Comments by "Daniel Sandberg" (@ddanielsandberg) on "Dr. John Campbell" channel.

I'm not so sure we should call a resurgence in countries that are now opening up a "second wave". The entire world is still in the middle of the first wave, some countries just managed to pause it. The second wave will be late autumn/winter and that will be much more difficult to control because people will be people.
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Why do people keep spreading the lie that Sweden went for herd immunity? I mean, do you live here? Have you followed our press briefings basically every day since February? Everybody not living in Sweden seems to think that we did nothing and "rolled the dice" - herd immunity FTW! Of course that is what the international media has been saying. This is nothing but a propaganda proxy war where half the world seems to want Sweden to suffer and 100,000 of us die. Because they are terrified that it would turn out that forcibly locking their populace in their home was generally a bad idea. The US and Australian media are the worst offenders here. Just because we don't order people to stay at home, or give people fines for stepping out of their homes, or keeping children out of school, or shutting down peoples livelihood does not mean nothing was done. We are recommended to socially distance which works relatively well, events over 50 are banned (sports, cultural, etc), to stay at home if we feel the slightest sick (which most of us can due to our social safety net), wash hands and avoid crowded places and public transports. After we realized that we had been unable to contain it in the third week of March and had a large community spread - mostly due to complete unpreparedness and the abysmal rate of testing among other things (because Sweden is a bureaucratic hellhole) we were told to work from home, colleges and universities switched to online teaching, cinemas closed, a lot of places closed voluntarily for some weeks and months (like gyms, stores, etc), some restaurants switched to take-away only and a lot had to close because they had either no customers, no staff or unable to follow the guidelines. Stockholm turned into a ghost-town in days (for a while it was as eerie as the pictures we have seen from New York in April). I have been working home alone for 33 weeks and the few times I've been to the office I had to walk 10km and 10km home again. I cannot visit my old sick mom and I haven't met any of my friends for 7 months. Some others take a more lax approach, fine, I'm not. We basically did a self-imposed lockdown. We are trying to walk the line between reducing the impact of the pandemic in all aspects of society and take a more holistic view. The public health agency is responsible for the general public health. This includes everything from domestic abuse, cancer, dietary/exercise to poverty and children's education. So not only the health of the populace for this year, but the health of everyone for the next 10, 20 and 30 years. It's like the world went mad and every country turned it into a d*ck measurement contest. No solidarity, no empathy, nothing but a bunch of nationalistic 15 year old boys. It's been turned into a contest where points are measured in harshness of lockdown and deaths per capita. It is all very convenient isn't it? When people have a single leader to place all the decisions on, and therefore also someone to place all the blame on when things does not work out. If people would dare to look themselves in the mirror they would realize that most of the failures comes from the people being selfish and not caring of others - Sweden is no exception to this, there are egocentric dungheads here too. The point is that the government does not exist to hold your hand, to tell you what to do or to think for you so you don't have to take any personal responsibility, crisis or no crisis. Maybe Richard Dawkins was right when he called humanity "a selfish, condescending hairless ape." It's amazing that we are even able to make a sandwich without starting a war. According to the Swedish Communicable Diseases Act (2004:168), individuals can be put in quarantine but not town or cities. It is possible, however, to impose a lockdown on a particular geographical area. An area corresponding to a few blocks may be put in lockdown. This means, among other things, that it is prohibited to enter or leave the area. A lockdown can be used when one or more people have fallen ill with a life-threatening disease within a particular geographical area. The lockdown then serves to make it possible to find the source, and to identify any other cases of disease or transmission. A lockdown is a temporary intervention in order to investigate cases of disease or disease transmission. Hence, it cannot be used in order to prevent people from travelling in or out of an area for a longer period of time. [Last time something like this was enforced was when we had a Cholera outbreak in Stockholm killing 4000 - in 1834.] Since the corona virus causing COVID-19 is classified as dangerous to society, the county medical officers [not the government] can decide to put healthy people in quarantine. This means that people are ordered to stay within a particular building, e.g. their home, in a specific part of a building, or in a geographical area. However, putting someone in quarantine is a forceful intervention, strictly regulated in the Communicable Diseases Act. If a less intrusive intervention, for example particular hygiene routines or suspension from work, school or daycare, can achieve the same effect it should be used instead. The Communicable Diseases Act also states that it is each citizens responsibility to take actions to reduce the spread of a dangerous disease. All Swedes have the right of free movement within the country and this right cannot be imposed upon in peacetime. All children have the right to go school, even in crisis or wartime. Also, our constitution states that ministerial rule is forbidden - meaning that it's up to the (non-political) public health agency to provide recommendations and restrictions - not the government. The government may create (temporary) laws to implement the recommendations and instructions from the public health agency if needed. If the PM would start giving orders outside his purview there would be an impeachment coming. We also do not have a state of emergency law. We have a new temporary "crisis law" enacted in April that gives the government the power to take some emergency measures without going through parliament. What those measures could be is a bit unclear but it's mostly centered around emergency economic and resource management, no-one have tried to push it into any area that goes against our constitution. Everything is decentralized, regions and municipalities are responsible for their local healthcare/covid-response, everyone is responsible so no-one is responsible and it took three months to get any kind of large scale testing going and that didn't happen before the government gave $700M to the regions for TTI. What actually happened was that the public health agency and politicians was asleep at the wheel. And that is how we failed in three words: Too. Damn. Slow.
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Welcome to Sweden. Same issue here. Even though we are well aware of the general seriousness of the situation, the absolute sh*tshow that is the "elder care" is finally being recognized. We've known that it has been bad for years but everyone "in charge" has been in denial until now. More than half of our deaths have been in care homes or old/sick people being cared for in their homes. I'm so angry at the state of the healthcare in Sweden. We used to have a national emergency stockpile of medicine, PPE, etc. and then we sold the pharmacies to private interests and the stockpile was dismantled. We used to have a military stockpile for wartime healthcare, it was rather old but instead of keeping it fresh and up to date they burned most of it and didn't replace it. Yes, you read that right. Burned it! We used to have the best healthcare in the world, now we have the least amount of ICU beds per capita in Europe. *The endgame of a 20 year long story of shooting ourselves in the foot: * February: "We are well prepared!" March: "-What do you mean 'we are running out of medication and PPE'? -We burned it, sir!" April: "-Why are so many dying in our care homes? We were told we had the best healthcare. -We sold it, sir!" May: "-Oh, OOH. Our healthcare actually sucks! Maybe we shouldn't have dismantled and sold it off to private interests. -Duh!" June: "-Hey EU, our healthcare workers are burned out and recovering from COVID-19, can we borrow some from you? -Same here, good luck!"
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Last I heard (regarding the half-dose efficacy of the AZ/Oxford vaccine) the hypothesis is that it's due to the immune system attacking the Adenovirus vector when given full dose. This would mean that people produced a less strong immune response to the Coronavirus spike protein. A lower prime dose keeps the immune system slow enough that a better level of memory-B/T cells will have time to be produced. From this perspective the mRNA vaccines are better, given they are coded to make the right epitopes of the virus. Pity they are so expensive and difficult to transport and store. Pfizer and Moderna really need to sell them at cost.
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Random thought: What if we had the first wave a year ago, it then mutated into a more virulent strain in November and what we are experiencing now is the second wave?
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What? No, let me correct you. 1. Every year about 90,000 people die in Sweden. The excess deaths per 100,000 population has been going down for the past 30 years. Some years it's less (like the 2018/2019 light flu season) and some years it's more (like the 2017/2018 flu season followed by a heatwave). 2. During the first half of the year about 47,000 dies and in the second half about 43,000 dies. This is due to that the flu peaks during the first half of the year and long dark winters also takes its toll on the old and sick. 3. This year about 51,000 died in the first half of the year, giving us an excess mortality of about 4,000 for the period. 4. We have had a negative excess death since six weeks back (which is expected after a period of excess deaths). Currently we have had the equivalent of three weeks of extra deaths this year.
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AstraZeneca didn't file a request for conditional approval to the EMA until the 30th of December.
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Question. How do you handle this in a country where you can't make masks compulsory, cannot forcibly close restaurants/gyms/stores, cannot force companies to send their workers home, cannot stop people from traveling and moving about, cannot impose curfew or a state of emergency, cannot enforce quarantine of 1000's of sick people? :(
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There are vaccines in the works in Sweden as well. Although those are aimed at something further down the stream (Phase 1 testing in 2-3 years) which targets coronoviruses in general. Kind of larger solution against similar viruses and future outbreaks.
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This is an amazing discovery. A Neanderthal gene present in half of people in South Asia and in one sixth of Europeans, but mostly not present in Africans increases the risk of severe COVID-19 by a factor of 3. "The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3
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Does vitamin-D have any effect on the amount of M-MDSC cells? I'm wondering, because this is the second paper pointing in the same direction - to many suppressor cells as the cause for the low levels of T-cells seen in COVID-19 patients. https://news.ki.se/myeloid-immune-cells-in-the-blood-tied-to-severe-covid-19
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Hi Dr. Campbell. I just wanted to make you aware of graphs with total vs. new (that can in-fact go downwards) over at https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ The logic behind it is discussed in video by Minutephysics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc It also have a function where you can change the doubling rate and place the line over the current value of a country. Keep up the good work and stay safe.
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A study was just released in Sweden in where they followed 160 patients since March. What they found was that patients that fared worse had an over-representation of Myeloid suppressor cells; which regulates down T-cells. Vitamin D takes part in the control of Myeloid supressor cells and helps moderate the immune system. "COVID-19 patients had fewer T cells, and displayed downregulated expression of the CD3ζ chain. Ordinal regression showed that early M-MDSC frequency predicted subsequent disease severity. In conclusion, M-MDSCs expand in blood of COVID-19 patients, suppress T cells and strongly associate with disease severity, suggesting a role for M-MDSCs in the dysregulated COVID-19 immune response. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.08.20190272v1
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A misunderstanding. It's called pooled testing and is a way to speed up the lab process and it works as follows: 1. Mix samples from 192 different tests. 2. If the pool tests negative, they are all negative. Done! 3a. If the pool tests positive, at-least one of the includes samples are positive. 3b. Then test each one of the 192 samples individually to figure out which ones in the pool were positive. Since >95% of samples taken tests negative this increases the throughput and speeds up the response time enormously. It's about ruling out COVID-19 and then zone in on the positive cases.
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If I remember correctly from biology class; newborn receive their immunity from the mother a few month before birth and also after through breastfeeding. This immunity lasts from a few months up to a year. There is probably an evolutionary benefit in why babies and young children instinctively bites and tastes everything - training their immune system while still having some level of protection from the mother. As we grow up we are exposed to a lot of different viruses, especially common cold like rhino and corona viruses. By the time we get to be 20 years old it's seldom more than a day or two of sniffles and sore throat. Imagine what would happen if you had lived alone in a cave in Siberia for 50 years and never been exposed to any of these viruses, until one day you were. Wouldn't you get really really sick? It would be "novel" for you so to speak. Isn't this what happened to the native Americans when the Europeans came. We basically caused a pandemic in the Americas from viruses that were common in every day life in Europe at the time. So what am I trying to say? Shouldn't we expect this, after a few years, to turn into a common cold with mild reinfections every couple of years? Some people will get it often, others almost never, some would be asymptomatic, others would have a man-cold for a week, some would need hospitalization - everyone is different. The elderly and at-risk population would of course need a vaccine but most others wouldn't. Just a thought.
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Do you have anything to say about the drug in development called APN01? APN01 is the recombinant form of the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (rhACE2), and has the potential to block the infection of cells by the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, and reduce lung injury. The Phase II trial aims to treat 200 severely infected COVID-19 patients, and the first patients are expected to be dosed shortly. APN01 has already been shown to be safe and well tolerated in completed phase 2 trials for pulmonary arterial hypertension and ARDS.
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If the virus was around way before it exploded in feb/mar 2020 must that not mean it mutated or recombined with another virus and turned bad?
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