[News] The Coronavirus Good News thread

[Poojah]

Prof JVT was brilliant on his live Q&A today - would highly recommend anyone watch a recording of it if they are worried. As usual a hugely reassuring presence.

I'll hold my hands up, I didn't like JVT at the outset. Looking back, if I'm completely honest with myself, it was simply because he wasn't telling me this was all going to be over in a few weeks and I'd be enjoying a pint at the footy again in no time at all. He was simply stating the facts of course, and sometimes the truth hurts - the unfolding situation was difficult to comprehend for someone born in 1985 and who had only ever experienced peace and stability (the occasional, distant terror attack aside).

However, I've really begun to appreciate the man's brilliant ability to calmly state the facts in a measured and reassuring manner whenever possible, and with quiet caution whenever the situation has called for it. Good communication is so, so important at the moment and yet there has sadly been so little of it.

Probably an accolade he'd have never expected, but one of the great communicators of our time.

 

[The Wizard]

This is further information about the Budesonide reducing serious cases by NINETY percent, 10 people required more treatment in the control arm, 1 person in the Budesonide arm. A small study yes but that is really remarkable, as it’s a pre tested and very cheap drug you’d think this could be tested and rolled out very quickly.

 

[dazzer6666]

 

[Weststander]

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Interesting. Is there a graph that extends back to Marc/April 2020 too?

 

[dazzer6666]

Interesting. Is there a graph that extends back to Marc/April 2020 too?

Not that I can see. I’ve asked them......

 

[dazzer6666]

Interesting. Is there a graph that extends back to Marc/April 2020 too?

Quick response from them on Twitter. Data was only collected from March.

 

[Mellotron]

[TWEET]1359557811638833154[/TWEET]

Hint - you need to click into the pictures/tweet to see the important part of the right hand graph.

 

[Weststander]

Quick response from them on Twitter. Data was only collected from March.

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Thanks very much, I guessed the graph would look something like that.

A long time ago now, but I recall at the very beginning countless folk coming out of the woodwork saying they’d had Coronavirus and Coronavirus symptoms. People, and many still do, attributing their colds all the way back to September 2019 to the pandemic. GP’s and hospitals were hit by a wave of people claiming they had it.

There was a lack of knowledge all round at that stage.

 

[thedonkeycentrehalf]

My parents both got their jabs today (AZ).

Even better, they had a message yesterday to say that instead of having it in a centre that was a 20 minute drive away, they could go to their local clinic a five minute walk away. As they live up on the Notts/Yorkshire border, makes me much more comfortable now that they have had the jab.

 

[Poojah]

I thought this was a very good, sensible and above all reassuring article by The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...rd-vaccine-covid-19-jab-south-african-variant

The Oxford jab is less protective against the South African variant – but that's no disaster

The news that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is less protective against the South African variant of Covid-19 has caused a lot of concern. But before we start worrying, we should first be clear about the details. While the current vaccine has less efficacy against the South African variant, it offers only slightly less protection when used on the variant first identified in Kent. And it is still thought to be likely that the vaccine will protect against serious disease caused by the South African variant.

This is an important detail. The current death toll in the UK is frighteningly high. Thousands of people are in hospital being treated for Covid-19, and many more are dying at home. Our first priority is to ease the death toll and the number of hospital admissions, which are overwhelming the NHS. If the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is still effective at preventing serious disease caused by the South African variant, then it should help with both of these things. A vaccine that prevents serious illness is more than adequate for the time being to get the pandemic under control.

In general, vaccines of all types are most effective at preventing severe illness and less effective at preventing mild to moderate illness. Vaccines work by preparing the body’s immune system so that if it encounters the virus, it recognises it immediately. After a person has been vaccinated, they may have sufficient neutralising antibodies circulating in their bloodstream to destroy a virus before it can cause infection. If they don’t, they will have memory cells, which can rapidly produce the necessary antibodies. Vaccination also primes the immune system to produce other responses, such as T cells, which destroy cells infected by the virus. This immune response may take a little time, in which the virus might start to cause a few symptoms. But the effects of the vaccine can still kick in in time to prevent serious illness.

Of course, if we are to beat this virus altogether, we will need vaccines that prevent infection and transmission. It’s not yet clear if current vaccines will prevent people who have been vaccinated from transmitting the virus, even for the original variants of the virus. Phase 3 trials have been unable to demonstrate this. But there’s good reason to hope they will – not least because of reports that the AstraZeneca vaccine appears to reduce infections by 67%.

Scientists who have been alarmed by the spread of diseases such as Sars, Mers and Ebola have been working for more than a decade on what they call “platforms” – systems that allow for the rapid design and creation of vaccines. In the past, developing vaccines followed a “one drug, one bug” approach, where scientists would scramble for a new treatment with each new virus. The traditional way of making a vaccine would involve growing a pathogen in bulk before injecting a small, neutralised amount of virus or bacterium into patients, whose immune systems would react to the antigens on its surface and develop antibodies that could ward off the disease.

But vaccine platforms allow scientists to identify a pathogen’s genes and then “plug” the genes for the part of the virus – the antigen – against which humans need to develop antibodies. Once you’ve developed a platform for delivering a vaccine, you can easily and quickly plug different genetic material into it, making it possible to develop vaccines for different variants much more quickly than before.

As new variants of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – are found, producing vaccines against them should be relatively straightforward. And so long as the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency treats these new vaccines like the annually updated seasonal flu vaccines, rather than as brand new vaccines, they should be available relatively quickly. In the future, we might even have a single injection every year to protect us against new variants of both Sars-CoV-2 and influenza.

Future vaccines against new variants will help reduce cases even further, suppressing transmission and eventually bringing the R number below one. At this point, the disease will start to die out. For now, however, even if the vaccines we have aren’t perfect against all variants, we need to go full steam ahead and vaccinate as many people as possible to prevent serious illness and deaths from Covid-19. Once we have reduced the number of hospitalisations and deaths, we can then focus on suppressing infection, transmission and mild-to-moderate cases of the disease.

 

[Mellotron]

[TWEET]1359868015580508174[/TWEET]

 

[The Wizard]

NHS England report 494 deaths, down from 630 reported last Thursday & 907 two weeks ago.

The usual caveat that 494 is still a lot of people, but reducing at a great rate now and that’s almost 50% down on two weeks ago, I’m not sure we saw such a steep decline the first wave.

 

[blue-shifted]

NHS England report 494 deaths, down from 630 reported last Thursday & 907 two weeks ago.

The usual caveat that 494 is still a lot of people, but reducing at a great rate now and that’s almost 50% down on two weeks ago, I’m not sure we saw such a steep decline the first wave.

Don't think it got that high in the first wave ...... but take your (many people are now immune through having had it or been vaccinated) point

 

[The Wizard]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56024772

Arthritis drug can reduce deaths in severely ill by nearly FIFTY percent

(Thought I’d write that like a daily Mail headline to really make my point )

 

[A1X]

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56024772

Arthritis drug can reduce deaths in severely ill by nearly FIFTY percent AND increase house prices by up to £150,000

(Thought I’d right that like a daily Mail headline to really make my point )

FTFY

 

[blue-shifted]

Glad we're not going to have to listen to Trump trying to pronounce tocilizumab

 

[MJsGhost]

EDIT: Don't want to derail the good news thread!

 

[dazzer6666]

Daily data update from the official website, all trends remain very positive :

Infections - 13,494, rolling 7 day down 28.6%
Admissions 1,842 rolling 7 day down 22.5%
Deaths - 678, rolling 7 day down 25.9%
Vaccinations - 450,810 (slightly down on last Thursday's reported number). First jab total 13,509,108 - so likely we will be well over 15m reported on 15th Feb.

 

[The Wizard]

 

[Poojah]

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That’s as conclusive a piece of real world data as I’ve seen so far. There’s simply no other explanation for it. If you look at where the over 60s line would be now had it continued on its northward trajectory (around 150 hospitalisations per day, roughly), it would seem that as of yesterday vaccinations were preventing roughly 50% of ‘expected’ hospitalisations, with the picture getting markedly better day-by-day.

Encouraging stuff.

Edit: looking at that graph again I’ve completely misread the axis. The 60+ cohort would probably have been well in excess of 200 hospitalisations per day, it appears that serious illness is already being reduced by more than two thirds, not the 50-ish figure I’ve quoted above. Even more encouraging.