Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

after ridiculous hike of covid cases, Indonesia finally started to force people to go home at 8 PM, with cops patroling and closing down shops.

yep, still daily normal life, but now max 8 PM.

im not sure this will be effective...
 
I just wonder how many other countries are going to imagine they don't have a problem with Delta as the falling numbers of Alpha infections mask its rise - until it is too late to respond to?

Reality is now biting in the US and also various other European countries. Here in the UK, government figures are still talking about removing the current restrictions in a few weeks as infections are absolutely rocketing! We'll be on 50,000+ cases per day by the time we reach the current 19th July 'freedom' date.
 
Apparently, Delta is ~50% more infectious than Alpha, certain data indicates risk of hospitalisation may be twice that of previous variants and it also evades some of the effect of the vaccines.

Vaccine efficacy still holds up pretty well,
though reduced (Pfizer better than AZ on this regard), but all vaccines seem to give very good protection against serious disease ~95%.

Ultimately, the sheer number of people getting infected with Delta means there will be a lot of hospitalisations and there will be a lot of deaths, but the numbers should be much reduced in comparison to previous waves of infection.

Most infections (and most serious illness) will be in the unvaccinated but there will still be plenty of fully vaccinated folk suffering as well.
 
Multitude of figures to digest to figure out exactly where we are. in the Uk figures are indeed rising, 11K +ve yesterday, 16K today, which is a startling rise. The numbers were down a bit over the weekend so I'm wondering if delayed reporting is part of this. Be interesting to see the % figures for test v positive tests.

Delta is more transmissiable apparently. However Uk data thus far is showing that whereas 10% of infections previously required hospital treatment, thus far delta is just around 3%. This is nothing to do with the virus, and all to do with the vaccinations, both in terms of vaccinated people not requiring hospital treatment so much, and also that more of the infected people are younger (again because they are not vaccinated as well as being in more social environments) and a natually smaller % of them would require hospital treatment.

My take (so far) is that the signs are that the policy is going to mostly work, hospitals/care home will remain largely unaffected, and deaths will be a lot lower. Now if yet another variant arrives that has some appreciable vaccine escape then all bets are off. But given how much this gov has emphasised that this is a non-reversible process, its highly unlikely that well see major restrictions again unless there is a drastic downturn in events.
 
Big surges in Scotland thanks to people meeting up for the football, would be my guess.

Note that the Sage modelling is that the coming wave of infections will lead to more than 40,000 deaths this summer, even with the 4 week delay of 'opening' to 19th July baked in. For some reason, the newspapers and rest of the media didn't seem to bother reporting this number, which is peculiar.

A lot of deaths will be in the unvaccinated (including quite a lot of elderly folk from certain ethnic groups), or those vaccinated but with other health issues. Anecdotally, we've heard that many of the hospitalisations from Delta so far are generally younger people who are less sick than in previous waves and therefore don't require treatment for as long. However, if the numbers of infections get high enough as seems likely, the number of hospitalisations will still be extremely high. I've got a holiday within the UK booked in about a month and I'm far from certain that we'll be able to go as I think there is at least a fair possibility that some sort of a milder lockdown will be required to ensure the NHS isn't overwhelmed.
 
Good indication of how effective vaccination is preventing outbreaks.

Marin County north of San Francisco has the highest vaccination rate in the Bay Area, with about 90% with at least one dose. They had two outbreaks of the delta variant in June:

The first outbreak occurred in the adjacent towns of San Anselmo and Fairfax where 30 COVID-19 cases were reported, all in unvaccinated individuals who were eligible for inoculation. One patient infected with the Delta variant was hospitalized and recovered. While the county didn't identify the specific variant in every case, those that were sequenced showed the Delta strain.

The second outbreak rose in June from a school in Novato where 25 cases were identified, with some in unvaccinated children who aren't eligible for the vaccine due to their age.


"It was centered in the school, and then in people who were connected to the school through sports programs or social networks," said Willis.

Both outbreaks were controlled within 14 days and are no longer active, the county said.
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So the cases were of unvaccinated people and they didn't spread further because of the high level of vaccination in the community.

However, because of the low case rate, these breakouts amounted to 70% of cases in the county being from the delta variant.

https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/delta-variant-Marin-County-COVID-San-Anselmo-16267943.php
 
Norwegian study: More than half of young people with mild Covid-19 infections experienced Long Covid

Six months after the infection, more than 50 per cent of young adults aged 16-30 still had symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath and trouble concentrating.

Researchers at Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, have followed 312 Covid-19 patients for an entire year. 247 of them home-isolated, while 65 were hospitalized.

The results of their study were recently published in an article in Nature Medicine.

At six months, 61 per cent of all patients had persistent symptoms, the researchers found.

Among those who home-isolated, 52 per cent still experienced various symptoms after half a year.

“A surprisingly high share of those aged 16-30 experience symptoms six months after the infection, even if they were not ill enough to be hospitalized,” Bjørn Blomberg, first author of the study and chief physician at Haukeland, says to the newspaper Aftenposten (link in Norwegian).
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https://sciencenorway.no/covid19/no...-19-infections-experienced-long-covid/1880560
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01433-3
 
Unfortunately, much of the attention has been focused on the extremes: asymptomatic/uninfected versus death.
This doesn't capture a very broad middle with observed complications and uncertain long-term and permanent effects.
Even when dealing with mild vs severe, there's a lot of damage that can occur in a case that falls short of hospitalization.

Compromised lung function for months or possibly years is a measurable percentage of patients, and while it seems best-tracked after hospitalizations, some mild cases have at least anecdotally led to compromised function.
Some real long-term questions like eventual development of pulmonary fibrosis are one reason I was eager to be vaccinated, having seen an older relative suffer from an idiopathic form of progressive and permanent lung scarring.
Highly vascular tissues being affected by blood clots might not show significant issue until age or other injury shows how much of the reserve capacity has been lost (kidney damage, brain trauma, etc.).

Another anecdote I've seen is an example of a patient that reacted severely to a vaccine, after having contracted COVID prior. If patients with prior COVID infection experience severe reactions to vaccinations, that may put an increasing number of people in the category of those that cannot have the vaccine or put up a poor immune response--those that depend on herd immunity for protection. Might become worse if additional boosters are needed and successive waves of new variants keep adding infected people to this category.

I have been a little concerned by the focus on the rare instance myocarditis among younger vaccination recipients, given there were small studies showing teenage athletes in with mild to asymptomatic COVID showing blood markers for heart inflammation at a much higher rate last year. If the goal is to avoid a 1/70000 chance at heart inflammation, perhaps it's not best done by being open to an increasingly infectious virus that might cause it in 1/16 to 1/10 of infected athletes.
 
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3dilettante said:
If patients with prior COVID infection experience severe reactions to vaccinations, that may put an increasing number of people in the category of those that cannot have the vaccine or put up a poor immune response--those that depend on herd immunity for protection
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A severe reaction to vaccine due to previous infection implies a pre-existing immune response, though...? So we are not talking about poor immunisation in such case.
 
Covid-19: A coronavirus-linked threat to children in India - BBC News
June 28, 2021
This month, four children were admitted separately to a hospital in the central Indian state of Maharashtra with symptoms of breathlessness and falling blood pressure.

Their mothers had contracted Covid-19 more than a month ago. The children had developed no symptoms of the disease. At the 1,000-bed Kasturba Hospital in Sevagram, the young patients, however, were found to have antibodies to Covid-19, indicating past infection.

Now they were battling a rare, inflammatory and potentially life threatening condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C). This condition usually develops four to six weeks after children and teenagers have recovered from Covid-19.
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WhiningKhan said:
A severe reaction to vaccine due to previous infection implies a pre-existing immune response, though...? So we are not talking about poor immunisation in such case.
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It's a reaction from an undesired branch of the immune response. The vaccine is meant to stimulate T-cell antibody response, and in particular the memory T-cell response for long-term immunity.
Allergic reactions or non-T pathways can produce life-threatening events, but do not stop the virus. Early analysis on COVID-19's success focused on how it was unusually capable at suppressing antibody response, leaving the ineffective inflammatory response that proved so damaging for many patients.

Some subset of people are going to have an unwanted adverse response, but another theoretical possibility is that significant wide-spread damage from an infection can sensitize other pathways, meaning an additional subset of the population will be unable to safely take the vaccine, but will lack the appropriate antibody response.
That couples with the probable decay in antibody immunity over time, evidence that natural infections appear to provide poorer long-term immunity, and other virus variants possibly necessitating boosters. The miss-trained immune systems of such patients can respond violently to the vaccine, or possibly even a later re-exposure to COVID-19 or another variant while simultaneously not being effective at stopping the actual virus.

Those people would be a subset of those that depend on the vaccination rate of the rest of the population being high enough, but if we fail to tamp down on successive waves well enough, new small slices of the population will be added to that group each time.
 
wco81 said:
I think if we have to get boosters, the Novavax may be a good choice for those who got mRNA shots.
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True that was dumb of me, yes prolly having a different vaccine type prolly is the smarter way

I see the cases in israel are rising again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Israel 60% ppl there have had 2 vaccines true its not 70% or whatever the herd number is but its worrying, I doubt they will go into lockdown again cause why? until a vaccine has been developed :)
 
I heard a report on BBC radio the other day that they have just begun trials of a rejigged AZ vaccine designed to combat the Beta (South African) variant. A quick search brings up the following release:

https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-c...ase-ii-iii-trial-participants-vaccinated.html

I'd imagine this has been in development for some time back to when the vaccine escape properties of Beta first came to light but it could well have been better to target one at Delta! Hopefully, the Beta target will also have improved efficacy against the Delta variant as well. The release doesn't mention anything about use of a stabilised spike used by the more efficaceous vaccines this time around which is a shame. Also, probably too late to refer to the German academic research which claimed to have discovered the probable cause of the blood clotting episodes. Hopefully, something has been tweaked to reduce or remove the risk of these issues.
 
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