Covid

[alec]

@isa - hope your recovery is going OK.

I saw this, and thought of you, as they say - time.com/6215346/covid-19-rest-helps/

It's not confirmed, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence being gathered that indicates trying to get back to full activity too soon after infection may have a bearing on whether or not people develop complications, so a lot of doctors are now suggesting patients rest more than feel they need to in the immediate aftermath.

Not sure if this helps, but I thought I would pass it on.

[Deleted]

Sept 25, 2022 9:00:53 GMT alec said:

@isa - hope your recovery is going OK.

I saw this, and thought of you, as they say - time.com/6215346/covid-19-rest-helps/

It's not confirmed, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence being gathered that indicates trying to get back to full activity too soon after infection may have a bearing on whether or not people develop complications, so a lot of doctors are now suggesting patients rest more than feel they need to in the immediate aftermath.

Not sure if this helps, but I thought I would pass it on.

Morning alec. Thanks for your interest. On the personal front, mixed news. Quite suddenly yesterday evening, the temperature and 'bursting head' sensation I'd experienced since Friday morning abated, and I had a much more comfortable night. Back to feeling just knackered with general manflu symptoms now. Then this morning, after some coughing, I noticed some light blood streaks in my sputum. Seemed not surprising after some (not excessive) coughing in the last few days, but thought I'd check the NHS website. The self-diagnosis led me to ring 111, and after quite a few questions, I await a call from a local GP to discuss further.

Your link was interesting, however there is very little likelihood of me indulging in any vigorous exercise in the short term, anyway! My exercise regime has never centred on intensive activity. I have just followed the NHS guidance, which recommends 150 minutes of reasonably active exercise per week. 

[alec]

@isa - hope it goes OK.

On the activity idea, it also applies to mental exertion, from what I gather.

[Deleted]

Sept 25, 2022 10:41:48 GMT alec said:

@isa - hope it goes OK.

On the activity idea, it also applies to mental exertion, from what I gather.

Thanks, alec. Mental exertion has never been a strong suit of mine, as my posts on UKPR2 demonstrate. 

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

“Death rates among men with prostate cancer tripled during the first year of the pandemic, according to “extremely worrying” new data.

The figures show almost 5,000 extra deaths of men with prostate cancer during the pandemic - at a time when the number of diagnoses fell. Only around 1,000 were caused by Covid, researchers said.

The major study of NHS hospital data by charity Prostate Cancer UK shows alarming changes in diagnosis and treatment of the disease, with cases spotted far later, when the disease is less treatable.

Experts warned that the failings could cut thousands more lives short, with an estimated 14,000 men with the disease having missed a diagnosis during the pandemic.

…

The new research shows that even when men received a diagnosis, they were less likely to receive life-extending treatment, as hospitals came under pressure from Covid, the research shows.

Overall, deaths among men with prostate cancer rose from seven per cent before the pandemic to 26 per cent in the first nine months of the pandemic, the analysis shows.

Even in the next nine months, covering the period up to September 2021, deaths remained high, with an 18 per cent fatality rate.

The vast majority of the rise was not caused by Covid deaths, researchers said.”

Telegraph

[mandolinist]

Hope you feel better soon @isa.

[Deleted]

Sept 25, 2022 23:34:01 GMT mandolinist said:

Hope you feel better soon @isa .

Thank you, mandolinist. Much appreciated. The worst is hopefully over now.

[alec]

Latest weekly update for English hospital admissions just out, and it's pretty savage - data can be found here www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospital-activity/

Last week we saw a 17% rise, which was susprising, as most experts had been working on the assumption of a wave peaking by mid/late October, so this rise seemed too big, too soon. However, the latest data has a week on week increase of 55%, so something of a screamer. This helps explain why Shaun Lintern from the Independent has been popping up with increasing frequency flagging up NHS trusts around the country declaring critical incidents, as A&E departments once again start to fall over. Separately, Adele Groyer has calculated that 37% of admissions (England) are likely hospital acquired infections, which is rising, and this almost certainly reflects the daft idea to stop routine testing of admissions.

Overall, this looks pretty bad news.

[Deleted]

Bearing in mind alec's latest post, I feel a bit like the canary in the coalmine, having gone down with Covid last Friday. I have had four jabs, the most recent, (together with a flu jab), only a fortnight ago.

I know it affects everyone differently, and the vaccines are very effective in protecting against severe symptoms, but I still had an initial very debilitating couple of days. Gradual general improvement since. Fatigue seems to be the main issue now. Zero energy in the tank. The exercise bike will be seizing up through lack of use at this rate.

[alec]

More analysis on the hospital admissions -

This has the weekly admissions for England up by 48%, so either my quick calculation from the NHS stats was wrong or the data is from different dates, but either way, this is a big jump. The Covid Actuaries have a method I don't understand that calculates an 'implied R' from the admissions data, and the latest shows implied R at 1.2, which happens to be the highest level for the whole of 2022. We also can't use the excuse that this is all incidental infections, as the numbers admitted with covid as the primary diagnosis has risen by 48%. This group are now expecting covid deaths in hospital to start increasing next week.

I think the speed this is moving is worrying. A small rise in cases noted by the ONS, with distinctly lagging data, didn't initially suggest rapidly escalating hospitalisations, but clearly something quite major is happening with covid. The other point of note is that this doesn't really appear to be variant driven. There are a swirl of new and potentially difficult variants that are spreading, but these are still at low level. This wave appears to be based (so far) more on waning immunity, which in turn points to a future of repeated infections every year, regardless of vaccine status.

I remain of the view that this is simply not acceptable, either on a personal basis, or in terms of how we run the country.

[shevii]

Got a text invite for the booster but when I go onto the page to book and answer the questions it says I don't need one yet so maybe the website has not updated the criteria. Can obviously follow this through with 119 or my GP but I'd also heard there were shortages of the new dual vaccine and a friend who had hers done a couple of weeks ago was given one of the old vaccines. Struggling to find details of these potential shortages but would rather wait for the new vaccine so any info on what those shortages might be would be helpful and Google is not being especially helpful on this.

[alec]

Link to a thread on the weekly ONS infection data -

Situation not at all good, with signs of an early, rapid rise underway.

[alec]

Latest on variants -

BQ1.1 looks nailed on for a big wave in November, and it's also one with complete antiviral escape, so none of the drug treatments will be effective once people succumb. I don't know yet what the immune evasion in terms of vaccines is yet for this one, but I'm sure we'll start getting some data soon.

[alec]

Something more positive on covid. This paper - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13109?campaign=woletoc details a successful trial to use filters from HEPA air purifying systems to test for the presence of covid. Various air con experts have picked this up and suggested ways HEPA systems could be adapted to make for easy virus monitoring (removable pre filters for regular sampling etc).

This is potentially excellent news, if developed and applied, for both covid and other respiratory diseases. Currently, mass testing is the main way to track outbreaks, with sewage testing giving population level data (and variant monitoring). But this HEPA method can be applied to specific locations, so - for example - individual work teams - but has the added benefit that you aren't just measuring the spread of disease - the measurement method is actually preventing transmission.

As with so much of the covid coverage, I'm often accused of being a miserabalist, over over-exaggerating. I actually see myself as simply being a realist, and an optimistic one at that. I don't see the point in hiding from the truth, while at the same time, I'm deeply impressed by the wealth of knowledge we've gained in 2 1/2 years and believe that if only we could apply this new found knowledge, we really could beat covid, and other respiratory infections that we've now found out we don't actually need to live with.

[Deleted]

Purely anecdotal Covid update. Having gone down with it out of the blue 11 days ago, (4 jabs, the most recent less than three weeks ago, still wearing a mask in shops and supermarkets), I finally tested negative yesterday. I still feel terrible. I have bronchitis now, which explains the coughing, phlegm and general exhaustion which is seriously jeopardising planned family trips to Devon this week and Italy next.

I have occasionally suffered bronchitis in the past but not for at least 10 years. I wonder if going down with Covid has made it a piece of cake to lower my immunity so that a bronchial infection could just waltz in on its coattails.

[alec]

@isa - sorry to hear that. It sounds highly likely that you're suffering from the knock on effects - you're by no means the first person I have heard of with post covid bronchitis. Hope you get well soon.

**********

Here's a fascinating study from Italy, based on detailed contact tracing and cohort matched retrospective analysis, looking at transmission dynamics - demo2.dropcite.com/articles/3b4e0c76-5405-4c4c-91d8-53df47c0a9bb

One of the reasons often given for not bothering to tackle transmission in public settings was the - completely true - finding that most transmission occurred in the home. That observation was central to the argument in favour of 'living with covid', as clearly we can't distance and wear masks at home. I always thought it was obvious that yes, while numbers of individual transmissions at home were the biggest factor, for disease control it makes far more sense to treat a household as a single unit, in the sense that infections enter the household from outside - the precise community settings that those arguing for 'living with covid' wanted to ignore.

This is exactly what this study finds. In this case, an outbreak in school was amplified by household transmission, so although technically the majority spread was in households, had the school controlled transmission successfully, none of those household infections would have happened.

This seems so simple to grasp, but again it's one of those memes spread by Usforthem, HART and the other right wing US billionaire covid denier and anti vaxxer groups that so many have fallen for. The truth is that with a few simple and cost effective steps we can prevent the vast majority of infections.

[mercian]

19 minutes ago Danny said:

they told the world this was a really deadly disease when it wasnt.
I know I'm going to regret this but according to this

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

it's the 5th worst plague in recorded history, and that includes HIV/aids which isn't a plague in the usual sense. OK, not exactly the Black Death but deadly enough.

[Danny]

Oct 6, 2022 22:24:49 GMT mercian said:

19 minutes ago Danny said:

they told the world this was a really deadly disease when it wasnt.
I know I'm going to regret this but according to this

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

it's the 5th worst plague in recorded history, and that includes HIV/aids which isn't a plague in the usual sense. OK, not exactly the Black Death but deadly enough.

Cigarettes or alcohol much more deadly.

Humans are strange. Yesterday's news was dominated by an incident in Thailand about an ex cop killing 30 or so people including kids. In Ukraine Russia just kidnapped thousands of kids as hostages and is killing as many people every day as it can. They have systematically destroyed as much of Ukraine as they can, to make it uninhabitable. Yet as I say this tiny incident in Thailand dominated the news. They have declared a day of mourning. Not for Ukraine though.

In a similar way we have obsessed over covid but ignored the bigger picture of what people really die from. How we could have taken that trillion pounds spent on covid and instead used it to step up the NHS generally. had we spent more on training nurses and doctors beforehand, some more infrastructure maybe, then the end result would have been better. The emergency spending was money thrown away, much of it anyway. And now the covid situation has normalised what happens, we start cutting health care. How insane is that? Its an utter outrage what has been done, and it was significantly politically motivated to make the politicians look good.

[Danny]

Oct 5, 2022 7:12:08 GMT alec said:

@isa - sorry to hear that. It sounds highly likely that you're suffering from the knock on effects - you're by no means the first person I have heard of with post covid bronchitis. Hope you get well soon.

**********

Here's a fascinating study from Italy, based on detailed contact tracing and cohort matched retrospective analysis, looking at transmission dynamics - demo2.dropcite.com/articles/3b4e0c76-5405-4c4c-91d8-53df47c0a9bb

One of the reasons often given for not bothering to tackle transmission in public settings was the - completely true - finding that most transmission occurred in the home. That observation was central to the argument in favour of 'living with covid', as clearly we can't distance and wear masks at home. I always thought it was obvious that yes, while numbers of individual transmissions at home were the biggest factor, for disease control it makes far more sense to treat a household as a single unit, in the sense that infections enter the household from outside - the precise community settings that those arguing for 'living with covid' wanted to ignore.

This is exactly what this study finds. In this case, an outbreak in school was amplified by household transmission, so although technically the majority spread was in households, had the school controlled transmission successfully, none of those household infections would have happened.

This seems so simple to grasp, but again it's one of those memes spread by Usforthem, HART and the other right wing US billionaire covid denier and anti vaxxer groups that so many have fallen for. The truth is that with a few simple and cost effective steps we can prevent the vast majority of infections.

You miss your own point. You argue transmission withing the home is inevitable, so might as well accept it and consider this as one unit. Fair enough. However transmission within the school is equally inevitable. We should therefore treat it as one unit and accept it. the kids wont come to any significant harm, in fact will benefit because their immunity now will help them when they become old. So they wont be susceptible in the way the old were when covid arrived new.

The separation you need to impose is between the children and their parents considered as one groups who are essentially safe,  and their granparents generation who are the ones at risk. Th eplace you need to break transmission is from young to old. Not between young and young. Thats pretty much what I have argued for a long time, and you are rather agreeing.

[alec]

Danny - I may have missed this, but have you issued a retraction (on the main thread) concerning your lying about my views, as requested?

Lying about another posters beliefs is a rubicon you really shouldn't cross.

[Danny]

Oct 7, 2022 7:51:12 GMT alec said:

Danny - I may have missed this, but have you issued a retraction (on the main thread) concerning your lying about my views, as requested?

Lying about another posters beliefs is a rubicon you really shouldn't cross.

Oh you accused me of that before, you seem to do it a lot, and not just to me. Is this hansard that every word has to be correct? But I didnt lie. I sometimes over simplify or make mistakes, but I dont honestly recall what you are on about. perhaps you can explain in detail?

Its a funny thing, but when politicians cannot refute an argument made by an opponent, they imply accuse them of lying. Or infidelity, or embezzlement, or befriending terrorists, or whatever they think has best chance of sticking.  never simpy engage in debate.

if you think something I said is wrong, then please explain precisely in detail what the problem is?

[alec]

Danny - you know full well that I have never argued for people to be locked in their homes. Quite the reverse, in fact.

So I'm not going to engage in your silly games; if you wish to avoid the embarrassment of being known as a proven liar on here, you can politely withdraw your false claim, but if you choose not to, that's entirely up to you.

[alec]

Link to the ICNARC pre-print on vaccination impact here - www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.03.22280649v1.full.pdf

[Danny]

Why do all the links on here have attached prefixes? Who is collecting the data each time someone clicks one of those links?

[Danny]

Oct 9, 2022 8:33:55 GMT alec said:

Link to the ICNARC pre-print on vaccination impact here - www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.03.22280649v1.full.pdf

didnt you post an article recently which attacked a vaccine sceptic for having published their research before peer review? yet here you post some similarly non peer reviewed findings?  So which is it, you accept the validity of doing this or you dont?

The findings here seem to be that from a sample of people admitted to critical care because they had covid, the unvaccinated group were on average younger.  The study was conducted May to december 2021, so would have included time before the vaccination program reached all younger groups. So it is the case that had the population proportions of disease been totally unaffected by vaccination, then we would expect to see more younger uncaccinated people seriously ill with covid, because the vaccination program had not yet reached them.  A completely useless vaccine might have been expected to produce a similar pattern of results.

They also found that people sick with covid who had had a booster were older than the rest. no surprise again, since the old got their boosters first too.

Now, there may be underlying information in the study results which says eg 70 year olds who had been vaccinated were 50% fewer in hospital than their proportion of the whole population would expect, compared to uncaccinated 70 year olds. But that isnt what they say they measured. Only the average age of all those in hospital.

Do you agree this needs something of a rewrite before acceptance for publication proper?

[alec]

@dannyin exile - "didnt you post an article recently which attacked a vaccine sceptic for having published their research before peer review?"

No I didn't. What I said was caution was required, and then I attacked the paper for being very poor and biased. In this case, this is a summary of the excellent data ICNARC has been publishing for the last couple of years, so is unlikely to have any trouble getting through peer review. In terms of timings, the paper is consistent with data extending well into 2022, making your various points about the vaccines redundant. A useless vaccine would absolutely not have produced such startling benefits either. You're completely wrong on that point. Totally wrong, in fact. The evidence that vaccines have a huge impact on hospitalisations is utterly overwhelming.

No I don't expect the paper to require significant rewriting before publication. Your understanding of science needs a complete reset though.

[alec]

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797443

Paper on incidence of long covid. It's a meta review encompassing 54 separate studies from 22 countries, plus two medical databases with 1.2 patients. Findings are again quite stark, with over 6% of covid sufferers having symptoms after three months, and around 1% of people still experiencing symptoms after a year. The study did attempt to baseline symptoms (eg patients had worse health after covid) but it's worth noting that this doesn't cover the Omicron period, and presumably booster campaigns were more widespread in 2022, so the study also misses this period.

With risks from long covid appearing to increase with each subsequent infection, as per recent paper in Nature and other studies, and vaccination only appearing to reduce the LC risk from 20% to 10%, the evidence is slowly emerging that long covid will present a very substantial global health burden unless we work to restrict transmission.

[Danny]

Oct 11, 2022 8:31:25 GMT alec said:

@dannyin exile - "didnt you post an article recently which attacked a vaccine sceptic for having published their research before peer review?"

No I didn't. What I said was caution was required, and then I attacked the paper for being very poor and biased. In this case, this is a summary of the excellent data ICNARC has been publishing for the last couple of years, so is unlikely to have any trouble getting through peer review. In terms of timings, the paper is consistent with data extending well into 2022, making your various points about the vaccines redundant. A useless vaccine would absolutely not have produced such startling benefits either. You're completely wrong on that point. Totally wrong, in fact. The evidence that vaccines have a huge impact on hospitalisations is utterly overwhelming.

No I don't expect the paper to require significant rewriting before publication. Your understanding of science needs a complete reset though.

i read the paper you cited as source for your attack on whoever critic of government policy it was.  The paper mostly attacked the way her (i think it was her) research had been published without peer review, and then attacked it as wrong. But actually wth the benefit of hindsight, she was correct in her predictions about covid. The attacking paper was writen a year or two ago and hsitory has decided she was right, not her detractors. It seems many of the papers attacking 'fake news' which you are posting are themselves the fake news.

[Danny]

Oct 11, 2022 8:48:30 GMT alec said:

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797443

Paper on incidence of long covid. It's a meta review encompassing 54 separate studies from 22 countries, plus two medical databases with 1.2 patients. Findings are again quite stark, with over 6% of covid sufferers having symptoms after three months, and around 1% of people still experiencing symptoms after a year. The study did attempt to baseline symptoms (eg patients had worse health after covid) but it's worth noting that this doesn't cover the Omicron period, and presumably booster campaigns were more widespread in 2022, so the study also misses this period.

With risks from long covid appearing to increase with each subsequent infection, as per recent paper in Nature and other studies, and vaccination only appearing to reduce the LC risk from 20% to 10%, the evidence is slowly emerging that long covid will present a very substantial global health burden unless we work to restrict transmission.

Is it as usual a paper about people who attended hospital with covid? thats how most of these studies find their subjects, from medical records. If you arent ill enough to have a hospital record about your covid illness, then you dont get included. So obviously all the people who are not very ill with covid get left out.

The original example of this was from China, where they said they had 100 patients with a new disease, most of whom were very ill. So it must be really really dangerous. Only...they ignored the thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands who also had covid but never went to hospital because they werent ill enough.

Anyone on here should understand that if you dont start a survey using a sample representative of the whole population, then the results will not be representative of the whole population.

All these people have shown is that if you are very ill with covid, it probably means you were particulalry susceptible to it from the outset. Not helpfull.

[alec]

Danny - no, your assessment is completely wrong. I'm really not sure quite why you manage to so totally misunderstand and then misrepresent good quality science analysis in such a manner. You're thinking of the Gurdasani rebuttal I posted a while ago, one of several bits of excellent deconstruction of scientific errors, and it's clear that you don't understand what it is you are reading when you attempt to engage in such topics.