COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update Friday 1st October 2021

COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update Friday 1st October 2021

(Some UK data is delayed today)
UK Daily Statistics:
Cases: 7,842,613 (+35,577)
Losses of Life: 136,789 (+127)
Vaccinations 1st Dose: 48,863,490
Vaccinations Fully Vaxxed: 44,901,832

Rep. Of Ireland: 390,989 (+1,057) cases and 5,249 losses of life.

World: 234,772,640 reported cases and 4,801,177 losses of life.

"The world missed the target set by WHO of vaccinating 10% of all people in all countries by the end of September.
Vaccinating the Earth equitably is a moral, epidemiological, and economic necessity. #VaccinEquity"
The World Health Organisation.

German pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. have released interim data (the trial wasn't due to finish yet) from their antiviral pill study for Molnupiravir - and it's fabulous. It reduced hospitalisations and deaths by half in people who had mild to moderate illness (recently infected people, within 5 days of symptoms starting, when it could still go either way). This hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, but the world is all over it like a rash. If there are any flaws we'll soon know, but it's looking great so far.
Because the safety data is all there, and the efficacy findings are so positive, it starts to become unethical to give patients the placebo, and the trial doesn't need any more proof that it works.
"7.3% of patients who received molnupiravir were either hospitalized or died through Day 29 following randomization (28/385), compared with 14.1% of placebo-treated patients (53/377). Through Day 29, no deaths were reported in patients who received molnupiravir, as compared to 8 deaths in patients who received placebo. At the recommendation of an independent Data Monitoring Committee and in consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), recruitment into the study is being stopped early due to these positive results. Merck plans to submit an application for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the U.S. FDA as soon as possible based on these findings and plans to submit marketing applications to other regulatory bodies worldwide."
At Day 29 the reduction in risk of death was looking far better than 50%, but some patients are still in hospital, so we can't yet say what the final outcome will be. (Hopefully positive all round - fingers crossed for them all.)
If Molnupiravir is approved, it will be the first oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19. Nice. 

Fun Fact - yes. It really is named Molnupiravir after the God of Thunder Thor's hammer, Mjollnir. (We either have divine help, or the Marvel Avengers have come to save us.)

"Deaths involving COVID-19 are consistently lower for people who have received two vaccinations. Between 2 January and 2 July 2021, there were 640 deaths involving COVID-19 in people who had received both vaccine doses (England), accounting for 1.2% of all deaths involving COVID-19 in that period (51,281 deaths)."
UK Office for National Statistics.

UK travel restrictions relax on Monday October 4th. Countries move to a 2 tier system - Red and 'rest of the world'. To return from a country which IS NOT on the Red List, if you are fully vaccinated, you just need a Day 2 PCR and a passenger locator form.
Always bear in mind that what's true today may change at any point without notice. 

India have.... well. If you read UK press, they've 'imposed restrictions on arrivals from the UK', and if you read Indian press, they've "retaliated".
The UK agree that several of the world's health authorities require similar standards to ours, so trust them to ensure exports meet our controls, but they don't include India's Health Ministry in that list. Therefore, arrivals to the UK from India, even if double-vaccinated with the Indian-manufactured version of the exact same Oxford AstraZeneca jab, will still have to quarantine.
It is a slur. The Serum Institute India is supplying vaccines to much of the world, including the majority of the poorer nations via the World Health Organisation's COVAX vaccine sharing, and there really is no reason for the UK not to just 'okay' their AstraZeneca jab. I don't blame India for retaliating at all.
From 4th October UK nationals arriving in India are subject to the same 10 day quarantine, pre-flight test, day 2 test and day 8 test that Indian nationals (and red list arrivals) face when they arrive in the UK. 

Today the UK Government launched the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. COVID has forced a lot of chatter to become action, let's hope it doesn't stop there... 

Today IndieSAGE called for the UK's JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) to be more transparent. They pointed out that "No minutes from JCVI meetings discussing Covid-19 are available since 16 February 2021." Naughty...
indieSAGE also looked closely at case rates in school aged children. Cases in 10-14 year olds are currently incredibly high, and coincidentally the data on school absences hasn't been updated since 16th September. Obviously it could be nothing, but it looks pretty fishy...
The UK has some major COVID hotspots. They use Kettering as an example.
In Kettering, 6% of children aged 10-14 tested positive last week alone - that's 1 in every 18. Case rates in people 40-49 are higher than they've ever been. Crikey Kettering, what happened? Mass hug-a-stranger event? 

Hoax Of The Day:
The US CDC and the UK NHS are having to tell people 'vaccines are NOT gene therapy'. They don't enter into the DNA, so they can't actually change anything about you - they can't try and tell your ear to turn into a finger or anything wild and whacky. They simply aren't that clever.
The AstraZeneca and Johnson&Johnson vaccines are 'viral vector' - which is a fancy way of saying 'a dead bit of virus'. It's like teaching a cat to hunt with a bit of string. They'll recognise a mouse tail, and know how to snag it.
The Pfizer and Moderna are 'messenger RNA'. mRNA tells your body what shape of proteins to make, and antibodies are a type of protein, each with a specific and complicated shape to match a virus or other pathogen. mRNA vaccines are basically a 'how-to' instruction leaflet which says "You should start making these".

Japan has fully lifted their State Of Emergency - although bars and restaurants will still have to close at 9pm. COVID cases have dropped almost 90% in the last month. Japan has fully vaccinated 60% of the adult population, and another 10% have had 1 dose, which is good, but not spectacular. It's a reminder that vaccination really isn't everything - it's one tool from many. 

2nd Hoax Of The Day:
The CDC fact-checkers have been busy today. Yes - you should get vaccinated even if you have had COVID. You cannot have a clue how much immunity it gave you, or didn't. You may or may not have very good immunity, or immunity against variants. Your immunity may also wane fairly quickly. No-one can tell how your body will perform.
It's the same for all diseases, because every human body is unique. Most people will catch chicken pox once, quite a few people catch it twice, and a rare few will never gain immunity.
To be properly protected you need to build on your antibodies with vaccination - and all the studies show that on average, you'll have really excellent, and much longer lasting, protection afterwards. 

I've been at this a while now, so let's have a little recap of some of the things we've learned over the last 20 months:
1. Real world studies are far superior to lab studies, but they take more time and aren't usually available for ages.
2. No study is worth worrying over until its been peer-reviewed and any major errors pointed out.
3. Scientists are capable of focussing too much on science and forgetting plain common sense - e.g UK scientists believed around 50% of people would break lockdown, based on how many people would usually bend rules, and forgetting we might actually care about the whole 'illness and death' thing.
4. Fomites is the fancy science word for 'surfaces'. Uptick is the fancy Government word for 'going badly'
5. Everyone in the world would quite like Jacinda Ardern as their Prime Minister.
6. Bhutan is awesome. It measures GDP in happiness, not money. They vaccinated 85% of the entire adult population in 7 days, despite having a tiny medical staff (they had 4 ICU doctors when the pandemic started) - because they worked together.
7. The people who actually make our world turn, the 'essential' workers, are often the lowest paid and least respected.
8. You can have too much banana bread.
9. Extra hospitals can't run without extra staff.
10. Women have shown they are pretty darn good at pandemics. A woman first developed mRNA, a woman led the Oxford (AstraZeneca) vaccine team, a woman led the BioNTech (Pfizer) vaccine team, and women leaders have on average far less deaths per head than similar populations.
11. A lot of people don't have home broadband. A lot of kids don't have access to the Internet except on their mum's phone.
12. Waste water can be used predict levels of COVID in a population, because it shows up in poo before people even have symptoms. England is actively monitoring wastewater at 262 sites.
13. Some people will literally believe anything.
14. Disappointingly, no-one became magnetic after vaccination.
15. Dolly Parton is a hero
16. No matter how many times Jenny Harries says kids don't spread COVID, they just go ahead and do it anyway.
17. The lockdown was so stressful, Gwyneth Paltrow ate bread.
18. Under pressure we will pay 20 x the regular price for toilet paper. And should remember we promised we'd boycott any shop which took advantage of that.
19. Stop touching your face.
20. We all appreciate a hug more than we would ever have realised without the pandemic

It is the weekend! Hurrah! Don't you forget your treat - something that YOU want, not them. We have good news today - a new drug that could really help save some lives, and keep the pressure off our hospitals. Cases in the UK are creeping up slowly (although Scotland is dropping), but hospitalisations are falling. Cases are falling worldwide. Vaccination is winning the race. Just a bit further...

Play Outdoors, Wash Your Hands, Save The NHS...

Some people. All unique, and all the same:

Countries / Cases / Losses of life (since midnight GMT. In larger countries, such as the USA and India, some states /provinces have yet to report today):

UK 7,842,613 (+35,577) 136,789 (+127)

Russia 7,535,548 (+24,522) 208,142 (+887)

Philippines 2,565,487 (+15,566) 38,493 (+199)

Iran 5,601,565 (+14,525) 120,663 (+235)

Ukraine 2,435,413 (+12,034) 56,446 (+172)

Malaysia 2,257,584 (+11,889) 26,456 (+121)

Thailand 1,615,229 (+11,754) 16,850 (+123)

USA 44,325,740 (+11,316) 716,921 (+74)

Romania 1,244,555 (+10,887) 37,210 (+169)

India 33,775,135 (+9,647) 448,504 (+132)

Mexico 3,664,223 (+8,828) 277,505 (+533)

Serbia 949,260 (+7,271) 8,280 (+46)

Vietnam 797,712 (+6,957) 19,437 (+136)

France 7,018,367 (+4,935) 116,759 (+46)

Italy 4,675,758 (+3,405) 130,973 (+52)

Israel 1,285,570 (+3,352) 7,766 (+5)

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Sources: 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/monitoring-of-sars-cov-2-rna-in-england-wastewater-monthly-statistics-1-june-to-23-august-2021/environmental-monitoring-for-health-protection-emhp-wastewater-monitoring-of-sars-cov-2-in-england-1-june-to-23-august-2021

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=

India:

https://twitter.com/i/events/1443913837451759617

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-covid-cases-vaccine-state-of-emergency-ends/

https://twitter.com/i/events/1443890863222890496

https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oral-antiviral-molnupiravir-reduced-the-risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-by-approximately-50-percent-compared-to-placebo-for-patients-with-mild-or-moderat/

https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/1443909023837958149

https://twitter.com/OHID/status/1443914565096513555

https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/messenger-rna

https://twitter.com/john_actuary/status/1443898526048657416

COVID vaccines not genetic material:

https://twitter.com/i/events/1443751688158912515

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-variants-genomically-confirmed-case-numbers

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/molnupiravir-thor-s-hammer-delivers

Vaccination i better than natural immunity

https://twitter.com/i/events/1443793434129539075

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/deaths#deaths-by-age

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

https://www.independentsage.org/call-for-more-transparency-around-jcvi-recommendations-for-childhood-vaccination-against-covid-19/

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/1october2021

indieSAGE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZffPwtD25c