Excellent article in the New Yorker about covid and how it impacts the immune system:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-coronavirus-hacks-the-immune-system
(I THINK this will work without a subscription)
Peter wrote:
I agree; I would use the “engine corrosion + Lyco SL 30 day max” angle insteadUltimately, who will enforce this anyway?
The Police, who will (not understanding aviation, and the need to run engines, and the need to maintain currency) promptly turn you around. I suspect some police officers will accept it as a valid reason.
During our lockdown here, the Manx CAA provided us with a written letter we could show to the Police saying that running engines etc. was a reasonable excuse. They (quite rightly) pointed out they were not in the business of writing regulations or restrictions around COVID, but they could support our argument that looking after aircraft at a remote airfield was both low risk and a reasonable excuse.
If we get another lockdown (which seems unlikely at the moment, as we have no community cases) then I’ll be sure to dig this note out.
Adrian Hill, who is co-head of the Oxford Vaccine, gave an interesting presentation to members of his college at Oxford the other day. He is quite confident that the vaccine will be given preliminary approval v soon and that vaccinations will start before Christmas for health care workers at least. What I found really interesting was his answer to a question about how they managed to create, test and produce a vaccine in less than a year, when the industry says it takes 10 years normally. The answer is not in the science but in bureaucracy. He told us the delays are getting funding at various stages in the process including lots of grant application writing and in getting sign off from govt regulators of the testing procedures.
In the case of the Oxford Vaccine the whole vaccine team there dropped everything else in mid Jan to focus on Covid, the first funding (several million pounds) came not from the govt, private industry or the University, but from one phone call to a private philanthropist linked to the College (not Bill Gates) who agreed to support the program on the spot. They are now in advanced stage three testing in several countries.
Great story of how rapidly progress can be made when the bureaucrats get out of the way.
The number of Covid-19 patients in my hospital has tripled since my last post on Monday. It is now more than double the previous record number in April…
@MedEwok interesting to see that the fatality rate does not really become significant until you get past median life expectancy.
In the early days of the first wave, the daily deaths in the UK were qualified with the note that all had pre-existing conditions. It was quite a big deal when the first death of an otherwise-healthy non-elderly person was reported. Subsequent commentary, when deaths peaked at around a 1,000 a day for a very short time, neglected to mention that almost all of these deaths were still the very old and the already-very ill. The impression was somehow created that swathes of healthy people were being cut down and that no-one was safe.
I believe the reality remains, on a statistical level, that unless you’re very old (approaching or beyond median life expectancy) or have a serious pre-existing condition then Covid-19 does not represent a serious risk compared to the other risks we run on a daily basis.
@Graham yes that is broadly true, although we should remember that these numbers are only valid as long as all of the infected receive adequate (intensive) medical care. So for under 60s the chance to survive is >99%, but once enough of them get infected to overwhelm hospital capacities, the mortality rate is likely to rise dramatically. About 2% of all infected, even among the under 50s, require intensive care, with between 6 and 9% requiring stationary/in-hospital care.
By definition, if you require intensive care you are in mortal danger, so it is not presumptuous to assume that all-case mortality without adequate care is at least 2%.
@MedEwok, sure, preventing services from being overwhelmed is important. But I wonder whether there are other ways to do this (more beds, cross-training staff?) besides just trying to lower the number of admissions.
Also the problem with any mortality rate is that in calculating it you assume you are aware of all cases. Of course you are not, there are many, many untested and asymptomatic cases, so not all cases (just the ones the system is aware of) go into those figures.
Right now I am more concerned about the long term effects than the straight chance of dying of it.
The chart posted by Medewok above makes the risk of death clear but we are getting very poor data on the other problem.
And there are too many reports of people who were in perfectly good health and who can’t walk anymore, etc. As usual one can’t be sure of media selection there, but… do you feel lucky?
Peter wrote:
And there are too many reports of people who were in perfectly good health and who can’t walk anymore, etc. As usual one can’t be sure of media selection there, but… do you feel lucky?
There are many reports of a lot of things, generally passed around and ninth-hand at the telling (i.e. do you actually know anyone to whom that applies) but the plural of anecdote is not data….
The media selection is of course a factor. The media reports every ‘youngish and healthy’ Covid-19 death because it is a good human-interest story and the way they report them makes it seems like they are common. But they are not – we know this because (a) the data tells us they are not, and (b) they would not be newsworthy if they were ten a penny..
Is there current data on long term effects, from the first wave?
