COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[St.Pauli support]

That's not even possible is it? I thought all clinical trials had to last at least a year?

It depends on several things.
CureVac need a best case development of the vaccine candidate. Clinical studies could start early summer.

Approval standards are high, but EU commission president yesterday said
they would think about reducing "bureaucracy" in this extraordinary situation.

On the other hand, a German member of the World Health Council pointed out that approval of a new vaccine will require
1) safety and 2) efficiency of the candidate.
No way the life of young healthy persons should be at risk by reducing necessary approval time.
It would be an ethical discussion.

 

[Gabriel]

It was an unintentional mistake Bob! I walked into the bedroom and there was Piers Morgan on the TV!!! Of course, I did a "Don't look at the Gorgon" and swiftly averted my gaze, but unfortunately I heard him. I feel violated.

There was considerable relief when I reached that point in the sentence.

 

[cibaman]

Didn’t they come up with a vaccine for swine flu in a much shorter timeframe?

 

[George Hannah]

Suppression is aimed at eliminating the virus by reducing R to below 1, whereas mitigation aims at reducing the effects of the virus but maintaining R above 1 so that society takes on immunity.

See the Imperial College document for discussion of suppression v mitigation https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf It's possible the terms have been used in different senses elsewhere.

In yesterday's briefing Vallance was asked explicity about this and he gave the reply I quoted. Imperial College researchers and the SAGE committee use the term suppression to refer to suppressing the infection peak. See 22:18 in for the question and 22:28 in for the answer - expanded after about 34'

 

[mancity2012_eamo]

Unrelated to the above, I thought I would post some other thoughts...

We face two possible ways out of this mess right now. (A) A short, sharp shock, or (B) Less severe measures but over a longer period.

It seems clear to me that (A) is the best route forward at this point. If we clamp down *hard* now on unecessary movement, it will more effectively stop the numbers rising, and from a lower peak, they will fall back more quickly. We could be out of this phase and back into "containment" again - with life having a chance of vaguely returning to normal fairly quickly. The minimum numbers of businesses will have gone bust and the maximum numbers of people will be financially OK.

The alternative - the path we are on at the moment - is a mistake. Allowing people to go to pubs and to meet socially if they wish is stupid. It isn't going to keep any significant number of businesses going, because the numbers of people still going out is so low. All it does is means the clamp down will have to go on longer, because the peak numbers of infections (and dead people!) will be higher and reached later, and take longer to reduce back down. More businesses will be in trouble, more people tearing their hair out, feeling unable to go out. More people dead, and for what? So a small minority can act irresponsibly? Why???

We need to lock down HARD, right now. Troops in the streets, the full works. Only trips to supermarket or pharmacy or food drop offs to relatives allowed. If we do this, we can have this under control in only a few weeks. If not, it will drag on for months and months.

I'm no expert. But I do believe you are correct. It is the most logical conclusion in my opinion and always was, with the evidence that we are being presented with.
From my rudimentary understanding of biology, any pathogen needs a host to thrive and multiply in.
If you close down and stop the spread, each pathogen has a time span that it can survive outside of a host.
We are not going to fully eradicate the virus but, as you say, stopping it in it's tracks and getting us back to a containment phase, with a wider understanding amongst the population of what compliance to the regulations can do, will buy a lot of time hopefully before the next spike.
Hopefully that time bought will be enough for a vaccine to be developed and tested.

Just my opinion and has been all along.

 

[twosips]

The article explains that they will try to shorten the trials without compromising the safety of the vaccine. They'll try to deliver the vaccine in the autumn, I.e. before Christmas, so more like 9 months from now rather than 6. Would still be great if they do it. The boss of the company says it's possible, so it might be possible indeed.

I'd be amazed if they do. The reason clinical trials are so long now is because of the Thalidomide tragedy. In this case it was causing horrible birth defects in new borns, which obviously is a long term thing. The bodies that approve these kind of things are extremely cautious as they know its better to be safe than sorry in case it only makes matters worse.

https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/thalidomide-tragedy-lessons-drug-safety-and-regulation

 

[AlgarveBlu]

Unrelated to the above, I thought I would post some other thoughts...

We face two possible ways out of this mess right now. (A) A short, sharp shock, or (B) Less severe measures but over a longer period.

It seems clear to me that (A) is the best route forward at this point. If we clamp down *hard* now on unecessary movement, it will more effectively stop the numbers rising, and from a lower peak, they will fall back more quickly. We could be out of this phase and back into "containment" again - with life having a chance of vaguely returning to normal fairly quickly. The minimum numbers of businesses will have gone bust and the maximum numbers of people will be financially OK.

The alternative - the path we are on at the moment - is a mistake. Allowing people to go to pubs and to meet socially if they wish is stupid. It isn't going to keep any significant number of businesses going, because the numbers of people still going out is so low. All it does is means the clamp down will have to go on longer, because the peak numbers of infections (and dead people!) will be higher and reached later, and take longer to reduce back down. More businesses will be in trouble, more people tearing their hair out, feeling unable to go out. More people dead, and for what? So a small minority can act irresponsibly? Why???

We need to lock down HARD, right now. Troops in the streets, the full works. Only trips to supermarket or pharmacy or food drop offs to relatives allowed. If we do this, we can have this under control in only a few weeks. If not, it will drag on for months and months.

This is the problem though none of this works on a unilateral basis in relation to moving on to phase 2 of lockdown which is going back to shutdown - Gordon Brown was bang on about this - it's a global pandemic which needs global solutions and most importantly coordination between the governments of the world to buy as time to get the anti virals/vaccines we need. Questions we should generally be looking at for phase 2 -

1) What is the agreed trigger targets for lock down back to shut down - Assuming it will be based on medical data targets

We have different countries in Europe running different policies on this so we are already going to be showing inconsistent data on rates of infections in the same geographical land mass as well as on hospitalisations, mortalities. If we are going to then thereafter adopt a herd immunity variant policy its vital that it has the consensus of the leading scientists - not easy I know.

2) Travel/movement policies

A shambolic mess by the EU in trying to unify the member states when you would have thought that this would be one of the very bloody reason they were created for after ww2 and with the UK, and member states taking unilateral decisions by the day; scratch that, we are even having regional areas adopting a mismatch approach in their own country. Italy is partly in the mess it is in because of this. The timing of these implementations are everywhere and everyone in close proximity is either a few weeks behind in front of someone else.

3) Health services - this is the frontline for every nation in terms of determining the number of mortalities we will experience, lets try and get a central location/point of coordination to feed back data from every country in Europe's land mass where we put the external borders out. We can then feed back a host of medical information on what policies, equipment are working, where we are seeing negative/positive results in procedures/safety policies that work better for front line staff and possible movement of equipment and personnel to really badly effected areas on our doorstep should one nation be experiencing better capacity at any given time etc etc we need an equivalent of a medical body of the stature of the CDC as the final go to for 500 million odd people.

In my opinion the above should be split between the different continental shelves to have their own continental decision making teams (working broadly on the same guidelines taking into account regional differences for culture, religion, politics etc) with access to pooled data from their regions and a policy that will allow each continent to agree when it is most desirable to go back to shutdown phase whilst we cocoon ourselves from other continents whilst we either catch up or wait for them to catch us up. The UK/Ireland is a perfect example of the stupidity on running different policies on testing and movement of people within the same landmass what one does directly effects the other and pretty much negates each others policies. If the UK, Italy or France etc start determining their own policies for going back to shutdown from lockdown we are all basically back in exactly the same spot as before looking left and right, up and down to see where the weakest link in the long chain is on our immediate borders.

When this is all over we can all go back to singing the national anthems but without cooperation and high level coordination this project is going to take a lot longer than it may need to.

 

[mancity2012_eamo]

The path we are on now is to option A. I’m surprised you can’t see that.

It is, but you could argue that it could be moving quicker to the inevitable shutdown.

 

[George Hannah]

I'm no expert. But I do believe you are correct. It is the most logical conclusion in my opinion and always was, with the evidence that we are being presented with.
From my rudimentary understanding of biology, any pathogen needs a host to thrive and multiply in.
If you close down and stop the spread, each pathogen has a time span that it can survive outside of a host.
We are not going to fully eradicate the virus but, as you say, stopping it in it's tracks and getting us back to a containment phase, with a wider understanding amongst the population of what compliance to the regulations can do, will buy a lot of time hopefully before the next spike.
Hopefully that time bought will be enough for a vaccine to be developed and tested.

Just my opinion and has been all along.

Everything you say there seems to be common ground with our the government and every other rational individual - it's CB's call for "troops on the streets" that's completely OTT in the present circumstances

 

[cibaman]

it's tricky. It was explained today in the select committee.
If the first person has it then anyone else in isolation with them will get it within the first 5 days and show symptoms a couple of days later. They will all get it if it's really COVID. The example given is so remote that it doesn't matter.
The other house members in this case should only isolate if they show symptoms.

The same bloke completely contradicted himself this morning