UKC

Interesting article discussing an apparent decline in the infection fatality rate:

https://unherd.com/2020/09/has-covid-become-less-dangerous/

It's probably become less deadly, but that's because we know how to treat it better, but what about "Long covid" is this going to be the new norm?

ps didn't read the article, just popped in from work!!

Has covid becomes less dangerous if untreated?  No evidence.

Has treatment of covid improved survival outcomes for some?  Good evidence.

Has covid (until very recently) been successfully kept away from those most likely to die, thus (until very recently) lowering overall fatality rates?  Quite likely.

Currently I’d estimate the true fatality rate in the UK to be about 0.4%.  Does that give reason to worry about exponentially rising cases?  Yes.

The most important quote from the story is

'First things first: it’s almost certainly not because the virus has mutated or anything'. 

Exactly. when it's able to spread before affecting its victims then there is no evolutionary reason it will become less dangerous.  If a more infectious strain emerges which happens to be less lethal then that will invariably result in that strain becoming dominant, but it won't stop the current strain from dying out.

The article says no, it hasn't become less dangerous, the virus is the same, it's just currently in populations more capable of surviving, and for those who are infected, the treatment options have improved slightly.

Maybe it has become less dangerous because we are gradually  getting wiser to it’s immediate impact, rather than by any mutation of the virus. 
We know very little about the long term impact of covid. It is still early to mid-term, if that, and we have no idea what effects the relatively mild but recurring symptoms will have. ‘Long covid’ is definitely a thing. I have had it since March, and despite obvious symptoms, it has slipped under the radar of two separate throat/nose swab tests.

It will, over time, as people will develop cross-immunity.

Good and cosidered article, though.

CB

It has been suggested for some considerable time that infection with a lower dose of the virus gives the immune system time to start working before the number of virus in the body becomes more than it can cope with.

And that wearing masks is protecting wearers by reducing the viral load at first infection.  If this is true it means many many lives could have been saved if the government hadn't continued to oppose suggestions that masks would have been helpful from early on.

You say you've had it but no tests prove it....so how can you 100% say you have long covid...abit far fetched if theres no proof 

Indeed ,which is why the internet is so dangerous. The threads on twitter (for example) are packed full of people making this claim (that it's weakened) every day. If enough people say it, more people believe it and then they say it. End result - self justification for being completely selfish and behaving exactly how you like regardless of the consequences....so here we go again. 

Someone made this claim as a UKC thread OP about a month ago in the face of all the evidence.  It rapidly gained a lot of likes.  People want to hear good news, and as you say, the more people who say it, the more likely other people are to believe it.

This is what I think and this is why I rather went off on one on an incorrect set of claims on UKC yesterday.  Our local council's Facebook update on a new testing centre is riddled with people repeating misunderstood and/or false claims.  The one grinding my gears currently is the CEBM blog post and media release over PCR false positives which - even if I thought it was credible - is now completely irrelevant to what's going on as detected cases have increased by 7x whilst testing has remained about constant.  I'm surprised CEBM haven't issued clarification of the fact their study is now irrelevant.  

Edit: To borrow words from a colleague, I am disappointed with the CEBM but not surprised.

Where did I say 100%?
Like most things of relative unknown quantity, I make assumptions based on evidence. The symptoms (evidence) are significant and prolonged  breathlessness, headaches, brain fog, dry cough.

It is also thought  that once the virus has moved down to the lungs, it is undetectable by the normal swab test in the throat and nose.

Yes the false positives is another thing that folk are really going for right now. I think Dominic rab said something I’ll advised about it recently to further muddy the waters. Unfortunately. 

The government didn’t oppose suggestions. 
 

There was no evidence that people would have been able to reduce the spread of the virus wearing masks. 
 

We didn’t know what role fomites had. Remember everyone washing their shopping? There was a big concern that people would touch their masks and spread the infection round. Hence wearing masks would actually make the problem worse.
 

We needed to act quickly so rather than making everyone wear masks and not know if this would work, we locked down.
 

It’s just amazing what people have forgotten in less than 7 months. 

Radio 4's More or Less has an excellent podcast on this, and pretty much all the other Covid myths and Government figure fiddling and misinformation; it should be compulsory listening for everyone.  The short message on false positives is that it's only significant when the infection rate is very low. 

My brother and a colleague both had Covid in March and are both still suffering from the aftermath. My brother still cannot go for a run despite being a keen runner before it struck. We're over 6 months from when he was infected. I'd expect any test he has now would be negative, the virus probably left after a few days/week or two, but whatever damage it caused is still rumbling on.

It's awful and depressing to be suffering long term tiredness, breathlessness and occasional pain. The relief of not dying from it has long gone and replaced with frustration. The same goes for my colleague. And they're not the only ones.

I'm so sick of people not understanding that yes, for them it's nothing or almost nothing so why not just throw caution to the wind? Or worse still, those idiots who think it's all made up. Well, f*ck you. Some people just aren't so lucky.

By the way, a friend of mine had it and recovered after about 3 weeks but lost both his parents.

plus part of the reason for not encouraging mask wearing to begin with was because there simply wasnt the stockpile of masks needed, there was already a run on toilet paper etc and stories of people steeling medical supplies from hospitals. the last thing we would have needed was further mass panic over people fighting for masks in the streets! the masks available at the time were needed for front line and medical personnel.

I’m not convinced of that. Cloth masks are worn in Asia. I was wearing a cloth mask in April as the company I work for insisted on face coverings in common areas - edict from overseas head office.

People are still wearing disposable masks. I’m not sure why, they’re uncomfortable and dry your skin, and an environmental disaster. And because they’re uncomfortable, people hang them off their chins at the first opportunity. 
 

That's not true. Too many important scientists got this wrong and this had real policy consequences.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-face-mask-debate-reveals-a-scientific-doubl...

Which people have forgotten?  I took the view that the advice about masks was wrong then.

Your "Big Concern" was unsubstantiated speculation which also delayed lockdown due to unsubstantiated assertions attributed to scientists who later denied they had made warnings about the psychology of lockdown.

Also, letting Cheltenham go ahead?  I know Harding is on the board of the Jockey Club but why does that ive her evidence that Cheltenham was less harmful than people wearing masks?

Plus, what evidence of mass wearing of masks (including S Korea where Civil Defence is taken very seriously indeed)  in the SARS affected countries spread the disease was there then?  I wasn't aware of any.

You have forgotten. The debate went on and on, for weeks. In the meantime the government followed the scientific advice not to wear masks. The advice wasn’t you didn’t need to, or that you needed to, it was just not to wear them at the moment.  
 

In early March the extent of the spread was unknown. We had one confirmed case of death. We thought it could be contained by contact tracing. There was no testing. 
 

People just have selective memories over what happened. It’s been going on so long now and people are exhibiting hindsight bias to back up their views back then. 
 

You may well have been saying wear a mask back then, but the government weren’t and you were just going on gut feeling. Just because it turned out to be right, doesn’t mean it was going to be right. 
 

It’s like driving down the outside lane of a motorway at 70mph in the fog telling everyone to follow you because it’s safe. And then when you arrive safely, telling everyone you were right. 

Is there much real world evidence now (as in not a lab study)? They are not stopping cases from picking up rapidly in a host of mask mandating European countries, in fact you could point out that infection rates across Europe have skyrocketed since mask rules have been tightened. Yet face-mask hostile northern European countries are fairing no worse... People were very quick to cite the trend of mask-wearing in Asian countries as "evidence" to follow suit back in the summer, yet the response when this trend appears to have little or no benefit is "quick more masks!".

Btw I have a mask, and follow the law, but I do look forwards to the day I can tear it up, stamp all over it and set it on fire.

Infections have skyrocketed. Masks never were intended to stop infection. They were supposed to reduce likelihood of infection. As soon as you allow people to get closer, you increase that likelihood. So several things are happening at once and it’s not possible to say which has contributed individually. Just that wearing masks, getting closer and putting more people together has affected infection rates. 
 

However, and this is a big indicator that they are working, the disease appears to be less serious amongst those that wear masks. And this is thought to be related to ‘infectious dose’. This has been known about for centuries for infectious diseases. 
 

I think the real question is why didn’t the scientists take that into account early on? How comes the experts had forgotten the basics, or what made them discount that. 
 

But that’s why we have scientists, and why they all debate these things. I’m not in a position to carry out tests and collect, analyse and interpret data from thousands of people. I have enough debate between 3 engineers at work over the most efficient way to run some plant. 

We had this conversation back in March.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/has_covid19_been_here_for_a_lon...

ANS:  The case fatality rate (CFR) always appears to decline with time - it's a trick of the maths.  Primarily caused because 1) we're always pretty accurate at estimating deaths i.e. that measurement is pretty static, but 2) we always low ball the infection rate at the outset.  CFR = deaths/infections.  

If I am not mistaken, they now estimate that back in March infection rates in the population were perhaps 10x what they were publicly estimating.   If that's the case, the CFR back in March has to have been lower too.  

From prior post

--------------------------

Example:  Swine Flu.

During the Swine Flu epidemic they thought death rates ~1-1.5%.

https://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_11_27a/en/ 2

However, years later they (WHO again) went back and revised the estimate for the numbers infected and found it to be much much higher.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781221/ 1

The revised fatality rate suggested at is ~0.02%.

it wasn't gut feeling at all.  It was based on the mass behaviour in other countries where they had had previous experience with SARS.   And what I have not forgotten is that a lot of discouragement from wearing masks was propagated (I am at home so I have a lot of time for listening to radio output as it doesn't prevent other activity.)  The tone was distinctly discouraging and over hyped the possible hazards of masks (of which I was already aware, having seen NBC training material in the past).  I had already done a lot of personal planning and execution over my own safety on the outside to the extent I could see a lot of unsafe behaviour every time I was out.   Given the actual precautions being taken in other countries I don't think any sound arguments against mask wearing were put out and my logic told me (not gut feeling as I had thought long and hard about protection in a biohazard contaminated environment) it was not sensible to take a negative attitude (this came across in many interviews on R4 from scientists with no experience of such a pandemic and from ministers).  Given the go ahead for Cheltenham the vidence I had was that I could not trust the existence of common sense in government policy.

The word "forgot" is not properly used here, any more than I have forgotten the mass popular support for the invasion of Iraq that is sometimes alleged when I met no one (and I was so upset I spoke willingly about it and frequently) who was in support of it.

Hindsight is used too often to wipe away the idea that errors are not evident early on.

"Young people as diligent about Covid measures as older people, survey finds.

Global poll calls into question stereotype of feckless youth driving up infection rates."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/30/young-people-as-diligent-abou...

All im saying is can you prove its covid? Or is it a viral infection etc theres lots of things it could be , not necessarily covid.  Im just using fact and evidence like most people rant about....not doing nothing apart asking if youve had proof....my bad for not believing things withing evidence behind them...

Very interesting how population wide behaviours give a misleading picture  

Whole report here:

https://lifewithcorona.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Life_with_corona_REPO...

We find that the total number of counter-coronavirus behaviours is strongly associated with age, although we also note that the absolute differences are moderate. Out of nine surveyed behaviours, 18-25 year-olds (who undertake the fewest actions) engage in just over 6.1 on average; those over 45 (who undertake the most actions) engaged in just over 6.3 behaviours on average. At the individual level, these differences are very small, suggesting that young people take their responsibilities very seriously. At the same time, aggregated across the entire populations we study, these small individual-level differences aggregate up a difference of millions of more actions taken by older people. 

To clarify, do you mean that estimates of infections in March were out by a factor 10, or do you mean that tests where only picking up 10% of cases?

Are you suggesting 40,000 cases a day in March or 400,000.

Rounding to the nearest order of magnitude....

Since March, so many people have died in the UK that a hard lower bound for our fatality rate given by (total dead) / (population) is around 0.1% (going by excess deaths).

Given seroprevalence studies suggesting around 8% of people have been infected we get a fatality rate of around 1%.  This gives an upper bound for the fatality rate.

Nothing can push the fatality rate as low as for swine flu now, and as the localised explosions of cases show we are nowhere near herd immunity which suggests a true fatality rate closer to the 1% suggested by seroprevalence than the 0.1% by assuming we've all had it.  

The things I think could narrow down the real rate or perhaps are understanding the correlation between t-cell immunity and antibody immunity (is seroprevalence a good indicator of the total scale of infection?) and the potential for demographic shifts and less NHS overload in the 2nd wave and beyond.   In extremes t-cell immunity not studied could lower the upper bound but I don’t think that’s looking likely.

So it looks like like we’re close to the upper bound given by the CMO back in March.

Unless one is an Oxford professor of theoretical epidemiology, that is...

I don’t know how meaningful it really is to look at fatality rates when outcome is linked to viral load at infection.

The March figures of positive tests were estimated to be about 10-20%  of all infections. We were only testing the sick people in hospitals. Given the seroprevalence data from blood donations is suggesting 9% of England have had Covid thats 5.4m people infected in about 200 days. That’s over 27,000 a day on average. At the peak it would have to have been close on 100k+ a day

I think his point is that the CFR will drop further. But I think we need to take into account that with the Swine Flu people definitely had cross immunity. We don’t know about that with Covid, although there’s a few people who suspect that might be the case. 
 

As you are fond of saying, we should probably assume the worst (within reason). 

I don’t disagree with that, but Stu seems to be suggesting a higher figure.

Indeed. I have worked in labs. Usually within a clean room environment where you shower and change clothing. 
 

I really don’t think that’s possible in an uncontrolled environment like the outside world. I drove myself nuts just trying to load the shopping in the car. Was doing ok round the supermarket until I went for my car keys and contaminated my trouser pockets with my Covid soaked hands. Then realised I’d already contaminated my back pocket and wallet and all the handles of the shopping bags. 
 

At which point I gave up and decided it would be better to wash my hands often and risk it. 

I am saying only that it is typical during the early days of a novel outbreak to low-ball infection rates (as was the case for Swine flu and as was the case for Covid) and as a result of that low-balling of infection rates ... it generates an artificially high CFR during that early stage.  

As the outbreak advances we get a better handle on infection rates, we realize that it was actually wider spread than our measurements in the early days were telling us, and the CFR starts to fall as a result.

While other factors will be at play (like our ability to treat with the infection), this particular factor has the effect of making it look like CFR is reducing ... when it is not ... we're just measuring the the denominator properly.

To the OP ... Covid isn't becoming less dangerous.  

My apologies ... I was not making the case for the CFR of covid falling to the CFR of Swine flu.   I was simply using Swine Flu as an example to demonstrate that as we get a handle on the extent of infection ... the CFR mathematically has to fall as a result.

Good insight!

I'm going to interpret that as actual infection rates being 10-20 times the number of positive tests in March and April, rather than some Gupta style lunacy. In which case, yes I agree.

17 APRIL 2020 - "Antibody tests suggest that coronavirus infections vastly exceed official counts

Study estimates a more than 50-fold increase in coronavirus infections compared to official cases, but experts have raised concerns about the reliability of antibody kits."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0 

There was evidence, even as early as April, that they were "officially" low-balling the infection numbers at the early stages.  As they correct for low-balling .. the CFR appears to fall.

(What is a Gupta style lunacy?  )

Sorry; I didn't think you were and I agree with your point from back in March and now; I'm making the point that the CFR is pretty damned high by any possible metric and that it's never going to be shown to be much less than 0.1% despite some ongoing fantasy thinking from others (not you!).

I've attached my latest plot of the current CFR for the UK, achieved by dividing deaths into cases with various lag and with a judicious amount of filtering applied to both the inputs (15-point 3rd order Savitzky Golay) and output (7-point, 3rd order SG) .  Depending on the lag from detection to death, CFR is about 1% at the moment in the UK and we're detecting perhaps 40% of infections suggesting an IFR of about 0.4%.  What's troubling me is that as of last week's ONS data (now about 8 days more out of data than the inputs to my CFR plot), infections are largely confined to those < 65.   Tomorrow's ONS update will be instructive.  

I'd fear that with infection across all ages we tend form our current IFR of perhaps 0.4% towards an IFR of 1% and that's where we're heading as widespread community transmission breaks the shielding around the older and otherwise more vulnerable.  There's anecdotal evidence of this from a poster on UKC and hard evidence in the last PHE report from last Friday (likewise, tomorrow's PHE update will be instructive).  So, we could be faxing something of a double whammy if exponential growth in cases continues from both the growth in cases and the effect that has on shielding and therefore the IFR.

Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She claimed in March that 65% of the population had already had the virus. In June she stated that the death rate could be as low as 1/10,000, when it had already killed 5.5/10,000 of the population.

Are there different strains and can it mutate? Yes

4,992 distinct genomes sequenced and submitted to nextstrain as of today.

https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global

Is there evidence that a significantly less lethal strain is pushing an older, more lethal one out of circulation? Not that I've seen.  I've seen articles arguing for both less- and more- virulent mutations but I don't think much of what is circulating in countries where a 2nd wave is taking off is getting sequenced right now...

one trick I learned fairly early on was to take gloves off inside out and if holding change, receipts (usually requested to be dropped into a bag with shopping to go into 3 days of quarantine but sometimes unavoidably given in hand) and use the glove, inside out, as the quarantine bag for the contents, which has included bank cards on occasion.

It is pretty evident that you have to decontaminate hands between shops otherwise people are simply protecting themselves with gloves and still potentially carrying the virus between sites.  I'm still collecting leaves to carry when I know gates are coming up on hillwalks so I can use and drop the leaf to avoid contact with gates.  Costs me nothing and may or may not achieve anything which does not matter to me as its just a routine.

I just try to imagine there's cyanide or novichok on anything out there and on people's breaths!  On the subject of masks, it goes on on leaving the car and apart from any unavoidable adjustments stays on till I'm back in.   Gardening gloves for scrambling in the Lakes as places have been so busy and they work really really well, as good if not better than bare hands as no sticky fingers on the rock.

news from an informant who lives in Keswick - heaving all week with large numbers of visitors from the NE who have decided to do their forbidden minglin' in Keswick and the surrounds.  He and his gf have had a lot of opportunity to observe this phenomenon.  Interestin'  can you just leave an infected locked down area to do as you like disporting yourself and your pals elsewhere where it's less infected and not locked down?

An older acquaintance tells me he and his sister dare not go out in the daytime as they are both elderly and shielding and the visitors seem not to feel any need to  keep any distance or respect their personal space on the streets of Keswick.

Makes a bit of a mockery of the title "professor". 

At least it isn’t at a prestigious university!

I doubt there have been many pensioners enjoying freshers week parties. 

My wife has antibodies. She’s hardly been out of the house. I work in London and was working in London everyday throughout the Lockdown. Neither of us have had any symptoms whatsoever. One of the guys I work  with closely has also got anti bodies. Again completely asymptomatic. I think it’s pretty likely that I’ve bought it home. Three buildings locally to me had cases in March where they cleared floors and bought in the deep cleaners. No cases of transmission recorded despite one guy being at his desk for 4 days after returning from Italy. 
 

But then they were doing no testing then. 
 

It’s all a bit mad. 

Whats not to trust about an article written by a sceptic with an arts degree ...

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine estimate 100k cases a day in the first wave peak:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51768274

I'm watching Channel 4 news now and they mentioned that the infection rate is going down nationally and the R number might be just above 1, 1.04 was the exact number given. 

What about an a Brit Pop hero who is a staunch anti-masker - I, myself was not a fun. 

https://www.nme.com/news/music/noel-gallagher-refuses-to-wear-face-mask-the...

MS

100k cases a day at IFR of 1% is 1000 deaths a day. 
 

Crudely speaking. 

I'm sorry, it wasn't right of me to take it out on you like that. The cursing wasn't directed at you personally, just to all those people who have perhaps taken it less seriously than they should (in my opinion).

Please accept my apology for losing my sh*t, I think it was just kind of bottled up a bit.

Doesn't trust "Big Pharma"  but does trust Colombian Jungle shed produced Coke and home lab synthesised MDMA ....

Sars2 CoV is surprisingly stable for an RNA virus (there is a well understood reason for this that is to do with the nested arrangement of genes and overlapping reading frames).

So yes, there are moleculary separatable strains that dominate circulation in different areas (presumably a result of random differences between founder strains infecting patient zero for a given region).

However, there is no evidence for reduced pathogenicity as yet. The time scale would be much too short anyway, we are at probably no more than 100 infection cycles since the jump to humans).

The only reports linking a change in sequence with a difference in disease physiology concern a mutation causing an amino acid change in the spike protein that is more common in Europe than Asia, which seems (!) to make the virus more infective but at the same time more susceptible to antibody based immunity.

CB

Either that or you have cross reactivity with ABs from standard, common cold associated coronaviruses. There is a good reason why e.g. positive HIV antibody tests are confirmed by PCR, virus isolation, or Western blot before a proper diagnosis.

CB

Not necessarily, nobody catching it in the home would be wearing a mask and i've heard nothing about the second or third infected in a household getting it worse despite hearing just about every other folk story imaginable, this detail makes me suspicious of the viral load argument. Why aren't people dying in droves when their bed mate or covid kid coughs all over them for days but nurses are? An early run on already short supply masks would have seen care setting and hospital infection intensified exposing the most vulnerable. I hate defending this government but the mask muddle was probably grounded in the messy reality we faced in April. The slightest mis-step could have sparked more panic buying, they were strange times.

Jk

Quite, it is only "the other place".

CB

As I wrote above, the article is not a bad summary. Simplifications, yes, outright fake news, not really.

CB (biologist)

I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make at first, other than that you could multiply 100k by 0.01...

But I suspect you were looking at the graphs of deaths, which peaked at about 1000. So the estimated 100k cases/day and known 1000 deaths per day does give your IFR estimate 1%.

That hospitalisation figure of about 3k per day at the peak must have been scary if you got hospitalised: a 1 in 3 probability of not coming out.

Too right!

Like Boris doesn't 'get' Climate Change Noel doesn't 'understand' the science of the virus - or he in living a coccaine and MDMA fueled bubble world.

The problem is will all the Oasis fans follow him and believe his arse talking?

MS

I think that is a bit paranoid (and I have worked in virology labs with pressure suits, glove cabinets and chlorine bleach showers). The infection risk from food, change, door handles seems to be negligible compared to a guy sneezing hard on a bus 15 mins before you board, or sitting in the office canteen a couple of meters down draft of an asymptomatic carrier.

I do have a disinfectant spray in my car and in my bike bag, which I apply to my hands after shopping, and that is pretty much it. Importantly, using liberal amounts of disinfectant  (5-6 ml into the cupped hands) and letting it work for 20 secs before wiping your hands is crucial.  If  you just spread some droplets from the supermarket dispenser that evaporate in seconds you might as well not bother.

CB

CFR is a bit of a worthless stat as its based on known 'cases', so the  percentage of infected people  diagnosed as cases effects the result. What you really want to know is Infection Fatality Rate or perhaps even better the population mortality rate. As the disease is better understood over time, a better estimate can be made of these.

"I am saying only that it is typical during the early days of a novel outbreak to low-ball infection rates (as was the case for Swine flu and as was the case for Covid) and as a result of that low-balling of infection rates ... it generates an artificially high CFR during that early stage.  "

No it doesn't, CFR is based on known 'cases' I think you mean IFR

Yes I spotted that at the time too, she's not too sharp is she.

Yes sorry. If you take the widely accepted figure of 0.3% you get 330k a day. But my gut feeling is that’s quite skewed in London by the ethnic make up, the obesity and heart disease of the U.K. in general and the care home outbreaks that would have made pockets of spread more deadly. 
 

I think the number of infections must be between 8-12m which you can’t get to in 200 days without some pretty large rates. 

I did consider whether it was a bit over the top, but then I have a history of being unlucky so I considered that avoiding contact with sweaty gate handles and scrambling in busy mountains could be entirely avoided without any significant effort or cost.  Given I'm a bit older and asthmatic it seemed reasonable.

I come from a mindset from winter soloing, if you neglect something it will catch you out and perhaps imagining cyanide in the beginning was paranoid but it got me into a careful routine so perhaps it served a purpose.

We were pretty indoctrinated round here with biosecurity in 2001 as we were in the centre of it and the front line moved through this area so lots of army vehicles, closed footpaths, piles of rotting bodies of cattle and sheep lying around waiting to be burned or collected in stinking drippy lorries leaking indescribably horrible stuff.  Oh, and govt contractors who made 3 attempts to dig a burning pit before the army prevented their final unaided attempt to dig one over a large gas pipeline despite the people on the farm telling them it was there!  Got sick of hearing announcements about being in a "Biosecurity Intensification zone" on local radio.  You could taste the burnt rotten meat in the smoke from two burning pits whose smoke got into the house from South and West at less than a mile with the wind always seeming to be set in a direction that carried one or other to us low over the ground in a  long stream.

What I posted:  https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/has_covid_become_less_dangerous...

1.  https://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_11_27a/en/  "As many countries have stopped counting individual cases, particularly of milder illness, the case count is likely to be significantly lower than the actual number of cases that have occurred."

2.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781221/  "Assuming that the cumulative incidence in the countries included in our studies is similar to the rest of the world for which no little data exist and if the global mortality estimates produced by two research groups1, 2 are confirmed by other studies, this would place the CFR for H1N1pdm at <0·02%."

In both cases ... they, the WHO, meant cases/CFR.

Have you read guys the latest findings about Covid19 where the data was run by a computer then results were duly analyze by professionals. This talks about Bradykinin hypothesis.

Yes I was in the UK back then, you could smell the burning pits even if the closest ones were dozens of miles away! Being close to the centre of a local outbreak must have been horrible!

FMD is MUCH more infectious and stable than SARS2, though, as it is an uncoated virus, essentially just a little protein crystal filled with RNA. Recent outbreaks in Japan were caused by virus travelling in dust clouds from central Asian deserts!

And of course, being extra careful cannot hurt.

CB

edit: and digging a fire pit over a gas pipeline would have made disposal of the carcasses quite a bit faster!

this was incorrect

""I am saying only that it is typical during the early days of a novel outbreak to low-ball infection rates (as was the case for Swine flu and as was the case for Covid) and as a result of that low-balling of infection rates ... it generates an artificially high CFR during that early stage.  ""

You can't low ball infection rates to raise CFR. With CFR the they either are Cases or aren't cases. Low balling the number of infections would however generate an artificially high IFR (not CFR). CFR is just what it is, the death rate of known cases.

Another example of your confusions with CFR / IFR 

"CFR = deaths/infections."

This is incorrect, IFR  = deaths caused by infection / infections

CFR = deaths of known cases / cases

(these are often actually displayed as percentages not raw fractions as above)

Top lad 👍

T-cells appears to improve immunity.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-09-04-persistent-immune-memory-covid-19-foun...

We obviously want a good, safe and affordable vaccine.  Even if one is found immediately, it could take a year to be put into mass use.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54371559