Coronavirus Covid-19 - opšta tema

[Sammael]

Huh, kako je ovo novo, sećam se da smo o tome pričali još prošlog leta...

[vememah]

Pričalo se, ali nije bilo istraživanja koja to potvrđuju baš na ovom virusu.

Edited October 12, 2021 by vememah

[vememah]

Odličan član Kaja Kupferšmita u novom Sajensu:

 

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Will the pandemic fade into an ordinary disease like the flu? The world is watching Denmark for clues

With the virus “defanged” by high vaccination rates, the Danish government dropped all remaining restrictions this month

 

Life in Denmark now feels so much like it did before the pandemic that it can put visitors on edge, says Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist at Roskilde University. The country lifted all of its remaining coronavirus restrictions on 10 September. Copenhagen clubs are buzzing, music lovers flock to festivals, and buses are packed with unmasked commuters. The government has given up its power to close schools and shut down the country. “When we have guests now, they feel uncomfortable about how normal everything is,” Simonsen says.

Denmark is a pioneer. As the second coronavirus winter approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Denmark and a few other countries where vaccines now protect a large percentage of the population from severe disease are entering a momentous transition: from pandemic to endemic COVID-19, when the virus is still there but ceases to be an overriding public health threat. Researchers are closely watching what happens next, because it could yield valuable information about what lies ahead for the rest of the world.

There are many unknowns: how best to manage the transition out of the public health crisis, how it might go wrong, and exactly what endemicity will look like once it arrives. “Going into a pandemic is hard enough, coming out of it is even harder,” says Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease researcher who leads the Wellcome Trust. “We don’t just go from a no-vaccine state and horror to a status quo. There’s a transition phase, and I think that will be this winter.”

Denmark has fully vaccinated more than 88% of people older than 18 and an astonishing 97% of those over age 60, the group most vulnerable to serious COVID-19. That allows the country to try to treat SARS-CoV-2 like influenza and other infectious diseases instead of a threat to the entire health system. “We’re thinking of this virus now as a sort of defanged version of the original one. It has gotten its teeth pulled out by the vaccine,” Simonsen says. “What’s left is not much worse than diseases that we’re used to and that we don’t close schools for, like seasonal flu or maybe the 2009 influenza pandemic.”

That does not mean Denmark is out of the woods. There are still susceptible people, including children, adolescents who aren’t yet fully vaccinated, and people in whom the vaccines have not elicited sufficient immunity. Since the measures were dropped, case numbers in Denmark have been slowly rising—there were 542 yesterday—ending a long summer lull. Simonsen is not alarmed. The continuing spread will result in more natural immunity in unvaccinated children and adults, and vaccine coverage will keep inching upward, she says. “All of this together makes me think Denmark will reach herd immunity in the spring.”

Four recently published projections from the Statens Serum Institute (SSI), a governmental public health and research agency, provide some idea of what might happen between now and then. In the best-case scenario, the country reaches 90% vaccination coverage among those over age 12 and there is no increase in social activities, currently still below the prepandemic level; then no surge in cases and hospitalizations is expected, says SSI modeler Camilla Holten Møller. In the worst-case scenario—no further increase in vaccine uptake and a 10% rise in social activities—Denmark could see a wave in cases and hospitalizations as bad as those in December 2020 and January. “We do not expect [that] to happen,” Holten Møller says, but if it did the government would likely bring back some restrictions. “The key is to be ready to change one’s mind as the data comes out,” says Rustom Antia, an immunologist at Emory University.

None of the models included a waning of immunity; Denmark started to give booster shots to vulnerable groups in September and has said it expects to give the entire population a third dose eventually. The models also didn’t include a key wild card: the emergence of nasty new variants of the virus.

Norway, with a similarly high vaccine uptake, followed Denmark’s lead last week. But many countries around the world do not have access to enough vaccine to vaccinate even the most vulnerable groups. And even in Europe, awash in vaccine, few countries are as ready as Denmark to attempt this transition. “If you have a lower coverage in the elderly, you should not try to do what Denmark is trying right now,” Simonsen says. Spain has vaccinated 97% of residents over age 60, for example, France 81%, and Greece 77%. Israel, which fully reopened on 1 June, has double-vaccinated about 90% of its population older than 60, meaning that per capita, it has several times as many unvaccinated people in that vulnerable group as Denmark does. It is now struggling to contain a big new wave of cases.

Countries with lower coverage will have to accept a higher level of restrictions during the transition phase to keep the virus at bay, Farrar says. “I think that politicians across the world are sort of pretending that you can have your cake and eat it: You can have zero deaths, no control measures, vaccinate if you want or not vaccinate—and it will all end. I just don’t think that’s realistic.”

Farrar has seen that happen in England, which celebrated “Freedom Day” on 19 July, when only about half the population was fully vaccinated. Cases began to trend upward in early August, to well over 30,000 per day now; deaths have risen to an average of about 150 per day. Keeping in place some public health measures such as wearing masks would have helped keep the burden of disease down, says Farrar, who is part of the U.K. government’s scientific advisory group on emergencies. The plan to abolish free testing later this year is mistaken as well, he says.

“I don’t really understand the tremendous rush to get rid of light touch things like masks,” adds David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. Canadian provinces such as Saskatchewan opened up recently with only 60% of the population vaccinated, Fisman notes. “The result is that they’ve crashed their health care system into a tree,” he adds.

Sobering analogy

Meanwhile, scientists are trying to figure out how endemic COVID-19 will behave. “The models are all over the map,” Fisman says. “I know lots of smart people who are projecting very different things.” Endemic COVID-19 probably won’t be like measles, which is highly infectious but leaves people immune from infection for life. That results in a childhood disease with a wave every few years, once a large enough new cohort has been born.

With SARS-CoV-2, it’s already clear that immunity from infection wanes, Antia says. As a result, it might follow the trajectory of the four endemic coronaviruses—which all cause the common cold—in which protection from infection erodes over time, but protection from severe disease does not. That leads to a pattern of a first infection in early childhood, followed by recurring mild infections—like a case of the sniffles—later in life.

The outlook is different if immunity against severe COVID-19 declines as well. In that case, paradoxically, it might be best if the virus keeps infecting people frequently, Antia and Elizabeth Halloran of the University of Washington, Seattle, argue in a paper published in Immunity last week. With a lot of virus circulating, those vulnerable to infection but not yet to severe disease are more likely to be infected and have their immunity boosted; when there’s little transmission, the population would slowly become vulnerable again. Avoiding infection at all costs might not be the best strategy for vaccinated people, Simonsen says: “I just have this gut feeling for myself that maybe it’s not so bad if I meet that virus naturally now that my immune system is strong.”

Influenza is a more sobering analogy. It, too, causes infections throughout life, but reinfections are often more severe than those caused by the four endemic coronaviruses because the virus evolves faster and escapes host immunity. And Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center notes that so far, SARS-CoV-2 has evolved about five times faster than H3N2, one of the three influenza types circulating in humans. That rate is likely to slow over time to something comparable to flu, Bedford says. But given SARS-CoV-2’s high transmissibility and the low vaccine uptake in the United States, he thinks it might well infect one-third of the U.S. population every year, causing 50,000 to 100,000 deaths, after society fully reopens.

It’s a grim vision of endemic COVID-19. Measures like better ventilation and even continuing to test, trace, and isolate could reduce the toll, but Bedford doubts there will be any appetite for that, given that the United States routinely tallies 30,000 deaths each year from flu. “We never really did anything about it. People still show up to work sick and so forth,” he says. “I don’t know if 50,000 people dying a year of COVID would somehow be different.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/will-pandemic-fade-ordinary-disease-flu-world-watching-denmark-clues

[vememah]

13 minutes ago, vememah said:

Odličan član Kaja Kupferšmita u novom Sajensu:

 

Članak, naravno.

[Paul Gompitz]

11 hours ago, vememah said:

Pričalo se, ali nije bilo istraživanja koja to potvrđuju baš na ovom virusu.

Paracelzus je 16. vijeku utvrdio da "doza cini otrov".

[Friend]

11 hours ago, vememah said:

Odličan član Kaja Kupferšmita u novom Sajensu:

 

https://www.science.org/content/article/will-pandemic-fade-ordinary-disease-flu-world-watching-denmark-clues

 

Otprilike kako smo i pretpostavljali.
 

Vakcinacija i posle toga direktan kontakt sa virusom su najbolje sto imamo.

[msv]

(RTS) Šta su "kovid prsti" i zašto nastaju

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Ubrzo nakon izbijanja pandemije koronavirusa prošle godine, lekare su zbunile tegobe pacijenata, uglavnom tinejdžera i mladih koji se žale na bolne lezije uglavnom na nožnim prstima, a ponekad i na rukama. Još jedan neobičan simptom kovida 19, pored gubitka čula ukusa i mirisa, nazvan je "kovid prsti".

Promene na "kovid prstima" su uglavnom crvene ili ljubičaste. Izazivaju bolno pečenje ili svrab, što pacijentima često otežava nošenje cipela ili hodanje.

Francuska studija objavljena u stručnom časopisu, British Journal of Dermatology, pokušava da objasni uzroke nastanka bolnih lezija.

Istraživanje pokazuje da lezije mogu biti nuspojava pokušaja imunološkog sistema da odgovori na izloženost virusu, što može dovesti do oštećenja ćelija i tkiva.

Francuski istraživači analizirali su uzorke krvi i kože 50 pacijenata koji su u aprilu 2020. godine prvi put primetili lezije slične zapaljenju krvnih sudova.

Nešto više od polovine pacijenata imalo je druge simptome koji ukazuju na kovid 19, poput kašlja, otežanog disanja i gubitka mirisa ili ukusa, ali svi su bili negativni na pi-si-ar testiranju.

Uzorci su pokazali visok nivo interferona tipa 1, proteina koji aktivira imunološki sistem u borbi protiv virusa, ali koji takođe može izazvati štetu.

Istraživači su takođe otkrili i visok nivo antitela koje može greškom da napadne sopstvene ćelije.

 

Neprijatan pokazatelj da organizam radi dobar posao 

Iako je direktna veza između infekcije koronavirusom i lezija na prstima još uvek nedokazana, istraživači tvrde da istovremenost pojave kovid prstiju i pandemije koronavirusa sigurno nije slučajnost.

Objašnjenje za pojavu "kovid prstiju" nije sasvim iznenađujuće jer jedna od karakteristika kovida 19 i prekomerna reakcija imunološkog sistema nazvana "citokinska oluja", koja može uzrokovati više štete organizmu od samog virusa.

Dermatolozi kažu da se ljudi sa "kovid prstima" uglavnom osećaju dobro i da retko razvijaju ozbiljnije simptome kovida 19, što odražava dobar imunološki odgovor na virus.

Stručnjaci zato "kovid prste" povezuju sa lakšim ili srednje teškim oblicima kovida 19 i objašnjavaju ih kao nuspojavu borbe organizma protiv virusa, odnosno pomalo neprijatan ali pozitivan pokazatelj da organizam radi dobar posao.

Francuska studija sugeriše i da bi lečenje "kovid prstiju" lokalnim ili sistemskim antiinflamatornim agensima moglo biti efikasno.

[vememah]

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UK has worst Covid case and death rate in western Europe

The UK recorded 40,000 new cases on Tuesday - and its death rate is more than double that of France and Germany.

Britain has the highest rate of coronavirus cases and deaths in western Europe.

Whereas France, Germany, Spain and Italy have managed to suppress the wave caused by the spread of the Delta variant, nearly 40,000 new cases were reported in the UK on Tuesday.

According to the latest data, there are 1.7 daily Covid-19 deaths per million people in the UK – more than twice the rate in France and Germany, and five times that of the Netherlands.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said the effectiveness of vaccines meant that the country could maintain normality – but warned the UK remained in a “balancing act”.

‘Public health failure’
A damning report from MPs, released on Tuesday, criticised the government and its scientific advisers for serious errors and delays which, they said, cost lives during the pandemic.

The study, from the cross-party Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee, said the UK’s preparation for a pandemic was far too focused on flu, while ministers waited too long to push through lockdown measures in early 2020.

In a wide-ranging report, MPs said the UK’s pandemic planning was too “narrowly and inflexibly based on a flu model” that failed to learn the lessons from Sars, Mers and Ebola.

Former chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies told MPs there was “groupthink”, with infectious disease experts not believing that “Sars, or another Sars, would get from Asia to us”.

Once Covid-19 emerged in China, MPs said the UK policy was to take a “gradual and incremental approach” to interventions such as social distancing, isolation and lockdowns.

In their study, they said this was “a deliberate policy” proposed by scientists and adopted by UK governments, which has now been shown to be “wrong” and led to a higher death toll.

The MPs said the “decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of  the pandemic – and the advice that led to them – rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”.

‘Running hot’
Simon Clarke, professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said Britain was pursuing a different policy to its continental neighbours.

He told The Times: “The UK has firmly committed itself to ‘running hot’ when managing its Covid spread. Mitigations which might have had an effect have been firmly rejected and people are largely behaving as though the pandemic is entirely behind us.

“Wider rollout of vaccines to younger age groups and booster jabs to those at high risk might have limited further spread, but these programmes seem to have stalled, so it’s unsurprising to me that infection numbers are so high.”

Professor Clarke added: “Previously people only really paid attention to the situation when faced with scenes of large numbers of people clogging up hospital, struggling to breathe.

“While I don’t expect a wave of hospital admissions anything like the previous ones, it’s clear that with infection numbers currently so high, we could face a situation where hospitals are put under unnecessary strain.

“If that were combined with high numbers of flu cases, it could cause the NHS to buckle under the strain.”

 

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/uk-has-worst-covid-case-and-death-rate-in-western-europe-295066/

 

Link na spomenuti izveštaj:

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/

 

Iz zaključka:

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We must ensure that the UK learns from its experience of covid-19 and does not repeat mistakes in the future. We have therefore identified a number of consistent themes in our conclusions and recommendations in this Report, including that:

a) the UK’s response, with the notable exception of vaccine development and deployment, has for the most part been too reactive as opposed to anticipatory;

b) there has been too little explicit learning from the international experience, as illustrated in the approach to non-pharmaceutical interventions and test and trace;

c) the right combination needs to be struck between centralised and localised measures and in certain cases implementation of pandemic containment measures was too centralised when it ought to have been more decentralised; better engagement with relevant sectors and interest groups was needed to understand on-the-ground experience and inform decision making, particularly for social care; and

d) the response has lacked speed in making timely decisions.

 

Edited October 13, 2021 by vememah

[Module]

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-940278/v1

[vememah]

 

[NiZdr]

Мапа са Реддита за период од 7-13 октобра. 

 

Ὀρθοδοξία ἢ θάνατος!

 

 

 

Edited October 14, 2021 by NiZdr

[vememah]

Srbija vs ostatak ex-Yu:

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~HRV~BIH~SVN~MKD~OWID_KOS~MNE

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Reproduction+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~HRV~BIH~SVN~MKD~OWID_KOS~MNE

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated+(by+dose)&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~HRV~BIH~SVN~MKD~OWID_KOS~MNE

 

Srbija vs šire okruženje:

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+cases&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~ITA~AUT~HUN~BGR~ROU~GRC~ALB

 

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Reproduction+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~ITA~AUT~HUN~BGR~ROU~GRC~ALB

 

 

Bugarska je na nekih 18% sudeći po dnevnoj vakcinaciji i zadnjim kumulativnim podacima od sredine septembra.

 

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2021-07-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=People+vaccinated+(by+dose)&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SRB~ITA~AUT~HUN~BGR~ROU~GRC~ALB

 

Edited October 14, 2021 by vememah

[vememah]

Quote

The UK records a further 45,066 coronavirus cases on Thursday - a rise of 11% on the 40,701 cases recorded the previous week and the highest daily figure since 20 July. Meanwhile, case rates are currently rising in all age groups and regions in England.
...
The increase looks to be fuelled by cases among school-aged children and teenagers which are at their highest level since autumn 2020, new data shows.

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-daily-coronavirus-cases-highest-since-july-as-professor-chris-whitty-warns-of-exceptionally-difficult-winter-12433818

[Gojko & Stojko]

 

Trolling, abuse, death threats: a COVID scientist’s lot

I don’t read comments on articles I author or look at reviews following a TV or radio appearance or follow the comments in the newspapers where I am cited. It turns out this is a common practice of many for my fellow epidemiologists during these long hard days of COVID, during which many of us have endured trolling, abuse and threats of violence and even death.

 

I regularly drop off social media for periods when the feeds get too intense. But this phenomenon is not new for me.

 

 

 

About 10 years ago, I dropped off all social media following threats of violence and threats of a sexual nature. My former workplace received many unsubstantiated complaints about me from “anonymous” colleagues, members of the public and so-called “concerned citizens”.

 

Those complaints and concerns were about how I got my job, where my grant money came from, about my qualifications, my professionalism and my character. I received similarly nonsensical and sometimes threatening letters in the post. My workplace took the threats seriously. I ended up having to be escorted in and out of my office and I took multiple routes to get home safely. Others checked the mail and opened packages addressed to me.

 

I was unsuccessful in achieving an AVO against one of the “threateners” whose identity was known to me. I don’t think I did a good enough job of expressing how frightened I felt at the time. I was – apparently – looking too calm for the court.

 

During this time we had a break-in. The police called it a “home invasion”. We were home at the time and my husband disturbed the intruder; his mate was lurking outside. My husband was thrown down the stairs. He was pummelled as he lay injured on the ground. He sustained 11 broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a lacerated liver. He nearly died.

 

I took this attack professionally and personally. Why? The only things taken were some of my research diaries and personal files. My office was ransacked. This is an extreme example of what happened to me. The trolling had escalated.

 

But these experiences are not unique. They are experienced by many of my colleagues. But we don’t really talk about it – until now.

 

This week the Australian Science Media Centre reported that 31 of 50 scientists working on COVID, who it surveyed, reported some sort of trolling. One in five experienced threats of violence or death. The experience of colleagues internationally seems horribly similar, with a poll by Nature finding these experiences even more widespread.

 

Just last week I got a bunch of inappropriate comments on a published article, a racist jibe in the street after being on the TV (and I was wearing a mask!) and a few texts that were sexually explicit and disgusting.

 

We swallow the pain of being harassed, the name-calling and the vilification – and we keep on going. Why? Because the science we do is needed to deal with a worldwide outbreak that continues to transform and spread. We do it for equity, for each other and for the people we serve.

 

The gutless trolls do it because they can. It’s time to disempower the brand. Speaking out, supporting our scientists and having each other’s back is our power.

 

Lisa Jackson Pulver is an epidemiologist and a professor of public health and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney.

 

SaE

[vememah]

31-godišnjak bez hroničnih bolesti.

 

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by vememah