The Dutch high council of law recently made euthanasia in cases of dementia legal by refusing to prosecute a doctor who euthanized a patient for this reason. At the patient’s request obviously.
This is the News… THIS IS THE NEWWWWWWWS!
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Does anyone else find it coincidental that this news comes out the first business day after Biden is declared the winner in the US Presidential election?
Someone from Pfizer was on the news here last week talking about progress on the vaccine, but this is more solid.
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Yes, Pfizer have been giving regular updates on the vaccine they’re developing with BioNTech, but this is the first time they’ve offered this kind of detail about efficacy.
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This wasn’t quite weird enough for the Weird News thread:
Mother bear and cub shot after climbing onto Russian nuclear submarine
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Or if the bears were Scientologists.
Yeah.
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I was actually expecting the vaccine news because I’d recently read an article that two trials (the Pfizer and Glaxo Smithkline ones) were ending their blind testing in October and we’d get the results in early to mid November.
What did surprise me is how effective it appears to be on the first pass. Hopefully Glaxo’s one is thereabouts too because that’ll double the capacity to get it out there.
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I was actually expecting the vaccine news because I’d recently read an article that two trials (the Pfizer and Glaxo Smithkline ones) were ending their blind testing in October and we’d get the results in early to mid November.
Yes, I follow this stuff fairly closely in my day job and Pfizer had basically said “soon, but not quite yet” on the vaccine data when they announced their Q3 results just a few weeks ago.
What did surprise me is how effective it appears to be on the first pass.
Yep. It’s obviously important to wait for the full data and let the review processes proceed, but at first glance it looks very promising.
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That’d be kinda cool.
You’re a master of understatement, Christian. Yeah, that would be kinda cool.
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Then we’d actually know
ifthings are gettingbetter orworse.Don’t be an optometrist
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It kind of annoys me that the news tells me the UK has “HIGHEST NUMBER OF DAILY CASES EVER” and then tells me we’re currently testing more people than ever.
I mean, well duh.
I wish they would report the cases as a percentage of tests rather than as an absolute figure. Then we’d actually know if things are getting better or worse.
The tracking on http://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus includes tests, cases and deaths per million of population. So the numbers are tracked and posted.
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I wish they would report the cases as a percentage of tests rather than as an absolute figure. Then we’d actually know if things are getting better or worse.
If you reported a percentage of tests you’d still include biases around who is being tested now compared to earlier in the year.
But random mass testing studies do exist to track the positives as a percentage of random tests.
From the Guardian’s liveblog:
Covid infections in England running at around 1.3%, but some evidence of slowdown, Imperial College survey says
Imperial College London has published the latest data from its “React” survey, which uses mass testing to monitor the prevalence of coronavirus in England. These figures, along with the data from the similar ONS coronavirus infection survey, probably provide the best information available on the full spread of the virus, because they involve testing people at random – not just those with symptoms.
The latest Imperial figures (from round six of the survey) cover the final two weeks of October, and up to 2 November. More than 160,000 people participated. Here are the key findings.
The infection rate was running at 1.3% – equivalent to 130 people per 10,000. That was up from 60 people per 10,000 in the second half of September and early October.Infections were doubling every 24 days.Growth may be slowing, the study says. In its news release Imperial says:
Coronavirus infections in England have continued to rise but growth may have slowed during the latter part of a recent study on community prevalence …
Results from the most recent swabs suggest that there was a drop in infections followed by an uptick. But it’s too early to determine if this represents a levelling off or a transient dip followed by continued growth, the researchers say.
And the report itself says:
In contrast with our findings for mid- to late-October, we found evidence for a slowdown in the epidemic during the final days of October and beginning of November 2020, with suggestion of a fall and then rise in prevalence during that period. This slowdown was seen across the country, both north and south, and was not being driven by any one region.
R, the reproduction number, was 1.2 for England as a whole. It was highest in the north-west and lowest in the south-east and east of England. Here are the full figures, with the change from the second half of September/early October.
Prevalence of infection was highest in north-west (2.4%, up from 1.2% ), followed by Yorkshire and The Humber (2.3% up from 0.84%), West Midlands (1.6% up from 0.60%), north-east (1.5% up from 1.1%), east Midlands (1.3% up from 0.56%), London (0.97%, up from 0.54%), south-west (0.80% up from 0.33%), south-east (0.69% up from 0.29%), and east of England (0.69% up from 0.30%).
The rapid growth in the virus in the south detected by the survey in mid October was no longer apparent by the end of October.
Prof Steven Riley, study author and professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial, said:
These findings support those of other large studies that are monitoring England’s epidemic, but at the moment it’s too early to tell whether we are seeing a true slowing of growth.
That’s why it’s vital that we continue to monitor the situation closely with our next round of testing planned later this month. Combined with today’s report, these timely data will form part of the evidence base that will inform decision-makers.
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Perhaps a better gauge of where we stand compared to the first wave is the number of hospital patients with the virus.
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I tend to agree cases isn’t the most relevant stat without a lot of context, especially now they are conducting things like testing everyone in Liverpool so they’ll be picking up those with no or mild symptoms.
I’d be looking at hospitalisations as the headline measure because the whole crux of this has always been how health services can deal with an extra load of illness outside their capacity plans.
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Based on the past week it feels like 2020 is really trying to turn things around before the finish line.
I was only joking here, but today I learned that Dominic Cummings is leaving Number 10 and the Yorkshire Ripper’s dead.
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It’s very poor reporting.
Ah, I see you’re not familiar with the quality of modern journalism.
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Covid-19 vaccines may have potentially unpleasant side effects
The vaccine, and likely most others, will require two doses to work, injections that must be given weeks apart, company protocols show. Scientists anticipate that the shots will cause enervating flu-like side effects — including sore arms, muscle aches and fever — that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school. And even if a vaccine proves 90 percent effective, the rate Pfizer touted for its product, 1 in 10 recipients would still be vulnerable. That means, at least in the short term, as population-level immunity grows, people can’t stop social distancing and throw away their masks.
Yeah, I’d say that’s very unpleasant.
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This could also explain why Pfizer’s share price has plummeted since they announced the vaccine (where wouldn’t you expect the exact opposite?
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Oh, how do you know? And how do you know which you’ll be in advance? Will you get short, long or death Covid – place your bets! Clearly, I’m living in a nation of fucking gamblers.
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Clearly, I’m living in a nation of fucking gamblers.
Did somebody say “BREXIT”?!?!
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This could also explain why Pfizer’s share price has plummeted since they announced the vaccine (where wouldn’t you expect the exact opposite?
)I’m not sure whether you’re joking or not, but the share price leapt massively and peaked immediately after the recent announcement and has then slightly declined in the days since, which is pretty much exactly what you would expect.
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Covid-19 vaccines may have potentially unpleasant side effects
The vaccine, and likely most others, will require two doses to work, injections that must be given weeks apart, company protocols show. Scientists anticipate that the shots will cause enervating flu-like side effects — including sore arms, muscle aches and fever — that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school. And even if a vaccine proves 90 percent effective, the rate Pfizer touted for its product, 1 in 10 recipients would still be vulnerable. That means, at least in the short term, as population-level immunity grows, people can’t stop social distancing and throw away their masks.
Yeah, I’d say that’s very unpleasant.
This feels a bit sensationalist. A lot of vaccines produce comparable side effects.
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’m not sure whether you’re joking or not, but the share price leapt massively and peaked immediately after the recent announcement and has then slightly declined in the days since, which is pretty much exactly what you would expect.
Yes the Meadows assessment seems to be what we term as ‘bollocks’.
I don’t quite understand why he persists with this ‘personal risk’ nonsense when it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
The crux of it all is we understand and factor in annual risk, of flu or accident or cancer or whatever physical of mental illness. If you add a new unprecedented element we haven’t.
That ends up with this logically bizarre idea that if we just ignore coronavirus and do nothing about it we’d get a better end result for the cancer/flu/accident sufferers.
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The vaccine, and likely most others, will require two doses to work, injections that must be given weeks apart, company protocols show. Scientists anticipate that the shots will cause enervating flu-like side effects — including sore arms, muscle aches and fever — that could last days and temporarily sideline some people from work or school.
Those are almost the exact same words my physician said to me on Monday during my annual checkup — only he was talking to me about Shingrex, the vaccine that protects against the Shingles virus. The only difference is that you have to get the second shot between 2 and 6 months after the first, not weeks as with the COVID vaccine.
And, yes, I got the first Shingles shot, and had a sore arm and muscle aches for two days; but knowing how my older brother and an aunt suffered from Shingles, I’m glad I got the shot. And, when it becomes widely available, I’ll hopefully get the COVID vaccine shot too.
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What did surprise me is how effective it appears to be on the first pass.
It’s pretty crazy. And this is potentially even bigger news in the long term where mRNA vaccines in general are concerned. What Biontec is actually working on is cancer therapy, after all.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration. However, their application has until recently been restricted by the instability and inefficient in vivo delivery of mRNA. Recent technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results in both animal models and humans.
I wonder if these recent advances are related to CRISPR and Cas9. Our world is about to change far more than we can anticipate right now, and this unexpectred jump may be a first indication of this.
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Stuff happens in medical science without the mass media reporting on it. My dad’s just had his first treatment for a health condition but the treatment itself didn’t exist a decade ago.
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Covid found in Italy as far back as September 2019
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The toughest restriction yet is imposed in Sweden, no social gatherings with more than eight people. It’s interesting what’s happening here. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has said ~”Do not try to weasel yourself out of this. Do your duty.”
It’s kinda obvious they would go for a full lockdown – If they could. But… By the nature of the constitutional freedom of movement we have, they simply can’t.
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There is denial then there is this: Nurse: Some patients who test positive refuse to believe they have Covid-19
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota speaks with Jodi Doering, a nurse from South Dakota who says some of her coronavirus patients often don’t want to believe that Covid-19 is real, even in their dying moments.
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There is denial then there is this: Nurse: Some patients who test positive refuse to believe they have Covid-19
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota speaks with Jodi Doering, a nurse from South Dakota who says some of her coronavirus patients often don’t want to believe that Covid-19 is real, even in their dying moments.
This kind of madness is becoming more widespread. My girlfriend works in a hospital, and they had a patient a few weeks ago who came in with something not related to Covid in any way, but they have to test all new in-patients for Covid now as a formality. He refused to be tested, claiming Covid was a hoax, so they had to treat him as though he WAS infected, which meant among other things, his family wasn’t allowed to visit him. This kind of Fox News/Youtube/Facebook kind of indoctrination is so damaging.
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This kind of Trump/Fox News/Youtube/Facebook/Trump kind of indoctrination is so damaging.
Fixed that for you, Steve.
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Covid found in Italy as far back as September 2019
Heard about this and apparently this is a study that is not to be taken seriously. It’s just one that generates a headline that the non-scientific papers will jump on.
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Fuck Ricky Schroder:
Kyle Rittenhouse’s Attorney Thanks Actor Ricky Schroder for Helping Post $2 Million Bail
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Fuck Ricky Schroder:
Kyle Rittenhouse’s Attorney Thanks Actor Ricky Schroder for Helping Post $2 Million Bail
I guess Scott Baio was busy that day.
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And Jon Voight was either too slow, too cheap or too poor.
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And Jon Voight was either too slow, too cheap or too poor.
It can be three things!
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Iran scientist linked to military nuclear program killed
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It’s amazing how quickly this stuff can shift. Guardian reporting NHS front line medical staff may get the Pfizer vaccine within 10 days from now.
By all I’ve seen this looks a lot quicker than the US where the vaccine originates but with the President solely on golf and whining duties I doubt you can expect more.
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but hey. At least we got this one!
Ah, yes, prolong the suffering! Sustenance!
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There’s still a void there in direction of who should get the vaccine in what order to minimise impact and how that’s communicated to the public. A private company distributing to private healthcare providers could have the wrong priorities when they’ve been pushed to do it alone. Is there co-ordination that it goes to the areas of highest need for example?
I do think there will be real detriment from Trump and his government basically doing nothing since the election.
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There’s still a void there in direction of who should get the vaccine in what order to minimise impact and how that’s communicated to the public. A private company distributing to private healthcare providers could have the wrong priorities when they’ve been pushed to do it alone. Is there co-ordination that it goes to the areas of highest need for example?
On that point the CDC has laid out guidance about who should be prioritised in terms of most urgent need. This information is fairly up to date:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommendations-process.html
There’s more detail here about how the national plans are being co-ordinate at local level, including with state authorities:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html
You’ll find no argument from me on the point that the US response would be stronger with a more engaged and competent administration, but it is reassuring to know that vaccine distribution and prioritisation plans are still being put in place in spite of that.
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Remember Trumps law: If Trump can fuck it all up – Trump will fuck it all up.
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Probably another set of brands to add to the museum of defunct brands in Malaysia. We have Burton, TopShop/Topman and Dorothy Perkins in the local mall, if Arcadia goes bust they can be added to Toys ‘R’ Us and Borders books. I honestly think they should market it as ‘time machine tourism’.
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It’s a genuine concern. While online is likely the future, the Covid issue has really just accelerated an existing problem, it leaves a huge hole in town and city centres. Debenhams are not small shops and they add to a lot of closures in other department stories, then add in every Burtons, Topshop etc and that’s a lot of empty space with nobody rushing to fill the gap.
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Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine wins licence for use in the UK
‘Historic moment’ opens way for mass immunisation with vaccine to target those most at risk
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Live footage of Matt Hancock overseeing transportation of a vaccine that must be kept at -70C. pic.twitter.com/g8Bt021ve0
— Chris Hewitt (@ChrisHewitt) December 2, 2020
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Let’s bring it on. Dr Mike was saying they’ve been briefed on getting jabs in the NHS sometime next week.
It seems the UK government really is going all in on a vaccine being the way out and covering as many people as fast as possible. The Guardian article pointing out they’ve bought 40m doses of the Pfizer jab (and I know even more of the Moderna and Astra-Zeneca ones). They give the Pfizer numbers for the US and EU and they are much lower per head of population. My maths has it as:
UK: 60%
US: 31%
EU: 44%
It also seems from that story the minus 70 degrees storage requirement isn’t quite as onerous as they first said and it can be stored at normal fridge temperatures for a few days.
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See, at last Brexit is good for something. It’ll probably take until January until they’ve got clearance for the EU, so the UK is getting this a month early.
On the flip side, it will probably take the shipments until January to get out of Dover.
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See, at last Brexit is good for something. It’ll probably take until January until they’ve got clearance for the EU, so the UK is getting this a month early.
So this was being claimed by some MPs but the truth is the UK is still bound to the EU regulations for another few weeks and anyone could do it due to some legislation in 2012.
Both Downing Street and the UK’s medicines regulator have contradicted a claim by Matt Hancock that Brexit helped the UK become the first western country to license a vaccine against coronavirus.
The health secretary asserted on Wednesday morning that “because of Brexit” the UK had been able to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, rather than wait for the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to do so.
However, the government announcement of the decision said it had taken place under a provision of the Human Medicines Regulations, passed in 2012, which permits the rapid licensing of medicines in the event of an emergency such as a pandemic.
The UK is still under the remit of the EMA until the end of the Brexit transition period on 1 January, and EU laws also allow other member states to approve medicines for emergency use without EMA authorisation.
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Dr Mike was saying they’ve been briefed on getting jabs in the NHS sometime next week.
From what I gather it won’t be quite as straightforward as that and there will be a greater emphasis on care homes and their staff and frontline NHS staff ahead of a roll-out to NHS staff more widely.
A lot of this is still in flux with things happening quite quickly, but I think that is that latest thinking based on the current UK prioritisation plans.
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See, at last Brexit is good for something. It’ll probably take until January until they’ve got clearance for the EU, so the UK is getting this a month early.
On the flip side, it will probably take the shipments until January to get out of Dover.
The irony is that there is some suspicion that the UK has deliberately accelerated the authorisation and roll-out so that it can begin distribution ahead of all the supply-chain problems that are going to come from 1 January.
So not only are the UK vaccine activities not facilitated by Brexit but they stand to be actively undermined by it.
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From what I gather it won’t be quite as straightforward as that and there will be a greater emphasis on care homes and their staff and frontline NHS staff ahead of a roll-out to NHS staff more widely.
Yeah I saw that this morning. That was the original plan but they were worried about the distribution and keeping it cold, I suppose the news that it can work in normal refrigeration for a few days has reversed that again.
By now plans being in flux and changing are pretty much the reality of the virus and its treatment as what we know also changes quickly.
Even the idea of NHS frontline staff is a moving target because at the height of the initial infection the likes of Mike were drafted onto Covid wards.
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Rudy Giuliani tests positive for coronavirus, Trump says – CNNPolitics
Georgia Democratic state senator Elena Parent, who attended the hearing at the Georgia Capitol on Thursday with Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani and his team “willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump.”
“It was reckless and irresponsible for the Georgia Senate Republicans to hold an in-person hearing without requiring masks and social distancing during a pandemic. Clearly the COVID risk from (Giuliani) and team, who have been attending hearings maskless all around the country, was high and they willingly endangered all of us to pander to Trump,” Parent said in a statement emailed to CNN Sunday.
She added, “Mayor Giuliani’s blatant disregard for public safety measures in this pandemic is irresponsible and puts Georgians in danger.”
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Must… not… wish… terrible covid death… on… anyone… must… not…
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There’s a video going around from a couple of days back where Giuliani is asking one of his ‘election fraud’ witnesses to take off her mask when sat next to him. Luckily for her she doesn’t comply.
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Must… not… wish… terrible covid death… on… anyone… must… not…
Too late.
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I celebrated the day by finally taking a look at that Borat scene. As much as I could bear of it.
must… not…
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She’s actually staff, a ward sister in a south Wales hospital, so they may have been a bit lazy as she’ll know it’s 2 weeks and is in the hospital every day anyway. 😉
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They were wrinkled and aged before she took the vaccine. This is the ‘after’ photo.
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They were wrinkled and aged before she took the vaccine. This is the ‘after’ photo.
I mean, the second person who received it was William Shakespeare, so not only can it de-age you, it can revive the dead!
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Florida state police raid home of Rebekah Jones, data scientist who challenged DeSantis on coronavirus statistics
https://news.yahoo.com/florida-state-police-raid-home-of-rebekah-jones-data-scientist-who-challenged-de-santis-on-coronavirus-statistics-010351103.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=1_04
Frickin’ Florida…
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It has begun:
Clare Davies got her vaccine on August 12th?! How the hell did that happen?!
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Clare Davies got her vaccine on August 12th?! How the hell did that happen?!
That’s the British convention for writing the date, which has the numbers in a sightly different order to the US convention. She actually got it on 20th December 2008.
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So if you say it out loud, do you say August 12th or 12 August?
Neither, I say 8th December.
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In all seriousness, it’s quite rare to hear someone in the UK phrase it as “December 8th”, although a little more common to hear people say “December the 8th”. Still though I would say most common is “the 8th of December”.
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I honestly pay no attention to what order I say the date in. I’ll say March the 26th as often as I’ll say 26th of March. Written down I’ll obviously use the correct format, but spoken out loud… who cares as long as the correct information is conveyed.
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I honestly pay no attention to what order I say the date in. I’ll say March the 26th as often as I’ll say 26th of March. Written down I’ll obviously use the correct format, but spoken out loud… who cares as long as the correct information is conveyed.
Well, be happy you’re not a German fifth-grader being taught British English, because that’d get you a bad grade!
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As a non German 5th grader I tend to agree with Steve. In writing I follow the day-month-year format but verbally would interchange both pretty easily and never really think about it. When the ‘May the 4th be with you’ joke came around I can’t remember Brits up in arms that it doesn’t work as it should be ‘4th of May’.
However we’d never say ‘May 4’ as some Americans do. It’d have to be 4th.
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Which reminds me, my lesson is at 10am tomorrow
Unfortunately you already missed it as it was on 12th November.
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As a non German 5th grader I tend to agree with Steve. In writing I follow the day-month-year format but verbally would interchange both pretty easily and never really think about it. When the ‘May the 4th be with you’ joke came around I can’t remember Brits up in arms that it doesn’t work as it should be ‘4th of May’.
Yeah, this is a pretty good example for the kind of thing that you’re taught to do a certain way when you’re learning a language as a really hard rule and once you’re proficient you realise that you really don’t always have to do it that way. But you kind of have to first learn the rules, even the soft ones.
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And in other local news, Germany is headed for a full lockdown. We’ve been doing a “lockdown light” thing in the hopes of lowering numbers until Christmas, but that didn’t work for shit so we’re going full lockdown probably before and mainly after Christmas. Apparently, it was really daft not to go into a full lockdown last month. (The model for what we should’ve been doing is apparently Ireland, who managed to get their numbers down pre-Christmas rather well.)
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(The model for what we should’ve been doing is apparently Ireland, who managed to get their numbers down pre-Christmas rather well.)
It’s been good but not great, I think we really came out of the first lockdown too soon – we were down to fewer than a thousand active cases and less than ten new cases per day. We’re still getting a couple hundred cases per day right now, and we’ve got twice as many active cases as resolved ones. The vibe with people I’ve talked to about it is we’re gonna get back into lockdown in the new year because it’s gonna spread like wildfire over Christmas
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Yeah, sorry, it was actually Northern Ireland that they refered to I notice now. They’ve been in a circuit breaker lockdown that’s being lifted today.
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