Professor Adam Finn on R4 just now saying it’s highly likely that people who’ve had CV *do* get resistance and in the rare cases where people do get reinfected it’s it’s not serious. I know it’s been suspected all along but it’s nice to hear it

But I also heard/read somewhere that the coronavirus family immunity was typically only 6-8 months, so if this variant follows that we could be in for a second big wave later if it’s not well contained by then as it’s still unlikely a vaccine will be ready anywhere near that time frame. We really should be focusing on therapeutics now so that if a second big wave does hit we already have the treatments in place to deal with it without requiring so many ICU cases

Incubation times I have read quoted up to two weeks. Then you have the same for the remainder of a household. Plus, lockdown is/was not Chinese, military style, barricaded into houses, right from the get go.

I suspect the effectiveness of self isolation in a shared residence will also extend transmission times.

You don’t want to lockdown so hard that you stamp it right down. You just need to maintain the number of new cases down enough to get as close to the ICU capacity line as possible. If you restrict spread too much, it will pop up again as soon as you lift restrictions.

We need to significantly reduce transmission, but not completely remove it. This thing has to go through the population, just hopefully not all at once.

+1

Wasn’t this the much derided ‘herd immunity’ concept?

I follow all that, Drac, and still think it points to a slow down in new case at about the point into confinement Italy is now and yet yesterday was a bad day for new cases.

On the treatment front there was one of the guys in Germany who is running that front on Eins Extra yesterday.

He went through Interferon which works well early on in infection but makes matters worse used late based on pervious experience with SRAS etc. A Japanaese tratment which is available to market and could be used immediatley without further tests if proved sufficiently effective, and of course Chlorquinine which the Doc in Marseille is promoting and getting some abuse over. The conclusion was that there’s nothing really effective that’s proven safe that’s going to be widely available quickly. 🙁

Professor Adam Finn on R4 just now saying it’s highly likely that people who’ve had CV *do* get resistance and in the rare cases where people do get reinfected it’s it’s not serious. I know it’s been suspected all along but it’s nice to hear it.

Did he mention how long people are immune for, with other coranaviruses , it’s only. 6 mths or so (not sur if that’s due to new strains or short lived immune response?)

Wasn’t this the much derided ‘herd immunity’ concept?

Yes & to keep numbers manageable for NHS you’d have to keep lockdowns in place for many (10+?) years & still see 10s (100s?) of 1000s of deaths.

But I also heard/read somewhere that the coronavirus family immunity was typically only 6-8 months, so if this variant follows that we could be in for a second big wave later if it’s not well contained by then

Firstly I’d like to see that 6-8 months estimate – it seems suspiciously specific! …but taking it at face value at that point it will be staggered as people lose their resistance and the hospitals will be more able to cope.

…but even if all that is wrong, if people get some kind of resistance once they’ve had this AFAIC that’s far better than *not* getting resistance. [1]

[1] For those of us who regard less infections and deaths as a good thing.

And explain to me where the new cases are coming from given that if there was already an infected person in the household 18 days ago they should have infected their cohabitants within 3-6 days on average

For the same reason the ones quarantined with the infection spread it on those numbers have now come through. So in another week to two they should start falling again.

Kimbers, where did you read we would need 10+ years of lockdowns from?

As for the herd people, do you really want soemthing three times as easily transmitted and 10 times as deadly as flu doing the rounds like colds do now? IIRC there are about 200 variations of the common cold and many of us go through a good many of them in life. This thing will mutate and like colds you’ll catch the ones you haven’t had even if you’ve got resistance to others. 1918 flu killed millions and how many has the flu in it’s various mutations killed ever since, lots.

Unfortunately this virus is well and truly out of the bag and like flu we’ll probably end up protecting the vilnerable with a never ending series of vaccins.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to expose more people than the health service can cope with to the virus until the first of the vaccins is available or a reliable treatment to reduce symptoms is validated.

The herd idea is great if you like playing roulette with people’s lives.

The herd idea is great if you like playing roulette with (other) people’s lives.

That’s how some people see it. They need to hear more about cases of young fit and healthy people in coffins, or with permanently reduced lung damage to change their minds.

Wasn’t this the much derided ‘herd immunity’ concept?

It’s the only game in town until there’s a test and/or a vaccine. It’s not so much a concept but a description of the process that will become our new reality until there’s a test or vaccine.

Yes & to keep numbers manageable for NHS you’d have to keep lockdowns in place for many (10+?) years & still see 10s (100s?) of 1000s of deaths.

Well hopefully it won’t be 10 years because there will hopefully be an antibody test/treatments/vaccine quicker than ten years. …but there might not, in which case we’ll have to live with what our immune systems can do.

speedstar
Subscriber
Kimbers, where did you read we would need 10+ years of lockdowns from?

No. Act earlier and they’d have saved lives.models used wrong virus with lower Critcal care rate. wrong initial strategy with “heard immunity”… if you do the numbers at current NHS capacity to “flatten” curve would have taken 17 years. Us hospital staff are very worried. pic.twitter.com/t7GT8N3oe7

— The Marxmatician (@Newsbehindthen2) March 21, 2020

Of course all dependent on how many extra deaths you want to avoid, as well as actual mortality & infection rates –

When I say how many extra deaths government (Cummings?) is willing to live with I mean this

It appears former No10 adviser Andrew Sabisky is saying the government has a policy by which “everyone over 65 is getting palliated (or will be in the v near future)”. He says: “Dunno if it’s been reported”. pic.twitter.com/iidYfMa2lA

— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) March 26, 2020

^^^^
sacked eugenicist tit pretends to have inside track

Options:

1. Scoop it all up and put it back in the bottle (likely=lockdown forerver).
2. Lockdown at some level until vaccine and effective treatments arrive, alongside people getting it and having some degree of immunity? Then live with it hoping milder strains prevail.
3. Let it rip
4. Er…?

Option 2. is complicated and messy with plenty of room for argument… Anyone prefer the others?

Wasn’t this the much derided ‘herd immunity’ concept?

Not quite. The initial ‘herd immunity’ discussion was basically – let’s ‘take it on the chin’ and let it surge through the population in one go, so we can come out of the other side ahead of everyone else (and get Brexit done etc).

That would have produced a massive spike in cases and excess mortality (preventable deaths).

But, in the absence of a vaccine or any other strategy, the majority of us are going catch this thing at some point. There is no means of preventing this, if you locked down completely then the virus would still be there waiting for you on the other side, and a total lockdown is unsustainable economically and socially.

The only lever you have is to try to create a bottleneck* in cases, so that the rate of transmission and hospital caseload is held as close to your ICU capacity as possible. At the same time, you take as many of those at highest risk of hospitalisation and death out of normal society to protect them while some kind of immunity gradually builds up in the general population. You would need 70-80% infection to starting getting proper herd immunity, but even 20-30% may well be useful in suppressing transmission.

*You slow down the flow, not stop it entirely. If you visualise every patient as a drop of water, and our NHS has a pint glass to catch as many as possible, the current strategy aims to turn the caseload into a fast flowing tap rather than just dumping a 10 gallon drum all at once.

Wasn’t this the much derided ‘herd immunity’ concept?

I think that was more like, stuff it, let everyone get it, then enough people will have it to reduce the available hosts such that R0 drops low enough that it ceases to be a pandemic problem. It involved a lot of death very quickly.

Slowing it down to feed people through ICU and save a lot of lives, is not the same.

edit: mh beat me to it with a better post.

2. Lockdown at some level until vaccine and effective treatments arrive, alongside people getting it and having some degree of immunity? Then live with it hoping milder strains prevail.

I’m calling

lockdown until antibody testing arrives
return to normality for anyone who has had it
treatments arrive
return to normality for out of risk groups
vaccine arrives
return to normality

with lockdown lifted after some weeks anyway because people will go nuts and the conomy will splode and stuff, lockdown being reasserted if cases spike again

Colleague has been off with fever, aches, cough, tight chest and loss of smell.

100% sure was never tested, and got no further than 111 advice to stay at home so I reckon those stats are hospital based only.

Friend of mine who ended up in hosp due to breathing difficulties, tested positive, and is now well on road to recovery says loss of taste and smell is happening to her too.

Hey, weird – realised this morning I’ve lost my sense of smell, and taste is much dulled! What are the odds!?!:)

*googles it* Uh-oh…. 🙁

I keep thinking back to Italy. All those cases were in a small area as opposed to France/UK/Spain with a much bigger spread.

Also, if Italy’s morbidity numbers are growing linearly instead of exponentially is it not working?

That graph totally misses the point of flattening the curve stuff like is totally useless and possibly harmful

^^^
sacked eugenicist tit pretends to have inside track

Options:

1. Scoop it all up and put it back in the bottle (likely=lockdown forerver).
2. Lockdown at some level until vaccine and effective treatments arrive, alongside people getting it and having some degree of immunity? Then live with it hoping milder strains prevail.
3. Let it rip
4. Er…?

Option 2. is complicated and messy with plenty of room for argument… Anyone prefer the others?

Yup, gotta be 2.

I’m calling

lockdown until antibody testing arrives
return to normality for anyone who has had it
treatments arrive
return to normality for out of risk groups
vaccine arrives
return to normality

with lockdown lifted after some weeks anyway because people will go nuts and the conomy will splode and stuff, lockdown being reasserted if cases spike again

Yup. That’s just a detailed 2 and that’s what’s gonna happen. (With the minor quibble that a vaccine may never arrive – we don’t have a flu vaccine that works for every strain or vaccine for the thousands of different ‘cold’ bugs). Christ it’s even possible there will never be an antibody test.

I think that was more like, stuff it, let everyone get it, then enough people will have it to reduce the available hosts such that R0 drops low enough that it ceases to be a pandemic problem. It involved a lot of death very quickly.

I think that’s what people assumed it meant, which seemed ridiculous to me. Government scientists aren’t Nazis generally.

Slowing it down to feed people through ICU and save a lot of lives, is not the same.

That’s what I took it to mean. Managing the influx of cases, protecting the vulnerable and relying on herd immunity to throttle the disease in the long term i.e. 1-2 years. Instead of locking absolutely everything down and hoping it goes away on its own which was always impossible.

It now appears that locking everything down as much as is possible still results in a slow trickle of cases so perhaps the two approaches have converged.

I think you are likely to be disappointed by the number of people who have had it and can return to normality, mrmonkfinger. One of the media myths. I saw something this morning in one of the French things I read that found only 20% of people being tested thinking they’ve got it have it.

Have a look at the have you got it thread on here. If all the STWers that think they’ve got or have had it really have that’s a significant proportion of the STW population, but the fact is they probably haven’t got/had it, because if they had then extrapolated to the community as a whole they’d be many more seriosu cases than there are given Chinese, Spanish and Italian data. There’s one case I reckon is highly probabmy CV and I hope she’s doing OK

Lots of people with colds and flu think they’ve got CV, the vast majority of them haven’t.

On the subject of anosmia – my daughter had it with her cough, and my wife had it more or less randomly shortly afterwards, with few other symptoms.

The general flu/cold like stuff is hard to attribute to COVID-19 but the anosmia seems rather unusual for otherwise mild symptoms, and a lot of people are reporting it. Is this the best indicator we currently have?

I think that was more like, stuff it, let everyone get it, then enough people will have it to reduce the available hosts such that R0 drops low enough that it ceases to be a pandemic problem. It involved a lot of death very quickly.

Well that’s exactly what we’re doing. All people are quibbling about is whether the brakes were put on in time to allow the hospitals to cope. Time will tell about that.

That 20% is only for live infections isn’t it?

and a lot of people are reporting it.

And a lot are still testing negative even though anosmia is integrated into who gets tested (because they haven’t had enough tests to test everybody who is ill).

People just aren’t objective when it comes to their own health, including me. Mind games.

Edit:

That 20% is only for live infections isn’t it?

Must be, the people wouldn’t have been tested otherwise. The only population with a high proportion of testing in France are hospital workers where 40% have tested positive in the east of France with the corresponding number of severe cases and deaths even though you can reasonably expect health workers to do everything within their power to save their working age colleagues.

lockdown until antibody testing arrives
return to normality for anyone who has had it
treatments arrive
return to normality for out of risk groups
vaccine arrives
return to normality

The lockdowns will be determined by trying to model the arrival of surges. That requires extensive community testing, both for ‘live’ infections and antibody testing. The idea is to keep the UK teetering on the edge of a massive spike in cases, managing workflow through the NHS, locking down when numbers are about to explode again, releasing when the rate drops back. Rinse and repeat until vaccination arrives.

Not easy if you don’t have decent surveillance data.

It now appears that locking everything down as much as is possible still results in a slow trickle of cases

We haven’t got anywhere near the first surge peak yet. It certainly won’t be a slow trickle.

I think that’s what people assumed it meant, which seemed ridiculous to me. Government scientists aren’t Nazis generally.

I think some people on STW thought so. Everyone I know in real life seems to have totally grasped it.

That’s what I took it to mean. Managing the influx of cases, protecting the vulnerable and relying on herd immunity to throttle the disease in the long term i.e. 1-2 years. Instead of locking absolutely everything down and hoping it goes away on its own which was always impossible.

+1

It now appears that locking everything down as much as is possible still results in a slow trickle of cases so perhaps the two approaches have converged.

Yes, with the proviso that I’m pretty sure they always knew a European style lockdown would result in a fair few new cases. I wonder if the current situation in Italy has caught them by surprise though! You’d think three weeks on there would be a significant reduction in cases.

Government scientists aren’t Nazis generally.

Depends if you believe this quote from Cummings is true, a lot of people in government don’t like him, but Tim Shipman as reliable as any journo & he wouldn’t have published it if he wasn’t certain.

herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”.

& Austerity has pretty much been doing that for a decade

That Cummings mate is saying the same thing ? Tho of course he may have an axe to grind

.

And a lot are still testing negative even though anosmia is integrated into who gets tested (because they haven’t had enough tests to test everybody who is ill).

People just aren’t objective when it comes to their own health, including me. Mind games

WHO are looking at the link and Whitty was yesterday considering adding it to the list of symptoms but I’m much reassured by the casual dismissal of it by a stranger on the internet – thanks! 🙂

Does anyone believe “lockdown lite” that we seem to be under will be done in 3 weeks? I think they know it will need longer, much longer, but simply don’t trust the public to be told it will be 12 weeks and then behave rationally.

@danstw13

Also, if Italy’s morbidity numbers are growing linearly instead of exponentially is it not working?

Growing linearly is a key marker that the growth has reached the peak “speed”, so I think the answer is yes, it is working.

And a lot are still testing negative even though anosmia is integrated into who gets tested (because they haven’t had enough tests to test everybody who is ill).

Where did you get that information from? I hope we’re not starting a new one tag. #eduFacts

Does anyone believe “lockdown lite” that we seem to be under will be done in 3 weeks? I think they know it will need longer, much longer, but simply don’t trust the public to be told it will be 12 weeks and then behave rationally.

+1

I suspect when this is over and Whitty/Vallance/Politicans write books about it we’re going to find that a massive part of their problem (perhaps the biggest) is managing the public.

The fact the opposition parties have been pretty sensible and not exploited much for political capital is both a credit to them, but also a scary indication of how ****ed we are.

Does anyone believe “lockdown lite” that we seem to be under will be done in 3 weeks?

In the states Trump has suggested lockdown will be lifted in a couple of weeks.

Given that almost everything Trump has publicly stated about the virus and response is diametrically opposed to the reality that is/has transpired, I’d suggest his statements represent a good way to determine what won’t happen.

Or, in another word, no.

I’m just pointing out that anosmia isn’t regarded as absolute proof because if it were there would be no need for a test and that despite all the symptoms that are considered before someone is tested the actual positive rate for people with symptoms tested is low.

Just relaying the news as I hear it Drac, but don’t believe me if you don’t want to.

Sometimes you’re a bit too quick to insult, far too quick today.

I could do with some clarification- is flattening the curve’s main benefit that it spreads the workload for the NHS/reduces chance of overloading the system?

For the individual, the main difference it makes is that they’ve a higher likelihood of receiving the care they need if infected, or at the far end, receiving the vaccine if still not infected?

If somebody needs, and has access to ICU/ventilation, how likely is it that they’ll come home?

Can anyone point me to the numbers of those who’ve been hospitalised and gone home?