[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

Doesn't seem like any virus expert is surprised that cases are going up pretty much everywhere.
It is flu season for a reason.
Just a matter of how fast and how far it is going up.

mudbunny wrote:

*looks at Canada*

Most of Canada has followed the science. Lockdowns, masks, social isolation, etc.

And our cases are still going up.

Granted, they are not going up as fast as in the US, but they are still going up.

Given the newness of the virus, there is lots we don't know about it and how it is transmitted.

But isn't that expected? We don't have anything that would really lower the numbers do we? No vaccine, no "herd immunity" (no matter how silly that might be as a hope) and we have loosened restrictions on many activities.

Of course the numbers would go up.

I thought the goal was to have the numbers go up slowly enough or steadily enough that hospitals were not overwhelmed. I never thought we expected cases would go down.

There may not be waves of disease at all, just waves of people getting tired of being careful.

I'm not sure how to interpret when people "joke" about the flatten the curve thing. Is it a jab at public officials for being wrong or knowingly lying about how long this would go on? Is it a jab at people for believing it? Is it just a way to say "I'm exhausted, how much longer will this take"?

PoderOmega wrote:

I'm not sure how to interpret when people "joke" about the flatten the curve thing. Is it a jab at public officials for being wrong or knowingly lying about how long this would go on? Is it a jab at people for believing it? Is it just a way to say "I'm exhausted, how much longer will this take"?

I think it is all of the above depending on the context.

For example my state if I say flatten the curve it would probably be a jab at leadership. It is up to you the individual to flatten the curve. Also schools and bars are open. We must all do our part to flatten the curve. Support your local businesses.

I always see it as a frustrated jab at our determined refusal to actually heed it. We're Homer Simpson with the last remaining tomacco plant.

U.K. Preparing COVID-19 Vaccine Trials That Deliberately Expose Study Subjects

I saw this in the news last night. This is very close to the ethical dilemma that was the theme of the Star Trek Voyager episode Nothing Human. In the episode, B'Elanna Torres gets attacked by an alien bug which latches onto her. The Doctor uses the research of a Cardasian exobiologist to create a holographic version of said doctor. The ethical dilemma was due to the technique this doctor used to cure a disease. He would purposefully infect people to so he can try different treatments. Eventually he finds a cure and saves millions of Bajoran lives, but at the cost of thousands of deaths and other long term ailments (blindness was one that was mentioned).

At this point the UK research is looking for volunteers so maybe it isn't as bad, but still rubs me the wrong way. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm seems to be thrown out the window.

Ugh. Is the study guaranteeing free healthcare if/when subjects contract Covid and are hospitalized with potentially life threatening symptoms? What if a patient contracts covid and becomes a, "long hauler" with symptoms lasting for months? I assume the answer to both of these questions is that you're signing a waiver that releases these trials from any responsibility.

The fact that they're asking for subjects in the 18-30 years old range gives these individuals a better chance but still you're basically volunteering to be given a deadly disease...

In the first part of the U.K. study, researchers will try to determine the smallest amount of virus required for a person to develop COVID-19 and elicit an immune response. That phase is scheduled to be wrap up sometime next year.

"The proportion of participants becoming infected and the amount of virus that they subsequently shed will be tracked to better understand the course of infection," Imperial College London said in the statement.

JC wrote:

Ugh. Is the study guaranteeing free healthcare if/when subjects contract Covid and are hospitalized with potentially life threatening symptoms? What if a patient contracts covid and becomes a, "long hauler" with symptoms lasting for months? I assume the answer to both of these questions is that you're signing a waiver that releases these trials from any responsibility.

It's the UK. I think free healthcare happens regardless.

kazar wrote:

At this point the UK research is looking for volunteers so maybe it isn't as bad, but still rubs me the wrong way. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm seems to be thrown out the window.

By that argument, chemotherapy and radiation therapy would also never be allowed, and neither would amputation.

In exceptional circumstances, when the harm applied is less than the benefits, harm is allowed.

JC wrote:

Ugh. Is the study guaranteeing free healthcare if/when subjects contract Covid and are hospitalized with potentially life threatening symptoms? What if a patient contracts covid and becomes a, "long hauler" with symptoms lasting for months? I assume the answer to both of these questions is that you're signing a waiver that releases these trials from any responsibility.

The fact that they're asking for subjects in the 18-30 years old range gives these individuals a better chance but still you're basically volunteering to be given a deadly disease...

In the first part of the U.K. study, researchers will try to determine the smallest amount of virus required for a person to develop COVID-19 and elicit an immune response. That phase is scheduled to be wrap up sometime next year.

"The proportion of participants becoming infected and the amount of virus that they subsequently shed will be tracked to better understand the course of infection," Imperial College London said in the statement.

Yeah, this is a challenge study. IIRC from my epidemiology course, the guy who first popularized vaccines in England (Jenner? they'd been used for centuries before) did this with a little boy. Exposed him to cowpox to innoculate him from smallpox. The boy lived and then vaccinations started to take off.

ETA: and it's not approved yet. Still has to get final board approval over there. Don't know how an IRB would view it...

I wonder what the compensation for participating in the study is. Surely it's pretty high...

I got a pretty weird letter today from a company that was paying up to $450 for healthy volunteers to participate in a vaccine study.

mudbunny wrote:
kazar wrote:

At this point the UK research is looking for volunteers so maybe it isn't as bad, but still rubs me the wrong way. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm seems to be thrown out the window.

By that argument, chemotherapy and radiation therapy would also never be allowed, and neither would amputation.

In exceptional circumstances, when the harm applied is less than the benefits, harm is allowed.

I wouldnt consider any of those treatments as causing harm, unless they are healthy and the treatment is unnecessary.

mudbunny wrote:
kazar wrote:

At this point the UK research is looking for volunteers so maybe it isn't as bad, but still rubs me the wrong way. The Hippocratic Oath to do no harm seems to be thrown out the window.

By that argument, chemotherapy and radiation therapy would also never be allowed, and neither would amputation.

In exceptional circumstances, when the harm applied is less than the benefits, harm is allowed.

Someone doing a challenge doesn't currently have Covid and are not at risk of harm where the vaccine is a mitigation. A patient receiving chemotherapy already has cancer and while the treatment is harsh it's a treatment.

I know this is obvious and it shouldn't have to be spelled out, but just in case.

True, however, given the health crisis currently facing us due to COVID, I could easily see the argument being made that this would be an ethical trial to perform.

It would be a damned hard argument, but I could see it being made.

Maybe it is unethical of me to support it, but I salute those brave subjects.

One of the Oxford docs was taking about that on the news back in June or something. Honestly I thought they had already happened.

Yes it's risky. But if successful, needs a lot less subjects and gets approved and released faster.

Top_Shelf wrote:
JC wrote:

Ugh. Is the study guaranteeing free healthcare if/when subjects contract Covid and are hospitalized with potentially life threatening symptoms? What if a patient contracts covid and becomes a, "long hauler" with symptoms lasting for months? I assume the answer to both of these questions is that you're signing a waiver that releases these trials from any responsibility.

The fact that they're asking for subjects in the 18-30 years old range gives these individuals a better chance but still you're basically volunteering to be given a deadly disease...

In the first part of the U.K. study, researchers will try to determine the smallest amount of virus required for a person to develop COVID-19 and elicit an immune response. That phase is scheduled to be wrap up sometime next year.

"The proportion of participants becoming infected and the amount of virus that they subsequently shed will be tracked to better understand the course of infection," Imperial College London said in the statement.

Yeah, this is a challenge study. IIRC from my epidemiology course, the guy who first popularized vaccines in England (Jenner? they'd been used for centuries before) did this with a little boy. Exposed him to cowpox to innoculate him from smallpox. The boy lived and then vaccinations started to take off.

ETA: and it's not approved yet. Still has to get final board approval over there. Don't know how an IRB would view it...

From the CDC website:

The basis for vaccination began in 1796 when an English doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox did not show any symptoms of smallpox after variolation. The first experiment to test this theory involved milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and James Phipps, the 9 year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into Phipps’ arm.

The gardener's son took one for the team!

DSGamer wrote:

Someone doing a challenge doesn't currently have Covid and are not at risk of harm where the vaccine is a mitigation. A patient receiving chemotherapy already has cancer and while the treatment is harsh it's a treatment.

I know this is obvious and it shouldn't have to be spelled out, but just in case.

Except that the point of the trial is to figure out the effectiveness of the vaccine. If it turns out to be 50% effective, then 50% of the subjects would not have any mitigation and would be risk of harm.

Not qualified to give medical comments, but I'm not sure that is a straightforward analysis.

After being inoculated, the volunteers get exposed to real SARS-COV-2. But they would only expose the volunteers who developed antibodies from the inoculation, the point being to test those whose bodies successfully created antibodies to assess the effectiveness of the antibodies.

How is that any different? The point of the trial is to find out if those antibodies are effective and if they are not you are infecting healthy people with a deadly virus. Finding out how many people develop antibodies does not require infecting people.

Ars Technica has an article on this: Trial to deliberately infect people with coronavirus draws mixed reaction.

Basically, the criticism is that we're not learning anything we wouldn't otherwise learn from having the disease in broad pandemic status already. We may learn it faster, but the things they're studying probably won't be that useful for vaccine generation. The need for speed on this particular material doesn't seem to be there.

As far as I can tell, they're putting people at risk to get data they could get without putting people at risk, and there's no good reason to do so, as this data is not time-critical. That seems quite unethical, consent or no.

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I don't like where the daily cases numbers are trending.

I don't know if this "game" was ever posted, but it teaches you how to spot disinformation.

https://www.goviralgame.com/books/go...

He really thinks he can wish this away...

“We're going to quickly end this pandemic, this horrible plague that came in from China,” Trump said at a rally at The Villages in Florida on Friday. “Normal life will fully resume. We had the greatest economy in our history and next year will be the greatest economic year in the history of our country.”

Earlier in the rally, Trump criticized Joe Biden for only wanting to talk about coronavirus and again claimed the US is “rounding the turn.”

“You look at what is going on and we're rounding the turn, we're rounding the corner. We're rounding the corner beautifully,” Trump said.

Idaho apparently has a death wish. I don't understand how they can ignore something like this and go backwards...

IDAHO

Even as the health-care situation worsened in northern Idaho, a regional health board voted to repeal a local mask mandate. It acted moments after hearing how the Kootenai Health hospital in Coeur d’Alene had reached 99% capacity.

Kootenai is the third-most populous county in conservative Idaho.

The state is experiencing its largest coronavirus spike since the pandemic began, with new cases increasing statewide by 46.5% percent over the past two weeks. Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, has declined to take steps such as requiring masks statewide to slow the virus’ spread.

JC wrote:

He really thinks he can wish this away...

“We're going to quickly end this pandemic, this horrible plague that came in from China,” Trump said at a rally at The Villages in Florida on Friday. “Normal life will fully resume. We had the greatest economy in our history and next year will be the greatest economic year in the history of our country.”

Earlier in the rally, Trump criticized Joe Biden for only wanting to talk about coronavirus and again claimed the US is “rounding the turn.”

“You look at what is going on and we're rounding the turn, we're rounding the corner. We're rounding the corner beautifully,” Trump said.

I guess that can describe circling the drain.

81,400 new cases in the US today. Hospitalizations are increasing in 38 states, with most of the cases coming from 14 or so states. In the previous waves, most of the cases came from just a handful of states. It could be really bad if cases, hospitalizations, and deaths spike in that many places at the same time.