Stayin' Alive - Covid-19 #10

[Fury Resurrected]

So I understand today that 45 and Dr Oz said that lupus patients can’t get the Rona. Excellent, my rheumatologist will be thrilled for me. This is great news except the Plaquenil (chloroquine as the media has been calling it) we are prescribed is unavailable because a bunch of people who are well demanded prescriptions from their doctors so now people who are sick can’t get it because they have it all. Great. Wonderful.

[Fury Resurrected]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Hmmm. Whenever I hear that argument I, just say Lincoln would be ashamed of what his party has become.

You mean the same guy who ordered the largest mass hanging in American history of the Dakota 38 (+2)? Naw, I think that guy would be fine with this shit.

[Arakan]

As I predicted the UK is escalating rapidly. It is very likely that the country will be the worst hit in Europe when all is said and done. At least the mostly rational British public is not going to forget the early shitshow unlike the lost case USA where the narcissist Trump is creating a new history and unfortunately half of the country will believe it. I came to the conclusion that it’s for the best that US Western hegemony is coming to an end. Lost case. Italy entering the next phase. Let’s see how they‘ll manage it. I am very sceptic. 
 

In Germany things are ok, relatively speaking. A lot of cases but widespread across the country. No worst case capacity overload expected like we have seen in Lombardy, Grande-Est, Paris, Madrid, NY, London. Mass testing and contact tracing is working well on a local level. Stable situation and first restrictions expected to be lifted end of April. 

[Heartofice]

6 minutes ago, Arakan said:

As I predicted the UK is escalating rapidly. It is very likely that the country will be the worst hit in Europe when all is said and done. At least the mostly rational British public is not going to forget the early shitshow unlike the lost case USA where the narcissist Trump is creating a new history and unfortunately half of the country will believe it. I came to the conclusion that it’s for the best that US Western hegemony is coming to an end. Lost case.

Uk death toll growth is starting to flatten. Hopefully it will continue to flatten and not grow.

Having said that, the almost delight you are having with these events is repulsive.

[ljkeane]

Leo Varadkar is apparently going back to work as a doctor one day a week. He's helping out with phone assessments so there's probably not much risk involved but, still, good for him.

[Arakan]

5 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Uk death toll growth is starting to flatten. Hopefully it will continue to flatten and not grow.

Having said that, the almost delight you are having with these events is repulsive.

What are you talking about? Please spare me your gaslighting and fake outrage. You are like the Donald Trump of these threads. Doesn’t work with me. Deliver facts and hard data, not personal attacks. 

[BigFatCoward]

10 minutes ago, Arakan said:

You are like the Donald Trump of these threads. Doesn’t work with me. Deliver facts and hard data, not personal attacks. 

Personal attack, no facts. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVEgtMhXgAAXIFw?format=jpg&name=360x360

Me, finally getting a work laptop to help beleaguered colleagues while self-isolating...

Until FF7 Remake arrives. Then I may experience ‘broadband issues’

[Isis]

16 hours ago, Jen'ari said:

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.

It's got a lot to do with your immune system. Many people have been exposed to it and recovered (thanks to their immune system), but then if they become immunocompromised later in life it can re-emerge. Co-infection with HIV is a problem too. Once you have it the drug treatment is a long process (mycobacteria are slow growers and so drugs that target their replication are also slow to act), plus treatment involves up to five drugs (to ensure that drug resistant forms are covered and also that treatment does not create any new drug resistant strains). At any rate, it would be preferable for infected people to be treated so that they don't risk infecting others (possibly more vulnerable people).

[Isis]

15 hours ago, The Great Unwashed said:

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

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?

I don't think it has anything to do with modelling (predicting outcomes based on a number of factors). It is to do with policy and context (and finance!).

A case is a case. It should only be counted once (unless patient recovers and then acquires a new infection and then they would be considered a second case not the same one*). One case is one infection in one person. 

One person may have multiple samples taken, either at the same time or on separate occasions. For example, in our Acanthamoeba lab we might test two contact lenses and a swab from a single patient. Three samples. If one is positive, and two are negative, that's one positive result (one positive case). We might get further samples from the same patient a week later, and whether they are positive or negative, that would be the same infection and still only counts as one case.

Sometimes there are issues with samples where they cannot be tested, are contaminated or discarded in error or something, meaning they do not give rise to test results which can be validated (released). These can still count toward the number of tests taken. 

Obviously not every test will be positive. The negative results still count as tests performed.

I would not assume that every positive result leads to each person being tested more than once - that is going to be highly dependent on context. If it was a positive test in the community, we would not want potentially positive people going back to a clinic or whatever to get tested again as that would be a risk of exposure for others. It is more likely to happen in a hospital or specific research/surveillance setting.

*We used to have this argument with the two people who do the case counting for imported malaria in the UK. They wanted a person to ALWAYS have the same unique identifier regardless of how many samples we got on that patient. Also in malaria you get relapses, drug resistance, partial prophylaxis/treatments etc. This 'give the patient the same number' approach was really confusing for us in the lab. After years, we switched it so that we give as many unique sample numbers as we need to do our jobs properly and the pen pushers do the work of 'is this the same case?' - because that's actually their role, not ours.

[Alarich II]

1 hour ago, Arakan said:

What are you talking about? Please spare me your gaslighting and fake outrage. You are like the Donald Trump of these threads. Doesn’t work with me. Deliver facts and hard data, not personal attacks. 

Please, people are dying and yet your entire tone is so full of German smugness, you were begging for this comment. 

Through a stroke of luck and without any great contribution from ourselves we are in a lucky situation where we live in a country that may hopefully avoid some of the bad shit that our neighbours and allies suffer. This is not the time to go about pontificating about the deficits of other countries or make broad statements about their populace.

[RhaenysBee]

What do you all think about this quarantine conundrum? 

my father wants us to visit my grandmother for her birthday and wave from the street while she stays behind the fence of her front yard. 

details: I’m not worried about myself too much per se, but spending two hours in the car with my father counts as close contact and while he is more careful and conscious of hygiene and contact as he would normally be, he does not exactly strictly speaking practice the recommended pre-cautions. At least nowhere near to the extent My sister, my mother and I had practiced them the past weeks. After the visit we would return to my mother’s house a pass all The potential the germs to her. We have 550ish known cases in our places of residence and 50 in my grandmother’s county. She lives alone and it’s a 75th birthday. She has been very bitter, lonely and hence emotionally manipulative about  not seeing us as much as she would like over the past couple years. This is not at all dangerous for her, of course, but I still find the idea an unnecessary absurdity. I know I will burn in hell. 

[Heartofice]

I guess you are not living with your father and therefore I’d say staying in a car with him is an unnecessary risk, and wouldn’t do it. Right now we should only be keeping contact with people in our household if possible. 
 

I currently deliver food to elderly relatives but stay far away from them at the door so that is mostly ok.

[Alarich II]

If you have a bad feeling about this, don't do it. It's very hard, I know, we have a similar problem with my parents and Easter, they want us to come over, they are lonely (2.5 weeks of quarantine) and we are all healthy and live just a few km apart. And yet... there is a lingering doubt about this.

[Buckwheat]

8 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

This is not at all dangerous for her, of course, but I still find the idea an unnecessary absurdity. I know I will burn in hell. 

It is an unnecessary absurdity. Two hours one way, makes 4 hours travel just to wave at somebody over the fence? I don't think it would be worth it even in better circumstances, and it is not advisable now. Call your grandmother over the phone and sing happy birthday to her.  And make an effort to visit her after this madness is finished.

They started talking about loosening some of the restrictions here next week, but no details as to what this would entail yet.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, Alarich II said:

If you have a bad feeling about this, don't do it. It's very hard, I know, we have a similar problem with my parents and Easter, they want us to come over, they are lonely (2.5 weeks of quarantine) and we are all healthy and live just a few km apart. And yet... there is a lingering doubt about this.

Overcoming a bad feeling about things is the literal through line of Star Wars. 

[The Anti-Targ]

47 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

What do you all think about this quarantine conundrum? 

my father wants us to visit my grandmother for her birthday and wave from the street while she stays behind the fence of her front yard. 

details: I’m not worried about myself too much per se, but spending two hours in the car with my father counts as close contact and while he is more careful and conscious of hygiene and contact as he would normally be, he does not exactly strictly speaking practice the recommended pre-cautions. At least nowhere near to the extent My sister, my mother and I had practiced them the past weeks. After the visit we would return to my mother’s house a pass all The potential the germs to her. We have 550ish known cases in our places of residence and 50 in my grandmother’s county. She lives alone and it’s a 75th birthday. She has been very bitter, lonely and hence emotionally manipulative about  not seeing us as much as she would like over the past couple years. This is not at all dangerous for her, of course, but I still find the idea an unnecessary absurdity. I know I will burn in hell. 

I'm not coming within the 2 metre rage of anyone outside my household, and we only have 8 confirmed cases in my whole region which is 130km (80mi) x 65km (40mi) area.

I think Zoom or something equivalent would be a better option if you can do it.

[maarsen]

5 hours ago, Jen'ari said:

That’s a very long recovery time, I’m glad he recovered though, must have been very tough.

He recovered just in time for his home country to be occupied by the Nazis. Yeah, tough times. 

[The Anti-Targ]

The good news is that globally it looks like we've been experiencing linear growth rather than exponential growth for a while now. The bad news is that's only in diagnosed, reported cases, so who knows what the real rate of increase is aside from in a handful of countries? Because if your rate of testing isn't increasing that might make an exponential curve look like linear growth. But at least the reported cases isn't still in an exponential curve, if it was we'd have been at 1.5M world wide by about 1 April and as of now we're still a bit over 50K short of that. There is just the teeniest, tiniest hint that the global reported cases curve might, almost be starting to flatten.

[Alarich II]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Overcoming a bad feeling about things is the literal through line of Star Wars. 

And whose parents actually survive Star Wars?