Category: COVID-19

What do Sciencebase readers make of the view that there will far more long-term excess deaths and misery caused by the global lockdowns than there would have been had we let this coronavirus run free? This question is about estimating the serious long-term effects rather than giving those covidiots who fancy a trip to the beach or Barnard Castle an excuse to run wild and party. It is being discussed widely by many lockdown skeptics, including very well-respected scientists such as Mark Changizi.

Obviously allowing the virus to run free would have meant overwhelming our healthcare services and there’d have been many more acute tragedies around the world. But, in the long-term the economic and social damage will ultimately lead to greater levels of suffering on a much wider scale. Ultimately, there will be many more excess deaths some argue*. This will be partly due to delayed diagnosis and treatments that will be available to everyone “after” Covid-19. It will also be partly due to mental health problems that emerge leading to an increased suicide rate caused by the loss of employment, companies collapsing, and the general negative effects of the “new normal”.

*News in today suggests that the death rate in France is the lowest it’s been for several years even when compared to a bad flu year.

Personally, I believe lockdown is the right thing to do for the sake of the more vulnerable and to avoid that overwhelming of the healthcare systems. We can try to face the issues that emerge post-Covid as they arise.

I live-tweeted a fascinating and perhaps rather depressing meeting with William Haseltine via a Reuters Newsmaker Broadcast. His talk was upbeat but the message does not offer a positive outlook unless we can collaborate internationally to identify, trace, and isolate and go back to early antivirals to treat people urgently. A vaccine will probably never be found, we must stay on top of this virus when we get communities under control. Moreover, we must recognise that another emergent pathogen could appear any time.

These are essentially my notes from Haseltines’s talk.

Might we ever achieve herd immunity?

There is no herd immunity. It doesn’t exist for any other coronaviruses, it is unlikely this one will be an exception. Sweden is a bad example of controlling this pandemic because they chased herd immunity.

Don’t assume because you’ve been infected you are immune, even if you had an antibody response. This virus doesn’t have to change to re-infect, probably because it gets in through respiratory mucus membranes, this means a vaccine may never protect as they don’t protect such membranes. Vaccines work in the blood.

Remember, as long as one person in the world is infected, we’re all at risk. This pandemic started with one person, after all.

The US has to collaborate with China. We’re one world, we need a one-world solution. We’re not in a race, this isn’t a competition, we’re one species. We have to work together against this virus.

If not a vaccine, then treatments?

Monoclonal antibody infusions may be the first line of therapy to work and then possibly small-molecule antiviral drugs. We may never have a vaccine. Do not count on the possibility of a vaccine. See also HIV. The SARS and MERS vaccines didn’t work…but we can control it by identifying infection, tracing people, and isolating them (controlled quarantine with healthcare). This has worked in Beijing and even Wuhan.

Don’t even need to test. If you’ve been in contact – isolate!

Opening up is possible but needs full contact tracing and quarantine and immediate lockdown if there’s an outbreak. We have to look at this as a long-term approach: identifying those infected, isolating them, tracing their contacts, and putting placing them all in quarantine. Summarily.

Monoclonal antibodies are expensive and will need blends of 2-3 to overcome viral mutations. Chemical therapies [pharmaceuticals] will be cheaper and easier…when we can identify the compounds that work. But will companies make them affordable?

What about Trump’s claims to be taking a drug for this disease?

Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t prevent or treat the disease and if you have heart problems it can kill you. Trump’s probably not taking it and he’s saying he is for purely political reasons to encourage people back to work in time for the presidential election. Science denialists and antivaxxers are a big problem.

This virus is transmitted all summer long but will peak in the winter as do some other viruses. We don’t know why. Some viruses like rhinoviruses and polio peak in the summer. [Incidentally, polio is airborne, facemasks would have prevented its spread rather than avoiding swimming].

There’s a Covid-19 spike in Mumbai where it is hot and humid, right now. When the winter flu comes around again will it overload our hospitals when beds are still needed for Covid patients

Did we learn nothing from earlier epidemics, such as AIDS, SARS, MERS?

The scientific and medical community learned a lot…that might all be applied to the current virus. But in some cities 70% of 15-25 females are still infected with HIV. Some parts of the world learned from SARS etc, but did we? We’re part of nature, we can’t control it. Viruses are part of nature. We knew this was coming, it was predicted, but we have to prepare for the next one, this is not the last. Devastation to lives, economies, opportunities. We have to prep ourselves.

We need to strengthen education so people understand science and technology for the next time…strengthen our healthcare systems, overcome the science denialism.

Also, learn from Singapore and don’t neglect neglected communities such as migrant workers [and ethnic minorities] they need to be protected too!

What are the wider impacts?

National debts are going to be 5-10 times bigger than they were at the start of the pandemic, this means more taxes, this means limited opportunities for investment and for young people, for everyone…

As an e.g. of that Jeremy Corbyn’s “debt” plans if he’d got 5 years as British Prime Minister have already been exceeded massively in the UK by the government that beat him.

Might we find anti-viral drugs?

There are half a dozen antivirals that were developed for SARS that might work against Covid, but they were never stockpiled so we don’t have them to use right now. We have stockpiles of anti-anthrax drugs and treatments for bioweapons. We could’ve stockpiled against this natural terrorist.

We need to use all the scientific tools we have to defend ourselves against all the future threats too…governments are there to protect us, but they’re not doing that…they should be not just bioterrorism but natural terrorism.

We’re learning things all the time about how someone might seem to have recovered but then suffer effects weeks later, we need to understand why. At the beginning of the crisis, 90% of people on ventilators died, but then they spotted blood clots were killing so now using anticoagulants and that has fallen to 30%..

School’s out forever?

The rules of this coronavirus are not any different from common cold transmission…this is essentially a lethal cold virus…you catch colds easily from children [See also polio]. Multiple-organ effects can kill children. This is not a simple pneumonia.

What about travel and holidays?

It’s going to be a long, long time before we get back to travelling the world…especially for Americans…the rest of the world doesn’t want them coming to their countries.

Could the virus have started somewhere other than the Wuhan market?

Yes. Easily. Someone could’ve turned up infected and entered the market. But the viruses are coming along all the time from animals. It’s very, very unlikely that it came from a lab. [It didn’t, in other words].

Footnote
Dr William Haseltine is a scientist, businessman, and philanthropist. He is well-known as a pioneer in the fight against HIV/AIDS and cancer. He was in conversation with Reuters Global Managing Editor Alessandra Galloni on 20th May 2020, with additional questions from invited representatives of the media.

A doctor at Queen’s Hospital offers some self-care advice for people with Covid-19 to help prevent pneumonia developing. The bottom line is that you need to keep your lungs working as well as they can.

1. Sit up, take a deep breath, hold it for five seconds. Do this five times and on the fifth breath, have a good cough into a tissue or cloth and safely bin it. Repeat this whole procedure. This will all help expel fluid/mucus from the lungs.

2. Lie on your stomach and breath fairly deeply for ten minutes. The main mass of your lungs is actually closer to your back than the front of your chest so this presumably allows them to fill even more efficiently than they do when you’re supine. The exercises will keep up the strength in your breathing muscles.

3. Repeat instructions 1 and 2 regularly.

Breathing exercises and posture are important generally. So, it is perhaps worth doing these exercises regardless of whether you have Covid-19 or not.

In a recently published review dedicated to the diagnostics of viral infections, a Russian research team featuring MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) researchers is the first to systematically describe and summarize the cutting-edge technologies available. A number of new effective methods of virus detection have been developed over the past few years, including those targeted at unknown pathogens. The authors described the so-called high-throughput next-generation sequencing as a potent new approach. The method promises to revolutionize the detection and analysis of new pathogenic viruses, but it will be at least several years until it is introduced into mainstream clinical practice.

“There are, by various statistical estimations, over 320,000 viruses that can infect mammals,’ explains MIPT’s Kamil Khafizov. “To date, less than 1% of this vast multitude has been studied.”

Most viruses, including those that cause respiratory, digestive, and other diseases in humans, remain unresearched and thus almost undetectable. The reason behind this is the narrow spectrum of viruses that the modern testing systems are designed to target.

‘Metaphorically, we are attempting to look at a vast sea of threats through the eye of a needle,’ the authors write in the review. Among other things, they explore the shortcomings of the polymerase chain reaction method. This essential technique for microorganism molecular testing fails to identify poorly explored viruses, and this constitutes one of the key problems in modern virology. There are, however, new methods that may potentially solve the issues of detecting and identifying new microorganisms. The authors describe next-generation sequencing as the most promising. Also known as high-throughput sequencing, it enables the analysis of multiple DNA molecules in parallel, be it a set of samples, different regions of the same genome, or both.

“Efficient mathematical algorithms are a key part of the method,” explains says MIPT grad student Alina Matsvay. “They allow researchers to compare the genome of an unknown virus against all available references of viral genomes, and predict all of its possible characteristics, including its pathogenic potential.”

Khafizov noted that the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the importance of next-generation sequencing methods for identifying new pathogens in clinical samples and studying the molecular mechanisms of virus transmission from animals to humans.

https://doi.org/10.3390/v12020211

Scientists in the UK are developing a new smart testing device for the coronavirus and now need backers to get the device manaufactured quickly and in large quantities.

The team from Brunel University London, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey reckon the can test for Covid-19 infection in half an hour. The device has already been successfully tested in The Philippines to check chickens for viral infection and the team has now adapted it to detect Covid-19 in people. The system is quick and easy to use, requires little training and could be used by healthcare workers and even lay people.

“Now we have access to multiple genomes (blueprint) of SARS-CoV-2 virus, we can develop reliable molecular assay in a week and have them up and running on the device in three or four weeks,’ explains Brunel’s Wamadeva Balachandran. “We are confident it will respond well, and we rapidly need industrial partners to come on board. It will have a huge impact on the population at large,” he adds.

The operator takes an oral or nasal swab, puts it into the device and connects to the smart phone app. Samples do not need to go to a laboratory and the same device can be used to test six samples simultaneously. The addition of telemedicine functionality will make the device even more useful. The idea is to try and make it cheaper than other tests so it can be used worldwide at home, in doctor’s surgeries, hospitals, and workplaces. Once the infection is identified, the intelligent system will track down all people who had close contact with the newly identified patient in the previous two weeks and alert them to the threat.

Source: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/uk-scientists-develop-new-rapid-smart-testing-device-for-coronavirus

I am receiving an inordinate number of personal messages on social media and emails asking about different aspects of Covid-19 and the coronavirus. Often the question will be about some email that has purportedly arrived from a friend of a friend in China or Italy or wherever and claiming all sorts of conspiratorial nonsense, proclaiming the end of civilisation, or pointing out how some miracle cure might be a miracle cure (it won’t be). Often recipients are told to urgently share the message with all their contacts.

Now, I am not medically trained, I cannot give medical advice. But, what I do know is that random notes of unknown original source about scientific and medical matters from non-scientist, non-medical friends are invariably BS, they were long before Covid-19 and will remain so long after it’s over and we’ve moved on to the next crisis.

Often the BS is sprinkled with truth glitter as a kind of camouflage, but the stinking turd beneath the shiny, thin veneer of sparkles is still unpolished, fake news, scam fodder, or somehow maliciously biased ordure. It may also just be common or garden bovine waste of the kind you might use to condition allotment soil to make your rhubarb grow thicker if there were not sufficient equine output available.

If you receive such a message, just delete it. It takes a simple swipe, tap or click and you can then forget about it. Please don’t share it. Please don’t email it to people you imagine might be able to remove the glitter and reveal some hidden truth.

If you have real concerns and questions about Covid-19 and the coronavirus that causes it, visit the websites of the NHS or the WHO and take note of their advice and guidance.

Stay well friends :-)

There is a lot of disinformation about Covid-19 (FAQ here) out there and it can be very disheartening to read the nonsense and conspiracy theories especially when they come from moronic world leaders.

Indeed, when the US president tweets that there is no problem and then a week later claims he knew it was a pandemic before anyone else it becomes very depressing watching this play out. His daily “fake news” tweets about what drugs might work are completely inappropriate from a pharmacological point of view. He mentioned one drug that would have no effect on a virus and then a drug combination that can actually cause heart failure and so is never used.

Additionally, some countries (the UK) are misguidedly opting for their own version of the WHO recommendations. This seems just as ludicrous especially when we were still seeing people huddled together in pubs until last Friday and teens on the street even today acting as if nothing has changed in the world.

It makes one wonder how we are ever going to get through this. I have pointed out elsewhere, with my purportedly scientific head-on, that as far as I understand it there are many significant obstacles to overcome yet. It is not yet known whether post-infection immunity for those who recover from the disease persists. Also, we have not found a way to make vaccines for other coronaviruses, so what are the chances with this one.

There is a glimmer of hope. Scientists have known about the possibility of an emergent pandemic for decades. I reviewed a book – Virus – for New Scientist back in the day (1997) that predicted the emergence of such a disease. We have seen some hints of such an outbreak that would engulf the world with SARS and MERS and others and we managed to overcome those. We have known about coronaviruses for decades and studied them in detail. We have known that some coronaviruses that infect bats could make the leap from bat to human without chicken or pig as an intermediary. One potentially lethal coronavirus was found in the Brazilian vampire bat in 2008, for instance. As such, we have been analysing them in detail and accumulating fundamental scientific knowledge.

That knowledge was never going to stop the emergence of a pandemic virus, but we can build on what we have learned in the last 20 to 30 years and ultimately find a way to overcome this disease.

Within minutes of writing this blog post, an update arrived on how the WHO is about to push fast-track megatrials of four contenders for drug combinations to beat the disease.

In the meantime, keep your distance and be vigilant of symptons.

Most of us will get through this together…apart.

Stay well