Then there’s Tweed Heads / Coolangatta. What happens there?? (Asking from Yorkshire)
Don't know....... I don't go north of Byron dahling
Absolutely Batfink - it's a luxury to have had the time to watch and learn from everyone else.
Scuttler - presumably once the border's open, the border's open?
... until it isn't again.
And Batfink - we don't let you Mexicans in you know?
Thats ok, I'm going to Blueys beach after Christmas - much further north than that and I get a nosebleed and ****er er coffee withdrawl. Not too keen on Byron itself these days - far better places to go (eg: Blueys) without having to put up with all the nonsense / Hemsworths littering the place.
Sorry - BACK ON TOPIC
Guy at work told me about a boy in Midlothian who is doing a raring business of fake covid vaccine QR codes for a tenner each.
Got my booster booked for mid December.
Last vaccination was in July then had very mild COVID 2 months ago so I figured the timing works out about right to keep my anti-covid powers strong. Roll on injections 4 and 5!
A few weeks ago there was a reference to Dr John Campbell and his thoughts and theories on aspiration for preventing blood clots.
He now has a new video promoting Ivermectin, and reporting on some papers that (he claims) show that it's basically doing the same thing as the Pfizer antiviral, so given that one is £thousands and the other is pennies, might as well just use Ivermectin.
But, before you rush out to your local veterinary suppliers and empty the shelves of worm tablets, I found this response really interesting:
I might get some Ivermectin if I find I have worms, but otherwise I shall leave it.
This looks like good news, if they can now find a way to work around it for future vaccines
BBC News - Covid: Trigger of rare blood clots with AstraZeneca jab found by scientists
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418123
Is this the same category of “basically doing the same thing” as say, petrol vs paraffin…
Sigh. A clinical pharmacologist writes…
The Pfizer protease inhibitor is nanomolar potent. That means that very low (mg) doses are required for blockade of the target. Ivermectin is micromolar potent (and worse) which means you will need thousands of times more molecules to have the equivalent effect.
It’s a bit like saying you and I have the same number of coins and money can buy a Ferrari. But if your money is more potent than mine (£2 coins rather than 1p pieces), then only one of us might get that car.
Ivermectin may do something, but at the doses needed for pharmacology, it will be doing a lot of unwanted things as well. We call that toxicity in the trade.
Good reposte TiRed, thank you.
In this paper the target ivermectin level would be 100 uM. The target for Pfizer is about 0.03 uM. In English, that means you need 3000x as much ivermectin as you do Pfizer. Those would be some whale pills. With that difference, we would call ivermectin a “hit”as it does actually bind to the protease, but not a “lead” and a long long way from a candidate drug. Molnupiravir has a target of about 5 uM
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x/tables/2?proof=t
For those who have forgotten, 1 uM is a millionth of a mole in 1L of fluid, and there about 6 x 10 with 23 zeros after it molecules in one mole. So the dose of Pfizer is 250 mg (0.25 g) which weighs about 500 g/mol. Hence the dose is 0.25/500 = 0.0005 moles or 300000000000000000000 molecules. Or 30 billion billion billion.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1466234026843205637
Omicron getting established and increasing in the UK, possibly, based on the prevalence of the PCR test signal which has been associated with the variant.
We already have evidence that it is able to easily outcompete Delta in SA, although they are at the end of a wave rather than just plateauing along like us. Some estimates suggest that it may have 4 or 5 times the transmission rate.
As far as we are concerned, it's a pure numbers game even with the optimistic assessment that the rate of hospitalisations and deaths will remain roughly on a par with Delta because of vaccines. If case numbers climb much beyond what we would have had with Delta, they will deliver larger numbers of people to hospital, and we will be back trying to stop the health system buckling.
Ivermectin was recommended by one or more of the snake oil salesmen in the US a few months back with a corresponding uptick in stores having their shelves emptied of the stuff swiftly followed by an uptick in admissions to hospital for ivermectin poisoning.
Some people are positively dangerous and should be de-platformed.
Or, alternatively, the effects of Omicron are less than Delta and we end up with a milder virus?.
We live in hope.
yours,
The optimist. 🙂
Or, alternatively, the effects of Omicron are less than Delta and we end up with a milder virus?.
We live in hope.
Still a possibility, and we won't know for a bit. Cross everything.
Hospitalisations rising in Guateng Province.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1466302653969809414
Or, alternatively, the effects of Omicron are less than Delta and we end up with a milder virus?.
The Mail etc are saying this is what the WHO think, but I can't find anywhere, that it's been said by them
Every variant is greeted with hopeful noises that it'll have lower morbidity and mortality rates. At some point it's likely to happen, and those pinning that tail on the donkey will feel vindicated (and all the times they were wrong before will be forgotten because we'll all be cheering). The correct response is to assume that any emergent more transmittable variant is just as much of a threat to the vulnerable as the variants it out performs. If that turns out to be wrong, great, we'll find out relatively quickly (a few weeks), and we'll all be happy. In the mean time, caution is well founded, and should be supported.
The Mail etc are saying this is what the WHO think, but I can’t find anywhere, that it’s been said by them
The WHO spokesman said that most cases were mild, but most cases of all the variants are mild. It's not ebola. The problem is the small % of patients, particularly older, who require hospitalisation and are at risk of death.
Small percentages applied at population level add up to a lot of death and serious disease.
In the absence of data, I defer to the null hypothesis; it's probably about the same as Alpha, which was about the same as Delta. It may or may not be more transmissible, and it may or may not be more pathogenic. But is will be pathogenic for some, as all other strains have been. It has some useful escape mutations for sure.
A pocket of SGTF reports in the UK could just be a local outbreak with reporting selection bias. That's what's seen at very low per capita incidence before mass spread takes over. Give it another week for some in vitro data looking at neutralising sera and antibodies, and the daily incidence in SAfrica. My (mildly informed) guess is that the rate of increase will slow in a week in Guateng, to Delta-like growth rate, and that it might replace Delta in the UK, but not as fast as Delta replaced Alpha. But that's really a look-at-the-tea-leaves (well mutations) guess.
But that’s really a look-at-the-tea-leaves (well mutations) guess.
That's not good enough, we need to know the precise number of people we are allowed to invite to our Christmas party at the weekend. 🙂
Every variant is greeted with hopeful noises that it’ll have lower morbidity and mortality rates. At some point it’s likely to happen,
There's no pressure on the virus to become more benign. People don't show symptoms, if at all, for a few days after they're contagious.
Re Booster Jabs.
I received AZ for jab #1 and jab #2.
Should I expect to receive AZ for the booster jab?
(Going to a walk in place this afternoon).
No. Booster will most likely be Pfizer (or less likely Moderna). It shouldn't be AZ again.
There’s no pressure on the virus to become more benign.
Agreed. Which why I said at "some point"... it won't come quickly. There's very little selection advantage to becoming benign, given existing characteristics... but also, no real disadvantage to it. A more benign change will "likely" coincide with a change in transmissibility at some point... and then we win. Eventually. The path out of this is about vaccines, treatments, and containment... still... throwing our arms in the air and just hoping a benign variant comes along soon has always been superficially attractive, but arguably foolish.
SARS-CoV-2 is benign already. You just need to widen your reference point. Closely related SARS-CoV-1 had 10% mortality, whilst less closely related MERS-CoV had 30% mortality (but was not readily transmissible between humans). OK, it's not HCov-OC43 and just a sniffle, but it could be a lot worse.
"What if this is as good as it gets"
All boosters are currently a reduced dose of Pfizer or Moderna. Only AZ for those who can’t have the mRNA ones.
This looks like good news, if they can now find a way to work around it for future vaccines
BBC News – Covid: Trigger of rare blood clots with AstraZeneca jab found by scientists
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59418123/a >
Conversely - proof that the vaccine hadn't been properly tested and shouldn't have been launched until this was known
(disclaimer - not what i think, but was proposed by a vax sceptic friend of a friend. If i could be bothered to engage any more...... I'd have said that in some car accidents, people get injuries due to their seatbelts - so we should scrap seatbelts? )
All boosters are currently a reduced dose of Pfizer or Moderna. Only AZ for those who can’t have the mRNA ones.
it’s only the Moderna that is reduced.
(it’s still the same amount of Pfizer just not the full 100 (micro milliwotsits)
so don’t come out thinking you were short changed if it’s moderna
there are no AZ boosters unless there is a reason you cannot have an mRNA booster.
Conversely – proof that the vaccine hadn’t been properly tested and shouldn’t have been launched until this was known
This research looked for the potential mechanism of a rare side effect that emerged during testing, and had already been factored into decisions about risk/benefit.
Just because you don't fully understand why something is happening, doesn't mean you can't make a judgement about how often it's happening. That would be like not planting crops because you didn't understand how the Earth orbited the sun.
Sorry - my mistake on the doses! I’ve not been jabbing since the summer as my NHS trust won’t let any flying staff in the clinic within 10 days of a flight.
So Germany are to ban unvaccinated people from shops and bars - any ideas how they'll be able to police it?
The same way its neighbours do?
Or, alternatively, the effects of Omicron are less than Delta and we end up with a milder virus?.
We live in hope.
yours,
The optimist. 🙂
I think we're due a change in luck regarding Covid (I know it could be much, much worse).
Still, I'm having a very bad sense of Déjà vu about Omicron. Like, well pretty much, every stage of Covid, if we'd taken inconvenient measures earlier, we could have avoided really unpleasant ones later, and of course saved lives.
I know the timing couldn't be worse, Christmas and all that, but easy stuff, like masks when not seated in pubs and limiting numbers to smaller groups around tables, asking people to WFH, I mean, in about a week most office types will all but down tools and break out the Quality Street anyway.
I have this terrible feeling that, in 2 weeks or whatever when the data comes out of South Africa that it's going to be bad, by which time everyone in the UK has been out dancing and hugging with everyone from work and their friends and visited every branch of their family tree and it's everywhere. Sod Plan B, with the NHS already flat out, and peak Flu season, we'll be back locked in our homes and saying goodbye to loved ones via skype.
I have a mental image of Johnson in his bunker with his cronies with a projection of deaths and restrictions in one hand, and his approval ratings in the other, and I know every single time, he'd gamble everyone's lives and livelihoods before he gambled with his job.
What's worse, can anyone think of a time when Covid didn't get worse? I mean, shit-the-bed, this time last year we were all going to be jabbed by the end of Spring and Covid was going to be in the past.
So Germany are to ban unvaccinated people from shops and bars – any ideas how they’ll be able to police it?
I doubt they will. Typically a move like this will be enough for a large number of people who are on the fence to get jabbed. Their will still be a hardcore of stupid who will not only ignore it, but flaunt it, which is exactly what they want. They'll be made examples of, and if they happen to get Covid later on, all the better.
The same way its neighbours do?
Which is?
France and Italy. I just have the pass in my pocket and show it when asked. In many places I could take the mask off once I'd shown the pass but kept it on unless there was a good reason to take it off such as swimming. Masks are obligatory again in most places and outside in th etown center as of today.
What’s worse, can anyone think of a time when Covid didn’t get worse?
We are in a MUCH better position than we were earlier in the pandemic. Vaccinations (and better understanding and treatments) mean that a wave of infections this winter will result in MUCH fewer deaths and hospitalisations than a similar size wave would have in the first 9 months. Things have got better, not worse. We may have to have another short period of "stay at home, see people next month" in January while we push out boosters, but if we do, it'll in no way be "worse" than when we've had to before.
France and Italy.
And the Netherlands. Every bar or restaurant asks to scan the QR code on your phone, even to sit at a table outside. No QR code, or no tick from their app when they scan it, then you don't get served. It's not hard.
And the Netherlands. Every bar or restaurant asks to scan the QR code on your phone, even to sit at a table outside. No QR code, or no tick from their app when they scan it, then you don’t get served. It’s not hard.
Just curious but are those who can't have the vaccine for medical reasons exempt and if so how is this shown in the app?
My dad can't have his second vaccination as the first nearly left him paralysed from the waist down, I would hope he doesn't begin to get excluded from society.
There are all sorts of exclusions for where keeping vaccinations up to date isn't possible, including recent positive tests or history of reactions to vaccinations. You still get a pass/code to show, so you don't have to give the staff checking your history, they just see the tick.
There are all sorts of exclusions for where keeping vaccinations up to date isn’t possible, including recent positive tests or history of reactions to vaccinations. You still get a pass/code to show, so you don’t have to give the staff checking your history, they just see the tick.
Thanks. Just wondering how 'the system' picks that up because not sure if the QR code shows the reason why you haven't had the second one.
All over 18 in the family third jabbed on monday afternoon . Local pharmacie are doing it without appointments ; my son was only jabbed in mid july but still had it .
Thanks. Just wondering how ‘the system’ picks that up because not sure if the QR code shows the reason why you haven’t had the second one.
You need a doctor's note in France... you used to have wave that instead of the QR code, but now the passe sanitaire can be updated, so you can wave the QR code like everyone else. Still need's a doctor to sign off on it though. And I don't think the same applies when travelling yet, you're just stuck there. It's all moving pretty fast.
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/actualites/A15102
You need a doctor’s note in France… you used to have wave that instead of the QR code, but now the passe sanitaire can be updated, so you can wave the QR code like everyone else. Still need’s a doctor to sign off on it though. And I don’t think the same applies when travelling. It’s all moving pretty fast.
Thanks, makes sense. I would hate to think he'd fall into some two tier society gap due to a separate medical condition (he developed Guillian Barre syndrome from it and is just relearning how to walk six months on).
