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Scaremongering or Not, Corona Virus = Nae Killie


Andy

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9 minutes ago, Lions13 said:

"Could" be the worst global respiratory viral pandemic in 100 years.

I remember similar comments made about viruses in the last couple of decades.

I'll stick with the opinion of me ex colleagues specialising in Respiratory Conditions and those that work at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research. 

Things may change over the next few weeks. They may not. Guess we'll wait and see, but building a fort out of toilet paper and bathing in hand sanitizer isn't required yet.

This is worse than SARS, MERS or H1N1. 

H1N1 killed between 150,000 and 575,000 globally. The 1968 flu pandemic killed around one million. 

COVID-19 is currently doubling every five days and the mortality rate is much higher than  H1N1.

Any predicted overall mortality is guesswork, but it is reasonable to predict that it will be over a million, making it the worst global respiratory virus pandemic since 1918.

The worst overall pandemic since 1918 is HIV, which has killed around 30 million. 

Have your colleagues at Glasgow University published anything in a peer-reviewed journal in relation to the virus? If so, I'm happy to read it. 

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27 minutes ago, fraz65 said:

Any predicted overall mortality is guesswork, but it is reasonable to predict that it will be over a million, making it the worst global respiratory virus pandemic since 1918.

Guesswork is the most important part of this paragraph.  There were predictions  regarding SARS, MERS, and H1N1, none of which came true. In fact, only H1N1 was considered (qualified as) a pandemic. Beware of the media overplaying things and how they choose their quotes.

I'm not saying it's not dangerous, in fact I am within the higher risk category due to my asthma, hence my interest in Respiratory research in particular.

There have been several (30 to 50) papers published. Personally, I've only read the ones via The Lancet. 

There will not doubt be others that are available via Virology titles, some of which may be available via pre print servers. 

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6 hours ago, Lions13 said:

I hope you have not found me patronising @fraz65, that is certainly not my intention.

These fields are not my speciality, which is why I speak to my colleagues and take their best advice.

I've found you closed-minded rather than patronising. 

This isn't being driven by the media, it's being driven by experts in infectious disease and public health. 

I can send some reputable literature your way, and might actually post some on here as a counterweight to some of the ignorant comments that are being posted. 

Disinformation is one of the biggest challenges that we'll encounter in combating this virus. 

Edited by fraz65
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From the New England Journal of Medicine, February 2020:

"With Covid-19, are we seeing a replay of 1918? Although we did not “witness” the beginning of the 1918 pandemic, evidence suggests that wherever it began, it silently spread around the world, causing mostly mild cases but also mortality of 0.5 to 1% or higher — a rate that was initially too low to be detected against a high background rate of death from unrelated respiratory illnesses. Then it suddenly exploded in urban centers almost everywhere at once, making a dramatic entrance after a long, stealthy approach. We are now recognizing early stages of Covid-19 emergence in the form of growing and geographically expanding case totals, and there are alarming similarities between the two respiratory disease emergences. Like pandemic influenza in 1918, Covid-19 is associated with respiratory spread, an undetermined percentage of infected people with presymptomatic or asymptomatic cases transmitting infection to others, and a high fatality rate

With luck, public health control measures may be able to put the demons back in the jar. If they do not, we face a daunting challenge equal to or perhaps greater than that posed by the influenza pandemic of a century ago".

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2002106

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This is a long read, but pretty eye opening. It's a testimony from an Italian doctor at a hospital in Bergamo.

«In one of the non-stop e-mails that I receive from my hospital administration on a more than daily basis, there was a paragraph on "how to be responsible on social media", with some recommendations that we all can agree on. After thinking for a long time if and what to write about what's happening here, I felt that silence was not responsible. I will therefore try to convey to lay-people, those who are more distant from our reality, what we are experiencing in Bergamo during these Covid-19 pandemic days. I understand the need not to panic, but when the message of the danger of what is happening is not out, and I still see people ignoring the recommendations and people who gather together complaining that they cannot go to the gym or play soccer tournaments, I shiver. I also understand the economic damage and I am also worried about that. After this epidemic, it will be hard to start over.

Still, beside the fact that we are also devastating our national health system from an economic point of view, I want to point out that the public health damage that is going to invest the country is more important and I find it nothing short of "chilling" that new quarantine areas requested by the Region has not yet been established for the municipalities of Alzano Lombardo and Nembro (I would like to clarify that this is purely personal opinion). I myself looked with some amazement at the reorganization of the entire hospital in the previous week, when our current enemy was still in the shadows: the wards slowly "emptied", elective activities interrupted, intensive care unit freed to create as many beds as possible. Containers arriving in front of the emergency room to create diversified routes and avoid infections. All this rapid transformation brought in the hallways of the hospital an atmosphere of surreal silence and emptiness that we did not understand, waiting for a war that had yet to begin and that many (including me) were not so sure would never come with such ferocity (I open a parenthesis: all this was done in the shadows, and without publicity, while several newspapers had the courage to say that private health care was not doing anything).

I still remember my night shift a week ago spent without any rest, waiting for a call from the microbiology department. I was waiting for the results of a swab taken from the first suspect case in our hospital, thinking about what consequences it would have for us and the hospital. If I think about it, my agitation for one possible case seems almost ridiculous and unjustified, now that I have seen what is happening. Well, the situation is now nothing short of dramatic. No other words come to mind. The war has literally exploded and battles are uninterrupted day and night. One after the other, these unfortunate people come to the emergency room. They have far from the complications of a flu. Let's stop saying it's a bad flu. In my two years working in Bergamo, I have learned that the people here do not come to the emergency room for no reason. They did well this time too. They followed all the recommendations given: a week or ten days at home with a fever without going out to prevent contagion, but now they can't take it anymore. They don't breathe enough, they need oxygen. Drug therapies for this virus are few.

The course mainly depends on our organism. We can only support it when it can't take it anymore. It is mainly hoped that our body will eradicate the virus on its own, let's face it. Antiviral therapies are experimental on this virus and we learn its behavior day after day. Staying at home until the symptoms worsen does not change the prognosis of the disease. Now, however, that need for beds in all its drama has arrived. One after another, the departments that had been emptied are filling up at an impressive rate. The display boards with the names of the sicks, of different colors depending on the department they belong to, are now all red and instead of the surgical procedure, there is the diagnosis, which is always the same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. Now, tell me which flu virus causes such a rapid tragedy.

Because that's the difference (now I get a little technical): in classical flu, besides that it infects much less population over several months, cases are complicated less frequently: only when the virus has destroyed the protective barriers of our airways and as such it allows bacteria (which normally resident in the upper airways) to invade the bronchi and lungs, causing a more serious disease. Covid 19 causes a banal flu in many young people, but in many elderly people (and not only) a real SARS because it invades the alveoli of the lungs directly, and it infects them making them unable to perform their function. The resulting respiratory failure is often serious and after a few days of hospitalization, the simple oxygen that can be administered in a ward may not be enough. Sorry, but to me, as a doctor, it's not reassuring that the most serious are mainly elderly people with other pathologies. The elderly population is the most represented in our country and it is difficult to find someone who, above 65 years of age, does not take at least a pill for high blood pressure or diabetes.

I can also assure you that when you see young people who end up intubated in the ICU, pronated or worse, in ECMO (a machine for the worst cases, which extracts the blood, re-oxygenates it and returns it to the body, waiting for the lungs to hopefully heal), all this confidence for your young age goes away. And while there are still people on social media who boast of not being afraid by ignoring the recommendations, protesting that their normal lifestyle habits have "temporarily" halted, the epidemiological disaster is taking place. And there are no more surgeons, urologists, orthopedists, we are only doctors who suddenly become part of a single team to face this tsunami that has overwhelmed us.

The cases multiply, up to a rate of 15-20 hospitalizations a day all for the same reason. The results of the swabs now come one after the other: positive, positive, positive. Suddenly the emergency room is collapsing. Emergency provisions are issued: help is needed in the emergency room. A quick meeting to learn how the to use to emergency room EHR and a few minutes later I'm already downstairs, next to the warriors on the war front. The screen of the PC with the chief complaint is always the same: fever and respiratory difficulty, fever and cough, respiratory insufficiency etc ... Exams, radiology always with the same sentence: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. All needs to be hospitalized. Some already needs to be intubated, and goes to the ICU. For others, however, it is late. ICU is full, and when ICUs are full, more are created. Each ventilator is like gold: those in the operating rooms that have now suspended their non-urgent activity are used and the OR become a an ICU that did not exist before. I found it amazing, or at least I can speak for Humanitas Gavazzeni (where I work), how it was possible to put in place in such a short time a deployment and a reorganization of resources so finely designed to prepare for a disaster of this magnitude. And every reorganization of beds, wards, staff, work shifts and tasks is constantly reviewed day after day to try to give everything and even more. Those wards that previously looked like ghosts are now saturated, ready to try to give their best for the sick, but exhausted. The staff is exhausted. I saw fatigue on faces that didn't know what it was despite the already grueling workloads they had. I have seen people still stop beyond the times they used to stop already, for overtime that was now habitual. I saw solidarity from all of us, who never failed to go to our internist colleagues to ask "what can I do for you now?" or "leave that admission to me, i will take care of it." Doctors who move beds and transfer patients, who administer therapies instead of nurses. Nurses with tears in their eyes because we are unable to save everyone and the vital signs of several patients at the same time reveal an already marked destiny. There are no more shifts, schedules.

Social life is suspended for us. I have been separated for a few months, and I assure you that I have always done my best to constantly see my son even on the day after a night shift, without sleeping and postponing sleep until when I am without him, but for almost 2 weeks I have voluntarily not seen neither my son nor my family members for fear of infecting them and in turn infecting an elderly grandmother or relatives with other health problems. I'm happy with some photos of my son that I look at between tears and a few video calls. So you should be patient too, you can't go to the theater, museums or gym. Try to have mercy on that myriad of older people you could exterminate. It is not your fault, I know, but of those who put it in your head that you are exaggerating and even this testimony may seem just an exaggeration for those who are far from the epidemic, but please, listen to us, try to leave the house only to indispensable things. Do not go en masse to make stocks in supermarkets: it is the worst thing because you concentrate and the risk of contacts with infected people who do not know they are infected. You can go there without a rush. Maybe if you have a normal mask (even those that are used to do certain manual work), put it on. Don't look for ffp2 or ffp3. Those should serve us and we are beginning to struggle to find them. By now we have had to optimize their use only in certain circumstances, as the WHO recently recommended in view of their almost ubiquitous running low. Oh yes, thanks to the shortage of certain protection devices, many colleagues and I are certainly exposed despite all the other means of protection we have. Some of us have already become infected despite the protocols. Some infected colleagues also have infected relatives and some of their family members are already struggling between life and death. We are where your fears could make you stay away. Try to make sure you stay away.

Tell your family members who are elderly or with other illnesses to stay indoors. Bring him the groceries please. We have no alternative. It's our job. Indeed what I do these days is not really the job I'm used to, but I do it anyway and I will like it as long as it responds to the same principles: try to make some sick people feel better and heal, or even just alleviate the suffering and the pain to those who unfortunately cannot heal. I don't spend a lot of words about the people who define us heroes these days and who until yesterday were ready to insult and report us. Both will return to insult and report as soon as everything is over. People forget everything quickly. And we're not even heroes these days. It's our job. We risked something bad every day before: when we put our hands in a belly full of someone's blood we don't even know if they have HIV or hepatitis C; when we do it even though we know they have HIV or hepatitis C; when we stick ourselves during an operation on a patient with HIV and take the drugs that make us vomit all day long for a month. When we read with anguish the results of the blood tests after an accidental needlestick, hoping not to be infected. We simply earn our living with something that gives us emotions. It doesn't matter if they are beautiful or ugly, we just take them home. In the end we only try to make ourselves useful for everyone. Now try to do it too, though: with our actions we influence the life and death of a few dozen people. You with yours, many more. Please share and share the message. We need to spread the word to prevent what is happening here from happening all over Italy.

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5 hours ago, KillieDIV said:

This is a long read, but pretty eye opening. It's a testimony from an Italian doctor at a hospital in Bergamo....

 

That's a terrifying account. 

Based on current estimates of the virus doubling every week, unless extraordinary containment measures are put in place, the UK is 4-5 weeks away from being in a similar situation to Italy (6,000 cases), and 8-10 weeks away from the health system being overwhelmed (100,000 cases). 

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21 minutes ago, Wrangodog said:

What's the betting the Sevco v Celtic game gets played then then SFA/SPFL order the rest to be played behind closed doors ? Valencia fans gathered outside the Mestalla last night during the game which kinda defeats the purpose of making it a closed doors game. 

I’d argue that should the SPFL make the OF game a behind close doors game that it would cause more problems should the same thing happen as did last night at the Mestella , hence I think they’ll let it go ahead . 

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7 hours ago, Wrangodog said:

What's the betting the Sevco v Celtic game gets played then then SFA/SPFL order the rest to be played behind closed doors ? Valencia fans gathered outside the Mestalla last night during the game which kinda defeats the purpose of making it a closed doors game. 

Getting 1/10 of the population of a city to gather place seems a right bad move, when gatherings of over 1000 are banned in Spain or Germany - even if it's not as bad here.  When they still had cafes open in Italy, they were making folk sit 1m from the next person!  Can't see how at least some of the games won't be played behind closed doors - even if they make that decision in a couple of weeks.

 

 

Edited by RAG
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14 hours ago, Wrangodog said:

Poor Nadine Dorries, guess fiddling your expenses doesn't stretch to buying hand soap. :P

Government denies there will be any problem despite her being in contact with 100s of MPs in the past week: 

There are no plans to test any UK ministers, including Boris Johnson, for coronavirus after the health minister Nadine Dorries became the first MP to be diagnosed with Covid-19, PA Media reports.

The Department of Health and Social Care said ministers would not need to undergo testing as Public Health England worked to advise those who have been in close contact with Dorries.

PHE said it had assessed the risk of Dorries’ individual close contacts and only those with symptoms needed to self-isolate. For each Covid-19 case, a risk assessment is carried out and advice tailored to that group, a spokeswoman said.

 

advice contradicted by another MP who doesn't have symptoms:

A second UK MP enters self-isolation

The York MP Rachael Maskell has confirmed that she has been advised to self-isolate after having a meeting with Nadine Dorries last Thursday – she says that she is asymptomatic.

"NHS111 have advised that I self-isolate as a result of a meeting I had with the Government's Mental Health Minister last Thursday who has subsequently tested positive for Coronovirus. Thankfully I am asymptomatic. It is so important that we all follow all public health advice."

 

 

 

 

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The SPFL have warned Scottish clubs there is no pot of money to help them should games have to be played behind closed doors because of coronavirus.

Various competitions across Europe have either had fixtures postponed or played without spectators.

No matches in Scotland have yet been affected but the SPFL warned last week of "dire financial consequences".

The league body have written to clubs "advising them to examine their insurance arrangements".

A statement added: "This is particularly important as the SPFL does not hold reserves. Every single penny of income from sponsorships, broadcast deals and cup revenue is already paid to the clubs as fees."

The SPFL also said that they would be guided by instructions from the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, while the Scottish FA say they are continuing to monitor the situation daily.

Wednesday's Scottish Premiership meeting between St Mirren and Hearts will go ahead as scheduled, but the Paisley club have asked fans suffering from cold or flu-like symptoms not to attend.

The club say it is "imperative we protect the health of all those who attend".

That comes with figures accurate at 06:00 GMT showing 382 cases of coronavirus and six deaths in the UK as the illness spreads across the world.

SPFL clubs rely heavily on ticket sales, with Uefa's latest benchmark report revealed that 43% of the Scottish top flight's revenue was made up of gate receipts in 2018.

One Premiership club told BBC Scotland they would be forced to rely on the goodwill of fans to not demand refunds should they not be permitted to attended games.

Another top-flight outfit said they had not received clarification as to whether the league body's own insurance would cover any potential compensation claims.

However, Aberdeen chairman Dave Cormack said all clubs had to rely on the governing bodies to guide them.

"Clearly, if games are played behind closed doors and you've got less income coming in, that is a concern. If we have a year off, I don't think there'd be too many teams left in Scotland.

"But also, we need to take a deep breath and see where this leads us.

"Everyone's concerned but the guidance we've been given so far, we've followed to the letter - in fact, even more, by trying to isolate our first team," he said.

"It's a concern, but how long is a piece of string? Is this going to be over in a week, two week, two months? We've got to take things as they come."

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1 hour ago, Wrangodog said:

The SPFL have warned Scottish clubs there is no pot of money to help them should games have to be played behind closed doors because of coronavirus.

Absolute disgrace of an organisation.  There may be no easy solution but to just go all slopey-shoulders about it is yet another reason why that scumbag Doncaster should be well out the door.

How does he manage to stay in charge?

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1 hour ago, dasboag said:

Absolute disgrace of an organisation.  There may be no easy solution but to just go all slopey-shoulders about it is yet another reason why that scumbag Doncaster should be well out the door.

How does he manage to stay in charge?

The SPFL (And EFL's) hands are tied by the fact games can't be broadcast by law on PPV at 3pm Saturday.   UEFA competitions are made for tv, pretty much like the EPL.

Killie will broadcast all the games live abroad on Killie TV, but they can't do that in UK at present.

Ironically in a games behind closed doors situation, the rules there to protect attendances could see clubs go the wall.

Even if BT/Sky agreed to let clubs broadcast online temporarily - which would be suicide for their business to allow football to go online even for a few weeks - the individual clubs or BT/Sky can't sell the product to folk in the UK, with a start time of 3pm on a Saturday!

 

Edited by RAG
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IF or is it more now when , decision is taken to ban public gatherings over 1000 in the UK.....has already been agreed the law re TV coverage of 3pm Saturday games will be relaxed and BT/Sky will also be asked to make some games subscription free to avoid large groups gathering in pubs etc......that allowance should also allow other clubs of games not picked by TV to broadcast live games on club channels in UK ......if they can

If in Scotland we see closed door games for a substantive period, the idea of ST holders asking for refunds may become tricky for a lot of clubs on top of losing other normal match day revenues

People’s health is the most important thing in all this and just have to hope correct procedures are seen to have the best effective and can get through this 

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