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Covid-19 #19 Tsunami Wave


Zorral

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"1 in every 15 North Dakotans have tested COVID-19 positive since March, according to department of health"

This is the state that never ever even did a partial shut down of anything, and will NOT wear masks, and is totally (with the brave exceptions, and yes, they do exist -- how else did that plaee produce moi?) in the bag for the superspreader, even as they die and those around them die.  This while the state gives Covid-19 relief-stimulous funds to Big Oil to execute even more fracking franchieses.

https://www.inforum.com/newsmd/coronavirus/6751087-1-in-every-15-North-Dakotans-have-tested-COVID-19-positive-since-March-according-to-department-of-health

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....The prevalence of COVID-19 in the state is increasing, and North Dakota's recent surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths is becoming unmanageable....

....Per capita, however, North Dakota is performing the worst in the United States with the highest death rate and positive case rate per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....

 


 

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Was it just me or did vaccine development news go very quiet for the past few weeks? Or was it being drowned out in the US election noise?

I have a theory that the pharma companies were holding off the trial result annoucements so they weren't seen as interfering in the US election, and undermining their credibility. If that's right we could see some results soon! (Fingers crossed)

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33 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Thankfully, it's a very sparsely populated State. Any dense area that tries to do this would get 1/15 infected people in a matter of weeks during peak pandemic and would come close to genuine "herd immunity" with one big wave - and a huge lot of dead people, and just as many disabled for life.

You don't understand the geography of ND -- it's worst in the centers where government, colleges, etc. are -- and, of course, the rez and nursing homes.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/06/north-dakota-covid-19-cases/

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Renae Moch is the public-health director for the city of Bismarck and Burleigh County, N.D.

As covid-19 surges across the country, one state stands out. In North Dakota, infections are, alarmingly, occurring at more than six times the national rate. How is the disease spreading so quickly through a small, rural state? And what lessons can North Dakota offer as we head into a winter season that Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, has warned will bring “a whole lot of hurt”?

Part of me wishes I didn’t have answers to these questions. But as the lead public health-official for the city of Bismarck and Burleigh County, N.D., I’m sadly familiar with the ways our state has failed to take this deadly virus seriously and what it means for our communities.

When the virus swept across the United States in March, North Dakota was one of only seven states that did not issue a stay-at-home order. Residents initially followed mitigation measures, but as businesses reopened and life returned to normal, adherence relaxed — and resentment surged. The cut-out hearts in windows and the “we’re all in this together” mentality gave way to social media posts, email messages and phone calls where I was accused of being a tyrant, a socialist, a Nazi — of lying about covid-19’s dangers to instill fear and of taking away people’s personal freedom.

With this attitude, it’s not surprising that the Bismarck City Commission’s attempts to implement a mask mandate in September failed. Instead, they decided to “wait and see” and follow the state’s “guidelines and recommendations” focusing on “personal responsibility.”

The problem, of course, is that personal responsibility isn’t working. North Dakotans are carrying on with their lives as if the pandemic doesn’t exist. This is especially true in the Bismarck metro area, which has the highest number of active cases in the state.[....]

....Last week, White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx toured Bismarck and described our mitigation efforts as the worst of any of the places she’s visited. It was a depressing reminder of our state’s failures. I can only hope our approach to this disease improves quickly — before our winter of hurt arrives and too many more North Dakotans pay the ultimate price.....]

 

 

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Greece is back on lockdown as of today, for the next 3 weeks to start with. Can't say I didn't see this coming but still feeling depressed about it.
Slight difference from the March-to-May one: They are keeping kindergartens and Elementary schools open. ( Because, you know, ages 12 and under don't contract the virus as often, or as severely, blah blah blah, and all their teachers are obviously immune, right?) So I still get to go to work and my kids still get to go to school, we'll just have to carry our special permission papers with us at all times.

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8 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

Was it just me or did vaccine development news go very quiet for the past few weeks? Or was it being drowned out in the US election noise?

A lot of covid-19 related news have passed to a second plane amid US elections and Europe terrorist attacks. So, it's pretty normal

 

8 hours ago, Impmk2 said:

I have a theory that the pharma companies were holding off the trial result annoucements so they weren't seen as interfering in the US election, and undermining their credibility. If that's right we could see some results soon! (Fingers crossed)

Of course, DT promised a vaccine for the election day, for reasons I don't understand. I highly doubt it would have changed the outcome.

I'm unsure if it was you or another poster who was working in an AIDS vaccine. This was around the news a few weeks ago. Summary: Ad5 vectored vaccines may increase the risk of AIDS

Use of adenovirus type-5 vectored vaccines: a cautionary tale

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32156-5/fulltext

At the moment only the Sputnik and CanSino vaccines use that vector, but Johnson&Johnson and Sputnik use the Ad26 and Oxford/AstraZeneca use a chimpanzee adenovirus. One wonders if similar effects may also occur.

 

 

 

 

 

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50 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

A lot of covid-19 related news have passed to a second plane amid US elections and Europe terrorist attacks. So, it's pretty normal

 

Of course, DT promised a vaccine for the election day, for reasons I don't understand. I highly doubt it would have changed the outcome.

I'm unsure if it was you or another poster who was working in an AIDS vaccine. This was around the news a few weeks ago. Summary: Ad5 vectored vaccines may increase the risk of AIDS

Use of adenovirus type-5 vectored vaccines: a cautionary tale

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32156-5/fulltext

At the moment only the Sputnik and CanSino vaccines use that vector, but Johnson&Johnson and Sputnik use the Ad26 and Oxford/AstraZeneca use a chimpanzee adenovirus. One wonders if similar effects may also occur.

 

 

 

 

 

That was me.  From what I remember, the increase in risk was small, but the bigger takeaway from that trial was that the AIDS vaccine just didn't work in the phase III trial, despite promising results in the phase I and II trials, where patients showed both good antibody response and T cell responses.  It's one of the reasons I'm not impressed with good phase I and II results, and instead, need to see the results of the phase III trials before I get my hopes up.  We really have no idea how vaccine development is going to go for SARS-CoV-2.  Is it going to be like a measles vaccine, which is highly effective?  Or like the HIV vaccine, which have all resulted in failure despite decades of research?  Or somewhere in between like the influenza vaccine, with its mediocre performance?  All of these are possibilities.

I don't think the problems with the AD5 HIV vaccine should be a show stopper for AD5 based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.  People have hypothesized how the increased risk of getting infected with HIV could have happened, but I don't think it's been conclusively solved and the mechanism is not well understood. 

For example, one of the proposed mechanisms is through antibody-dependent enhancement of infection.  The idea is that some of the antibodies generated against HIV actually help the virus infect cells instead of block it.  If this is the predominant mechanism, then I don't see why a AD5 vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 would increase the risk of getting HIV because the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine wouldn't be generating HIV antibodies that could help the HIV virus bind to and infect host cells.

I think the author of the paper is suggesting other possible mechanisms, due to some data which suggests only men which were given a particular version of the AD5-HIV vaccine had increased risk.  Because that trial was stopped early, and no other follow up trials were performed to see if the effect could be replicated, not a whole lot of data was collected, so it's difficult to assign much confidence to any of the findings.

I should point out though that one of the problems with using AD5 is that a significant portion of the population has already been exposed to it, something like 30%, if I recall correctly.  And if you haven't been exposed to AD5, you've almost certainly been exposed to other strains.  Coronaviruses are very common, and are one of the viruses responsible for the common cold.  If the problem is that exposure to coronavirus increases HIV risk, well, I wouldn't worry about it much because for the vast majority of us, it's already happened.  For the record, I'm skeptical that coronavirus exposure, naturally or through a a non-HIV vaccine, would result in an increased risk for HIV infection.  The evidence is very speculative.

That said, it wouldn't hurt though to track the rate of HIV infection among people who have received the AD5 vaccines. 

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15 hours ago, mashiara said:

Greece is back on lockdown as of today, for the next 3 weeks to start with. Can't say I didn't see this coming but still feeling depressed about it.
Slight difference from the March-to-May one: They are keeping kindergartens and Elementary schools open. ( Because, you know, ages 12 and under don't contract the virus as often, or as severely, blah blah blah, and all their teachers are obviously immune, right?) So I still get to go to work and my kids still get to go to school, we'll just have to carry our special permission papers with us at all times.

Stay safe. 

A friend of mine is a teacher at a vocational school(pupils are usually 15+ though) and they hade some kind of superspreader event before the lockdown and all teachers are now infected.

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5000+ cases today. No lockdown just yet, but at this point I can’t blame anybody but the people. Family attended a funeral today (not COVID related), 70+ years old little old ladies and gents just casually walk around without masks, undertakers without masks, virtually no request announced or quietly spread around to word to please keep distance and wear masks. And there wasn’t a huge crowd and we were all outside, but still, the principle. Unis close from next week yet student organizations felt the need to hold initiation nights :dunno: 

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42 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

And deaths are starting to tick up again.

Interesting on my walk-abouts now since the News: I am hearing the Young people talking about Covid-19, calling it by name, and how, now, maybe we can hope to start actually having a plan to something about it.

 

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Things are not looking good here in Austria the number of positive people in hospitals is already higher than during the worst phase of the first wave(2504 as of today and 431 of those are in ICUs). Staff levels in hospitals are already a problem. Deaths per day are also higher than during the first wave. Positive tests are also at a all time high(8241 as of today) despite the fact that most symptomless contacts of positive people are not tested automatically anymore as the system has been overwhelmed(getting test if you or your employer pay is still no problem though and a friend of mine had one such test this week and got the result pretty quickly).

To me it does not feel like first lockdown more like a farce and way more people are on the roads and at work.

I'm not optimistic at all but I'm never very optimistic I guess.

Edit: Offical numbers per 100k people are far worse than those from the US. The US would need 300k positive test per day to match our numbers. 

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17 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Because the decision was made to destroy millions of animals, I am leaning towards scary...

Millions of mink were culled in several European countries a few months ago because they got the COVID but it was the human strain, and they were passing it around each other, and I believe a worker caught it back of the mink. But it wasn't a mutant strain. So the culling itself is not immediately a sign of anything really bad. Though really, mink farming shouldn't be a thing anymore anywhere, and I am surprised it still exists in what I thought were countries that care a lot about animal welfare, AND after the first round of culling a few months back, they really should have culled all farms. I wonder if they finally will, now.

I hear a number of people have been confirmed infected with this new strain. But I have not heard or read anything to say if it is more infectious or causes more illness or any of the vaccines work, or don't work with it. The biggest question to answer is the vaccine one, so I hope the companies making the vaccines are getting onto it ASAP.

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I'm going to pretty much parrot the twitter thread @rotting sea cow linked a couple pages ago, and say I'd be leaning towards it being nothing much to worry about.

Haven't read the paper, but if it's going to have any effect on the currently developed vaccines at all, it'll be a previously unseen mutation in the spike receptor binding domain - the target of most vaccines atm. As it's arisen in minks it's likely one that'll make it more virulent in minks, and that would likely make it less in humans. I would speculate that because otherwise it probably would've occurred and become at least somewhat prevelant over the now literally hundreds of millions of human infections, and billions of billions of viral generations.

As soon as SARS-CoV-2 starts running through a farmed animal population they'll start destroying the animals regardless of the mutations or lack of them - you simply don't want to have a reservoir of virus out there as a potential source of infection.

Now it's possible the mutation could give an advantage under selective pressure from a vaccine. But none have been rolled out in any kind of widespread way yet. And frankly, if it is a vaccine-escape mutation which is decently viable in the human population, it'll probably occur pretty damn fast when we inoculate a good portion of the population against the virus anyway.

 

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AFAIK, the technical data has only been shared with the E-CDC and the WHO. Scientists around the world are waiting for more news. I tend to agree with you regarding that it's unlikely to cause more severe disease, maybe well be the opposite. Aren't animals used to make those attenuated vaccines?  The clinical symptoms are of course something to watch.

From what I've read the mutation included several replacements in the spike protein, making it a threat to those vaccines that express that part of the virus (basically all frontrunners).  I think it is particularly a threat for those vaccines relaying on viral vectors as the body develops immunity to the vector and to the coronavirus.

I find the news fascinating anyway, as it says a lot about the origin of the virus, given the ease between these kind of animals and humans.

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More uplifting news

No infections among 56,000 people who traveled abroad after receiving Sinopharm-developed COVID-19 vaccine: developer

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1206008.shtml

This is inactivated virus vaccine, expressing more antigens than most of the other vaccines. It is also a real world exercise.

Sources are chinese, there is that.

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