So you're saying hes been pretty balloux
Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]
- Thread starter RDGoodla
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WhiningKhan
Regular
I suspect that the difference of approach is due to the difference of viewpoint. You searched for a paper which compared how Covid is mutating in comparison to other widely spread pathogens. However, in doing so, you're missing the wood because of all the trees in the way. It doesn't matter how it compares to other endemic viruses which have been around for a long time. They aren't important and don't tell us much because we don't know how long it may have taken for them to get into a non-threatening equilibrium. Covid is different because it is entirely novel. It has only been seen in humans for 2 years, it's running riot through unvaccinated populations (and the vaccinated with Omicron) and our immune systems are still learning to deal with it. There is absolutely no evolutionary pressure for Covid to mutate into a potentially less dangerous illness. The evolutionary pressure is on us and I'm not happy that governments are now apparently happy to throw people with pre-existing conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma etc etc) under a bus.
Posting a link to a dated article saying the virus isn't anything special in regards to mutations is just odd to me, given all that has occurred since September 2020. I suspect a similar paper produced now would tell a rather different story. For instance, Omicron has evolved a completely different method of cell entry to the previous variants which seems a pretty major mutation! The paper was an honest attempt to look at the virus at the time but has little relevance to our current experience. I'm no virologist and have no interest in how quickly Covid mutates in comparison to other viruses because they aren't causing a global pandemic. I do have an interest in how Covid might evolve because, well, we're living it now, aren't we?
My links to Ravi Gupta's posts were because he is a virologist actively investigating how Omicron operates - as he has done with previous variants. Gupta (and his team) also authored a paper (previously linked in this thread) which followed mutations of Covid in an immunocompromised patient over a number of months. Given his background and areas of study, I think you have to take his view seriously that we need to be on guard about what may come next.
From your comments about exposure, it seems you've entirely bought into the 'Omicron' is mild narrative. It is certainly milder and appears to be less damaging than Alpha and Delta (providing there aren't any long-term sequelae which we don't know about yet), but avoiding catching a novel variant of a virus which we're still learning about is much preferable to the alternative.
As I've mentioned in the past, my brother in law, who I also work with, is CEV - he's been given a personal PCR swab to send off at the sign of any symptoms and would be one of those getting a course of Paxlovid if/when he catches Covid. We've been extremely careful to try and avoid catching the virus within the family because of this. I also have 2 young children who I wanted to avoid Covid until they could receive a vaccine. Sadly not possible thanks to the failures of our government to protect or vaccinate young children. Thankfully, both kids seem to have weathered it OK. If you aren't facing similar issues within your family, it may be easy for you to just shrug and carry on but the experience of the pandemic isn't quite the same. I really feel for the 5 million or so people with pre-existing conditions (in the UK alone) who are being pretty much ignored by government in their desperation to change the narrative and 'get back to normal'. These people certainly can't do so and many will be at considerable risk even going about their daily business.
I'm obviously very pleased that Omicron seems less virulent than Alpha and Delta (still more serious than the original Wuhan strain, however) and I'm happy that my immediate family has managed to avoid Covid until the past couple of weeks. This doesn't mean I think we should just let Omicron rip through society, especially as the health care system is still under so much stress. We're stabilising at a level not far off 100,000 deaths per year at the moment which isn't exactly ideal.
We will see future variants, some of which could prove very dangerous, so I hope that we continue the sampling and oversight of what is going on around the world. As Omicron has shown, with modern travel, the genie can be out of the bottle within days with this virus. If something more virulent appears, we need to have a proper plan as to what needs doing. The UK government, especially, took a massive gamble with Omicron and mostly got away with it because of the reduced virulence. We might not be so lucky next time.
I'll continue to wear masks in shops for the foreseeable future. Not exactly that much of an imposition, is it?
Well thats what the scientists say, its very infectious though, so unlike the common cold etc a lot of ppl will get it, so prolly a lot will die.
anecdote time (of course worthless)
I started feeling a bit cold the thursday night, thought nothing at the time, firday came along and I coughed maybe 6 times, no fever or anything else but took a test
no other symptoms (Im not sure if sore bum counts, actually my worse 'symptom' but not sure if its anything to do with covid (*)) I did stop work for about 6 hours yesterday after the positive and watched 3 films, perfect excuse.
saturday I notice absolutely zero, sitting in the study working (no excuses now not too) in my tshirt & shorts and flipflops, without heater (ventilate the house so my gf doesnt get it)
The funny thing is which is a small anecdote of how infectious it is, I usually walk 5-10km a day, but I must of got it from being 5 minutes in the supermarket not even crowded, of course everyone had masks on.
(*)https://time.com/5866687/tom-hanks-on-colbert/
Well, despite first testing positive on Wednesday morning, I've not really developed any symptoms to speak of - slight fatigue and headache, but I've only had a few paracetamol. Testing daily on LFTs, I returned a negative test this morning (yesterday's positive was almost too faint to see). If I test negative on Monday (day 5 after the positive came by UK reckoning) and Tuesday morning, I'll be back at work the same day. It seems odd to think I might have fought it off in just a few days. As my wife and daughter brought it into the household 2 weeks ago, I've been testing every day so certainly shouldn't have missed actually becoming infected earlier. That said, I did have a bit of a dry cough last weekend (which was gone pretty much by the time the tests turned positive!) so perhaps I had a low level infection back then which only 'peaked' at a low viral load when my tests turned positive? Seems very odd, though a good indication that vaccination and booster works pretty well! That said, my wife is still coughing a fair bit and feels unwell so she's had it much more severely than the rest of us. She's in her late 30s and had 3 Pfizer. I'm late 40s, 2xAZ plus a Moderna booster. That might be a difference as well. I think there is a chance I had a mild case of Covid during the early days of the pandemic but only a small chance. I've never tested positive until this month.
Some European countries like Denmark are dropping restrictions because they're seeing low hospitalizations and deaths, probably due to high vaccination and booster rates.
The US can't say the same unfortunately. Hospitalizations are starting to decline but deaths are still high. Low vaccination rate and even lower booster rate compared to other G8 nations.
The US can't say the same unfortunately. Hospitalizations are starting to decline but deaths are still high. Low vaccination rate and even lower booster rate compared to other G8 nations.
American researchers have developed a test which may be able to determine the severity of a covid infection. The study on which the test is based is not yet peer reviewed.
https://thehill.com/changing-americ...-blood-test-can-predict-how-severe-your-covid
Will be awhile before the study is validated and they can apply for EUA from the US FDA.
https://thehill.com/changing-americ...-blood-test-can-predict-how-severe-your-covid
Will be awhile before the study is validated and they can apply for EUA from the US FDA.
So a Johns Hopkins University study came out this past week and it concludes that lockdowns or any kind of NPI has had minimal impact on saving lives, specifically maybe reducing the CFR or IFR by .2%.
Fox News is whining that the mainstream media isn't covering this study, which hasn't been peer reviewed.
Well it turns out that the authors are economists, not scientists from JHU's prestigious med school or school of public health. More relevantly, some of the authors have displayed a libertarian bent, previously arguing against lockdowns.
https://nationalpost.com/health/joh...le-to-prevent-covid-deaths-flawed-critics-say
I scanned the PDF. It's very long. It doesn't really address countries which had lockdowns and kept deaths low or countries which let it rip very early, such as Sweden.
So it doesn't mention Australia or New Zealand. Or really delve much into the Asian nations which still have much lower deaths -- and it's curious they only chose deaths as the only metric.
On Sweden, which most opponents of covid NPIs cited in the first year -- not so much these days -- they don't compare Sweden to neighboring Norway, and Denmark, which was done often, but to a pseudo Sweden. It's weird, their conclusion could be easily dismantled by comparing neighboring countries which implemented different levels of restrictions or comparing countries with similar demographics.
We will see how much the MAGA world tries to tout this study, in which the authors try to steal JHU's name and prestige for their "study."
Fox News is whining that the mainstream media isn't covering this study, which hasn't been peer reviewed.
Well it turns out that the authors are economists, not scientists from JHU's prestigious med school or school of public health. More relevantly, some of the authors have displayed a libertarian bent, previously arguing against lockdowns.
https://nationalpost.com/health/joh...le-to-prevent-covid-deaths-flawed-critics-say
I scanned the PDF. It's very long. It doesn't really address countries which had lockdowns and kept deaths low or countries which let it rip very early, such as Sweden.
So it doesn't mention Australia or New Zealand. Or really delve much into the Asian nations which still have much lower deaths -- and it's curious they only chose deaths as the only metric.
On Sweden, which most opponents of covid NPIs cited in the first year -- not so much these days -- they don't compare Sweden to neighboring Norway, and Denmark, which was done often, but to a pseudo Sweden. It's weird, their conclusion could be easily dismantled by comparing neighboring countries which implemented different levels of restrictions or comparing countries with similar demographics.
We will see how much the MAGA world tries to tout this study, in which the authors try to steal JHU's name and prestige for their "study."
@iroboto looked at this as we talked about it elsewhere. It has several caveats that should be noted. It's a study on studies. They picked only 34 studies out of 18950 papers to use.
This guy doesn't seem to think much of the study. A comprehensive thread:
The authors of the paper (which isn't peer-reviewed) picked and chose studies to use, ignoring some obvious ones, selecting others, not explaining their calculations, making strange assumptions and so forth. A couple of the authors of some of the papers used in the meta study have already spoken out against the conclusions. As you might expect with Fox News pushing it, it seems to mostly be bullshit.
The authors of the paper (which isn't peer-reviewed) picked and chose studies to use, ignoring some obvious ones, selecting others, not explaining their calculations, making strange assumptions and so forth. A couple of the authors of some of the papers used in the meta study have already spoken out against the conclusions. As you might expect with Fox News pushing it, it seems to mostly be bullshit.
I disagree. Those trees make the wood. I'm talking about Covid in relation to other diseases as to whether it is different or not. Yes, we may not be passed significant issues from variations, but in the long term, in how human beings evolve to live alongside viruses, there's nothing special here and I see little reason to doubt it'll be different.
On that point, exposure to viruses is good for humans. It trains the immune system. Complete isolation from pathogens leaves you ever more vulnerable to pathogens when you encounter them. Unless one intends to live in an aseptic bubble, getting the right amount of the right exposures is what's going to keep you healthy in the face of ever changing viruses.
Well you didn't qualify what you meant by mutation power. You just asserted that C19 was remarkable at mutating, and I'm challenging that assertion. If by "ability of this virus to mutate so quickly" your talking numerous strains in a short period, as I say, that's probably the normal for novel viruses. Mutations happen randomly at a rate per virus. The more people infected, the more variations you'll get in a given time period. And the more significant those infections because of a lack of immune response, the more virus replication, the more chance of mutations. The disease's capacity to spawn different strains is IMO a direct correlation to the rate of spread among an immune-naive population and once that population has adapted, the virus's behaviour will be more subdued and in keeping with all the other diseases, no? If instead you mean the virus actually mutates at a remarkable rate, with high genetic variations than other diseases, the only data I've found is that one number I linked to. If there's updated data showing SARS-Cov-2 undergoes base changes significantly more rapidly than other viruses, you'll have to educate me.
Not necessarily. It was an attempt to quantify the rate of mutation. More strains would appear with more infections, but this rate of variation wouldn't mean a difference in genetic mutation rate but the result of there being more infections. As I understand it, most viruses have their mutation rate quantified in lab experiments. It appears SARS-Cov-2 hasn't had this yet, and mutation rate is being deduced from phylogeny and stats. Again, if you have actual data showing the rate of mutation is actually higher than average, please share.
Fair enough.
Flatly disagree. The only way to achieve that is total social lockdown until...when exactly? When would it be safe to come out? We know Omicron is mild - that's not 'buying into a narrative' but following the mind-numbingly obvious data. Case rates through the roof, hospitalisations on the decline. Anecdotal evidence now abounds - in the early days, no-one knew anyone who actually had C19. We just heard stories. Now the majority of people I know have had it with nary a sniffle. Rather than just dismissing the current generally accepted truth as 'a narrative' is if people are being dumb and buying into the Koolaid, you'll need to present a damned good argument to suggest reality is something different to that obvious data.
That's disingenuous. As well as 5 million people 'at risk' there are millions struggling to earn a living. Choices have to factor in both health considerations and social considerations. When my brother had leukaemia, society didn't take to wearing masks and social distancing to stop the spread of the common cold. Preventative measures have a cost too and the whole thing is a difficult balancing act. Jeez, I've a mate, double amputee due to infections, spent nine months in hospital over the past year, just taken into hospital again on his birthday with another infection. Don't think yourself the only person with a conscience!
Which is where trained immune systems come in, because they are ultimately what will save us. People who have been vaccinated plus exposed to C19 will have more robust defences against future variants than people with just vaccinations. The more viral awareness the body has, the better resistance it can mount against new strains.
Not at all. Not sure why that's worth mentioning as this was a discussion about the nature of Covid19 and whether the virus is anything different to the norm, and as such what the long-term outcome is likely to be. With particular attention on the idea that the virus does/does not mutate faster than other viruses.
You'd have to assume that the Danes are very confident about the policy, given the crazily high number of infections over there at present. I remember reading the other day that the number of confirmed cases on one particular day would have been equivalent to 600,000 in a UK-sized population!
One thing I do have confidence about is that they are likely to change tack of the data indicates it is necessary. Not something that can be said for most countries who have eased restrictions.
Definitely true, I think there's no going back to lock downs in the US.
Last winter, CA stopped almost all restaurant dining.
This winter, they did not and CA set record cases and hit previous peaks in hospitalization and deaths, despite some areas having very high vaccination rates.
But even liberal CA wasn't willing to have a big political fight over it.
I believe the Swiss are also lifting all restrictions and UK is as well, though that may be driven more by the PM there trying to do something popular when he's under political fire for flouting restrictions on gatherings from the winter of 2020-21.
Shifty, you seem to think that I believe it is lockdown or bust to contain a pandemic. This isn't the case. Sensible mitigations like wearing masks in enclosed public areas, proper ventilation and air filtration in schools, shops, offices and other enclosed public spaces (all of which are beneficial to general health, of course) and so forth mean that the worst effects of lockdowns can be avoided alongside the harms to the healthcare system. The countries in the Far East (+NZ and Australia for a while) get this and have continued to live their lives not too far from normal as we've lurched from surge to lockdown and back again numerous times.
Ravi Gupta's comments about being prepared aren't just about the scientific side of things, I suspect, but all the other elements which should be put into place right now to hopefully ensure that kids will be able to remain in school and society and the economy can remain functioning even in the event of all but the very nastiest future variant.
Don't get me wrong, we're certainly heading towards the end game for now as we learn more about the virus, new drugs and treatments are developed and vaccination coverage improves. However, I think Covid has probably got one or two more major hands to play during the next year or so and not preparing for them is foolish. Even if all we're going to see is minor ongoing mutations of Omicron, it still causes Long Covid (though prevalence is lower in those who are vaccinated). LC can develop following reinfections as well, I believe. Don't have a citation for that now but I seem to remember reading it somewhere. The majority of kids in the UK are unvaccinated at present, of course, so are more susceptible to LC. We also don't know if there are any other longer-term post-infection issues which might arrive in due course.
'Let her rip' is not a sustainable policy if just one or two factors don't fall your way - in the UK we appear to have been lucky with Omicron this time around.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I really don't care if Covid is 'out of the ordinary' in comparison to other diseases as far as mutational rates are concerned. They aren't causing a global pandemic with hundreds of millions of infections millions of deaths and many millions of people suffering long-term chronic illness! This obviously doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to combat diseases such as Malaria, TB, Dengue fever, Zika etc and it is actually likely to be the case that the 'war effort' to develop vaccines for Covid will benefit some of these diseases as well.
Ravi Gupta's comments about being prepared aren't just about the scientific side of things, I suspect, but all the other elements which should be put into place right now to hopefully ensure that kids will be able to remain in school and society and the economy can remain functioning even in the event of all but the very nastiest future variant.
Don't get me wrong, we're certainly heading towards the end game for now as we learn more about the virus, new drugs and treatments are developed and vaccination coverage improves. However, I think Covid has probably got one or two more major hands to play during the next year or so and not preparing for them is foolish. Even if all we're going to see is minor ongoing mutations of Omicron, it still causes Long Covid (though prevalence is lower in those who are vaccinated). LC can develop following reinfections as well, I believe. Don't have a citation for that now but I seem to remember reading it somewhere. The majority of kids in the UK are unvaccinated at present, of course, so are more susceptible to LC. We also don't know if there are any other longer-term post-infection issues which might arrive in due course.
'Let her rip' is not a sustainable policy if just one or two factors don't fall your way - in the UK we appear to have been lucky with Omicron this time around.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I really don't care if Covid is 'out of the ordinary' in comparison to other diseases as far as mutational rates are concerned. They aren't causing a global pandemic with hundreds of millions of infections millions of deaths and many millions of people suffering long-term chronic illness! This obviously doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to combat diseases such as Malaria, TB, Dengue fever, Zika etc and it is actually likely to be the case that the 'war effort' to develop vaccines for Covid will benefit some of these diseases as well.
While I don’t care for the result, I’m not particularly pleased on the methodology. why choose papers and say yup, this is all. And when you have papers that do before and after say, we cannot accept those due to seasonality.
But we have tons of methods to remove trends, seasonality, and cycles. It’s confusing to me that some PhDs would rather ignore everything than to do some basic stats work.
So this is what I find confusing really. Did not a single paper doing checks on affects of lock down not account for typical seasonality? We have machines learning that can self drive and self land rockets but we cannot sort out this problem which is taught in stats courses ?
confused and not a fan.
So explain why 901,000 americans dead is a good thing I missed it
Confused?
They are obviously idiots as wco81 posted above (if true)
"Easily the most famous author is Steve Hanke, a renowned currency researcher who has certainly made no secret of his opinion on lockdowns. Just last week, he posted a cartoon to Twitter showing a semi-truck about to crush an effigy of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dressed up as Adolf Hitler."
Why go through the weeks of collecting, cherrypicking, correlating and massaging your data to get the results you obviously wanted to fit your agenda and then proceed to destroy all your credibility with a 1 minute tweet (OK his credibility was near zero to begin with but still).
Purely moronic behaviour
ps: His wikipedia page is nearing Ian Thorpe like length
It's an interesting question as to whether these guys seriously believe they've written a valid paper with reasonable conclusions, or whether they have been deliberately disingenuous to manipulate the data to reach their desired result. It might be that they've drunk the Kool-Aid, so to speak and actually believe they have produced good work. Seems more likely to me that they realise it is bullshit but think the ends are worthwhile. They can be pretty sure it won't hurt their pockets as plenty of future funding will be available from the likes of Koch, AEI, (insert any one of the many anonymously funded right-wing 'think tanks' here). They look after their own, I suspect.
The RPSC thread that should be posted in is @ https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/politics-and-economics-of-coronavirus.61643/
That link leads to an error.
The BBC article covers the history, like UK and EU fighting over it early in the vaccination rollout to other countries eventually abandoning it in favor of the mRNA vaccines, not necessarily because of efficacy questions though many countries limited it to certain age ranges.
It was going to be a source of national pride and also offered widely at low cost to developing nations. It's still accounted for about 1/4 of the 10 billion jabs rolled out worldwide.
Yet despite higher costs, when it came time for boosters, even the UK went heavily with Pfizer and Moderna. You don't even hear that AZ is working on an Omicron-specific booster.
If Brexit hadn't occurred during the pandemic, would some Europeans look down on the AZ as the "Aldi vaccine?"
IIRC, Australia and New Zealand had made big early orders of the AZ vaccine, even prepared manufacturing in Australia. But it was a slow rollout and it appears they switched to Pfizer mostly to hit their high vaccination rate goals.
I think Canada had also ordered a lot of AZ initially and they also had a slow rollout.
Could be that AZ didn't do as well in logistics as Pfizer, despite the fact that mRNA vaccines are harder and more costly to manufacture.