2019 Novel Coronavirus Covid-19 Discussion

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#2677343 19-Mar-2021 19:01

mattwnz:

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No one who went overseas for any period of time prior to the pandemic knew that this might happen.

Depends on the date when it was considered to be a pandemic. I recall there were people that left to go on holidays overseas when we were requiring incoming people from some countries to self isolate after arrival in NZ. Then they had to rush to return to NZ if they could. When I think it was fairly obvious based on how the numbers were growing that travel would be getting restricted.

I really dont get your post. He is right. Not everyone lives on the MoH website, or GZ or WHO website or CNN. Its not obvious at all. It is in hindsight.

sbiddle

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#2677410 19-Mar-2021 21:45

Batman:

Does anyone know if we are going to pfizer vaccine children and pregnant women?

No to anybody under 16 because there is no Covid vaccine approved for anybody under 16 at this point in time. It'll potentially be at least the end of 2021 before any are approved.

Yes to people who are pregnant, and what is interesting is that there have been several well documented cases now of babies being born with antibodies and t-cell responses showing protection against Covid after the mother has been vaccinated during pregnancy.

Scott3

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#2677465 19-Mar-2021 23:01

sbiddle:

Batman:

Does anyone know if we are going to pfizer vaccine children and pregnant women?

No to anybody under 16 because there is no Covid vaccine approved for anybody under 16 at this point in time. It'll potentially be at least the end of 2021 before any are approved.

Yes to people who are pregnant, and what is interesting is that there have been several well documented cases now of babies being born with antibodies and t-cell responses showing protection against Covid after the mother has been vaccinated during pregnancy.

Further to this, Pregnant woman are in priority group 3c (along with for example people with diabetes).

https://covid19.govt.nz/updates-and-resources/latest-updates/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-plan

Regarding kids, the Pfizer vaccine is yet to be approved for those 15 and under. Pfizer has fully enrolled a trial with participants aged 12 - 15 years. It is unlikely that (in the event of a positive result), that the vaccine will be approved for kids before August. Enrollment for a trail of those aged 5 - 11 is planned for later this year.

Source for that August (late summer USA) date: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/health/covid-vaccines-children.html

Should note that Pfizer is one of the frountrunners with regards to approval for kids, and our government has ordered 5m courses, despite roughly 20% of our 5m population being kids. So I do expect kids to be vaccinated at some point.

mattwnz

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#2677473 20-Mar-2021 00:11

tdgeek:

mattwnz:

Depends on the date when it was considered to be a pandemic. I recall there were people that left to go on holidays overseas when we were requiring incoming people from some countries to self isolate after arrival in NZ. Then they had to rush to return to NZ if they could. When I think it was fairly obvious based on how the numbers were growing that travel would be getting restricted.

I really dont get your post. He is right. Not everyone lives on the MoH website, or GZ or WHO website or CNN. Its not obvious at all. It is in hindsight.

There was a period last year prior to our first lockdown, where it was clear that people shouldn't be going overseas. I think the government were also warning people around that time. I remember this because we had a family member who had tickets to go overseas and didn't want to lose their money on them, and went against family advice and ended up having problems returning.

Dratsab

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#2677483 20-Mar-2021 06:10

mattwnz: There was a period last year prior to our first lockdown, where it was clear that people shouldn't be going overseas. I think the government were also warning people around that time. I remember this because we had a family member who had tickets to go overseas and didn't want to lose their money on them, and went against family advice and ended up having problems returning.

Completely agree.

Around July/August 2019 the wife and I (well, mostly the wife actually) started planning a trip to Thailand for a family wedding in August 2020. When news started emerging from China in late December 2019 about a new respiratory illness the first thing I thought of was SARS and all the problems that caused. I'm someone who usually pays scant attention to the infotainment that gets billed as news in NZ, but this was something I decided to follow. By the end of January 2020, which is when we usually book tickets/accommodation for Thailand, I said we weren't going as it seemed things were starting to get well out of hand. She wanted to wait until the end of Feb to make a decision but I wouldn't have a bar of it. With the lack of seriousness being applied around the world it was quite obvious what was going to happen.

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#2677497 20-Mar-2021 09:01

Siouxsie Wiles: The great Covid bin lid mystery – solved | The Spinoff

freitasm

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#2678263 22-Mar-2021 10:49

This is a very interesting read: The Covid-19 pandemic almost didn't happen, a new genetic dating study shows - CNN

Researchers working to show when and how the virus first emerged in China calculate that it probably did not infect the first human being until October 2019 at the very earliest. And their models showed something else: It almost didn't make it as a pandemic virus.

Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan -- the place the pandemic appears to have begun -- gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

"Our study was designed to answer the question of how long could SARS-CoV-2 have circulated in China before it was discovered," said Joel Wertheim, associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

"To answer this question, we combined three important pieces of information: a detailed understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 spread in Wuhan before the lockdown, the genetic diversity of the virus in China and reports of the earliest cases of COVID-19 in China. By combining these disparate lines of evidence, we were able to put an upper limit of mid-October 2019 for when SARS-CoV-2 started circulating in Hubei province."

The evidence strongly indicates the virus could not have been circulating before that, the researchers said. There have been reports from Italy and other European countries of evidence the virus may have infected people there before October. But Thursday's study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said.

What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people -- such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.

"It gives you some perspective -- these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said.

And that could have happened with Covid-19.

In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.

It's likely the market was not where the virus first infected people, but just the place where it got amplified.

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Fred99

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#2678347 22-Mar-2021 12:03

NPR published this article last week:

A member of the World Health Organization investigative team says wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

China shut down those wildlife farms in February 2020, says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WHO delegation that traveled to China this year. During that trip, Daszak says, the WHO team found new evidence that these wildlife farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan with animals.

Daszak told NPR that the government response was a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan.

Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now.

"They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak.

...

"China promoted the farming of wildlife as a way to alleviate rural populations out of poverty," Daszak says. The farms helped the government meet ambitious goals of closing the rural-urban divide, as NPR reported last year.

"It was very successful," Daszak says. "In 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry."

The outbreak possibly not coming from an infected animal being sent to the market, but contact with a person from one of these "farms" who became infected due to living in close proximity to large numbers of "domesticated wild" animals infected with the virus (in which species the infection may have been mild / not noticed / overlooked).

Oblivian

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#2678399 22-Mar-2021 12:30

These reports are only helpful to some parts of the world seeking the answers with no bias.

Unfortunately if you saw the news last week when they did a story on the US, it's pretty shocking.

Racial abuse and assaults on asian communities have increased tenfold. People are now taking their lockdown and restrictions frustration on others they come across in public.

Their driving line caught on cameras being said the most, was pretty much the same as a previous presidents continually used name/catchphrase repeating. Even asking people in the street about where they are a year on. Blaming directly for current situation on camera.

GV27

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#2678402 22-Mar-2021 12:35

freitasm:

"It gives you some perspective -- these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said.

This is a terrifying thought for the ages.

frankv

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#2678410 22-Mar-2021 12:58

Oblivian:

Their driving line caught on cameras being said the most, was pretty much the same as a previous presidents continually used name/catchphrase repeating. Even asking people in the street about where they are a year on. Blaming directly for current situation on camera.

Bearing in mind that people who are happy don't want desperately to be on camera, and that the media really isn't interested in people who say "I'm fine" and/or explain at length why they're fine (or unhappy), *and* you don't know how what was edited out.

Oblivian

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#2678414 22-Mar-2021 13:01

frankv:

Bearing in mind that people who are happy don't want desperately to be on camera, and that the media really isn't interested in people who say "I'm fine" and/or explain at length why they're fine (or unhappy), *and* you don't know how what was edited out.

Granted. But it was only spurred from the victims speaking out first too.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56218684

Scary mention there, is it's driving them to buy more guns.

Fred99

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#2678420 22-Mar-2021 13:16

There's a certain extra element of risk when large-scale farming exotic animals for food. The species we (humans) have traditionally farmed, we've done so for thousands of years. No doubt they were the source of or contributed to prehistoric human disease plagues, but with exceptions it's relatively safe, we have lived in close proximity for long enough so that we've developed immunity to those zoonotic infections and/or the pathogens have evolved to be a mild disease threat.

The global response to C-19 was hapless, and that's not China's fault IMO.

Something far worse than C-19 appearing is pretty much inevitable sooner or later. For an example of a nightmare scenario that hopefully won't:

There's been a cluster of 43 cases of an unknown neurological disease with similar symptoms to CJD, in New Brunswick, Canada. So far it's not been linked to a known prion (ie as responsible for CJD or vCJD etc). There have been cases of CWD in cervids in the area. Unlike BSE, CWD is transmissible by simple animal to animal contact between cervids. All prion diseases are currently without effective treatment and are universally fatal.
Prions can evolve and adapt too

As the news article says, it could be (and probably is) from an environmental toxin. But at this stage nobody knows.

DS248

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#2678621 22-Mar-2021 16:49

Trans-Tasman travel bubble date to be announced on April 6 - over 2 weeks but even announce a date

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300258584/live-pm-will-announce-commencement-date-for-transtasman-travel-bubble-on-april-6

Dingbatt

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#2678623 22-Mar-2021 16:52

So setting a date to set a date........

No decision is always the easiest decision to make.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. Carl Sagan 1996

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