Coronavirus in the UK

Again the 'Moonshot' took 8 years, would not be surprised if this took that long too.

And a test once week is pretty useless unless we are going to camp out at the office after the Monday morning test that allows us inside.

Back of an envelope.

36 million working population in the UK.

Let's test every one of them every day before they get into work, that is literally what they said about this idea at one point today.

5 times 52 working days minus say 28 days holiday statutory minimum and that's 232 working days a year.

Suppose they magic up a test that costs £1 each test.

232 days * 36 million people is £8.352 billion pounds a year for 8,352,000,000 total £1 tests.

Now lets look at the cost of a Covid 19 swab test if you buy it yourself, it is a lab test so it is going to be expensive and from Lloyds Pharmacy it is £99



Ok these saliva tests could not possibly cost that much they would have to be far cheaper but do you think £1 is realistic or is £10 more realistic?

at £10 a test (think of the cost of the logistics chain required for delivery alone) that's 83 Billion Pounds a year, what are the chances of it being nearer £20 per test, so lets say 165 billion pounds a year.

Do I think it is ever going to happen, no it won't it will be much smaller scale and there will be delays and excuses and more delays and excuses but meanwhile the politicians get to pretend that they are doing something about it and will spin it as a great success story in spite of it being fiction.

Temperature checks are nonsense people are spreading this for days before they show symptoms, it's total nonsense and pointless, by the time you get someone with an elevated temperature it is too late and where is the temperature threshold 37C, 37.8C what's the definition of fever and then you have that lassie you let into the office with a slightly high temperature of 37.2C who turns out to be asymptomatic but spreads it to the entire population of the building.

Airport temperature checks are dumb too, you are only going to catch people who are in the middle of fighting something not necessarily Covid and what do you do about the first hundred people who just got off that flight and walked out the door before the hot guy arrived

The Guardian is talking about a £100 billion price tag for testing 10 million a day not 36 million and a crucial quote :

Forgive my scepticism here :

But a few months ago antibody testing was going to be a game changer, where's that now we don't hear any talk about access to antibody tests or appear to have much random testing of the population to gauge the real depth of the spread of this thing and that data would still be valuable even now because it would give us some idea of the true level of asymptomatic spread and further that data could help identify whether there is long lasting immunity and what sort of timespan that immunity lasted.

I'm extremely sceptical of this 'Moonshot' thing, they used that term to in part justify the colossal expense that was going to be attached to a programme like this, however like the real Moonshot the technology does not exist and like the real Moonshot it will probably take a long time to invent test and implement.

This is just an attempt at feelgood optimism by politicians to keep spirits up, but they could equally decide to invest that kind of money in a Universal Basic Income (a UBI) that would likely be a far more effective way of protecting the economy and the livelihood of people who simply can't directly participate in work as a result of the nature of that work and a UBI would raise the spirits of a hell of a lot of ordinary working people a lot more than a fictional massively expensive programme where that kind of money is going into the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry.

Your man in this video, I agree with him on some of the possible reasons for the current lower hospitalisations.

He suggests that there is a less lethal mutation, I don't agree with that as genome sequencing is showing that the SARS-CoV-2 strain in Europe is mutating very slowly and is essentially identical to the D614 variant from March and earlier, they now refer to that as the G614 variant and while it is more infectious than the original from China there is no evidence of it being more or less deadly.

https://medium.com/microbial-instin...d-fatality-treatment-and-vaccine-7dda1c066f0d

Demographic (current demographic for spread as in the young), I think that is the most likely reason for current low hospitalisations in Europe, without random antibody tests we don't know the extent of existing infection in Europe and although T-Cell immunity could be very important it will not show up in testing but it is a hell of leap to say that most of the population is T-cell immune and that we only need 10% antibody results for herd immunity, particularly as T-Cell immunity will almost certainly be linked to metabolic health.

To assume on the existing very low penetration data that we have that we are anywhere near even short term herd immunity is very dangerous at this time.

Assumption of herd immunity in other countries, not sure I believe that one, I would be more inclined to go with his metabolic health theory and say other countries eat and live healthier, but I still feel that demographics play a huge part in other countries but would agree that metabolic health is likely a large factor everywhere and the wealthier we are as a nation the less healthy we appear to be in some respects.

Regards this particular plan I am knocking it, not for the sake of it, but because it feels wrong and it feels like the wrong way to spend that kind of money in a cost effective fashion.

Yeah I know

They have been pointing infrared cameras at passengers disembarking at NAIA for the last 18 years ever since SARS-CoV-1, they were funny in 2004 and all the intervening years, I walked past once with a bit of a fever as I had a cold starting.

Yeah it could spot someone with Malaria or a lot of other transmissible diseases where symptoms appear at the time someone is infectious, so not totally pointless but in the context of SARS-CoV-2 it is, yeah it will take one vector off the playing field but it will miss so many more.

Honestly Dr Aseem also points out that most transmission is happening before symptoms.

edit: My malaria example is not that great as it is not contagious scrub that and go with other actually contagious diseases

He's trying to achieve a daily passport to a normal life, an accurate antibody test could act as a passport for lets say 4 months on current evidence of two genome sampled confirmed cases of reinfection, chances are that in most people antibodies represent a few years general immunity, it is a slowly mutating virus after all.

If they followed through on the promised antibody testing it would likely be far cheaper as only a couple of tests a month or so apart would be needed, we would learn how far the virus had penetrated the population or at least have a much better idea combined with ongoing antigen tests and we would have data on which to estimate the duration of immunity as we could then know for sure about reinfection rates and symptoms in re-infected people.

Right now we are not gathering any of that data we won't really know who is re-infected because so many asymptomatic first time infection people might later present with symptoms and they were never tested first time round.

This 'moonshot' is antigen testing every day, whereas antibody testing at much lower frequency would give you a great baseline for a lot less money.

I have been replying based on my own thoughts not stuff I read elsewhere, I did the back of an envelope calculation on my own without prompting from the media and my thoughts on the issues with this 'moonshot' programme are likewise my own, however I just went looking for some comment from Independent Sage and found this, it echoes my own thinking.

Sir David King is saying fix the current test and trace make it work before we go off at some mad tangent looking at something where half the technology does not even exist yet, other countries handled this much better than us and are still handling it much better than us with functioning test and trace systems why is it so hard for us to do this.

Yeah I would agree with that.