dudeofdoom
Subscriber
Bet you wish you lived on an island 🙁
I do (IoW)...perfect opportunity to control it and they still ****ed it up by basically doing nothing until there were plenty of cases.
Looking for masks (the ones we have at work have breathing valves so largely pointless) - anyone know of a decent source - all the ones on eBay / Amazon look dodgy...
I've shopped loads online, probably more than usual. Bought loads of games console stuff (all used and cheap). However I do miss chilling out in down over a coffee and a doughnut, picking up a few things (kids need clothes and shoes atm), then having lunch out.
It’s a question of political will.
You get my point then 🙂
Well, they’re a week or two late… but we learnt from their mistake of coming to the mobile phone OS providers late in the process… haven’t we? Oh, we haven’t? How late will our tracking app be then? Maybe never you say? We’re not even asking the government that question any more? Why is that then…?
And from Norway.... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53051783
Data capture unlawful and must be deleted.
The Norwegian gov were advised by Oxford Uni's Big Data Institute - who also advised the NHS.
I do (IoW)…perfect opportunity to control it and they still ****ed it up by basically doing nothing until there were plenty of cases.
Snap UK.
Ahh the app, I really don’t know what game they are playing with this but it Is most definitely a game.
The original was fiddly using the Bluetooth as a sonar as there was no OS support for this,so some effort required but backend google so reasonably in place.
Now the Apple/google API’s are in place and ready to go it could have been banged out over a weekend and into Apple approval and they’d have been approving it way quicker than my commercial stuff which wasn’t even a day last time.
If you ‘wanted’ an easy win the app was it.
It’s not just that using the API would actually work and be quicker to deliver, it’s also about data retention and use (and how using the Apple/Google approach would increase uptake).
Seems New Zealand have fresh cases after being Covid free for 24 days. 2 women from the UK seem to be the cause although it appears them complied with all the rules.
Hopefully everyone on their flight is still properly quarantined. I can understand why they were allowed to breach quarantine (dying relative, by the sounds of it), but it reinforces the need for robust T&T even as case numbers seem very low.
It seems they complied with what was asked of them, but the people doing the asking were a bit slack - not asking about specific symptoms but just a generic 'are you feeling ok?' type questioning. It looks like if the authorities had followed protocol properly they would have got answers that would have led to tests, which probably would have picked them up before they drove half the length of the country...
Kryton57
Subscriber
Assuming it’s all true, isn’t this current spike In China an example of the future? It arrives, tests happen and the locality is quickly locked down?
I have just been speaking to a colleague in Chennai and they are about to start a new 2 week lockdown because numbers are rising again. It sounds desperate over there, he said many people cannot afford to receive any medical attention at all. He also added that the government are lying about the numbers (I told him it was the same over here!).
Madrid/Paris/Milan all got locked down pretty effectively.
Madrid locked down as it was the epicentre of infection with 80% of the Spanish cases. So our glorious leader, still very much in his 'shake hands with everybody' phase, asked if 5,000 of them would fancy flying into Liverpool to spend a few days in the City's hotels, bars, and restaurants then crammed into a football ground with 50,000+ other people. No checks at the airport, or anything inconvenient like that. Come on in!!
Looking for masks (the ones we have at work have breathing valves so largely pointless) –
That should be a 1 way valve on a FFP2 or 3 mask.
As such I'd speculate its not only not useless but many times better than a surgical mask.
The only question is really if its an active filter that has expired due to companies not being allowed to replace stock.
but it reinforces the need for robust T&T even as case numbers seem very low
New cases will keep popping up all over the world, and we will need working track/trace/isolate to contain them here as well. We’re not at that point yet… and it’s not something we can collectively do without our government doing their bit, but they are hopeless… aren’t they? It looks that simple to me.
Not sure foreign governments can keep allowing travel from the UK, if our government is happy for us to keep the virus ticking along untraced here. Even if they are kitted out to quarantine and/or track us on arrival in the longer term, it presumably comes at a cost to their taxpayers to keep doing so.
A good example of the above is what is happening here in Sweden...
We did not lock down and our cases have been higher than our neighbours in Scandinavia. Now that Norway and Finland are starting to emerge and allow travel, we are excluded from the travel bubble that has been created. I can see their point.
If the UK allows unrestricted travel through places like Heathrow and has no robust method of dealing with infections, why would any country that has taken measures seriously consider allowing their citizens unrestricted entry?
I'm pretty sure we were staying in the same hotel (in Manchester) as the Madrid side. Two coach loads of players plus entourage. Close call. We came home and locked down that night.
I see NZ have had two cases since declaring the country as free of Covid-19, guess where those two people came from?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53059633
Oops
That’s what we’ve been talking about.
Some info here on the rates of infection and the speed of decline differences in the regions, seems the lockdown worked better in London with a rapid decline in cases.
https://theconversation.com/why-coronavirus-death-rates-wont-fall-as-quickly-as-they-rose-139947
No idea if a reversal of freedoms will be adhered to but you can ask that question of anywhere.
In my home village my folks are still having zero contact but their elderly neighbor has driven to next village to buy a paper every day all through lockdown :facepalm:
Some bright news about treatments for some of the worst affected patients - as expected, a hefty dose of steroids seems to help a fair few of those requiring intensive care.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53061281
Something to contribute to the triumvirate of lockdown, improved/refined treatment and vaccine that we'll need to get to other side of this.
Yeah, that's mega news, cutting risk of death by a third. A proper positive result for palliative care scenarios.
I don't know if that exactly translates to meaning that the 45k deaths here could have been 30k if they'd all been given the thing.
I see Big Fun Boris is doing the announcement today, fancy that, it's a good news day what with the trial result. Goal hanger.
I don’t know if that exactly translates to meaning that the 45k deaths here could have been 30k if they’d all been given the thing.
Using it on all ventilated patients could have prevented one death for every eight patients treated, in theory, and prevented 1 death in every 25 patients treated who were just getting extra oxygen. Don't know how many people who died from Covid in the UK never got anywhere near a ventilator, but suspect it's quite a few, given the care home situation and ventilator capacity in ICU.
Will be interesting to see if earlier intervention with Dex will yield better results, or combinations of this and remdesivir/others.
Goal hanger.
One of the journos can head it off the line by asking how the 'world beating' track and trace is getting along.
Big Fun Boris
Which one was he? Perhaps it's time to re-release 'Blame it on the Boogie Scientists'
Some bright news about treatments for some of the worst affected patients – as expected, a hefty dose of steroids seems to help a fair few of those requiring intensive care.
It's a bit puzzling or deporessing. It starts off as just the sort of research I was hoping for.
Then goes on to say...
But people should not go out and buy it to take at home.
Dexamethasone does not appear to help people with milder symptoms of coronavirus who do not need help with their breathing.
yet
The drug is already used to reduce inflammation in a range of other conditions.
And it appears to help stop some of the damage that can happen when the body's immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus.
Given my personal primary concern throughout has been my overactive autoimmune system that I've previously been on steroids to control this sounded hopeful. The BBC write up makes it sound like "milder symptoms" like losing major organ function is some sort of inconvenience.
I'm rather puzzled as "as expected, a hefty dose of steroids seems to help a fair few of those requiring intensive care" but the article then seems to be complete the opposite of what I'd expect. (that a proportion of those that die are dying due to cytokine response)
I know this is just the BBC but it makes it sound like someone should be allowed to die from kidney or heart failure so long as they don't need a ventilator???
edits...
I dunno.. this is the BBC but right now this sounds to me like "we don't have enough masks so masks don't reduce transmission"
I can understand if supplies are limited ?? but from personal experience from when my son was intubated after the consultant concluded something like "it was too late for the steroids to work" it doesn't seem efficient to not treat a patient with a run away immune system earlier???
Not sure I grasp your point - by 'milder symptoms', I assumed they mean folk with a temperature, headache and mild cough, not those with kidney failure. You don't want people self-medicating with a powerful steroid until the potential benefits outweigh the risks.
It's no use against Covid symptoms until the 'cytokine storm' immune overreaction starts kicking in, and in fact, it's probably best not to suppress your immune system in the early stages of infection, as it has a job to do.
In a nutshell - if you are admitted to hospital with breathing problems, dexamethasone is probably a good thing from that point onwards. Don't take it for mild symptoms or to try to prevent illness, as it may well do more harm than it prevents.
Dexamethasone is a drug nobody should die without having on board. It's already been in use widely, but the confirmatory randomized placebo controlled trial is cast iron evidence that it works (and hydroxychloroquine does not) in severe patients with an uncontrolled inflammatory cascade. For some perspective, your odds of not returning from hospital with a COVID19 infection went down from 1/3 to 1/4.
I'm hoping for good news from the tocilizumab anti-IL6 arm too. Sarilumab (another anti-IL6) was also efficacious in a small study.
Not sure I grasp your point – by ‘milder symptoms’, I assumed they mean folk with a temperature, headache and mild cough, not those with kidney failure.
I assumed the same ... I guess my point is the BBC seem to have written this up almost dismissing something like heart or kidney failure.
There are 5 voices in the article (or 6 if you count Matt Hancock)
Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online
Lead researcher Prof Martin Landray
Chief investigator Prof Peter Horby
and Fergus Walsh - Health correspondent.
It’s no use against Covid symptoms until the ‘cytokine storm’ immune overreaction starts kicking in, and in fact, it’s probably best not to suppress your immune system in the early stages of infection, as it has a job to do.
These two points don't seem that clear to me.
Nothing the qualified people from Oxford said seems to back that up nor that they even tried.
I'm not saying they should have tried... just that nothing they say indicates that in the trial they identified the patients with over active immune systems to see if this treatment was more effective than in the random sample.
IF the results had come back indicating that for people with low-moderate immune systems (usually but not exclusively older) the optimal treatment time with an immuno-suppressant was later (or even not at all) and or people with highly over active immune systems benefited most/earliest I wouldn't have been surprised either...
Last time I spoke to my GP (almost 2 mo ago) we discussed if I should or shouldn't be on immune suppressants (if nothing else because then I can exercise) and if yes then what but the answer then was "we really don't know yet" ... my immune system usually doesn't bother "passing go" as it were it just goes bat shit crazy. By the time I realise its usually too late...just so far it's stopped short of a chain reaction. My son was realistically on a less than 50% chance of survival when his occurred and he was on a hospital ward at the time and intubated en-route to St Thomas' P-ICU as waiting what turned out to be 17 min ward to ward was judged too long to wait.
This all started off sounding very positive for me...
Another risk of inflamation is apparently increased heart attacks and stroke as your arteries become inflamed and rupture. I'd have thought this new drug would be something anyone with a risk of heart disease would want to taking long before they end up on a ventilator..
That's said I'm no doctor...
https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drug/dexamethasone.html#sideEffects
Fill yer boots.
and remember this bit: Oxford study shows low-cost COVID-19 drug improves survival rate in hospitalised patients with severe respiratory complications
and this bit: No benefits to patients not requiring respiratory support was observed.
Ok whose Christmas came early this year...
Last time I spoke to my GP (almost 2 mo ago) we discussed if I should or shouldn’t be on immune suppressants (if nothing else because then I can exercise) and if yes then what but the answer then was “we really don’t know yet” … my immune system usually doesn’t bother “passing go” as it were it just goes bat shit crazy. By the time I realise its usually too late…just so far it’s stopped short of a chain reaction.
Obviously, it's no reassurance in your individual circumstances, but the whole premise of the trial was to look as quickly as possible at the situation in a largish group of seriously ill patients of varying degrees of previous underlying illness, age etc. Naturally there will be subgroups of people whose immune response varies widely from the norm, and for whom treatments may be more or less appropriate.
We can expect more clarity over time as more data comes in, but at the moment it's an emergency situation and clinicians are looking for broad-brush information about how to treat a very difficult viral infection and its effects.
As a marker of how little is known, even in a fairly common group such as my own - severe asthma - we are still somewhat guessing as to how much steroid treatments are protective (probably are), and which kinds of severe respiratory illness are more likely to increase your risk of dying.
There's a lot of educated guesswork going on.
I’d have thought this new drug would be something anyone with a risk of heart disease would want to taking long before they end up on a ventilator.
It’s not a new drug. Plenty is already known about it’s benefits (or not) for other conditions from much older trials.
Anyway, all good news in the fight against Coronavirus, and a reminder that there is a point to (other) countries seeking to keep this virus under control long enough for more to be known to help those that contract it… lucky for them that we’ve hospitalised enough people in the first half of this year to be able to do many of the studies for them. Good old altruistic England.
and remember this bit: Oxford study shows low-cost COVID-19 drug improves survival rate in hospitalised patients with severe respiratory complications
and this bit: No benefits to patients not requiring respiratory support was observed.
Erm that is from the BBC isn't it?
What I'm failing to see is how the BBC editor and BBC correspondent got to that based on what the actual experts said (in quotes and attributed)
Perhaps this is my perspective from doing engineering and science and clinical trials on humans can't be performed in the same way due to ethics?
I guess if I was doing the same thing in engineering then I would segregate the sample and I would have the luxury of "killing" some machines deliberately.
I could for example know that some specific pumps (engines, bearings...) should react badly to poor lubrication and others not but we have a cheap lube that is much cheaper than the higher quality lube. At the end of the test I would be looking to see which pumps could run this cheaper lube and the effect on the MTBF for very specific pumps with a specific lube doing a specific job (say corrosive fluids)
In the real world (outside of the test) then sometimes we kill (run to failure) pumps deliberatly and sometimes we want to eek out another thousand hours so maintenance can be scheduled with other things.
I guess the difference is when I kill a pump it's just a pump... I can have an hypothesis that with a lower quality lube the pump will fail quickly with corrosive fluids and I can just test that. I guess giving a drug to a patient you think is inappropriate is different so you can't actually ask those questions? (I'm just trying to understand clinical ethics but i think it's OK to kill a patient because they were selected randomly but not if they were selected due to specific characteristics you expected them to die from a specific treatment???)
At the end of my pump lube test what someone would want to know is "which pumps should we use the cheap lube on"? As such I'd partition the data and work out for different base cases
So idly speculating this trail selected people randomly and I'd guess some had weak immune systems, some had normal and some had over active ones. It was a pretty large dataset (2k? and 4k control) so ethics aside they could have segregated the data
In the trial, led by a team from Oxford University, about 2,000 hospital patients were given dexamethasone and compared with more than 4,000 who were not.
For patients on ventilators, it cut the risk of death from 40% to 28%.
For patients needing oxygen, it cut the risk of death from 25% to 20%.
What it doesn't say is age, gender, haplotype or "pre-existing conditions" or what pre-existing medication the patients were on.
For a disease that seems to discriminate so widely this general number seems inadequate...
It could have killed 100% of patients with specific conditions or who were taking other drugs before admission but we can never see this from those results... equally and probably more likely it may have killed higher numbers of some but saved even higher numbers of others
What I'm getting at here is a reasonable hypothesis would seem to be it would help those who are at risk of developing a cytokine storm every day of their lives more than someone who is immuno compromised and would in general need their immune system boosted. Equally of the patients that were selected with over active immune systems many/some would have already been taking steroids prior to hospitalisation.
This seems similar to other characteritics and co-morbidities.
It seems a major co-morbidity is obesity for example but what percentage of obese patients are taking specific medication? Is it the long term mediation that made them more vulnerable or the obesity?
I dunno... I was expecting a breakdown of what types of patients but perhaps thats not possible in clinical trials?
dudeofdoom - the MD of Crisp Websites is not listed as a 'person with significant control', was only appointed as a director in mid-May this year and is not listed as a director of any other companies - past or present.
The two with significant control are members of the England family; who are they?
Ah, now I understand - with such a patriotic surname we should give you the biggest possible bung.
The two Englands with significant control have no apparent social media presence; as for what the 'company' does it's activities are described as '....Agents involved in the sale of a variety of goods'.
Since incorporation, shareholders funds have fluctuated between (£3.4k) and £82k; last accounts showed c£13k.
Abbreviated accounts make it impossible to see what's happening.
This stinks - no surprise then.
Just seems a tad irregular as it’s not a small contract to award to an ‘unknown’ supplier.
Smells like another Ferry deal but throwing 100+ Million purchase orders at a small pest control shop when you’ve not approached any of the the usual ppe providers seems a tad incompetent or iffy.
Tbh you could pretty much build a ppe business up on the back of that order from nothing, I’ve heard of incentive schemes but this ones a corker.
dudeofdoom
Subscriber
Ok whose Christmas came early this year…We’re suing the Government over its decision to grant an £108 million contract for the supply of PPE to Crisp Websites Limited.
Wow - what a story!! I hope if anything underhand has gone on that it will be exposed.
I have just been scrolling through their Twitter account and they have gone from selling pigeon wires and rat poison, to chartering aircraft to fly in PPE.
I dunno… I was expecting a breakdown of what types of patients but perhaps thats not possible in clinical trials?
It's possible, if they've got a large enough number of patients, and they may well revisit the dataset to look for that, and publish further papers*. But not in the first wave of a pandemic where you need to get the headline result out and published as quickly as possible.
EDIT: Actually, they haven't even published a paper yet, just rushed out the most important findings, which are clinically significant enough to be of value immediately to medical teams worldwide.
Little Matty Handjob is on R4 now.
I truly believe he is taking some kind of stimulant medication. Or has been prescribed it by Joris.
He was a bit twitchy towards the end of his spot on BBC Breakfast too.
According to Twitter, the magic steroid, completely British, invented and produced by Boris Johnson, was trialled previously in Spain, and the results reported in ? The Lancet. My subscription has lapsed, but maybe someone knows more ....
He was a bit twitchy towards the end of his spot on BBC Breakfast too.
He's always a nasty snappy little bully.
Much smaller numbers, but yes.
There's the silver lining on our shitshow of a Covid response - our hospitals have been brimming with study subjects.
Hopefully they weren't actively assigning patients to the control group, though.