Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Valmy]

The Nightingale in Birmingham has opened.

Please explain what we are looking at here.

They are opening a new hospital.

[Syt]

And who is the guy who looks pretty bad on camera?

[Syt]

Not getting much better from a higher angle.

[Syt]

[Valmy]

And who is the guy who looks pretty bad on camera?

The head of the NHS? Not sure.

[celedhring]

Not getting much better from a higher angle.

Social distancing makes it look like a low budget authoritarian regime though. Needs more extras.

[mongers]

And who is the guy who looks pretty bad on camera?

Health/Death* secretary (minister).


*because he invariable states the daily hospital deaths figure as the death rate and so excludes mentioning the largely uncounted deaths in care homes and the community.

[ulmont]

The Nightingale in Birmingham has opened.

Please explain what we are looking at here.

Staff and soldiers observing social distancing today as they listen to Matt Hancock, the health secretary, speak to them by video at the opening of the NHS Nightingale Hospital Birmingham.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/16/coronavirus-uk-live-news-covid-19-lockdown-extension?page=with:block-5e9815eb8f08ea7431f43c75

And who is the guy who looks pretty bad on camera?

The head of the NHS? Not sure.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary.

[Valmy]

Doing actual research is cheating

[Legbiter]

I presumed there are no cold vaccines because a) it's so rare for a cold to kill anyone or make them seriously ill, that it's not worth the time and effort to develop one, and/or b) the 'cold' IIRC is actually a huge number of unrelated viruses, so developing vaccines against most or all would be a monumental effort.

Yeah the yearly cold is a bewildering soup of different viruses. A third of colds don't even have a known underlying cause. Making a vaccine is therefore technically difficult plus it's not debilitating enough to warrant a serious effort. Because nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging there are now vaccines that have been injected into volunteers but they have to be observed for a time to see if they are effective and nobody keels over dead. I bet the Chinese will fast track their candidate by injecting it into say, Uighurs then infecting the test subjects with the virus and just observe if it works. Informed consent is for weaklings.

My fear is actually that the vaccine will turn out to be only 50% effective at preventing infection hence the virus will just smoulder on. 

[The Brain]

I presumed there are no cold vaccines because a) it's so rare for a cold to kill anyone or make them seriously ill, that it's not worth the time and effort to develop one, and/or b) the 'cold' IIRC is actually a huge number of unrelated viruses, so developing vaccines against most or all would be a monumental effort.

Yeah the yearly cold is a bewildering soup of different viruses. A third of colds don't even have a known underlying cause. Making a vaccine is therefore technically difficult plus it's not debilitating enough to warrant a serious effort. Because nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging there are now vaccines that have been injected into volunteers but they have to be observed for a time to see if they are effective and nobody keels over dead. I bet the Chinese will fast track their candidate by injecting it into say, Uighurs then infecting the test subjects with the virus and just observe if it works. Informed consent is for weaklings.

My fear is actually that the vaccine will turn out to be only 50% effective at preventing infection hence the virus will just smoulder on.

Is unit 731 still in operation btw?

[Grey Fox]

So we are indeed starting almost from scratch when we could have leveraged a vaccine against SARS.
There's around 50 different candidates in the works last I checked. Even if most of those don't work we'll probably have one that does. And there is a protocol to test those candidates in one or two years instead of ten.

That's still too slow. We need it in ~6 weeks.

[Duque de Bragança]

I presumed there are no cold vaccines because a) it's so rare for a cold to kill anyone or make them seriously ill, that it's not worth the time and effort to develop one, and/or b) the 'cold' IIRC is actually a huge number of unrelated viruses, so developing vaccines against most or all would be a monumental effort.

Yeah the yearly cold is a bewildering soup of different viruses. A third of colds don't even have a known underlying cause. Making a vaccine is therefore technically difficult plus it's not debilitating enough to warrant a serious effort. Because nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging there are now vaccines that have been injected into volunteers but they have to be observed for a time to see if they are effective and nobody keels over dead. I bet the Chinese will fast track their candidate by injecting it into say, Uighurs then infecting the test subjects with the virus and just observe if it works. Informed consent is for weaklings.

My fear is actually that the vaccine will turn out to be only 50% effective at preventing infection hence the virus will just smoulder on.

Is unit 731 still in operation btw?

In China/Mandchuria or in Japan?

[The Larch]

I presumed there are no cold vaccines because a) it's so rare for a cold to kill anyone or make them seriously ill, that it's not worth the time and effort to develop one, and/or b) the 'cold' IIRC is actually a huge number of unrelated viruses, so developing vaccines against most or all would be a monumental effort.

Yeah I don't think we have a vaccine for any coronavirus because most of them aren't this bad, or, like SARS, were contained.

I think Iorm or Larch said that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be done but it probably does mean we're starting from a lower base and it's going to take longer?

I think it was Iorm, I believe he mentioned there were veterinary vaccines for some types of coronavirus that researchers were taking as reference for the development of a vaccine for Covid 19.

[Eddie Teach]

Not weird at all. 

The weird part is the spacing.