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Third wave

The home for all non-political Coronavirus (Covid-19) discussions on The Lemon Fool
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This is the home for all non-political Coronavirus (Covid-19) discussions on The Lemon Fool
GeoffF100
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Re: Third wave

#401652

Postby GeoffF100 » April 4th, 2021, 3:17 pm

servodude wrote:
Julian wrote:
9873210 wrote:Just for giggles.

There is no reason for drivers to cross the channel. French driver drop the trailer (or container) in Calais. Drayage onto a ferry or train and into Dover. British driver picks up trailer. Isolate and test drayage drivers (and boat/train crews).

It's basically how intermodal freight works in the rest of the world. Also quite common on land borders, since it allows a specialist to handle customs.
No need to ship tractors and drivers around or have them idle. Saves money because these are the most expensive part of the truck.

At first glance that seems a really good and clever idea. The world needs as much of this lateral thinking as it can get, plus sufficient will power and good engineers and general problem solvers to turn good ideas into reality. Fast forward a decade or so and one could imagine a new generation of cross-channel ferries where the loading and unloading of the cargo spaces is fully automated, made far easier by requiring all cargo to be standard sized ISO containers.

From a pandemic suppression point of view it just needs folk to drive to the ferry and drive something else back
I know that's how they changed the Tasmanian ferry to work; staff don't get off the boat on the South Island (or home as the missus calls it) and there's a steady stream of guys who would otherwise have been driving on the mainland turning around and heading back to where they came from.
Helps in this instance though that the ferry is generally full both ways; so there's a balance. And there's a park of 40' containers to choose from either side for what you need to pick up, and where to take it.

In most cases we do not have a ferry. We have a truck with a continental driver arriving via the tunnel. If we have the space, and can unhook the load and hook it on a British truck, no problem. If the load cannot easily be transferred, the truck has to continue. Our government decided to ignore the problem initially, but they may be demanding Covid tests now. In principle, we could track the truck, and fit the driver with a tag so that he could be tracked too. He could still get out of the truck without it showing, but it would deter him from going to a party.

servodude
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Re: Third wave

#402150

Postby servodude » April 6th, 2021, 11:26 pm

New COVID variants have changed the game, and vaccines will not be enough. We need global ‘maximum suppression’

https://theconversation.com/new-covid-variants-have-changed-the-game-and-vaccines-will-not-be-enough-we-need-global-maximum-suppression-157870

The impact of the new variants on the effectiveness of vaccines is still not clear. Recent real-world evidence from the UK suggests both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines provide significant protection against severe disease and hospitalisations from the B.1.1.7 variant.
On the other hand, the B.1.351 variant seems to reduce the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine against mild to moderate illness. We do not yet have clear evidence on whether it also reduces effectiveness against severe disease.
For these reasons, reducing community transmission is vital. No single action is sufficient to prevent the virus’s spread; we must maintain strong public health measures in tandem with vaccination programs in every country.


not sure how much of this article is just because the risks are as yet unknown - or whether they're just not yet public

- sd

GrahamPlatt
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Re: Third wave

#402199

Postby GrahamPlatt » April 7th, 2021, 9:26 am

Global excess deaths, waves

https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb ... df5b386938 (Free to read)

servodude
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Re: Third wave

#406022

Postby servodude » April 22nd, 2021, 8:17 am

servodude wrote:Surely the Tanzanian government must be ranking worse than Brazil now?
- sd


A novel variant of interest of SARS-CoV-2 with multiple spike mutations detected through travel surveillance in Africa

This new VOI, temporarily designated A.VOI.V2, has 31 amino acid substitutions (11 in spike) and three deletions (all in spike). The spike mutations include three substitutions in the receptor-binding domain (R346K, T478R and E484K); five substitutions and three deletions in the N-terminal domain, some of which are within the antigenic supersite; and two substitutions adjacent to the S1/S2 cleavage site. Several of these mutations are present in other VOCs/VOIs and are evolving under positive selection

Found in Angola from people who travelled from Tanzania
so that's 34 total mutations - 14 in spike (including the E484K)
compared to:
- 17 total (8 spike) for the UK variant
- 18 total (10 spike) for the Brazil variant

I think we should level up a bit more for the boss fight

-sd

Julian
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Re: Third wave

#406100

Postby Julian » April 22nd, 2021, 11:37 am

servodude wrote:
servodude wrote:Surely the Tanzanian government must be ranking worse than Brazil now?
- sd


A novel variant of interest of SARS-CoV-2 with multiple spike mutations detected through travel surveillance in Africa

This new VOI, temporarily designated A.VOI.V2, has 31 amino acid substitutions (11 in spike) and three deletions (all in spike). The spike mutations include three substitutions in the receptor-binding domain (R346K, T478R and E484K); five substitutions and three deletions in the N-terminal domain, some of which are within the antigenic supersite; and two substitutions adjacent to the S1/S2 cleavage site. Several of these mutations are present in other VOCs/VOIs and are evolving under positive selection

Found in Angola from people who travelled from Tanzania
so that's 34 total mutations - 14 in spike (including the E484K)
compared to:
- 17 total (8 spike) for the UK variant
- 18 total (10 spike) for the Brazil variant

I think we should level up a bit more for the boss fight

-sd

Yes. Not knowing a huge amount about it that does still seem concerning simply on the "that number is bigger than that number" basis. One long expert interview I saw with a US immunologist said that there are currently two schools of thought amongst the expert (immunologists and virologists) community. One school of thought is that mutations will be an ongoing thing and we'll end up in a similar situation as we have with the Flu, namely annual booster shots to address the constant flow of new variants. The other more encouraging school of thought is that the number of viable mutations available to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is limited, that it might have already "played its best cards", and that one more round of boosters to address various common specific mutations that have arisen (e.g. the E484K-carrying mutations) might be all that is needed plus potential top-ups depending on the duration of vaccine-induced immunity. The last school of thought draws on the independent emergence of various specific mutations such as E484K.

I was already a bit disappointed yesterday to see that one mutation in this new Indian strain is E484Q so a K amino acid substitution clearly wasn't the only viable spike mutation at position 484 and the virus has now been seen to be viable with at least 3 different amino acids at that position (E, K and Q). There are still another 19 left in the standard RNA coding list although hopefully some or all of those are unviable. The E484Q extremely viable (based on the "success" of the Indian variant) mutation plus seeing so many additional individual mutations surviving in the A.VOI.V2 variant does make one wonder if that "the virus has already played its best cards" school of thought might be overly optimistic and becoming increasingly undermined by new evidence.

I tend to agree with you that maybe we should level up a bit before the boss fight but if we're willing to make an in-game purchase this weapon might help if it works ...

Using a new platform, scientists have developed a Covid-19 vaccine that they say could offer protection against not only existing and future strains of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but also other coronaviruses. The vaccine is cheap, at $1 a dose, and has shown promising results in early animal testing, the researchers have reported in the journal PNAS.
...
The vaccine, created by Zeichner and Virgina Tech’s Dr Xiang-Jin Meng, targets a part of the virus’s spike protein called the fusion peptide. This compound is essentially universal among coronaviruses, and has not been observed to differ at all in the many genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 obtained from around the world, the researchers said.
...


[ Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/expla ... s-7282248/

Or as a more general brief discussion of the search for a universal vaccine - https://www.news-medical.net/health/The ... ccine.aspx

We still really do have a lot more opportunity to "science the sh*t" out of this (to quote a line from "The Martian"). This is all very much still a work in progress which is why I think we still need some non-pharmaceutical interventions in place for a while yet. Definitely not to the extent of draconian lockdowns, at least not in light of current efficacy of vaccines against currently prevalent variants in the UK, but please let's take contact tracing seriously while numbers are low, let's have more research, initiatives and government advice on internal air quality, and I'm sure there are many other aspects of NPI that could be explored or left in place at least for the next 6-9 months or so that wouldn't massively impact the economy & personal freedoms but wouldn't signal an "it's all over, we can let our guard down completely" attitude that might well come back to bite us.

- Julian

servodude
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Re: Third wave

#406127

Postby servodude » April 22nd, 2021, 12:46 pm

Julian wrote: "the virus has already played its best cards" school of thought might be overly optimistic and becoming increasingly undermined by new evidence.


Julian wrote:This is all very much still a work in progress which is why I think we still need some non-pharmaceutical interventions in place for a while yet


Those two bits I've quoted ^
That's how I see it
With the addenda that:
- get your NPI right and the risk of the first is reduced
- (sort of like whatever the reverse of the "proof by induction" is.. :? )
- and it's already had almost as much opportunity for mutation as any virus strain in the history of the humans ever (c.f. pernicious flexible ones like HIV)

- sd

Mike4
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Re: Third wave

#406162

Postby Mike4 » April 22nd, 2021, 2:28 pm

servodude wrote:
Julian wrote: "the virus has already played its best cards" school of thought might be overly optimistic and becoming increasingly undermined by new evidence.


Julian wrote:This is all very much still a work in progress which is why I think we still need some non-pharmaceutical interventions in place for a while yet


Those two bits I've quoted ^
That's how I see it
With the addenda that:
- get your NPI right and the risk of the first is reduced
- (sort of like whatever the reverse of the "proof by induction" is.. :? )
- and it's already had almost as much opportunity for mutation as any virus strain in the history of the humans ever (c.f. pernicious flexible ones like HIV)

- sd


Stop panicking you two! No need to do anything about this in a hurry.

After all "Lockdowns merely defer; vaccines fix" as we've recently been informed in the other thread. https://lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=405992#p405992

servodude
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Re: Third wave

#406180

Postby servodude » April 22nd, 2021, 2:55 pm

Mike4 wrote:
Stop panicking you two! No need to do anything about this in a hurry.

After all "Lockdowns merely defer; vaccines fix" as we've recently been informed in the other thread. https://lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=405992#p405992


I looked at the bit you'd emboldened and tried to work out what it was in Roman numerals before I realised you weren't quoting some fancy dan paper extract and had instead linked to a litany of "expand this post; it's by a porb on your fud list"

If you don't mind I've got some Bruichladdich Classic Laddie to finish before I spend 8 hours tomorrow in a fecking EMC Hokey Pokey Chamber pointing out that if you tie the the analogue and digital ground planes together with an unshielded PWM driven motor in the mix it's not surprising that noise radiates.

But yeah.. viruses they change! Who knew?
What do you want me to do about it?
Blowing oxygen in to your lungs I can manage... but you'd really rather not have that happen

-sd

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Re: Third wave

#538221

Postby Alaric » October 17th, 2022, 1:28 pm

Jimarilo wrote:[
Currently 6,000 deaths per month above the 5yr average in england and wales .......so far .........not enough for you ??


Here's the latest report by the ONS who keep score
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulation ... tember2022

That confirms 6000 is in the ballpark. As a percentage it's around a 15% increase.

They also suggest around 300 a week from COVID.

I don't know why one would conclude that the balance is from vaccinations against COVID. Would it not be as likely that it's the after effects of COVID weakening immune systems etc?

Howyoudoin
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Re: Third wave

#538409

Postby Howyoudoin » October 18th, 2022, 2:44 am

Jimarilo wrote:The rise is since the jab roll out . . . . . . . .


Yikes.

:?

HYD

monabri
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Re: Third wave

#538447

Postby monabri » October 18th, 2022, 9:09 am

Jimarilo wrote:New World Odor™
@hugh_mankind
ALARMING: 50% Increase in Miscarriages & Infertility Since the "Roll-Out"

OB/Gyn Kimberly Biss, MD, says they are seeing about a 50% rise in infertility and miscarriages & about a 25% increase in abnormal Pap smears and irregular cervical malignancies since the roll-out.

https://twitter.com/hugh_mankind/status ... 1103170560


What is " New World Odor"? It fails the sniff test ( spelling).

"Hugh Mankind"....Good name.

So, Ob/Gyn Biss , MD reports 50% rise in infertility... you'd have thought others in the UK, USA, Europe would have been flagging this up ( screaming from the rooftops, morelike).

redsturgeon
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Re: Third wave

#538463

Postby redsturgeon » October 18th, 2022, 9:31 am

Moderator Message:
I have opened a "Covid Denial Thread" to try to keep conspiracy theories from hijacking too many threads. Please keep denial debates on there.

Hallucigenia
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Re: Third wave

#541576

Postby Hallucigenia » October 26th, 2022, 3:10 pm

On the pregnancy stuff - this thread is about as authoritative as you're going to get (TLDR - no particular risk in pregnancy just the same as for everyone else, the small risk attached to vaccines is less than the risk you run from facing Covid without a vaccination), following the same logic that we use for the several other vaccines given during pregnancy :
https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1 ... 2418414592

On the heart stuff, we've known for over two years (when the preprint version of this paper came out) that the SARS2 virus preferentially infects heart muscle, so you'd expect a rise in heart problems in its wake :
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.112 ... ed.abf7872

On excess deaths, Scotland has a very similar pattern of vaccination and variants, but has not seen the same excess deaths as England, which suggests that there's something else going on. The chaos in NHS England is probably a signficant factor - if ambulances in England are taking an average of 58 minutes to reach people with strokes and chest pains (compared to 22 minutes in 2019 and a target of 18 minutes), and over 2 hours in 10% of cases, then you will see more deaths from strokes and heart attacks compared to Scotland where the current reponse time averages 16 minutes.


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