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Forums - General Discussion - Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

haxxiy said:
A number of states in Brazil didn't report yesterday, that's why the number was higher today.
I also discovered today the vaccines for SARS actually worked in animal tests back in the day where they were still being studied (albeit provoking some, erm, minor lung damage). I'm sure that knowledge is being useful in developing a vaccine nowadays.
I'm somewhat confident a moderately effective one will be available later this year. It will likely still cause you some bothersome side-effects after application and you might still develop a cold, but as long as hospitals aren't overcrowding, that's all good, right?

Ah, I wondered what the drop was in Brazil yesterday.

Looking at the 3 day average, the 'spike' today isn't even a spike, 112% week over week growth, actually less than 2 weeks ago (over 117%) but higher than last week (about 110%). The last time the world saw a bit of decline was May 14th, but only very slight (98% week over week change)

And yep, some of the vaccines in development are continuations from the work done on SARS vaccines. That stopped since an efficacy test wasn't possible anymore after the virus was stopped.

2 more added to phase 1 trials
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

The one you're talking about is in there as well

PRECLINICAL

After the SARS epidemic in 2002, Baylor College of Medicine researchers began developing a vaccine that could prevent a new outbreak. Despite promising early results, support for the research disappeared. Because the coronaviruses that cause SARS and Covid-19 are very similar, the researchers are reviving the project in partnership with the Texas Children’s Hospital.




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Also Arizona has seen more Covid cases in June than the months of March-May.



Growth continues world wide

The spread is slightly accelerating, current 3 day average is 111% change week over week, up from 107% a week ago.
The USA is growing again as well, current 3 day average is 123% change week over week, up from 98% a week ago.
Europe is even joining he growth party, current 3 day average is 104% change week over week, up from 93% a week ago.

The USA has now passed Europe in total case count.
USA sits at 2.297 million reported cases, Europe is at 2.283 million reported cases.
Reported deaths are different, 187K in Europe vs 121K in the USA. However per million, 367 in the USA vs 250 for Europe.

The continents

South America leads with 32.4% of the world's 154.5K cases per day. Slight growth 104% week over week.
Asia is in second place with 26.9% of the world's cases. 112% week over week change, slowing down.
North America follows with 24.1% of the world's cases. Moderate growth, 120% week over week change, accelerating.
Europe is down to 10.6% of the world's new cases. Back to slight growth, 104% week over week change.
Africa now adds 5.5% of the world's new cases. 116% week over week change, slowing down.
Oceania just dropped under 20 cases a day again from Australia.


Around the world

Brazil, under reported yesterday, now back on track with a big spike today.
USA accelerating from the protests and other states still having to reach their peak.
India steadily growing while Iran is a bit of a mystery where they're going.
Canada is doing good but lost a bit of its downward momentum.
Japan and South Korea are pretty even with their resurgence, while China seems to be squashing theirs quickly again.
Australia looks to have reached the peak of their recent newfound cases.

Week over week for the big ones

USA, India and Iran are virtually tied with 123% week over week change. Brazil is currently at 111%.
Canada still in decline but losing some momentum, 83% week over week atm.



The talk of the week is re-openings, restarting the economy, going back to normal. The numbers tell a different story. Borders better stay closed and air traffic discouraged.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/who-warns-world-in-new-and-dangerous-phase-of-pandemic-1.4991762

The World Health Organization warned Friday of a "new and dangerous phase" of the coronavirus pandemic with people tiring of lockdowns despite the disease's accelerating spread.

The virus, which has now killed more than 454,000 people and infected 8.4 million people worldwide, is surging in the Americas and parts of Asia even as Europe starts to ease restrictive measures. Lockdowns imposed to halt the spread of the disease have caused crippling economic damage, but the WHO said the pandemic still posed a major threat.

"The world is in a new and dangerous phase. Many people are understandably fed up with being at home... but the virus is still spreading fast," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference


Florida may or may not be running out of ICU beds
https://www.newsweek.com/multiple-florida-hospitals-run-out-icu-beds-coronavirus-cases-spike-1511934

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article243655502.html

As Florida reported another record day of new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, with 3,822, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against suggestions that the state may become the next epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic and that it’s quickly running out of hospital beds to care for patients.

Mary Mayhew, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates hospitals, accused the news media of overlooking the ability for hospitals to boost the number of staffed beds to handle a surge of patients.

Here are some quotes for you @Trumpstyle :)

“Our hospitals have an incredible ability to rapidly increase their capacity,” she said. “That is often overlooked by the media as they focus on current capacity.”
“The trends are absolutely favorable,” Mayhew said. “The acuity is down.”



The repeated reminder to keep getting sun (if your able) (like 1hour a day if possible (more if darker skin tone)) and takeing vitamin D suppliments.
If you cannot, or have darker skin (so it takes much longer to make vitamin D), you should be on a suppliment for your own safety.

John Campbell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyMFsLFAE5o

98.9% of covid19 patients defined as vitamin D deficient (below 20ng/ml) died.
While only 4,1% of patients with high enough levels died.

Thats from Indonesia, where they looked at ~800 patients history at a hospital that had Covid19.
(ei. you got a bad case of covid and were hospitalised)

Basically you get hit hard with covid19, and you have a deficiency in Vitamin D, chances of you dieing are so much higher its unreal.


In the UK they did studies about Vitamin D levels (Annualised mean levels):
So the yearly avg was:
White ~45,8 nmol/L   (john campbell says this is too low as well) (he basically sees the entire UK as being deficient in general)
Asian ~20,5 nmol/L
Black  ~27,7 nmol/L

So your thinking, why would asians have lower levels than blacks? Well bacause the black people in the UK arnt afraid of sun bathing abit or being outsides in the sun. Asians in general have this thing about light fair skin, not wanting to tan, and also because "asians" here means muslims (in the uk), and the women are typically always covered up (ei. if only your face can get sun light, and not arms/legs ect, you make less Vitamin D).

This is (a large part of) why asian & black people make up a disproportional amount of infections for covid19,
and have higher deaths than whites in the UK.

Last edited by JRPGfan - on 20 June 2020

jason1637 said:

Also Arizona has seen more Covid cases in June than the months of March-May.

Arizona with its 7.2 million population had 3246 new cases yesterday, I thought swedes were barbarians charging against the virus, but that isn't truth anymore. We peaking at only 1.4k cases with 10 million population.

Arizonians are the true barbarians, they might face an epic battle soon against this covid-virus.



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Beaten Sigrun on God of war mode

Beaten DOOM ultra-nightmare with NO endless ammo-rune, 2x super shotgun and no decoys on ps4 pro.

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SvennoJ said:




Florida may or may not be running out of ICU beds
https://www.newsweek.com/multiple-florida-hospitals-run-out-icu-beds-coronavirus-cases-spike-1511934

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article243655502.html

As Florida reported another record day of new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, with 3,822, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against suggestions that the state may become the next epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic and that it’s quickly running out of hospital beds to care for patients.

Mary Mayhew, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates hospitals, accused the news media of overlooking the ability for hospitals to boost the number of staffed beds to handle a surge of patients.

Here are some quotes for you @Trumpstyle :)

“Our hospitals have an incredible ability to rapidly increase their capacity,” she said. “That is often overlooked by the media as they focus on current capacity.”
“The trends are absolutely favorable,” Mayhew said. “The acuity is down.”

Florida numbers has been pretty good so far, so long they don't overburdens their hospitals I can't see anyone complaining, if fewer patients are needing icu beds and they can rapidly expand beds there should be no issue. I think Florida and much of United states never needed to do a shutdown/lockdown, they would have been just fine.

That ron desantis dude seems to be capable.

Also I want to update you that Sweden won't be giving any numbers during weekends anymore (saturday/sundays), friday was a holy day here in sweden no numbers this friday either. They will from now on giving on monday.



6x master league achiever in starcraft2

Beaten Sigrun on God of war mode

Beaten DOOM ultra-nightmare with NO endless ammo-rune, 2x super shotgun and no decoys on ps4 pro.

1-0 against Grubby in Wc3 frozen throne ladder!!

Trumpstyle said:
SvennoJ said:




Florida may or may not be running out of ICU beds
https://www.newsweek.com/multiple-florida-hospitals-run-out-icu-beds-coronavirus-cases-spike-1511934

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/health-care/article243655502.html

As Florida reported another record day of new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Friday, with 3,822, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against suggestions that the state may become the next epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic and that it’s quickly running out of hospital beds to care for patients.

Mary Mayhew, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which regulates hospitals, accused the news media of overlooking the ability for hospitals to boost the number of staffed beds to handle a surge of patients.

Here are some quotes for you @Trumpstyle :)

“Our hospitals have an incredible ability to rapidly increase their capacity,” she said. “That is often overlooked by the media as they focus on current capacity.”
“The trends are absolutely favorable,” Mayhew said. “The acuity is down.”

Florida numbers has been pretty good so far, so long they don't overburdens their hospitals I can't see anyone complaining, if fewer patients are needing icu beds and they can rapidly expand beds there should be no issue. I think Florida and much of United states never needed to do a shutdown/lockdown, they would have been just fine.

That ron desantis dude seems to be capable.

Also I want to update you that Sweden won't be giving any numbers during weekends anymore (saturday/sundays), friday was a holy day here in sweden no numbers this friday either. They will from now on giving on monday.

Ah they were missing on purpose. Sure why not take a 3 day break while numbers are nice and high. Spain has taken a permanent break on reporting deaths, seems to be a working strategy for them. It has been saying this on worldometers for over a month

The discrepancies that may appear with respect to the total case data previously reported are the result of the validation of the same by the autonomous communities and the transition to the new surveillance strategy. This discrepancy could still persist for several days.

I see worlsometers gave up waiting and smoothed out the +280 deaths spike that were reported end of May, distributing them in a nice downward slope to no deaths while Spain should still be around Italy and France between 35 and 45.

The best strategy for the pandemic:
- Test more to bring down your positivity rate
- Add Immunity tests to boost numbers.
Wait a week
- Test less to see a good decline
- Re-open economy




JRPGfan said:

The repeated reminder to keep getting sun (if your able) (like 1hour a day if possible (more if darker skin tone)) and takeing vitamin D suppliments.
If you cannot, or have darker skin (so it takes much longer to make vitamin D), you should be on a suppliment for your own safety.

John Campbell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyMFsLFAE5o

98.9% of covid19 patients defined as vitamin D deficient (below 20ng/ml) died.
While only 4,1% of patients with high enough levels died.

Thats from Indonesia, where they looked at ~800 patients history at a hospital that had Covid19.
(ei. you got a bad case of covid and were hospitalised)

Basically you get hit hard with covid19, and you have a deficiency in Vitamin D, chances of you dieing are so much higher its unreal.


In the UK they did studies about Vitamin D levels (Annualised mean levels):
So the yearly avg was:
White ~45,8 nmol/L   (john campbell says this is too low as well) (he basically sees the entire UK as being deficient in general)
Asian ~20,5 nmol/L
Black  ~27,7 nmol/L

So your thinking, why would asians have lower levels than blacks? Well bacause the black people in the UK arnt afraid of sun bathing abit or being outsides in the sun. Asians in general have this thing about light fair skin, not wanting to tan, and also because "asians" here means muslims (in the uk), and the women are typically always covered up (ei. if only your face can get sun light, and not arms/legs ect, you make less Vitamin D).

This is (a large part of) why asian & black people make up a disproportional amount of infections for covid19,
and have higher deaths than whites in the UK.

That seems extreme.

Who is they? And where did he get this report of the 800 cases from? 99% vs 4% is such an extreme difference, how come google turns up nothing while searching for Indonesia, vitamin D deficiency and Covid19. There is a correlation but 99% with less than 50 nmol/L (20 ng/ml) dying?


https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/05/23/does-vitamin-d-protect-against-coronavirus.html

It does have a big effect on respiratory diseases

The benefits of regular supplementation were greatest among participants who were severely vitamin D deficient to begin with, for whom the risk of respiratory infection went down by 70%. In others the risk decreased by 25%.

Some warnings against suddenly dosing up

Large one-off (or “bolus”) doses are often used as a quick way to achieve vitamin D repletion. But in the context of respiratory infections, there were no benefits if participants received high single doses. In fact, monthly or annual vitamin D supplementation has sometimes had unexpected side effects, such as increased risk of falls and fractures, where vitamin D was administered to protect against these outcomes. It’s possible intermittent administration of large doses may interfere with the synthesis and breakdown of the enzymes regulating vitamin D activity within the body.

Covid 19

We still have relatively little direct evidence about the role of vitamin D in COVID-19. And while early research is interesting, much of it may be circumstantial.

For example, one small study from the United States and another study from Asia found a strong correlation between low vitamin D status and severe infection with COVID-19. But neither study considered any confounders.

In addition to the elderly, COVID-19 generally has the greatest consequences for people with pre-existing conditions. Importantly, people with existing medical conditions are also often vitamin D deficient. Studies assessing ICU patients have reported high rates of deficiency even before COVID-19. So we would expect to see relatively high rates of vitamin D deficiency in seriously ill COVID-19 patients – whether vitamin D has a role or not.


And that's a key point there, elderly people are more likely to be vitamin D deficient, an old study in Indonesia

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19054885/

The prevalence of 25(OH)D deficiency among Indonesian elderly women in institutionalized care is about 35.1%. Most of deficient subjects went out-door only once a week (38.5%). Veil was the most sun protection worn by the subjects and most subjects had length of sun exposure 30-60 minutes a week. The mean daily intake of vitamin D was 0.6 IU, protein was 33.9 gr/day and calcium was 239.9 mg/day,and cut-off of serum 25(OH)D in Indonesian elderly women is (suspected) to be 75.9 nmol/L.


And South Asia in general

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.4161/derm.24054

Vitamin D deficiency is more common in South Asia and Southeast Asia than is appreciated. Most studies defined 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels [25(OH)D] levels of less than 50 nmol/L (20 ng/mL) as vitamin D deficiency. With this cut-off level, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency was about 70% or higher in South Asia and varied from 6–70% in Southeast Asia. The determinants for the variation of vitamin D status are skin pigmentation, aging, the sun protection behaviors such as application of a sunscreen, religious, lifestyle and nutritional differences. Advanced age is a known risk factor for vitamin D deficiency.



I checked his source in the you tube link, daily mail... hmm.

Researchers warned the study was not definitive, however, because the patients with high vitamin D levels were healthier and younger.

The Indonesian study was not associated with experts from any university, unlike most Covid-19 research. All five researchers, led by Prabowo Raharusuna, were listed as 'independent'. No details of their scientific backgrounds were provided in the paper. The research — published in April — has yet to be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists, a process that often uncovers flaws in studies.


Their correlation graph is woefully out of date as well with Sweden and Brazil (with high levels of Vitamin D) sitting nice and low for infections per million people.


Bad study John Campbell....



Most Brazilians don't have high levels of vitamin D. Do you know that phrase coined in the British Raj, that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun? It turns out that to bask in the tropical heat isn't exactly comfortable to most people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23980576_Prevalence_of_Vitamin_D_Insufficiency_in_Brazilian_Adolescents

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302007000300012

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302008000300008

Regardless, older people will produce vitamin D more slowly than younger people, same as the difference between darker and lighter skin, so both ethnicity and age disparity would add to the confounding factors at play here. 

Of course, since the immunomodulatory effects of vitamin D have been known for a long time, a little sunshine here and there can't hurt.



 

 

 

 

 

haxxiy said:

Most Brazilians don't have high levels of vitamin D. Do you know that phrase coined in the British Raj, that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun? It turns out that to bask in the tropical heat isn't exactly comfortable to most people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23980576_Prevalence_of_Vitamin_D_Insufficiency_in_Brazilian_Adolescents

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302007000300012

https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302008000300008

Regardless, older people will produce vitamin D more slowly than younger people, same as the difference between darker and lighter skin, so both ethnicity and age disparity would add to the confounding factors at play here. 

Of course, since the immunomodulatory effects of vitamin D have been known for a long time, a little sunshine here and there can't hurt.

Funny, in that graph from the daily mail Brazilians come out on top with Vitamin D levels.
I quickly corrected that correlation graph for where the cases per million are at today:

Not much left from that cherry picked correlation...


Also women tend to have lower vitamin D levels than men (at higher age) yet men (with lower avg age, women live longer) still die more from covid19 than women.  Comparing countries by avg vitamin D levels is a fallacy anyway since that avg is directly tied to the average age in the country, vitamin D levels are very much age dependent. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/

Lose correlations like average vitamin D levels and reported deaths ignore so many things. What you can also show that way is that higher vitamin D levels will reduce your average lifespan, or that older people wouldn't be dying so much from covid19 if only they had more vitamin D.

And then there's still the whole disparity in socioeconomic factors, like front facing jobs, lower income neighborhoods, smaller houses with bigger households, nutrition differences leading to different levels in comorbidities.

Vitamin D deficiency (< 30 nmol / 12 ng/ml) has many bad effects. Insuficiency (< 50 nmol / 20 ng/ml) probably less of an effect. Also comorbidities could lead to vitamin D deficiency or be caused by vitamin D deficiency. A correlation is just that, a correlation.


It's definitely worth looking into. Covid19 is not going away before next year and vitamin D levels tend to drop come winter time. It needs a real study, same age groups, same risk factors, only vitamin D levels as the variable.