Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

Two South Koreans recover from COVID-19 after plasma therapy
07 Apr 2020

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SEOUL: Two elderly South Korean coronavirus patients recovered from severe pneumonia after being treated with plasma from survivors, researchers said Tuesday (Apr 7), offering hope in the face of the global pandemic.

Scientists have pointed to the potential benefits of plasma - a blood fluid - from recovered individuals who have developed antibodies to the virus enabling the body's defences to attack it.
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Plasma therapy could become "an alternative treatment for patients in critical condition who do not respond to antiviral drugs", said Choi Jun-yong, a doctor and researcher at Severance Hospital in Seoul, where both patients were treated.

But large-scale clinical trials were needed to prove its effectiveness, he added.

One of the two patients was a 71-year-old man with no underlying conditions who only improved when treated with plasma from a recovered patient in his 20s, along with steroids.

He was initially given malaria drugs and a respirator for severe pneumonia.

The other patient, a 67-year-old female, also did not respond to initial treatments including malaria, HIV drugs, and oxygen therapy. She began to recover after receiving plasma therapy and steroids at the same time, researchers said.

Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Korean Medicine.

Kwon Jun-wook, an official at Seoul's Central Disease Control Headquarters, said plasma therapy was "important" when there was "currently no vaccine or treatment available" for the virus.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/two-south-koreans-recover-from-covid-19-after-plasma-therapy-12618422

And on youtube (the news caster is easy on the eyes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47IOaG2oUQQ

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

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ORIGINAL: mind_messing

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ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

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ORIGINAL: mind_messing

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ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake

ICD-10 codes

U07.1 Confirmed Covid 19

J12.89 Viral pneumonia other cause

If you code the upper one first its COVID pneumonia, vice versa it's viral pneumonia.

The WHO tortured the entire world's medical community with these things so they sit in a fancy hotel in Geneva having cocktails and sushi talking about the numbers.

The WHO were justified in that torture - the statistics are important.

Easy for you to say. There is a code for "attack by Emperor Penguin, first encounter". Sometimes I code "Chagas disease" (South American parasitic disease) just for fun

Not really, see for yourself - https://www.who.int/data/gho

Making that data of this nature accessible is absolutely critical in encouraging the research and modelling that make a serious contribution to health outcomes.

If it's painful on your end, that's because input control is needed in all good systems - garbage in, garbage out

No, I disagree. What benefit is it to know if the injury from an Emperor Penguin was a first or subsequent encounter? Or (as noted in a prior thread here) an injury sustained in a killer whale encounter?

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Enormous effort goes into collecting data that either will not be used, or should not be used (but probably will be used if it costs taxpayer money to do so).

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

US mortality dropped significantly today to the lowest level since March 31. New York and New Jersey had big drops. Eight states reported no deaths today.

A quick scan of ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS and New York Times websites shows uniformly negative covid news stories. Seriously - every story is negative - how will we handle summer, what's the matter with the president, what will we do and when can we do it? Not a single positive story from those five sources on the first day with big jumps in good news in so many jurisdictions.

These critters are incorrigible.

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ORIGINAL: CaptBeefheart

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

Two South Koreans recover from COVID-19 after plasma therapy
07 Apr 2020

quote:

SEOUL: Two elderly South Korean coronavirus patients recovered from severe pneumonia after being treated with plasma from survivors, researchers said Tuesday (Apr 7), offering hope in the face of the global pandemic.

Scientists have pointed to the potential benefits of plasma - a blood fluid - from recovered individuals who have developed antibodies to the virus enabling the body's defences to attack it.
.
.
.
Plasma therapy could become "an alternative treatment for patients in critical condition who do not respond to antiviral drugs", said Choi Jun-yong, a doctor and researcher at Severance Hospital in Seoul, where both patients were treated.

But large-scale clinical trials were needed to prove its effectiveness, he added.

One of the two patients was a 71-year-old man with no underlying conditions who only improved when treated with plasma from a recovered patient in his 20s, along with steroids.

He was initially given malaria drugs and a respirator for severe pneumonia.

The other patient, a 67-year-old female, also did not respond to initial treatments including malaria, HIV drugs, and oxygen therapy. She began to recover after receiving plasma therapy and steroids at the same time, researchers said.

Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Korean Medicine.

Kwon Jun-wook, an official at Seoul's Central Disease Control Headquarters, said plasma therapy was "important" when there was "currently no vaccine or treatment available" for the virus.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/two-south-koreans-recover-from-covid-19-after-plasma-therapy-12618422

And on youtube (the news caster is easy on the eyes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47IOaG2oUQQ

Hey RangerJoe, I touched on those cases. That's my wife's hospital, by the way. What, don't you read my posts? [Just kidding--this thread has a huge number of posts.]

The news is still good here. Here's the latest: Loose social distancing looms large as new virus cases stay low

Over the weekend, I took the family down to the riverside park by bus, since papa wanted a couple of thirst quenchers and parking is usually a hassle. The ROK Navy Seoul (FF-952) tied up on the river and a land-bound SS and KV were unfortunately closed. While there, I noticed a German-speaking fellow and his two kids were not sporting masks. The missus commented that it didn't look good for foreigners to not be wearing the things. Still, I have yet to see anyone, including them, be hassled for not wearing a mask.

On the way back, we went through a jam-packed market (which wasn't too wet, by the way, although there were a couple of fishmongers). With maybe 200 active cases in a city of 11 million, it's hard to get too excited about social distancing.

Driving this morning traffic seemed to be worse than pre-virus. However, I pay only $3.80 a gallon for gas, which is about 40% less than pre-virus (gas tax is very high), so that's a nice effect I'll take.

On the media, it's in their nature to play up doom and gloom to get eyeballs and clicks. It's what they do. If you want to live a long and stress-free life, not turning on the news wouldn't hurt.

Cheers,
CB

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ORIGINAL: mind_messing

Very good article - Spiegelhalter knows his stuff

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c

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ORIGINAL: obvert

Another avenue for finding new hotspots and more reliably measuring the number of people with Cornavirus. Sewage.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/04/24/new-castle-county-poop-suggests-higher-covid-19-infection-rate/3019927001/

Last week, county officials sent a sample of raw sewage from the Wilmington Wastewater Treatment plant on 12th Street to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology startup. There, they compared the prevalence of genetic fragments from the virus in fecal matter against local population data and sewage flow rates – all in an effort to estimate how many people may have the virus.

The company's analysis estimated that 15,200 people – three percent of the population north of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal – had the virus as of April 14. That number is approximately 15 times the laboratory confirmed cases in the county as of the sample date.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

With respect to the news, that makes sense. You can't trust people to handle/process truth. You have to mislead them to keep them in line and achieve goals for the common good.

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Use your imagination.

Here's a hypothetical - if Antarctic residents start displaying symptoms of a new unknown illness, and there's a massive increase in injuries from Emperor Penguins in both first and subsequent encounters, then that's a possible avenue to explore for determining the source of the new illness.
No, because a person's first Emperor Penguin injury could have been years ago even before electronic medical records. The distinction between first and subsequent injuries is not reliable in the database.

It's not even restricted to medicine, either. If you have good records on injuries from Emperor Penguins and control for the size penguin and human populations, then you can monitor how aggressive they are through seasons and years. Then you could compare that to weather information and see if climate change has an effect on their behaviour
No, because there would be many, many confounding factors to eliminate.

And why are not all species included? Why not even all species of penguins? Why not all birds? Why not all mammals? All species of sharks, nay, all fishes? What about injuries caused by the animals after death, such as by fish bones stuck in the throat? {ExtremeSarcasm=ON}Are those lazy, under worked ER docs recording what species the fish bone was from? How about which bone? Not just any rib, which rib?!{ExtremeSarcasm=OFF}

Arguments for including more and more detail are always there because they are always theoretical: we can dream!

That's just the top of the iceberg (pun intended) of what you could do with a silly little data stream like that.
Here I agree, except of course the data stream is anything but little. You can drive up the cost of medical care (both directly and throughout the infrastructure that supports it) while achieving non-compliance with the data collection (which destroys that heavenly theoretical value of the data collected), increase the time it takes to enter the data resulting in Doctors spending most of the time during a supposed examination staring at their computer screen while typing in/selecting said data, making medical care incrementally less available, and on and on.

The doctors I know personally have told me that having electronic medical/health records has, net, not improved patient care. The fact it is possible to merely think (fantasize?, hallucinate?) that wonders can be achieved is enough to overcome the practically non-existent resistance politicians have to spending other people's money, time, lives...

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

I would not be surprised that even if restrictions were relaxed that the number of cases would not dramatically increase. Some will still stay in seclusion, especially those at high risk, while others may get infected but not seriously enough to be tested. I think that most people will still be careful, but some may not. Also, there is a much smaller chance of catching it outside.

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Belgium and Netherlands continue to report sharp drops in new cases and mortalities.

This seems to be happening all over Europe and most of the US now. That may be because many of these jurisdictions began imposing countermeasures about six weeks ago. It might be due to climate, as weather warms across the northern hemisphere. Or both. Certainly a major developing trend.

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

I would not be surprised that even if restrictions were relaxed that the number of cases would not dramatically increase. Some will still stay in seclusion, especially those at high risk, while others may get infected but not seriously enough to be tested. I think that most people will still be careful, but some may not. Also, there is a much smaller chance of catching it outside.

I agree, people are simply petrified here in my neck of Pennsylvania. I got a survey from my gym (Planet Fitness) and one of the questions is would sanitizing locker rooms every 15 minutes important to me. In addition to a whole slew of questions regarding the sanitizing everything and density of equipment and limiting people, and greater spacing, etc.

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ORIGINAL: witpqs
No, because a person's first Emperor Penguin injury could have been years ago even before electronic medical records. The distinction between first and subsequent injuries is not reliable in the database.

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No, because there would be many, many confounding factors to eliminate.

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And why are not all species included? Why not even all species of penguins? Why not all birds? Why not all mammals? All species of sharks, nay, all fishes? What about injuries caused by the animals after death, such as by fish bones stuck in the throat? {ExtremeSarcasm=ON}Are those lazy, under worked ER docs recording what species the fish bone was from? How about which bone? Not just any rib, which rib?!{ExtremeSarcasm=OFF}

Arguments for including more and more detail are always there because they are always theoretical: we can dream!

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Here I agree, except of course the data stream is anything but little. You can drive up the cost of medical care (both directly and throughout the infrastructure that supports it) while achieving non-compliance with the data collection (which destroys that heavenly theoretical value of the data collected), increase the time it takes to enter the data resulting in Doctors spending most of the time during a supposed examination staring at their computer screen while typing in/selecting said data, making medical care incrementally less available, and on and on.

The doctors I know personally have told me that having electronic medical/health records has, net, not improved patient care. The fact it is possible to merely think (fantasize?, hallucinate?) that wonders can be achieved is enough to overcome the practically non-existent resistance politicians have to spending other people's money, time, lives...

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Another Stanford physician's conclusions: Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

I would not be surprised that even if restrictions were relaxed that the number of cases would not dramatically increase. Some will still stay in seclusion, especially those at high risk, while others may get infected but not seriously enough to be tested. I think that most people will still be careful, but some may not. Also, there is a much smaller chance of catching it outside.

I agree, people are simply petrified here in my neck of Pennsylvania. I got a survey from my gym (Planet Fitness) and one of the questions is would sanitizing locker rooms every 15 minutes important to me. In addition to a whole slew of questions regarding the sanitizing everything and density of equipment and limiting people, and greater spacing, etc.

My sister, who needs to go to the gym to fight osteopenia/osteoporosis, complains about how many people don't wipe off machines when they are done with them. I'm talking about before COVID-19, just leaving pools of sweat on benches, handles dripping wet, and so on. Suddenly gyms are going to disinfect locker rooms every 15 minutes? And the air is a huge issue, so they would have to have large air handlers with UV or something to disinfect that. Sounds like a difficult business going forward.

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ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
With "Attack by Emperor Penguin, second encounter" there is a modifier "with cognitive impairment" or "without cognitive impairment"

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

I would not be surprised that even if restrictions were relaxed that the number of cases would not dramatically increase. Some will still stay in seclusion, especially those at high risk, while others may get infected but not seriously enough to be tested. I think that most people will still be careful, but some may not. Also, there is a much smaller chance of catching it outside.

I agree, people are simply petrified here in my neck of Pennsylvania. I got a survey from my gym (Planet Fitness) and one of the questions is would sanitizing locker rooms every 15 minutes important to me. In addition to a whole slew of questions regarding the sanitizing everything and density of equipment and limiting people, and greater spacing, etc.

My sister, who needs to go to the gym to fight osteopenia/osteoporosis, complains about how many people don't wipe off machines when they are done with them. I'm talking about before COVID-19, just leaving pools of sweat on benches, handles dripping wet, and so on. Suddenly gyms are going to disinfect locker rooms every 15 minutes? And the air is a huge issue, so they would have to have large air handlers with UV or something to disinfect that. Sounds like a difficult business going forward.

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ORIGINAL: Chickenboy

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

Another Stanford physician's conclusions: Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

Well said. It's what we're all thinking, but succinctly summarized.

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ORIGINAL: HansBolter

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ORIGINAL: obvert

Another avenue for finding new hotspots and more reliably measuring the number of people with Cornavirus. Sewage.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/04/24/new-castle-county-poop-suggests-higher-covid-19-infection-rate/3019927001/

Last week, county officials sent a sample of raw sewage from the Wilmington Wastewater Treatment plant on 12th Street to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology startup. There, they compared the prevalence of genetic fragments from the virus in fecal matter against local population data and sewage flow rates – all in an effort to estimate how many people may have the virus.

The company's analysis estimated that 15,200 people – three percent of the population north of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal – had the virus as of April 14. That number is approximately 15 times the laboratory confirmed cases in the county as of the sample date.

That kind of analysis is so rife with speculation and assumptions on what values to assign variables that it likely isn't any more accurate than measuring cosmological distances using the red shifting of light.

Was a speculated margin of error stated?

A creative exercise in how to find ways to spend tax dollar science funding.

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ORIGINAL: Sammy5IsAlive

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ORIGINAL: Canoerebel

Belgium and Netherlands continue to report sharp drops in new cases and mortalities.

This seems to be happening all over Europe and most of the US now. That may be because many of these jurisdictions began imposing countermeasures about six weeks ago. It might be due to climate, as weather warms across the northern hemisphere. Or both. Certainly a major developing trend.

I think both Belgium and the Netherlands are following the general pattern of sharp drops in numbers around the weekend. The seven day rolling figures are going down though which is encouraging.

I think when they do the next Washington revisions they'll stay the same/slightly increase for the US (where the total numbers of deaths are c.2k above what the most recent model predicted at this point), will go up slightly for Italy/Spain/France whose recoveries seem to be slower than predicted and the UK staying about the same at around 30k or just below (I think the last prediction was still underestimating health care system resilience and we were 2k below the most recent prediction for 26/04 but I think we will have the same pattern as other European countries and in the US with slower reductions in deaths than predicted).

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ORIGINAL: witpqs

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ORIGINAL: Lowpe

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ORIGINAL: RangerJoe

I would not be surprised that even if restrictions were relaxed that the number of cases would not dramatically increase. Some will still stay in seclusion, especially those at high risk, while others may get infected but not seriously enough to be tested. I think that most people will still be careful, but some may not. Also, there is a much smaller chance of catching it outside.

I agree, people are simply petrified here in my neck of Pennsylvania. I got a survey from my gym (Planet Fitness) and one of the questions is would sanitizing locker rooms every 15 minutes important to me. In addition to a whole slew of questions regarding the sanitizing everything and density of equipment and limiting people, and greater spacing, etc.

My sister, who needs to go to the gym to fight osteopenia/osteoporosis, complains about how many people don't wipe off machines when they are done with them. I'm talking about before COVID-19, just leaving pools of sweat on benches, handles dripping wet, and so on. Suddenly gyms are going to disinfect locker rooms every 15 minutes? And the air is a huge issue, so they would have to have large air handlers with UV or something to disinfect that. Sounds like a difficult business going forward.

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ORIGINAL: obvert


Have a read instead of finding the negative without looking into it.