BOSCH, ROCHE and UNITY?
It’s the 5th May. ALL the talk is about “Lifting Lockdown”. Will schools go back? Hairdressers? (Oooh I hope so). Transport ramping up again? How many tests are we doing? What’s the rest of the world doing? Have we found a cure/vaccine/treatment? ARE WE ALL UNITED? Why aren’t we fighting all this together, as a planet?
That’s a big one, and worth a thought or two. What’s first up?
Italy: Packed Again after Lockdown Lifted
WELL. LOCKDOWNS.
“Journalists” like Toby Young in today’s Sun “Newspaper” says END the lockdown, and stop children losing their childhood.
Spain and Italy (and France to a lesser extent) after having imposed much more severe (and much earlier imposed) lockdowns than the UK have started to allow some shops to open, and for people to go out for walks after being trapped indoors for 8 weeks. Their Death and Infection rates are finally reducing.
The Far East has already started to return to some kind of normal while testing and Contact Tracing have been operating at much greater levels than here. Many States in the USA are keen to go their own way and just open up, help save the economy and to hell with the consequences.
Who will have got this right will be reported by historians in the years to come. Seems to me that it’s softly softly with everything presently, and no rash decisions should be made if gains are to be respected. But people with loud voices will get their way in some places no doubt.
TESTING & TREATMENT
In the UK, almost bottom of the Leading Nation Ladder regarding testing, we apparently reached 122,000 per day (which suddenly included posted out tests, many of which people had to throw away as there were no instructions or return labels). This test, being versions of the swab virus test, is the only one that’s been available in the UK. The number dropped to 75,000 the following day. Many of the postal tests of course haven’t even arrived back at the labs to analyse. The UK is still way behind everyone else in this matter, although there’s a mass of research groups all hard at it in the Antibody Test evaluation, and Vaccine Research areas.
In the US, the FDA (which approves the use of new drugs and treatments) has given the thumbs up to the Roche Antibody Test. YOU READ IT HERE FIRST weeks ago!!! They will be producing over 100 million test kits to detect who has had the virus, developed antibodies, and presumably has immunity against further infection. This final issue is however still hugely uncertain, subject to further investigation. But the Roche test (which may arrive here in a couple of months) is said to be very close to be 100% accurate. the tests that have been and are being evaluated in labs in Oxford are said to have 75-85% accuracy (and could and should have been used as a guide and for general trend in the UK over the last few months; they were good enough for many countries, but clearly not us. Today’s death figure is 29,000 plus. Sad.
HOWEVER, in Utrecht, Holland, University and HBM (a BioMed company) researches have found and isolated a “fully human antibody” that prevents the virus infecting people. Sort of. Therefore, this may well be a very major advance, as announced by Doctor Bosch, and the basis for future treatment for infected and uninfected people. While tests on the more traditional types of vaccine have reached trials (up to 20 human trials happening currently), this discovery could be the big one.
While President Trump was trumpeting disinfectant as a solution, there has been more interest and even promise, in the use of anti-viral drug remdesivir in treatments, while an earlier er trumpeted drug hydroxychloroquine has been found to have no positive effects and even a few negative ones in tests in the States.
FINALLY China and Japan are sending out an anti-flu drug Favipiravir (FujiFilm brand name Avigan), to 43 countries for clinical trials with moderately infected patients, and Japan is almost certain to approve both Remdesivir and Favipiravir as treatments for Covid-19 in the next two weeks.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/testing/serology-overview.html
THOUGHTS
I’m not like some who think that it’s all a conspiracy and that life should get back to normal, because we’re all being Manipulated By The System.
The not so unexpected HAS happened. A virus more potent than flu wasn’t caught and isolated quickly enough, as SARS and MERS were. Bill Gates amongst many others said in 2016 that we should all be prepared. It seems certain now that The USA and UK were not prepared sufficiently and that is resulting in the World’s Highest Infection rates and death tolls in these two countries. Leadership arrogance and incompetence are partly to blame IMO. Trump is obsessed by egotism and re-election, while Boris’ “Puppet Government” (see New York Times article link below) has clearly been obsessed with Brexit, and nothing else.
I think this is sickening. I’d still like some life and have plenty of living to do, and although there is a high trust level in the UK and US leaderships at present (there nearly always is during a crisis), I read with absolute alarm how people have been writing about our disastrous handling of all things Covid. Far Eastern newspapers in China, Hong Kong, Australia plus articles today in India and the aforementioned NYT American piece all seem to assess the UK’s response as lamentable, especially considering the events occurring in Italy and Spain, and the early response from Germany.
INCIDENTALLY, the more I read about the road taken by the US to reach its currently 200,000 tests/day (they are said to require 500,000 minimum and “35 million/day would put us in a much better situation”, then the more I feel that the US and the UK have been similarly arrogant and incompetent.
Our Government on a daily basis churns out the same story of stay in, stay safe, social distancing, hearts go out to the families, our wonderful NHS, Led By Science etc etc…
EVERYONE in the know from the WHO to almost ALL of Europe, all the advisors in the States and all the experts in the Far East said Test Test Test. When you look at testing regimes in the poorest parts of South Africa, it makes how rich UK and USA have failed seem a 21st Century disgrace.
The NHS was ill-equipped. The absence of any kind of believable strategy has resulted in huge hospitals being built and remain unoccupied while vast numbers of Care Home patients have remained untested and left to die alone and unvisited by their families. (Public Health England had to radically change approach after 3 weeks of Italy being overwhelmed, and only investigative journalism by Newspapers and Channel 4 and BBC programmes has forced the release of more and more documents revealing inadequacy and almost non responsiveness of Government to the 300 companies who offered to divert PPE and Ventilator sales and production from Overseas to the UK. Madness. Incompetence.
We applaud the NHS once a week while doctors nurses and cleaners are dying due to lack of equipment. Scandalous. We seem to have someone called Sir Patrick Vallance leading the Scientific Advisory Committee who just minutes ago after being asked by Jeremy Hunt (yes him) about the models used to form our response to the virus said ”I can’t remember when we changed our modelling approach”. That’s encouraging.
How quickly the testing regimes, equipment supply and lockdown lifting strategies improve the UK’s ability to cope with this emergency will determine what state the spirit, economy and life of the country will be in over the recovering months and years, while the People will know who was right or wrong.
UNITY? As an old hippy who can never understand why people prefer to do things apart rather than together, well, being away from friends and family is surely much worse than mucking in together.
Especially…when you’re making a hash of it.
Comments below if anyone so desires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/boris-johnson-coronavirus-uk.html