildren, and saving this country for all of us."

[stui magpie]

I saw some video on the news tonight, Americans on a beach, memorial day weekend, not a lot of social distancing happening.

People were interviewed and were fatalistic.

If one of us gets it, we'll deal with it as a family
If it's my time to go, so be it

Call them dumb rednecks if that's what it takes to make you feel good about yourself, I just saw acceptance of risk and consequences. Hospitals aren't overwhelmed, yeah 100k people are dead but an imperial shitpile more have had it and lived, people have seen the data and are making a choice to get on with life and take the punt.

[Pies4shaw]

K, It’s not too difficult for Patrick to adopt that stance, indefensible as it is. Texas has one of the lowest death rates in the US (presently 53 per million) and large swathes of the State haven’t been affected much in their health at all. Texas has 254 counties and most of the 1,542 deaths to date have been in just a handful. 221 deaths in Harris (Houston), 211 in Dallas and just 5 more counties with 50 or more deaths. 143 have had no deaths. 34 have had 1 death. The problem, at the moment (and at the time he said it, which, IIRC, was around the time Texas was announcing its intention to reopen from 1 May), is a small and confined one by US standards. Politically, it is probably hard for a conservative to try to persuade people who aren’t suffering health consequences that they should remain in lockdown. It’s easier to tell the oldies they’ll have to take their chances.

[stui magpie]

^

And of all the states in the USA, the former Republic of Texas, the Lone Star State, doesn't take kindly to being told what to do by anyone.

2nd largest state in the USA both by geography and population, don't mess with Texas Y'all

[Pies4shaw]

[stui magpie]

large population of individual narcissists or large population of people conscious of personal liberty and willing to take educated risks?

I didn't see anyone thinking they were more important than others, quite the reverse.

[Pies4shaw]

They’re willing, it appears, to take educated risks for other people. In normal speech, we used to call such behaviour “selfish”.