Talk:Coronavirus

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People to follow:

Twitter:

Marc Lipsitch

Infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist, aspirational barista. mlipsitc@hsph.harvard.edu Director

Florian Krammer

Viruses, viruses, viruses and vaccines / Professor at the Department of Microbiology Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Nicholas A. Christakis

Sterling Professor of Social & Natural Science at Yale. Physician. Author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.

Christakis' thread-of-threads on C19

In this thread, I collect the threads about #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 that I have prepared on various aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. Please note that the situation is fluid and knowledge may change and be updated. Feel free to suggest topics in response to this tweet. 1/

Trevor Bedford

Scientist @fredhutch, studying viruses, evolution and immunity.


WHO Coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) situation reports


How long can the novel coronavirus survive on surfaces and in the air? Economist

A new study shows that SARS-CoV-2 can linger in the air for hours and on some materials for days

Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1 NEJM


Younger adults are large percentage of coronavirus hospitalizations in United States, according to new CDC data WaPo


We’re not going back to normal by Gideon Lichfield, MIT Tech Rev, Mar 17, 2020

Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.


A Silent Hero of the Coronavirus Crisis project-syndicate Role of technology in tackling crisis


In the Battle Against Coronavirus, Humanity Lacks Leadership Time


Imperial paper

Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand

A chilling scientific paper helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies WaPo

Twitter thread by Jeremy C. Young

We can now read the Imperial College report on COVID-19 that led to the extreme measures we've seen in the US this week. Read it; it's terrifying. I'll offer a summary in this thread; please correct me if I've gotten it wrong.

The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China/Korea/Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation: what happens if the US does absolutely nothing -- if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course?

Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself.

It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.

So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die.


Leslie Davenport on staying sane amid coronavirus craziness Post Carbon Institute


WaPo C19 simulator


Tom Nicholas

I made a mathematical model to predict the spread of Coronavirus given different assumptions about how we respond - you can have a look here:

https://github.com/TomNicholas/coronavirus/blob/master/covid-19_model.ipynb

The idea is to show how even a very simple model can capture the trends which are currently making the headlines.

For example the attached graph shows how "flattening the curve" through aggressive social distancing and quarantining measures would reduce the overall mortality rate by easing strain on the healthcare system.

The initial simple model is extended to look at:

(a) Social distancing,

(b) Finite capacity of the healthcare system,

(c) Specifically isolating the most vulnerable people.

You can read through how it works, but the summary of the conclusions (which agree with the real scientist's results) are:

  • Very simple and intuitive mathematical models can reproduce the same overall trends as more complex epidemiological models.
  • If unchecked, the virus will spread exponentially through a large fraction of the population.
  • In the worst-case scenario, the total death toll in the UK alone could be in the hundreds of thousands.
  • The peak load on the healthcare system might not be reached for 2-3 months.
  • Widespread social distancing can help reduce the number of cases, and limit the burden on the healthcare system.
  • The earlier social distancing begins the lower the number of cases will be.
  • However, slacking off on the social distancing could lead to a re-emergence of the virus.
  • Specifically isolating the most vulnerable segments of the population can significantly reduce the overall mortality rate.
  • If possible, then the best thing to do would be to act decisively immediately, to stop the virus in its tracks.

Thread by Karen Street

I was part of saying that kids in schools are OK and kids aren't getting very sick. This article doesn't talk about permanent problems kids might suffer (elsewhere, I read long term loss of lung function). While fewer require critical care, still, 6% of children are severely affected, even more among infants. And because their symptoms are different (see end of quoted section), they may spread coronavirus faster.

>>>Largest study to date suggests infants may be vulnerable to critical illness after all -- and that children may play a ‘major role’ in spread of pathogen

In the nightmare of the coronavirus pandemic that is unfolding around the world, parents have been able to take comfort in one thing — early reports that the virus mysteriously spares children even as it often causes critical illness in the elderly.

A paper released this week in the journal Pediatrics, based on 2,143 young people in China, provides the most extensive evidence on the spread of the virus in children, and there is bad news and good news.

The study provides confirmation that coronavirus infections are in fact generally less severe in kids, with more than 90 percent having mild to moderate disease or even being asymptomatic. But it contains worrisome information about one subset — infants — and suggests that children may be a critical factor in the disease’s rapid spread...

So what does coronavirus look like in children?

According to the analysis by Shanghai Children’s Medical Center researchers Yuanyuan Dong, Xi Mo and co-authors, mild cases (52 percent) were marked by the typical symptoms of a cold — fever, fatigue, cough, sore throat, runny nose and sneezing. Some patients had no fever and only digestive symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

Those with moderate infection (39 percent) had pneumonia with frequent fever and cough, mostly dry cough, followed by a wetter cough. Some had wheezing but no obvious shortness of breath.

Severe cases were rare (5 percent) as were those who required critical care (0.4 percent.) The severe cases began with early respiratory symptoms which were sometimes accompanied by gastrointestinal issues. Around one week the children have more difficulty breathing. Those cases sometimes quickly progressed to critical illness with acute respiratory distress or failure which in turn sometimes led to other organ dysfunction — heart failure or kidney injury.

One boy, a 14-year-old, died on Feb. 7. No further details on the patient were revealed in the study.

Of special interest to pediatricians is a group of seven infants (11 percent of the total number of infants in the study), and two children in the age 1 to 5 range (15 percent), who progressed to critical condition. The study suggests, the authors wrote, that “young children, particularly infants, were vulnerable.”<<<


Excellent visual comparison of how COVID-19 has advanced in different countries. Anton Van Der Merwe

international

China's coronavirus lockdown strategy: brutal but effective Guardian

A Coronavirus Explosion Was Expected in Japan. Where Is It? Bloomberg

bats

Bats are not to blame for coronavirus. Humans are CNN

vaccines

Trials to begin on Covid-19 vaccine in UK next month Guardian

Researchers at Oxford University, led by Prof Sarah Gilbert, are planning a safety trial on humans of what is expected to be the UK’s first coronavirus vaccine next month. Provided that it goes smoothly, they will move directly into a larger trial to assess how effective the vaccine is at protecting against the infection.

The same vaccine will start animal trials next week at the Public Health England (PHE) laboratory at Porton Down near Salisbury. Normally, animal work must be completed before human trials can start, but because similar vaccines have worked safely in trials for other diseases, the work has been accelerated.

ventilators

Oxford and King’s developing prototype for rapidly deployable ventilator

OxVent: could this prototype ventilator save thousands of lives? The Face

Meet the mega-brain engineers, clinicians, students and manufacturers from Oxford University and King’s College who have built a machine that could be key to the battle against COVID-19.

politics

UK

10 Days That Changed Britain: "Heated" Debate Between Scientists Forced Boris Johnson To Act On Coronavirus BuzzFeed News

Boris Johnson wasted seven weeks talking nonsense about coronavirus, says expert Vox

Don’t take my word for it; this information comes from leading medical journal The Lancet.

He points out that the current strategy of “suppression” was recommended by The Lancet on January 24. That’s now eight weeks ago.

That’s the strategy followed by China, South Korea, Taiwan and other countries that have been successful in reducing the rate of infection. China is now reporting no new cases at all.

And it was also recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Conservative government is saying the science has changed, citing a report by Imperial College which states that Boris Johnson’s former policy of “mitigation” – allowing the virus to spread to create “herd immunity” – would lead to 250,000 deaths, both from the virus and because people with other illnesses would be denied treatment by an overwhelmed NHS.

But the information in the Imperial College report was already available when Johnson was forming his “mitigation” policy.

Writing in Byline Times, Mike Buckley stated that the government was right to think “herd immunity” was worth having – but ignored the fact that it has never been achieved through mass infection; it has only been managed via vaccination.

“To attempt to create herd immunity through mass infection for a disease with at least a 1% mortality rate would lead to an unacceptable numbers of deaths, all the more so in a country with a comparatively low number of intensive care beds, ventilators and specialist staff where access to care will be at a premium,” he wrote.

Rishi Sunak has given us wartime finance fit for wartime economic conditions by Will Hutton in The Guardian

rec

This commentator’s got no live sport so he’s commentating on everyday life and it’s brilliant The Poke