SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Link

Shows there is at least some evidence for closing restaurants/pubs.

Would be keen to see the PHE data on this when they announce it. If it's anywhere near 41% of cases, it'll represent a titanic size swing in the data (Purple & Yellow as Food/Restaurant/Other) from the prior weeks.

It's no surprise though as Chris Whitty said back in August, if schools and workplaces are to remain open and the R rate is under control, then everything else must shut. The government, if they are to pursue that approach, need to address the support package in line with their evidence.

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Would be keen to see the PHE data on this when they announce it. If it's anywhere near 41% of cases, it'll represent a titanic size swing in the data (Purple & Yellow as Food/Restaurant/Other) from the prior weeks.

It's no surprise though as Chris Whitty said back in August, if schools and workplaces are to remain open and the R rate is under control, then everything else must shut. The government, if they are to pursue that approach, need to address the support package in line with their evidence.

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The reason they’re not picking up cases in pubs/restaurants seems to be because the tracing system is so poor. In workplaces and institutions it’s easy to identify and test all close contacts but they seem to be really bad about doing the same “out in the field”.

This new report (which I would also like to see) takes a different approach and tracks back the movements of cases and sees if there’s an overlap in their movements. Be interesting to see the detail but it was always likely that we would have a much higher rate of cases being linked to very controlled environments than we would from people milling around from pub to restaurant to pub (and on to a house party) on a Friday/Saturday night.
 
The reason they’re not picking up cases in pubs/restaurants seems to be because the tracing system is so poor. In workplaces and institutions it’s easy to identify and test all close contacts but they seem to be really bad about doing the same “out in the field”.

This new report (which I would also like to see) takes a different approach and tracks back the movements of cases and sees if there’s an overlap in their movements. Be interesting to see the detail but it was always likely that we would have a much higher rate of cases being linked to very controlled environments than we would from people milling around from pub to restaurant to pub (and on to a house party) on a Friday/Saturday night.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...e-alert-about-an-outbreak-in-a-venue-12099651

According to this after two weeks of the uk covid app only one person in the country has ever been sent an alert.

I honestly believe measures like this will make a difference, but they have to work first.
 
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...e-alert-about-an-outbreak-in-a-venue-12099651

According to this after two weeks of the uk covid app only one person in the country has ever been sent an alert.

I honestly believe measures like this will make a difference, but they have to work first.

through contact in hospitality not just told a single person to isolate through the whole app. It’s pretty clear from the outside it’s schools and universities driving this but they can’t be seen to go back on education so the next target has to be hospitality it’s the only one that’s actually enforceable as the house hold meeting is impossible to police.
 
Zlatan Ibrahimovic could miss the Milan derby next week after AC Milan revealed that the veteran Swede had again tested positive for coronavirus.

saw this on today’s press headlines. 2 points;

1. reinfection didn’t take long if it’s not an error
2. COVID is a brave boy squaring up to Zlatan twice
 
One person in the country or one person from that venue?
You could read it either way but I don't see it would be deemed newsworthy unless it meant the country. As Bos says, from using the app to enter venues. Speaking from sunny Lancashire a lot of venues have closed due to staff being infected in that time, there should have been hundreds, if not thousands, of alerts.
 
An interesting read about educational settings and super spreader events

A study of more than a half-million people in India who were exposed to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 suggests that the virus’ continued spread is driven by only a small percentage of those who become infected.

Furthermore, children and young adults were found to be potentially much more important to transmitting the virus — especially within households — than previous studies have identified, according to a paper by researchers from the United States and India published Sept. 30 in the journal Science.

Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways and mortality rate of 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. It is the largest contact tracing study — which is the process of identifying people who came into contact with an infected person — conducted in the world for any disease.
Largest COVID-19 contact tracing study to date finds children key to spread, evidence of superspreaders
 

Big numbers so likely to be reliable data. I always find the attack rate stuff fascinating. You can live with somebody who is acutely unwell with covid and still have a 91% chance of not getting infected. Puts those white knuckle trips to the supermarket back in March/April in perspective!
 
It’s blatantly obvious. Countries like Italy are still plenty warm enough too. Obviously all those other things have an impact too but not to this degree. It baffles me that apparently closing schools is completely off the table.


Is it not blatantly obvious why they won't be closing the schools?
 
A fair few uni of Manchester students in hospital judging by reports today. Not good, but we still have a lot of tired people maybe optimistically promoting no new measures. I can’t think of a worse point of the season to be anything but cautious.

Saw that in the evening news, didn't see it anywhere else? Its a joke of a paper and would take anything in it with a pinch of salt.
 
Big numbers so likely to be reliable data. I always find the attack rate stuff fascinating. You can live with somebody who is acutely unwell with covid and still have a 91% chance of not getting infected. Puts those white knuckle trips to the supermarket back in March/April in perspective!
Yeah. In some countries, there were cases where workers were sharing the same 10 person dorm room for months and did not get infected. The whole thing is just counter intuitive. We really still have so much to learn about it
 
While children may not expel the virus as much or carry it in large numbers according to some data, they could be an important link still.

The schools will be a hub or swap meet of the area, it might be small transfers but what happens is one child passes it to another, they go home and like most have very close contact with their parent(s), then the parent will expel the virus more effectively to their adult friends and family by just being in their presence.

Some of the adults become super spreaders and start off a chain of them.
 
saw this on today’s press headlines. 2 points;

1. reinfection didn’t take long if it’s not an error
2. COVID is a brave boy squaring up to Zlatan twice
I’m hearing more and more cases of reinfection. Scary stuff.

side story given the number of cases with footballers catching this and with cases on the rise surely it’s only a Matter of time until sport is called off again. Probably said in hope more than anything else!
 
Would be keen to see the PHE data on this when they announce it. If it's anywhere near 41% of cases, it'll represent a titanic size swing in the data (Purple & Yellow as Food/Restaurant/Other) from the prior weeks.

It's no surprise though as Chris Whitty said back in August, if schools and workplaces are to remain open and the R rate is under control, then everything else must shut. The government, if they are to pursue that approach, need to address the support package in line with their evidence.

Screenshot-2020-10-09-at-09-03-42.png

It wouldn't be a titanic swing. That chart tells us the % of traceable cases which, as @massi83 pointed out, in countries where the have a better handle on the virus and more cooperation from the public like Finland, the traceable cases amount to 30%. So without knowing the number here, that would mean 40% of known cases represents just 12% of all cases being traced back to school. We don't know how many cases have come from pubs that haven't been traced back by that one method, and the flaws of the method have been established in other reporting.

Is it not blatantly obvious why they won't be closing the schools?

Not really. They're closing schools in New York now, for example. It's clear why it isn't preferable but it isn't clear why it's off the table, given there's good reason to suspect it is a critical factor in a situation they're now describing as almost becoming uncontrollable.
 
saw this on today’s press headlines. 2 points;

1. reinfection didn’t take long if it’s not an error
2. COVID is a brave boy squaring up to Zlatan twice

He tested positive so recently I’m willing to bet this is just some viral debris from the previous infection being shedded. To be really certain about reinfection you’d want to see sequencing of the virus to prove it’s a different virus to the one that first infected him.
 
I’m hearing more and more cases of reinfection. Scary stuff.

side story given the number of cases with footballers catching this and with cases on the rise surely it’s only a Matter of time until sport is called off again. Probably said in hope more than anything else!

Yeah, shit is getting real in professional football. They kept infections down while they were down in the rest of society but now it’s on the up and up generally we’re seeing more and more cases with footballers.

Which really just proves how impossible it is to let the virus rip through society while shielding certain cohorts. If we can’t keep wealthy, privileged footballers in a bubble how the hell do we do it for vulnerable members of the general public?
 
While we were back in the UK I went out to a pub twice for lunch and to three different cafes. All of them took contact details, the pub was very organised about it.
Same here, and when they took people's details in writing the track and trace people would contact them if necessary, but since most people have been scanning in with the app only one person using the app in the country has ever been contacted, allegedly. Even when, to my personal knowledge, a bar has closed down due to covid. We need to carry on of course, it's the way forward, once it works.
 
Same here, and when they took people's details in writing the track and trace people would contact them if necessary, but since most people have been scanning in with the app only one person using the app in the country has ever been contacted, allegedly. Even when, to my personal knowledge, a bar has closed down due to covid. We need to carry on of course, it's the way forward, once it works.

One person contacted where they picked it up in HOSPITALITY, loads of people have been contacted by the actual app i have friends who have been told to self isolate by the app.

The media are trying to say hospitality isn't the driving force, 12million app users 1 single case from hospitality.
 
One person contacted where they picked it up in HOSPITALITY, loads of people have been contacted by the actual app i have friends who have been told to self isolate by the app.

The media are trying to say hospitality isn't the driving force, 12million app users 1 single case from hospitality.
If a bar closes down because the staff have covid wouldn't you expect the customers who had scanned in and stopped there all evening (a social club in my case) to be contacted? Quite a few places have closed temporarily for the same reason, plus all the ones that must have had staff and customers that registered a positive test on the app, as you're supposed to.

Did you mean to say the media are trying to say hospitality is the driving force by any chance? In any case personally I wouldn't say it is the driving force as such, just one of many.
 
The headline of the slide presented here puts it pretty plainly: regardless of how much transmission is driven by schools or businesses, the government have prioritised them, so we need to look at whatever is driving the transmission outside of that. And that is hospitality. It doesn't mean public health officials don't see schools as a problem, it's just a problem they're not permitted to deal with so there's no point in digging into it.

I can't imagine that being the policy for much longer.
 
The headline of the slide presented here puts it pretty plainly: regardless of how much transmission is driven by schools or businesses, the government have prioritised them, so we need to look at whatever is driving the transmission outside of that. And that is hospitality. It doesn't mean public health officials don't see schools as a problem, it's just a problem they're not permitted to deal with so there's no point in digging into it.

I can't imagine that being the policy for much longer.
The problem isn’t just with that being what they’re doing. My biggest issue is with the demonising of individuals when it may not be them to blame. The Government is not telling people that they’re willing to take the numbers associated with keeping schools and certain workplaces open, they’re saying it’s YOUR fault for not wearing a mask, it’s YOUR fault you saw a friend indoors.
 
The problem isn’t just with that being what they’re doing. My biggest issue is with the demonising of individuals when it may not be them to blame. The Government is not telling people that they’re willing to take the numbers associated with keeping schools and certain workplaces open, they’re saying it’s YOUR fault for not wearing a mask, it’s YOUR fault you saw a friend indoors.

Yeah, I don't agree. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. The schools are driving a lot of transmission, but seeing friends indoors does help to spread that transmission (incl. those originally sourced from schools), and wearing masks does make a difference, and because both of those actions are much, much simpler to take than closing schools, they should be a fundamental part of the strategy. And people who aren't following them should be reminded their actions have consequences.
 
Yeah, I don't agree. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. The schools are driving a lot of transmission, but seeing friends indoors does help to spread that transmission (incl. those originally sourced from schools), and wearing masks does make a difference, and because both of those actions are much, much simpler to take than closing schools, they should be a fundamental part of the strategy. And people who aren't following them should be reminded their actions have consequences.
Which is fine, but there’s no balance. Of course people should wear masks were needed. Most are though. You aren’t going to promote compliance by doing that for me. They’ve tried to turn people against each other from the start and it’s a disgrace that it’s working.
 
Yeah, shit is getting real in professional football. They kept infections down while they were down in the rest of society but now it’s on the up and up generally we’re seeing more and more cases with footballers.

Which really just proves how impossible it is to let the virus rip through society while shielding certain cohorts. If we can’t keep wealthy, privileged footballers in a bubble how the hell do we do it for vulnerable members of the general public?
In fairness, footballers are sneaking out of their bubbles and mimicking society
 
Which is fine, but there’s no balance. Of course people should wear masks were needed. Most are though. You aren’t going to promote compliance by doing that for me. They’ve tried to turn people against each other from the start and it’s a disgrace that it’s working.

The reality is that the restrictions placed on the UK have been less severe than countries in comparable situations and yet they've had lower levels of compliance. Part of that can be put down to poor communication but part of that is because people make personal choices not to comply.

From my perspective they've made very little of that given some of the studies out there about the majority of people skipping quarantine because they feel they're entitled to do frivolous things like going on holiday without having to face consequences that were made clear to them from the outset. Or that even though masks are requested in many fewer places than comparable countries, fewer people have worn them. There's lots of instances to that.

Not pointing them out at all would not be a balanced approach, and given they clearly haven't pointed it out all the time, deciding what the appropriate degree of balance is amounts to little more than quibbling. People need to be reminded of their responsibilities when they don't exercise them in key situations, that's a normal part of society.
 
Damn imagine have your freshers, going clubbing, getting drunk and finding a partner, find that they've left you the next morning but left you with a virus.

I remember how University was - all people care about is getting with each other. Even if that doesnt happen there is sharing of drinks and passing around cigarettes or J's. Dangerous stuff.
 
Yeah, shit is getting real in professional football. They kept infections down while they were down in the rest of society but now it’s on the up and up generally we’re seeing more and more cases with footballers.
Which really just proves how impossible it is to let the virus rip through society while shielding certain cohorts. If we can’t keep wealthy, privileged footballers in a bubble how the hell do we do it for vulnerable members of the general public?

WAGs and players gotta spend and enjoy that money, and bring it home, infecting their partners.
I suspect its because footballers or their bubble members don't have the discipline to stay isolated.
 


Holy shit.


Can you imagine what the parents of those students must be thinking right now? Not only have they got this virus to think about but the general mental health of their children who are forced to pay thousands to live on campus with none of of the social benefits or academic benefit of any sort of contact time with their lecturers. It’s a fecking farce to be honest.
 
Can you imagine what the parents of those students must be thinking right now? Not only have they got this virus to think about but the general mental health of their children who are forced to pay thousands to live on campus with none of of the social benefits or academic benefit of any sort of contact time with their lecturers. It’s a fecking farce to be honest.
Think of the economy stoo-pid!

I really don't understand why people in UK accept that their Government puts the economy before their long term health.
Compare with how many Asian are dealing with this and their younger people.
 
What the feck. 1400 people infected at a University? Isn't that like... an insane amount?

To be fair having worked there, it's a fecking massive University! Within a stone's throw of Northumbria too which has had around 800 positive cases. Northumbria staff had been told (last I heard) that face-to-face teaching was still expected.