Did I hear this right that Covid-19 can attack the intestines? Dam, there goes my gut feeling on anything Rona related.
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Vs a normal âcrazyâ PLO game that might be 1/2/5/10 all night. Button straddling is the worst, aria and bellagio rooms are fine as well (and playground/cowboys in NA) But Bellagio regs are insufferable.
Our local casino only really runs 1/3 PLO thurs/fri, game might run from 7-230, casino closes at 3. Saw a 10k pot last year and won a $4800 pot on Halloween within half an hour of sitting down. 200bb max BI.
Just saw a tweet that Seminole hard rock has 18 tables running and over 100 on the list. I would have lost a lot of money on over under on how many tables running first day. I would have said 3 and probably took the under. I just canât even imagine playing cards right now.
There are a ton of home games everywhere rn
People do want to go out/get back to normal
Lol Florida
Yea there are a few private games still running where I live. They are amazing games and large part of my income. I havenât thought once to go play. The host even stopped asking me. Iâm just shocked that many people would go play.
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Same here, I stopped getting invites and Iâm worried I may struggle to get back in when this is over. But Iâve gotta be responsible and smart.
The old 1/2/5 game that used to run at the shit hole mentioned up thread had a $500 max BI. Saw a guy get stuck 7.5K and cash out 6K winner. We played like 30 straight hours that ânightâ.
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Shout out to donald trumpâs majestic star casino in gary indiana. Absolutely the most soul-sucking place Iâve ever been in, and I was in a jail once.
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UK scientists are to begin testing a treatment that it is hoped could counter the effects of Covid-19 in the most seriously ill patients.
It has been found those with the most severe form of the disease have extremely low numbers of an immune cell called a T-cell.
T-cells clear infection from the body.
The clinical trial will evaluate if a drug called interleukin 7, known to boost T-cell numbers, can aid patientsâ recovery.
It involves scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Kingâs College London and Guyâs and St Thomasâ Hospital.
They have looked at immune cells in the blood of 60 Covid-19 patients and found an apparent crash in the numbers of T-cells.
Prof Adrian Hayday from the Crick Institute said it was a âgreat surpriseâ to see what was happening with the immune cells.
"Theyâre trying to protect us, but the virus seems to be doing something thatâs pulling the rug from under them, because their numbers have declined dramatically.
In a microlitre (0.001ml) drop of blood, normal healthy adults have between 2,000 and 4,000 T-cells, also called T lymphocytes.
The Covid patients the team tested had between 200-1,200.
The researchers say these findings pave the way for them to develop a âfingerprint testâ to check the levels of T-cells in the blood which could provide early indications of who might go on to develop more severe disease.
But it also provides the possibility for a specific treatment to reverse that immune cell decline.
Manu Shankar-Hari, a critical care consultant at Guyâs and St Thomasâ Hospital, said that around 70% of patients that he sees in intensive care with Covid-19 arrive with between 400-800 lymphocytes per microlitre. âWhen they start to recover, their lymphocyte level also starts to go back up,â he added.
Interleukin 7 has already been tested in a small group of patients with sepsis and proved to safely increase the production of these specific cells.
In this trial, it will be given to patients with a low lymphocyte count who have been in critical care for more than three days.
Mr Shankar-Hari said: "We are hoping that [when we increase the cell count] the viral infections gets cleared.
"As a critical care physician, I look after patients who are extremely unwell and, other than supportive care, we do not have any direct active treatment against the disease.
âSo a treatment like this coming along for in the context of a clinical trial is extremely encouraging for critical care physicians across the UK.â
This research has also provided insight into the specific ways in which this disease interacts with the immune system, which Prof Hayday says will be vital as scientists around the world look for clinically valuable information.
âThe virus that has caused this completely Earth-changing emergency is unique - itâs different. It is something unprecedented.â
"The exact reason for this disruption - the spanner in the works of the T-cell system - is not at all clear to us.
âThis virus is really doing something distinct and future research - which we will start immediately - needs to find out the mechanism by which this virus is having these effects.â
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How safe are takeaways and deliveries?
Around the world there have been long queues as drive-through restaurants reopen. In the UK, pubs and bars have sold takeaway pints and supermarket deliveries remain elusive for many.
But what are the risks if you get a takeaway or a delivery?
Covid-19 is a respiratory illness; there is no evidence it can be spread via any food or food packaging. Good restaurant kitchens are most likely to be geared towards professional, hygienic food preparation, meaning there would be minimal risk from a freshly cooked takeaway meal.
And delivery slots permitting, a home food drop is less risky than a trip to a supermarket as you will avoid other shoppers.
JFC Sweden. You have to be either super genius and confident or insane/dumb to simply think the rest of the world is wrong and youâre right. Looks like we know who is in charge of Sweden right now. Kind of funny the right is obviously aboard the virus is bullshit gimme my freedom train, otherwise they would be able to point to Sweden as a massive failure of " socialism " lol
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Itâs a weird one. A friend of mine thinks that the guyâs job description must just be justifying govt policy, but Iâm not sure Iâm that cynical. This isnât Jared Kushner, he has a Ph. D in Medicine and a Masters in epidemiology, so Iâm reluctant to just write him off on the basis of having âdone my own research broâ.
OTOH, I called out that 75x number back in April when it was first mentioned (maybe not here but certainly in a COVID group chat Iâm in with irl friends). And their estimate wasnât âa bit lower than weâd thoughtâ as Tegnell would have it, it wasnât much more than a quarter of what theyâd estimated. Iâm going to want an explanation of why they fucked up that hard the first time around before I buy his latest outlandish number.
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Throughout modern human history, leaders and governments have lied to people to get them to keep working and acting normal during pandemics.
This one is proving to be no different. The USA is leading the way in this category, but if any government is putting out info that seems questionable, the simplest explanation may be that theyâre trying to keep the economy going.
Sure but Sweden seems like itâd be the last place to do that politically. Their population likely respects good science and probably wouldnât be upset/protest about restrictions but will be upset if they have way more death than everyone else. Plus with their social services system theyâd likely be way better of than most people. And I donât think their politicians are completely owned by corporations and businesses the way many western politicians are. Seems like Sweden has all the incentive to do the right thing, which is why this is so surprising to many people.
The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party is encouraging people planning to protest stay-at-home orders imposed amid the pandemic to dress like health care workers.
I mean we all know there are lots of dumb nurses but this one is definitely fake lol
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This is pathological
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That line would not be appropriate for Franklinâs bbq in a sane world. Wtf.
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One for the WAAGTD mob
It would be hard to overstate the importance of developing a vaccine to Sars-CoV-2 â itâs seen as the fast track to a return to normal life. Thatâs why the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the UK was âthrowing everything at itâ.
But while trials have been launched and manufacturing deals already signed â Oxford University is now recruiting 10,000 volunteers for the next phase of its research â ministers and their advisers have become noticeably more cautious in recent days.
This is why.
Why might a vaccine fail?
Earlier this week, Englandâs deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said the words nobody wants to hear: âWe canât be sure we will get a vaccine.â
But he was right to be circumspect.
Vaccines are simple in principle but complex in practice. The ideal vaccine protects against infection, prevents its spread, and does so safely.
But none of this is easily achieved, as vaccine timelines show.
More than 30 years after scientists isolated HIV, the virus that causes Aids, we have no vaccine. The dengue fever virus was identified in 1943, but the first vaccine was approved only last year, and even then amid concerns it made the infection worse in some people. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years.
Scientists have worked on coronavirus vaccines before, so are not starting from scratch. Two coronaviruses have caused lethal outbreaks before, namely Sars and Mers, and vaccine research went ahead for both. But none have been licensed, partly because Sars fizzled out and Mers is regional to the Middle East. The lessons learned will help scientists create a vaccine for Sars-CoV-2, but there is still an awful lot to learn about the virus.
A chief concern is that coronaviruses do not tend to trigger long-lasting immunity. About a quarter of common colds are caused by human coronaviruses, but the immune response fades so rapidly that people can become reinfected the next year.
Researchers at Oxford University recently analysed blood from recovered Covid-19 patients and found that levels of IgG antibodies â those responsible for longer-lasting immunity â rose steeply in the first month of infection but then began to fall again.
Last week, scientists at Rockefeller University in New York found that most people who recovered from Covid-19 without going into hospital did not make many killer antibodies against the virus.
âThatâs what is particularly challenging,â says Stanley Perlman, a veteran coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa. âIf the natural infection doesnât give you that much immunity except when itâs a severe infection, what will a vaccine do? It could be better, but we donât know.â If a vaccine only protects for a year, the virus will be with us for some time.
The genetic stability of the virus matters too. Some viruses, such as influenza, mutate so rapidly that vaccine developers have to release new formulations each year. The rapid evolution of HIV is a major reason we have no vaccine for the disease.
So far, the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus seems fairly stable, but it is acquiring mutations, as all viruses do. Some genetic changes have been spotted in the virusâs protein âspikesâ which are the basis of most vaccines. If the spike protein mutates too much, the antibodies produced by a vaccine will effectively be out of date and might not bind the virus effectively enough to prevent infection.
Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who helped identify some of the virusâs mutations, called them âan early warningâ.
Another challenge: making any vaccine safe
In the rush to develop a vaccine â there are now more than 100 in development â safety must remain a priority. Unlike experimental drugs for the severely ill, the vaccine will be given to potentially billions of generally healthy people.
This means scientists will have to check extremely carefully for signs of dangerous side-effects. During the search for a Sars vaccine in 2004, scientists found that one candidate caused hepatitis in ferrets. Another serious concern is âantibody-induced enhancementâ where the antibodies produced by a vaccine actually make future infections worse. The effect caused serious lung damage in animals given experimental vaccines for both Sars and Mers.
John McCauley, director of the Worldwide Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute, says it takes time to understand the particular challenges each vaccine throws up. âYou donât know the difficulties, the specific difficulties, that every vaccine will give you,â he says. âAnd we havenât got experience in handling this virus or the components of the virus.â
We should âend up with something â ⌠but what does that mean?
When the prime minister, Boris Johnson, told a No 10 press briefing that a vaccine was âby no means guaranteedâ, his chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, agreed, but added: âIâd be surprised if we didnât end up with something.â Many scientists share that view.
In all likelihood, a coronavirus vaccine will not be 100% effective.
Those in development draw on at least eight different approaches, from weakened and inactivated viruses to technologies that smuggle genetic code into the recipientâs cells, which then churn out spike proteins for the immune system to make antibodies against.
Ideally, a vaccine will generate persistent, high levels of antibodies to wipe out the virus and also âTâ cells to destroy infected cells. But each vaccine is different and today no one knows what kind of immune response is good enough.
âWe donât even know if a vaccine can produce an immune response which would protect against future infection,â says David Heymann, who led the response of the World Health Organization (WHO) to the Sars epidemic.
Early results from two frontrunner vaccines suggest they might have some use.
The US biotech firm Moderna reported antibody levels similar to those found in recovered patients in 25 people who received its vaccine.
Another vaccine from Oxford University did not stop monkeys contracting the virus, but did appear to prevent pneumonia, a major cause of death in coronavirus patients.
If humans react the same way, vaccinated people would still spread the virus, but be less likely to die from it.
How well a vaccine works determines how it is used. Armed with a highly effective vaccine that protects for several years, countries could aim for herd immunity by protecting at least two-thirds of the population.
Coronavirus patients pass the virus on to three others, on average, but if two or more are immune, the outbreak will fizzle out. That is the best-case scenario.
More likely is we will end up with a vaccine, or a number of vaccines, that are only partially effective.
Vaccines that contain weakened strains of virus can be dangerous for older people, but might be given to younger people with more robust immune systems to reduce the spread of infection.
Meanwhile, older people might get vaccines that simple prevent infections progressing to life-threatening pneumonia. âIf you donât have the ability to induce immunity, youâve got to develop a strategy for reducing serious outcomes of infection,â says McCauley.
But partially effective vaccines have their own problems: a vaccine that doesnât stop the virus replicating can encourage resistant strains to evolve, making the vaccine redundant.
So, is the virus here to stay?
The simple answer is: yes.
Hopes for eliminating the virus start with a vaccine but do not end there. âIf and when we have a vaccine, what you get is not rainbows and unicorns,â says Larry Brilliant, CEO of Pandefense Advisory, who led the WHOâs smallpox eradication programme. âIf we are forced to choose a vaccine that gives only one year of protection, then we are doomed to have Covid become endemic, an infection that is always with us.â
The virus will still be tough to conquer with a vaccine that lasts for years.
âIt will be harder to get rid of Covid than smallpox,â says Brilliant. With smallpox it was at least clear who was infected, whereas people with coronavirus can spread it without knowing. A thornier problem is that as long as the infection rages in one country, all other nations are at risk.
As David Salisbury, the former director of immunisation at the Department of Health, told a Chatham House webinar recently: âUnless we have a vaccine available in unbelievable quantities that could be administered extraordinarily quickly in all communities in the world we will have gaps in our defences that the virus can continue to circulate in.â
Or as Brilliant puts it, the virus will âping-pong back and forth in time and geographyâ.
One proposal from Gavi, the vaccine alliance, is to boost the availability of vaccines around the world through an âadvance market commitmentâ. And Brilliant believes some kind of global agreement must be hammered out now. âWe should be demanding, now, a global conference on what weâre going to do when we get a vaccine, or if we donât,â he says.
âIf the process of getting a vaccine, testing it, proving it, manufacturing it, planning for its delivery, and building a vaccine programme all over the world, if thatâs going to take as long as we think, then letâs fucking start planning it now.â
How will we live with the virus?
People will have to adapt â and life will change. Heymann says we will have to get used to extensive monitoring for infections backed up by swift outbreak containment. People must play their part too, by maintaining hand washing, social distancing and avoiding gatherings, particularly in enclosed spaces. Repurposed drugs are faster to test than vaccines, so we may have an antiviral or an antibody treatment that works before a vaccine is available, he adds. Immediate treatment when symptoms come on could at least reduce the death rate.
Yuen Kwok-yung, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Hong Kong, has advised his government that all social distancing can be relaxed â but only if people wear masks in enclosed spaces such as on trains and at work, and that no food or drink are consumed at concerts and cinemas.
At restaurants, tables will have to be shielded from each other with waiters following strict rules to prevent spreading the virus. âIn our Hong Kong perspective, the diligent and correct use of reusable masks is the most important measure,â he says.
Sarita Jane Robinson, a psychologist who studies responses to threats at the University of Central Lancashire, says people are still adapting to the ânew normalâ and that without more interventions â such as fines for not wearing face masks â âwe could see people drifting back to old behavioursâ.
We might become blase about Covid-19 deaths when life resumes and the media move on, but the seriousness of the illness will make it harder to ignore, she says.
One last possibility could save a lot of trouble. Some scientists wonder whether the common cold coronaviruses crossed into humans in the distant past and caused similar illness before settling down. âIf the virus doesnât change thereâs no reason to think that miraculously in five yearsâ time it wonât still cause pneumonia,â says Perlman. âBut thatâs the hope: that we end up with a much more mild disease and you only get a bad cold from it.â
Heymann says it is too soon to know how the pandemic will pan out. âWe donât understand the destiny of this virus,â he says. âWill it continue to circulate after its first pandemic? Or will it, like some other pandemic viruses, disappear or become less virulent? That we do not know.â
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Some solid detective found her. Looks like shes actually a CEO at a research facility for kids. So definitely not a nurse, just a shitbag CEO who probably wants her employees BACK TO WORK.
She looks crazy as fuck.
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They even tell on themselves with the fake nurse thing. So trapped inside their stereotyped world view she couldnât even make herself play the part of a fake doctor.
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