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Any medical experts care to comment? I don't know who to trust any more (I have a good idea who NOT to trust!!)
... but the horse's human entourage can. So can the marshalls/horse umpire people (whatever they are called), vets, paramedics etc. etc.
DrJ's article he linked to. seems to imply it has some kind of shelf life...
Viruses historically do generally seem to attenuate over time.
this seems to be due to the fact that the milder strains allow people to move around and as a result infect more people.
Where the virus puts someone in bed or kills quickly the chance of transmission drops.
Doesn't work in all viruses though, something like polio may not need to as it doesn't rely on human contact to spread (waste water borne).
Pathogens evolve to become less pathogenic and coexist with their host. The timeframe for a generation is rapid for a virus. But I'd want to see some genotyping data which backs up such a claim (even if we understood the true virulence factors at work in the infection). Management of infection has evolved (early management with O2 not late with ventilation), cases may now be younger as the elderly have been more shielded, Personal protection may have lowered the initial viral inoculum. I could go on...
The statement, that the cases appear less severe probably has some element of truth. But the reasons will certainly be multifactorial.
Could the number of asymptomatic infections be way higher than previously thought?
I may have missed this, but has there been a random sample of the population tested (similar selection procedure to electoral polling), to find the background infection level?
If not, why not?
I for one hope that the Reuters report has some truth in it, something pleasant among the doom.
I may have missed this, but has there been a random sample of the population tested (similar selection procedure to electoral polling), to find the background infection level?
If not, why not?
Yes ONS have run sampling by swabbing for current infections
It does not include nursing homes or hospitals (obviously). Seroprevalence (had not has the infection) data is harder to come by, but 6.8% tested positive. There is debate over how many WOULD show positive if they had an asymptomatic infection - and hence the levels needed for herd immunity.
Kryton57
SubscriberEven the positive ones – e.g. The one where the Sheriff dresses down his colleagues helmets & batons to join in the protest, contains a lot high fives and hugs from said Sheriff to colleagues and public.
While that's true, the benefits in that case may well outweigh the risks. I mean, I don't think he was doing a careful risk assessment or anything but the odds of catching the virus from that level of contact is extremely small while the odds of preventing a bad situation were pretty high
I recall reading that Spanish Flu petered our due to evolving into something less deadly. Is that correct?
It does seem unlikely to me to have happened so fast in this case. But I don’t know what I’m talking about so that doesn’t count for anything.
I may have missed this, but has there been a random sample of the population tested (similar selection procedure to electoral polling), to find the background infection level?
If not, why not?
my wife was randomly selected for an Imperial/NHS trial
she was sent a swab kit in the post last week, results are due back tomorrow, I think
id expect them to say -ve
asymptomatic & contact outside house virtually 0, if anything she'd have caught it via me while i was commuting into london, but thats not happening now or for a while
Flu does seem to evolve to less harmful variants and there is reasonable theory to explain why it might happen but there is no evidence that it has happened here. In fact there are some theories that a milder version was around a bit earlier, which may explain some odd early cases that never spread, prior to the current highly contagious flavour.
Always worth bearing in mind that the testing has significant error rates. Occasional anomalous results are probably just wrong.
Yes ONS have run sampling
Thanks, TiRED & kimbers.
I had assumed that even asymptomatic infection led to showing sero+ve, and hoped the level of background infection was higher
That's the HOT topic. Does having some preexisting cross-reactive T-cells lead to immunity in the absence of antibodies, and does this immunity not show in serology studies. Lots of debate regarding whether the infection has passed through great swathes of the population, or whether it has just scratched the surface. If the former, then the fatality rate makes the pathogen look like benign influenza, if the latter, then lockdown was the right thing to do and we should be very cautious.
The science does not have an answer here, except for analogy with other pathogens. You can be seronegative for Hep A after vaccination and still produce antibodies after challenge. T-cells recognise peptides not whole virus particles, so perhaps other pathogens have a similar peptide sequence for presentation. Maybe some humans already have a self-peptide that has some cross-reactivity. We don't know.
"my wife was randomly selected for an Imperial/NHS trial"
Yes, so was my father (81) who did his on Sunday. It was very well organized with swab kits, couriers to take results away etc.
Trying to be positive according to the charts on the bbc website both France and Spain had a strange plateau at the end of the wave similar to what the U.K. seems to be showing at the moment. Spain’s was more pronounced
Klunk,
Thanks for the link to that article about the betting companies being one of the largest donors to the Tories.
We were told that betting adverts were to be suspended during lockdown. Instead I have seen a plethora af gambling adverts centred around 'gambling responsibly', advertising the tools the companies offer to manage your habit.
Don't the Government understand how advertising works? Don't they understand how addiction works? Or so I thought.....
That link answers my question.
Alcohol and betting advertising are absolutely entrenched in everything now.
which may explain some odd early cases that never spread, prior to the current highly contagious flavour.
Question - how contagious is this virus really? IDK, it's not my area of science but 15 mins in close contact with someone to stand a good chance of getting it doesn't sound very contagious to me. How can you tell - I've seen R numbers but are they of any use for that question, when R is also highly influenced by what we do.
Horses don’t catch it.
I hope you have a good source for that........
https://twitter.com/jimmfelton/status/1267503648642347011?s=21
This government is just dripping with incompetence and bullshit.
I feel like the Gov is desperate to be the good guy handing out freedom to everyone.
A slow painful death is too good for Boris, Cummings, Hancock etc..
FFS
I’m all for freedom… but nothing is in place that the government itself said would be required to enable the execution of those freedoms while being able to monitor and respond to the virus that is still not under control in the UK.
I’m all for freedom… but nothing is in place that the government itself said would be required to enable the execution of those freedoms while being able to monitor and respond to the virus that is still not under control in the UK.
This is what I don't understand - it was made so clear that relaxation of the rules was dependent on those 5 tests etc and now it seem it's just gone out the window.
Would make an interesting question at PMQs, getting Boris to show exactly how those tests have been met
rydster
MemberI feel like the Gov is desperate to be the good guy handing out freedom to everyone.
It's like parents. Keeping a kid alive is hard, giving them chocolate and letting them do whatever they want is easy. And of course this government is desperate to get people to like them again after the disasters of the last few months, and since they barely have any actual positive news, they're going direct to "tell everyone it's fine to eat nothing but chocolate and stay up late"
Probably just as well Johnston abandoned all those kids really.
That definitely fits BJ's whole bonhomie persona.
Some good news in there. In fact, with much of this, while rules are being relaxed in June, support is continuing well into the summer at least. Feel free to make your own steps towards normal behaviour in July if you want, after we’ve seen a couple of weeks more data and track/trace/isolate is hopefully actually in place. With this particular relaxation, there will he cut off people desperate to see someone… with the right mitigation, it makes sense to signal that they can.
Feel free to make your own steps towards normal behaviour...if you want? Really?
Personally, I want hard evidence from the government that it is safe to relax restrictions, not have joe public making their own judgement calls. It makes no sense to be signalling to people that it is OK to start relaxing things if you've not delivered any of the stuff required to manage that relaxation in a safe way.
Do you really believe Hancock brought the "launch" of track and trace forward 3 days because they were ready early? The government is just making things up as they go, and gambling they are going to get away with it.
Indeed. If you can carry on as you are ‘till July, and then see where the UK us, I think that would be wise. We would be, if we didn’t have a teacher in the house. Government also waiting, and asking everyone to wait, is what is really needed, but none of us can do anything to get that to happen, sadly.
Keeping a kid alive is hard, giving them chocolate and letting them do whatever they want is easy.
That's another big factor; the fact that managing a crisis of this scale is hard.
Johnson has no track record in getting difficult things done well. He has bullshitted his way through Brexit so far because he hasn't actually had to deal with any of the difficult stuff yet. With the pandemic, he appears evasive and lazy, at a time when you need somebody with decisive leadership skills taking hard decisions and actually getting stuff done, and he's squandering what trust he has left:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/01/public-trust-in-uk-government-over-coronavirus-falls-sharply
Hasn’t anyone considered that UK Gov has a transparently-hidden benevolent plan for us? A super-secret plan which has always sat beneath the opaquely-ambiguous pseudoplan that they are only using on us to get to the real plan?
Documentary film-maker Philomena Cunk seems like she has actually given it some thought. A lightbulb-moment, TBH.
The official line was that stopping mass gatherings now, wouldn’t make as much difference as it would later* - when there’d be more people spreading the virus that they’d caught at the first load of mass gatherings
*ie ‘now’.
I think SAGE has found a new member
😆😆
As far as I can tell, I'm not going to be able to **** my girlfriend until the very final stage of lockdown easings (we live apart and have incompatible cats and her flatmate mean moving in isn't an option), which is what - the end of the year-ish?
While we might be outliers in the spread of family situations in the population, due to it being a family situation it's pretty important to us. And the right to a private/family life is enshrined in law. Though people's right to not die is also enshrined in law and obviously all human rights have to be in balance, so I'm not being a total douchebag.
But if the government don't take their head out their arse and come up with an exemption to let us have physical intimacy when folk around us are buying new clothes and having pints in the pub (all of which are allowed before I can get laid again), then we're starting down a slipperly slope of rule-breaking because frankly there is no way we'll stick with this for all those months, and glib asides about how it is a test for a relationship are not viewed well by younger people making unreciprocated sacrifices for their vulnerable elders because our lifestyles are outliers that are hard to write into your guidance..
Just have a ****
That's quite an incoherent mess. Wanna try to explain that again.
All I got was it's the Govt's fault that your pussy is stopping you getting some good loving.
I’m not going to be able to **** my girlfriend
You can outdoors.
The new law is pretty insane, I agree. The fact they haven’t allowed two ‘households’ to group together, and be in each other’s homes, will cause a lot of couples issues, legally, if the law was actually to be enforced… just do it and tell no one. Still… horseracing and opening car showrooms… finance before love…
I don't often post things here, but can i also add my appreciation to TiRed in particular, and many others in general, for making this such an informative and instructive thread?
It has proved to be a beacon of integrity in what has been otherwise a shitstorm of bollox.
Thanks people.
@yourguitarhero - your situation was specifically mentioned by Nicola Sturgeon on Thursday and she said they were currently coming up with something. I suspect it will be along the lines of having some sort of small social "bubble" where you can mix with non-bidey-in partners. Might be as early as next week.
The Dutch Govt addressed this week's ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52685773
TL;DR - get yourself a funk-buddy to get your funk on!
Amongst all these numbers, is anyone else skeptical that Coronovirus seems to be going away rather more quickly than everyone thought? Sure things have changed but back in March we were ruling out the whole of 2020, and yet here we are in June wandering around parks & ikea, with Spain and Italy thankfully reporting zero deaths.
Whats caused this? I’m worried that a) that all the interventions have actually worked And the many conversations threads and forums politicising negative responses to governments will fall only to the death count - not that that’s something ever to forget or trivialise - rather than the duration or enormity. Or b) this is some kind of false dawn, and we’ve underestimate this thing or will get too complacent and boom... we are back again.
I’d love to think that the misery for some is shorter lived than it could have been, and that global Nightingales and Track and Trace teams equivalents remain over staffed and underused, but why, and have we got this expectation of continuation or second wave wrong?
with Spain and Italy thankfully reporting zero deaths
I'm sure I saw 60 deaths in Italy yesterday? not seen the Spanish numbers.
and have we got this expectation of continuation or second wave wrong?
Not sure it's an expectation rather than something to be rightly fearful of, and thus protected against.
I've had the same thought Kryton.
Is it going away, or are governments keen to now play it down in so many countries?
🤔
this is some kind of false dawn, and we’ve underestimate this thing or will get too complacent and boom… we are back again.
The thing is that the gov were losing control of the situation, so they’ve had to release the restrictions that weren’t being adhered to ,to give the impression they are still in control.
The papers and the Cummings affair sorta pressed the gas pedal.
You also at some point have to get on with stuff,but not as normal, its not gone away but at the moment there’s gonna be less chance of catching it as less people have it and the social distancing that the majority of people will stick with.
The Baton has also been pushed onto the people so if the numbers go up, it’s our fault, remember that the most important man in the uk is the spin doctor Not the epidemiologist 🙂
TLDR can”t hide in caves indefinitely.