Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

Excess mortality in countries in comparison to NO2 across Europe.

excess mortality:





this should be NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), from google.com/search?q=nitrogen+dioxide+europe+map:

 

NO2 again, East Asia and USA:


I think this roughly correlates as well

 

Today schools and kindergartens opened again in Norway. Not without debate on whether or not this was the right timing.

Paediatrician Ola D. Saugstad has written an opinion piece in the newspaper Aftenposten about children and Corona where he summarises current knowledge about the virus and children. (If his name sounds familiar, he's also an ME researcher and strong advocate for ME patients).

Ola D. Saugstad: Er det grunn til bekymring for korona hos de minste?
google translation: Is there cause for concern about corona for the little ones?

Children have so far been infected less frequently than adults. Till now children have had less serious illness than adults, but they too can once in a while develop serious illness, and they can infect others. These are the facts we have as of today, and I think every expert should conclude that there is much we do not yet know about children and corona disease.

The facts we have must be weighed against the need to open kindergartens and schools. In a democratic society, such political decisions are made after an open debate where all facts are put on the table. In my opinion, it's therefore wrong when the Children's Ombudsman and others dismiss the debate by referring to a group of experts who may not necessarily have all the answers on how many children get sick and to what extent children infect others.

 

New Zealand PM:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1252191523942420480


Their R0 is 0.48. She also seems to understand the point of waiting longer to lift lockdown, which in the long run, helps the economy anyway.

It is notable that the alert level that New Zealand will be moving to when they relax it a bit called “Alert level 3”, is more similar to the lockdown that the UK has had all along, ie takeaways and construction sites opening, having businesses open for online shopping, etc. (Although some new additions such as schools open up to a certain age group, but attendance voluntary, etc)

 

Seems like New Zealand might reasonably be hoping not to have a second wave --- 9 cases--- @Ravn

 

and as @Jonathan Edwards said the data can be presented in a way that identifies the risk factor but does not divulge personal data. So it might be bus driver rather than Mr/Ms X --- bus driver.

 

There was a brief but fascinating segment on Newsnight tonight about the possibility that the Covid-19 virus was man made. Emily Maitlis put the following question to Mark Urban:

“When we asked that question, which sounded ridiculous a few weeks ago - if the virus could be manmade - is that now a resounding no Mark?”

To which the response was:

 

Our PM also assembled a Special advisory committee that crosses party lines. One thing nations might need to do going forward is set in place some process that achieves the same, and that is automatically activated in a state of emergency. In these situations, it's so easy for governments to be motivated by votes, rather than by what's in the genuine best interests of the nation. Or worse still, detractors of the govt to use the situation to sow unrest that works in their interests. We have seen both in recent days.

I can see downsides to this too, because then the group has no formal political opposition, and maybe that's important to keep things in check?

But that might be too political for this discussion?

 

5 new cases today. It will be very encouraging if we start having days where there are no new cases. The Prime Minister has extended our Alert 4 for one more week and then we go down to Alert 3 level for 2 weeks to test the waters.

I'm really impressed with the way our government is handling this epidemic even though I was extremely anxious about quarantine in the earlier weeks. Our Prime Minister is a very good leader and fortunately for New Zealand she had sought the right advisors.

I hope we can continue to manage Covid19 at very low levels of outbreak. It would be amazing if we could eradicate it within New Zealand. I wonder if that really is possible.

 

And two messages above (quoting myself here).

If I understood rightly, NO2 is often taken as indicator for air pollution in general.
But it could of course also be a very cause. This might be indeed the case in Covid-19, I think, as NO2 may cause elevated IL-6.
I just posted this post in the corona-biology thread, which then is on No2 -> IL-6:

 

We sure are hoping and crossing every finger and toe and any other crossable bodypart! As @Rosie said today we were down to 5 new cases. Though that could well go up again in the next few days as another repatriation flight has just arrived but at least any infected persons on there will be safely in quarantine.

The bigger danger now is people getting overconfident and slacking off with less hand-washing and social distancing and so on. I don't know how you best keep the social pressure on everybody to stick to the rules once people loose their fear of getting infected. The government's pep talk for this week seems to be "Let's do this properly and do it only once; let's finish the job we've started".
Yes, let's!

 

Don't think this paper has been posted? One for those who like looking at graphs and statistics.

Iceland has tested a high proportion of their population, including random testing, and here they're presenting the resulting data.

There are the usual numbers tested vs numbers tested positive etc. but also where they had travelled, which genetic strains they had, the countries the various strains originated from (including one mutation that happened in Iceland), what symptoms people had, how they got exposed, etc.

Spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Icelandic Population
Daniel F. Gudbjartsson, Ph.D., et al
April 14, 2020
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2006100

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100?query=featured_home#figures_media

 

I'm in part of the UK, Northern Ireland, a young doctor died last night from coronavirus. What New Zealand and Australia have done is impressive --- might help others.

 

Wow --- impressed by your Government, I'm in part of the UK i.e. Northern Ireland ---.

Eradication seems achievable i.e. for New Zealand and the benefits seem attractive --- being able to go on holidays North Island/South Island --- return to a relatively normal life, socialise ---.

Difficult for those planning to visit New Zealand for a holiday but the benefits generally.

Maybe Australia, and New Zealand, will both end up relatively coronavirus free (just brief outbreaks - imported cases/returning travellers) and people can move freely between both.

 

I think this for comparison would be interesting:

wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion
In Jan-Aug there had been an investigation carried out in the USA,
on what would happen if a sever influenza epidemic would take place.
The simulation came to this result:

from wikipedia

For discussion of pandemic preparation and simulation exercises, go to this thread: Pandemic preparation exercises 2019

 

This scientist is from UCL, Global health epidemiology:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1252478337353748481


https://twitter.com/user/status/1252478338649804800


https://twitter.com/user/status/1252478339807412224


I think this is the point. Locking down early enough.
All the people who are dying now in the UK from coronavirus, and in other countries, did not have to die. There is almost a sense of inevitability about it in the media and from the govt - we would always have a peak, exponential growth, have tens of thousands dead, just need to flatten the curve. Why?

If we had had a proper lockdown just weeks earlier, maybe even 5-6 weeks earlier, we wouldn’t have got onto this exponential growth. If every country had all at once locked down and closed their own borders to all other countries (and anyone coming in on repatriation flights was kept in strict quarantine), for a sufficient period of time, early enough, when there were only 0 or 1 deaths, couldn’t we have been like New Zealand? Couldn’t every country have eradicated it within their own borders? Instead the UK sat around and waited until lots of people died, which makes no sense.

New Zealand seems like a dream but it was always attainable, if other countries leaders had made the same kind of decisions early enough.

 

There is an interesting interview with Dr Charlotte Houldcroft (virologist at the University of Cambridge) on The Guardian website looking at the question of whether the UK’s recommended 7 day isolation period is long enough:

Covid-19: is seven days in isolation enough?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/audio/2020/apr/21/covid-19-seven-days-isolation-enough-podcast

In the interview Charlotte Houldcroft discusses a recent study which came out in Germany. She explained that the study found that after 7 days from symptom onset, you can still find fragments of the virus in people’s nose and throat but you can never grow virus from those samples. Charlotte says “What that suggests is that after 7 days people are not infectious to those around them any more but they might still test positive”

Does any one have any idea what study is being discussed here? Unhelpfully it doesn’t give any details of the study in the podcast or on website.

Charlotte Houldcroft also explains that people with this disease are much more infectious at the beginning of the disease, even when asymptomatic and that the infectiousness decreases over time. Interestingly, this is in contrast to the original SARS virus from 2002 where people actually became more infectious with time.
[/QUOTE]

 

She might refer to the study on the very first Bavaria cluster by our main scientific adviser, Christian Drosten.

"Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 6-12 days, but was not followed by a rapid decline of viral loads."

[...]

"Swabs taken up to day 5 were in the same range, while no sgRNA was detectable in swabs thereafter. Together, these data indicate active replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the throat during the first 5 days after symptoms onset."

[...]

"Also, viral load differed considerably. In SARS, it took 7 to 10 days after onset until peak RNA concentrations (of up to 5x105 copies per swab) were reached13,14. In the present study, peak concentrations were reached before day 5, and were more than 1000 times higher. Successful live virus isolation from throat swabs is another striking difference from SARS, for which such isolation was rarely successful"

He summarized in a podcast that viral load Edit correction: in this study from Hong Kong was highest one day before symptom onset, very low after four days and almost non existent after 7 days (via throat swabs).

According to that the UK advice to discharge positive tested people out of quarantine after 7 days makes sense (as in it seems they can't infect others anymore).

I think our CDC tells us to stay home two weeks though.

 

I guess many of you on the other side of the Atlantic must have heard that tiny traces of the Virus were found in the water system in Paris. Paris, has two water provision systems, one for drinking water and the other for washing streets, watering greenery, etc. The virus was found in this second system. This has been worrying news in Paris. And one has to wonder if other cities have done the testing of water. https://www.lemonde.fr/sante/articl...ble-de-la-ville-de-paris_6037099_1651302.html
Text is in French.

 

The association between NO2 (or pollution in general) and corona seems to hold, in some sense:

NO2 and corona cases in Japan


corona cases and NO2 (picture on the right) in South Korea

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0269749116324514