The COVID-19 Discussion Thread (OTB)

[Roger E. Moore]

My description of the swab when I had it for possible flu in the spring of 2019 was that they put it about eleven feet into your sinuses.

I have heard the same.

Anyone catch the results of the disastrous Broncos-Saints game? COVID-19 messes up everything.

[Solfe]

My description of the swab when I had it for possible flu in the spring of 2019 was that they put it about eleven feet into your sinuses.

Argh, my thalamus! I can see, hear, taste and feel that! You poked me in everything except my sniffer station. So tired, now.

[Gillianren]

It's what David Prowse died of.

[Selenite]

The three most recent former US presidents – Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – are volunteering to get their Covid-19 vaccines while on camera in order to promote public confidence in the vaccine's safety.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/02/polit...ine/index.html

[grant hutchison]

Hmmm. Anthony Fauci, generally a voice of reason and sanity IMHO, just suggested that the MHRA (the UK's notoriously pernickety and micro-managing medicines regulatory body) "rushed" approval of the Pfizer vaccine. He seems to have said it in the context of a question about why the FDA was taking a few days longer on the same job, but really, Dr Fauci, thanks a bunch for driving up vaccine hesitancy in the UK.
(The MHRA have been all over the current vaccine trials like a coat of paint for months, so approval has been assembled over the same time period. I'm sure the FDA has been doing the same. So a difference of a few days at the end of a months-long process is not entirely surprising. And as far as I'm aware, Dr Fauci is not privy to the inner workings of the MHRA.)

Grant Hutchison

[profloater]

Hmmm. Anthony Fauci, generally a voice of reason and sanity IMHO, just suggested that the MHRA (the UK's notoriously pernickety and micro-managing medicines regulatory body) "rushed" approval of the Pfizer vaccine. He seems to have said it in the context of a question about why the FDA was taking a few days longer on the same job, but really, Dr Fauci, thanks a bunch for driving up vaccine hesitancy in the UK.
(The MHRA have been all over the current vaccine trials like a coat of paint for months, so approval has been assembled over the same time period. I'm sure the FDA has been doing the same. So a difference of a few days at the end of a months-long process is not entirely surprising. And as far as I'm aware, Dr Fauci is not privy to the inner workings of the MHRA.)

Grant Hutchison

Have just heard that EU countries are upset, the EU is not yet due to approve. Low temperature distribution is also not yet clarified in UK.

[Van Rijn]

I posted this Nov. 30:

Our governor talked today about “possibly” doing another lockdown “if” the numbers keep going up, as ICU requirements “could” exceed capacity. By comparison, in the spring there was quite a bit of extra capacity at peak.

I give it a week, two at the most. The numbers will go up, I can’t see this as anything but trying to soften the impact. We’ve had one full lockdown in the spring and variable restrictions after that.

Again, I doubt it will affect me much. I’m going back to home delivery, for the most part anyway.

So today, on the 3rd, he announced a regional plan, where sections of California will go into lockdown when ICU capacity drops below 15%. I heard it is expected most of CA will go into lockdown whithin a week. The Bay Area probably will have longer.

[Trebuchet]

Most single-day US deaths since the beginning yesterday according to Worldometer, along with over 200,000 new cases.
This is not looking good.

[grant hutchison]

Have just heard that EU countries are upset, the EU is not yet due to approve. Low temperature distribution is also not yet clarified in UK.

The only group more ponderous than the MHRA are the EMA, in the experience of My Wife The Professor. The MHRA have actually operated entirely within the EU decision-making framework--they've just used the "emergency approval" clause which is available to all EU national regulators. It was predictable that there would be posturing, with the early adopters selling themselves as well-organized, while being criticized for rushing, the late adopters characterizing themselves as careful, while being criticized for feet-dragging. But Fauci seems to have (entirely predictably) triggered an antagonistic and overblown response in the UK, which has in turned triggered weary rebukes from the EU, and round and round it will go. There has never been a single medicine in the entire history of medical regulatory bodies that has been simultaneously approved across the world. This one is no different from thousands of medicines before it, and people really just need to stop trying to read more into it than that.

Initial distribution to healthcare workers and social carers is reportedly pretty well sorted in Scotland. We'll see how that works in practice next week. Care home residents are more problematic. Pfizer currently distributes the vaccine in 1000-dose containers, which makes turning up to vaccinate just a few tens of care-home residents at a time, in multiple locations throughout the day, logistically complicated. But we just need clarification on what sort of temperatures are OK for "last mile" transport, or packages with smaller numbers of doses. In a way, the UK has complicated things for itself by approving early, because we'll end up having to hash out these problems while the rest of the world observes.

Grant Hutchison

[Selenite]

A couple gets a positive test and still boards a plane to Hawaii where the authorities arrested them. They were taken to a designated isolation room where they were arrested on suspicion of second-degree reckless endangering.

https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavir...est-in-nw.html

I don't know what soap bubble they're living in. I couldn't even fathom traveling for recreation right now.

[Van Rijn]

It makes me kind of hope they get sick enough - but not too sick - to help them reflect on the error of their ways.

It sounds like they had already been on vacation and were trying to return home. That undoubtedly was an incentive to flout the rules, but once they tested positive, that was time to check in with local authorities and get a place to self isolate.

[ozduck]

The only group more ponderous than the MHRA are the EMA, in the experience of My Wife The Professor. The MHRA have actually operated entirely within the EU decision-making framework--they've just used the "emergency approval" clause which is available to all EU national regulators. It was predictable that there would be posturing, with the early adopters selling themselves as well-organized, while being criticized for rushing, the late adopters characterizing themselves as careful, while being criticized for feet-dragging. But Fauci seems to have (entirely predictably) triggered an antagonistic and overblown response in the UK, which has in turned triggered weary rebukes from the EU, and round and round it will go. There has never been a single medicine in the entire history of medical regulatory bodies that has been simultaneously approved across the world. This one is no different from thousands of medicines before it, and people really just need to stop trying to read more into it than that.

Initial distribution to healthcare workers and social carers is reportedly pretty well sorted in Scotland. We'll see how that works in practice next week. Care home residents are more problematic. Pfizer currently distributes the vaccine in 1000-dose containers, which makes turning up to vaccinate just a few tens of care-home residents at a time, in multiple locations throughout the day, logistically complicated. But we just need clarification on what sort of temperatures are OK for "last mile" transport, or packages with smaller numbers of doses. In a way, the UK has complicated things for itself by approving early, because we'll end up having to hash out these problems while the rest of the world observes.

Grant Hutchison

And I now see that that he has 'walked back' from his earlier comments about the approval process and claimed that he was merely trying to speak about the different process for approvals. He said - "I did not mean to imply any sloppiness even though it came out that way." To be fair to him he has been somewhat under pressure from certain places over the last few months.

[Roger E. Moore]

It makes me kind of hope they get sick enough - but not too sick ...

No no no no, let them get really, really sick. It's only fair.

[Van Rijn]

No no no no, let them get really, really sick. It's only fair.

But then they would take needed hospital resources that could go to those who better deserve it. And besides, I don’t feel they deserve that level of punishment just for being indifferent to the harm their thoughtless actions could bring to others. I doubt they actually intended anyone harm.

[Van Rijn]

And I now see that that he has 'walked back' from his earlier comments about the approval process and claimed that he was merely trying to speak about the different process for approvals. He said - "I did not mean to imply any sloppiness even though it came out that way." To be fair to him he has been somewhat under pressure from certain places over the last few months.

I had a hunch it would get back to Fauci and that he would say something about it. My impression is that he just said it without thinking through the implications at the time. He has never struck me as someone who would intentionally engage in unfair statements just to promote our effort.

It’s going to be interesting, since the vaccines will be a large part of the big endgame there will undoubtedly be all sorts of nonsense and hurt feelings surrounding them.

Incidentally, my state and a number of others have set up their own expert panels to review vaccines before they will be allowed for use, so adding a step to the process. It clearly is an attempt to promote confidence among the public that are concerned with the rushed development and testing. That too has resulted in mixed responses - some annoyed that another layer has been added, calling it obstruction, some others that won’t trust any government effort or so called “Big Pharma” members, no matter what. Meh, what can you do?

[profloater]

The only group more ponderous than the MHRA are the EMA, in the experience of My Wife The Professor. The MHRA have actually operated entirely within the EU decision-making framework--they've just used the "emergency approval" clause which is available to all EU national regulators. It was predictable that there would be posturing, with the early adopters selling themselves as well-organized, while being criticized for rushing, the late adopters characterizing themselves as careful, while being criticized for feet-dragging. But Fauci seems to have (entirely predictably) triggered an antagonistic and overblown response in the UK, which has in turned triggered weary rebukes from the EU, and round and round it will go. There has never been a single medicine in the entire history of medical regulatory bodies that has been simultaneously approved across the world. This one is no different from thousands of medicines before it, and people really just need to stop trying to read more into it than that.

Initial distribution to healthcare workers and social carers is reportedly pretty well sorted in Scotland. We'll see how that works in practice next week. Care home residents are more problematic. Pfizer currently distributes the vaccine in 1000-dose containers, which makes turning up to vaccinate just a few tens of care-home residents at a time, in multiple locations throughout the day, logistically complicated. But we just need clarification on what sort of temperatures are OK for "last mile" transport, or packages with smaller numbers of doses. In a way, the UK has complicated things for itself by approving early, because we'll end up having to hash out these problems while the rest of the world observes.

Grant Hutchison

Yes it is interesting, my sister the epidemiologist , advises there will be another one along in a few years so rapid testing and tracing will be the important technology for commercial operations in the medium term. That means we might see theatres, say, applying tests with quick results to all customers, with a waiting zone, as the new normal. I know of one major company that has already decided to invest in that approach. It is part public health and part market reassurance for the post Covid world. I find it also interesting that there is concern about how many will refuse a vaccine, making compulsory test the obvious choice for many enterprises. It is a brave new , get used to being tested, world.

[Noclevername]

Yes it is interesting, my sister the epidemiologist , advises there will be another one along in a few years so rapid testing and tracing will be the important technology for commercial operations in the medium term.

I've heard the same, from multiple expert sources. The factors that led to this virus getting mainstreamed into the human population are accelerating, as we continue to expand our activities into many previously untouched biological regions and interact globally.

[grant hutchison]

I had a hunch it would get back to Fauci and that he would say something about it. My impression is that he just said it without thinking through the implications at the time. He has never struck me as someone who would intentionally engage in unfair statements just to promote our effort.

If he was thoughtless, he was thoughtless for an extended period of time, making the same implication in several different ways to two broadcasters in succession. I don't know exactly what he meant when he told CBS that the UK "kind of ran around the corner of the marathon and joined it in the last mile", but it's difficult to interpret a novel metaphor like that as a mere slip of the tongue.
I suspect he felt at the time that he was speaking only for the benefit of an American audience, and was very keen to send the message that the FDA's deliberations were keeping them safe, and to try to damp down speculation that the FDA were dragging their feet through inefficiency or conspiracy. And I was sure that he would row back his remarks as soon as he realized the damaging effect they had had, because he seems to be that sort of man. But he won't be getting a Christmas card from the MHRA this year, that's for sure.

Grant Hutchison

[Solfe]

I think that sometimes a national response is appropriate, but in other cases, it causes problems. My wife received a dose of radiation for cancer, the guidelines were super clear. No one within 3 meters for more than 7 seconds for 42 days. In Canada, the guideline would have been different, virtually no restrictions on contact. It was all statistics and probability to get two different answers.

Basically, the thought behind the restrictions was "what are the chances that someone in the general public would be exposed to multiple radiation sources in a given 42 day period?" In Canada, the answer is lower risk because of lower population. How much is actually startling. One of my coworkers was going through the exact same situation as my wife at a lower dosage, a second was getting chemo and radiation. The second person was pretty frank about her experience because she was dying and wanted to do the job she had done for decades as long as she could. I spotted the first woman's "green card" a special badge given out by Rosewell and she didn't say anything until I said my wife had one, too. That caused a third person* to flash theirs. (Thyroid disease is incredibly prevalent in my area, like 1 in 3 people. No ones why.) What are the chances of random exposure? More than a Canadian's chance. More people, more risk, more restrictions.

I copied the quote in question from Dr. Fauci and it looks like he's back peddling that hard. Probably not hard enough because he can't possibly know what sort of mess he created. Different countries have different policies. I don't buy the comparison that some countries cut more corners than other on something that is happening so fast that we actually call it something like "Project Warp Speed". All kinds of crud got cut. I bet behind closed doors there was a lot of screaming in many different languages. And we are doing this with a "consumer product" that nearly everyone should get. That's not a fun game, that just fuels up paranoia.

This whole thing is a risky proposition, it was terribly foolish to compare US processes to UK processes. They don't have the same demographic, population, resources, etc. which makes any comparison wrong. He should probably peddle back to an apology. We ask our policy makers to gibber-jabber all the time. The chances of putting your foot in your mouth tends to jump to 100% when that happens.

Personally, I would totally gamble on this vaccine if it was more risky. Not for my own personal safety vs. covid, but to remove a risk from someone else like my kids. A lot of people don't like that, either the risk or the fact that I am such a risk taker. They think it's dangerous and perhaps it is. I don't evaluation risk like anyone I know, I'll give you that.

*edit - I am not sure if that 3rd person was currently receiving radiation or chemo or had so in the past. It might have been a gesture of solidarity. Rosewell will let you keep or destroy those cards as you see fit.

[geonuc]

...He should probably peddle back to an apology. ...

He very much has done so.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55177948

[Trebuchet]

A couple gets a positive test and still boards a plane to Hawaii where the authorities arrested them. They were taken to a designated isolation room where they were arrested on suspicion of second-degree reckless endangering.

https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavir...est-in-nw.html

I don't know what soap bubble they're living in. I couldn't even fathom traveling for recreation right now.

I saw a cruise ship advertisement just yesterday saying something about taking back your freedom by going on a cruise. Lots of images of unmasked happy couples on a ship or a beach. Disgusting.

I wouldn't be taking that line anyhow because of the cruise from hell they took us on in 2003.

ETA: 2918 new USA deaths reported yesterday and 218,576 new cases, per Worldometer. This is really getting bad and there are still people denying it. We probably haven't even seen the Thanksgiving surge yet.

[grant hutchison]

In other news, it seems that Covid lockdowns have helped Hornby (a British company famous for model trains, which now owns the Scalextric motor racing system, Airfix model kits and Humbrol model paints) turn themselves a profit for the first time in a decade. Airfix in particular almost went out of business, but (IIRC) was turned around when Hornby put in new management that actually understood the market. I watched a documentary a year or two ago, in which an incoming manager was pretty much reduced to tears when he discovered how many old kit moulds the previous management had scrapped.

Grant Hutchison

[Swift]

In other news, it seems that Covid lockdowns have helped Hornby (a British company famous for model trains, which now owns the Scalextric motor racing system, Airfix model kits and Humbrol model paints) turn themselves a profit for the first time in a decade. Airfix in particular almost went out of business, but (IIRC) was turned around when Hornby put in new management that actually understood the market. I watched a documentary a year or two ago, in which an incoming manager was pretty much reduced to tears when he discovered how many old kit moulds the previous management had scrapped.

Grant Hutchison

I've heard similar stories about model trains in the US; I know I've spent a lot of time on mine this year.

[Noclevername]

I saw a cruise ship advertisement just yesterday saying something about taking back your freedom by going on a cruise.

Shame on them for conflating Freedom with a cruise ship! That word should only be attributed to open-road cars.

(Seriously though, shame on them really for fanning the flames.)

[Solfe]

He very much has done so.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55177948

Good!

[Van Rijn]

I saw a cruise ship advertisement just yesterday saying something about taking back your freedom by going on a cruise. Lots of images of unmasked happy couples on a ship or a beach. Disgusting.

I no longer have the link, but a while back I read about an attempted cruise on a smaller ship, but with really high end accommodations for the very wealthy, that would go to nice uninhabited beaches and so on. They went through a big procedure to have everyone tested before boarding and all that. Long story short, they missed someone and it spread like wildfire once on the ship, and that was it for the cruise (which I believe had barely gotten started).

Now maybe they could have done better with a mandatory monitored isolation period combined with the tests pre-cruise but it seems to me that a cruise with the obvious crowded conditions is just asking for trouble. They only need to miss one.

[Van Rijn]

If he was thoughtless, he was thoughtless for an extended period of time, making the same implication in several different ways to two broadcasters in succession. I don't know exactly what he meant when he told CBS that the UK "kind of ran around the corner of the marathon and joined it in the last mile", but it's difficult to interpret a novel metaphor like that as a mere slip of the tongue.
I suspect he felt at the time that he was speaking only for the benefit of an American audience, and was very keen to send the message that the FDA's deliberations were keeping them safe, and to try to damp down speculation that the FDA were dragging their feet through inefficiency or conspiracy.

Ah, I didn’t realize there was that much to it. He may have been speaking for the benefit of the American audience but I think it got a lot more attention there than it did here. I thought he had made one poorly thought out off the cuff remark. Honestly, most of what I’ve seen about this story came after he apologized, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed that if not for seeing the comments here. It wasn’t the biggest news here, I’m afraid. Ah well, at least he did apologize, which is more than I would expect of some.

[Extravoice]

Seriously though, shame on them really for fanning the flames.

I saw the same commercial and had a similar reaction. I think at the very end they subtly indicate that they want you to book for the future. It doesn’t work to change overall message.

[Noclevername]

Now maybe they could have done better with a mandatory monitored isolation period combined with the tests pre-cruise but it seems to me that a cruise with the obvious crowded conditions is just asking for trouble. They only need to miss one.

They didn't recognize the Trapped On A Ship With X standard horror/thriller trope. Not movie fans?

[grant hutchison]

Ah, I didn’t realize there was that much to it.

The count went up to three separate interviews (Fox, CBS, Sky) before he started walking backwards. He was of course being challenged on each occasion to account for why the UK approval was ahead of the US, and those are circumstances under which one feels defensive and wants to push back a little. And (reading his various comments) I think he also suffers from an unexamined assumption--that the FDA's regulatory process is considered a "gold standard" by other countries. Of course it isn't, otherwise it would be emulated in depth by other countries, since we're all striving to achieve the same ends. But if you think that everyone shares your view, it becomes easier to just say what you think without engaging social filters.

So it goes. Brits are the last people who can criticize anyone for falling into the "national exceptionalism" trap.

Grant Hutchison