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[News] The Coronavirus Good News thread



Green Cross Code Man

Green Cross Code Man

Wunt be druv
Mar 30, 2006
20,740
Eastbourne
blue-shifted said:
The Farage one definitely, but i'd expect nothing less. Anyway. I shouldn't have started the discussion on the good news thread so i'll withdraw from more comments on this because I get ticked off!
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[MENTION=12101]Mellotron[/MENTION] was right, the tweets you refer to are Twitter's recommended section. It's annoying that they mix up comments from the tweet in question with irrelevant stuff and it can be confusing.
 






Mellotron

Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
darkwolf666 said:
Ok, I didn't spot any Farage stuff, so sorry!

Back to the good news...
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I'm guessing the More Tweets section might be different for each person, but then that is my frustration, as I'm thinking "Does Twitter really think this is what I want to see?"
 


















Mellotron

Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
Have lost the article that I saw last night but further good news recently on studies of "Monoclonal antibodies" as treatment, a stop gap prior to the vaccine.

Seems to make quite a big difference in severely ill patients, and could significantly improve fatality rates. Dr Fauci confirmed these should be in widespread circulation sooner than any of the vaccines, so hopefully within the next couple of months or so.

Science is continuing to effectively weaken the virus.
 


P

Postman Pat

Well-known member
Jul 24, 2007
6,972
Coldean
Mellotron said:
Have lost the article that I saw last night but further good news recently on studies of "Monoclonal antibodies" as treatment, a stop gap prior to the vaccine.

Seems to make quite a big difference in severely ill patients, and could significantly improve fatality rates. Dr Fauci confirmed these should be in widespread circulation sooner than any of the vaccines, so hopefully within the next couple of months or so.

Science is continuing to effectively weaken the virus.
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Good spot. Doubt it was the same article but


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1235753

What we're dealing with now is trying to determine what works in early disease," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a press briefing Tuesday.

Monoclonal antibodies are made in a lab to mimic the body's natural antibodies. Antibodies act by recognizing specific pathogens — in this case, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — and harnessing the immune system to fight them off.

The NIH trials will use a monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly, called LY-CoV555. This antibody was isolated from a COVID-19 patient in Washington state in the early months of the pandemic, Fauci said. It works by binding to the virus's infamous spike protein, interfering with its ability to infect cells.
 






Mellotron

Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
Postman Pat said:
Good spot. Doubt it was the same article but


https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1235753

What we're dealing with now is trying to determine what works in early disease," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a press briefing Tuesday.

Monoclonal antibodies are made in a lab to mimic the body's natural antibodies. Antibodies act by recognizing specific pathogens — in this case, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — and harnessing the immune system to fight them off.

The NIH trials will use a monoclonal antibody developed by Eli Lilly, called LY-CoV555. This antibody was isolated from a COVID-19 patient in Washington state in the early months of the pandemic, Fauci said. It works by binding to the virus's infamous spike protein, interfering with its ability to infect cells.
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It wasn't the article, but it's on the same subject/person - Eli Lilly.

This article is also worth a look;

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/viral-stun-gun-how-monoclonal-antibodies-can-help-fight-covid-n1234151?icid=related

14th July 2020
By Erika Edwards
A vaccine for the coronavirus is still months away, but a different type of drug — called monoclonal antibodies — may be reason for optimism, at least among scientists.

"Monoclonals offer a great bridge to a vaccine," Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said.

A vaccine, which would teach the immune system to mount a defense against the coronavirus on its own, is, of course, the ultimate goal. But monoclonal antibodies can provide the immune system an immediate, albeit short-lived, boost to fight off the virus.

It's not unlike the proverb, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Monoclonal antibodies are like giving the man a fish; the vaccine is teaching him to fish.

Monoclonal antibodies are currently being developed by several drugmakers, including Regeneron and Eli Lilly. Both companies began clinical trials in early June, and results are expected in the coming weeks. But what exactly are monoclonal antibodies, and how do they work? When a person is infected with a germ — a coronavirus, for example — the person's immune system creates proteins called antibodies tailor-made for that specific germ. Armed with those antibodies, the immune system can recognize the enemy in case it shows up again and fight it off.

Antibodies have been used in medicine as far back as the 1890s, when they were demonstrated to cure diphtheria, a deadly bacterial infection. This was before widespread use of antibiotics or a vaccine for diphtheria.

Diphtheria antibodies were even transported 674 miles by dogsled to Nome, Alaska, in 1925 to stop an epidemic of the disease that had killed at least five children. That daring medical response is commemorated annually with the Iditarod dogsled race.

Antibodies are now used to treat cancer, rabies, Ebola and some forms of hepatitis.

Scientists hope that COVID-19 will soon be on that list, thanks to two potential applications.

The first is convalescent plasma, an antibody-rich blood product from people who have recovered from COVID-19. Donated plasma is infused into patients to give an immediate boost to their immune system. There is anecdotal evidence it works.

But convalescent plasma relies on the altruism of blood donors, and blood donations cannot meet the demands of a pandemic. As of Friday afternoon, the U.S. had reported nearly 3.6 million COVID-19 cases, stretching hospital resources nationwide.

"We need drugs that prevent hospitalization," Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday during an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg. That includes both convalescent plasma and monoclonal antibodies, he added.

Monoclonal antibodies are made in a laboratory, designed to mimic the natural antibodies found in the body. "Monoclonals are a refinement" of the convalescent plasma process, Gronvall said, "mass producing it as a purified form."

Gronvall said that convalescent plasma contains all of a person's antibodies to a variety of pathogens, not just the coronavirus. But in the lab, scientists can pinpoint specific antibodies and then manufacture them en masse.

In this case, it's antibodies specific to the coronavirus. These are "the best of the best," Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said. "When you manufacture it, you have quality control, picking the best and giving the right quantity."

Such targeted antibodies "stun the virus," Chin-Hong said, adding it could be used as either a preventative, or for those who are already sick with the coronavirus, as a therapeutic in combination with an anti-inflammatory. While it's unclear how long the immune boost from the monoclonal antibodies would last, infectious disease experts are hopeful. Chin-Hong described monoclonal antibodies as a "force field" around the coronavirus. "There is a lot of excitement," he said.
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The article I had found (and now lost) referred to some of the early results being very promising, albeit in a small study sample - something like 17 out of 18 COVID-19 positive patients given the Monoclonal Antibodies showed significant improvement, and rapidly.
 


shingle

shingle

Well-known member
Jan 18, 2004
3,223
Lewes
A big shout out to

mellotron, postman pat, dark wolf666, Lamie, Notters, Saulth, Poojah and of course Wizzo for all the constant positive updates over the last few months, well done chaps :thumbsup:
 






Poojah

Poojah

Well-known member
Nov 19, 2010
1,881
Leeds
shingle said:
A big shout out to

mellotron, postman pat, dark wolf666, Lamie, Notters, Saulth, Poojah and of course Wizzo for all the constant positive updates over the last few months, well done chaps :thumbsup:
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Ooh, you thumbsup seeker you... :lolol:

Anyway, here's another good one, I think. As I was looking for the daily numbers from the Government, I came across what appeared to be a new (if it's not, I've been missing it) page with some new graphs showing the trends in terms of 7 daily averages. So let's take a look.

First up, we have deaths. As we know, we're continuing to see a healthy downward trend in daily deaths, clearly visible here:

cvd.png

So, that's a good start. What then, about people in hospital? Well, this is also really, really possible. Far fewer people in hospital with Covid, and even then very few in an apparently serious condition:

cvh.png

But wait a second; how does that last one make sense when it's abundantly clear that we're seeing an alarming spike in cases?:

cvc.png

This spike is surely the beginning of the inevitable second wave, right? Well, I think not. Without wanting to undermine the seriousness of a sharp rise in cases, it's also important to look at case numbers in the context of testing. So what do we see here then? Lo and behold, there has also been a spike in tests processed:

cvt.png

So, what happens when we look at positive cases as a percentage of tests processed - a far more accurate measure of the prevalence of the virus in our community? Fortunately, the government data is now provided in handy CSV format, so I quickly overlaid the two. I've only gone back as far as June to preserve the scale, but things are essentially completely flat, and have been more or less since the beginning of July; ergo, when the pubs opened:

cvp.png

What we've seen in recent days is a quite sensible approach to local lockdown. Aberdeen being a good case in point; one flare up successfully identified in one pub and boom, it's back into lockdown you go. Yes, it's inconvenient for Aberdeenian's, and no doubt for anyone such as myself living in a major conurbation it's probably inevitable that it's going to happen to you at some point, but a short-term, local inconvenience has to be better than a more significant nationwide escalation.

As an aside, one of the CSV's I downloaded included a column named: cumTestsByPublishDate. Who knew you could find out that way? At least now I have the perfect excuse when the wife catches me with my trousers down, watching something compromising on the laptop. "Just testing for corona, love...." :whistle:
 




Mellotron

Mellotron

I've asked for soup
Jul 2, 2008
32,468
Brighton
The latest update from the ZOE app (COVID-19 app run by Imperial College) also suggests that - by symptoms reported - prevalence is either holding steady or decreasing slightly at the moment. Good news.
 






K

Kinky Gerbil

Im The Scatman
NSC Patron
Jul 16, 2003
58,792
hassocks
So 10 deaths today via NHS

But there is a death on there from May and 3 from June

They need to report these deaths in a different way - it’s not helping
 


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