Coronavirus?!

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nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,086
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037

Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.
...
What about Hotez’s second criterion, interrupting virus transmission, which some experts have argued17 should be the most important test in phase III studies?

“Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission,” Zaks said, “because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable.”

He repeatedly emphasised these “operational realities” of running a vaccine trial. “Every trial design, especially phase III, is always a balancing act between different needs,” he said. “If you wanted to have an answer on an endpoint that happens at a frequency of one 10th or one fifth the frequency of the primary endpoint, you would need a trial that is either 5 or 10 times larger or you’d need a trial that is 5 or 10 times longer to collect those events. Neither of these, I think, are acceptable in the current public need for knowing expeditiously that a vaccine works.”
 

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,152
(Some text removed for clarity.)

I wrote this before, but as virus mutates and the vaccine dream proves to be a fallacy, what next? This does not appear to be a virus that will go away.
1603339110707.png
From the chart above, it seems to be going away in Sweden without a vaccine and by people following reasonable common sense practices. That fact that there are several strains of what appear to be the same virus should be taken into account when interpreting the long-term implications that can be drawn from the chart.
 

MrSalts

Joined Apr 2, 2020
2,767
View attachment 220263
From the chart above, it seems to be going away in Sweden without a vaccine and by people following reasonable common sense practices. That fact that there are several strains of what appear to be the same virus should be taken into account when interpreting the long-term implications that can be drawn from the chart.
It is actually pretty welll believed within Sweden that cities empty in the summer - and amplified in 2020. People leave for summer cabins/cottages and spend little time interacting with others outside of localized pods of friends/family - the same as they have for the past 100+ years. It is not a quarantine, it is just their standard summer vacation.

On the other hand, COVID death rates may be attributed to other causes in Sweden - and euthanasia seems to be a bit more acceptable than most other places...
From Science Magazine....
Soon, infections surged. By late March, more than 30 COVID-19 patients were being admitted to ICUs every day. By early April, Sweden was recording about 90 deaths from the virus daily—a significant undercount, critics say, because many died without getting tested. Hospitals did not become as overwhelmed as those in northern Italy or New York City, but that was in part because many severely ill patients weren’t hospitalized. A 17 March directive to Stockholm area hospitals stated patients older than 80 or with a body mass index above 40 should not be admitted to intensive care, because they were less likely to recover. Most nursing homes were not equipped to administer oxygen, so many residents instead received morphine to alleviate their suffering. Newspaper reports told stories of people who died after being turned away from emergency rooms because they were deemed too young to suffer serious COVID-19 complications.​

Stockholm has been repopulated after the summer vacation season and the induction period has passed, hospitals are filling up (less old or obese people) and the death rate is about to climb.
 

joeyd999

Joined Jun 6, 2011
5,237
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/10/21/a-few-brief-updates-on-minnesota-and-elsewhere/

A reporter did ask about dates of death, finally, and here Chris just lied, really, I don’t know how she could give the answer she did. Since a couple of months after the epidemic began here, the state has been reporting deaths on a daily basis that actually occurred weeks and months ago. They continue to do that, as I stated above. She has the dates of death. States like Oregon and Florida give the actual date of death. She said the deaths were all recent, that is definitely not true.
Florida used to publish date of death for new daily death counts. But no longer.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,086
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/1...suspend-in-person-learning-under-coronavirus/
The email, sent on behalf of education Commissioner Jeff Riley, also said, “We continue to see little to no evidence of COVID-19 transmission in school settings.” The state announced Thursday that 202 teachers and staff tested positive for the highly contagious virus in the previous week, though it doesn’t mean they contracted the virus while in school.

The DESE provided the email upon request, but then didn’t respond to further questions.

The state is seeing rising case levels, closing in on 1,000 cases a day by the end of the week and hitting levels not seen since the spring peak. Boston on Wednesday made national headlines when it pulled the plug on in-person learning, citing the city’s rising positive test rate.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,220
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-old-and-young-astrazeneca-says-idUSKBN27B0IV

LONDON (Reuters) - One of the world’s leading COVID-19 experimental vaccines produces an immune response in both young and old adults, raising hopes of a path out of the gloom and economic destruction wrought by the novel coronavirus.
That's excellent news... let's hope things pan out the way they claim they do... I neve thought I'd say it, me being the social oddity that I normally am, but I'm sick and tired of all this social distancing curse,


And kudos to the authors for including this explanation in the report:
Work began on the Oxford vaccine in January. Called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the viral vector vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus that causes infections in chimpanzees.

The chimpanzee cold virus has been genetically changed to include the genetic sequence of the so-called spike protein which the coronavirus uses to gain entry to human cells. The hope is that the human body will then attack the novel coronavirus if it sees it again.
 

justtrying

Joined Mar 9, 2011
439
The flu-shot effect is likely a correlation than a cause/effect. Any hospital worker that does not get a flu shot likely practices other behaviors that increase the odds of getting the flu or COVID or ...
The mantra for hospital workers is that you get the flu shots to stop the spread of the flu because of asymptomatic transmission, same claim they are making for COVID and masks. The evidence to support it is not inconclusive based on what I have read.

I do find this interesting to put things in context: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31207-1/fulltext
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,086
The mantra for hospital workers is that you get the flu shots to stop the spread of the flu because of asymptomatic transmission, same claim they are making for COVID and masks. The evidence to support it is not inconclusive based on what I have read.

I do find this interesting to put things in context: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31207-1/fulltext
I see cloth and most masks usage by the public as a means to reduce the initial viral load a person might get at this stage of the pandemic. The virus IMO is now so contagious that universal mask usage will help to reduce the level of sickness and death of the at risk population, it won't reduce total cases by much.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,086
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