Mridul K. Thomas - Covid

ecology - phytoplankton - functional traits

02/05/2021

3/5/2021

Today in pandemic theatre: Bangalore is using drones to spray disinfectant around, including seemingly just directly into the air around buildings.

At the same time, the Indian central govt. ministry in charge of promoting bullshit boasts about traditional Indian medicine claims that a herbal concoction 'developed' to treat malaria in the 80s also cures Covid. Needless to say, there is absolutely nothing trustworthy about the 'study' and the claim should be treated like the garbage propaganda it is, not as science.

Meanwhile, hospitals overflow, oxygen supplies run low, people die in droves and the vaccination program stalls because of a lack of doses.

UPDATE:

The latest rage: steam inhalation in groups. Let's gather people in clusters, make them take off their masks, sit together for a while, and inhale deeply.

It's like the virus wrote this policy.

30/04/2021

3/5/2021

FYI: if you are in India and have Covid-like symptoms now or in the next few weeks, just assume you have Covid and isolate immediately. Testing your contacts is a priority at that point, testing yourself is not - you are extremely likely to have it. Monitor yourself to see if you need medical attention, of course.

28/04/2021

3/5/2021

India will now authorise vaccines approved by the US, UK, EU, Japan or WHO.

So in April 2021, Indian citizens will finally be allowed to get the Pfizer & moderna vaccines, which has been *illegal* till now. Pfizer actually withdrew its application for authorisation months ago after being asked to jump through hoops by the Indian government for no good reason.

The last year should make us much more sceptical of these regulatory bodies. India's is a stupidly extreme case, but every country's regulator has required a complex submission and evaluation procedure for these vaccines despite the burning pandemic and very strong evidence from other places. There's no good reason for the EU and US health regulators (for example) to not trust each other's judgement of the data. And there's even less reason for Indian regulators to think that their scrutiny is more rigorous and trustworthy.

26/04/2021

3/5/2021

Anyone with expertise in GIS & remote sensing who could help me figure something out?
This twitter thread made me think that we may be able to better estimate deaths across India using satellite imagery of funeral pyres. Would this be feasible? How would we go about it? What expertise/manpower would be needed to make this happen?

The reason I ask is that there's a very real chance that tens to hundreds of thousands will die uncounted and that it will all be forgotten. I'd like to help out with efforts to avoid that.

25/04/2021

3/5/2021

UPDATE on this situation: The US, EU, UK, and more have offered help! Oxygen and concentrators for immediate relief. And perhaps more importantly for the medium term, the US will undo the (effective) embargo on vaccine raw material export.

"The United States has identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine that will immediately be made available for India."

23/04/2021

24/4/2021

The situation in India: 300k cases and 2000 deaths recorded per day and rising rapidly. Perhaps 10 times that number in reality, maybe more. The deceased being burnt in parking lots because there is no space for cremations. People dying in waiting lines outside hospitals, and inside crowded emergency rooms/ICUs because supplies have run out. Families desperately begging on social media for help in finding a hospital bed, an oxygen cylinder, or a drug that somebody has told them will cure their dying kin.

This is why so many of us were yowling since early last summer that every damned vaccine needed to have accelerated review and approval if it was even moderately protective. That we needed to plough mountains of money into creating manufacturing capacity even though many of the vaccines would not work out. That the months wasted on following standard review protocols were prioritising arse-covering over saving lives - possibly millions of lives. That slowing the whole vaccination process over every possible rare side-effect in the hope of maintaining faith in the system was dooming many to a horrible death while simultaneously wrecking confidence in vaccines globally, even in places without much prior antivax sentiment.

There's plenty of blame to go around for this present crisis. Pride of place certainly goes to the utterly incompetent and vile Indian government. But the US has made things worse by stopping the export of basic material needed for vaccine manufacturing. This has slowed down the rest of the world's ability to produce vaccines even as the US imports materials for its own vaccination program. If you can make your voice heard in the US about this, please urge your government to fix this!

06/04/2021

7/4/2021

It's all still quite uncertain, but more evidence has been accumulating that there is a very rare link between the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and a combination of blood clots throughout the body + low platelets (the cells involved in clotting, so this seems contradictory and is quite weird).

By rare, I mean something like 1 per 100,000 vaccinated people seem to develop this reaction. That proportion is also quite uncertain; it could be closer to 1 in 20,000 or 1 in 1,000,000. A high proportion of the small number of cases studied have died. This may be in part because the blood thinners sometimes used to treat symptoms such as these could actually make this particularly rare condition worse. So understanding this means that we may be able to save many more people who develop this reaction by treating more appropriately.

Even if this reaction turns out to be caused by the vaccine, the risk of dying of Covid is way, way higher - maybe thousands of times higher for the elderly. And vaccinating people also prevents Covid spread. So giving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to people (especially old people) definitely saves many lives, and I still think Europe should not have stopped using it while we figured this out. And that we should keep using it in much of the world where better options are not available.

But there are places (New Zealand, Australia, etc) where case loads are so low that it's reasonable to pass on this vaccine and wait for better ones, assuming this risk is real. For young people in other places, the risk of dying from Covid is so low that it's also somewhat reasonable to skip this vaccine in favour of others. But if other vaccines are not available right now and skipping this means they have to wait, it will likely lead to more infection spread and more deaths overall; a tough choice.

^This is all heavily hedged because we still don't know this stuff with much confidence.

15/03/2021

16/3/2021

You probably know that many European countries have suspended the use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. This seems to be a panicky, unjustified reaction based on incredibly limited evidence. About 40 people have experienced some clotting out of >10 million doses administered. The numbers are very similar for the Pfizer vaccine, which remains unquestioned. And these numbers appear to be about what you'd expect if you monitored 10 million random mostly elderly people for a few weeks. If you apply extreme scrutiny to big numbers of people without a reference or control group, you will see all kinds of patterns that don't really mean anything. Even if the vaccine does increase the risk of clotting, it does so by a minuscule amount while protecting you from a still-burning pandemic.

European governments continue to screw this up badly. I assume they think that suspending vaccinations because of 'concerns' while they 'review the situation' makes them seem responsible and makes people trust the system more. I suspect they are wrong and that they are fatally undermining the painfully limited trust that their citizens already have. Incidentally, this has happened before; we lost the first ever vaccine for Lyme disease in the 90s because of a loss of trust:

"The clinical trials for the vaccine showed that arthritis occurred at similar rates in both the vaccine and placebo groups. But media reports and suits by plaintiff’s lawyers led to fears among members of the public. Even after a panel of outside advisers to the FDA voted that the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks, sales fell so low that the company withdrew the vaccine from the market" (Story from here: https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/15/the-curious-case-of-astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine/ )

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine isn't the best available. But it is effective (I'd take it if I could), Europe is short of vaccines, and it is seeing a variant-driven surge. This is not helping.

I'd also like to remind you that the US and Europe are sitting on tens of millions of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine doses that they are not using while abusing intellectual property law to prevent poor countries from manufacturing vaccines for their citizens.

11/02/2021

16/3/2021

The UK variant B117 was first noticed in early December. It became major news by mid-December and several countries shut down travel links by the 20th.

By that date, it was already in at least 33 countries (now in 81). We desperately need more sequencing and better monitoring.

02/02/2021

2/2/2021

Re-upping this weekend Covid post explaining variants, mutations and how the virus' evolution is likely to play out. The past couple of days have brought bad news that unfortunately bear out predictions from some recent posts.

New cases of the UK variant B117 show it has evolved further and has mutation E484K (see post). This mutation probably makes our antibodies (from existing vaccines & earlier infection) somewhat less effective against the virus. E484K is a major reason why the South Africa variant B1351 is such a threat, and we need to worry about this new mutated B117 for the same reason. It appears to be very rare right now (known only from a few cases in the UK) and I hope we can eradicate it. But we sequence very little, so similar evolution may be happening in other places and we wouldn't know.

Also, more evidence accumulates that the UK variant is more lethal than earlier ones, with about a 65% increase being most likely.

Vaccines ARE still effective, especially in protecting against severe disease and death. Get vaccinated as soon as you can.

Why I do this

I am not an expert on Covid, viruses, or vaccines, but I am a scientist with relevant training. I believe we have a responsibility to clearly communicate science to the public, especially in emergencies. So I started to write summaries of Covid developments on facebook in March 2020 to help friends and family understand the situation as it unfolded. This is an archive of those posts (created much later).

I also track the spread of alarming Covid variants at http://covidvarianttracking.com/ and map the consequences of faster variant spreading at https://tabsoft.co/2YwHCmZ.

Please do let me know if you find errors in the most recent posts.