COVID-19 Virus.

[spacesailor]

396 covic ( wuflue )  deaths in Australia.

Finally equald the  "Back Burning Smoke "deaths .

Nothing newsworthy on those deaths it seemed. 

spacesailor

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

Just had some terrible news.. A work colleague of mine has lost both his parents to the virus - around mid-60s and apparently otherwise healthy - and he was struck down for over three months and has yet to return to working from home - mid 40s and keeps reasonably fit. It would be rare that other diseases such as the flu, etc, would operate quite so devastatingly being able to be caught so innocuously.

 

Edited August 19, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

 

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

quite so devastatingly being able to be caught so innocuously

 

All the more reason for masking up, if you are well. You get it from other people.

 

Perhaps Mother Nature is coming to our aid. Since the COVID virus can be supported in air for a long time, perhaps the arrival of the August winds will blow these particles out to sea. Yesterday it blew at an average 30 kph at Camden with a maximum gust of 76 kph, and the wind is up to the same this morning.

[nomadpete]

You'd better warn Jacinta!

[facthunter]

I was speaking at length to a well informed specialist yesterday and what a lot of people forget or don't know, is some will have ongoing severe disabilities for the rest of their lives after they (supposedly) recover. Just letting her rip is not a real option. No Immunity is seen to be guaranteed and non symptomatic younger people are carriers. It's very easily transmitted when proper procedures are not in place. I'm going to get the best masks that I can. Gloves are hard to use properly. In a lot of cases you'd be better just cleaning your hands. Carry a few tissues to use on door knobs and lift buttons. Nev

[Subria]

We'll all end like Howard Hughes the way the fear & hysteria us mounting!

[pmccarthy]

Keeping jars of piss in the corner.

 

[octave]

Two recent studies suggest that this virus is not as benign as some people want/need to believe.  These two studies were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Understanding the evidence regarding the risks and outcomes does not really constitute hysteria. 

 

https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about-lasting-heart-damage

 

 

One study examined the cardiac MRIs of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19 and compared them to heart images from 100 people who were similar but not infected with the virus. Their average age was 49 and two-thirds of the patients had recovered at home. More than two months later, infected patients were more likely to have troubling cardiac signs than people in the control group: 78 patients showed structural changes to their hearts, 76 had evidence of a biomarker signaling cardiac injury typically found after a heart attack, and 60 had signs of inflammation.

 

Findings  In this cohort study including 100 patients recently recovered from COVID-19 identified from a COVID-19 test center, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), which was independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and the time from the original diagnosis.

 

These were relatively young, healthy patients who fell ill in the spring, Valentina Puntmann, who led the MRI study, pointed out in an interview. Many of them had just returned from ski vacations. None of them thought they had anything wrong with their hearts.

 

“The fact that 78% of ‘recovered’ [patients] had evidence of ongoing heart involvement means that the heart is involved in a majority of patients, even if Covid-19 illness does not scream out with the classical heart symptoms, such as anginal chest pain,” she told STAT. She is a cardiologist at University Hospital Frankfurt. “In my view, the relatively clear onset of Covid-19 illness provides an opportunity to take proactive action and to look for heart involvement early.”

 

 

 

Taken together, the two studies, published Monday in JAMA Cardiology, suggest that in many patients, Covid-19 could presage heart failure, a chronic, progressive condition in which the heart’s ability to pump blood throughout the body declines. It is too soon to say if the damage in patients recovering from Covid-19 is transient or permanent, but cardiologists are worried.

 

“These are two studies that both suggest that being infected with Covid-19 carries a high likelihood of having some involvement of the heart. If not answering questions, [they] prompt important questions about what the cardiac aftermath is,” said Matthew Tomey, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System in New York.

 

 

[Yenn]

Jerry is in the UK and for some reason the UK has a much higher death rate than most other countries, even while it has a lower incidence rate. For some reason Poms die more than others. Is it the living conditions, or general poor health system?

[Subria]

29 minutes ago, Yenn said:

Jerry is in the UK and for some reason the UK has a much higher death rate than most other countries, even while it has a lower incidence rate. For some reason Poms die more than others. Is it the living conditions, or general poor health system?

Lack of soap & not knowing what to do with it I'd say!😉😂😂😉

[Jerry_Atrick]

@Yenn, without looking it up (i.e. just on recall of the news), in the early days, there was such a shortage of PPE/general supplies and the civil service were so slow in getting it, the focus was on getting all things to the NHS (National Health Service)  and aged care homes were neglected. The virus ripped through them and their workers far worse than Aus/Vic. That, and for the average Brit, the stiff-upper-lip syndrome still prevails And there have been anecdotal cases of mis-priortisation; where men in their 40s who have had no known comorbidity and mild symptoms were sent home to subsequently die - usually within 2 weeks.. Again, this is anecdotal and I have only heard of a few cases on chat shows. I think the death rates are currently quite low... we are often hitting over 1,000 new cases/day, but the death rates are around 12 - 14 (again, haven't checked the exact figures, but on the occasions I have checked, that appears to be around where it stands. Of course, as Octave and Facthunter point out, recovery doesn't necessarily mean a quality of life as good as it once was.

 

Remebering, the above is my interpretation of why the significantly higher death rate for the UK than other countries does not mean it is the picture of what could happen if it gets out of control.. So, given outcomes are generally much better when people act on facts and known (and developing) science rather than opinion such that the actions are hysteria, which in the absence of any credible evidence being offered, are plainly idiotic, I will take the medicos advice on this one..

 

Re the NHS, despite being poorly managed and under-funded (partly because of the waste of management and political interference), the NHS hospitals, in general, are pretty good (yes, there are a few poor ones, as there are in every country). However, the NHS provides far more than that. Free (at point of service) GP and consultant consulations, physio, most common dental (if you can find a NHS dentist as the rates are low) and other medical services such as chiropractors, etc. They even will pay for accredited  weight loss classes, etc as they see a wider benefit and longer term reduction in remedial care (prevention better than cure). I personally think some of this goes above and beyond the remit of a national health service, and the reality is that even if it were superbly and efficiently managed, there are simply not the resources to provide all these services to the public for free at point of service - without significant extra taaxes (or a superrblyand efficiently run whole of government).

 

The result is a lot of the non-emergency/hospital services wait times are excessive - it is reported some GP practices have wait periods of up to 2 weeks; the NHS have provided drop in centres staffed by senior clinincal nurses with some radiology and other services to boot. Access to mental health services is woeful, but in its defence, as a general rather that acute service, it is realtively new. Most people just go to a private physio when they need to unless it is part of integral treartment after some major trauma (e.g. workplace or car accident, etc).  However, when the chips are down, most NHS hospitals are not a bad place to be in.. In Europe, I would think the top three are Germany, France and UK... probably in that order. One of the good things is that, unlike Australia, your medical records move with you (I think they are now centrally stored, too but not sure). As long as you see a NHS GP, which 99.9% of the population do, your records will transfer to that GP rather than them having a separate set of records. If you end up in hospital, they can get your records (if they can't already see them) so can make very good decisions on your whole history if required.

 

 

Edited August 20, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[red750]

That's one of my beef's. They now have My Health which is supposed to be a central register of your medical history - you had to opt out if you didn't want it kept - but you still have to complete reams of paperwork to get admitted to a hospital listing your entire medical history - when you were an inpatient at that hospital less than 12 months ago. And they still .get it wrong - like charging full rate not pensioner rate, when they have your pension number on file. Hospital ddoesn't talk to pathology or radiology. You cop a bill in the mail for radiology - ring them up and they say "Oh we didn't know you were a pensioner. Forget the bill, we will bulk bill it,"

[pmccarthy]

Departments within the hospital do not have access to central patient records. They get what you filled in this time, not the whole history. The public is to blame, the people who protest about their rights to confidentiality and demand privacy. It has gone so far now that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

[Jerry_Atrick]

This is a sad development.. I understand that people can opt out.. but surely, if they don't, then the default position is that they give permission for authorised clinincal staff to view the records on an "as-needs" basis. My guess is that it is a monumental systems/contract stuff up. We had this in the UK.. Before I returned to Aus in 2003, the then Labour (not Labor) government tendered for a centralised patient record computer system. Computer Services Corporation (owned by Ross Perot at the time) won a £5bn contract to provide a centralised record system. £5bn! In today's money, that would be more like £15bn.. Even the most expensive IT person of the day would have been, say, £1,000/day and they would have been specialist trading IT people, not a simple records management system that, to be honest, a few 3rd year students should be able to cobble together as part of the indsutry placement project. In other words, if they employed the brightest minds, that would be 5 million working days to design the process by which it would work, build a system to support that process, test it, fix it and roll it out. The reality is, max Ross would have paid was £500/day to contractors so that leaves, say 2.5bn profit on 5 million work days (OK, you have to take some overhead out of that, like there may well have been some kick-backs somewhere... I could not possibly say for sure)

As it stands, the costs raked up to 9.8bn before they binned it.. Yes, binned it.. After £9.bn!:  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn.  (Although it says the original contract value was 3.1bn.. I distinctly remember 5bn. but doesn't matter... even at 3.1bn, that is 3.1million working days).

 

Yes, there is no doubt there was indecision and disputes to scope, etc which led to some delays, but I can speak from experience that when these large consultancies get invovled, they usually engineer it to get to these disputes as the meter is stil lticking and they don't have to deliver. Obvously, I can't say whether this happened in this case, but I know of a two big consultancies who were the prime system integrators (fancy term for lead vendor) on projects I was working on, where they deployed the strategy of instigating disputes, delivered nothing and raked in the fees.. and considered them successful projects. For the record, CSC was NOT one of them..

 

A couple of my favourite cartoons:

 

 

 

Edited August 20, 2020 by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

 

The response from those not IT-savvy

 

[Subria]

9 hours ago, red750 said:

That's one of my beef's. They now have My Health which is supposed to be a central register of your medical history - you had to opt out if you didn'e want it kept - but you still have to complete reams of paperwork to get admitted to a hospital listing your entire medical history - when you were an inpatient at that hospital less than 12 months ago. And they still .get it wrong - like charging full rate not pensioner rate, when they have your pension number on file. Hospital ddoesn't talk to pathology or radiology. You cop a bill in the mail for radiology - ring them up and they say "Oh we didn't know you were a pensioner. Forget the bill, we will bulk bill it,"

That's Australia for ya!

[Bruce Tuncks]

Personally, I don't even know anybody with the virus. What I think though is that you have to do something stupid to catch it. This doesn't apply to the very first people but it does to the later ones when the facts were known. 

I think that if you spent the day in close proximity to an infected person then you have been stupid to not take enough precautions to avoid catching the virus.

[octave]

6 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

Personally, I don't even know anybody with the virus. What I think though is that you have to do something stupid to catch it. This doesn't apply to the very first people but it does to the later ones when the facts were known. 

I think that if you spent the day in close proximity to an infected person then you have been stupid to not take enough precautions to avoid catching the virus.

 

A large number of infections are of health workers.   People in aged care do not have no ability to isolate from the staff.   Yep it would be stupid to spend a day in the company of someone you knew to be infected however this is not by and large how it is being spread.  Take for instance the guy from Victoria who travelled to that pub in NSW,. How could the strangers who were also in that pub had know that he was positive?   Many infections have happened in restaurants before the lockdown, how can one patron know if someone on the next table is infected with few or no symptoms but no the less contagious.

 

 

[old man emu]

34 minutes ago, octave said:

how can one patron know if someone on the next table is infected

Or, indeed, in the early stages before symptoms appear, how does anyone know that they are infected?

 

All the warnings posted on public signs say, "If you feel sick, stay home." That's pretty sensible, but what about the day or two before you started feeling sick? Them little critters are in your body, but have't infected enough of your cells to produce identifiable symptoms. However, some of that invading population could be ejected when you breathe out.

 

Today I realised a social downside to wearing a mask. You can make eye-contact with people, but you can't get a response from a smile because the other person cannot see the smile. It makes for a glum society.

[Subria]

[pmccarthy]

I have just finished re-reading Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. It is amazing how many things are the same. He writes at length about lock-down and how some people avoided it. How the infection was worse in the street of butchers. How, despite a terrible death toll, no bodies were left to rot in the streets. How the wealthier neighbourhoods got it later, and thought for a while they had avoided it. How it spread exponentially. How it found its way into the countryside. How teams went around disinfecting surfaces and objects. People knew it could be transmitted on books or clothing and avoided touching things. The hazard teams breathed through masks containing herbs. He even gives the statistics for infections and deaths over time, by neighbourhood.

[red750]

A man stands on the edge of a cliff that is about to give way. A butterfly lands on his shoulder and the cliff breaks, sending the man plunging to his death. Is it the butterfly's fault the man died?

 

That's the way it is with corona deaths. In todays figures from Victoria, they said there were 13 deaths yesterday. One was a woman who was 100 years old. Was corona her butterfly?

[Subria]

We are each owed a death, we each face that 'butterfly' you speak of!

[red750]

This pandemic has brought out an expression that I'm starting to tire of. It has been  in everything from Aldi commercials to the Premier's daily reports.

 

The word is UNPRECEDENTED. Everything about this pandemic is unprecedented. Grrrr.

[willedoo]

The virus is causing a traffic jam of babies in the baby production industry. Foreign clients can't take delivery of their surrogate born babies due to border closures and restrictions. BioTexCom in Ukraine currently has nearly 50 babies housed in a baby hotel under care until border restrictions are eased.

 

 

 

Edited August 22, 2020 by willedoo