Coronavirus with an R0 of 3 or beyond

[Chris]

Interesting perspective on vaccinations.

I don't agree actually. I think everyone should get it, for the sake of society as a whole. Obviously, it should be everyone's own decisions if they want to get it or not, but there's nothing wrong with government incentives nudging people towards getting vaccines and it makes sense from an epidemological perspective, that only those that are vaccinated or have recently recovered are allowed to participate in highly risky activities, in terms of infecting others. Any yes, immunity only lasts for around 6 months, so we'll have to get used to twice-yearly vaccinations.

It sucks, but it's still better than the alternative, semi-permanent lockdowns and ever-deadlier waves of covid as new variants take hold.

My main concern is vaccine discrimination. In the EU especially, those that have been vaccinated with Eastern Vaccines will not be able to travel to most of Western Europe, despite having vaccine passports.

[Chris]

This might be good news for those suffering from long covid.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...n-survey-finds

Long Covid symptoms ease after vaccination, survey finds

Exclusive: Fifty-seven per cent of people with illness say they were better overall after jab

Covid-19 vaccines tend to alleviate the symptoms of long Covid, according to a large survey of more than 800 people that suggests mRNA vaccines, in particular, are beneficial.

Though Covid-19 was initially understood to be a largely respiratory illness from which most would recover within a few weeks, as the pandemic wore on increasing numbers of people reported experiencing symptoms for months on end. There is no consensus definition of the condition of these people who have symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue to organ damage, let alone a standardised treatment plan.

As vaccines hit the mainstream, concerns arose that vaccination could precipitate relapses or a worsening of symptoms. But conversely, anecdotal reports suggested that vaccines helped some people with long Covid.

The analysis, which is yet to be peer reviewed, was based on a survey conducted by the advocacy group LongCovidSOS involving 812 people (mostly white, female participants) with long Covid in the UK and internationally, who were contacted via social media. The participants (a small proportion of whom also said they had ME/CFS) were asked to wait at least a week after their first dose to avoid their responses conflating with side-effects of the vaccine.

Scores across 14 common long-Covid symptoms were compared before and after the first vaccine dose. Data showed that 56.7% of respondents experienced an overall improvement in symptoms, with 24.6% remaining unchanged and 18.7% reporting a deterioration in their symptoms.

In general, those who received mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna) reported more improvements in symptoms, compared with those who got an adenovirus vaccine (Oxford/AstraZeneca). In particular, those who received the Moderna vaccine were more likely to see improvements in symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog and muscle pain, and less likely to report a deterioration, the analysis found.

“This survey will reassure people that they would have to be quite unlucky to really have an overall worsening of symptoms,” said analysis author Ondine Sherwood, from the patient advocacy group LongCovidSOS. “The data is very encouraging, but we don’t know how long the benefits last.”

Dr David Strain, also an analysis author and a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter medical school, said: “There isn’t a blood pressure tablet that fixes everybody … and similarly, there’s not one long-Covid treatment that’s going to fix everyone – but the fact that one treatment does fix something means that there’s bound to be other treatments out there that will fix others.”

This data cannot definitively prove that the vaccine made the subjects’ symptoms better – they may have been getting better anyway after months of being symptomatic. However, in the 130 people in the survey who received both doses of vaccine, some patients got better after their first dose – then started to experience a resurgence in symptoms – and then got better again after their second, noted Strain.

Given that the improvement in symptoms in about half of the participants had abated by the time they completed the survey, the study could indicate that the improvement (if attributed to vaccine effect) was transient, said Nisreen Alwan, an associate professor in public health at the University of Southampton.

It is unclear why some people get long Covid, but immunologists – in particular Dr Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunology at Yale University – have hypothesised that long Covid could be explained by one or a combination of reasons: the persistence of the virus remaining within the body; fragments of the virus lingering after infection; and the immune system overreacting and hurting healthy tissue in response to the infection.

The analysis suggested Covid-19 vaccines helped to reset the immune system, letting the body know that its defences should respond to the virus but not attack itself any more, said Strain, cautioning that this explanation was speculation, and had to be ratified with further research.

Prof Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London who is working alongside Iwasaki, said: “How could a vaccine make a subset of long-term sufferers feel better? It’s tempting to hypothesise that this was the subset who had symptoms due to a reservoir of virus that was never properly cleared, and the enormous boost of a potent vaccine equipped them with the immune response to do this. This needs mechanistic investigation of the actual immune responses.”

There is no consensus on the prevalence on long Covid. The latest data published by the Office for National Statistics suggests that in the four-week period ending 6 March, an estimated 1.1 million people self-reported having long Covid in the UK.

[Chris]

Christmas has come early for Ganges crocodiles.

The situation in India seems reminiscent of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and the Covid-19 surges last year in the Amazon region of Brazil and Ecuador.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-covid-victims

Stench of death pervades rural India as Ganges swells with Covid victims

Stigma and cost of wood leave families with no choice but to immerse their dead in river

There was a time before when the Ganges was “swollen with dead bodies”.

In 1918, when the great flu pandemic swept through India and killed an estimated 18 million people, the water of this river – upon which so many lives depended – was filled with the stench of death.

And so it is again. India’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic may be just over a quarter of a million, but experts believe the real figure to be up to five times higher, and the bodies that have begun washing up in India’s holiest river have become haunting representations of the uncounted Covid dead.

On Wednesday, India reported another record number of deaths, 4,529, as the virus continued to spread out of the big cities and into rural areas.

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There is, however, no official record of the number of bodies that have been found over the past two weeks in the stretch of the Ganges that flows through the poor rural states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or buried in shallow sandy graves along the riverbank in Uttar Pradesh. Locals and journalists who have counted put the figure at more than 2,000.

In the Uttar Pradesh village of Gahmar, Raju Chaudhry, 15, who works on the fishing boats, said recently he had seen “around 50 bodies a day washing up, over many days”.

There is no way to know if all were infected with coronavirus, though the government has accepted some are Covid victims. It is widely believed that as the vicious Covid second wave has ripped through the poor rural communities of Uttar Pradesh, leaving death in its wake, stigma around the virus and the high cost of firewood for cremation meant many families had instead resorted to a custom – a tradition in some of the villages – of immersing the shrouded bodies into the holy waters of the Ganges. Others have buried them on the sandy banks.

Officially, death and infection rates of coronavirus in Gahmar are low. But Bhupendra Upadhyay, a local priest sitting beneath a banyan tree on the ghat – a flight of steps leading down to the river – said a lot of people had died in the past few weeks.

“I have seen 30 to 35 bodies brought to the river recently and immersed here,” he said. “More are doing immersion because people have found it hard to arrange cremation when so many people are dying.”

Upadhyay pointed to the trunk of the banyan tree, where dozens of clay pots were tied. “Each of those pots represents someone who has died,” he said. “Look how many there are, just from the last 10 days.”

Police have been stationed along the river to stop immersions and said they had cleared most of the bodies from the river, even putting nets across the Ganges on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but around Narva ghat in Gahmar many were still visible. As a body slowly emerged into view, carried by the slow current of the Ganges, cries rang out. Scattered across a bank of the river were three more, each metres apart, still shrouded in cloth and entangled in the detritus of the river.

A brief boat trip upstream revealed dozens more in the water and along the bank, in varying states of decay and picked at by birds and wild dogs.

Those who immersed the bodies say they had little choice. Sitting in the courtyard of a ramshackle family home, where 20 people live under one roof, Narsingh Kumar spoke of his two older brothers who died days apart. Though neither were tested for coronavirus, they died less than two days after showing symptoms.

The first brother, Shambhu Nath, developed a high fever on 19 April and three days later he was struggling to breathe. An ambulance was arranged but he died on the way to hospital on 23 April. That same day, his brother Swami Nath also began to have breathing difficulties. He was taken to a private hospital and put on oxygen for a night then discharged, but died on 24 April.

In the case of Shambhu Nath, the family had no difficulties with cremation, with villagers offering help and attending the funeral. But after the second brother died they found themselves as outcasts among their neighbours.

“When we tried to buy firewood for the cremation we were shooed away and no one in the village would help us with cremation because they suspected Covid,” said Kumar. “We couldn’t get any wood and didn’t know what else to do so we had no choice but to immerse his body into the river. We did it the next morning at 11am with just close family.”

The toll of the pandemic on the rural villages of India, home to 65% of the population and where basic healthcare infrastructure is lacking or absent, will probably never be known. In Uttar Pradesh, where the population of 235 million exceeds that of Brazil, rural villages across the state have reported people dying in their droves within days of getting a cough, a fever or breathlessness, without ever getting a Covid test. The government has begun door-to-door testing in villages but has not reached many remote areas.

In Sauram village, in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, locals described the situation as “very scary”.

“In the last 25 days we have heard of 17 deaths in the village,” said Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, 42, the husband of the head of the village. “Ninety per cent of people in this village are sick, every household has someone who has a cough or a fever. Many people in the village are getting a temperature, cough and they die within a day or two.”

Jaiswal said no one in the village was being tested for coronavirus, even when they went to local hospitals. “I am scared because we don’t know why this is happening,” he said.

Mohammad Iqbal, 42, who runs a grocery shop in Sauram, described how his mother, Tara Begum, 55, had fallen sick on 4 May with a cough and a fever. As she struggled to breathe, he took her to the nearby private Shivangi hospital where she was put on oxygen. She died the next morning.

“The doctors didn’t tell me the cause of death but they said that four or five people had died in the hospital that morning,” said Iqbal. “There was no corona test done for her at the hospital and no tests are being done in the village, so how can we know if corona is here. All I know is that I have never seen so many people dying.”

The dire state of the healthcare accessible by the residents of Sauram and neighbouring villages was evident in a visit to Shivangi hospital, where many in the village displaying Covid symptoms had been treated at a steep cost. It was now emptied of patients and the doctor running it had “gone away”.

Raju Kushwaha, a second-year student in traditional ayurvedic medicine who had been treating the patients at the Shivangi, said he had never knowingly treated a Covid patient because no one had been tested.

“We admitted many patients who were breathless and kept them on oxygen support,” said Kushwaha. He acknowledged many older people would have died after the hospital had discharged them with low oxygen levels. “The hospital has not kept any records of patients who have come in recent weeks,” he said.

Meanwhile, the local public health centre in Ghazipur, the first medical point of contact for most rural villagers, was ghostly and deserted on the evening the Guardian visited and the “on-call doctor” was actually just a local pharmacist.

The Uttar Pradesh government has said it is carrying out door-to-door testing in 97,000 villages and has launched an “aggressive trace, test, track and treat policy” that has reduced cases by more than 100,000 in recent days, as well as adding 100,000 hospital beds. Families of the dead are also being given 5,000 rupees (£48) for cremation costs.

“Even after being infected with coronavirus himself, the chief minister has been travelling to the countryside to see and monitor the situation,” said a government spokesperson. “Our model is better than any other model in the country.”

Yet for those families grieving the dead in Sauram, it has been an added indignity that their loved ones will never be counted as official victims of the pandemic. For Radhe Shayam, 64, a farmer whose wife, Jagrani Devi, 60, died on 7 May after suffering breathlessness and severe lung damage, government action had come too late.

“We did our best, we did everything the doctors told us to, but we could not save her,” he said. “If she had been tested for coronavirus and given proper treatment in hospitals rather than sent home twice, maybe she would be alive.”

[Chris]

The lab leak hypothesis is gaining ever more mainstream attention, mostly because we now know that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised with covid-like symptoms as early as November 2019, well before the first patient zero from the Wuhan seafood market was supposed to have emerged (still the official and absolutely ludicrous story).

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZniDsuCX5g

[Emil El Zapato]

The lab leak hypothesis is gaining ever more mainstream attention, mostly because we now know that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised with covid-like symptoms as early as November 2019, well before the first patient zero from the Wuhan seafood market was supposed to have emerged (still the official and absolutely ludicrous story).

If one has a history of telling the truth, you expect more truth, if one has a history of lying ... Welll, yuk, yuk, yuk, one expects more lies. I read Fauci's statement when it was up ... no mention of gain-of-function ... more b.s. from the usual sources.

Fauci has apparently been swayed by anecdotal information not related to scientific opinions but by truth or lies. That is what annoys me so much about media, Those two are just spouting and criticizing logical deductions that any sane person would adopt. The fact that they might be partial to lunatics doesn't really give them much of a foothold on what is logically true and what is a fantasy trip through Fox World.

[Chris]

The Daily Mail is the first to report on a new scientific paper coming out in the UK confirming, that the Coronavirus has been leaked from a lab. Moreover, it did not have any clear natural ancestor and was clearly manipulated in a lab, by adding a new spike protein to it, designed to make it more infectious, the famous HIV-like gene sequence, which we discussed here in February of 2020, after the Indian paper that pointed it out was published and quickly retracted, due to political pressure. This news isn't a surprise to anyone, who has read that original paper.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...dy-claims.html

Also, here's Rand Paul grilling Anthony Fauci on his clear conflict of interest, having supported gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab, with grant money and training.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLJ1JpnkVc8


If you ask me, Chinese netizens have been proven right, as they referred to this pandemic from the very beginning as their Chernobyl. The parallels really are very uncanny, with another Communist government putting the rest of the world in danger with their callous disregard for scientific safeguards.

[Wind]

I wonder if USA is actually going to start media war with China over this and perhaps something else too.

[Chris]

I wonder if USA is actually going to start media war with China over this and perhaps something else too.

No, because the US itself is heavily implicated. The US has dozens of such labs doing highly dangerous gain-of-function research, China has one and it was largely set up with US help, probably as a misguided attempt at outsourcing. I suspect that famously lax safety standards got the better of them, that just won't do in a level 4 Biohazard lab, which this was.

If we're lucky, the end result may be something akin to what followed Chernobyl, a tightening of safety regulations and particularly, a ban on outsourcing biotechnology research to third-world nations with lax safety standards. I'm hoping that the public will finally wake up to the dangers of this sort of Frankenscience and there will be a movement to ban it altogether. Covid has already killed more people than all of the Nuclear accidents, tests and even bombings in the world combined. That was from 1945, whereas covid is less than 2 years old.

[Emil El Zapato]

The Daily Mail is the first to report on a new scientific paper coming out in the UK confirming, that the Coronavirus has been leaked from a lab. Moreover, it did not have any clear natural ancestor and was clearly manipulated in a lab, by adding a new spike protein to it, designed to make it more infectious, the famous HIV-like gene sequence, which we discussed here in February of 2020, after the Indian paper that pointed it out was published and quickly retracted, due to political pressure. This news isn't a surprise to anyone, who has read that original paper.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...dy-claims.html

Also, here's Rand Paul grilling Anthony Fauci on his clear conflict of interest, having supported gain of function research in the Wuhan Lab, with grant money and training.

If you ask me, Chinese netizens have been proven right, as they referred to this pandemic from the very beginning as their Chernobyl. The parallels really are very uncanny, with another Communist government putting the rest of the world in danger with their callous disregard for scientific safeguards.

I don't know about the Paul/Fauci thing. Rand Paul is a silly bitch and Fauci has many reasons to cover his back but if you read carefully between the lines of Fauci's earlier and current statements and then weigh them against field technical details there doesn't seem to be any support for gain-of-function research, at least from the United States. Research with dangerous viruses, yes, but gain-of-function is one more step in the line.

[Aragorn]

I don't know about the Paul/Fauci thing. Rand Paul is a silly bitch and Fauci has many reasons to cover his back but if you read carefully between the lines of Fauci's earlier and current statements and then weigh them against field technical details there doesn't seem to be any support for gain-of-function research, at least from the United States. Research with dangerous viruses, yes, but gain-of-function is one more step in the line.

It is just as likely that this "report" was conceived and released for purely political reasons, such as the "report" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction ─ anyone remember that? After all, the Biden administration filed the request for a report on the origins of the virus three days ago, and without going to the scene in order to investigate, there suddenly is a conclusive report that the virus came from the Wuhan lab?

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

[Chris]

It is just as likely that this "report" was conceived and released for purely political reasons, such as the "report" that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction ─ anyone remember that? After all, the Biden administration filed the request for a report on the origins of the virus three days ago, and without going to the scene in order to investigate, there suddenly is a conclusive report that the virus came from the Wuhan lab?

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Sure, that's possible, but there is now both circumstancial and direct evidence to suggest genetic manipulation of a naturally-occurring bat virus, to make it more infectious. There is a reason suddenly everyone is looking into it, the evidence out there is simply too strong to ignore. I don't agree that this is anything like the WMD-dossier scam, in fact it looks to be the opposite, the usual suspects were doing everything in their power to hide the truth, but it is slowly coming out. Same as with the UFO-phenomenon actually.

[Wind]

I'm not paranoid, but I've never and especially in recent years have had much belief in authorities. I'm a critical thinker and I don't buy any official "truths". I figure out the truth by digging out and comparing data and then I make my own conclusions. Sometimes there are quite fishy things happening. I am not a puppet nor a slave, I make my own decisions and that includes what I will or won't put into my body. The goal for our rulers is to enslave us and keep us as obedient, dumded down slaves. It seems to be working quite well.

Seeing any similarities here? "The end result, the true genius of the plan, was the FEAR."


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRgwoe668M

[Chris]

I'm not paranoid, but I've never and especially in recent years have had much belief in authorities. I'm a critical thinker and I don't buy any official "truths". I figure out the truth by digging out and comparing data and then I make my own conclusions. Sometimes there are quite fishy things happening. I am not a puppet nor a slave, I make my own decisions and that includes what I will or won't put into my body. The goal for our rulers is to enslave us and keep us as obedient, dumded down slaves. It seems to be working quite well.

Seeing any similarities here? "The end result, the true genius of the plan, was the FEAR."


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqRgwoe668M

Where exactly would that be? North Korea? Xingjiang-Uighur in China?

Because in most of the developed world, life has never been better, most of us have a better life, than medieval royalty, not to mention at least double the life expectancy.

Slavery? Come on man, who here is a slave? Yes, there still are around 50 million of them around the world, but nobody on this forum is in slavery and no, working for wages is not only not slavery, it is the opposite.

Also, I don't buy the depopulation agenda. In the developed world, the problem is too few workers and babies, not too many. Even China, overpopulated as it is, is now encouraging couples to have up to three children.

[Wind]

I don't think you got my point and I wasn't necessarily saying that there is a depopulation plan.

It's just all about maintaining control and keeping people in fear. That's what it all boils down to, low frequency.

[Chris]

I don't think you got my point and I wasn't necessarily saying that there is a depopulation plan.

It's just all about maintaining control and keeping people in fear. That's what it all boils down to, low frequency.

Yeah, I get the meme, I just don't think it is true to any significant extent.

Now, if you were talking about North Korea, yeah sure, it would certainly apply. I don't see anyone in Denmark living in fear and ignorance, in fact, most people seem happy, content and quite well-informed, apart from an irritating virtue-signalling habit that is common to left-leaning liberal types all over the West.