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Economic impact of Coronavirus


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53 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

Feels like Deja vu to February, March time. Sitting back watching what's happening in France and Spain currently (cases rising followed now by hospitalizations and ICU patients rising and unfortunately the last thing to rise, death figures).

We're still at the 'cases are rising but we're doing a lot more testing' stage of the denial phase. Give it a month and we'll be seeing a lot more patients going into our hospitals and a few weeks after that our death tolls will start rocketing again. 

I don't know what the solution is but sadly this is the scenario that so many experts predicted would happen. 

 

If you go here and look at the chart on the right (click on the months to add them to the chart), you can see that confirmed cases are rising at around a rate of 1 to 2% day to day, but deaths aren't rising with it.

The problem back in March (and still to a lesser extent now), is that this is a novel coronavirus. The panic was that the medics didn't know how to treat it effectively. Treatment is much better now than it was even back then, and the death rate from hospitals is much lower (as a percentage, obviously there have been fewer cases overall). It still remains true that the overwhelming majority will have no or mild symptoms from this, and make a full recovery.

Putting everyone in lockdown again just kicks the can a little further down the road I'm afraid.

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8 minutes ago, Scooby_Doo said:

If you go here and look at the chart on the right (click on the months to add them to the chart), you can see that confirmed cases are rising at around a rate of 1 to 2% day to day, but deaths aren't rising with it.

The problem back in March (and still to a lesser extent now), is that this is a novel coronavirus. The panic was that the medics didn't know how to treat it effectively. Treatment is much better now than it was even back then, and the death rate from hospitals is much lower (as a percentage, obviously there have been fewer cases overall). It still remains true that the overwhelming majority will have no or mild symptoms from this, and make a full recovery.

Putting everyone in lockdown again just kicks the can a little further down the road I'm afraid.

From what I see on https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker/ this decent, well put together site. It's mainly the younger population who are getting infected meantime. There is always a lag between infections rising and the subsequent hospital cases, ICU and death tolls going up. In the manner the case numbers are rising, its inevitable that infections will spread to the older or more vulnerable population eventually and the worst figures will follow. 

The actual death toll might not be as bad as March/April because of the reasons you've mentioned regarding better treatments and more awareness of how to treat. But it scares me when people are pointing out the rise in cases without the deaths and ICU patients at this stage, as I say there's always a lag between all this happening which is why I suggest we're likely to see a bleaker picture in a month - 6 weeks time. 

Edited by Dieter's Heeder
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5 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

From what I see on https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker/ this decent, well put together site. It's mainly the younger population who are getting infected meantime. There is always a lag between infections rising and the subsequent hospital cases, ICU and death tolls going up. In the manner the case numbers are rising, its inevitable that infections will spread to the older or more vulnerable population eventually and the worst figures will follow. 

The actual death toll might not be as bad as March/April because of the reasons you've mentioned regarding better treatments and more awareness of how to treat. But it scares me when people are pointing out the rise in cases without the deaths and ICU patients at this stage, as I say there's always a lag between all this happening which is why I suggest we're likely to see a bleaker picture in a month - 6 weeks time. 

The above explains the current situation well I believe 

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3 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

From what I see on https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker/ this decent, well put together site. It's mainly the younger population who are getting infected meantime. There is always a lag between infections rising and the subsequent hospital cases, ICU and death tolls going up. In the manner the case numbers are rising, its inevitable that infections will spread to the older or more vulnerable population eventually and the worst figures will follow. 

The actual death toll might not be as bad as March/April because of the reasons you've mentioned regarding better treatments and more awareness of how to treat. But it scares me when people are pointing out the rise in cases without the deaths and ICU patients at this stage, as I say there's always a lag between all this happening which is why I suggest we're likely to see a bleaker picture in a month - 6 weeks time. 

Like I said, if you go to the Wikipedia page I linked to, you can expand it to see the past month. It shows a steady 1-2% increase in cases day to day, but no increase in deaths. That is over the course of a month. The picture didn't get any bleaker.

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28 minutes ago, Bonbon19 said:

Getting people back to work sooner after holidaying is a good thing imo for their mental and fiscal health and is also good for the economy. I believe in freedom of choice with appropriate measures to offset the risks , as someone caught up in quarantine the measures at the 2 U.K. airports I used were pathetic to say the least . If I had had a test taken the authorities would have had an audited trail of my journey and the propensity for “fraudulent “ behaviour by some would be reduced .

As for the Handcock quote , the quote I read from PHE is that it is believed  that the cases only catch 7%   With his track record id urge caution . 

7% is f. all.   You'd be as well selecting folk at random, or spotting those who've coughed since entering the airport to narrow it down.

It's all about freedoms of the individual vs our responsibilities to society as individuals.  I'm all for libertarianism and individual choice, but  if that freedom of choice leads to others having their own freedoms removed, with imported Covid cases, we need to think of the greater good and social responsibility to society at large and  the risk to the wider economy, another full lockdown would bring. 

Edited by RAG
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8 minutes ago, Scooby_Doo said:

Like I said, if you go to the Wikipedia page I linked to, you can expand it to see the past month. It shows a steady 1-2% increase in cases day to day, but no increase in deaths. That is over the course of a month. The picture didn't get any bleaker.

The picture IS getting bleaker day by day with their hospital cases now well on the rise. If the younger - and generally healthier - population were picking up the majority of cases recently then it's easily explainable why they haven't translated into a rise in death figures right yet. There's also discrepancies between how each individual country records their deaths, I don't know what effect this will have on the figures noted. 

Another 12 patients in Scottish hospitals today. ICU gone up from 1 patient to 5 in space of 10 days or so. Figures are at the very least plateuing if not slightly rising at this stage. We're in the very early stages yet. 

 

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4 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

Another 12 patients in Scottish hospitals today. ICU gone up from 1 patient to 5 in space of 10 days or so. Figures are at the very least plateuing if not slightly rising at this stage. We're in the very early stages yet. 

It got out of hand in Israel when the schools went back.  Might find that out soon here, with Scottish schools being back, but not English ones.  Couple of weeks for it to multiply and you could see the local Glasgow lockdowns being extended down here sadly.

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23 minutes ago, RAG said:

7% is f. all.   You'd be as well selecting folk at random, or spotting those who've coughed since entering the airport to narrow it down.

It's all about freedoms of the individual vs our responsibilities to society as individuals.  I'm all for libertarianism and individual choice, but  if that freedom of choice leads to others having their own freedoms removed, with imported Covid cases, we need to think of the greater good and social responsibility to society at large and  the risk to the wider economy, another full lockdown would bring. 

I think we agree on the freedoms of individuals and with due respect paid to society in general . Increased testing of any kind however small would allow individual freedoms whilst protecting society at large . Peoples tolerance of any sort of lockdown whether it’s called self isolation or quarantine is on the wane , something that shortens that period whilst reassuring others should be implemented . 

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35 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

The picture IS getting bleaker day by day with their hospital cases now well on the rise. If the younger - and generally healthier - population were picking up the majority of cases recently then it's easily explainable why they haven't translated into a rise in death figures right yet. There's also discrepancies between how each individual country records their deaths, I don't know what effect this will have on the figures noted. 

Another 12 patients in Scottish hospitals today. ICU gone up from 1 patient to 5 in space of 10 days or so. Figures are at the very least plateuing if not slightly rising at this stage. We're in the very early stages yet. 

 

It isn't getting bleaker. I don't know how else to present the statistics to show you that.

As for Scotland, the number of positive tests has increased tenfold over the six week period you mention. Hospital admissions and deaths have not risen.

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2 minutes ago, Scooby_Doo said:

It isn't getting bleaker. I don't know how else to present the statistics to show you that.

As for Scotland, the number of positive tests has increased tenfold over the six week period you mention. Hospital admissions and deaths have not risen.

The statistics are showing that the number of patients being admitted to hospitals in France and Spain is rising by the day. There is not another way to present that information and if you don't see that as bleak then that's up to you. 

As for Scotland, we're a bit behind as we have been all the way through this pandemic. All that's happening at this stage is an increase in positive cases, an increase in % of tests positive and a plateuing if not slight rise in hospital admissions and ICU patients. Admittedly these figures go up and down so there isn't a major change. 

What I'm suggesting is, given that it's statically the younger population who are presently responsible for the increase in infections - be it through working, socialising, house parties or whatever - this completely explains why there's been no major shift or uptick in the serious type of cases I've just mentioned (hospitals etc). But the more and more people becoming infected, even if they are young and healthy, leaves the vulnerable population of society in much greater danger of gradually picking up those cases too. Infact, its exactly what happened in Florida. Young people were getting it, nobody cared, it was just a spike etc etc. Eventually it spread and then we all saw what happened. 

Taking away any major game changer in terms of a vaccine or lockdown (which I'm neither pro nor or anti btw), I'd be gobsmacked if things continued the way they are just now and by November time we weren't seeing that rise in serious cases as the disease spreads to the vulnerable. The rise might be slow and gradual, and may as I've said not turn out to be quite as devastating as March/April for reasons involving treatment and care, but it's inevitable at this stage that we're going to see things getting worse. 

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The number of Covid-19 patients being admitted to hospital intensive care units and dying are on the rise in France after another 7,157 new cases were reported in the last 24 hours.

The number of new cases of the virus reported in France has been rising 'exponentially' for several weeks now, from around 500 cases per day in mid July to 7,000 a day in recent days. 

However until last week although case numbers were rising sharply, the number of people getting seriously ill or dying with the virus stayed stable, prompting some to hope that the virus had weakened and become milder.

But over the last week France has reported a small but steady growth in two key areas; the number of Covid-19 patients in intensive care and the number of people dying with the virus.

1599202317_graphic-sfp2.jpg

There are now 461 Covid-19 patients in intensive care, up from 380 two weeks ago. While this is not a massive rise, the general trend has been for slight increases on most days over the last fortnight.

Similarly the daily death rate is also showing a small but steady increase, with 21 people dying in hospital in the previous 24 hours, compared to 17 two weeks ago. While the increase is not large, there has again been a general trend of slight increases over the last week.

France reports its hospital deaths daily and, after encountering logistical problems, releases a weekly total for deaths in nursing homes. A weekly average of total deaths also shows a small rise, standing at 18.5 for the last week against 13.2 for the week before and 10.5 for the week before that.

The total number of patients in hospital remains stable at 4,643 compared to 4,748 two weeks ago.

Compared to the peak of the epidemic in April these numbers are all low - at its height there were more than 7,000 patients in intensive care and deaths peaked at 800 a day.

In the past 24 hours 7,157 new cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed and although testing in France has been ramped up and now stands at 800,000 tests a week, health experts say the increased testing alone cannot account for the increase in cases. The percentage of people testing positive now stands at 4.4 - up from 3.3 percent two weeks ago.

There are now 60 départements - out of a total of 101 - that are classified as of concern to health authorities and the French government has divided the country into red, orange and green zones, with health rules applied more strictly in red zones

Over the summer many of the people testing positive for the virus were younger people who to tend to be less badly affected, but public health experts warned that if the virus began to widely circulate older and more vulnerable people would begin to be infected, and were more likely to suffer severe symptoms and be admitted to hospital.

This week in France marked la rentrée, when schools reopened and many French people went back to work after their summer holidays.

The government has introduced strict new rules on mask-wearing in the workplace and many French cities have also made masks compulsory in all outdoor spaces in a bid to halt the spread of the virus as people return to the cities and the workplace.

Masks are also compulsory in all indoor public spaces and on public transport, at risk of a €135 fine.

 

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.thelocal.fr/20200904/covd-19-deaths-and-hospitalisations-in-france-begin-to-rise-again/amp

The situation in France. It seems that inexplicably we forget how things pan out the moment they actually happen and we're for some reason left uncertain. 

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1 hour ago, Bonbon19 said:

 

my apologies for the earlier poor posting in reply to Dieter hope this works 

 

It works, and I've watched it. I wondered where it was going until the end bit when he said "we'll see much lower mortality rates because the community is now more robust". I get what a casedemic is and I get why it might eventually become one. But the very fact that hospital cases and ICU's are now slowly but surely beginning to rise in France and Spain (amongst other countries btw) pretty much debunks his entire theory. I note the tweet was dated the 1st of August, the picture has changed quite a bit since then. 

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Covid: Just A “Casedemic”?

Published: August 24, 2020

Many critics believe covid has turned into a mere “casedemic”, as positive tests (“cases”) are rising in many European countries while hospitalizations and deaths stay very low.

The reality is that covid is a casedemic on top of a pandemic. “Cases” are currently rising in Europe due to routine testing at airports, offices, schools and among family contacts, catching mostly younger low-risk people with mild or asymptomatic disease (hence no hospitalizations).

Moreover, some of these tests are false-positives or non-infectious RNA fragments of an earlier infection, causing unnecessary quarantine and tracing trouble, while the real infection rate is about ten times higher than daily PCR tests show, anyway.

However, antibody levels are still very low in most of previously locked-down Europe, including notably the German-speaking countries (2% antibodies), Scandinavia except Sweden, but also large parts of Italy, France and Spain as well as England outside of the London area.

Thus, there can be little doubt that increasing “cases” will soon translate into increasing hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk groups. Masks and “contact tracing” won’t prevent this, as France and Spain already show. It is likely that Europe will panic a second time.

What can (and should) be done is the targeted protection of high-risk groups and early or prophylactic treatment of people at high risk or high exposure to prevent progression of the disease. As most authorities ignore both, people are on their own.

The British ONS recently published the age-adjusted January to July mortality statistics. While the 2020 covid increase is clearly visible, mortality is comparable to pre-2009 levels. Oxford CEBM professor Carl Heneghan explained that the covid IFR dropped to 0.3% by the end of July and the pandemic may end up “no worse than a bad flu season”.

england-ons-mortality-rates.jpg

 

https://swprs.org/covid-just-a-casedemic/

29 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

It works, and I've watched it. I wondered where it was going until the end bit when he said "we'll see much lower mortality rates because the community is now more robust". I get what a casedemic is and I get why it might eventually become one. But the very fact that hospital cases and ICU's are now slowly but surely beginning to rise in France and Spain (amongst other countries btw) pretty much debunks his entire theory. I note the tweet was dated the 1st of August, the picture has changed quite a bit since then. 

The latest article on the “casedemic “ agrees with your assertion but as it’s explains it could be prevented by protecting the high risk groups and early or prophylactic treatments .The comment regarding the Infection Mortality Rates and masks are interesting . 

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Yeah @Bonbon19, agree with the better treatments and to some certain extent in society social distancing will continue to remain prevalent, so the death toll may not reach AS bad as it did earlier in the year. That being said, I think we'd be naive at this stage to suggest a "second peak" of some sorts isn't too far round the corner. It's just about minimalising that as much as we can. 

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4 minutes ago, Bonbon19 said:

The controversial hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine 

zinc and vitamin D have been shown to be beneficial in boosting your immune systems and are much easier to get a hold off . 

So basically the kind of supplements that vulnerable age groups already take, plus two drugs that haven't been proven to work. The number of scientific "experts" in Covid-19 are increasing at a faster rate than infections are. 

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Here is a Coronavirus puzzle for you to ponder – A guest article

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9th July 2020

A guest article

I was sent this piece on Vitamin D and COVID by a reader of this blog. I thought it was very good and asked them if they minded me posting it. They said fine, but they wish to remain anonymous. Not everyone likes the glare of publicity – with all the attending Trolling and insults that inevitably follow [you should read my in-box sometime].

Season, Latitude, and COVID-19 Severity

Here is a coronavirus puzzle for you to ponder.  For context, let’s look at how many people have died of COVID-19 in the USA (as of mid-June).  Websites give different totals, but it’s around 120,000, or about 360 per million of population.  So how many died in Australia?  102.  How many died in New Zealand?  22.  In both countries, the death rate is 4 per million.  That is an extraordinary contrast!

Wouldn’t public health officials like to know the cause of this difference?  Are the Antipodeans that much better at hand-washing and social distancing than the people of New York, Italy or Great Britain?  Do they share a highly-effective cure kept secret from the rest of the world?  Or is there another reason for the disparity?

Unlike the USA and other countries where the disease has taken a huge toll, the coronavirus arrived in Australia and New Zealand in mid-summer.  Most of the inhabitants of these two countries are descendants of pale-skinned British settlers (and convicts in the case of Australia).  Yet at the same time the death rate in Great Britain, the homeland of their ancestors, is over 600 per million.

This suggests that sunshine, and, specifically, the sunshine vitamin, are responsible for the difference.  If you look at the death rates throughout the world, it becomes apparent that countries in the southern hemisphere fared much better than countries north of the equator.

Actually, the division between countries with high death rates and low death rates is about the 37th parallel north.  According to Wikipedia, the 37th parallel is the dividing line between greater than average and less than average sun exposure.

So it appears that people living south of the equator, and south of the 37th parallel north, experienced, in general, higher levels of sun exposure and lower death rates from the coronavirus than those in the northern hemisphere north of the of the 37th parallel.

This explains the very low death rates observed in Africa. Many experts have forecast that the coronavirus would take a heavy toll in Africa because of poor healthcare infrastructure in much of the continent.  Yet this has not happened.  For example, death rates in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Togo, South Sudan, Niger and Burkina Faso are between 2 and 3 per million.

Virtually all of the continent is south of the 37th parallel north and sub-Saharan Africa is close to the Equator.  It could be argued that the low death rate is an artifact of poor record keeping, but reasonably good data about another virus, Ebola, reached world attention, so high death rates from coronavirus would likely be evident.

The same is true in the Far East.  Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka are near the equator and have coronavirus death rates per million of 8, 4, 4, and 0.5.  But this pattern breaks down when one looks at that most equatorial of nations, Ecuador.

Here the reported coronavirus death rate is about 223 per million.  Other major countries of the South American continent, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Bolivia, have per million death rates of 208, 208, 176, and 54, which is quite a contrast to those seen in Africa and Southeast Asia.  The disparity may arise from a greater susceptibility to the coronavirus among people with indigenous ancestry.

Support for this idea comes from the death rates in Argentina and Uruguay, which are 19 and 7, per million, respectively.  Unlike the rest of South America, the populations of these two countries are very largely of European ancestry, mostly Spanish and Italian.  Remember that while it was summer in Argentina and Uruguay, at the same time it was winter in Spain and Italy, where COVID-19 death tolls per million were 580 and 571, respectively.

This analysis supports the idea that the virulence of the coronavirus, as measured by death rate, varies inversely with sun exposure.  Where the coronavirus struck during the summertime, in the southern hemisphere, death rates were very low, in very marked contrast to countries in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, where the coronavirus struck in mid-winter.  The cause proposed to explain this disparity is Vitamin D levels in the respective populations.   How does that work?

Vitamin D3 is created in the skin by the ultraviolet light in sunlight.  Before the advent of dietary supplements, sunlight was the only significant source of Vitamin D3.  Fatty fish is a natural dietary source. Vitamin D3 is transformed inside the body to calcidiol, 25(OH)D3, which is not a vitamin, but a hormone.

Calcidiol has a half-life in the body of 2 to 3 weeks, so serum levels decline if they are not continually replenished by sun exposure or dietary supplements.   Winters in the higher latitudes diminish sun exposure due to shorter days, lower sun angle (if the sun is lower than 45 degrees in the sky, little UV light makes it through the atmosphere), and the need to bundle up or stay indoors in cold weather.

About 15 years ago it was discovered that Vitamin D is critical to the proper function of the innate immune system.  Broadly, there are two kinds of immunity – innate and acquired.  The body acquires immunity when it creates antibodies in response to infection by a specific pathogen.  This is the principal behind vaccines – to trigger the creation of antibodies.

However, the body also has an innate immune system that responds to the wide range of pathogens to which it is exposed every day.  Recently it has been demonstrated that the innate immune system is the body’s principal defense against another viral disease – influenza.  The annual wintertime outbreaks of influenza are triggered by declining levels of serum vitamin D in the host population.  That is why influenza doesn’t occur in the summer and is very uncommon in the tropics.

For in-depth discussion of innate immunity, Vitamin D3 and influenza, read the paper in Virology Journal titled “On the Epidemiology of Influenza” by John Cannell, et. al., and his earlier paper “Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D” published in the journal Epidemiology and Infection.  Open access full text of both articles can be found on the internet on PubMed.

However, the COVID-19 coronavirus is not influenza, so the role of innate immunity and Vitamin D in the incidence and virulence of this disease must be established.  Given the very recent emergence of COVID-19, it is understandable that not very much research on the role of Vitamin D has been published.

However, one key paper has come out, which has been summarized in the website Grassroothealth.net/blog/first-data-published-covid-19-severity-vitamin-d-levels/.  The data are observational and the population of patients was 212, but the results are statistically significant.  People with adequate levels of serum Vitamin D in their blood experienced mild bouts of COVID-19, while those with inadequate levels suffered ordinary, severe or critical cases.  The chart in the article illustrates these data.

cv19-chart.jpg

The results of this study are exactly consistent with the idea that sun exposure is inversely correlated with the virulence of COVID-19.  When serum levels of Vitamin D are high, the disease is mild.  When they are low, the disease is severe.   Which then leads one to ask what are the specific effects of Vitamin D that reduce the severity of COVID-19 infection?

There are at least two.  Severe cases can be complicated by what is called a “cytokine storm.”  This is a severe over-reaction of the immune system that can be fatal.  Vitamin D is known to prevent this condition (see the above-referenced articles by John Cannell).  A second effect is related to the recent discovery that COVID-19 attacks blood vessels, in particular, the endothelium, which is the internal lining of vessels, causing widespread clotting1.

Research published in 2015 showed that Vitamin D3,  in the form that is created in the skin by UV light or taken as a dietary supplement, has a direct, protective effect on the endothelium 2 Because Vitamin D3 lasts in the body only a day or so before it is processed into calcidiol, one needs a daily dose of sunshine or supplement to maintain the protective effect on blood vessels.  It should be underscored that sunscreen blocks UV rays from reaching the skin and therefore diminishes the formation of Vitamin D.  The skin pigment melanin is a natural sun screen and has a similar effect.

What does this mean for people who want to protect themselves from the malign effects of COVID-19?  Vitamin D3 is not some untested off-label prescription drug or sketchy supplement: it is an essential hormone naturally produced in the human body by sunlight on the skin.

With enough sun, one’s body makes all that is necessary to counteract the virus.  But modern lifestyles can make it impossible for many people to get sufficient daily sun exposure in the summer, and during Minnesota winters it is physically impossible because the sun is too low in the sky, not to mention that it is too cold to take off your clothes.

Therefore, one needs a program of supplementation with Vitamin D3, which is readily available over the counter.  The question, of course, is how much.  Grassrootshealth has devoted considerable study to finding the answer, a good discussion of which can be found here 3 The coronavirus statistics I used are from the site Worldometers 4

 

http://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/07/09/here-is-a-coronavirus-puzzle-for-you-to-ponder-a-guest-article/
 

1 hour ago, Wrangodog said:

So basically the kind of supplements that vulnerable age groups already take, plus two drugs that haven't been proven to work. The number of scientific "experts" in Covid-19 are increasing at a faster rate than infections are. 

There are very few effective antiviral drugs plus they are expensive , prophylaxis encompasses social distancing , hand washing etc etc 

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4 minutes ago, Dieter's Heeder said:

3 deaths in Scotland today, first time that's been the case since the start of June. New cases on every health board across the country, first time in ages. Hospital patients up another 11, another patient in ICU, now 6. 

Sounds like a serious situation. What's driving this now though?  Schools returning?  Holidays? Lockdown restrictions easing? If it is the former, how are they gonna prevent that?  No school was built to house 1000 odd kids, all potentially infectious, at a 1m distance.   I suspect most of the infrastructure we're using at present, really isn't fit for purpose in the covid world.

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17 minutes ago, RAG said:

Sounds like a serious situation. What's driving this now though?  Schools returning?  Holidays? Lockdown restrictions easing? If it is the former, how are they gonna prevent that?  No school was built to house 1000 odd kids, all potentially infectious, at a 1m distance.   I suspect most of the infrastructure we're using at present, really isn't fit for purpose in the covid world.

Probably why Swinney referenced blended learning again at the weekend - would be the likely backup plan.

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5 hours ago, RAG said:

Sounds like a serious situation. What's driving this now though?  Schools returning?  Holidays? Lockdown restrictions easing? If it is the former, how are they gonna prevent that?  No school was built to house 1000 odd kids, all potentially infectious, at a 1m distance.   I suspect most of the infrastructure we're using at present, really isn't fit for purpose in the covid world.

Probably a mixture of everything, with the addition of people becoming a lot more relaxed about distancing regs when they shouldn't be. I know Sturgeon has now mentioned a few times about house parties and people getting too close together in pubs. Feels a bit of a case of giving us an inch of leeway and some have taken a mile, contributing to the issues which we're now facing.

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