Coronavirus Page 29

Quote: A Horseradish @ 7th April 2020, 9:37 PM

And it's a great way to get off swimming.

Is this the same BCG that was compulsory in school in 1975 and which left many of us merely watching chlorine for three months while picking at the scab of our allergic rashes?

And if so, is it now safe for me/us to go out and play?

All this staying out of the public gene pool by staying in to watch paint dry has made me deeply ambitious.

I want to break the record for the person who has dived in to life save the greatest number of pyjamas.

FACT CHECK

In the UK, all schoolchildren between 10 and 14 were injected with the vaccine between 1953 and 2005. Boris Johnson was aged between 10 and 14 in the years 1974 to 1979. He currently lives at St Thomas'S Hospital - in intensive care.

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Correction - not ALL school children. What they did was give you what was commonly known as the skin test - a wee scratch on the arm. It either swelled or it didn't and this was checked a few days later. Can't remember which way round, but one set of kids then got the BCG vaccination and the rest only got a chest x-ray because they'd obviously been in touch with TB and had developed an immunity. I remember being taken with a busload of classmates to a place in Glasgow for an x-ray. When I was quite young, I spent a lot of time with a young aunt who died of TB when she was just 28, hence my immunity - luckily I'd never actually caught it

A few additional points:

Obviously I would like to think there was something in it.

A glance at the stories suggests some of the research comes from Ireland which is boasting it started compulsory BCG vaccinations 16 years earlier than the UK as well as that it owns Galway. That of itself doesn't rule the findings out.

They point to the old East Germany being less Covided than the old West Germany on account of the Soviets injecting anything that moved but it is more likely to be that the West is simply a more attractive proposition to travellers.

They are also saying how much better Portugal is than Spain but that could be anything. Maybe it is because its navy works to a different time zone or that it has no real football fans or there is a vaccine in tons of free methadone?

I guess it isn't quite so simple to say that because Boris at 55 has got it, the theory is rubbish because he went to Eton so maybe they were playing the Wall Game when the nurse came round. They would have been used to seeing nurses.

But I went on a council pass to an Independent School and we all had to have it so the normal end of the private sector wasn't excluded. 'Course it was only us plebs who got the rash as we weren't natural supermen from a parental castle.

Finally for now, I accept that it isn't all about susceptibility to getting it. It could also be about the numbers passing it on. Non BCG ers could be super spreaders. If so,they will in the UK be aged late 70s plus and under 30. That is convenient.

Because if test kits remain rare, the elderly when ill will be tested anyway and the under 30s are the first group they want back in standard routines. So the BCG idea provides an excuse to test those ahead of the 30s/40s/50s/60s/early 70s.

Ooh.....Briosaid has written some detailed comments on my post.

I will now investigate them with my microscope.

Sorry about the multi posts - it seemed as if tgey weren't posting. Think I've sorted it.

Quote: Briosaid @ 7th April 2020, 10:20 PM

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Correction - not ALL school children. What they did was give you what was commonly known as the skin test - a wee scratch on the arm. It either swelled or it didn't and this was checked a few days later. Can't remember which way round, but one set of kids then got the BCG vaccination and the rest only got a chest x-ray because they'd obviously been in touch with TB and had developed an immunity. I remember being taken with a busload of classmates to a place in Glasgow for an x-ray. When I was quite young, I spent a lot of time with a young aunt who died of TB when she was just 28, hence my immunity - luckily I'd never actually caught it

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Erm, I'm not sure then.

I don't think I had a chest x-ray. I've had them since. Two last year. No one mentioned TB in those to me. I do remember a lot of swellings at that time, though - and one was definitely on my arm. Surely several of us wouldn't have been sitting on benches not allowed into the pool if it had just been a wee scratch, could it? I was a bit wet but not that wet. Or maybe I was. I do have a list of my vaccinations which says BCG but my mother wrote it so it was her interpretation, not medics'. And delightfully the NHS lost all of my notes when I was 22 when they were supposed to be transferred back from my college to home. So if they want documents to let us out of our house, I don't have any proof through no fault of my own.

Advances in liquid breathing are needed to have any chance of fighting these pandemics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing

The worlds billionaires and governments need to plough some serious bananas in to this research for treatment of mankind threatening viruses. I can understand it's probably slow progress because of the dangers in experimentation of this kind but the theory has been proved so it just needs more egg heads in a room to work out how to make it safe and a viable choice in a clinical scenario.

I don't know how it would work but if filling the lungs with liquid medication maybe it could attack and neutralise mucus formed by the chest infection for as long as it lasts and then drain the lungs of the liquid so the patient can return to non assisted breathing.

My son lives in Seattle (initial epicenter in the U.S.) and hasn't been out of his apartment in weeks, but yesterday he developed a fever and a bad cough. He's blaming a sushi delivery as the transmission vector.

Stay healthy, everyone!

Quote: DaButt @ 7th April 2020, 10:58 PM

My son lives in Seattle (initial epicenter in the U.S.) and hasn't been out of his apartment in weeks, but yesterday he developed a fever and a bad cough. He's blaming a sushi delivery as the transmission vector.

Stay healthy, everyone!

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Sorry to hear that. Again that's raw food. Hopefully it is to do with that food and nothing more serious. I reckon that is it.

But I wonder if he is an anxious type? From one of the articles about BCG is this rather staggering bit of information. Quote: "COVID-19 mortality per one million for low-middle-income, upper-middle-income and high-income countries were 0.4, 0.65 and 5.5, respectively. Researchers call the fact the wealthier nations have a higher death rate 'counter-intuitive'".

It then goes on to say that breathing illnesses are never that way round and yet here they are not only "that way round" but the differentials are stark. The newspaper ponders lamely on reasons while noting scientists haven't got a clue. So I'm putting this one forward again. High-income countries have obsessive 24/7 media with all of the details under the sun.

And stress upon existing serious illness caused by that is very unhelpful. When you look at Johnson, he was under massive stress - the decisions on health and the economy and liberty plus the pregnant girlfriend and the baby. Pretty much everything and that is just a few weeks after a gruelling Tory leadership election followed by a Parliamentary one.

A slight correction to my earlier post - Sorry but BCG effectiveness does dip down below the upper 70s as it is only effective for up to 60 years. So that 60 years is 1960. If you had it in 1959 at 10 then, you are 70 or 71. If you had it at 14 then, you are 74 or 75. And note it is an effectiveness of "up to" 60 years so it could be a bit less in some . So that segues back into the over 70 category which was talked about early on as needing especial care. Didn't want to mislead!

Quote: A Horseradish @ 7th April 2020, 10:44 PM

Erm, I'm not sure then.

I don't think I had a chest x-ray. I've had them since. Two last year. No one mentioned TB in those to me. I do remember a lot of swellings at that time, though - and one was definitely on my arm. Surely several of us wouldn't have been sitting on benches not allowed into the pool if it had just been a wee scratch, could it? I was a bit wet but not that wet. Or maybe I was. I do have a list of my vaccinations which says BCG but my mother wrote it so it was her interpretation, not medics'. And delightfully the NHS lost all of my notes when I was 22 when they were supposed to be transferred back from my college to home. So if they want documents to let us out of our house, I don't have any proof through no fault of my own.

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Bear in mind you're a good bit younger than me and things might have changed by yourtime. I think I had the scratch (above the wrist?) Round about 1959.. Could the pool thing have had to do with polio? I think there was a theory that it was passed on via swimming. Ha! The good old days! Maybe not.

Quote: Briosaid @ 7th April 2020, 11:31 PM

Bear in mind you're a good bit younger than me and things might have changed by yourtime. I think I had the scratch (above the wrist?) Round about 1959.. Could the pool thing have had to do with polio? I think there was a theory that it was passed on via swimming. Ha! The good old days! Maybe not.

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I don't know your background but it is clear to me that you have a medical sense. I don't have that at all but had some experience of having to turn my mind to all kinds of policy making under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron. A key part of my job was to know how our lords and masters worked and then to try to understand enough of things I didn't understand. I could do it but I am so glad I wasn't in the Department of Health as I would have been completely clueless.

Yes - it was partly wrist. I think what you say overall rings a faint bell. Possibly a two part process and hoping I didn't need the vaccine, not knowing what the alternative (as it was for you) involved. I could convince myself that happened but I was barely 12 and actually more like 9 in my ways. At 14, it might have been clearer and longer lasting in the memory.

I am guessing that your situation might actually be better for you than those of your age who had the BCG as you have a more direct form of immunity? I hope so. On swimming and polio, I'm not sure it was quite as you say. Polio is on my list and I may have had that younger. But also various things were probably starting to be combined in one shot in a way that they weren't in the late 1950s. However, my instinct says to me that combinations were more for those rather younger than me, ie advances were made in the 1980s/1990s so that a lot of these sorts of things could be done in that way.

Ha, memories! I remember my mother having to take me ti the health department in Glasgiw City Chambers fir a polio vaccination. Subsequently Kids got the stuff on sugar lumps.

Quote: Briosaid @ 7th April 2020, 11:59 PM

Ha, memories! I remember my mother having to take me ti the health department in Glasgiw City Chambers fir a polio vaccination. Subsequently Kids got the stuff on sugar lumps.

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Oh - yes, yes, sugar lumps. I remember those now. It was done in that way. For what it is worth, I have always maintained that I "knew" the 1950s because the music on Radio 1 (from 1967) apart, the 1960s I was in from age 0 to 7 was much the same as the 1950s. No car, no foreign holidays, no Carnaby Street, no central heating, no telephone, no colour television etc. etc. It feels almost as if we have all gone halfway back to there now although computers make a huge difference.

You might like to hear that one of my early achievements was to bite right through a thermometer when having my temperature taken. A biting of it in half. I was walked up to the GP rapidly. Along the way a woman my mother knew asked why she was looking alarmed and advised I should eat cotton wool sandwiches to mop up the mercury. This is no lie. The surgery said I hadn't any poisoning but I doubt it knew. I am proud that this is probably why I am like I am today.

Not John Prine, dammit. Not John Prine.

Heartbroken.

Probably best not to get raw food delivered as Horse said. We're not big on sushi here, but we're big on sandwiches which is mostly raw food. Instead of buying them in there has been a 35000% increase in online searches of how to make a sandwich, which is sensible. I'm no expert at them but after forty years of practice I can make a reasonable cheese and pickle sandwich but I'd struggle with anything exotic like Brie and cranberry sauce. Maybe Pret a Manger can put some videos online.

In the last 24 hours, another 936 people in the UK died after contracting coronavirus.

That brings the running total of UK fatalities to 7095 (at least, given that many may be unrecorded).

I've been steeling myself for the gradual loss of all the big musicians from the 60s and 70s as they become elderly, but imagine how bad it would be to lose Dylan and Townshend and Jagger all in the same week. I hope all those guys are out at sea on their yachts and staying away from this nasty disease.