Covid-19 As Seen From Taiwan

My time in Taiwan shows the virus will exploit any hint of complacency
Helen Davidson in Taipei
I’ve had an almost pandemic-free existence reporting from Taiwan, but it hasn’t all been a smooth ride
Sun 11 Jul 2021 10.45 BST

For much of this year, I’ve lived a mostly Covid-free life. Taiwan wasn’t just lucky. It had been traumatised by Sars, which it didn’t handle well, and established comprehensive epidemic plans for the next time. There was no talk of herd immunity or accepting mass deaths as inevitable. As far as Taiwan was concerned, Covid-19 wasn’t getting in, and if it tried they were ready.

Taiwan took full advantage of being an island to quarantine itself from the world. It funnelled entrants through a tightly controlled system defined by extreme caution.

In October 2020 I flew in from Sydney and took a subsidised quarantine taxi to the basement of a Taipei quarantine hotel. An employee in full PPE took my temperature, checked me in, gave me plastic shoe covers, and sent me up the service elevator to my room, where I spent 15 days alone.

I was whiplashed by the world I walked out into. I went to Taipei Pride, a heaving, glittering, free-hugging, street party of thousands. I went to a concert and danced with newfound friends, our masks hooked around elbows. I went to a religious festival, with fireworks going off at close range. It felt like another universe and I sometimes forgot there was a pandemic, remembering with a sickening wrench of the heart.

Life wasn’t totally normal – loved ones and others were overseas. Australia’s border closures meant my husband and I couldn’t rush home if needed, and no one could visit. We were in a bubble, safe but trapped.

In November, Taiwan clocked up 220 days without a single community case. Before flu season it extended mandatory mask-wearing and I wondered if they were also trying to eliminate the common cold and smiling.

Days before Christmas, a sick cargo pilot lied about his symptoms and contacts, and infected a friend in Taipei. The Covid-free counter was reset to zero after 253 days. Miraculously it didn’t spread. Another outbreak at a hospital in January infected about 20, but again it was contained.

Four months flew by, and an outbreak linked to reduced quarantine requirements for airline staff made headlines but didn’t alarm – surely, this one would be contained too. But then cases appeared two counties over, and then in a densely populated district of Taipei, then across the island.

Taiwan went into a soft lockdown, but the early rules were unclear, and it was the first sense things might not run so smoothly this time. I’m lucky – I’m healthy and had a job I do from home. Interviewing health experts, a worrying picture formed: authorities had grown comfortable and weren’t ready for an outbreak of a faster moving strain. It felt scary and frustrating when there was a world of examples to have learned from.

Case numbers climbed into the hundreds, politics grew partisan. Businesses resisted working from home. I spent a Saturday FaceTiming dozens of migrant factory workers locked in their crowded dorms, showing the clear double standards compared with local workers. Across the world the pandemic has left the most vulnerable exposed.

Case numbers are low again but lockdown has been extended to late-July. I think Covid is here to stay – at least until we get vaccines. Just 0.3% of Taiwan’s population is fully vaccinated, and current supply is largely propped up by donations.

There are plenty of places to look for a dose of perspective. Taiwan made mistakes, but our tragic deaths are in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. To live here has been a blessing, but one tempered by what is happening elsewhere.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/comme ... omplacency

Việt Nam reports highest daily rise in infections with 2,377 domestic cases
12/07/21 21:26
HÀ NỘI, 9 July (VNS) - Việt Nam saw a record number of COVID-19 cases for the fifth day in a row on Monday, the same day the overall caseload topped 30,000.

A total of 2,383 cases were recorded on Monday, including 1,764 in HCM City, the country's COVID-19 hotspot, leading to the Ministry of Health increasing the self-isolation period for people returning from HCM City to other areas from seven days to 14, effective starting today.

A total of 28,689 cases have been reported since the start of the fourth wave on April 27.

Other cities and provinces that recorded new cases were Bình Dương (128), Tiền Giang (118), Đồng Nai (82), Khánh Hoà (58), Đồng Tháp (40), Phú Yên (30), Hà Nội (29), Vĩnh Long (26), Đà Nẵng (14), An Giang (11), Bình Phước (8 ), Trà Vinh (8), Hậu Giang (8 ), Bắc Giang (7), Hưng Yên (7), Quảng Ngãi (7), Sóc Trăng (5), Bắc Ninh (4), Tây Ninh (3), Bạc Liêu (2), Thanh Hóa (2), Nam Định (2), Huế (1), Nghệ An (1), Vĩnh Phúc (1) and Đắk Nông (1).

A total of 2,096 of the new cases were recorded in locked-down areas or quarantine zones.
- FRESH NEWS

Global coronavirus updates from the Guardian, posted half an hour ago

25m ago 11:02
Today so far …

This week, the Netherlands has recorded a 500% rise in Covid cases, following moves to fully reopen the economy including opening nightclubs. It has been seen as a warning as to how case numbers might take off in England when restrictions are dropped next week.
Indonesia recorded its biggest daily increase in coronavirus infections with 54,517 cases on Wednesday, taking the total tally to just over 2.67m cases.
The Philippines has announced it will ban travellers coming from Indonesia to prevent the spread of the Delta variant.
Thailand is considering regulating the volume of locally manufactured AstraZeneca Covid vaccines for export, a health official has said, a move that could affect supplies to other Asian countries.
South Korea on Wednesday tightened social distancing curbs across most of the country to try to combat its worst-ever outbreak of coronavirus after new cases on Tuesday soared past previous daily peaks to 1,615.
Russia has reported 786 coronavirus-related deaths on Wednesday, which is again the most confirmed in a single day since the beginning of the pandemic.
France is celebrating Bastille Day with scaled back celebrations and a limited number of spectators allowed in Paris.
The UK will not be added to the EU travel green list this week. EU diplomats agreed unanimously to add Ukraine, and remove Thailand and Rwanda.
First minister of Wales Mark Drakeford will make an announcement at noon today on whether the nation will be further lifting Covid restrictions next week.
US vaccinologist Dr Peter Hotez has said that young children will pay the price if enough US adults don’t get vaccinated. Many more adolescents could become hospitalised, Hotez said, adding up to 30% of children infected will develop long-haul covid.
People waiting hours to get a Covid-19 test in Sydney’s Fairfield have expressed confusion and frustration at the new requirements for essential workers. Long queues formed on Tuesday night and continued on Wednesday after the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, announced essential workers must get tested every three days.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... pics-muted

Not sure where to post this. the topic came up several times in several threads. The alleged cure had been brought up by self-professed health experts or just believers. No doubt it is proof, showing the democratic nature of debate to have an anal perspective included.
Alas, things seem to be more complicated as expected as we know from the earlier bleach cure promoted by American fascists.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... l-concerns


Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns

The preprint endorsing ivermectin as a coronavirus therapy has been widely cited, but independent researchers find glaring discrepancies in the data



The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.

The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.

It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
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The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.

But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.

It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.

“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.

“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”

There were other concerns.

“In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19,” Lawrence said. “According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four.”

Lawrence and the Guardian sent Elgazzar a comprehensive list of questions about the data, but did not receive a reply. The university’s press office also did not respond.

Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly.

Brown created a comprehensive document uncovering numerous data errors, discrepancies and concerns, which he provided to the Guardian. According to his findings the authors had clearly repeated data between patients.

“The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records,” Brown told the Guardian. “It’s certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren’t even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural.”

Other studies on ivermectin are still under way. In the UK, the University of Oxford is testing whether giving people with Covid-19 ivermectin prevents them ending up in hospital.

The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”. This was concerning because two meta-analyses of ivermectin for treating Covid-19 had included the Elgazzar study in the results. A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies to determine what the overall scientific literature has found about a treatment or intervention.

“Because the Elgazzar study is so large, and so massively positive – showing a 90% reduction in mortality – it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

“If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomised control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed.”

Kyle Sheldrick, a Sydney doctor and researcher, also independently raised concerns about the paper. He found numbers the authors provided for several standard deviations – a measure of variation in a group of data points – mentioned in tables in the paper were “mathematically impossible” given the range of numbers provided in the same table.
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Sheldrick said the completeness of data was further evidence suggesting possible fabrication, noting that in real-world conditions, this was almost impossible. He also identified the duplication of patient deaths and data.

Ivermectin has gained momentum throughout Latin America and India, largely based on evidence from preprint studies. In March, the World Health Organization warned against the use of ivermectin outside well designed clinical trials.

The conservative Australian MP Craig Kelly, who has also promoted the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 – despite there being no evidence that it works – has been among those promoting ivermectin. Several Indian media outlets ran stories on Kelly in the past week after he asked Uttar Pradesh to loan the state’s chief minister, Adityanath, to Australia to release ivermectin.

Lawrence said what started out as a simple university assignment had led to a comprehensive investigation into an apparent scientific fraud at a time when “there is a whole ivermectin hype … dominated by a mix of right-wing figures, anti-vaxxers and outright conspiracists”.

“Although science trends towards self-correction, something is clearly broken in a system that can allow a study as full of problems as the Elgazzar paper to run unchallenged for seven months,” he said.

“Thousands of highly educated scientists, doctors, pharmacists, and at least four major medicines regulators missed a fraud so apparent that it might as well have come with a flashing neon sign. That this all happened amid an ongoing global health crisis of epic proportions is all the more terrifying.”

I saw this quoted on FB..

France takes a tougher line on vaccinations:

French President Emanuel Macron:
“I no longer have any intention of sacrificing my life, my time, my freedom and the adolescence of my daughters, as well as their right to study properly, for those who refuse to be vaccinated. This time you stay at home, not us. "

In France, those who do not get vaccinated will no longer be able to go to restaurants, cafes (from the beginning of August), cinemas and museums (from July 21) and get on airplanes or trains (again from August). Alternatively, you will have to submit a negative test, which will no longer be free (49 euros for the PCR, 29 for the antigen).

Macron then announced the vaccination obligation for medical personnel and for those who work in contact with fragile people. Since September 15, a nurse who has refused to be vaccinated will no longer be able to go to work and receive a salary. "We cannot make those who have the civic sense to get vaccinated bear the burden of inconvenience," Macron said. "The restrictions will weigh on others, those who for reasons incomprehensible in the country of Louis Pasteur, science and the Enlightenment still hesitate to use the only weapon available against the pandemic, the vaccine."

"I am aware of what I am asking you," he said, "and I know that you are ready for this commitment. This is, in a sense, part of your sense of duty."

Thank you Maricer Martínez-Cid Escalón

clutchcargo wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 8:46 pm I saw this quoted on FB..

France takes a tougher line on vaccinations:

French President Emanuel Macron:
“I no longer have any intention of sacrificing my life, my time, my freedom and the adolescence of my daughters, as well as their right to study properly, for those who refuse to be vaccinated. This time you stay at home, not us. "

In France, those who do not get vaccinated will no longer be able to go to restaurants, cafes (from the beginning of August), cinemas and museums (from July 21) and get on airplanes or trains (again from August). Alternatively, you will have to submit a negative test, which will no longer be free (49 euros for the PCR, 29 for the antigen).

Macron then announced the vaccination obligation for medical personnel and for those who work in contact with fragile people. Since September 15, a nurse who has refused to be vaccinated will no longer be able to go to work and receive a salary. "We cannot make those who have the civic sense to get vaccinated bear the burden of inconvenience," Macron said. "The restrictions will weigh on others, those who for reasons incomprehensible in the country of Louis Pasteur, science and the Enlightenment still hesitate to use the only weapon available against the pandemic, the vaccine."

"I am aware of what I am asking you," he said, "and I know that you are ready for this commitment. This is, in a sense, part of your sense of duty."

Thank you Maricer Martínez-Cid Escalón

I wonder what the answer will be for the people who would like to have the vaccine but can't because they have possibly a illness or are on medication that prevents them doing so. Will the president of France "Macron" openly discriminate against those people, surely seen has discrimination and the human rights Act.

clutchcargo wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 8:46 pm I saw this quoted on FB..

France takes a tougher line on vaccinations:

French President Emanuel Macron:
“I no longer have any intention of sacrificing my life, my time, my freedom and the adolescence of my daughters, as well as their right to study properly, for those who refuse to be vaccinated. This time you stay at home, not us. "

In France, those who do not get vaccinated will no longer be able to go to restaurants, cafes (from the beginning of August), cinemas and museums (from July 21) and get on airplanes or trains (again from August). Alternatively, you will have to submit a negative test, which will no longer be free (49 euros for the PCR, 29 for the antigen).

Macron then announced the vaccination obligation for medical personnel and for those who work in contact with fragile people. Since September 15, a nurse who has refused to be vaccinated will no longer be able to go to work and receive a salary. "We cannot make those who have the civic sense to get vaccinated bear the burden of inconvenience," Macron said. "The restrictions will weigh on others, those who for reasons incomprehensible in the country of Louis Pasteur, science and the Enlightenment still hesitate to use the only weapon available against the pandemic, the vaccine."

"I am aware of what I am asking you," he said, "and I know that you are ready for this commitment. This is, in a sense, part of your sense of duty."

Thank you Maricer Martínez-Cid Escalón

Good for Macron, I hope Boris does the same. Time to stop pandering to the anti-vaxers and make their life much harder.

so if i refuse to get a vaccine for medical, religious or just personal reasons, i need a test every time i leave my house?

Thank god American ( and even Thailand and Cambodia) are more anti discriminate and realistic

Thank god American ( and even Thailand and Cambodia) are more anti discriminate and realistic

No, Mandated vax is legal in USA.

USA Precedent for mandatory vax:

Once a COVID vaccine or vaccines are made available, could states mandate that people get them?
The short answer is yes. States have the legal and constitutional authority to require that the people who live in that state be vaccinated, or to introduce a vaccine mandate.

The authority for the state being able to compel vaccination—the affirmation of that authority—goes all the way back to a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1905 called Jacobson v. Massachusetts. That case arose in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1902. Cambridge introduced an ordinance requiring all adults be vaccinated or revaccinated against smallpox. If they didn’t [get vaccinated], they would have to pay a fine of $5.

Jacobson was a resident of Cambridge who, for a number of reasons, objected to the vaccination mandate and brought a lawsuit against Massachusetts for the mandate. He raised a number of arguments, including one that his constitutionally protected liberty interests were being infringed by this mandate.

In that case, the Supreme Court—and —said that states have under their police powers, which is under the Constitution, the authority to enact reasonable regulations as necessary to protect public health, public safety, and the common good. Vaccination mandates constitute exactly that kind of permissible state action to protect the public’s health. Even though it’s 115 years old, this continues to be the benchmark case on the state’s power to mandate vaccination.

In response to the argument about this individual liberty interest, the court said that sometimes individual interests might have to yield to state laws that endeavour to protect the health of everybody—the “common good.” The court said: “The rights of the individual may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint to be enforced by reasonable regulations as the safety of the general public may demand.”

So, yes: Once COVID vaccines are available, states could elect to require that people who live within that state be vaccinated.

Full article here:
https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles ... cides.html