Well it wasn’t was it? What am I talking about? BREXIT! Remember that? Well….there are an awful lot of Government officials along with yer Dominic Cummingses and yer 1922 Commiteeses, that have been caught SO on the hop by this latest Coronavirus that while all of their attitudes to matters EU were firm and severely ANTI, the UK missed out on a whole bunch of things:

• Seeing how rapidly Germany was reacting to events in China by purchasing huge amounts of testing reagent plus swabs, and Protective Equipment for its medical staff, that vast numbers of labs were equipped to do vast numbers of RNA “virus tests” while we were still cancelling EU Trade meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg. Ironically, Germany (and Spain and Italy) continues to import PPE weekly from World sources, INCLUDING the UK. Yesterday a massive shipment went to Germany from Heathrow, while an RAF plane had to wait for three days on a Turkey runway in order to get less than a week’s equipment for our Doctors and Nurses. Madness.

• February and March saw infection levels and Covid-19 related deaths in Italy and Spain absolutely soar. Lockdowns were not seriously considered in those two countries until it was too late to save large numbers of vulnerable and not so vulnerable, it seems. Severe strict Lockdowns in place (particularly in France) have since led to starting to control the spread of the virus.

• Testing and Contact Tracing regimes have been analysed in European Countries, and Britain is the last in Europe to even attempt to get our act together on these matters.

WELL. ANYWAY. Since my last piece here a week ago, there have of course been the usual largely irrelevant Government Daily Briefings where a bunch of unknowledgeable Minor Cabinet Megalumps have spouted the usual stuff about “ramping up”, “ending lockdown strategy” and “who’s using the trains and buses”, while only this last week having to admit that you could easily add 40% to deaths and infected figures that we’ve been given due to an excessive mortality rate in Care Homes and away from hospitals. Should many of these people have been admitted to the thousands of free Nightingale Hospital beds? Probably. How many lives would have been saved? According to various “experts” maybe a third (see references at end of this post). Why weren’t they? Because the majority of these Covid-19 related deaths were people who hadn’t even been tested. Why? Because the policy was that as our labs were so few, not properly set up to test, and there were so few testing kits, only people arriving at A&E and SOME frontline workers were actually getting tested UNTIL the second week of April. CRIMINAL, I say.

So where are We, and where is the World?

Testing-wise, remember the two types of test, the VIRUS test can detect the virus currently in the body, whereas the ANTIBODY test will only show the presence of antibodies created by the body against viruses, but antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 appear and become detectable between 9 and 15 days after infection, see below..

WELL, finally, in the UK, test volumes are ramping up at a decent rate. Eventually, the government and Public Health England (a dubious bunch of arguing real and not so real scientists) decided the money was needed for FOUR Superlabs, where up to 50,000 tests can be processed in each daily in each, down to the refinement and reworking of the Virus Test. The original test used a swab in the mouth and nose, and was dropped into one of about 10 different smaller local labs (there were only three of these in February), and the PCR nature (see post way below for the description of this test) meant each test took up to 6 hours to process. The newer version means the mouth and nose are swabbed, and “antigens” (kind of precursors to the antibodies themselves) can be detected almost immediately after infection. These tests use a “Lateral-Flow Assay” method, but basically, this means the tests can be manufactured in vast numbers very quickly, and the results are VERY rapid, in the same format as pregnancy tests, and can be distributed everywhere, not just swab centres in car parks in Cardiff, or Burger Bars in Birmingham. Ahem.

Avacta-Cytiva (a partnership based in Cambridge) is claiming these “Point of Care” tests can use saliva, and results appear in a few minutes. So, within TWO MONTHS, there could be tests in the 100.000’s daily in the UK. These tests will be distributed worldwide, so they may end up being in short supply, but should be the most reliable in the world (as currently people need to be tested TWICE because of false negative results in all the current tests).

ANTIBODY TESTS, I hear you cry. VACCINES, said someone at the back.

WELL, Antibody tests show a person HAS ALREADY been infected with the virus, and has built up antibodies which will then fight the virus for possibly years to come. Thing is, only YESTERDAY, the CEO of the world’s biggest Biotech Company (Roche) stated "It's a disaster. These tests are not worth anything, or have very little use. Some of these companies, I tell you, this is ethically very questionable to get out with this stuff… Every kind of amateur could produce an antibody test. The two of us could do it overnight in the garage. That's not the problem. The question is, does it really work? And for that, you have to do testing and validation," Severin Schwan said.

These tests have been used in many Far East countries, but with false positives and negatives reaching 75%, they’re a bit rubbish, to be honest. The UK paid a fortune for some Chinese tests, only to have to send them back after the Antibody Test Labs in Oxford found, along with 50 other testing kits, that They Didn’t Work.

Roche’s test relies on a doctor or nurse drawing blood from a person, not merely a finger-prick test as some other tests require. Reuters reports that Schwan "promised" that his company's test would be reliable because Roche "had successfully found the antibody produced by the body after exposure to the novel virus." Their antibody test is set to launch in May. So there. They are huge, they’re in Switzerland, and they are worth Quazillions, so should be able to produce Mountain-loads of these tests. They’ll need to.

There are between 100 and 200 other Antibody tests all up for approval and regulation in Europe and USA currently. The companies producing tests in China, Singapore and other countries in the Far East are much more guarded about the success rates and development of antibody tests, in fact, as of today, I can’t find any definite proclamations about high success rate antibody tests from those countries at all.

FINALLY. VACCINE DAY. 23rd APRIL 2020. In the UK, in Imperial College London and in Oxford, today is day 1 of Vaccine Trials, where, at the Jenner Institute, the chief Prof says there’s an 80% chance that the vaccine they’ve developed will be successful! Hurray. It’s called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Comes from a Chimp virus. A trial has started today in Germany too. Next week, Southampton University vaccine trials start. In the US, the first clinical trial of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate, which is Moderna’s mRNA-1273, started at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) in Seattle. They say the trials will take 12 months. The numbers of affected and dying in the States are becoming HUGE despite the President’s and Republicans’ equally HUGE desire to “die on their feet”…….Yup, Merry Christmas Lockdown Lovers.

NEXT TIME We can consider what will happen with the Ramped Up testing, combined with App or ‘Appless Contact Tracing (“PHE says “Only Towns of 300,000 or more in England need apply”). We WILL be locked down until the Summer at least. How will we all cope? Is Industry and Commerce doomed? Sport, the Arts, Social Lives, Travel…..what’s to become of these?

SO WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT FISH?

Well, I was being facetious in suggesting that Boris Johnson’s comment about Taking Back Control Of Our Fish was really what the whole EU Brexit thing was all about. No, it was of course about deregulation, where rich Brits can continue to make pots and pots of money from dubious investment practices, and evil companies won’t have to abide by thoroughly decent laws to protect us all. Well, that’s what SOME people think. A shame that we could have all faced this wretched pandemic much more together, and helped to look after our friends in Spain and Italy much more, in cahoots with Germany and France, and thus attempted to fight this nasty business together. Despite our PM having his life saved by Doctors and Nurses from everywhere (including New Zealand and Portugal), the UK is 45,000 nurses short. Because we didn’t tackle the PPE and Testing regimes quickly enough, we’ve ended up with our medical saviours (plus other key workers) dying. This whole business, if we get through it in one piece, will leave scars. Some will involve feeling isolated in our homes for way too long. Some may want to be less isolated from the rest of the world too. Things will never be the same.

In many people’s views, Taking Back Control was NEVER the issue. It was always, however, the lie.

C xx

References follow, please feel free to comment (be nice) in the new comments area below each post.

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https://www.newsweek.com/ceo-worlds-largest-biotech-company-says-some-coronavirus-antibody-tests-are-disaster-1499617

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30936-3/fulltext

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-guidance-for-clinical-diagnostic-laboratories/wuhan-novel-coronavirus-who-to-call-to-request-laboratory-testing#capability

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-human-trials-of-a-uk-covid-19-vaccine-get-under-way-11977363

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-vaccine-trial-uk-gbr-intl/index.html

https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/first-us-covid-19-vaccine-trial-moderna/

https://www.biopanda.co.uk/php/products/rapid/infectious_diseases/covid19.php

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2020/04/protest-demonstration-pandemic-coronavirus-covid19/610381/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336/