Covid 19 C&P

Vic government to vote on extending the Coronavirus State of Emergency for another 9 months.

The Victorian government has launched a bid to extend its coronavirus state of emergency for another nine months to December 2021.
Premier Daniel Andrews said it was “always better to err on the side of protecting what we’ve built”, and the move was based on health advice.
He said the state government would introduce legislation this week to keep the emergency powers in place beyond March 15, when they are due to expire. If the bill passes, the powers will be extended in four-week blocks until December 15.
“The sorts of rules that the state of emergency underpins is the order for someone to isolate for 14 days, is the order that means hotel quarantine is mandatory, wearing face masks in certain settings,” Mr Andrews said on Tuesday.
“All of those common-sense things, but particularly hotel quarantine, without a state of emergency, the chief health officer simply has no power to be able to compel people to isolate in a hotel.
“These rules are all about staying safe and staying open.”
Mr Andrews said the legal framework was also important to allow Victoria to continue receiving Australians returning home after being trapped overseas for months.
“That’s why we’ll put this bill into the Parliament today [Tuesday] and we’ll have those good-faith discussions with everybody across the Parliament and hopefully that can pass in an orderly way,” he said.








Victoria extends state of emergency, while WA aims for more zero days (thenewdaily.com.au)

A break through in the coronavirus fight. A chicken disease found a century ago may be the key to fighting COVID-19.

The poultry industry has a lot to teach the world about the future of coronavirus infection control, according to a University of Melbourne academic.
Professor Amir Hadjinoormohammadi works in avian medicine in the Asia Pacific Centre for Animal Health.
Although the term coronavirus was yet to be coined, Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said the illness was first detected in chickens.



Professor Hadjinoormohammadi said IBV not only presented with almost identical symptoms to COVID-19 but it also had a similar physical make-up.

"The name coronavirus was established later on, but in the 1930s' they actually determined the structure and the shape of the virus," he said.

Chicken disease found almost a century ago could be key to controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, expert says (msn.com)

Victoria investigates hotel transmission between guests,

COVID Quarantine Victoria said late on Wednesday afternoon it was investigating how two separate resident groups at Melbourne’s Park Royal Hotel returned positive tests for the same strain of the highly infectious B117 variant first detected in Britain.

It is understood genetic tracing revealed two guests on the same floor at the hotel have somehow transmitted the same British variant of the virus between the groups.
“That means it’s as if they have been in the same room together,” Victoria’s Police Minister Lisa Neville said on Wednesday.
“This is a hotel transmission, it is not a community transmission. The public health team … have indicated there is an exceptionally low risk of any community transmission.”
The manner in which the virus was likely transmitted points to how infectious the strain is.



Vic authorities investigate potential hotel transmission of British virus strain (thenewdaily.com.au)

There is always some one worse off.;


A German military plane just carried medical personnel and equipment to Portugal to help with a worsening COVID-19 crisis, Reuters reports. “The German team will manage a new unit of eight ICU beds in a private hospital in Lisbon, Hospital da Luz, which was equipped but lacked the staff to operate.”
Context: “Hospitals across Portugal, a nation of about 10 million people, appear on the verge of collapse, with ambulances sometimes queuing for hours because of a lack of beds while some health units are struggling to find enough refrigerated space to preserve the bodies of the deceased.” More here.

"A symbol of hope" - German military aid arrives in Portugal | Reuters

The pandemic is in tenuous retreat in the USA. From the COVID tracking project, THE ATLANTIC.;

The good news in COVID-19 data continued this week, as new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all dropped. For the seven-day period running January 28 to February 3, weekly new cases were down more than 16 percent over the previous week, and dropped below 1 million for the first time since the week of November 5. This is still an astonishing number of new cases a week, but far better than the nearly 1.8 million cases reported the week of January 14. Tests also declined nationally, but by less than 3 percent, nowhere near enough to explain the steep drop in cases.






The Pandemic Is in Tenuous Retreat (msn.com)

THE ATLANTIC newspaper has had a project " the COVID tracking project" going for some time in the US, the latest ;

The Pandemic is in tenuous retreat. The first paragraph reads;

The good news in COVID-19 data continued this week, as new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all dropped. For the seven-day period running January 28 to February 3, weekly new cases were down more than 16 percent over the previous week, and dropped below 1 million for the first time since the week of November 5. This is still an astonishing number of new cases a week, but far better than the nearly 1.8 million cases reported the week of January 14. Tests also declined nationally, but by less than 3 percent, nowhere near enough to explain the steep drop in cases.

The beginning of the end ?

The path out of the pandemic;

The path out of the pandemic

Countries that are moving quickly to vaccinate their populations are poised to move out of the deadliest phase of the pandemic in a matter of weeks.

At the front of the pack is Britain, which is on track to give everyone in the country the first shot of a two-dose regimen by the end of June, if supply and logistical issues don’t get in the way. The most vulnerable people in the U.K. — those over 70, health care workers, and nursing home residents and staff members — are on schedule to receive their first dose within the next two weeks. If achieved, it could considerably reduce the number of deaths, as together these groups account for 88 percent of all Covid deaths in the country.

The timeline below shows Britain’s path out of the pandemic through inoculations, and even if the pace of vaccinations slowed down by 20 percent, the country should still be able to give everyone a shot by the end of July.

https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/pr...ticleLarge.png The New York Times. Source: Public Health England

The country has been able to move quickly by delivering shots through the highly centralized National Health Service, which covers all Britons, and because of its quick approval process for experimental vaccines.

While the U.K. has vaccinated over 15 percent of its population, Israel leads the world in Covid inoculations, having delivered doses to more than 37 percent of the country, as of Wednesday. In comparison, the U.S. was over 8 percent, and the European Union was below 3 percent.

Israel offers a first glimpse at what happens when a country inoculates a large percentage of its population — and the results are encouraging. (However, almost all of the Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory have yet to receive their first dose.)

A study released yesterday reported that cases of Covid-19 and hospitalizations in Israel had dropped markedly among people who have been vaccinated.

Eran Segal, a quantitative biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, a co-author of the study, tweeted: “We say with caution, the magic has started.”

South Africa halted use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine on Sunday after evidence emerged that the vaccine did not protect clinical-trial participants from mild or moderate illness caused by the more contagious virus variant that was first seen there.
The findings were a devastating blow to the country’s efforts to combat the pandemic.
Scientists in South Africa said on Sunday that a similar problem held among people who had been infected by earlier versions of the coronavirus: the immunity they acquired naturally did not appear to protect them from mild or moderate cases when reinfected by the variant, known as B.1.351.





South Africa Says AstraZeneca's Covid-19 Vaccine is Not Effective at Stopping Variant - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

No more acting like " stunned mullets ".

The world must decide what needs to change to prevent events like the COVID-19 pandemic happening again, according to the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark.

The review’s full recommendations are due in May, but she spoke about the panel’s interim report at the University of Otago Public Health Summer School on February 1. Clark painted a grim picture of the findings to date, including:

• pre-existing shortcomings in pandemic preparedness
  
• a lack of appetite by nations to comply with the basic provisions of the International Health Regulations
  
• no mechanisms for co-operation or financing when a crisis hits
  
• key metrics such as the Global Health Security Index possibly giving false reassurances due to leadership and political factors
  
  
  One failure leading to another’
  
  The review committee is developing an authoritative chronology of COVID-19. It’s a timeline of virus spread, knowledge acquisition, recommendation sharing and actions taken. Clark said this “will speak for itself” about the deadly delays the world suffered.
  https://images.theconversation.com/f...w=237&fit=clip
  Helen Clark. GettyImagesThe big questions arising from that chronology are:
  
  
  • why it took a month and two meetings for the WHO’s Emergency Committee to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) — in a densely interconnected world where hours may be the difference between catastrophic spread and containment
    
  • why travel restrictions were specifically recommended against at that time, seeming to undercut the gravity of the PHEIC declaration
    
  • why the world stood around like “stunned mullets” while disaster unfolded.

No more acting like 'stunned mullets' — bigger, better, faster responses needed to meet future bio-threats (theconversation.com)

Why we need to keep on top of the COVID variants. ;

A more contagious variant of the coronavirus first found in Britain is spreading rapidly in the United States, doubling roughly every 10 days, according to a new study.


Dr. Andersen’s team estimated that the transmission rate of B.1.1.7 in the United States is 30 percent to 40 percent higher than that of more common variants, although those figures may rise as more data comes in, he said. The variant has already been implicated in surges in other countries, including Ireland, Portugal and Jordan.

Analyzing 212 American B.1.1.7 genomes, Dr. Andersen’s team concluded that the variant most likely first arrived in the United States by late November, a month before it was detected.

The C.D.C. has recorded only 611 B.1.1.7 cases, attesting to the inadequacy of the country’s genomic surveillance.
In parts of the country where Helix doesn’t do much testing, it is likely delivering an underestimate of the spread, Dr. Andersen cautioned. “I can guarantee you that there are places where B.1.1.7 might be relatively prevalent by now that we would not pick up,” he said.


Coronavirus Variant First Found in Britain Now Spreading Rapidly in US - The New York Times (nytimes.com)