Coronavirus good news thread

I'd love them to come up with a test that doesn't involve sticking a rod up your nose, I can live with it but doing those tests on children is awful.
Well, there are some tests being developed that simply use saliva, such as this one:

Israel starts pilot program for fast, swab-less PCR tests

The Health Ministry on Thursday announced a pilot program to perform COVID-19 PCR tests using saliva samples rather than nasal swabs, aiming to find a less uncomfortable method to check for the coronavirus.
 
Slowly getting there, in terms of drug options.

‘Anti-inflammatory treatment baricitinib, which is normally used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, reduces the risk of death in patients admitted to hospital with severe covid-19 by around one fifth, the Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 Therapy (Recovery) trial has reported.1

What is particularly good about this news - (in bold)

‘Researchers leading the trial from the University of Oxford said that the benefit of baricitinib was on top of those seen for dexamethasone2 and tocilizumab,3 the two other anti-inflammatory treatments that the trial previously found to reduce the risk of death in these patients.’

👍👍👍


 
We’ll it’s 2 years to the date I ended up in the Egyptian health care system for 37 days.

Reading the first few pages of this thread again is a bit weird. HCQ hopes, Djokovic gets a mention, Sikora was a beacon of hope……
 

Moderna’s new Covid vaccine is five times better than the original​

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/me...sedgntp&cvid=4558d70cd73b49f39a31b8154d0663c9
I take it that's 5x the antibodies compared to a first dose of the original MRNA vaccines (Pfizer/ Moderna etc)?

With each booster the protection gets higher and lasts longer anyway, so this might not make much of a difference to those already vaccinated.

Most have had Covid now too, and had multiple exposures to have a more rounded protection profile with T cells etc.

It's still a great development mind, as when Covid first came out most were not expecting the first vaccines to be out until around now, so to get a few which were exceptionally good (like 95% protection), inside 6 months, and then improve that to 99% protection (or whatever it is) in two years is exceptional. The learning from this will cut down on these timings for the next event too.

The main problem they have now, is to try and come up with something to reduce the transmissibility (for this and future problems), as this new vaccine might not have significant reduction in people spreading it, before the protection kicks in, and that's been the biggest problem since Delta, when the R0 skyrocketed, and skyrocketed again for Omicron.

All of the above is hypothetical mind, as the Covid problem seems to have already been solved/ ran it's course. There's a BA5 wave coming, but nothing like previous waves and then that might be the end of it.
 
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I take it that's 5x the antibodies compared to a first dose of the original MRNA vaccines (Pfizer/ Moderna etc)?

With each booster the protection gets higher and lasts longer anyway, so this might not make much of a difference to those already vaccinated.

Most have had Covid now too, and had multiple exposures to have a more rounded protection profile with T cells etc.

It's still a great development mind, as when Covid first came out most were not expecting the first vaccines to be out until around now, so to get a few which were exceptionally good (like 95% protection), inside 6 months, and then improve that to 99% protection (or whatever it is) in two years is exceptional. The learning from this will cut down on these timings for the next event too.

The main problem they have now, is to try and come up with something to reduce the transmissibility (for this and future problems), as this new vaccine might not have significant reduction in people spreading it, before the protection kicks in, and that's been the biggest problem since Delta, when the R0 skyrocketed, and skyrocketed again for Omicron.

All of the above is hypothetical mind, as the Covid problem seems to have already been solved/ ran it's course. There's a BA5 wave coming, but nothing like previous waves and then that might be the end of it.

According to that article, from the bit I can access, it’s 5x the antibody count of the booster shot. If the article is accurate, that’s impressive👍
 
According to that article, from the bit I can access, it’s 5x the antibody count of the booster shot. If the article is accurate, that’s impressive👍
Yeah, that's good, I must have missed that bit.

But the booster is already ~98% protection, so a 5x improvement is probably upping that to ~99.5%, although the antibody level of the booster may already be "enough", as in to the point where anything above that makes little difference?

Suppose it depends how quickly those antibodies wane, and how much of an effect above the T cells it has etc.
 
I take it that's 5x the antibodies compared to a first dose of the original MRNA vaccines (Pfizer/ Moderna etc)?
In other articles I've read, Moderna are actually saying that it's in terms of using this new bivalent vaccine as a booster dose, in comparison to using the original Moderna vaccine as a booster dose. The biggest improvement in protection is specifically against the omicron variant although they also say it generates "significantly higher" binding antibody titers against other variants of concern as well.

In terms of protection against the original strain, they say it's also "non-inferior" to their original vaccine.

I'm not sure where MSN get a "five times better" figure, I'm not seeing that in the other articles. They simply say that a booster dose of the new Moderna vaccine produces better levels of protection against omicron and other variants, but without putting an actual multiple on it.

Here's one example of such articles:

Moderna Says Its Bivalent Vaccine Works Against Omicron
 
In other articles I've read, Moderna are actually saying that it's in terms of using this new bivalent vaccine as a booster dose, in comparison to using the original Moderna vaccine as a booster dose. The biggest improvement in protection is specifically against the omicron variant although they also say it generates "significantly higher" binding antibody titers against other variants of concern as well.

In terms of protection against the original strain, they say it's also "non-inferior" to their original vaccine.

I'm not sure where MSN get a "five times better" figure, I'm not seeing that in the other articles. They simply say that a booster dose of the new Moderna vaccine produces better levels of protection against omicron and other variants, but without putting an actual multiple on it.

Here's one example of such articles:

Moderna Says Its Bivalent Vaccine Works Against Omicron
Ah cool, I'll have a read of that when I get chance.

There's no point targeting pre-omicron now, as they have been outcompeted, and always will be by the looks of it, but hopefully it also works well against any future strains but I can't see how a future strain could be more transmissible/ survive against Omicron, especially BA2 and now BA5 etc. But anything can happen I suppose!

Yeah, the 5 times better thing, or just about any media always seem to get confused, about what increases in number actually mean. "Five times better" could mean about a thousand different things, but I suppose it gets people reading it.
 
In what could potentially be the best bit of Coronavirus-related news I've heard in a while, researchers have published results from trials of a vaccine that could protect not only against any CoVid-19 variant, but also against any future SARS-like coronavirus that might emerge.

As the lead scientist involved, says:

"...we can't predict which virus or viruses among the vast numbers in animals will evolve in the future to infect humans to cause another epidemic or pandemic. What we're trying to do is make an all-in-one vaccine protective against SARS-like betacoronaviruses regardless of which animal viruses might evolve to allow human infection and spread. This sort of vaccine would also protect against current and future SARS-CoV-2 variants without the need for updating."

New Vaccine Offers Protection Against a Variety of SARS-Like Betacoronaviruses
 
In what could potentially be the best bit of Coronavirus-related news I've heard in a while, researchers have published results from trials of a vaccine that could protect not only against any CoVid-19 variant, but also against any future SARS-like coronavirus that might emerge.

As the lead scientist involved, says:



New Vaccine Offers Protection Against a Variety of SARS-Like Betacoronaviruses
It's a bit early in the morning to be trying to understand that, but seems very promising.

My unqualified take from an immunology point of view, but reasoned mathematical point of view is that I'm not sure if that problem might have already been semi-solved by the current virus itself mind, as Delta, Omicron, BA2, BA5 etc are extremely transmissible and becoming more transmissible each wave, and each wave/ new variant offers a massive amount of protection from death/ hospitalisation from future variants, as well as previous ones. It could be a year or two before this vaccine comes out, and another year to vaccinate everyone we intend to, and within that time nearly everyone's going to have had it, or been exposed, numerous times.

Effectively each new strain just seems to hoover up more and more of the stragglers that the other strains missed, which makes sense as they have a higher transmissibility and need a higher HIT for the population.

Looking at the recent wave of hospitalisations, they've had zero effect on the deaths trending down since early April, even though this new wave came in mid/ late March. Deaths are still trending down in a straight line. We're on like ~90 deaths a day from nearly 2000 hospitalisations this wave, yet the last waves of ~2500 hospitalisations peaks from Omicron and BA2 caused deaths peaks of ~300. There may be some lag in that, but I would have thought we would have seen something, it's had a month to start to show on the deaths.

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Of course this new vaccine may protect from other coronaviruses, but the way C19 has evolved it's likely that this virus could also offer good protection from C25, C40 or whatever comes down the line later. I'm not sure if it works like this but C19 coverage could get that broad, it might effectively make other coronaviruses extinct (in humans at least), or from getting a foothold where they turn into a pandemic.

C19 seems to now have blended into the Flu level of IFR, due to vaccinations/ previous infections etc, so may be best to soon shift attention to eradicating Flu (I assume immunologists are doing this already mind), as we could be heading for some bad flu years in the near future.

There's no way on earth that enough people would get vaccinated with this new covid vaccine to make coronaviruses extinct mind, it may not even get used in 10% even if it worked 100%, but if you only do those 10% then you're not really stopping coronaviruses from circulating, you're just offering protection and over time those coronaviruses might just develop to evade the vaccine coverage. There would be the combination of new vaccine protection and C19 circulation offering a wider coverage though.

It looks to me like we're very much in the exit wave/ phase now, and Omicron was the big one which effectively put C19 on the path to end itself (albeit still takes time).

Below is for the world, cases are far higher in real terms, as there's less/ no testing, but those death numbers will be more accurate than they've ever been, places are still lying about the number of deaths, but certainly no worse than they were in 2020 + 2021, and probably far, far better.

1657265127912.png
 
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