Coronavirus 2019-2020 thread (no unsubstantiated rumours!)

Well, that would require many countries testing their early samples and compare them with the known Chinese strains. However, I kind of sense that no one will do that... So all those mysterious pneumonia cases will stay mysterious...
I assume you've reacted to my kind of casual point Yesterday at 7:46 PM
"(but of course one might claim a already infected foreigner visited Wuhan and so on, LOL)"

my main point has been "if the virus didn't originate in China, there would be an outbreak in other-than-China country last year, I guess"
 

superdog

Junior Member
All those things are to be carefully monitored in the test groups to see how they are affected by the vaccine; I understand that. I was saying that there's basically nothing be be gained from a control group, which is basically injected with just the saline that the vaccine is suspended in. Scientifically speaking, strictly, you need a control group to make sure there was nothing wrong with your medium and that the therapeutic effects seen aren't due to placebo effect but in this case, there's really no reason as no placebo effect in the world can create specific antibodies.
My point was simply that placebo control allows for more reliable measure of the various physiological effects of the vaccine, so that's not "nothing" to be gained.

Why not? Young and healthy people have nearly zero chance of mortality, especially if religiously monitored and provided top tier care. If you don't run the test through to show that the vaccine actually defends against COVID-19 challenge, you risk administering a vaccine that doesn't work to millions of people. If you run phase 3, it takes an incredibly long time and people are dying. On the other hand, if you do a COVID-19 challenge on a smaller (but still statistically significant) group, you speed things along dramatically. Labs are considering it and people are willing; check it out:
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There has been many cases of young people dying from COVID-19, the reported fatality rate may be low (around 0.2% for age groups under 39) but shouldn't be regarded as "nearly zero". Not to mention there are also those who survived with permanent organ damage. With a few hundred subjects, you will very likely kill some people and permanently cripple some others. Phase III actually require thousands if not tens of thousands of subjects, results obtained by tracking their natural infection rate, not by intentionally giving them the virus.

On the other hand, if you only do it on a handful of subjects, you won't have enough statistical data to calculate efficacy. Without large scale clinical trials you also risk missing fatal side effects which could result in massive death tolls comparable to that of COVID-19 when vaccination was applied to the entire population.

As for the news you quoted, they're not hiring volunteers to be infected with COVID-19, they specifically said it'd be a safer type of coronavirus. There are very tame types of coronavirus out there, some only causes common cold.
 
Germany has 20,000 intensive care beds reported, of which 12,000 are currently occupied. Among them are 2500 Covid-19 patients, predictable treatments for other diseases had to be postponed. The number of seriously ill Covid-19 patients will increase in the next 14 days. But the authorities have calculated that the free intensive care beds will be enough (
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).

The number of available intensive care beds determines how strong the measures have to be and how much freedom can remain for a functioning economy.

Because every change takes effect in 14 days and has to be predicted, the government's voting process is very intense and emotional. In fact, there are 17 governments: the federal government and 16 state governments. Not an easy job!

The number of active cases is decreasing in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
could be Germany found a 'sweet spot' I mean countries more to the West did nothing and have more dead, but in countries more to the East countermeasures are stricter than in Germany as far as I noticed, which is obviously inconvenient, though resulting in a lower number of deaths so far

before you start nitpicking:
Italian tragedy is well-known, plus it's different in Sweden and Belarus Tuesday at 10:42 AM
I guess the most interesting now is Sweden situation (
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Date 04.04.2020)
in short, they ignore COVID-19 (so does Belarus:
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6 days ago)

time will tell the rest
 

Intrepid

Major
How people live, how close they get in everyday life, how often and how far they travel - everything matters.

What measures are ordered and, above all, whether people adhere to them also plays a role.
 
in response to someone in some other thread I posted Mar 26, 2020

tn_uk-flag.gif

United Kingdom



Deaths:
578
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it sounded like a lot at that time to me (apparently not to the other guy though), and sixteen (16) days later they'll likely have 1k dead in one day:
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EDIT now noticed it'd mean 10k dead in total reached today

Last updated: April 11, 2020, 09:56 GMT

tn_uk-flag.gif

United Kingdom

Coronavirus Cases:

73,758

Deaths:
8,958
 
Last edited:

Intrepid

Major
oops, ...
"'The number will only increase, 91 is just the beginning now,' said Kim Woo-joo, professor of infectious diseases at Korea University Guro Hospital.

The KCDC’s Jeong raised the possibility that rather than patients being re-infected, the virus may have been 'reactivated'.

Kim also said patients had likely 'relapsed' rather than been re-infected.

False test results could also be at fault, other experts said, or remnants of the virus could still be in patients’ systems but not be infectious or of danger to the host or others."
 
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