outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

The serious point about covid toe is that there is a wide spectrum of symptoms associated with covid and in the uk we have completely given up on the idea of proactive clinical diagnosis, we just narrowed it down to 3 symptoms (fever, dry cough, loss of taste/smell) & told everyone “book a test if you get one of these”. As I said in another thread this means, rather bafflingly, that we have missed off the fourth “main symptom”, shortness of breath, that other countries list (all of the eu I think). Seems like an important one idk! And we also ignore the other symptoms:

https://bestpractice.bmj.com/topics/en-gb/3000201/history-exam#keyFactors

Including some that are quite common! So as well as the fabled covid toed diarrhoea wanderers, anecdotally I’ve seen sick ppl turn up to work and say “oh it isn’t covid, I’m phlegmy and have a headache” (there is a wider issue here of a fucked up culture where sick ppl feel they should come to work obv)

Another thing that isn’t talked about nearly enough is that children with covid tend to present a slightly different range of symptoms than is common in adults - so again last year when cases were rising and rising for months and infection surveys were showing the fastest rise was among school age children, a reason for that (along with the fucking schools being open in the first place, thanks boris and kieth) might have been a lack of clarity on what to look out for

i've been talking to people who've tested positive all day for 6+ months and fever isn't even present in 40% of the people i speak with. body aches and extreme fatigue seem to hit more like 75% of those with symptoms. A doctor i spoke with that works in a ER disagreed with what i was saying, implying that he sees the average Covid19 patient when he's at work. Some healthcare people are so damn arrogant

There have been studies about this, which are presumably more reliable than your anecdotal evidence.

that’s really out of line, pom.

here in the UK, though it is as wins said in terms of official symptom recognition, the Zoe app is flagging up stuff like covid toes and rashes (I had a weird viral rash in the autumn, I never have them), and people are at least a bit conditioned to think “covid” for symptoms you’d probably associate with colds previously.

sry if i hit a nerve, doc
xp

uh I would not discount “anecdotal evidence” from a contact tracer

I was not aware of that. And it's not a debate I'm interested in having.

I mean it’s right there in the post

Ok.

This Harvard medical school article from this week lists the known covid symptoms variously as

What are the symptoms of COVID-19?

Some people infected with the virus have no symptoms. When the virus does cause symptoms, common ones include fever, body ache, dry cough, fatigue, chills, headache, sore throat, loss of appetite, and loss of smell. In some people, COVID-19 causes more severe symptoms like high fever, severe cough, and shortness of breath, which often indicates pneumonia.

People with COVID-19 are also experiencing neurological symptoms, gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, or both. These may occur with or without respiratory symptoms.

For example, COVID-19 affects brain function in some people. Specific neurological symptoms seen in people with COVID-19 include loss of smell, inability to taste, muscle weakness, tingling or numbness in the hands and feet, dizziness, confusion, delirium, seizures, and stroke.

In addition, some people have gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, such as loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain or discomfort associated with COVID-19. These symptoms might start before other symptoms such as fever, body ache, and cough. The virus that causes COVID-19 has also been detected in stool, which reinforces the importance of hand washing after every visit to the bathroom and regularly disinfecting bathroom fixtures.

Main symptoms

The main symptoms of coronavirus are:

a high temperature – this means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature)

a new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual)

a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste – this means you've noticed you cannot smell or taste anything, or things smell or taste different to normal

Most people with coronavirus have at least 1 of these symptoms.

my best friend during the first two weeks of her COVID bout said it "hurt to breathe so much she wanted to cry" and basically didn't sleep. also had a stabbing pain one night and her then-b/f almost whisked her to the hospital.

fatigue has definitely been one of the common symptoms mentioned by the few friends I know who had it.

It's definitely up there with the most common symptoms and I agree that omitting it is strange.

sometimes I wonder if the bigger benefit of the vaccines = the reduction of severity, if it winds up reducing hospitalizations, long-term effects, deaths, etc. not getting it is even better but it'd also be nice if getting it was a much less significant deal too.

I think that’s probably true, like if the efficacy fails you then you still benefit from the reduction in severity?

which is why J&J's vaccine, while some of my friends are viewing it as a failure, I think there's still probably benefit to it even if it's not the preferred of the three in the US so far. if it's a choice between a large part of the population getting J&J or nothing, I'd definitely prefer "J&J".

in other news, my mom got pretty brutal side effects (as expected), yet dad weirdly seems to be acting as if someone gave him cocaine instead. he'd been walking slowly all week, today he's been walking so fast I've been telling him to slow down as he's thwacking his walker into walls.

The big benefit of vaccines in general (we don’t know if it’s true of these ones yet) is protecting the unvaccinated. They are exponentially (literally!) more powerful than a perfect cure because they do that.

There’s a suspicion the NHS list of symptoms is so short because they were struggling with testing capacity early on.

xxpost biggest pet peeve rn, friend of mine asks question on FB specifically targeting medical professionals asking questions about the lasting effects of vaccine, what we know and don't, and so far every response has been from non-medical people, usually touting wrong information.

does everybody wanna seem like they know everything, what is the benefit of talking about shit you have no clue about other than getting mentioned in an Aerosmith song

The big benefit of vaccines in general (we don’t know if it’s true of these ones yet) is protecting the unvaccinated. They are exponentially (literally!) more powerful than a perfect cure because they do that.

Possibly being fatigued doesn't make the NHS shortlist as everyone is fatigued anyway.

This mathematician believes that the vaccine effect in the UK is already showing up in the data

I have updated my analysis of potential vaccine effects in over-80s cases with today’s latest dashboard data. I am increasingly confident that this does show an actual impact of vaccines, for the following reasons: (THREAD) https://t.co/3fFCpNERGr pic.twitter.com/hAgZQWTEnf

— James Ward (@JamesWard73) January 31, 2021

Just heard, Captain Tom has been hospitalised w/Covid.

I daresay there will be fuller details in every newspaper, prominently displayed.

This mathematician believes that the vaccine effect in the UK is already showing up in the data

*bit

welp now dad is pretty down for the count, he can barely stand up on his own power. come to find out mom didn't give him pain reliever cos he didn't say out loud he wasn't feeling good. HE CAN BARELY TALK, mom, and lol he lied about how he was feeling when he was a chatterbox.

but hey, better this than actual COVID!

yow! Was that the second dose by any chance? I've heard it's rougher than the first. H got the first and she had a sore arm and was a little tired for two days.

Yea second. They had similar symptoms to the ones i had after my second stab.

Fortunately neither works anymore so...easy enough to rest

BREAKING: NYC releases, for first time, data on race/ethnicity of those who have been vaccinated so far.

As feared, reveals picture of profound inequality.

White: 48%
Black: 15%
Latino: 15%
Asian: 11%

We need dramatic action NOW to fix this.

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) January 31, 2021

These numbers are out of vaccine recipients who provided their race/ethnicity. 40% did not, either because providers didn't ask or the patient declined to say.

— Erin Durkin (@erinmdurkin) January 31, 2021

i knew the UK had overtaken the US in vaccinations (thanks to AZ coming online) but this is better than i realized (congrats to the NHS and logistics people, fuck you to the tories of course):

Astonishing vaccination numbers released today in the UK: the NHS provided a vaccine dose to ≈1.2% of British adults *yesterday* alone. 1 out of every 87 adults got a vaccine dose yesterday! The UK has screwed a lot up, but the vaccination effort so far is a huge accomplishment.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) January 31, 2021

also this is kind of good news (?). we're now not vaccinating more in the US because we don't have more vaccine, which is an improvement over the previous reason (i.e. fucking everything else up)

We are *supply constrained* in the 1.3-1.5M range. Here’s data from CDC showing our DAILY ALLOCATION total has been constrained between 1.0 and 1.7M all month https://t.co/TN6ra7BWrz pic.twitter.com/2dRA9MWwyD

— hk (@hassankhan) January 31, 2021

I want the juice

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/01/south-african-variant-of-covid-found-in-eight-areas-of-england

Door-to-door testing is being launched after cases of the mutation were found in Hertfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Walsall, Sefton and in the London boroughs of Merton, Haringey and Ealing.

Spent a moment bemoaning the fact that I live in Haringey before realising that the SA variant is probably everywhere else already.

This team did yeomen's work for almost a year. Good thread explaining why they're taking a break (short answer: duh, Biden isn't Trump, but they're also noting how they'll keep an eye on things for a little longer to make sure data matches)

Some important news about CTP: After a year of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting COVID-19 data for the United States—and months of preparation for what we’re about to announce—we’re ending our data compilation work on March 7. https://t.co/HtM9c0lwDB

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) February 1, 2021

Related posting:

https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/covid-tracking-project-end-march-7

For those who can read the WSJ, this is eye-opening.

The NFL was slowly discovering something far deeper: a core tenet of Covid-19 transmission wisdom—how to define when individuals are in “close contact”—was just wrong.

The safety of interactions during this global pandemic had been for months measured by a stopwatch and a tape measure. The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes. It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel.

But that wasn’t proving true during the NFL’s outbreaks. People were testing positive for the virus even though they had spent far less than 15 minutes or weren’t within six feet of an infectious person—and the league had the contact-tracing technology to prove it.

“That was a wake-up call,” said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer. “We had to be more precise in our definition of high-risk close contacts because clearly transmission could occur outside those basic boundaries of time and distance.”

The league’s finding is the critical reason why the NFL got through its regular season playing all 256 games and made it all the way to the upcoming Super Bowl on Feb. 7, between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs, as scheduled.

And:

The NFL told teams to take meetings virtual, avoid indoor gatherings, even if they were distanced and quit eating together. If someone had done any of these things with a person who subsequently tested positive, they had to be isolated, regardless of how brief their interaction had been.

“It goes back to those four basic things we talked about in the paper with cumulative time, distance, ventilation and masks. If you think about those four factors as being four different quadrants, if you’re failing in two or more of those, then that’s going to become a high risk for a transmission,” Sills said. “I always talked about the big three, which was: meeting, eating and greeting.

this pretty much puts the lie to the idea that indoor dining can really work under any circumstances

Yep. I get that restaurants are still suffering and I wish they were being helped out more by our government, but it's mind-boggling how much everyone is pushing for this (that goes for customers too! I've seen folks on social media, who I'd wrongly assumed to know better, absolutely cheering on the reopening here as if its a major "win").

excerpt from the covid tracking project link ned posted above (bold/italics in original)
--
That we were able to carry the data through a full year is a testament to the generosity of the foundations and firms that gave us the resources we needed, to the counsel of our advisory board, to The Atlantic’s support for our highly unusual organization, and above all to the devotion of our contributors. But the work itself—compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and making sense of COVID-19 data from 56 individual states and territories—is properly the work of federal public health agencies. Not only because these efforts are a governmental responsibility—which they are—but because federal teams have access to far more comprehensive data than we do, and can mandate compliance with at least some standards and requirements. We were able to build good working relationships with public health departments in states governed by both Republicans and Democrats, and these relationships helped bring much more data to into public view. But ultimately, the best we could hope to do with unstandardized state data was to build a bridge over the data gaps—and the good news is that we believe we can now see the other side.

very deserving of bold/italic emphasis, i would say. part of the nightmare of the trump admin was things like a group of volunteers having to take on the incredibly complicated but obvious and essential work of TRACKING DATA, just because the federal government couldn't be relied on to provide their essential services with any competence. fucking pathetic. and i know a lot of must have just been suppressed/sabotaged/slept on by trump appointees, or people acting for people acting for acting people acting for acting directors.

but anyway, i'm glad they emphasized that in their message, just to snap us all back to the reality that holy fucking shit, they never should have had to do this in the first place

The purpose of those hard numbers (six feet, fifteen minutes) was always to give people something concrete and measurable they could visualize and apply. The authorities who provided these guidelines knew they weren't 'magic numbers'. They were a compromise designed to reduce transmission, not guarantee safety.

“That was a wake-up call,” said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer.

They should fire this guy.

into my veins

Israel: We say with caution, the magic has started

Note blue lines, of 60+ years old (first to vaccinate), in the past 2 weeks:

~35% drop in cases
~30% drop in hospitalizations
~20% drop in critically ill

Stronger than in younger people & not seen in previous lockdown

>>> pic.twitter.com/vzYFbVZ98K

— Eran Segal (@segal_eran) February 1, 2021

into my veins

...but not the Palestinians:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-01-28/plight-of-palestinians-reflect-global-vaccination-inequity-un-says

apparently they've started to send the vaccine to palestinian doctors, but the numbers i've seen so far indicate they've sent somewhere between 2k-5k, which is, uh, not enough.

AP says 5,000, WSJ says 2,000 to be clear

https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-israel-coronavirus-pandemic-9cf252d0a19c1e9b1f9079ce8c203d3b

As I understand it the PLO is relying on WHO's COVAX project - which has been sidelined by wealthy countries (like Israel) in access to vaccine

PA not PLO FYI. However the PA has its own entirely separate health system. I think it would be the right thing for Israel to provide vaccines to the territories but it wouldn’t be the normal course.

Here I go being nice about Russia again (oh wait it’s not me, it’s The Lancet)

BREAKING: Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, is 91.6 percent effective, according to a peer-reviewed study published today in the medical journal The Lancet.

The data comes from a Phase 3 study of almost 20,000 participants. https://t.co/R3XrbrNmLr

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) February 2, 2021

Taking comfort in seeing the national daily vaccination rate creep up, at 1.4m per day now.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/southern-california-coronavirus/la-county-covid-19-hospitalizations-continue-decline/2514925/

although a bit alarmed to see we have 147 cases of UK variant here in FL in that same article

(in other news, the folks' side effects from 2nd vaccine are already gone)