Continuing coronavirus happenings (Part 1)

7 Likes

China had been periodically having new, allegedly minor, outbreaks, but (as far as I have seen) every single one was blamed on foreigners entering the country. (Not even on Chinese nationals entering the country!)

Considering the 14 day quarantine that everyone has to do upon entering China, I likewise have said “Really?”

13 Likes

Saddening statistic, that more Ghanaians have died of covid-19 in the U.K. than have died of it in the whole of Ghana

16 Likes

Or die with it, whichever. He doesn’t care as long as you get back to work. Hmmm, sounds familiar. Can’t quite… orange, I’m seeing orange. Nope, lost it.

16 Likes

image

21 Likes

Yet.

Not really surprising though, since the UK is such an amalgamation of people from all over the world. As someone posted here wayyy back in January,

3 Likes

Ah, I see it’s time for broken clock Scott Adams to be right about something for once.

26 Likes

Ha, it’s funny because the squirrel Is dead!

Wait, no… :grimacing:

7 Likes

I’d say that what’s happening in UK is a result of mismanagement at the beginning of crisis, not Chinese students. Remember when UK government wanted to go herd immunity route?

9 Likes
16 Likes

The reason people get the virus is that they come in contact with other people with the virus. Good public policy is designed to minimize that, but doesn’t cause the virus. I don’t know whether the bulk of the UK infection was due to visitors from China (there were at least 2000 from Wuhan alone in the UK in January) or to vacationers returning from places like Italy, but England being a busy international hub is certainly a factor in the spread, and the Ghanese in the UK have much more contact with people from all over the world, including infection hotspots, than do people in Ghana.

2 Likes

Something else may be also happening here. There are reports of disproportionately large numbers of Black people dying in US, and this is probably caused by the specifics of their jobs which can’t be done from home (like bus/taxi drivers, security, store workers, etc.). There may be similar disparity concerning jobs of people from Ghana who live in UK.

13 Likes
6 Likes

And yet genetic analysis of strains in the UK shows that most UK infections, unsurprisingly, came from Spain and Italy. Posh people skiing (as the first Irish cases) and Brits abroad (retirees and just in general) for which I refer you to the video of the conga line of drunken English being told to go home by Spanish police while they were singing “we’ve all got the virus, we’ve all got the virus, na na na nah”.

I know plenty of people from Wuhan province and people with family there. I have had no indication that the Chinese population in Ireland are significantly more infected and we are pretty sure where the virus predominantly came from to Ireland and, despite the large Chinese population in Dublin, it wasn’t there. We have quite large French, Spanish, and Italian populations too. Wasn’t them either.

Horsey set going to Cheltenham is pretty likely though.

EDIT Hubei. My face is red. I do know people actually in Wuhan though

18 Likes

As I suggested in my last post (“vacationers returning from places like Italy”); had I made my prediction months later I would probably have mentioned them too or instead, but then it wouldn’t have been a very interesting prediction.

Those jobs exist in Ghana as well.

For community transmission you first of all need the virus distributed in the community. Wherever it came from, I think it is pretty clear that it was in the UK community earlier and at a higher level than in Ghana.

1 Like

Has this been posted here?

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine?__twitter_impression=true

The actual fuck. What?

16 Likes

I am not so sure about the numbers, though. Ghana is one of West African countries which is rather rich, but if testing for the majority was possible, available, and implemented, I would be surprised. From what I personally experienced in hospitals in the neighbouring countries, I do believe that both cases and deaths from the whole region, including Ghana, are vastly underreported.

6 Likes

Came here to post this, was distracted.

One caveat: even though this is highly dubious indeed, I would still bet a bottle of whisky that hydroxchloroquine isn’t likely to help, and is of high risk for many patients with preexisting conditions. (My bet being informed by info I gathered from several sources, amongst them comments from the Drosten podcast regarding chloroquine when the french study kicked this thing off.

10 Likes

Oh hell yeah. The studies I’ve seen seem to imply it’s not an effective treatment. This is some kind of fictional meta analysis which is totally not unknown in other fields of science but something which I had hoped we were working to stamp out. This looks… Crazy. Like fraudulent predatory journals and fake conferences. But much worse.

Not going to take that bet!

8 Likes

Hell, yeah. And the fallout will be yuge. As this piece put it, in the bottom line:

“Here we are in the middle of a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the two most prestigious medical journals have failed us,” [Carlos Chaccour of the Institute for Global Health in Barcelona] says.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mysterious-company-s-coronavirus-papers-top-medical-journals-may-be-unraveling

Also, some details of the reporting around this case are horrible.

city government aimed to hand out more than 350,000 free doses of ivermectin

Oh glob. Based on one apparently bad actor.

police confiscated 20,000 bottles of veterinary ivermectin intended to be sold for human treatments

Oh glob. What a nightmare. Fuck yeah early stage pandemic capitalism.

“With data like this, do we even need a randomized controlled trial?”

Why, the answer seems to be yes, with an added “do not overstate your power of analysis without showing the complete data, you imbecile”, don’t you agree?

I am arguing in this topic (or the old one), way up, that fucking journos should do their fucking jobs and don’t fling around half-baked half-truths from sub-par scientific studies, that they must provide their source material (i.e., the papers) and that they should not overstate the results.

I am not taking back any of this, and I do have add that it is a deep disappointment that The Lancet seems to have failed us by publishing this piece, without the data. Theses things happen in peer review, but it is hard to see it happen now without the burning desire to kick the asses of those responsible.

13 Likes