News Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread III - L6ckdown

[DaveyBoy123]

Local football league rocked as player tests positive to COVID-19

A player from the Newport senior football team has tested positive to coronavirus. The Rumour File this morning heard a club had notified all its senior players that a member of the opposition team they played on Saturday had returned a positive COVID-19 result. The president of the Newport...

www.3aw.com.au

Fun fact #1: Versions of Newport teams (since they keep slightly adjusting their name) have been booted out of the WRFL approximately 4,369 times since the 1980's. Apparently, you need a black-belt in kickboxing to get a game.

Fun Fact #2: Shorten Reserve in West Footscray is built on an old tip. Every year or so, portions of the ground kinda collapse, so it's like you're running up and down mountains at times.


Not so Fun Fact: There may be a couple of slight exaggerations in the above 2 comments.

 

[Hojuman]

Fun fact #1: Versions of Newport teams (since they keep slightly adjusting their name) have been booted out of the WRFL approximately 4,369 times since the 1980's. Apparently, you need a black-belt in kickboxing to get a game.

Fun Fact #2: Shorten Reserve in West Footscray is built on an old tip. Every year or so, portions of the ground kinda collapse, so it's like you're running up and down mountains at times.


Not so Fun Fact: There may be a couple of slight exaggerations in the above 2 comments.

Hope the forward pocket where Hoffa is buried still intact.

 

[giantroo]

COVID-19 latest: Another two local cases as list of exposure sites grows

Another two new local COVID-19 cases have been identified in Victoria. It comes on top of the six new locally-acquired cases recorded yesterday, which were revealed by the Health Department this morning. The two new cases are close family contacts of the Hobsons Bay couple who tested positive...

www.3aw.com.au

 

[giantroo]

HS reporting a 3 day snap lockdown is being considered.

 

[TennisPlayerAndy]

HS reporting a 3 day snap lockdown is being considered.

Two weeks....

 

[Hojuman]

Two weeks....

 

[Billy Not Really]

This is ****ing ridiculous. Its groundhog day here, we're never getting out of this cycle of opening up and locking down.

 

[rooboy_07]

Dictator Dans time to shine

 

[Lomas]

Quick, has anyone seen any AFL teams heading for the airport? They are the canary in the coal mine.

 

[giantroo]

 

[Hojuman]

Quick, has anyone seen any AFL teams heading for the airport? They are the canary in the coal mine.

Trust G.R. above Lome.

 

[7577969923]

Really good open letter in The Australian by 14 leading doctors including Nick Coatsworth who was until recently the Deputy Chief Medical Officer:

NoCookies | The Australian

www.theaustralian.com.au

"Against that background, our strong recommendation to all Australians in an outbreak setting is to get a first dose of AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine as soon as possible, followed by a second dose as soon as possible. This is consistent with the latest Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation advice. Do not wait for the Pfizer vaccine if the AstraZeneca vaccine is available to you.

AstraZeneca is an excellent vaccine that has already saved millions of lives and will save many more. Covid kills, and by the time you or someone you love is infected, hospitalised or in ICU it is too late."

 

[giantroo]

 

[jatz14]

My point is there isn't a study with the intent to prove or disprove something works, that creates bias. Studies just analyse drugs and they let the data dictate if something works or it doesn't work.



wtf are you talking about?



The professor who developed the protocol is an Australian professor who also developed protocols that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and saved billions of dollars worldwide. I think he is better at his job than a keyboard warrior on a football forum.

There is plenty of evidence and it has been the basis for numerous countries using the drug to help fight covid.

As an example... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8248252/ This is a meta analysis of 15 trials.

"This result was confirmed in a trial sequential analysis using the same DerSimonian–Laird method that underpinned the unadjusted analysis. This was also robust against a trial sequential analysis using the Biggerstaff–Tweedie method."

Low-certainty evidence found that ivermectin prophylaxis reduced COVID-19 infection by an average 86% (95% confidence interval 79%–91%).

Secondary outcomes provided less certain evidence. Low-certainty evidence suggested that there may be no benefit with ivermectin for “need for mechanical ventilation,” whereas effect estimates for “improvement” and “deterioration” clearly favored ivermectin use. Severe adverse events were rare among treatment trials and evidence of no difference was assessed as low certainty. Evidence on other secondary outcomes was very low certainty.

Conclusions:

Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."

The secondary outcomes refers to giving it to patients who are already f’ed up. As a prophylactic a number of studies have suggested it is as effective as vaccines whilst the drug has a long known history and is approved for human use unlike all of our vaccines, that only have emergency use. That meta study was published late June.

I am not sure if large, more sophisticated studies would produce similar results, I just find it odd that this wasn't pushed by Trump so the Orange-Man-Bad mob have no reason to have a rod up their arse about it. Given we have had no treatment for it and it's potential was raised before we had an outbreak of covid here, I just find it perplexing why the entire world and medical community wouldn't aggressively test it if it could have helped to prevent the loss of life.

It just seems bizarre to me. If this thing is a dud root, we should have had a mountain of global tests showing that after testing it thoroughly it didn't work. We had NO treatment or prophylactic for covid and the only thing that might have been useful to help save lives and nobody of any note has performed trials in two years? Yay or Nay, we should have had mountains of irrefutable evidence before June last year.

And if these studies are backed up, Ivermectin will be rolled out. There is no anti Ivermectin conspiracy.

And what I am talking about? The studies we are discussing, the proof that is required, is proof on actual patients. Real world data on real people.

When you study a drug to assess it, without presupposing it works, or doesn't, you are talking about early trials. Petri dishes, cell cultures, animal trials.

If you have not established a base line that says the drug is a/ safe for use (not the same as harmless), and b/ of benefit, it stops there. You do not stick experimental drugs in people to just see what happens and assess the results, to eliminate bias.

You eliminate bias by doing double blind trials. Thats why we have double blind trials, so preconceptions of a drug based on preliminary work do not influence the outcome. But there absolutely needs to be a firmly established believe that the drug works before those trials commence. Hence the cancer drug analogy, which I thought obvious. If you have patients with cancers that will kill them, and there is an established moderately successful treatment form them, you absolutely do not give them an experimental drug instead, 'to see what happens in an unbiased fashion'. You are assessing that drug against that moderately successful treatment. The basis on which the trial proceeds is the expectation on data so far, that it is better, or you dont do the trial. No ethics committee in the world is letting you give their patients a drug where that isn't the basis.

Ivermectin is an established drug, so that makes it easier to establish safety. They are basically testing off label. It can also be given with current treatment, rather than instead of current treatment, which makes it easier to do, but harder to assess the outcomes.

Ivermectin has been advocated for from the start, when the data for it was basically a few anecdotes, and a really dodgy study. No one in their right mind is recommending a treatment based on that.

Given that people have been strenuously advocating Ivermectin for ages, most of the time based on jack shit. Makes me distrust their opinion now. They seem over invested. Exactly the sort of thing double blind is designed to avoid.

A meta study of 15 not very big or good studies is something. But there are also studies that showed nothing. Why are people so ready to believe positive studies and so easily dismissive of negative?

 

[giantroo]

 

[B4Bear]

But let’s review the NSW information.

It’s been the worse day so far, with 262 new cases recorded in the community and five deaths.

110 of those cases were in isolation for their whole infectious period.

43 were in the community for their whole infectious period.

29 were in isolation for part of their infectious period and 80 cases are still under investigation.

Australia live news update: 262 NSW Covid cases, five deaths and Hunter lockdown; Qld records 16 cases, Victoria six | Australia news | The Guardian


Active cases *
increasing
decreasing

NSW	3482	QLD	100	WA	10
VIC	99	NT	7	SA	21
TAS	0	ACT	0

Vaccinations
16.1% fully vaccinated
17.7% only one dose
37/38 ranked in OECD

 

[Swallow_Wood]

Lockdown here we come...

Thanks Gladys.

 

[TennisPlayerAndy]

Lockdown here we come...

Thanks Gladys.

Two weeks...

 

[B4Bear]

Dictator Dans time to shine

Rather Dictator Dan than Gulag Gladys.

 

[rooboy_07]

Rather Dictator Dan than Gulag Gladys.

All tongue in cheek mate.

 

[Swallow_Wood]

Two weeks...

 

[Lomas]

Well, we can give up on live crowds before the finals.

 

[Hojuman]

Well, we can give up on live crowds before the finals.

Still hoping we can get the Storm v whoever G.F. here.

 

[Ligma]

I’m not even joking every freaking time my team tries to play Research we go into lockdown it’s happened, every single bloody time.

And this time the case numbers go up :/

 

[krakouers]

WA FIFO ‘probably positive’ while in the community

Premier Mark McGowan has revealed a WA FIFO worker is suspected of being COVID-positive while in the community, although he has held off plunging the State into another lockdown.

thewest.com.au

“Mark McGowan has revealed a FIFO worker has “probably or possibly” been COVID positive in the community in recent weeks.

However, the Premier did not announce that Perth would be plunged into its fourth lockdown of the year.

Mr McGowan said the FIFO worker, a maintenance contractor in his 30s from Fortescue’s Cloudbreak mine site, had returned a “very, very weak” positive test result.

“The suspicion is that he may well have been positive at some point in the community,” Mr McGowan said.
“We don’t know if he’s infectious because, to further complicated matters, this person had been COVID positive back in March and April of last year.””

No new COVID cases amid WA testing blitz

Premier Mark McGowan has confirmed no new cases of COVID-19 have been recorded overnight amid a testing blitz sparked by a FIFO worker who returned a weak positive.

thewest.com.au

“Premier Mark McGowan has confirmed no new cases of COVID-19 have been recorded overnight, beyond that of a Greenwood FIFO worker who returned a weak positive.

All of the man’s close contacts who have been tested have so far tested negative, including his girlfriend.

More than 7000 people were tested for COVID-19 yesterday.”