Covid 19 Part XXIV-37,063 ROI (1,801 deaths) 12,886 NI (582 deaths) (02/10) Read OP

04-10-2020 03:42PM

Plumbthedepths wrote: »

https://www.independent.ie/world-news/coronavirus/i-lost-my-job-for-speaking-out-but-i-have-no-regrets-39585808.html

Nice to see some sense being covered in the media

I find it hard to take him serious when he gets something as simple as the false positive rate incorrect.

smellyoldboot · 04-10-2020 03:42PM

Tenzor07 wrote: »

It's absolutely and utterly nothing to do with someone wanting to consume an alcoholic drink, nothing!
It's those who we charge to look after our health services who need to manage services to ensure no one suffers because all resources are being committed to combating one single medical issue.

It is 100% everyone else suffering for prolonged periods because a certain percentage of assholes feel entitled to their lifestyles and social lives.

Tenzor07 · 04-10-2020 03:42PM

Knine wrote: »

My daughter has got her services back & PPE is being worn. Only I can't attend the therapy appointments but they give me regular feedback!
Hospital & dental appointments have been resuming again too.

Trying to entertain a child with special needs who was off since Feb was a nightmare though. I dunno how I would cope with another full on lockdown.

It's a fact that the zero covid lockdown hawks tend to completely ignore..

Lockdowns/restrictions need to be very specific and localized and not have such a hard impact on struggling families who depend on proper healthcare services for their loved ones..

WoollyRedHat · 04-10-2020 03:43PM

440Hertz wrote: »

Possibly, or they're doing serial testing of samples of students.

Some universities in the UK are doing aggregated/group tests, where they take swabs from multiple random people e.g. say a group of 10 and test them together in one test kit. If that shows up as negative, they're all assumed to be fine. If it turns up as positive, they call the 10 people for individual tests.

The use of that has reduced the number of test kits needed by a very large factor.

Interesting. Are we still talking about sewage analysis though as a screening tool?

is_that_so · 04-10-2020 03:43PM

Derek Zoolander wrote: »

How do you scale it up - ringsend treats 1.9m people - you can test every 15 mins but you’ve no idea where the sh1t is coming from...

Unless you get more granular data from areas what’s the point -

Did you actually read the article? Ringsend is just one of the locations they got samples from. This type of approach is not going to get down to the level of your street but may help given indications of areas and the method is viewed as a potential tracking tool of contagions.

Tenzor07 · 04-10-2020 03:45PM

smellyoldboot wrote: »

It is 100% everyone else suffering for prolonged periods because a certain percentage of assholes feel entitled to their lifestyles and social lives.

While I sympathise with your situation, having businesses which serve alcohol and the provision of healthcare are not mutually exclusive... Many other EU countries have both medical care services and most businesses open.

caveat emptor · 04-10-2020 03:46PM

440Hertz wrote: »

Possibly, or they're doing serial testing of samples of students.

Some universities in the UK are doing aggregated/group tests, where they take swabs from multiple random people e.g. say a group of 10 and test them together in one test kit. If that shows up as negative, they're all assumed to be fine. If it turns up as positive, they call the 10 people for individual tests.

The use of that has reduced the number of test kits needed by a very large factor and you can better target your resources.

Seems like a very logical way of doing mass testing of asymptotic groups.

In Africa they've used this method to great effect.

necessity is the mother of invention

440Hertz · 04-10-2020 03:46PM

WoollyRedHat wrote: »

Interesting. Are we still talking about sewage analysis though as a screening tool?

You can use multiple ways of screening the population.

The sewage approach, assuming it works, would be a very useful and non-invasive / non-disruptive way of doing things.

All you'd need some kind of Irish Water / HSE cooperative effort to collect samples in a safe way.

The network is fully mapped and known to Irish Water, so it's pretty straight forward to collect and test samples.

All you'd need to do is say test at a treatment plant for general peaks. Then you could test key junctions in a city. You'd rapidly see which ones had spikes. Then you could test further down the network of areas that have those spikes and you might identify an individual area.

It's probably well worth trying anyway.

There's no way you'd get beyond say a street, estate, town or suburb, but at least it would be something.

You could at least say 'we are going to target community testing resources at : Suburb X in Cork, Suburb Y in Dublin or Town Z. Also with the high prevalence of work-from-home most people are probably going to the bathroom in the same place these days and not at work etc.

is_that_so · 04-10-2020 03:47PM

WoollyRedHat wrote: »

Interesting. Are we still talking about sewage analysis though as a screening tool?

That UK university one is a pooling method. Good option where you are assuming/expecting a lot will be negative. Overview of the technique here.

https://theconversation.com/group-testing-for-coronavirus-called-pooled-testing-could-be-the-fastest-and-cheapest-way-to-increase-screening-nationwide-141579

Derek Zoolander · 04-10-2020 03:47PM

is_that_so wrote: »

Did you actually read the article? Ringsend is just one of the locations they got samples from. This type of approach is not going to get down to the level of your street but may help given indications of areas and the method is viewed as a potential tracking tool of contagions.

Yes I read the article and my point was specific to ringsend... it’s no use analysing sh1t from 1.9 milllion people... it’s not sufficiently granular

I didn’t make any point about other collection locations...

Someone clarified that Dublin sewage allows much more granular collection which would yield valuable data...

This would be good... testing the data in ringsend is pretty much useless

arrianalexander · 04-10-2020 03:48PM

Re the post on the focus on fatality rate should be the only focus , sorry I can't find original post

I'll tell my wife who was healthy and who is in 30s who can't walk up the stairs without losing her breathe to just get on with it

Fatalities aren't the only thing that can be focused on

Sorry for my over emotive response but I see the effects of coivid every day of my life. I'm not saying lockdowns work or don't , I'm saying there is more to coivid than fatalities

She nor I can't simply get on with it ... I'll probably regret this post, it's not meant as a personal attack .

440Hertz · 04-10-2020 03:49PM

Derek Zoolander wrote: »

Yes I read the article and my point was specific to ringsend... it’s no use analysing sh1t from 1.9 milllion people... it’s not sufficiently granular

I didn’t make any point about other collection locations...

Someone clarified that Dublin sewage allows much more granular collection which would yield valuable data...

This would be good... testing the data in ringsend is pretty much useless

It's not useless, but it's the start of a trail.

Start at Ringsend or Little Island in Cork or whatever plant you're talking about that covers a whole city, then work your way backwards.

The testing at Ringsend vs say Little Island could at least give you a sense of which cities are seeing higher spikes.

Also there are only two bodies involved now: Irish Water and the HSE/Department of Health. It can't be that difficult to achieve. We're in the unusual situation where the entire sewage system is run by a single semi-state company.

If it can be done, why not innovate and do it?! Ireland could end up leading the way on this.

I mean you could even install some kind of easily operated sampling stations into main junctions that were able to simply pump a small sample up every so often into a sample container. It's hardly that complicated to do or that messy.

is_that_so · 04-10-2020 03:53PM

Derek Zoolander wrote: »

Yes I read the article and my point was specific to ringsend... it’s no use analysing sh1t from 1.9 milllion people... it’s not sufficiently granular

I didn’t make any point about other collection locations...

Someone clarified that Dublin sewage allows much more granular collection which would yield valuable data...

This would be good... testing the data in ringsend is pretty much useless

It's really not designed to be very granular. The concept of it is as extra data or even an early warning system. Barcelona flagged COVID in November last year, on one or two days. It's also currently a research project being undertaken, not a live system.

Str8outtaWuhan · 04-10-2020 03:53PM

arrianalexander wrote: »

Re the post on the focus on fatality rate should be the only focus , sorry I can't find original post

I'll tell my wife who was healthy and who is in 30s who can't walk up the stairs without losing her breathe to just get on with it

Fatalities aren't the only thing that can be focused on

Sorry for my over emotive response but I see the effects of coivid every day of my life. I'm not saying lockdowns work or don't , I'm saying there is more to coivid than fatalities

She nor I can't simply get on with it ... I'll probably regret this post, it's not meant as a personal attack .

in fairness, the question you should be asking is "was your wife healthy before she caught it" , can you be 100% medically sure there was nothin wrong with her , that she had no undiagnosed prediposition to the bug"

Icyseanfitz · 04-10-2020 03:57PM

arrianalexander wrote: »

Re the post on the focus on fatality rate should be the only focus , sorry I can't find original post

I'll tell my wife who was healthy and who is in 30s who can't walk up the stairs without losing her breathe to just get on with it

Fatalities aren't the only thing that can be focused on

Sorry for my over emotive response but I see the effects of coivid every day of my life. I'm not saying lockdowns work or don't , I'm saying there is more to coivid than fatalities

She nor I can't simply get on with it ... I'll probably regret this post, it's not meant as a personal attack .

My wife, same age, had covid in April and hasn't been well since, suffered massive infections lately and is bed ridden. People are fools to think this virus isn't that bad because of a low fatality rate, the long-term effects are horrible.

ArthurDayne · 04-10-2020 04:00PM

Inquitus wrote: »

Good accurate graphs, this is a good website for all the pertinent numbers, and backs up yours precisely.

https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/

Yes, a good accurate graph for all those with a penchant for dramatics. It’s easy to just pick an arbitrary point in time in June to ensure that a graph will maximise the dramatic effect of the point you are trying to make — but it does make one wonder why you are trying to do that.

Of course, it wouldn’t be so dramatic if one actually took the origin of the chart back to the beginning of the crisis (https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/pages/hospitals-icu--testing). The rise in cases and hospitalisations is an inevitable consequence of locking down, minimising people’s exposure to the virus, and then reopening again.

People are acting as if we didn’t expect this to happen, and so we should all be shocked and scared — despite the fact that this was absolutely and logically the inevitable trajectory when things started to reopen. Nonetheless, in context, the curve’s rise is slower and flatter than it was back in March.

arrianalexander · 04-10-2020 04:00PM

Str8outtaWuhan wrote: »

in fairness, the question you should be asking is "was your wife healthy before she caught it" , can you be 100% medically sure there was nothin wrong with her , that she had no undiagnosed prediposition to the bug"

Why should I ask that ?

She is was healthy , lead an active and healthy lifestyle .

Am I or she 100% sure she had developed a medical prior to it , no one can answer that unless someone had a complete work up done prior to contracting it.

But let's pretend she did, it doesn't change the bug triggered this.

Got it in May, she cried herself to sleep last night wondering if she'll ever get better .

440Hertz · 04-10-2020 04:01PM

is_that_so wrote: »

It's really not designed to be very granular. The concept of it is as extra data or even an early warning system. Barcelona flagged COVID in November last year, on one or two days. It's also currently a research project being undertaken, not a live system.

If there's any hope it might work, put a few million € into resourcing it up. It's something national governments and also the EU though the ECDC should be looking at funding. It could be very, very useful.

I also don't know why we aren't putting a % of our testing capacity into actual sampling. It's been said since early on in the pandemic, but I see no evidence of much of it happening.

While it's useful to know who actually has it for contact tracing, it would also be very useful to have a picture of the population on an on-going basis. Perhaps some people might be willing to volunteer to do a test every week or something like that.

It wouldn't need to be a huge sample, just a representative one to give a sense of what's peaking and what's not and how prevalent it is.

All you'd need is a volunteer base of a few hundred people who would be willing to test regularly and provide a demographic / pattern of travel type profile i.e. do they commute every day, do they use public transport, age, what kind of lifestyle they live e.g. do they mingle a lot, do they work in particular sectors, involved in particular sports etc etc etc..

I'm sure plenty of people would volunteer to do something like that, much as plenty of people volunteer to give blood.

Also, I hope we are taking the opportunity to do antibody testing on a sample of blood samples and blood donations. It just seems like a really good opportunity to figure out what % of the population have been exposed and it could be anonymously done, or patients / donors could opt in. It would be really handy to know if you'd been infected.

WoollyRedHat · 04-10-2020 04:05PM

440Hertz wrote: »

You can use multiple ways of screening the population.

The sewage approach, assuming it works, would be a very useful and non-invasive / non-disruptive way of doing things.

All you'd need some kind of Irish Water / HSE cooperative effort to collect samples in a safe way.

The network is fully mapped and known to Irish Water, so it's pretty straight forward to collect and test samples.

All you'd need to do is say test at a treatment plant for general peaks. Then you could test key junctions in a city. You'd rapidly see which ones had spikes. Then you could test further down the network of areas that have those spikes and you might identify an individual area.

It's probably well worth trying anyway.

There's no way you'd get beyond say a street, estate, town or suburb, but at least it would be something.

You could at least say 'we are going to target community testing resources at : Suburb X in Cork, Suburb Y in Dublin or Town Z. Also with the high prevalence of work-from-home most people are probably going to the bathroom in the same place these days and not at work etc.

Good post. Seems like if it was done accurately it could be very useful public health tool not just for current situation but also for future communicable disease. Let's hope we can get our **** together once research project concludes, excuse the pun.

ZX7R · 04-10-2020 04:07PM

harr wrote: »

Just on the point of level 4 lockdown and if it happens, my son who has special needs has not seen any of his additional support team since March .. no speech and language , no OT , no physio and no psychology the whole team were put into the fight against COVID as part of track and trace teams or into admin roles in hospitals.
Limited service was due to return middle of October which we badly need as our child had regressed so much.
We have now been told if level 4 is implemented services won’t return till new year at earliest .
All respite cancelled till January also ..
While I agree with some form of lockdown , essential services like medical screening, mental health and services for special needs must get going again ..
It seems crazy that the focus is so much on the hospitality sector and schools.
So many people are being forgotten about during this pandemic.

I feel so sorry for you your son and your family.
The reason I left Ireland with my family is for this very reason access to essential services for my son he is special needs also.
For better or worse essential services and special needs schools never ceased or closed even during the initial lockdown in Poland.
Parents choice to send your child or not.
My son is 8 year's old and never seen a neurologist in Ireland dispite my pleas.
First two weeks
He has a dedicated team
Neurologist he sees one a month
Psychologist twice a week
Speech therapist daily
Occupational therapist daily
Dental once a month.
Pediatric check up once a month.
All is done one on one.

In the area of Poland I live Contact tracing is done in person by the police or by the contact center witch can ring you or whatsapp you this is mand by military personnel.
If you miss contact from them you have an hour to reply or you get a visit from the police

is_that_so · 04-10-2020 04:08PM

440Hertz wrote: »

If there's any hope it might work, put a few million € into resourcing it up. It's something national governments and also the EU though the ECDC should be looking at funding. It could be very, very useful.

I also don't know why we aren't putting a % of our testing capacity into actual sampling. It's been said since early on in the pandemic, but I see no evidence of much of it happening.

While it's useful to know who actually has it for contact tracing, it would also be very useful to have a picture of the population on an on-going basis. Perhaps some people might be willing to volunteer to do a test every week or something like that.

It wouldn't need to be a huge sample, just a representative one to give a sense of what's peaking and what's not and how prevalent it is.

All you'd need is a volunteer base of a few hundred people who would be willing to test regularly and provide a demographic / pattern of travel type profile i.e. do they commute every day, do they use public transport, age, what kind of lifestyle they live e.g. do they mingle a lot, do they work in particular sectors, involved in particular sports etc etc etc..

I'm sure plenty of people would volunteer to do something like that, much as plenty of people volunteer to give blood.

Perhaps, it's still a very new tool and a lot of what is going on is more research than anything else. Here's a paper on it from June of this year.

Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) is a new epidemiology tool that has potential to act as a complementary approach for current infectious disease surveillance systems and an early warning system for disease outbreaks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128895/

440Hertz · 04-10-2020 04:11PM

arrianalexander wrote: »

Why should I ask that ?

She is was healthy , lead an active and healthy lifestyle .

Am I or she 100% sure she had developed a medical prior to it , no one can answer that unless someone had a complete work up done prior to contracting it.

But let's pretend she did, it doesn't change the bug triggered this.

Got it in May, she cried herself to sleep last night wondering if she'll ever get better .

It seems there are some people on this forum and elsewhere who are absolutely desperate to prove that COVID-19 is all in our heads.

While there needs to be a sense of balance and we don't need to be hysterical about it, and I don't think we are being, I just find this whole narrative of trying to discredit anyone who says that they've had a bad experience of COVID-19 is a bit ridiculous.

It's clearly a serious illness for a lot of people and it needs to be taken seriously or the health systems in Ireland or anywhere else just become unable to cope when they reach capacity.

The turning of this into American political theatre has been the worst aspect of this pandemic and it's done enormous damage globally, including here as it's hampering the response to it.

Icyseanfitz · 04-10-2020 04:12PM

arrianalexander wrote: »

Why should I ask that ?

She is was healthy , lead an active and healthy lifestyle .

Am I or she 100% sure she had developed a medical prior to it , no one can answer that unless someone had a complete work up done prior to contracting it.

But let's pretend she did, it doesn't change the bug triggered this.

Got it in May, she cried herself to sleep last night wondering if she'll ever get better .

I hope she gets better soon. You and your wife are not alone in experiencing these horrible after effects.

Gruffalux · 04-10-2020 04:12PM

ZX7R wrote: »

I feel so sorry for you your son and your family.
The reason I left Ireland with my family is for this very reason access to essential services for my son he is special needs also.
For better or worse essential services and special needs schools never ceased or closed even during the initial lockdown in Poland.
Parents choice to send your child or not.
My son is 8 year's old and never seen a neurologist in Ireland dispite my pleas.
First two weeks
He has a dedicated team
Neurologist he sees one a month
Psychologist twice a week
Speech therapist daily
Occupational therapist daily
Dental once a month.
Pediatric check up once a month.
All is done one on one.

In the area of Poland I live Contact tracing is done in person by the police or by the contact center witch can ring you or whatsapp you this is mand by military personnel.
If you miss contact from them you have an hour to reply or you get a visit from the police

This sounds so excellent and well organised.
I am in favour of lockdown for the purpose of public health if circumstances go to a dangerous level. One cannot stand by and see vulnerable people die in excess numbers, nor risk an over run of the hospitals. I do not want us to be Brazil. And coinciding with any measures there should be a situation like this whereby other medical issues and all the needs of people for services and care should be run in a parallel and highly protected manner. I do not know how we cannot manage to organise ourselves to be at an excellent level in our health and support services - it is not like we are not a high tax economy.

odyssey06 · 04-10-2020 04:14PM

Tenzor07 wrote: »

Ok, you bring up the Spanish flu, which killed millions indiscriminately... Where as this strain of Coronavirus isn't fatal to most apart from the very elderly and/or those with not just one but many underlying conditions, so it could be said to be quite discriminate in who it kills, unlike the 1918 flu.

Actually the Spanish Flu was discriminate in its profile, the fatalities were concentrated in young adults.
Theory that it was either because the older generation has some exposure to a strain in the 19th century, or that their weaker immune response meant that a cytokine storm was less likely.
Older generation have more exposure to viruses, so if the 'prior exposure' theory was true, it should affect older generations less not more.

But I come back to the point, it's not just who this virus kills it is also who it hospitalises. Their survival is predicated on the hospital treatment being there for them. This disease is potentially fatal to anyone it hospitalises not just the ones who actually died.

440Hertz · 04-10-2020 04:14PM

is_that_so wrote: »

Perhaps, it's still a very new tool and a lot of what is going on is more research than anything else. Here's a paper on it from June of this year.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7128895/

We are going to have to get these research projects scaled up and rolled out faster. These aren't normal times and we can't really afford to go through long and drawn out processes.

The opportunity costs of not turning something like that into a pretty decent scale pilot project and quite quickly are far greater than the costs of wasting a few million on a project that might perhaps not achieve the results we hoped for.

This pandemic's going to cost money one way or the other. I'd just rather see those kinds of projects being taken far more seriously and given whatever resources they need to give them every opportunity to try and get something to work.

We need to be getting from lab to prototype to decent scale pilot projects much more quickly and there's a role for the state and the EU in this.

Think of it more like DARPA - make the resources available for scientists, engineers and medics to try things and maybe we might get somewhere.

Zebra3 · 04-10-2020 04:15PM

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

My wife, same age, had covid in April and hasn't been well since, suffered massive infections lately and is bed ridden. People are fools to think this virus isn't that bad because of a low fatality rate, the long-term effects are horrible.

I think most people are aware of what can happen, but everything needs to be put in context of the %age chance and the effects on the rest of society.

There are people out there for years suffering from injuries from participating in sport, from car crashes, from workplace incidents as well.

There are people out there suffering from air pollution because selfish car owners insist on driving through urban areas instead of using greener alternatives. But there is no attempt to shame people because they are out driving around needlessly.

Gruffalux · 04-10-2020 04:17PM

440Hertz wrote: »

It seems there are some people on this forum and elsewhere who are absolutely desperate to prove that COVID-19 is all in our heads.

While there needs to be a sense of balance and we don't need to be hysterical about it, and I don't think we are being, I just find this whole narrative of trying to discredit anyone who says that they've had a bad experience of COVID-19 is a bit ridiculous.

It's clearly a serious illness for a lot of people and it needs to be taken seriously or the health systems in Ireland or anywhere else just become unable to cope when they reach capacity.

The turning of this into American political theatre has been the worst aspect of this pandemic and it's done enormous damage globally, including here as it's hampering the response to it.

Well said.

There has been a division among the people I know, with some being serious and careful, not hyping but being wary, and considerate of others, and others going with the whole casedemic idea, and being very stubborn about it.
An old lady I was talking to about it said to me Who would you think are the most intelligent among those people and what do they say...

OscarMIlde · 04-10-2020 04:17PM

arrianalexander wrote: »

Why should I ask that ?

She is was healthy , lead an active and healthy lifestyle .

Am I or she 100% sure she had developed a medical prior to it , no one can answer that unless someone had a complete work up done prior to contracting it.

But let's pretend she did, it doesn't change the bug triggered this.

Got it in May, she cried herself to sleep last night wondering if she'll ever get better .

One thing I'd recommend for your wife, having suffered with some kind of post viral fatigue syndrome for three years, to the point where I couldn't work, is to take it easy. I used to find that any over exertion on 'good' days would lead to me tanking for a week or more afterwards. It's really hard but pacing yourself is the only way to overcome it.

I'd also recommend trying to get her referred to an asthma clinic, it's possible that she could have developed asthma as a result of covid, which might be assisted with medication. Any kind of breathlessness is going to contribute to fatigue and make it harder to recover in general. Also take heart, I did eventually get better, and I've been able to work for the last seven years, barely taking a day off sick, and I am now able to exercise regularly (swimming, walking etc.) despite that feeling like an impossibility at one point.

is_that_so · 04-10-2020 04:21PM

440Hertz wrote: »

We are going to have to get these research projects scaled up and rolled out faster. These aren't normal times and we can't really afford to go through long and drawn out processes.

The opportunity costs of not turning something like that into a pretty decent scale pilot project and quite quickly are far greater than the costs of wasting a few million on a project that might perhaps not achieve the results we hoped for.

This pandemic's going to cost money one way or the other. I'd just rather see those kinds of projects being taken far more seriously and given whatever resources they need to give them every opportunity to try and get something to work.

This project and others have been approved for funding. I'm a fan of the diligent research approach and caution is very welcome. Better to "waste" a few millions than really blow it on setting up an unknown system.

Covid 19 Part XXIV-37,063 ROI (1,801 deaths) 12,886 NI (582 deaths) (02/10) Read OP

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