Quote from Wyttenbach

1) Here we have no deaths with age <40 years.

2) Only people that had no strong cross immunity develop enough antibodies to be seen in the standard test.

3) Do also not worry about news that tell antibodies do decline over time. This only indicates you have a good T-Cell immune response that will curb the production up again.

But one thing is clear. Antibodies act immediately and protect you with a high degree from all symptoms. T-cell need some time and after a high does might be a bit to slow.

4) This is exactly what we see here in central Europe. We overall are close to herd immunity but not due to antibodies. So we have heavily fluctuating infection numbers as e.g. 10 super spreaders are enough to raise the numbers by 50..100%. Or in France where groups drink together 500..1000%!

And as I already said about a month ago. Now dozens of expert believe that masks may help to produce immunity due to low aerosol doses.

Last: Do not believe any expert as in fact there are none: It's all (-most all) new knowledge and you have to gather enough information yourself. E.g. I just read - German doctors heavily prescribe HCQ!

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I've labelled the Wyttenfacts 1) - 4).

A Wyttenfact is not always untrue - it is just pure speculation, or exaggeration, and therefore likely false.

1) Switzerland 6 deaths under 40 out of about 1800. Germany 37 out of approx 15,000 (sorry total figures approx).

Covid death is very age-related. But hits everyone.

2) No evidence at all for this that I have seen, but I'd be interested in what this is based on: links to papers please, not Wyttenfactoids. FWIW I would expect some level of cross immunity to exist, and that cross-immunity will confer some protection against infection enough to generate antibodies. Not 100% as Wyttenfact says.

3) There is no evidence that old people are protected 100%, or even 50% from COVID by having cross-immunity. We just don't know, All we do know is that cross-immunity prevalence will not be 1000X more for young than old, yet that is the death ratio, so clearly other factors matter.

4) No evidence here about close to herd immunity, not even more close than France. You need to start off with seropositive rates - which will correlate with overall exposure. No evidence that lack of superspreader events comes from greater immunity rather than better (Swiss) behaviour. Evidence please, not Wyttenfactoids.

Sorry I remain vague about whether a Wytenfactual assertion about "here" means Switzerland or Germany. Facts here for Switzerland:

https://www.medrxiv.org/conten…101/2020.09.18.20191254v1

Seropositivity in school children 2.8%

estimated 10% overall.

https://www.acc.org/latest-in-…roprevalence-of-anti-sars

Children are more likely not to seroconvert (but not more likely to have cross-immunity).

It is possible that 10% seroprevalence equates in Switzerland to enough herd immunity to reduce transmission. We don't know, the detailed data makes this look unlikely:

https://ncs-tf.ch/en/situation-report

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/c…mune-to-covid-19/45768452

10% seropositive

THH

Quote from Fm1

The evidence just keeps mounting that vitamn D is the key to turning this around yet no alerts. Fucci admitting in a interview he himself takes it to protect imune system function but no word to the world. This is becoming criminal

https://www.webmd.com/lung/new…her-odds-for-severe-covid

Fauci is saying that it is a good idea not to be deficient in Vit D because deficiency is bad for the immune system, and that he takes supplements (as is recommended for most people). And he has said this (and that he himself takes supplemets) on the record.

He is not saying specifically that it protects against COVID - though obviously you would want to make sure you were not Vit D deficient to give yourself the best chances, and that is a very common situation in most Western countries.

The above study does not prove Vitamin D helps and is in line with other studies that show associations. However in some cases (the VITAL RCT) most of those other associations have been shown to be non-causal - at least to the limits of the VITAL data so far.

Does not mean Vitamin D is a bad idea, just does not show it is obviously a good idea. It may be a good idea, we have one small RCT that delivers interesting positive evidence.

The study couldn't prove cause and effect. But patients who were vitamin D-sufficient -- a blood level of at least 30 nanograms per milliliter -- had a significantly lower risk for serious complications from COVID-19, including losing consciousness, low blood oxygen levels and death.

Among patients older than 40, those who were vitamin D-sufficient were also 51.5% less likely to die from COVID-19 compared to those who were vitamin D-deficient or insufficient, the team said.

The study was published Sept. 25 in the journal PLOS ONE.

For the UK, that first peak supposedly only recorded 7-10% of the true number of ill people.

Better testing now means that comparison with recent figures doesn't make much sense:

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3605

I think the real scale of the problem is shown by the lower graph.

Quote from THHuxleynew

A Wyttenfact is not always untrue - it is just pure speculation, or exaggeration, and therefore likely false.

That's why I call you a dilettante as most real medical doctors are also. Most of them have stopped learning after the last exam and have college level logic base.

Fact is: With no herd immunity the infections should rise exponentially. This is nowhere in the western the case anymore curves are oscillating. It was only true for a certain restricted range of deficient people. For this you have to dig a bit deeper in the curves.

Fact is: With no immunity the death rate should stay the same. True is, we see a large change/decrease of 15..50x in death rate/ mortality. So please learn to understand why this happens.

Switzerland reported some deaths at age below 40. Most famous one was age 89 wrongly decoded as 9 - handwritten reports !! ! The other a child brought to Switzerland. May be you can tells us about the other two. Could be others count a chemo patient age 39 as CoV-19 death too. But false positive tests are high here 5..10%! See latest case French Open Spanish player 2x positive may be 6x negative...

Last seven days we, whole Switzerland, had a decline (7%) in cases not expected without herd immunity. https://www.srf.ch/ Half of Switzerland is not wearing masks in shops anyway not in restaurants. Masks have no (measurable!) impact on infections if herd immunity is close.

I do not make my living as a spin doctor so I cannot afford the time to link just for you all relevant papers as may be these anyway will turnout to be wrong or need corrections again.

The only thing I can recommend for all western countries: Wearing mask stops idiots from spreading and converts them to immunization helpers...

Do not stop public events with people wearing masks!

Use the known prevention: V-D, Zinc, for more exposed ones quercetin . Drink (about 0.5l) bitter orange juice after a restaurant/gym etc. visit that lasted longer than 30 minutes. ASAP Leave any indoor place with people that cough 2..3x seriously e.g. three cough in a row with a high sharp pitch at the end.

Lock downs makes absolute no sense and only delay/prevent people from acquiring immunity.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'm still willing to consider the "lock up the oldies" solution, as one preferable to the great economic damage of not doing so. As long as its full cost is taken into account. Just as we should take into account the costs of locking up the economy we should also take into account the costs of letting the virus run free and trying to lock up those most at risk to reduce the death toll.

I am one of the Oldies. Perhaps if they funded oldies as an incentive to stay "locked up" - Say Social Security / pensions increases so "we" would not have to work and be out in society to survive. I think that Trump may give some $200 to supplement Medicaid meds. Perhaps some tax incentives to groceries that deliver cost reductions to seniors. …. something like that which would help "us" stay home. Just thinking out loud.

Quote from Zeus46

Better testing now means that comparison with recent figures doesn't make much sense:

This is exactly what happened here too 2..5x testing did deliver a boost 2-4x to growth in cases. But the only thing that counts are deaths/day "icu cases"/day.

Here in Zürich region no large change in average over months just fluctuations. In fact the death/ICU numbers are to low make statistics!

One care home can turn everything upside down for 2-3 weeks as happened about 4 weeks ago. See case peek at 7 September.

https://github.com/openZH/covi…ahlen_Kanton_ZH_total.csv

You have to look at the development of the positive/total testcases curve and best do multiply the curve by the percentage for comparing them. Currently some doctors do cash in money by testing people with almost no symptoms. 4 months ago they didn't test you even with strong symptoms...

So even UK is absolute no problem as their death rate is currently 30x lower that at the peek of the "first wave".

Living in Cornwall we have a high background level of UV which is probably preventing spread of the virus between people in the outdoors. However we still have a large number of visitors from all over the UK and well-off foreigners arriving in weekly droves, which the locals here actually tried to disrupt by blocking roads with manure heaps etc, arranged by the Cornish Nationalists 'An Goth'. Microbiologists have been sampling the seawater around the coastline and beaches, which you would think are probably the cleanest around the UK shores. Not so, unfortunately. Because of the continual overuse of antibiotics, oestrogen like wastes etc not being extracted in the sewage plants all this crap is ending up in the sea, and the samples show a dramatic rise in antibiotic resistant strains of E.coli, Streptococci etc etc. - leading to the years long campaign by the SAS (Surfers Against Sewage) to remedy this situation. OK if this is true for the evolution of antibiotic strains of bacteria, what about viruses? What about a possible spread into the sea, and consequently between surfers and holiday-makers on the beaches? Could COVID be spreading to marine mammals as well as between humans in the seas? There have been inexplicable mass strandings of pods of pilot whales reported, seals washed up dead for no apparent reason, its all adding up to a pretty grim picture in addition to all the plastic wastes being continuously dumped at sea. The same applies to all our rivers lakes and reservoirs, to all our food production etc etc. Not surprising that every time I have gone surfing over the last ten years, we always developed a slight fever and earache (Surfer's Ear) after the first few sessions, especially after high rainfall washed raw sewage into the sea. The Med, with no tides must be like a cess pit by now!

Quote from Zeus46

I think the real scale of the problem is shown by the lower graph.

FAKE NEWS ALERT

The top graph is CASES not INFECTIONS. The label on the top one is actually a blatant lie - not sure from whom?

Why is that such a big difference?

At start of epidemic (first peak) UK was testing 2000/day

Now UK is testing 200,000 / day

See the difference? CASE = positive test and can be nearly the same as infections, if you catch most of them, or much much less if you tell people to stray at home and get over it. The real infection rate during the peak was much much higher.

In additions the CASE age profile was lots of old people at start, and in the last month has been lots of children and uni students. However just in the last week or two

the CASE age distribution is going up. That will feed into more deaths soon, alas.

You need to compare infections two weeks ago with deaths now, so if the INFECTION graph were real it would still be only at 1000 not 7000.

So, three large factors make the intuitive comparison all wrong. And they are all in the same direction:

• Cases now mean many fewer infections
• You must compare deaths now with infections 2 weeks ago or so
• Those infections (2 weeks ago) were much more skewed towards children and young people

Anyone who draws inferences from these graphs without that context is going to be very far from reality.

Anyone who wants to persist in arguing this please first re-evaluate what those picture mean correcting the wrong caption and processing the three things above.

Anyone (I'm looking at you Shane) who ticked that post note this one!

Quote from Wyttenbach

WyttenFact is: With no herd immunity the infections should rise exponentially.

Only if you are a somone who has not kept up with the epidemiological literature, in particular (and I've linked it on the previous page in a reply to Mark U, as well as a few weeks ago)

A network-based explanation of why most COVID-19 infection curves are linear

NB this is summary page which does however properly reference the peer-reviewed and published paper:

Thurner, S., et al. (2020) A network-based explanation of why most COVID-19 infection curves are linear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2010398117.)

This is a high quality paper in a high quality Journal impact factor 9.4. It certainly impacted me, and changed (slightly) my ideas about the reasons for the linear increase.

I don't credit for finding this paper. Somone else here posted it, and I thanked them at the time. One of the reasons I like this thread

Quote from Mark U

The poor coronavirus, even after apparently sweeping through a city like New York, has only got ten percent of the population to make antibodies.

That is incorrect. The percent of population in hard-hit parts of New York are higher than that. ~9% is for the entire U.S. population.

The reports I cited made this clear. I suggest you read them more carefully before commenting.

The cover-up continues!

https://www.ajc.com/education/…VEFPYMIJAMDO4TRMVPR2SWUE/

Georgia withholds school COVID-19 counts from public

Georgia health officials have decided to withhold information about coronavirus infections at each school, saying the public has no legal right to information about outbreaks that the state is investigating.

The Georgia Department of Public Health started requiring weekly reports from the schools last month and initially said it might share the information with the public. The decision not to reveal the number of COVID-19 case counts and related quarantines and “clusters” means the only recourse for parents and teachers trying to gauge the risk is the willingness of their local school system to publicize its own data. . . .

Quote from THHuxleynew

A network-based explanation of why most COVID-19 infection curves are linear

NB this is summary page which does however properly reference the peer-reviewed and published paper:

I know it. As I said above: Most medical doctors are weak in logic and that's why we must suffer in such a stress moment.

The cluster model is now more than 3 months old - first proposed by Germans.

What this model explain is just the shape of a curve. It does not explain why the other 99% don't get/spread it. So this model has no epidemiological value as it only explains 1% of the spreaders and not the other 99%.

Quote from JedRothwell

Unfortunately, good care is not reaching many patients in the U.S., because of the inequality and inefficiency of our health care system.

UK : (June 24) Declining death rate from COVID-19 in hospitals in England
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/…-in-hospitals-in-england/

The figure shows that the number of people with COVID-19 in hospital has fallen at a slower rate than the number of people dying.

• The number of people in hospital with COVID is reducing by 2.4% every day: halving every 29 days.
• The number of deaths is reducing by 4.3% per day: halving every 16 days.

On the 2nd April, there were 644 deaths in 10,737 people in the hospital with COVID-19 HFR (Hospital Fatality Ratio) peaked at 6.0%.

By the 15th of June, there were 50 deaths and 3,270 people in hospital with COVID: an HFR of 1.5%.

.... various reasons considered ...

The reasons for the declining death rate in hospitals may be a combination of one or all of these factors or due to some other reason, we have not considered. In either case, further research is warranted to understand why the hospital death rate has declined so markedly over the past 8 weeks.

EDIT: Good source of UK data Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service
https://www.cebm.net/oxford-covid-19-evidence-service/
(That's the latest HFR report .. they have more CFR's)

US : (Harder to pick out specific numbers -- I don't see an HFR but ...)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru…data/covidview/index.html

Quote from Shane D.

We know the reason they are doing it though, and that is they do not want to panic the parents, and students, over something they need not worry about.

If they really think there is nothing to worry about, they are guilty of negligent homicide. Thousands of people will die after being be infected by children. Hundreds of children will suffer from serious permanent damage such as heart disease and strokes. The schools at present are more or less without masks. If people in Georgia do not start wearing more masks, 3,400 more people are likely to die before the end of the year.

https://covid19.healthdata.org…ew=total-deaths&tab=trend

I do not think that is the reason. The school superintendents and the governor repeatedly assured the public that the schools are safe, with proper social distancing, masks and ventilation. Some of the students themselves posted cell-phone photos showing that wasn't true. The schools responded by expelling the students, and lying to the public. The schools then said there are virtually no infections. A few weeks later, dozens of infections were reported by the parents. The government then said it cannot comment or give the numbers because of privacy concerns.

Does that sound like they are trying to avoid panic? I would say they are trying to avoid being held responsible for lying to the public and covering up the problem. If they wanted to avoid panic, they would publish the real numbers, because rumors of very large numbers are going around, and many parents are holding their children back from the schools.

Quote from Shane D.

Those (facts) being that children and young students have almost no risk from the virus,

That is an outrageous thing to say! They are as likely to be infected as anyone. Perhap you mean they are less likely to suffer severe illness or die, but that does not mean there is no risk. There is far greater risk to them than from seasonal influenza. They are much more likely to end up with life-long disabilities.

FURTHERMORE, as I have said repeatedly, there is a larger risk that the children will infect adults at home, or teachers in the school.

we have had the schools open all the time in Sweden and the teachers were better of then other work groups