The Lemon Fool

pje16 wrote:Had my booster on Tuesday
and have just had an Email from the NHS saying
"We are contacting you as our records show you are eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine but have not yet had one."

why isn't it on my records?

Multiple different systems, legacy systems, etc.

It takes time for all records to get updated across all systems.

Give them a little more time.

amazed we still have legacy systems
but that would explain it
thanks

pje16 wrote:Had my booster on Tuesday
and have just had an Email from the NHS saying
"We are contacting you as our records show you are eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine but have not yet had one."

why isn't it on my records?

Have you checked to see?

Didn't happen to me. You said you had your booster on Tuesday, how was that arranged? Mine was arranged by responding to a NHS text by making an appointment via the indicated website. The appointment was at a community medical centre.

Mike4 wrote:The thing that shocks me most is the guvvermint appearing to have learned from past mistakes and acting so quickly. What on earth is going on?!

Last time around they delayed putting the (leaky) barriers up for a couple of weeks to give all the infected ex-pats plenty of time to fly home. This time the threat from this new variant must be really serious.

Or maybe they are just focused on not risking messing up Christmas. That would be political suicide.

Quite. It's a combination of all of the above - the virologists do seem to be cautiously very-worried about this one. It's early days yet, so all we've really got to go on is theoretical studies of the mutations it has and it could yet come to nothing, but they're nervous. There's some indication that there's a bad outbreak around Jo'burg associated with it, so it seems it's not just a theoretical risk.

It seems the message about being proactive is finally being understood - 18 month too late. At the same time, we've got to be careful not to send the message that if you do the right thing and report new variants, you will see other countries ostracise you. I'd like to see a bit of "carrot" as well - giving them sequencing reagents, even (not-cheap) sequencers, offering training at our world-class sequencing labs, that kind of thing.

The one (relative) bright spot is that 529/nu seems to be like Kent (alpha) in that it breaks one of the three standard PCR tests, so you can track its spread without full genome sequencing by looking for S-gene dropout on standard PCR.

XFool wrote:

pje16 wrote:Had my booster on Tuesday
and have just had an Email from the NHS saying
"We are contacting you as our records show you are eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine but have not yet had one."

why isn't it on my records?

Have you checked to see?

OF COURSE
I wouldn't have posted my question otherwise...
Arranged by my medical practice and that's where it was done

pje16 wrote:

XFool wrote:

pje16 wrote:Had my booster on Tuesday
and have just had an Email from the NHS saying
"We are contacting you as our records show you are eligible for a COVID-19 booster vaccine but have not yet had one."

why isn't it on my records?

Have you checked to see?

OF COURSE
I wouldn't have posted my question otherwise...
Arranged by my medical practice and that's where it was done

Could be a rhetorical question: "Why ISN'T it on my records?"; "Why? Isn't it on my records?"

XFool wrote:

pje16 wrote:

XFool wrote:Have you checked to see?

OF COURSE
I wouldn't have posted my question otherwise...
Arranged by my medical practice and that's where it was done

Could be a rhetorical question: "Why ISN'T it on my records?"; "Why? Isn't it on my records?"

Not the grammar I use

pje16 wrote:amazed we still have legacy systems

This is an organisation that's only just been forced to give up the fax machine.

To be honest I'm amazed that the NHS IT systems have held up as well as they have, given all the history. But even the WHO has recognised the UK as "world-leading" in some aspects of its virus IT, albeit more on the reporting side than the appointment system.

Hallucigenia wrote:

pje16 wrote:amazed we still have legacy systems

This is an organisation that's only just been forced to give up the fax machine.

I know too well
The practice I go to only stopped faxing prescriptions to the pharmacy (which is next door) 2 or 3 years ago
Staggering

in the far east (china, korea, japan) they eat garlic very much. This can make a diference in comparison with europe.

look wrote:in the far east (china, korea, japan) they eat garlic very much. This can make a diference in comparison with europe.

I thought the French were supposedly great garlic munchers.

ursaminortaur wrote:

look wrote:in the far east (china, korea, japan) they eat garlic very much. This can make a diference in comparison with europe.

I thought the French were supposedly great garlic munchers.

According to The Simpsons, the French are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but your version works for me too.

i suppose the covid makes more victims in europe because the europeans don't eat enough raw garlic.

Lootman wrote:

ursaminortaur wrote:

look wrote:in the far east (china, korea, japan) they eat garlic very much. This can make a diference in comparison with europe.

I thought the French were supposedly great garlic munchers.

According to The Simpsons, the French are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but your version works for me too.

look wrote:i suppose the covid makes more victims in europe because the europeans don't eat enough raw garlic.

Eat cheese and garlic - make a monkey out of the coronavirus?

This video was cited in the "New South Africa 'super-variant' " thread,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1GF0H9V_1g

It was originally called (IIRC), "The Japanese miracle" but appears to have been renamed, "Ivermectin in Japan" although he discusses things other than Ivermectin.

This is a summary of most of the main points:

— Cases in Japan have dropped to a very low level, currently 79 new cases per day and 2 deaths per day out of a population of 126 million.

— Treatment of Covid-19 with Ivermectin has been (effectively) allowed since the 13th August in Japan. Cases peaked 12 days later and then declined.

— Vaccination rates in Japan are good but not massively higher than Canada, UK and the US. South Korea also has a high vaccination rate but is experiencing an up-tick in cases

— The Delta variant wave appears to have ended, possibly due to self-extinction due to too many mutations. A mutation has been found (A394V) which has affected the error-correcting protein nsp14. This means that errors in the virus are not being corrected and the resulting large number of mutations are making the virus unviable.

— The A394V mutation has been discovered in 24 other countries.

— More people in Asia, especially Japan, have the defence enzyme APOBEC3A. From memory, Japanese in America have had fewer deaths from Covid.

— The National Institute of Genetics and Niigata University is looking into how the APOBEC3A protein affects the nsp14 protein.

— SARS ended abruptly in 2003 and is now extinct.

— A drug to inhibit nsp14 is being worked on.


I am not convinced of the significance of the Ivermectin unless there was a rapid uptake as soon as it became available. The following probably made more sense before Google translated it: "The antiparasitic drug "ivermectin" shows the number of infections and deaths of the new corona in a country that is prophylactically administered for another disease in Africa".

I am not convinced that a drug to inhibit nsp14 would be perfectly safe as I suspect that it could increase the chance of an apocalyptic variant.

A point made in the comments is that the Japanese eat mostly fresh, unprocessed food and lots of fish. The high fish diet results in a low incidence of vitamin D deficiency. This, and greater levels of hygiene (such as mask wearing) would not explain the shape of the graph, however.


Julian F. G. W.

jfgw wrote:A mutation has been found (A394V) which has affected the error-correcting protein nsp14.
— A drug to inhibit nsp14 is being worked on.
I am not convinced that a drug to inhibit nsp14 would be perfectly safe as I suspect that it could increase the chance of an apocalyptic variant.
Julian F. G. W.

Sounds like a nightmare, is nsp14 production shared in animals as well as viruses? Don't especially want to grow a foot out of my mouth or any other form of cancer if nsp14 is related and produced in plants or animals.

Sorcery wrote:

jfgw wrote:A mutation has been found (A394V) which has affected the error-correcting protein nsp14.
— A drug to inhibit nsp14 is being worked on.
I am not convinced that a drug to inhibit nsp14 would be perfectly safe as I suspect that it could increase the chance of an apocalyptic variant.
Julian F. G. W.

Sounds like a nightmare, is nsp14 production shared in animals as well as viruses? Don't especially want to grow a foot out of my mouth or any other form of cancer if nsp14 is related and produced in plants or animals.

When you're starting drug development against a pathogen, you would always try to find a target in the pathogen that the host doesn't have, to avoid this kind of side-effect - and a lot of testing goes into making sure that you don't hit the host by mistake. In this case nsp14 is an RNA proofreader, which is really important for a virus that uses RNA to store its genome, whereas the host stores its genome in DNA and only uses RNA for short-term, disposable messaging (yes, I know...). You wouldn't worry too much about fixing spelling mistakes in an email about tomorrow's pub trip, but you would double-check a book describing your family history for future generations.

I can see arguments both ways for targetting nsp14, these things are never straightforward.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59445388

Two cases of the new covid detected in the UK

Did I just hear Chris Whitty saying the cases are flat, whilst showing a chart of rapidly rising cases?

garlic

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32836826/