Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
You are welcome to share this.
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It's my mother's birthday today. I haven't seen her in person in almost a year. I won't until she's vaccinated (which will be sooner than me because she's in the high risk group). Why? Because I want her to have another birthday after this one, and COVID would endanger that. Stay home. Stay safe. Keep your loved ones safe. Wear a mask, always, outside your home.
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Where are we? Europe has turned the corner with lockdowns to get their outbreak under control. North America slowed for a bit but has resumed growth. Asia is seeing a resurgence. Africa and Australia have kept things status quo and under control.
In America in particular, we have not only lost control, we seem to have abandoned efforts at control. This animation is very powerful.
Source:
Commentary: The United States is in horrifying shape. Despite testing not having fully resumed its volume after the Thanksgiving holiday, we have set new records for cases and hospitalizations (which is a much greater concern) and are nearing records on deaths.
We have a long 3 months ahead of us in America. Stay home, stay safe.
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Britain is so confident in the COVID-19 vaccines that they will pay anyone who can medically prove severe illness directly from the vaccine. "Britain is set to provide payments to any citizen who experiences adverse side effects as a result of taking a coronavirus vaccine, the country announced Thursday.
"We are extremely confident in the effectiveness and safety of our immunisation programmes. We will not be rolling out a COVID-19 vaccine unless it has met robust standards of safety, effectiveness and quality and authorised for use by the medicines regulator, the MHRA," Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said in a release.
People who are covered under VDPS will receive a tax-free lump sum of up to £120,000 (about $161,676) in the event that they can prove that a vaccine caused a severe disability, the release states.
All of the claims that are fielded through the VDPS program have to be vetted before they are accepted."
Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/528712-britain-will-compensate-citizens-for-any-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects
Commentary: That's a fantastic idea and a great implementation - not to mention a robust endorsement of the current candidates.
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Self-reporting works. "In this prospective, observational study, we did modelling using longitudinal, self-reported data from users of the COVID Symptom Study app in England between March 24, and Sept 29, 2020. Beginning on April 28, in England, the Department of Health and Social Care allocated RT-PCR tests for COVID-19 to app users who logged themselves as healthy at least once in 9 days and then reported any symptom. We calculated incidence of COVID-19 using the invited swab (RT-PCR) tests reported in the app, and we estimated prevalence using a symptom-based method (using logistic regression) and a method based on both symptoms and swab test results. We used incidence rates to estimate the effective reproduction number, R(t), modelling the system as a Poisson process and using Markov Chain Monte-Carlo. We used three datasets to validate our models: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Community Infection Survey, the Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT-1) study, and UK Government testing data. We used geographically granular estimates to highlight regions with rapidly increasing case numbers, or hotspots.
To our knowledge, we provide the first demonstration of mobile technology to provide national-level disease surveillance. Using over 120 million reports from more than 2·8 million users across England, we estimated incidence, prevalence, and the effective reproduction number. We compared these estimates with those from national community surveys to understand the effectiveness of these digital tools. Furthermore, we showed that the large number of users can be used to provide disease surveillance with high geographical granularity, potentially providing a valuable source of information for policy makers who are seeking to understand the spread of the disease.
Our findings suggest that mobile technology can be used to provide real-time data on the national and local state of the pandemic, enabling policy makers to make informed decisions in a quickly moving pandemic."
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30269-3/fulltext
Commentary: It makes logical sense that self-reporting of symptoms works at a population level. Even if only 15-20% of the population complies, that's still an enormous sample size, large enough to detect unusual patterns and anomalies. Hopefully more countries adopt this methodology as a companion to formal testing.
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A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home for any reason. Consider also spraying the bottoms of your shoes with a general disinfectant (alcohol/bleach/peroxide) when you return home. Remember that cleaners are NEVER to be ingested or injected. If you come in physical contact with others, wash your clothing upon returning home.
2. Always wear a mask when out of your home and if going to a high-risk area, wear goggles. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too. When going indoors to a place that isn't your home, wear the best protective mask available to you.
3. Stay home as much as possible. Minimize your contact with others and maintain physical distance of at LEAST 6 feet / 2 meters, preferably more. Avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
4. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
5. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
6. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit, except when you share close airspaces with other residences (like a window less than a meter away from a neighboring window).
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Common misinformation debunked!
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
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A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.