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Belgian scientific base in Antarctica engulfed by Covid despite strict measures
- pezzana 5y ago> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival. This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.
- aix1 5y agoWhat are some realistic alternatives?
- pezzana 5y agoOne would be to stop sending groups of people to that station. Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.
- leishman 5y agoGoing back to normal and stopping the theater.
- makk 5y agoDefine normal.
- bmeski 5y agoNo mandates. No vaccine passbooks or apps. Return jobs to employees lost because of vaccine compliance/rebuild small businesses (If this is somehow possible but the damage is already done). No mask requirements. Covid-19 Vaccines are available and treated in the same way as flu vaccines once FDA approved. Yknow, normal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 5y ago
- trophycase 5y agoThis is one of the worst nitpicks I've ever seen in my life. "Normal" implies removing all virus related mandates and restrictions. It's obvious what gp meant
- TMWNN 5y ago
- akomtu 5y agoIIRC, this is a well known rhetoric technique: flood the opponent with irrelevant facts, so he doesnt have time to refute them all. But that's for in person debates, with finite time to respond.
- XzetaU8 5y agoGish gallop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
- tomrod 5y agoEveryone wants this. We should do it slowly, but we should do it. In the US, omnicron is going fast. Hopefully, and I say this with week old information in a huge information-differential environment that evolves hourly, omnicron itself is a step towards mitigation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- qbasic_forever 5y agoMandatory vaccines and boosters, plus testing for antibody titer levels.
- _dain_ 5y ago
- Jabbles 5y ago> ineffective I don't think it's clear evidence of this, but you could definitely say it's not 100% effective. Whether it is useful is not something that you cannot determine from this story alone.
- Gigachad 5y agoThe problem is being 99.9% effective just isn't good enough. One person slips through and it's all over. It isn't realistically possible to keep covid out of areas.
- midasuni 5y agoNew Zealand has done a pretty good job over the last two years. Whether the costs outweigh the benefits is a separate question
- TeeMassive 5y agoThey had 1000 community cases today https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-data-and-statistics/covid-19-current-cases https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
- throwaway788 5y agoThats over the last 21 days. There was 47 community cases yesterday.
- midasuni 5y agoSince vaccinating they’ve relaxed restrictions
- lostlogin 5y agoAnd poorly behaved DJs aside, it’s going ok. Time will tell if the policies in place will deal with Omicron, though.
- freetinker 5y agoI’m not so sure; respectfully disagree. This only talks about process stricture, not efficacy or process compliance/lapse. Plausible hypothesis, but needs more data.
- csunbird 5y agoHuman error/non-compliance is a thing, to be honest. Although, this can also mean the procedures do not work as well.
- freetinker 5y agoGood point. However, one can’t conclude that with any reasonable certainty from the article.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoYep. Likely self-supervised isolation/quarantine and someone broke the rules. That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.
- avereveard 5y agoOr some asymptomatic carrier administering a set of the test, or some of the cleaning staff coughing in the room before the tests. That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.
- yosito 5y agoIf I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few seconds is a high risk activity.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoit’s only clear if they can verify 100% compliance
- Someone 5y agoNot even then. If they can verify 100% compliance, we can adjust our estimates about the false negative rate of these tests (which we already know not to be perfect) (And maybe not even that. There could have been an infection between the tests “when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica” and actual departure)
- keyle 5y agoIt only takes one slip...
- jobe_br 5y agoTwo options: quarantine bubble failure or incubation longer than .. 15 days? Both are possible, though the former is more likely. 5 day intervals for incubation seem too short for 100% safety. I believe omicron has some data points of longer incubation already.
- baxtr 5y agoMost probably people not staying in quarantine or still get infected in transit somehow.
- ssl232 5y agoThird option: flawed hypothesis. Swabbing the nose or throat and performing subsequent RT-PCR analysis is not an infallable indicator of whether or not someone is free from the virus SARS-CoV-2 or infected with or likely to become infected with the respiratory disease COVID-19. Before 2020 such tests were typically only used as a part of a diagnosis by a medical professional upon consultation, typically also alongside symptoms. The limitations of testing were well understood before 2020 but somehow that all got lost in the panic. Another point is that there are animal reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2. We've known this since well before the zero-covid debacle, making such a plan was doomed to fail, as it did. It's likely that the virus can live in intestinal tracts of animals, including humans, for long periods without being detected and destroyed by the host's immune system. This makes the use of negative nose/throat swab tests as a guarantee of no subsequent infection a fallacy. The way we deal with COVID is to stop testing asymptomatic people and use the plethora of effective early treatment protocols we've developed since as early as December 2019 to vastly reduce the need for hospital treatment in those that do develop symptoms.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoNose swabs reveal whether you're shedding the particles and thus infectious. It doesn't matter if you're infected if you're not shedding the virus. They are also exceptionally reliable. The home test kit I used had a sub-1% false negative rate.
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- qbasic_forever 5y agoThere's a weak link somewhere--I wonder if it's flight crews in this case. If the pilot and other crew for the leg from South Africa to Antarctica weren't also isolating 10 days and tested at the same time, then there's your infection vector.
- tcoff91 5y agoThere’s also the factor that some people have a longer incubation period. Early on in the pandemic there were reports of some people having 21-27 day incubation periods before testing positive and getting sick. I think it’s less common now with delta and omicron but likely still possible in rare instances.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- decebalus1 5y agoRight. Because something needs to be airtight 100% successful with 100% compliance and 100% enforcement or nothing at all. As with American politics, there is no gray area ever. I completely disagree with your statement. The goals of the current paradigm of dealing with the pandemic is to minimize the strain on various processes from a public health perspective. Anything moving the needle is effective. That's why guidelines are like 'gatherings of 20 people or more'. It's to minimize spread, not completely obliterate it. Comparing this incident with public health directives is disingenuous at best. It's the exact same line of thinking about masks. Oh, masks aren't 100% effective in preventing infection. Therefore, they're useless so nobody should wear them, ever. We've also sent some people to the IIS and they didn't test positive. What does that say about the current paradigm?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tandymodel100 5y agoI'd say "overkill" over ineffective. I do think that if all of these scientists were dying of the virus it was extremely ineffective, but thankfully they are not.
- NoblePublius 5y agoInteresting headline choice leading to the sentence “No severe symptoms have been reported as of yet.”
- bee_rider 5y agoIt isn't that surprising, right? The population is 25 people, probably a slight skew toward being a little fitter than average given that it is an installation for field research, and I'd hope they are required to be vaccinated. Severe cases should be pretty rare I guess.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoThe point of the article is that Antarctica's research stations--some of the most remote and isolated places on the planet--are now suffering COVID-19 outbreaks. This isn't some article trying to massage public opinion or make people feel better about ignoring the pandemic. It's an interesting look at how even places that think they are doing everything correctly to avoid infection are... not avoiding infection.
- chana_masala 5y ago> suffering COVID-19 outbreaks. The word choice foe describing covid over these years (!) is quite exaggerated. If you read the article, where is the suffering?
- gerikson 5y agoTIL Belgium has an Antarctic research station.
- 317070 5y agoIn some sense, yes. You could also say that Alain Hubert has an Antarctic station, he just happened to be Belgian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Hubert https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Hubert
- gfykvfyxgc 5y agoDoing scientific research confers some sort of control over the continent.
- JBiserkov 5y agoArticle IV of the Treaty states in part, “No acts or activities taking place while the present Treaty is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica or create any rights of sovereignty in Antarctica.” https://www.asoc.org/advocacy/antarctic-governance/overview-of-antarctic-governance https://www.asoc.org/advocacy/antarctic-governance/overview-...
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThe countries claiming a slice of the pie aren't signatories to that treaty.
- jcranmer 5y agoActually, they are. The original 12 signatories of the Antarctic Treaty are the 7 countries that have claimed Antarctic territory, the US and the USSR (who both expressly reserved the right to claim Antarctic territory), and Belgium, Japan, and South Africa. Which is to say, most of the people who cared enough to sign the treaty already had existing claims they didn't want repudiated by the treaty (which is why Article IV, in its entirety, also says basically "this doesn't affect any existing claims").
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
- petercooper 5y agoViruses are interesting things. I once enjoyed a case study about an outbreak of common cold on an Antarctic base that only happened after 17 weeks of isolation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/ (I'm no virologist but given that the common cold didn't seem to be impacted by the severe lockdowns in the UK at all, whereas flu was, I've gotten the - uneducated - feeling the cold is a bit like some STDs in the way it can linger around in people and pop up whenever the conditions are right. Maybe some COVID variant will end up similarly persistent and endemic?)
- CryptoPunk 5y agoThe common cold is a set of viral infections caused by an assortment of viruses, that includes amongst them, four different coronaviruses. If COVID-19 were to evolve to become milder, it could become a fifth coronavirus that causes the common cold.
- TeeMassive 5y agoOr the freezing temperatures allows it to survive outside. For example your spit outside the shelter, you go outside 17 weeks later and then come back and remove the snow on your boots which are now covered in contaminated water.
- MobileVet 5y agoStrep can lay ‘dormant’ in people for a while. Two months after the original outbreak and lockdown my daughter got strep. We hadn’t seen a soul. Dr said one of us was likely the carrier.
- desine 5y agoHad your daughter had it before? Once you get strep, you tend to get it semi-frequently. I get it once every couple of years. I always kind of wondered if it's like a viral infection such as cold sores where it lays dormant permanently, and flares up on occasion. However it is bacterial, and not viral, which counts against that idea.
- anonygler 5y agoWith a minuscule fatality rate at this point, all these measures seem like a massive waste of energy and resources. Masks, vaccines, dividers, hand sanitizer… none of it actually stops transmission. Spare everyone from this godawful ceremony.
- makk 5y agoHospitalizations tend to precede fatalities. While I hope you're right, it's too early (by a couple weeks in the US, at least) to start trumpeting a "minuscule fatality rate". https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-hospital?country=USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-ho...
- anonygler 5y agoUnless you’re elderly or have health issues, Covid fatality rate was already very, very low. Therapeutics make that even better.
- kuraudo 5y agoThat's complete nonsense. If covid wasn't as deadly as we have been reliably informed, then they would not be forcing us to go through these otherwise-draconian and insane mandates or lockdowns.
- benjaminwootton 5y agoI just spent 10 minutes Googling for a good source and surprisingly couldn’t find one. For under 65 say, the fatality rate is well under 1%. This was before vaccines and Omnicron is estimated as 70% lower. We must be well under the IFR of flu already.
- _dain_ 5y agoI think the person you're replying to was being sarcastic
- cmurf 5y agoWhat's the quarantine situation? Shared bathrooms? High enough virus density in the quarantine room that a meal delivery person gets a blast through the door slot? Or some other source of virus escape?
- Thorrez 5y agoThe quarantine in Cape Town or in the base? The article is unclear, but it sounds like people don't quarantine at the base normally. This person did after testing positive 7 days after arrival, but by then it was too late.
- akomtu 5y agoWhat's going to happen if they simply do nothing? Basically, if they treat it like flu?
- jhugo 5y agoMost likely nothing serious, but given their remote location, if they get unlucky and even one person needs hospital treatment beyond what's possible at the base, that's a big problem.
- tinus_hn 5y agoJust like when any other issue arises that requires hospitalization.
- tjpnz 5y agoThe issues they're not able to deal with tend to be slow burners. You might get a week to plan an evacuation or supply drop for a cancer patient. But with Covid Pneumonia not so much.
- tinus_hn 5y agoSo what would a mainland hospital be able to do what they can’t do? Using what supplies they can’t get in advance?
- jhugo 5y agoThat's a great question. I wonder if they took a belt-and-braces approach — as well as all the quarantining and testing, bring along some remdesivir/molnupiravir/ritonavir/etc, monoclonal antibodies and so on, just in case you get really really unlucky and one of the (presumably quite fit and healthy) people ends up with a severe case.
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoIt would very likely spread and infect more people. And by 'it' I mean awareness about how most of the measures are useless and that the vast majority of infections are benign.
- anm89 5y agoIts almost like canceling all of humanity although it accomplishes extremely little but a CYA for the politicians is not the best way to handle this. Im sure when are fighting the 200th variant whose symptoms are a day of fatigue we will almost be ready to end the restrictions. And just for the record, im 2x vaccinated, not an antivaxxer or denier or something.
- zzzeek 5y agoIt's 100% about hospital capacity and mass death. When hospitals around the country are no longer turning away cancer patients needing treatments and have plenty of ICUs for heart attacks and such, when they no longer have to rent fleets of refrigerator trucks every outbreak to store the bodies, the restrictions will end. It has always been about that and nothing more.
- trentnix 5y agoThey could start by not terminating perfectly capable doctors and nurses who have decided, for whatever their reasons may be, to refuse vaccination. I’m vaccinated (and boosted) but I cannot understand why it was okay for these people to be on the frontlines of the fight for over a year but suddenly they are no longer acceptable. And I find no convincing argument as to why actually recovering from infection counts for nothing, but the vaccine does. The decision to terminate unvaccinated individuals reeks of bureaucracy, not an understanding of science or medicine.
- Spooky23 5y agoIt’s pretty simple. They are more likely to get sick and more likely to infect those whose care they are entrusted with. There’s a long history of this type of sanction. If you are a provider or nurse in a hospital who fails to get a measles, hepatitis, or rabies (after exposure) shot, you’ll be terminated for cause in many places. The reason why recovery doesn’t “count” the same as vaccination is that immunity doesn’t last very long - 60-90 days typically. Some countries, such as Israel will recognize a single Pfizer dose and recovery as immune, if you have a negative PCR test.
- moltar 5y agoI imagine they probably have a central air system recirculating the air.
- kmeisthax 5y agoIt's Antartica. If they aren't recirculating, they're dying of hypothermia.
- kolinko 5y agoRecuperation also works :)
- wrycoder 5y agoIt's been known for a long time that a hepa filter in the air handler would be a smart idea.
- DavidAdams 5y agoA top flight HVAC system will have a Heat Recovery Ventilator, which is a heat exchanger that warms up incoming fresh air using the heat from the exhaust air.
- ed25519FUUU 5y agoNo severe symptoms? Great! Let them all go back to normal after this. Remove the social distancing, the masks, the plastic shields. Let them party, dance, etc It’s torture to take an already isolated group and isolate them with “strict measures” which apparently do nothing to stop infection.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoAll staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival. To me, that sounds like lots of testing, not strict health measures. There is a difference.
- jackson1442 5y agothe strict health measures are the quarantines and consequences of testing. what happens if someone tests positive?
- DoreenMichele 5y agoSeriously not impressed. Just spitballing here but to me strict health measures would be something like: 1. Here is the antiviral prophylactic we expect you to take starting X days before you depart and continuing until X days after you arrive. 2. Here is the shower at the entrance to the base that you must use before entering the base proper. 3. Here are the OTC meds or other protocols we expect to keep coughs and such under control in common areas if you are having any issues. 4. Here are your instructions for how to do lung clearance in the shower to minimize coughing and such in common areas. I'm sure I could come up with more if I really needed to. This is just off the cuff for the sake of conversation with an internet stranger, so not much effort or thought has gone into it.
- nradov 5y agoYou've got to be kidding. Effective antiviral drugs aren't at all benign; it would be completely unethical to administer them on a prophylactic basis to healthy patients who don't even have a confirmed exposure. There is no reliable evidence that showers are effective for controlling respiratory viruses. OTC cough suppressants are nearly useless, barely better than placebos. https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/otc-meds https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/otc-meds Seriously those are almost all bad or pointless suggestions reflecting a lack of relevant medical knowledge.
- sebow 5y agoGee, maybe because you can't stop such a virus? I legitimately am curious about any decent intelligence test being done among the people who truly believe in measures like masks, restrictions, and even vaccines.Though i know that ironically the first or second biggest group to not get vaccinated are people with 1 or more PhDs, but people who think these are long-term solutions, or any solutions at all are pretty delusional.And this has been partially proven: Sweden is doing fine, Florida is doing fine, any region that hasn't been building up hotbeds of infectious sedentary people is doing kind of fine, at least compared to the "predictions of specialists".Now this is not a cut&dry issue, partially the biggest factor for this is because the more urban lifestyle you have, the bigger the health problems, but that's precisely why the lockdowns will never work. Stay safe & HN(Y) everyone.I don't think it will soon be over, because this "pandemic"[it's actually more like an endemic disease but whatever] has stopped being about health since half into 2020, and politicians & people in any power don't have any incentives and reasons to let the power go.Especially not until the 1984 measures are all put in place.
- sneak 5y agoThey didn't fare much better with alien shapeshifters, either.
- brainbag 5y agoPeter Watts wrote a short story from the perspective of The Thing. It's very good, like all his work. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
- dylan604 5y agoThanks for this. Never would have thought of this perspective for myself. "What would the alien be thinking?"
- normalaccess 5y agoI wouldn’t be surprised if this is a false positive due to the CDC is now recommending against PCR tests as they can’t tell between corona or the flu. I hate to say it but I think some of the people who were saying the numbers were wrong might be right, we might have been counting the flu this whole time along with the coronavirus. https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
- CharlesW 5y ago> …the CDC is now recommending against PCR tests as they can’t tell between corona or the flu. False: https://khn.org/news/article/fact-check-cdc-pcr-covid-test-distinguishes-from-flu-eua-request-withdrawal/ https://khn.org/news/article/fact-check-cdc-pcr-covid-test-d...
- belltaco 5y agoPlease, not this misinformation and fake news on HN too. There's enough of it on Facebook and right wing circles.
- chana_masala 5y agoHow? That's what the linked CDC page says.
- microtherion 5y agoNo, it's not. What the page says is that ONE PCR test (the oldest one) is being phased out. If you look at the page of tests still authorised, you'll see lots of PCR tests: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-emergency-use-authorizations-medical-devices/in-vitro-diagnostics-euas-molecular-diagnostic-tests-sars-cov-2 https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-disease-2019... And the page says nothing about the now-withdrawn test being unable to differentiate between Covid and Influenza (which is not true). It encourages the development of tests that test for BOTH (since the patient is being tested anyway), but points out that those results must be reported separately.
- agsamek 5y agoSeems like a lot of testing and no quarantine before the departure and on the arrival. What can go wrong? Edit: I missed the 10 day quarantine in South Africa. So it is not so bad.
- tinus_hn 5y ago> All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. But of course, there could have been more quarantining.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fithisux 5y agoVery normal.
- jinpa_zangpo 5y agoif nothing else, this story should put a stake in the heart of the idea that we can achieve "Zero Covid". If testing and quarantine didn't prevent an outbreak here, it never will.
- q1w2 5y agoCovid is endemic - it will never leave us. Even if all vaccines worked perfectly and forever and every single person got vaccinated - we would still see new infections, because animals also get and transmit covid. I don't think I've seen anyone with any reputation make any claim about "zero covid".
- h0nd 5y agoYet many people get this idea through media and governments.
- h0nd 5y agoIt always sounded very utopian to me to 'try to get rid of the virus' and 'fight it' the way they did. No surprises so far.
- bigodbiel 5y agoAnd some people still insist that if we just locked down the world for x time the virus would go away.