Coronavirus

[1andrew1]

COVID symptoms appear quicker than previously thought - study

Symptoms of COVID-19 appear much more quickly following infection than previously thought, a government-backed study has found.

The landmark Human Challenge Programme, which saw healthy people deliberately infected with coronavirus, found symptoms start to develop very fast, taking just two days on average to appear.

Experts found that coronavirus infection first appears in the throat and then peaks on around day five.

Until now, experts, including from the World Health Organisation (WHO), have widely believed it takes five to six days from when someone is infected with COVID for symptoms to show.

But the new research suggests mild symptoms are apparent even after a few days - even if it takes until five days to become more noticeable.

As part of the study, 36 volunteers aged 18 to 29, who had never had COVID, were deliberately infected with a small dose of the virus via nasal drops.

Just over half became infected.

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-lat...cases-12507015

[TheDaddy]

Originally Posted by spiderplant

You are more likely to get those from the disease than the vaccine

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/374/.../F1.medium.jpg

I knew he was a quack! He was quite assertive in his claims of vaccine embolism effecting his colleagues in hospitals though

[OLD BOY]

Originally Posted by jonbxx

Why wouldn't you get a test? Surely it's good to know if you could potentially COVID to others?

It's free and takes 15 minutes...

Because if it’s positive, you have to isolate.

You don’t do that for flu, so why for omicron, which is similar?

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Because if it’s positive, you have to isolate.

You don’t do that for flu, so why for omicron, which is similar?

Parroting the Telegraph line, I see…

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Hugh

Parroting the Telegraph line, I see…

True though!

[nffc]

Originally Posted by Pierre

True though!

It's certainly an argument worth making.


Isolation makes sense, where the risks of having the person out to others are obvious.



Less so when the person being infectious is less of a risk to others they may infect.


So this can go several ways. And it all depends on the exact situation.


If you have something like noro, which usually goes away after a day or so, after making your room look like a scene from Bridesmaids, and in most cases doesn't really make any lasting effects on people, the unpleasantness of the illness is a bit meh but the vast majority will recover perfectly fine, though you'd still be a bit of a dick to infect others which is why a lot of schools and workplaces do prefer 48 hours after last puke or diarrhoea before allowing people back - which is a form of isolation isn't it?


Colds, yeah, they're mild and unpleasant but people don't usually think about stopping when they do get one, maybe they should. Maybe we shouldn't be so phobic of getting mild illnesses, this has only recently become a thing (aside from practising good hand hygiene etc).



Flu kind of forces it because - aside from the serious infections still progressing to more severe outcomes - most people recover but whilst ill don't feel up to doing much. But again the virus itself is forcing the isolation isn't it?


So where did covid sit at various points in the pandemic?


Well, at the start it was a virus we knew very little of besides a fair amount of short term effects, medium and long term effects were not known, it hadn't been around enough, more crucially, we had no idea how to treat it, and nothing to prevent it. We knew it could put people in hospital, we knew it could cause deaths, so isolation to prevent others getting infection was a very sensible policy.


Where were we with vaccination? Well, they always have and still do prevent severe outcomes, and have an effect if not complete on infection and transmission: this effect has waned with various variants with Delta (where you'd need a booster to nigh-on prevent it) and Omicron (where the protection usually causes some illness once infected). Isolation in a vaccinated population makes significantly less sense when the progression to more severe outcomes is lessened.


And Omicron? So yeah, we know by now it's very infectious, we know it can partially sidestep immunity from infection or vaccination, we also know that especially in these situations, the illness which does arise may well be unpleasant but is milder, and NPIs make less effect because of the transmissibility gains. So, isolation is starting to make less sense.


All of this is making covid progress into a more cold/flu like illness, which of course doesn't have mandatory isolation. If the response is proportionate, then something's not consistent there.



FWIW, I do think people should consider - or limit - leaving home if they have any signs of infectious disease, and though the effect is partial at best, should consider a face covering to try and reduce the amount of virus they emit. But, then, if the virus isn't going to cause more than an illness for 2-3 days, how much benefit does this have?

It's a classic case of risk balancing, there's answers, but not a single correct one which suits every situation.

[GrimUpNorth]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Because if it’s positive, you have to isolate.

You don’t do that for flu, so why for omicron, which is similar?

Can't believe you're still spouting that long debunked comparison.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by GrimUpNorth

Can't believe you're still spouting that long debunked comparison.

Is it?

[pip08456]

Little Jimmy's at it again.

Scottish National Party ministers plan to spend £300,000 chopping the bottoms off hundreds of classroom doors to try and stop the spread of Covid in schools.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...box=1643821386 (doesn't appear to be paywalled, at least not for me).

[Mad Max]

Originally Posted by GrimUpNorth

Can't believe you're still spouting that long debunked comparison.

It's a skiver's charter, no one should need to isolate for a cold.

Originally Posted by GrimUpNorth

Can't believe you're still spouting that long debunked comparison.

Maybe becasue it isnt ' long debunked'.
The symptoms of omicron are similar to flu, making it harder to tell the difference (feel free to use google).

---------- Post added at 01:47 ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 ----------

Originally Posted by pip08456

Little Jimmy's at it again.

Scottish National Party ministers plan to spend £300,000 chopping the bottoms off hundreds of classroom doors to try and stop the spread of Covid in schools.

Its paywalled here.

As i cant read it, it makes no sense, how is it supposed to stop the spread

[Jimmy-J]

Originally Posted by pip08456

Little Jimmy's at it again.

Scottish National Party ministers plan to spend £300,000 chopping the bottoms off hundreds of classroom doors to try and stop the spread of Covid in schools.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...box=1643821386 (doesn't appear to be paywalled, at least not for me).

It would be cheaper and less hassle if they just left it ever so slightly ajar.

[Pierre]

New study by John Hopkins university claims "Lockdowns" caused more harm than good and only prevented 0.2% deaths.

https://www.wcjb.com/2022/02/03/econ...hopkins-study/

the actual study paper is here.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/fi...-Mortality.pdf

So it was all worth it then.

[jonbxx]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Because if it’s positive, you have to isolate.

You don’t do that for flu, so why for omicron, which is similar?

Well that's a good question - is there an argument for isolating for flu? There is a strong culture of work presenteeism in this country that you don't see in other countries which certainly has the potential for frankly unnecessary spread of a disease which does kill.

Here is a comparison between COVID and inflenza from the BMJ

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in the US there were 1.8 deaths from flu per 100 000 population between 1999 and 2019. The estimated death rate from covid was 217.54 per 100 000 in the US and 206.73 per 100 000 in the UK.

The global figure for the covid-19 death rate is estimated at 279 per 100 000 population.

In the UK the Health Foundation has articulated the difference in impact between flu and covid in terms of life years. “In a bad flu year on average around 30 000 people in the UK die from flu and pneumonia, with a loss of around 250 000 life years. This is a sixth of the life years lost to covid-19,” it noted.

How many lives being saved is the limit to justify isolation programmes? 30,000 lives being lost in a bad flu year seems a hell of a lot. The Infection Fatality Rate for Omicron seems to be a bit up in the air at the moment with things slowly becoming clearer. What we have seems to be good news. I do feel a conversation needs to be had on what we as a society are willing to accept as an acceptable number of deaths.

[tweetiepooh]

Don't forget that if you've lost someone that's one too many regardless of the stats.


Covid is/was a novel virus. It was bound to cause problems both medically and epidemiologically as we had no natural immunity either as individuals or as a society.


The far east was badly hit by the 18/19/20 flu epidemic hence the tendency there to mask up in flu season. Was that due to it being bad flu or that their population was more susceptible? Maybe both, that flu killed a lot of people worldwide.


The problem is that we can't go back and try again with different approaches much though a number of "residents" of Westminster may wish they could. The approach taken was likely the sensible one given what was known at the time and the effect it did have on health services.


Going forward is going to be interesting. How will the next variant present? How do we deal with that? Remember the concern about household pets being vectors? Dogs are easy but cats? What would happen if cats were shown to be an unaffected vector? Vaccinate all the cats? Cat masks? Isolate your moggie? What if some "cute" wild critter was a vector? Imagine the outcry if need to cull off hedgehogs/voles/otters?