Coronavirus Thread VI: Are We Nearly There Yet? (READ OP)

[Seangoli]

Considers what the world would be like when 70% have powers like magneto.

Man, and all I got were fever chills and fatigue for a day. I got screwed.

[American Pere Housh]

I'm finally getting my second vaccine Saturday.

[Seangoli]

I'm finally getting my second vaccine Saturday.

I'd suggest planning to not do anything Monday. Most people will have mildish to no post-vaccine symptoms, however I have known a few who got sick as a dog.i got some fever chills for a few hours and was tired as hell, but it subsided quick. Was the weirdest thing to feel like I had a fever without running a fever. Its all pretty normal, nothing to be worried about, but there is the possibility you'll be knocked out for a day. That said, even the people I know who got sick as hell were fine the next day.

[Borderlands of Rojava]

I'm finally getting my second vaccine Saturday.

I'd suggest planning to not do anything Monday. Most people will have mildish to no post-vaccine symptoms, however I have known a few who got sick as a dog.i got some fever chills for a few hours and was tired as hell, but it subsided quick. Was the weirdest thing to feel like I had a fever without running a fever. Its all pretty normal, nothing to be worried about, but there is the possibility you'll be knocked out for a day. That said, even the people I know who got sick as hell were fine the next day.

I feel like I'm running a fever rn but its just because I'm dehydrated and it's like 80 degrees inside my house.

[Neanderthaland]

If you read to the end it seems like it probably didn't. Or, at the very least it is unclear. And actually this may have been a somewhat reasonable (albeit regrettable) thing to do.

Basically they were ordered to make room in the hospital, and needed to know who could be taken off oxygen without dying. So they shut off oxygen to find out, and 22 patients reacted poorly. But it's not clear that any of them died. Only that they started gasping for breath and turning blue.

Now testing the system of a sick person like that is almost certainly not medically advisable, but it does make the point that "we cannot discharge this person from the hospital or they will die" very clearly. And you get the sense that this is what they were trying to show.

That is unbelievably disturbing and sick. I hope none of the sick peoples families were in the room or they're gonna need like 20 years of therapy for that, or one second of a men in black flash stick.

Definitely falls into the "what would House M.D. do?" school of medicine.

[Glamour]

Theresa May has lashed out at the government's Covid travel policy, saying the UK is "no further forward" one year after the pandemic hit — despite more than half of UK adults receiving two doses of a vaccine.

The former prime minister suggested Britain is beginning to fall behind Europe in reopening its borders to travellers. She said the UK is sending a message to the rest of the world that "Global Britain" is "shut for business".

[Vetalia]

I'd suggest planning to not do anything Monday. Most people will have mildish to no post-vaccine symptoms, however I have known a few who got sick as a dog.i got some fever chills for a few hours and was tired as hell, but it subsided quick. Was the weirdest thing to feel like I had a fever without running a fever. Its all pretty normal, nothing to be worried about, but there is the possibility you'll be knocked out for a day. That said, even the people I know who got sick as hell were fine the next day.

Saturday is probably pretty good timing then...as far as I can tell from those who have received the two-shot vaccines, most people who had little or no side effects from the first won't have much worse, if even worse at all, from the second. Age and sex are also major variables, side effects scale by age for all of the vaccines with younger people having a stronger reaction and more severe side effects*. Men by and large also have much milder side effects than women, too, although I am not sure if this has anything to do with age or rather inherent immune system differences.

*Immune response of course changes as you age, but one thing I am wondering is if people also have a greater chance of exposure to other coronaviruses over time as they age rather than the ordinary rhinoviruses that comprise the vast majority of childhood colds, reducing the intensity of the immune response since it's something that is now known. It's totally anecdotal but I have rarely gotten a cold since I was a child, but when I do...it totally knocks my ass out for a day but then goes away completely after that. The J&J side effects were exactly like that but much shorter.

One thing to emphasize is that side effects, or the lack thereof, have no impact on the development of protective antibodies. So please do so if it is available to you.

[Kowani]

UK to donate at least 100 million surplus Covid vaccines to other countries

The UK will donate at least 100 million surplus Covid vaccine doses to other countries in the next year, Boris Johnson announced as G7 leaders gathered in Cornwall.

The group of seven leading industrialised nations are expected to collectively agree to provide a billion doses of vaccine in an effort to end the pandemic in 2022.

The summit, in Carbis Bay, begins on Friday with leaders of wealthy nations under pressure to do more to share the burden of protecting the world from the virus.

[...] Under the Prime Minister’s plan, the UK will provide five million doses by the end of September, with 25 million more by the end of 2021.

The Prime Minister said: “Since the start of this pandemic the UK has led the way in efforts to protect humanity against this deadly disease.

“Over a year ago we funded the development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on the basis it would be distributed at cost to the world.

“This unprecedented model, which puts people squarely above profit, means over half a billion doses have been administered in 160 countries so far.

“As a result of the success of the UK’s vaccine programme we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them.

“In doing so we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic for good.

“At the G7 Summit I hope my fellow leaders will make similar pledges so that, together, we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus.”

Around a fifth of the doses promised by Mr Johnson will be delivered through bilateral arrangements with countries in need while the rest will go through the Covax initiative which is distributing vaccines to poorer nations.

Downing Street said that by sharing five million doses in the coming weeks the UK will meet an immediate demand for vaccines for the countries worst affected by the pandemic without delaying completion of the domestic vaccination programme. [...] At the G7 summit, which runs until Sunday, the leaders of the UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy will pledge at least a billion coronavirus vaccine doses to the world through dose sharing and financing.

They will also set out a plan to expand vaccine manufacturing in order to achieve that goal.

The Prime Minister will ask the group to encourage pharmaceutical companies to adopt the Oxford-AstraZeneca model of providing vaccines at cost price for the duration of the pandemic.

Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, also known as Janssen, have already pledged to share 1.3 billion doses on a non-profit basis with developing countries.

The days leading up to the summit have seen Mr Johnson engaged in rows with the European Union and US over Brexit and with his own backbenchers, including predecessor Theresa May, over the cut in the UK’s aid spending.

The UK has gone back on a commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on overseas aid, cutting the amount to 0.5% due to the economic carnage caused by the pandemic.

But the donation of vaccines will count as extra aid spending on top of the £10 billion already promised under the reduced target.

[Kus Ther]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

[Kowani]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[Shazbotdom]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

So, not peer-reviewed and claiming something that has not been actually proven.


Yeeeah. I don't believe that quite yet until it is replicated a couple of times.

[The Black Forrest]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

At least medrxiv is honest. On their top page:

The preprint server for health services.

Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

[Shazbotdom]

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm

At least medrxiv is honest. On their top page:

The preprint server for health services.

Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.

Yeah, but there are going to be those people who take it as the word of God. Even though it's not proof positive of anything.

[Kowani]

90% of African countries to miss COVID-19 vaccination goal

Ninety percent of African countries are set to miss the September target of vaccinating 10% of their people unless Africa receives 225 million more doses, World Health Organization said on Thursday.

At a media briefing, Matshidiso Moeti, regional director of the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa, said without a significant boost in the availability of vaccines, only seven African countries will achieve the goal.

At 32 million doses, Africa accounts for under 1% of the over 2.1 billion COVID-19 doses administered globally.

Just 2% of the continent’s nearly 1.3 billion people have received one dose and only 9.4 million Africans are fully vaccinated, according to WHO figures.

“As we close in on 5 million cases and a third wave in Africa looms, many of our most vulnerable people remain dangerously exposed to COVID-19. Vaccines have been proven to prevent cases and deaths, so countries that can, must urgently share COVID-19 vaccines. It's do or die on dose sharing for Africa,” Moeti said.

She praised the US plan to purchase and donate half a billion Pfizer vaccines to 92 low and lower-middle-income countries.

The UN official said the Mastercard Foundation's announcement of $1.3 billion to support vaccinations and human capital development in collaboration with African Union and the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is another positive development.

“These are the kinds of partnerships needed to bring an end to the pandemic.”

“We need to ensure that the vaccines that we have are not wasted because every dose is precious,” said Moeti, adding: “Countries that are lagging behind in their rollout need to step up vaccination efforts.”

[Conservative Republic Of Huang]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

Preprints are scientific curiosities: ways for researchers to get other researchers interested in following up on their research without going through the months or even years long process of peer review.

[Picairn]

Study shows that hydroxychloroquine DOES help improve COVID-19 survival rate by a wide margin.

https://www.kusi.com/medrxiv-study-hydr ... ree-times/

MedRxiv is a preprint database for non peer-reviewed articles. I would hesitate to take this study at face value.

However, we do have multiple peer-reviewed, published meta-analyses of the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine on Covid patients. All of them concluded that hydroxychloroquine either provided no effect or even increased the mortality of patients.

• Lewis K, Chaudhuri D, Alshamsi F, Carayannopoulos L, Dearness K, Chagla Z, et al. (2021) The efficacy and safety of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 prophylaxis: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0244778. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244778

This article says "the current body of evidence failed to show clinical benefit for prophylactic hydroxychloroquine and showed a higher risk of adverse events when compared to placebo or no prophylaxis."

• Ghazy, R.M., Almaghraby, A., Shaaban, R. et al. A systematic review and meta-analysis on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as monotherapy or combined with azithromycin in COVID-19 treatment. Sci Rep 10, 22139 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77748-x

This article concludes:

Treating COVID-19 patients with CQ/HCQ did not decrease mortality. even it was increased if AZM was added. Besides, CQ/HCQ alone or in combination with AZM increased the duration of hospital stay. Overall virological cure rate and that on days 4, 10, or 14 were not affected by receiving HCQ. Adding AZM to HCQ/CQ did not show any benefit in terms of virological cure as well. Te Need for MV was not improved by exposure to CQ/HCQ alone or in combination with AZM. Moreover, CQ/HCQ, did not neither shorten the duration till conversion to negative PCR, prevent radiological progression, nor affect clinical worsening of the disease. Future randomized clinical trials are needed to confirm these conclusions.

• Axfors, C., Schmitt, A.M., Janiaud, P. et al. Mortality outcomes with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19 from an international collaborative meta-analysis of randomized trials. Nat Commun 12, 2349 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22446-z

This one tells us:

This collaborative meta-analysis of 28 published or unpublished RCTs, including 10,319 patients, shows that treatment with HCQ was associated with increased mortality in COVID-19 patients, and there was no benefit from treatment with CQ.

• Zakariya Kashour, Muhammad Riaz, Musa A Garbati, Oweida AlDosary, Haytham Tlayjeh, Dana Gerberi, M Hassan Murad, M Rizwan Sohail, Tarek Kashour, Imad M Tleyjeh, Efficacy of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, Volume 76, Issue 1, January 2021, Pages 30–42, https://doi.org/10.1093/jac/dkaa403

Another one:

Moderate certainty evidence suggests that HCQ, with or without azithromycin, lacks efficacy in reducing short-term mortality in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 or risk of hospitalization in outpatients with COVID-19.

[Picairn]

On a further note, here's a Reddit comment on the study:

As a note, I am not a medical professional, but I am a social science PhD that deals with statistics quite frequently. Can't comment on medical efficacy, but I can comment on study design.

It's an observational study, with a total of a 79% fatality rate. (199 deaths out of the observed 255 cases of intubation). Usually causation is difficult to infer when the PI does not have control over the sample or "treatments" and it's difficult to emulate successfully, but the authors claim a P<0.0001 for great survivability with HCQ.

Couple thoughts:

One critical thing I noticed is how obesity, weight, and dosage regimen is handled in the study to determine their conclusions. They note that mean BMI is 4.6 times greater than patients presenting who are younger than 60, while older than 60 show lower mean BMI.

They attempt to control for this by looking at what they call weight-adjusted dosing, where they see how many days a patient of x kg of weight takes to reach a particular level of mg dosing of the HCQ +/- AZ treatment. To establish a basis of "treatment" they actually say that patients who did not receive a threshold of HCQ relative to their total weight are thus "untreated." But in reality, the total number of patients who received HCQ is actually (I think) 210 out of the 255 total. But I don't think it's the best way to represent the significance of the data or the intervention being studied.

They noted that 49% of the study participants expired in less than 5 days, and with an average prescription starting 24-48 hours after admission, and at a rate of 800mg and 400mg each subsequent, it means that these patients likely do not meet the threshold of HCQ for the weight adjusted analysis, and are easily overtaken in the data by patients who stayed longer and received a full regimen. Patients will die faster if they're older or have pre-existing conditions, regardless of HCQ prescription, but I suspect these instances of HCQ use are not included in the claimed fatality improvements because of the weight adjusted metric.

Without actually digging into their data, it seems like they are drawing a very strong statistical significance from an extremely small sample of the total observed cases. They also have a questionable definition of "treatment" that is weight-based for the drug regimen, and may unnecessarily associate mortality with lower total dosage. I'm also slightly worried that over the course of their claimed study (90 days) begins with patients admitted on May 1, 2020, but HCQ was banned by the FDA in early June, meaning that the efficacy is really only tested in the first ~45 days, and it's unclear what percentage of patients in the period were admitted in a period and were unable to receive the "treatment" or meet the weight threshold of HCQ.

In other words, the design seems very cherry picked, but I am curious to hear the opinions of others.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Amazing
A full year afterwards we're still banging the hydroxychloroquine drum. Just how many dollars do these people have at stake in this shitfest?

[Kowani]

Amazing
A full year afterwards we're still banging the hydroxychloroquine drum. Just how many dollars do these people have at stake in this shitfest?

this was yesterday

[Vassenor]

Amazing
A full year afterwards we're still banging the hydroxychloroquine drum. Just how many dollars do these people have at stake in this shitfest?

But Trump said it worked and Trump is never wrong.

[The Free Joy State]

Just got my first vaccine, when do I get my powers?

Hope you have better luck than me.

Mine are indefinitely delayed in the post.

[Juristonia]

Amazing
A full year afterwards we're still banging the hydroxychloroquine drum. Just how many dollars do these people have at stake in this shitfest?

Yeah, you guys are falling behind. Our conspiracy nutters have moved on to Ivermectin being the miracle drug now.
Probably because it's easier to spell, but still.

[The Black Forrest]

Just got my first vaccine, when do I get my powers?

Hope you have better luck than me.

Mine are indefinitely delayed in the post.

How do we know you aren’t lying?

Super Heroes have to hide their identities after all!

[Ethel mermania]

Amazing
A full year afterwards we're still banging the hydroxychloroquine drum. Just how many dollars do these people have at stake in this shitfest?

this was yesterday

Again I had two friends on ventilators who received it and recovered. So I belive my lying eyes

[The Black Forrest]

this was yesterday

Again I had two friends on ventilators who received it and recovered. So I belive my lying eyes

Was it HydroC or was it because of all the other drugs they received as well?

I remember reading something about that in the fight over it.