Coronavirus

[Oracle]

I agree with parts of the article that Mike T linked, in particular the failure to perform large scale testing until recently. As many people with the virus are asymptomatic, medical staff will have unwittingly passed it on to patients. Likewise not testing elderly patients before being released back to their care homes was a dreadful mistake.

This is where Germany has been so much better than the UK. Yet it needn't have been like that. We did have the capacity to do more testing in this country using university and private labs as Germany did. The scandal is that Public Health England chose to ignore them. It is a similar story with the procurement of PPE, where British firms have ended up exporting equipment as their offers to supply in the UK went unheeded.

As mentioned in a previous post, the decision by Australia and New Zealand to close their borders at an early stage, was clearly the right one. Why we didn't do it beggars belief. But as also mentioned before, you can't really compare the UK's figures to those two countries as they are both more remote and have much less population density.

There appears to be evidence emerging that a deficiency in Vitamin D makes you both more likely to contract Covid-19 and suffer adverse complications if you have it. Vitamin D is supposed to increase the production of antiviral proteins and decreases cytokines. A "cytokine storm" is frequently mentioned in the worst cases where the body's immune system goes mad and starts to attack its own cells.

It has been puzzling why the pandemic has been much so worse in wealthy European countries than third world ones and perhaps a deficiency of Vitamin D in people from the former is part of the reason.

On various points.
1/ Testing is not as easy as journalists have led you to believe, nor is it a panacea.
Tests are only as good as the test set used to validate them, and with a proportion of the population assymptomatic, and a proportion of those with symptoms not necessarily having Corona, there are both false negatives and positives in the tests sets. If tests are only 80 percent, they are of little use for control. Validation takes a long time and a lot of people. There have many false starts in testing. Did Germany do well because of testing or in spite of it? Who knows?

2/ Belgium and Germany were both testing heavily. The results for belgium, not so good. Populations are clearly different. It might interest you to know that amongst other conditions with immune system overreaction aspects : asthma is a lot lower in Germany than in neighbouring countries. Indeed the countries fairing badly with this have a correlation with those fairing badly on asthma too.

3/ OH (who as ex scientific director of a big biotech lab, has a qualified opinion) thinks that the problem with corona is a possible cytokine storm, that is the body inflammation response overreacting, further that the reason it is not spreading like wildfire in poor countries, is they live in altogether dirtier environments, their immune systems dont go overboard because of continuous immune response. Just a theory in circulation, needs validation.

4/ University labs are by and large not the places to validate anything. They do not understand regulatory stuff. They have sent OH biotech company on many wild goose chases in the past.

5/ You are right - Public Health England - let us down badly by failing to harness the private sector. Entire biotech labs left idle. It is a systemic problem in the UK. Too many lefties high up in the civil service and health service utterly opposed to use of private resource. We need a stronger private alternative in medicine and more regional autonomy. PHE have proved useless.

6/ Closing borders is a dramatic step, and if you consider france has now validated it had a case in october, what was the point?
In portugal many had corona in january long before cases were recorded. Not surprising, they have many chinese who run the secondary retail sector alternative to the supermarkets. The virus was already here. As it was in all the other countries.

We are living in desparate times. Even this length of closure of our economy will have permanent damage and a massived downturn.

My own opinion for what its worth is when we first heard of the age distribution all the O70s and compromised should have been locked away. Then let it burn out in general population with no damage to the economy. But heres the thing. Nobody will ever know for sure. You cannot run experiments two ways. Sweden is fairing no worse for going an opposite direction.

So all this endless snipting at the "government" is pointless, and incidentally when saying "government" what is meant is a consensus of a team of appointed medical and scientific staff. So substitute "the medical profession" if you want to attack them for poor response.