Coronavirus: Advice from ME organisations

From the ME Association:

Coronavirus infection and ME/CFS by Dr Charles Shepherd

https://www.meassociation.org.uk/2020/02/coronavirus-infection-and-me-cfs-11-february-2020/

"The chances of someone with ME/CFS contracting this new strain of coronavirus, or even coming into contact with someone who has the virus, are almost zero here in the UK at the moment..."

 

unless you live in Brighton(?)

 

But Charles goes on to point out that things are getting more serious quite quickly.

As I see it if everyone thinks that the risk is nearly zero then the virus is pretty well guaranteed to spread unnecessarily. I would personally advise everyone to take the risk seriously. I was amused to see that my nephew Al Edwards was asked to give an expert opinion by the Science Media Centre no less! Al's basic message was that things are pretty serious.

I was interested to see that the person who seems to have infected 11 people in a French ski resort did not himself have a cough or sneeze. He infected people in a chalet but it does not seem so far that he infected anyone in cable cars or other lifts where people get close. Together with the way this has spread in China I strongly suspect that in many cases infection is spread by handling things like cutlery, glasses, food vessels or door handles in a domestic situation.

My guess is that the key issue forPWME is that if the virus becomes common here then we will have the situation they have in Wuhan with everyone having to stay at home and with it being very difficult to buy food on a regular basis. I can see that being a particular problem for PWME who may not be able to get to the shops to stock up when there is panic buying. Anyone with special dietary requirements may be particularly in trouble.

For what it's worth my wife and I have agreed the following plan:

1. Never touch your face or mouth unless you are washing it with soap. This sounds draconian but it may be the single most important thing not to do. Even if it is not essential now it is worth practicing. Rub an itch with a shoulder or sleeve, not your hand. Wear gloves outdoors if you have them.
2. Wash hands with soap and water whenever you are changing your activities -i.e. going out, coming in, preparing food, answering the door, etc.
3. Buy in a good supply of non-perishable foods in case you are going to self-isolate either voluntarily or by law. We are thinking of 10Kg of rice, 10Kg of pasta, 18 tins of chopped tomato, 8 tins of beans, 2L of olive oil, 7.5Kg of cereals and some powdered milk substitute.

 

I'm also worrying about meds since so many are produced in China. (Edit: As in supply chains are getting interrupted)

This German Professor has come up with a Blog to give a perspective for Europe

https://www.kekule.com/

 

That blog looks like an excellent and unbiased assessment. The only thing I would quibble with is the idea that wearing a mask might raise ungrounded fears. I see a much bigger problem with people forgetting to be careful. Thus, yesterday evening I arrived at Heathrow and had to queue for nearly half an hour at passport control. My wife noticed that the people in front of us were wearing masks. That made us look at their hand bags and see that they were coming from Beijing. In baggage reclaim we established that about 500 people from Beijing were in the passport queue with us. (If you read Prof Kekule's blog you will see that one of these probably had coronavirus.) Having seen the masks we made sure we kept at a two metre distance from these people and did not touch any railing they had touched.

So it seems to me that wearing masks might be good for everyone.

 

How many people contract the regular flu every year in China and what are the statistics on the flu going on to result in death in China.

When people get the regular Flu in China have they ever before this new coronavirus outbreak tested people to see if that flu contained cases of coronavirus?

What is the test for coronavirus?

How did they develop it so quickly?

Is it a specific test or a sensitive test? Who else has validated the test?

We have no historic record of testing for coronavirus on mass as I understand. We know how to confirm a death case (the lower figure). We simply have a dead body.

If we say 2/100 people die from coronavirus and yet have no idea in truth how many people have contracted it how can the upper figure (100) mean anything? It seems we are being told it is not necessarily symptomatic in... most?.. people .

The 24 fear porn in the media is largely content filler and there seems to be zero critical thinking journalism with no attempt to present all sides.

How does 2/100 compare to flu deaths especially when the upper figure for coronavirus could be 100 or it could be 10,000 for example.

It is claimed that 1 million people are being held in detention in camps for ""re education" and where they had civil unrest on the streets only last month is no one in the media going to ask simple questions about how now suddenly there are curfews on the streets and "hospitals" being erected within two weeks for a virus that potentially is only as "deadly" as the common flu?

 

Yuck! Coronavirus aside I don't think it would be unreasonable to request they wash their hands or use a hand sanitizer when they come into your home. Maybe have a bottle of the stuff on the hall table?

 

Worth reading the Kekule blog mentioned by Leila. Mortality from regular flu seems to be about 0.1%. For the new coronavirus the figure looks to be about 2% but if this is underestimated because of lag in diagnosis to death it might be above 10%. Strangely the MRC have put out an estimate of 18% mortality in Wuhan.

As you say, the denominator of the true number of infected cases could be ten times bigger than recorded so the death rate might be lower.

I am not sure that this is relevant though. What matters is that there is a new virus spreading that if it goes world wide may kill around 100 million people, and, importantly, the spread is not so fast that there is no chance of containing it. I suspect that the main reason why flu is not analogous is that flu spreads like wildfire with maybe 10-20 million people affected in the UK within three weeks of the virus arriving. There is no point in trying to contain flu and we have resources to deal with regular seasonal types. There may be a way to control the coronavirus and there is a possibility that if we do not our systems will have no way of coping.

As far as I know it is a PCR based test for specific RNA. That means that the machinery to do the test was already there. As soon as someone sequenced a new set of RNA in China, and so identified a new virus, labs all over the world could be ready to read off this new sequence pretty much immediately. My nephew Al Edwards has been working on what he calls a smartphone based assay for coronaviruses like MERS. I don't know what that involves but I suspect you use your standard PCR machine, read off a sequence and ask your Phone App to say what virus you have.

I think people have been testing large numbers for the various coronavirus sequences for a decade or more now. Al is often in the Far East presumably for this reason.

I agree that the media are hopeless on this but from what I have seen journalists seem to be underplaying the problem. Certainly Kekule and my nephew are taking this very seriously. Just the process of looking after cases in the UK might require a hundred thousand intensive care unit beds and staff that at present do not exist - the system could not possibly cope.[/QUOTE]

 

So the morning after it hit Brighton I attended graduation there, great timing.

Not sure who was worse off, the VC that had to shake hundreds of student's hands, or me, on Adalimumab and consequently immunosuppressed... hide!

 

That's the claim but its seems questionable that if there has been an outbreak in China that it hasn't already spread around the world.

Yes I understand that the claim is that it is being quarantined in China to stop it spreading but the actions being taken in China are not incompatible with the controls that can be implemented there which in other countries would be considered dubious and potentially totalitarian.

Yes there is always that possibility but what real evidence is there of that.

Would you be happy to see the government implement drone surveillance here to make sure people aern't on the streets, compulsory testing in public, camps being built for the purpose of isolation as they are doing in China for a virus that appears to be less deadly than the flu. At least that's what the evidence is presenting. Potentially compulsory vaccines in the future. What if they tell us that the detection period has to be one month, or two or....

Obviously none of that is happening here but to me that says something about what the people in this country think the real risk is. The precaution is for the what if narrative which unfortunatly spreads the ridiculous fear porn.

This is not a scientific based argument its a political one that has one presentation in China and another outside of China which is a red flag of a massive contradiction in my opinion.

Why such fear then? Surely statistically that means it has less potential that the flu to kill people and in such a circumstances most figures are likely to be "suspected cases" not confirmed cases.

I remember back to the XMRV issue and how we where being told how easy it is to get false positives yet with this issue with coronavirus it seems to be immediately accepted that it has suddenly jumped species?

Who is the someone who sequenced the new virus in China and how was it so quickly validated?

In humans? If so then its not a new virus in humans as we are being told in the media.

Once you have had the virus and recovered is it being claimed that you are then immune for life? Or are you a potential carrier for life or could you recontract it just like the flu.

Ah then we need camps built immediately?

Whom amongst us all that is not symptomatic is ready to undergo this test and volunteer to be detained as long as it is deemed necessary?

Which politician is allowed to give this order?

Oh boy!

 

@Trish yes that's kind of my point it seems that the flu and coronavirus hardly appear different to each other so how can you have credible figures over coronavirus being a "deadly killer" any more than the flu as when we have the flu virus we are never actually put through an objective test to see what virus it is. Also as you pointed out flu has so many strains that you continuously get it and this is the justification for having the flu vaccine every season. Yet it's impossible to know in advance of manufacturing the flu vaccine for that season what strain it's going to be as new ones appear all the time. It makes the whole flu, Corona virus deadly worldwide killer thing just seem lacking in any credibility in the claims that can be made about it. And yet many of the actions that are taken against this coronavirus seem so totalitarian and potentially counterintuitive if you are closing down whole parts of economy's hospitals GP surgeries etc etc which obviously affect crucial other crucial health and social services.

 

Are they still speculating that this coronavirus is an animal to human transmission?

I've read recently that they suspect pangolins as the new culprits. This is completely different from flu virus.

 

I haven't actually said they belong to different families of viruses in fact I was saying that they all come under the same blanket according to the mainstream scientists flu is a generic term. Also the claim that there is an objective test for this coronavirus we all seem to be accepting at face value we are also told at the same time it was only identified crossing over into humans on New Year's Eve 2019. It seems more than reasonable in the circumstances to question how many of those tests are false positives and how the test has been validated.

I have asked that question a number of times on this thread but there appears to be no citation for how this has been done being offered up here.

 

The government needs to implement measures, as you cannot trust the general populace.

People the UK government got out of Wuhan were not happy to remain in quarantine for the 14 days that they had agreed to. They started demanding free alcohol and private chefs, else they threatened to leave. And one detainee did try to leave. Source: here.

Clearly we cannot rely on people's good sense and public spirit to keep in isolation. So it's great that the UK government brought in new laws yesterday to make it illegal to leave isolation.

The evidence comes directly from the basic reproduction number, which is estimated as around 2 or 3 in the case of the Wuhan coronavirus. That means under normal circumstances, each infected person on average infects 2 or 3 more people.

It does not take a genius to appreciate that this will lead to an exponential growth of the number infected, in the absence of aggressive control measures.

At a death rate of around 2%, it's clear that tens of millions or more are at risk of death.

The provisional Wuhan coronavirus death rate is 2%, whereas when swine flu hit in 2009, the death rate was just 0.026%, which is much less than the Wuhan virus.

Globally swine flu led to half a million deaths, but the deaths caused by the Wuhan coronavirus, if it cannot be contained, may mount to tens or even hundreds of millions. Hence the importance of the efforts in trying to contain it.

You've probably caught several types of coronavirus in your life, as coronavirus is one of the common cold viruses. What's new is this Wuhan strain.

 

Is anyone on this forum willing to take the test being completely non symptomatic knowing that the government could have the power to quarantine them in such a way as we have seen done in China? As we all know now the claim is that you can pass it on if you are carrying the virus but you don't have to have the symptoms therefore surely it's the duty of every single person in this forum to offer themselves up for a test and then be quarantined by order of the government. I'm stating my case I will not be doing that as I believe the argument as it has been put forward is pure baloney. Who here is willing to do that test?

 

Not being able to go out and no interacting with people for 2 weeks, with basic needs met?

Seems pretty normal to me and probably for a lot of people on this forum.

 

From what I understand it's not only the death rate that's concerning (2% of a lot of people being infected is a lot of people dying).

(assuming the estimated 2% is correct)

It's the relatively high number of 15-20% of people developing pneumonia needing oxygen and/or intensive care. With enough people being infected that is going to put a huge strain on even the best health care system (let alone the countries without one).

Meanwhile, people will still have their stroke/heart attacks/cancer etc.