NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[longfellow95]

Ah, Ex. Ever the cynic.
But at least you can be cynical both ways, as I can.
Across five countries (Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland and Norway) the percentage of all Covid deaths that occurred in care homes was between 49-64%.
So call that half.
These people can only die once. In Belgium '73% of staff and 69% of residents who tested positive were asymptomatic.'
So, in care homes across much of the world, the virus is now truly endemic. Nearly everybody has been exposed to it. And those who succumbed to it have now mostly died already.
A significant proportion of these would have died anyway.
The other thing is that care home residents are routinely given an annual flu jab. Now there is a possible problem with that; the hypothesis being that the Covid virus was able to exploit that niche. Many of these individuals (advanced age, immunosenescence, co-morbidities) would have died of flu if they hadn't been vaccinated against it. But as I said they can only die once. Remaining care home residents who have been exposed to the virus will not die from it (or they would have died already) or perhaps they will die of something else.
This is where a properly tested Covid-19 vaccine may have a rightful place i.e. to those who are exceptionally vulnerable.
But a Covid-19 vaccine won't protect against Covid-20 or Covid-21.
As always there are exceptions. Norway's care homes are reported to be typically much smaller and widely dispersed in a sparsely populated country. So their elderly folk, both in and not in care homes are still very much at risk.

This is the tragic irony. Locking down society, if it is successful in reducing transmission rates, means that all those who were isolated remain vulnerable to infection when restrictions are lifted.

One thing is not really disputed by anybody. The response to protect this vulnerable sector was extremely poor just about everywhere. Care home staff didn't have access to PPE, didn't know what was happening, and as staff went from resident to resident so did the virus. So that scenario is what caused getting on for half of all Covid fatalities in the first two months in those five countries.
It's an LSE report by the way and they listed these factors:-

This study identified the following factors as contributors to the spread of COVID-19 in care facilities:
•Staff who worked while symptomatic (maybe that should read asymptomatic)
•Staff who worked in more than one facility
•Inadequate familiarity with and adherence to Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) guidance
•Challenges to implementing proper infection control practices, including inadequate supplies of PPE and alcohol-based hand sanitizer
•Delayed recognition of access due to low index of suspicion
•Limited availability of testing
•Difficulty identifying persons with COVID-19 on the basis of signs and symptoms alone

https://ltccovid.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Mortality-associated-with-COVID-17-April-1.pdf


The Santa Clara study is not 'pure BS' I would contend, but clearly has its limitations. I wouldn't worry too much about peer review because 95% of stuff gets nodded through by peer reviewers whether it is crap or not. But I do agree that you cannot really make widespread extrapolations based on one limited location.
And Santa Clara has quite unusual demographics in that it has high ethnic diversity and high average income.
And yes these were people who came forward voluntarily. Is such a group more likely to have contracted the virus?
Well you think so. But I don't know what the baseline inclusion / exclusion was. They may have been looking for people without active symptoms to test but I don't know that.

But we do know quite a bit about NY.
According to Bloomberg from a report dated yesterday:-

A New York study seeking to measure the spread of the new coronavirus found that 13.9% of 3,000 people tested across the state had signs of the virus, one of the biggest U.S. reviews to date.

That implies that about 2.7 million residents may have had Covid-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo said. That’s about 10 times more than the official count based on the state’s testing, which covered mostly very sick patients.

The pandemic was more intense in New York City, the hardest-hit area in the U.S. There, 21.2% of people tested positive for a blood marker showing that they had been infected at some point.

And:-

The study must be analyzed further to give a clearer picture, and it’s possible that it didn’t give a representative sample because it likely missed older people staying home as well as essential workers, Cuomo said. Still, the preliminary results appear to confirm predictions that the virus has infected far more people than New York has been able to diagnose.

It also means that the fatality rate is likely lower than implied by merely examining confirmed cases and deaths. If 2.7 million people have been infected, that would put the fatality rate at about 0.5%, based on the death count of 15,500 the state used to make its calculation. Since then, the number of deaths in New York has risen to 15,740.

The current death count doesn’t include some people who may have died at home and weren’t diagnosed with Covid-19, and may also miss people who died earlier on in the outbreak before diagnostic testing became widespread.

And that's why contact tracing in NY is now a ridiculous notion, if anyone is still suggesting it. If 21.2% tested positive (vast majority asymptomatic) then they would have come into contact with nearly all of the other 78.8%! And you can't isolate the other 78.8% just in case....

So yes 0.5% statewide. But that was when the virus came through like wildfire and everything was basically temporarily overwhelmed. Now, improved regimens are used with seriously ill patients, widespread use of chloroquine, use of proning techniques to relieve respiratory failure, down side of using ventilators now recognised, proper PPE (hopefully by now) etc etc.


Are lockdowns right? Well, imo, most definitely not. It will take maybe 3 months before the whole world reaches that conclusion (I humbly suggest...)
But anyone can already look at the economic devastation being wrought in the UK and Italy, and draw conclusions about the probable health-related outcomes associated with shrinking economies, unemployment and new levels of poverty.
These were all largely avoidable...

Hindsight is great, but the focus should have been protecting the known vulnerable groups.

The UK got everything wrong and now the die is pretty well cast. There are clear reasons why the politicians adopted such disastrous policies, but I won't go into them here.
A small example of mismanagement is the rapid construction of the field hospital type facilities with thousands and thousands of beds. There are about 8 of these across the country. All are near empty or empty. They cannot take serious cases, because there are no critical care nurses. All the critical care nurses are working in existing ICU's. You will simply not see this reported.

And face masks? They don't know whether they're coming or going on that score.
From having long held the position of 'the public don't need them' they are basically now saying in effect 'we've no real idea at all'.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51205344