Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

This professor also posted this recently:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1255797190645219329


https://twitter.com/user/status/1255797792171319296


https://twitter.com/user/status/1255516924844392452


I feel worried by this. I agree we do need a lot more evidence. I don’t think we should yet be saying “it sounds promising and I hope it goes well”. If it doesn’t go well - who will die? The grandparents :/

I find it worrying that children are being encouraged to visit and hug grandparents right now, do we really have evidence that it’s completely safe? I understand the issue that for elderly people, social and physical contact is very important. But surely attempting to eliminate the virus first so that grandparents could hug and interact with people in safety, is the better idea.

Edit: I just read the BBC article posted earlier and it says this: “Sounding a note of caution, Germany's chief virologist Christian Drosten told Austrian broadcaster ORF that there was insufficient data to say conclusively that young children could not transmit the virus.

He said the question of whether children contracted the virus, and if so how they might pass it on, was answered differently in different studies.”

If so, why is Switzerland rushing ahead to allow children to hug their grandparents and also claiming as Koch did, that “Young children are not infected and do not transmit the virus...They just don't have the receptors to catch the disease."?

 

Actually that’s a different study to the one I commented on (the names of the two studies have very similar titles so I can see how one could easily mistake them for being the same study)

I found this statement from the study you looked at interesting:

Surely fear is a consequence of the threat of a deadly virus spreading uncontrolled through a population? I would therefore suggest that those populations who succeeded in controlling the spread with an early and strict mass quarantine would fare much better on the fear scale in the long run than those who countries didn’t.

.....

The study I commented on is more detailed, has more authors and even has references! I only scanned it so there’s probably more to uncover (if any one else has the stomach to read it!) Link here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext

 

This is the study Drosten is refering to.

From what I understand children have sort of the same viral load as adults and Drosten concludes

"Based these results, we have to caution against an unlimited re-opening of schools and kindergartens in the present situation. Children may be as infectious as adults."

If children show far less symptoms and for example don't cough, doesn't that mean they are less infectious though? Because they, on average, don't spread as many infectious droplets?

 

I agree i.e. about the young also dying @spinoza577 a very few from memory: a young (31 year old?) doctor in Wuhan i.e. who announced the outbreak, young twins (35 years old?) one of whom was currently working as a nurse ----.

 

Sikora has always been somebody who makes a lot of noise. But one has to wonder what the motivation is for this sort of tweeting. As an oncologist I would have thought he would be horrified by the knock effects of how things are being handled.

Apart from anything else I would have thought that if infants were present the chances of transmission from prodromal parents to grandparents would be increased tenfold just because of the physical activities needed to control the infants. Why is it of any interest to an oncologist anyway?

Germany has a slightly larger population than UK and Spain a bit smaller, but anyone with any sense takes that into account. And although the media headlines are in terms of bald numbers I am pretty sure the sources warning on this have taken this into account. There are clearly reasons for thinking that the UK figure will be proportionately as well as actually the highest. Whether or not that proves the case I am baffled as to why Sikora should feel the need to take issue on this.

 

I think shouting is quite good at producing droplets and kids tend to shout a lot.

 

Regarding children and infection spread, a question please @Jonathan Edwards. Presumably virus can vary in potency, so that would presumably apply to the virus anyone exhales. Will the potency of exhaled virus be affected by how capable a person's immune system is at dealing with the virus? Or is the potency of exhaled virus completely independent of that?

 

This will be a result of them being picked up individually and flagged by their GP/GP records/other specialist rather than any change in national strategy. The shielded list is being updated each week as more people who were missed by the national NHS algorithm-based data trawl are added by their GP, hospital consultant or other specialist.

 

Yes and we also know that there are very high rates of asymptomatic transmission in adults so people can certainly be very infectious without any coughing. The study also points out that children also have greater physical activity and closer social engagement than adults.

https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadm...s-of-SARS-CoV-2-viral-load-by-patient-age.pdf

 

You mean, like the sort of person who might be intimately involved with a clinical trial without actually being listed as a author; the sort of person who might advise on who should be on a research collaborative without actually being a member of the collaborative?

 

Maybe "there is something in the saliva", preventing transmission?

 

Viral particles are all pretty much identical with no variation in potency, unless they have been degraded.
The immunological status of the host would not affect the infectious capability of the virus exhaled.

 

You might think that but I could not possibly comment (or whatever Sir Humphrey said).

 

The amount of travel in Sweden keeps increasing, despite the government's recommendations.

Last week it increased on average with 10% compared to the week before. (Big differences between different parts of the country, between -2% to +25%.)

https://tt.omni.se/svenskarnas-resande-okar-trots-uppmaningar/a/3J0pML

 

I was looking at the Worldometer graphs again. It looks to me as if the restrictions in Italy are sufficient to get the epidemic down to fully controllable levels in 6 months (yes six months). The curve for the UK looks more like being sufficient to get the epidemic fully controllable in, er, maybe a few years.

I am all in favour of loosening restrictions that are not actually doing any good but it seems to me that some sort of quantum leap is needed to get R0 down not just a smidgin below 1 but seriously below 1. Face masks were mentioned by the Prime Minister...

 

BBC Seoul correspondent, very good news:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1255667685716668416

 

It is reported that South Korea have had their amazing results without a lockdown, but in a sense that is a bit misleading. What they did in practice was in effect a very intelligently controlled and highly targeted lockdown. They invested very early on in masses of testing and tracing, thereby primarily locking down those with the highest probability of needing to be locked down.

 

Yes, I think there is a temptation to think that when you see a curve turning downwards it will steepen. But with such a long flat peak it seems likely that we already have the steepest part of the downward curve for the current R0. From now on reduction in numbers gets slower in that scenario. There may still be some hang over from before lockdown but for places like Italy and even UK that is getting unlikely.