Thread: Corona Virus

Bugger.
No matter how good your processes, people find ways around them or gaps occur.
It'll be really interesting to see how this happened.

Coronavirus Victoria. Virgin flight VA833 immediate quarantine alert for passengers from Sydney to Melbourne

Originally Posted by Arapiles

More loss of credibility for WHO: latest research shows that antibodies are likely to be long lasting - as they are for SARs - so, in the medium term vaccines are the answer.

As for the poor and marginalised, big chunks of the developing world - such as Africa - that it was feared would be decimated by COVID-19 have actually weathered it quite well, either because of existing immunity to other coronaviruses or because there are relatively few old people in those countries.

Can't let that rot go without a reply. For a start, WHO has said that vaccines may not be the only answer. Wearing of masks, social distancing, and personal hygiene , as practised in those countries that are doing better with the pandemic, will still be necessary. And where do you get the idea there are not so many old people in Africa? What do they do? eat them? [ not meant as a serious comment, just to highlight the average European misconceptions about Africa, the self righteous among us can relax] Here is a report on Africa. It might pay to actually read it, this time.

"We could be learning from the experiences that Africans and their governments have had with pandemics and viral diseases, including Ebola and AIDS.



While so much about the virus and how it operates remains unclear, sub-Saharan Africa so far has dodged a deadly wave of coronavirus cases. Many factors have contributed to this. A number of West African nations already had a pandemic response infrastructure in place from the Ebola outbreak of late 2013 to 2016. Just six years ago, Liberia lost nearly 5,000 people to Ebola. At the beginning of this year, Liberia began screening for covid-19 at airports. Travelers coming in from countries with more than 200 cases were quarantined. To date, Liberia, a country of some 5 million, has 1,335 cases and around 82 deaths.

After the Ebola pandemic, Senegal set up an emergency operations center to manage public health crises. Some covid-19 test results come back in 24 hours, and the country employs aggressive contact tracing. Every coronavirus patient is given a bed in hospital or other health-care facility. Senegal has a population of 16 million, but has only 302 registered deaths.Several countries have come up with innovations. Rwanda, a country of 12 million, also responded early and aggressively to the virus, using equipment and infrastructure that was in place to deal with HIV/AIDS. Testing and treatment for the virus are free. Rwanda has recorded only 26 deaths.

The BBC came under fire for a since-changed headline and a tweet that read “Coronavirus in Africa: Could poverty explain mystery of low death rate?” The New York Post published an article with the headline, “Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of coronavirus outbreaks in Africa.”

It’s almost as if they are disappointed that Africans aren’t dying en masse and countries are not collapsing. While Black Americans have been disproportionately contracting covid-19 and dying, Africa’s performance shows, as I quoted a Kenyan anthropologist saying in May, “being a black person in this world doesn’t kill you, but being a black person in America clearly can.”

In this global pandemic, Africa’s success stories matter more than ever."



Opinion | Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised. - The Washington Post

Another loophole that needs to be closed. Looks like they are on to it.

"I've spoken to [NSW Health] Minister [Brad] Hazzard to seek an explanation as to how it was that the security arrangements at Sydney Airport saw the two passengers avoid their hotel quarantine obligations in Sydney and travel to Melbourne.
"He has assured me a full investigation will be completed so it cannot occur again."

Two international travellers arrived in Sydney and caught immediate flight to Melbourne, prompting public health response (msn.com)

And a very short quiz. Who discovered the first vaccine? or more correctly, who first started the process of variolation, to inoculate against disease? To save us from the usual social media answers, it was China.

It was not Jenner’s idea, nor was it Dimsdale’s. But it may have been a single person’s. Remarkably, variolation may not have been independently discovered. Instead, the earliest documentation suggests it began in China—probably in the southwestern provinces of either Anhui or Jiangxi—before spreading across the globe in a cascading series of introductions.
Chinese merchants introduced variolation to India and brought knowledge of the practice to Africa, where it became widespread. In 1721 an enslaved African man named Onesimus–who may have been born in West Africa though exactly where is unknown–was variolated as a child before slave traders brought him to Boston. Once in New England, Onesimus taught his enslaver Cotton Mather the practice, and Mather successfully convinced doctors in the Americas of its efficacy.

Originally Posted by bob10

Another loophole that needs to be closed. Looks like they are on to it.

"I've spoken to [NSW Health] Minister [Brad] Hazzard to seek an explanation as to how it was that the security arrangements at Sydney Airport saw the two passengers avoid their hotel quarantine obligations in Sydney and travel to Melbourne.
"He has assured me a full investigation will be completed so it cannot occur again."

Two international travellers arrived in Sydney and caught immediate flight to Melbourne, prompting public health response (msn.com)

If they stayed inside the airport, is not really a State problem as International Airports are the domain of the Feds - looks like Border Force has struck again but they will wash their hands of this.

Looks like these travellers deliberately bypassed the airport processes as a conscious decision - when they have completed their 2 week quarantine and paid for it they should be immediately be deported back to where they came from (Germany?)

Originally Posted by bob10

And a very short quiz. Who discovered the first vaccine? or more correctly, who first started the process of variolation, to inoculate against disease? To save us from the usual social media answers, it was China.

It was not Jenner’s idea, nor was it Dimsdale’s. But it may have been a single person’s. Remarkably, variolation may not have been independently discovered. Instead, the earliest documentation suggests it began in China—probably in the southwestern provinces of either Anhui or Jiangxi—before spreading across the globe in a cascading series of introductions.
Chinese merchants introduced variolation to India and brought knowledge of the practice to Africa, where it became widespread. In 1721 an enslaved African man named Onesimus–who may have been born in West Africa though exactly where is unknown–was variolated as a child before slave traders brought him to Boston. Once in New England, Onesimus taught his enslaver Cotton Mather the practice, and Mather successfully convinced doctors in the Americas of its efficacy.

Variolation is not the same as vaccination, as it is simply the infection (usually of children) in controlled circumstances and with medical help available with the actual virus that causes the disease. It is the same as the deliberate infection of children with a range of "childhood diseases" such as measles, chicken pox, mumps, that was common practice in my childhood.

Vaccination is the deliberate production of immunity to a dangerous infectious disease by challenging the patient's immune system with an agent other than the actual disease causing virus or bacterium. This may or may not be derived from the actual virus or bacterium, and may indeed be a related virus that does not cause serious disease and the original vaccination for smallpox that gives us the term "vaccination" is in fact one of these.

Jenner is certainly not the first person to actually vaccinate using the vaccinia virus, but he is possibly the first person to do so and describe the procedure and results accurately and completely in a publication likely to be read by the medical profession. Even then, it took about fifty years before it was widely adopted, and more than two hundred years to eliminate the disease.

Originally Posted by bob10

Can't let that rot go without a reply. For a start, WHO has said that vaccines may not be the only answer. Wearing of masks, social distancing, and personal hygiene , as practised in those countries that are doing better with the pandemic, will still be necessary. And where do you get the idea there are not so many old people in Africa?
............

In this global pandemic, Africa’s success stories matter more than ever."

Opinion | Africa has defied the covid-19 nightmare scenarios. We shouldn’t be surprised. - The Washington Post

OK, the link in Bob10's post led to this, which is what I responded to:
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that re-infection may still be likely even after people are vaccinated and it would not alone end the global pandemic.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said although vaccines in progress had offered “light at the end of the tunnel”, coronavirus still had a long way to run.
Dr Tedros appealed for an immediate injection of $US4.3 billion ($5.78 billion) into a world vaccine-sharing program to prevent poor and marginalised being “trampled by the rich and powerful in the stampede for vaccines”.

This news item seems to be drawn from these two speeches:

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 4 December 2020

WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session - 4 December 2020

I've had a read of both and the DG of WHO doesn't refer to reinfection in either speech. So, the article is misreporting what he said. What he did say is this :

Progress on vaccines gives us all a lift and we can now start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

However, WHO is concerned that there is a growing perception that the pandemic is over.

The truth is that at present, many places are witnessing very high transmission of the virus, which is putting enormous pressure on hospitals, intensive care units and health workers.

Some countries in Europe have managed to reduce transmission of the virus by putting stringent measures in place that limit people from mingling.

As previously seen, as these measures are lifted, it’s important that people should continue to follow national and local measures to ensure that cases do not rebound.

Even as vaccines are rolled out, people will need to keep adhering to public health measures so that everyone is protected.

So, I was responding to what the news article said the DG of WHO had said - that reinfection can occur after vaccination (which is very unlikely and not a reason to hold back on vaccines) - that would appear to be completely not what the DG of WHO said.

Yes, he actually pointed to the importance of basic health measures.


Africa - I read the BBC articles and the New York Times article and the Washington Post article is more than a little misleading: it was South Africa's own experts who were expressing surprise that things had not gone pear-shaped:

"It seems possible that our struggles, our poor conditions might be working in favour of African countries and our populations," said Professor Shabir Madhi, South Africa's top virologist and an important figure in the hunt for a vaccine for Covid-19.

"Most African countries don't have a peak. I don't understand why. I'm completely at sea," admitted Professor Salim Karim - widely seen as a leading voice on the pandemic response in South Africa and across the continent.


"This is an enigma. It's completely unbelievable," said Professor Shabir Madhi.


I understand that South Africa may have had a surge since then, but the point is that it was the South Africans who were surprised, not the BBC.

In terms of Africa's demographics:

Africa has a young age structure, with about 40 per cent of itspopulation in the 0-14 age bracket and nearly one fifth (19 percent) in the 15-24 age bracket (see table 5 and figure 12). Thepopulation pyramid for the continent for 2015 reveals the effectsof high fertility manifesting itself in a population pyramid witha broad base. Every successive bar of the population pyramid isnarrower, suggesting fertility levels above replacement. A higherproportion of females in the 65 and above age group is a result ofthe higher life expectancy at birth for women. Source: ECA, based on Department of Economic and Social Affairs data (2015).

https://www.uneca.org/sites/default/...v_april_25.pdf

Relatively few older people means relatively few people in the highest risk age group.

Originally Posted by rick130

Bugger.
No matter how good your processes, people find ways around them or gaps occur.
It'll be really interesting to see how this happened.

Coronavirus Victoria. Virgin flight VA833 immediate quarantine alert for passengers from Sydney to Melbourne

It was the NSW police who stuffed up, with assistance from an airline and the passengers:


NSW police error to blame over two overseas travellers failing to quarantine | Coronavirus | The Guardian


Apparently the Japanese airline staff in Germany mistakenly issued boarding passes all the way through to Melbourne, so the police apparently believed that they were exempt since they had a connecting flight booked.

But I find it hard to believe that the travellers themselves weren't aware that they had to quarantine in Sydney, so something's a little fishy about it.