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Stayin' Alive - Covid-19 #10


Fragile Bird

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8 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

The UK (well, England certainly, I’m not certain on the rest of the country) still gave the BCG to schoolchildren as late as the mid-2000’s. It was stopped i think the year I would have received it - i know my friend in the school year above got it. i remember fairly well because whenever a year group got it the boys would go around punching people in the arm where they had just had the injection because that was just hilarious. Children are the worst.

Yep, this was in the U.K. so not assuming tin-foilers are just Americans at all. 

I got the BCG at school, it was 2001 and I was 13, I remember there was all this talk about how bad it was going to be. The actual injection wasn’t that bad but it scabbing over and leaving a scar on my left upper arm wasn’t very nice.

I remember reading fairly recently (certainly the last couple of years) that TB has made a bit of a comeback and is harder to treat because it is resistant to some antibiotics now, I’m not sure if being immunised against it nearly 20 years ago would protect you from the newer strains or not.

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3 minutes ago, Jen'ari said:

I remember reading fairly recently (certainly the last couple of years) that TB has made a bit of a comeback and is harder to treat because it is resistant to some antibiotics now, I’m not sure if being immunised against it nearly 20 years ago would protect you from the newer strains or not.

Yes, it would. If you don't get infected then it won't matter (to you) that the circulating strains are MDR or XDR. Because you won't need the treatment anyway. It only matters to the susceptible.

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1 hour ago, Isis said:

...I have colleagues with horror stories about Larium...

Good old Larium - nothing like excessively fast breathing, chronic constipation and yellowing skin to really enhance your trips to Asia.

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1 hour ago, Isis said:

Yes, it would. If you don't get infected then it won't matter (to you) that the circulating strains are MDR or XDR. Because you won't need the treatment anyway. It only matters to the susceptible.

Thanks for clearing that up, like I say it’s not something I know much about, despite the scar on my arm and it not being pleasant at the time it’s a shot I’d still rather have had than not.

Is the body capable of fighting off TB on its own?, from the little I know about it, I’d always assumed it was fatal, but it killed people off in a very long and slow way pre 20th Century.

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The (german) federal institute for research on animal health (FLI) has published their first results with SARS-CoV-2:

Dogs, pigs and chicken cannot be infected, but cats and ferrets can.

Infected ferrets can also infect other ferrets. With that result there is now a potential animal model (ferrets are wellknown in flu research) for the research on drugs and vaccines.

 

 

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Moving question to this thread. @ants or whomever else might have an idea as to the answer, please feel free to reply.

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17 hours ago, ants said:

We flagged yesterday that the number of tests were now being recorded at worldometers. Today we look at the number of tests per case. The intent here is to see which nations are finding positive cases most regularly or easily. There are 131 nations who have had test numbers recorded by worldometer.

The countries who are not getting great rewards for their efforts are; in 10th place Azerbaijan with 68 tests per positive case; 9th PNG who have conducted 72 tests to record their 1 case; 8th Taiwan 102t/c; 7th Hong Kong 108t/c; 6th New Caledonia 110t/c; 5th United Arab Emirates 122t/c; 4th Russia 129t/c; 3rd Botswana 161t/c; 2nd Nepal 169t/c. In first place is Vietnam, having conducted 88551 tests, and registered 241 positive cases. Australia sits in 17th position with 52 tests/case.

The countries who are finding diamonds everywhere they dig (and just focussing on the big players) are; Italy conducting 5.4 tests for every positive case; USA 5.2t/c; Brazil 4.9t/c; Netherlands 4.2t/c; UK 4.1t/c; Belgium 3.6t/c; Iran 3.2t/c; Spain 2.7t/c. Taking the prize as the best at identifying a COVID case of all countries is San Marino with 2.2 tests conducted before finding a positive case. I make note of that, because the 2nd best in the world is France with 2.4t/c. A strong indicator that France, who is already 6th overall with 92839 total cases, may indeed have more cases just waiting to be tested.

Sorry to derail the thread temporarily, but this is along the lines of something I've been wondering about lately, which is: how much of the testing being done is the same person being tested more than once? As in, presumably, every positive case that has a non-fatal outcome will involve at least 2 tests: the test confirming a positive case, and then at least one subsequent test confirming that the patient is no longer shedding the virus upon resolution of symptoms. 

But, I've also seen numerous interviews with people who've tested positive mentioning that even after resolution of symptoms, they often need multiple tests to ensure they're no longer shedding the virus. So is there any sort of modeling that suggests what percentage of tests involve repeat testing of the same individual?

Anyone have an idea?

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@Great Unwashed, surely the operative word would be cases?

As in a positive case should only count as one, as in one case. Each case could result in more than one test. 

But it's a good question, who knows the competence of the tabulating involved.

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1 minute ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

@Great Unwashed, surely the operative word would be cases?

As in a positive case should only count as one, as in one case. Each case could result in more than one test. 

But it's a good question, who knows the competence of the tabulating involved.

As far as I can tell, the results being reported aren't apples to apples. The results appear to be tabulating and reporting total positive cases, while also tabulating and reporting total negative tests. These are two different data sets.

Or, maybe I've been misunderstanding the data this whole time. That's certainly possible as well.

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This will be an interesting one to look at for the data junkies -- EuroMOMO (European MOnitoring of excess MOrtality for public health action) keeps track of all-causes mortality in 24 European countries, with statistics provided by national agencies. They have their week 13 update up, covering March 23rd to March 29. The chart features a baseline for those countries and then shows excess peaks that happen from season to season, including broken down by age groups. For example, on the front page you'll see the notable excess death peaks at the start and end of 2017 corresponding to a particularly bad flu season. 

There are also per-country graphs, with the option to break them down by age group. Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as the UK (England), all show at this point a bit of excess motaliy, whereas it seems like NI actually has a dip below the baseline as does Wales, presumably because of locking down (is it UK wide or England wide?) without having many people actually infected in those areas. 

I assume some of this data is behind the real deaths and will be updated next week, so the chart may be a bit different.

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7 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

On the bright side of things it appears that cholesterol helps fight infection, and the Chinese are researching whether people with higher levels of cholesterol handled Covid-19 better than other people.

Do you have a link to that? I can't find anything about it on Google News. And are we talking HDL, LDL, triglycerides, or all three?

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7 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

I've read that if you shove Fruit Loops up your ass, you gain 8 minutes of immunity. 

You have to be diligent to keep up the regiment, though. 

No way am I pushing anything up the arses of an entire regiment. This isn't Eton, you know.

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1 hour ago, Ran said:

There are also per-country graphs, with the option to break them down by age group. Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain, as well as the UK (England), all show at this point a bit of excess motaliy, whereas it seems like NI actually has a dip below the baseline as does Wales, presumably because of locking down (is it UK wide or England wide?) without having many people actually infected in those areas.

At least some parts of the lockdown are up to the devolved nations but I don't think there are significant differences in timing or severity between them and England.

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Le Monde confirms today that weight is a key factor for the severity of a Covid-19 case.

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/04/07/les-personnes-obeses-sont-plus-fragilisees-par-le-virus_6035831_3244.html

83% of the people in reanimation in France are obese (only 15% of the French population is obese).

Numbers are comparable in the UK apparently with 32% overweight and 41% obese.

In some specific geographical areas it can be worse. For instance in Nice, 95% of patients in ICU are overweight.

There's no sugercoating it: when it comes to Covid-19, fat people are more at risk of developing a very severe case of the disease.

Of course, my thoughts immediately go to the US where about 70% of the population is overweight and almost 40% obese...

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6 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Le Monde confirms today that weight is a key factor for the severity of a Covid-19 case.

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2020/04/07/les-personnes-obeses-sont-plus-fragilisees-par-le-virus_6035831_3244.html

83% of the people in reanimation in France are obese (only 15% of the French population is obese).

Numbers are comparable in the UK apparently with 32% overweight and 41% obese.

In some specific geographical areas it can be worse. For instance in Nice, 95% of patients in ICU are overweight.

There's no sugercoating it: when it comes to Covid-19, fat people are more at risk of developing a very severe case of the disease.

Of course, my thoughts immediately go to the US where about 70% of the population is overweight and almost 40% obese...

And about 15% of the country uninsured with no healthcare. I've been predicting for a while now that this would end up hitting the U.S. much harder than other developed nations for precisely these reasons.

We're already seeing stories that COVID-19 is having a disproportionate impact on black communities in the U.S., which are more likely to have high rates of obesity and other underlying health conditions than the U.S. population at-large.

ETA: Not to mention the high rates of incarceration, where inmates are already housed in overcrowded conditions with far worse expected health outcomes.

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1 hour ago, Ormond said:

Do you have a link to that? I can't find anything about it on Google News. And are we talking HDL, LDL, triglycerides, or all three?

Sorry, I was chasing links and came across a news story that researchers in Wuhan looked at 2,000 blood samples and found that people with high cholesterol had better outcomes against Covid-19. I tried to duplicate my search but could not find the article. I had also found a article from the 1990s suggesting cholesterol helped fight the flu. The article pointed out that statins interfere with the flu vaccine.

Here's a link and a quote to one study of 37,250 patients:

Quote

After multivariable adjustment, higher LDL-C, HDL-C, and TGs were independently associated with lower all-cause death risk. Neither LDL-C nor TGs were associated with CV death, and HDL-C was associated with lower CV risk. Higher LDL-C and HDL-C were associated with a lower risk of death from infection or other non-CV causes. LDL-C was associated with reduced all-cause and infectious, but not CV mortality, which resulted in the inverse association with all-cause mortality.

 

https://www.jlr.org/content/59/8/1519.full

I'll keep looking.

eta: the role of cholesterol in fighting infections has been studied for a long time, I gather. I tried searching cholesterol and infections.

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7 minutes ago, williamjm said:

At least some parts of the lockdown are up to the devolved nations but I don't think there are significant differences in timing or severity between them and England.

Could just be an artifact from slower reporting in those areas. We'll see when the next week update is put in.

 

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