Generic Virus Thread

[Seat68]

I think people are being a little too deep about this. I didnt clap last night as I was powering through the last episode of Tiger King. I didnt hear the knock by the state telling me to get my slippers onto the doormat and show some bloody love. 

 

[Genie]

11 minutes ago, Chindie said:

I've not clapped and I've not put a rainbow in my window or other such crap. 

The pictures in the windows have been great near me as a little game for the kids to play on our daily evening walk. Count the bears / rainbows / eggs etc. Kids enjoyed it.

[StefanAVFC]

Clapping on your doorstep, is what it is, but what in holy hell is this?

 

[sne]

Leaked reports that they've had successful test with using an (failed) Ebola medicine named Remdesivir on Corona patients at a hospital in Chicago.

They tested it on 113 critically ill patients and almost all were healthy enough to be discharged from hospital withing about a week. Sounds great.

It was leaked thou and the stock for the American biotech company that developed the drug has skyrocketed this morning. So I'll hold on a bit longer before celebrating

That company is called Gilead Sciences. I kid you not.

Edited April 17, 2020 by sne

[ml1dch]

12 minutes ago, Jareth said:

TBF the rainbow pics are a coping strategy for 7 year olds. 

Quite. We take our five year old round to look at the ones her school friends have done, and they do the same, to give them all a sense that they are not the only ones having to do this. 

I wouldn't really expect adults to need to do the same. 

[Seat68]

word removed might be a strong word. But its essentially a bridge of words removed, who cant read and do not have a television. 

[StefanAVFC]

1 minute ago, Seat68 said:

word removed might be a strong word. But its essentially a bridge of words removed, who cant read and do not have a television. 

The police clapping with them!

Go for a walk on the beach and eat an ice cream, you're nicked son.

Go onto a crowded bridge with thousands of others, great plan, let's clap alongside them.

[tom_avfc]

1 minute ago, StefanAVFC said:

Clapping on your doorstep, is what it is, but what in holy hell is this?

 

I was also going to post this. How many fines have the police issued during this lockdown but because people are clapping its fine? Seems like a great way to show support for those risking their lives.

[Genie]

2 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

The police clapping with them!

Go for a walk on the beach and eat an ice cream, you're nicked son.

Go onto a crowded bridge with thousands of others, great plan, let's clap alongside them.

Too much to expect the police officers to just tell people to spread out a bit of they want to stop and clap? Incredible scene. I’d be requesting an investigation if I was police chief.

[chrisp65]

To be fair to those people on the bridge they’d probably just got off planes from all over the world and didn’t know the distancing rules.

 

[Straggler]

They don't know what they are doing

Quote

Hancock will come under pressure to commit to a coordinated testing and contact tracing regime when he appears before a blockbuster select committee hearing on Friday, led by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt and attended by several other committee chairs as guests.

Hunt has long been pushing for a mass testing and tracing strategy, which was dismissed by the government’s experts in mid-March when they moved from a policy of trying to contain the virus to trying to delay its peak.

At that point, on March 26, Dr Jenny Harries said testing and contact tracing was “not an appropriate mechanism as we go forward”, despite the World Health Organization’s exhortation to “test, test, test”.

The government has since conceded the point on mass testing and begun to develop an app that can help trace contacts. However, there are concerns that online tracing will not be effective at reaching older people, that it is voluntary, and that privacy concerns may hamper its usefulness.

They are still hoping a voluntary app will solve the contact tracing problem. Two big problems with that. The voluntary part, we all know someone who has failed to quarantine properly or is just too stubborn/stupid/selfish to follow the rules. Even if the app is compulsory you can prevent it from working by simply forgetting your phone.

Then there is the idea that a govt run nation wide IT project will work at all. They never do. They always come in with a big splash about all the benefits that they will bring, then don't do what they are supposed do, bring unintended bad consequences, cost WAY more than was budgeted than more often than not get binned off. Everyone involved gets paid a fortune, the MP in charge gets a promotion and the tax payer gets bent over.

Don't really see what is going to be different here and certainly not happy if this is how we are planning on getting out of this. 

Testing and contact tracing will involve large numbers of people being out and about doing the work and a massive managerial effort to coordinate it all. The technological silver bullet is the modern snake oil.

[bannedfromHandV]

9 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

To be fair to those people on the bridge they’d probably just got off planes from all over the world and didn’t know the distancing rules.

 

It was the Romanian lettuce picking horde.

[Awol]

1 hour ago, Jareth said:

Not saying the vendor wasn't at fault here, but when I go shopping on Ebay, I tend to make sure the product is A not located in China and B is not collection only. 

Needs must, unfortunately. When you follow an economic/political model that outsources nationally critical manufacturing (let’s say PPE and pharma for example, but it’s a long list) to potential adversaries*, we shouldn’t be surprised if they screw us over in a crisis. 

National level resilience, the ability to look after yourself as far as possible if necessary, was basically binned as a serious consideration by politicians. One side believed in some fantasy of international solidarity, the other cared only for the globalisation of supply chains - code for increased margins. Both are thoroughly irresponsible. 

If anything good comes out of this, it will hopefully be a wake-up call for all those who put political ideology or shareholder dividends above doing the basics right. 

*In a crisis when every state needs the same stuff they are all potential adversaries.

[HanoiVillan]

7 minutes ago, Straggler said:

They don't know what they are doing

They are still hoping a voluntary app will solve the contact tracing problem. Two big problems with that. The voluntary part, we all know someone who has failed to quarantine properly or is just too stubborn/stupid/selfish to follow the rules. Even if the app is compulsory you can prevent it from working by simply forgetting your phone.

Then there is the idea that a govt run nation wide IT project will work at all. They never do. They always come in with a big splash about all the benefits that they will bring, then don't do what they are supposed do, bring unintended bad consequences, cost WAY more than was budgeted than more often than not get binned off. Everyone involved gets paid a fortune, the MP in charge gets a promotion and the tax payer gets bent over.

Don't really see what is going to be different here and certainly not happy if this is how we are planning on getting out of this. 

Testing and contact tracing will involve large numbers of people being out and about doing the work and a massive managerial effort to coordinate it all. The technological silver bullet is the modern snake oil.

There are all sorts of problems with the idea of a contact-tracing app, some of which you've identified. But I think we need to take seriously the point that the range of 'next steps' is extremely limited, and contact tracing is one part of trying to get back to normalcy.

[chrisp65]

7 minutes ago, Straggler said:

They don't know what they are doing

They are still hoping a voluntary app will solve the contact tracing problem. Two big problems with that. The voluntary part, we all know someone who has failed to quarantine properly or is just too stubborn/stupid/selfish to follow the rules. Even if the app is compulsory you can prevent it from working by simply forgetting your phone.

Then there is the idea that a govt run nation wide IT project will work at all. They never do. They always come in with a big splash about all the benefits that they will bring, then don't do what they are supposed do, bring unintended bad consequences, cost WAY more than was budgeted than more often than not get binned off. Everyone involved gets paid a fortune, the MP in charge gets a promotion and the tax payer gets bent over.

Don't really see what is going to be different here and certainly not happy if this is how we are planning on getting out of this. 

Testing and contact tracing will involve large numbers of people being out and about doing the work and a massive managerial effort to coordinate it all. The technological silver bullet is the modern snake oil.

 

We’ve got a version of this in Wales already and its working quite well. We’ve all been issued with a pad of coloured stickers. Every time we are in a queue or a jogger passes or we buy some milk we have to exchange a coloured sticker with each other.

Then, if say, the butcher gets ill (red sticker) on the news that night they announce everyone that’s received a red sticker, only shop in Bristol from now on.

Milkman, white sticker, veg man, green sticker and so on. Mine is magenta.

It’s working quite well so far. 

[Genie]

Quote

The director of a large NHS trust has contacted the BBC asking for the phone numbers of Burberry and Barbour because he does not have enough gowns for his staff working on coronavirus wards.

He said his trust had "less than 24 hours supply and [with the] weekend coming up" he was hugely concerned.

Link

Why not ask the likes of Matalan, Primark, supermarket high volume clothing suppliers? Seems strange to me to want to go to high end designer brands for scrubs.

[bannedfromHandV]

1 minute ago, Genie said:

Link

Why not ask the likes of Matalan, Primark, supermarket high volume clothing suppliers? Seems strange to me to want to go to high end designer brands for scrubs.

Because I don't think they're manufacturing them are they, whereas Burberry and Barbour (whilst making sure everyone knows) are.

[bannedfromHandV]

If the old fella walking round his garden gets a knighthood then every single frontline member of NHS staff should receive at least the same.

 

Christ we love a gimmick in this country.

Edited April 17, 2020 by bannedfromHandV

[Awol]

Interesting article in Nature last month about contact tracing in South Korea and the various pros and cons. I can imagine all kinds of people in UK objecting to a system like this.

South Korea is reporting intimate details of COVID-19 cases: has it helped?

For the past month, South Korean residents have been receiving flurries of emergency text messages from authorities, alerting them to the movements of local people with COVID-19. Epidemiologists say that detailed information about infected people’s movements is crucial for tracking and controlling the epidemic, but some question whether it’s useful to make those data public. Some say it could even be harmful.

The first cases in the country were reported in late January, and then surged a few weeks later. As case numbers grew, authorities launched a massive contact-tracing and testing regime to identify and then isolate infected people, even setting up drive-through testing centres. So far, the country has tested more people per capita than any country in the world — a total of nearly 300,000 people. As of 17 March, the country had reported 8,413 cases.

When a person tests positive, their city or district might send out an alert to people living nearby about their movements before being diagnosed. A typical alert can contain the infected person’s age and gender, and a detailed log of their movements down to the minute — in some cases traced using closed-circuit television and credit-card transactions, with the time and names of businesses they visited. In some districts, public information includes which rooms of a building the person was in, when they visited a toilet and whether or not they wore a mask. Even overnight stays at ‘love motels’ have been noted.

Other countries, including Singapore, have released data such as the age or gender of people with COVID-19, but nothing as detailed as in South Korea.

Public trust

The South Korean government says the public is more likely to trust it if it releases transparent and accurate information about the virus, including travel histories of confirmed patients. Laws passed since the country's last major disease outbreak, of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015, now specifically allow authorities to publish this information.

Numerous websites and smartphone apps have also sprung up to collect and map the data, such as coronamap.site. Checking the maps has become part of daily life for many South Koreans.

 

What China’s coronavirus response can teach the rest of the world

Experts and the World Health Organization say that South Korea’s extensive tracing, testing and isolation measures — along with campaigns encouraging people to avoid large gatherings — have helped to reduce the virus’s spread. Over the past two weeks, the number of new cases being reported each day in South Korea has dropped dramatically, from a peak of 909 cases announced on 29 February to 74 on 16 March.

But the specificity of the publicly available data has raised privacy concerns. The data trails released about some of the infected people have been so detailed that they could be identifiable, say some researchers and human-rights activists.

It might be useful for epidemiologists to “privately and securely have this information on hand, especially for contact tracing”, says Maimuna Majumder, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts. But she says she’s not sure that publicizing such information is worth the risk of exposing people to the social stigma that might come if their community knows they are infected. The potential for stigma could even dissuade some infected people from coming forward to get tested, says Majumder.

Human-rights concerns

On 9 March, Choi Young-ae, chair of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, also expressed concern that the “excessive disclosure of private information” could cause people with symptoms to avoid testing.

In response, South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on 14 March that such detailed location information should be released only when epidemiological investigations could not otherwise identify all the people with whom an infected person had been in contact before their diagnosis.

The idea is that a person with mild symptoms can check the travel logs to see whether they might have come in contact with an infected person, which could help medical officials decide who should be screened, says Sung-il Cho, an epidemiologist at Seoul National University. He thinks authorities are justified in making location information public for this purpose.

But he says an unintended consequence has been that people are avoiding places that an infected person has visited, even though the places have been closed and cleaned since then.

Personal hygiene and social distancing are more important than looking up websites to avoid places that infected people have visited, says Oh Myoung-don, an infectious-disease physician at Seoul National University.

Legacy of infection

South Korea’s data transparency during this outbreak has its origins in how the government handled the 2015 outbreak of MERS, which reportedly infected 186 people in South Korea and killed 36. The government at the time initially refused to identify the hospitals in which infected people were being treated, but a software programmer made a map of cases based on crowdsourced reports and anonymous tips from hospital staff. Eventually, the government relented and named the affected hospitals.

The public broadly supports the government publishing individuals’ movement, says Youngkee Ju, a researcher in health journalism at Hallym University in Chuncheon. In 1,000-person surveys that he co-authored, published in February and earlier this month, most respondents supported the government sharing travel details of people with COVID-19. Furthermore, most “preferred the public good to individual rights”, says Ju. He and his colleagues intend to perform a follow-up survey to find out exactly how much personal information the public supports disclosing.

[Genie]

3 minutes ago, bannedfromHandV said:

Because I don't think they're manufacturing them are they, whereas Burberry and Barbour (whilst making sure everyone knows) are.

Yes, but you contact the likes of  Matalan and ask them to put you on touch with their high volume, low cost clothing suppliers to knock out cheap scrubs quickly.
I can only assume the Government know these suppliers are based overseas and wouldn’t/couldn’t help, but then with our leadership team I might be giving them too much credit.

It’s just a strange segment of the market to ask for access to for cheap, disposable clothing.

Edited April 17, 2020 by Genie