I hope he gets better soon but make no mistake this is an ominous sign.

It’s OK. DWP has declared him fit to work.

Seriously though, hopefully this is just chest x-ray and a bit of supplemental oxygen territory.

Blimey, it has been a busy day… between Boris and the Queen, they’ve saved Prince Charles a heap of embarrassment thanks to NHS Nightingale

Turns out that until press exposure made them think otherwise, the folks behind ExCel (which among others includes Tom King, ex defence minister and Chair of the intelligence and security committee and Steven Norris, a transport Minister who also happened to be a patron of Sustrans and Chairman of the National Cycling Strategy Board) were looking to charge £2-3 Million a month for use of the Centre…

The ExCeL, owned by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company with Tory grandees on its board, charges the NHS £2m-£3m a month for using its premises as hospital.
In contrast, Blackstone owner the NEC in Birmingham will be providing the site rent free.https://t.co/5qKplpLg8k

— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) April 5, 2020

Wonder how much they charge when hosting the world’s largest arms fair, DSEI?

The world leading event that connects governments, national armed forces, industry thought leaders and the global defence & security supply chain on an unrivalled scale.

Still, errr, get well soon Boris, hope you’re chipper ready for the weekly phone call with the Queen old chap…

the “operation last gasp” joke not looking too funny for him right now!

The reported unreliability of anti body testing for those that had mild/no symptoms.

Is that fairly common for that kind of test?

Have we done the Tiger in New York catching it BBC

It’s true..we were expecting a tiger who was coming for tea, but he’s cancelled as he has to self isolate

is that the new meme “won’t somebody please think of the cats!” ?

Maybe I am a bad person but I cannot find a single shred of sympathy for Johnson mainly because his (in)actions have cost thousands upon thousands of lives.

What I have been told, it gets serious on the 8th day.

Hang on – I thought with symptoms we just need to isolate for 7 days?

US has bought 29 million doses of Hydroxychloroquine according to Trumps press conference last night.

What I have been told, it gets serious on the 8th day.

By who any proof in your claim was it from big Dave whose cousin knows someone high up in the military?

I thought the 8th day was for rest?

US has bought 29 million doses of Hydroxychloroquine according to Trumps press conference last night.

Probably snatched from the mouths of Albanian pensioners at gun-point 🙂

The reported unreliability of anti body testing for those that had mild/no symptoms.

Things are NOT binary. Amounts matter. So if you have low levels of antibodies they might be below the limit of detection.

The test is specific for antibodies against one particular part of the virus. If you have made some against a different part, they won’t show either. We use the tests every day to see whether patients have made antibodies against the biological drugs we produce. The assays are not as sensitive as the similar ones we use to measure the amount of drug the subject has in their body.

Test for amount of virus, amount of drug, are much more specific because you design them to probe what you know you want to find, so can test for this. The other tests must look broader to what has been produced. You must make a choice based on what the majority seem to have made.

Numbers matter. For those US hydroxychloroquine doses. 29 million doses of 200mg or 29 million course of 1200+600mg/day for 10days (88000 treatments?). Which number would you release?

[TL:DR] tests always have a limit of detection and only look for what you think is important. That makes them fallible. And dose matters.

@TiRed was sent the test kit details vwr are touting on Friday, no dl/ql details.
IgG is relatively accurate where IgM is ~92% sensitive
That is with clinically confirmed cases too.
Appears to be good on detection of positives for IgG but def some false negatives.
Can send the details on if you want.

Hang on – I thought with symptoms we just need to isolate for 7 days?

7 days ONLY if symptoms have stopped. According to my Boris letter.

Hang on – I thought with symptoms we just need to isolate for 7 days?

Errr! No.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/self-isolation-advice/

Cheers Tired clear information again and killing the click bait headlines.

Every supplier is sending out a promo for their vivid test kits at the moment, mostly antigen ones, but a couple of antibody ones, there’s loads on offer from China, but Italy had a batch that they found had veey poor sensitivity

PHE took our qPCR machines to scale up testing (and several other from colleagues labs) how many have they taken nationally?

Not sure how many they’ve got online yet, but about 1500 extra tests are being done a day are being done, which is the capacity of maybe 2 machines a day, so there’s still bottlenecks elsewhere.

There’s also talk of letting research labs doing the testing themselves, but they’d have to send our machines back (& probably get an engineer to set them up again too )

Graham did they take any GSK machines?

Please do.

Blair was very good this morning on testing. Get a minister only on that, report to PM, get industry in.

Public Health England can direct testing and provide the scientific background. But They’ve been found wanting when it comes to scaling. Leave the scaling to organisations that are used to working at scale. Whatever you think of industry, that’s what they do well.

Hey kimbers.
only liquid handling stuff.
they are in the process of setting up an assay dev lab on site at the moment to improve the tests so obviously they can’t take the kit away

Also on TF1 news last night was that some patients were still testing positive and an infection risk after a month. That Oxford doctor (linked by someone many pages back) who claimed people could only emit live virus for a week appears to be wrong.

Cheers for the testing responses

The article I read was a bit click baity which is why I asked

.

Maybe I am a bad person but I cannot find a single shred of sympathy for Johnson mainly because his (in)actions have cost thousands upon thousands of lives.

I hope Boris survives this, and it is truly a damascene moment for him.

I hope Boris survives this, and it is truly a damascene moment for him.

This^^^ I’m no fan of his or his cohorts, but I wouldn’t wish him dead.As you say hopefully it’ll stop him being so arrogant & have a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment.Strange times indeed…

The test is specific for antibodies against one particular part of the virus. If you have made some against a different part, they won’t show either.

Fascinating. So the immunity that I might develop to the virus could be completely different to that developed by other people? Presumably if the virus mutates in the future then there could be an equally varied re-infection profile depending on how it mutates.

Things are NOT binary. Amounts matter. So if you have low levels of antibodies they might be below the limit of detection.

If we are only testing for the virus on people going into hospital how can we test the antibody test on thosevwith only mild/no symptoms? We dont know who they are.

re: 7 days thing.

disease progression times from infection to death, fever could last fifteen days, the breathing problems for ten or twelve overlapping some of the fever period, but it looks like the 8 day timescale is where you find out whether it has taken hold in the lungs, I guess, which lines up with what TiRed and franksinatra have said.

@Flaperon
Yes that is exactly the issue, each person will create their own unique set of antibodies.
there should be a major level of overlap within the general population though as the body will not just produce a small number of differences antibodies it will produce against whatever antigens it can detect which depending on the level of viral load may be a large number depending on the binding pattern of antibodies.
it is a properly interesting science.
Will be interesting to see if they can identify universal neutralising monoclonal antibody, but that is a lot of work with limited capacity at the moment.
some really cool science though

Angelis – that is exactly the reason for the issue with getting the tests in. To approve it the tests must be shown to be accurate, specific and precise.
to do that you need to know how much antibody has to be present to give an accurate reading, also that the test does not generate false positives or negatives.
if you need help sleeping Google for ich q2 which is the overarching guidance on a assay development and validation

disease progression times from infection to death, fever could last fifteen days, the breathing problems for ten or twelve overlapping some of the fever period, but it looks like the 8 day timescale is where you find out whether it has taken hold in the lungs, I guess, which lines up with what TiRed and franksinatra have said.

Ah! Now I see what anecdote was meaning. Yes, it appears it’s 8 days from initial onset that things can go wrong, that though is not the same as the person who has a fever then by day 7 is feeling much better.

@kimbers

whaaaaaaaaat ?

Gawd bless Murca.

I’d say it is Darwinism, but we all know it isn’t quite working like that.

@Drac

exactly

what I’m understanding (possibly pub fact time)

if it’s shifted by day 7 then good chance of recovery, with no further problems
if it’s not, and breathing difficulties develop, hospital time

I note the side effect of that graph is the delay to reporting the death toll from first infection is massive. Our confirmed cases figures in UK, will be measured at point of hospitalisation as I understand it, which means they too are lagging by about two weeks from infection.

@TiRed , your contributions to this thread are exceptional, thank you. Very educational.

Thanks. It is part of my day job, but I have always enjoyed communicating science. It is a priviledge and a responsibility to do so. If you can’t communicate the message clearly, how well do you really understand it? That’s my mantra.

I hope Boris survives this, and it is truly a damascene moment for him.

Probably better that he does because he’d be held up as some kind of martyr if he dies. Anyway they’ll no doubt have one of those blood oxygenation machines on standby for him. Question is depending on how bad he gets will he be able to perform the job afterwards?

I’m apt to give Boris and the government the benefit of the doubt, they are hardly alone amongst nations in underestimating COVID-19 and being woefully unprepared. At a more structural level, I was reading some stuff about how years of hollowing out the state, specifically healthcare, i.e., the public-private partnerships, the outsourcing, the internal markets, etc., have significantly weakened the state’s ability to coordinate with vigour against coronavirus. Like a war it’s not really something you can let the market take care of. Furthermore, the NHS and PHE don’t seem to coordinate well or share information systematically.

Hang on – I thought with symptoms we just need to isolate for 7 days?

Which raises a question I asked a week ago in response to SOM posting this:

https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/cambridge-virologist-explains-what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-covid-19-9104220/

The symptoms that drag on are your body’s response to the virus, but the virus is gone after a few days. I take great umbrage at the lengths of time you are meant to be infectious for because it is just not true. Nine days is nonsense. You don’t excrete a live virus that long.

For about 72 hours of a viral infection you have a live virus. In children it can last for longer – four or five days have been observed in flu.

So that’s a pretty credible source telling us the virus itself is gone very quckly. Is the Prof wrong? Do patients in Boris’s position still shed viable live virus on day 8 and beyond?

Nearly everything she says there in that article is qualified as being based on how previous viruses have behaved. That bit is not, but nor does she provide any evidence that this particular virus is behaving in the way she describes for everyone.