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

redshaw said:
I've seen 80-90% in some parts of the north west.
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Numbers in hospital in the NW are approaching the peak we had in the first wave, although thankfully starting to level off. Mechanical ventilation beds are still fairly well below the peak, but there's more of a lag with those.

Most other regions are well below their peak from the first wave, except the north east and yorkshire, which is quite a bit higher.

The data on actual bed availability is less easy to get hold of, but it doesn't appear to be crisis time just yet.
 
I'm confused by the governments announcement today of a 'student corridor'.
So they're saying students can go home between December 3rd and 9th. They'll have to get themselves home as they usually would and there's nothing stopping them leaving at any time anyway. So what exactly is announced apart from a policy name?
 
noodlehair said:
It's definitely predictable but there's a lot I can't make sense of. I don't understand why vulnerable people were locked indoors all summer, in many cases becoming depressed and suffering other health issues as a result, just for it to get to the winter and now they're allowed to do whatever the feck they want despite being probably more at risk now than during the summer. Surely would have been better to do it the other way round. It's not like covid coming back in the winter was an unforseable event.
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The extremely vulnerable are back in shielding again until at least 2nd of December. The strange difference this time around is that my wife hasn't been told to shield with me, and there are no restrictions on spending time together like there was the last time around. So she can still go to work as normal, and then be around me when she gets home.

It is supposedly down to the workplace being 'covid secure' yet in the 2 weeks before shielding resumed I think there was 4 or 5 cases between less than 100 staff, working in 2 separate locations.

It's the little shithousery parts of the workplace that really get me though. We are both key workers and although there is guidance on staying 2m apart, and wearing gloves, masks etc if you need to break that 2m it isn't always possible, and due to the job needing to be done to keep the railway moving you'd expect some sort of accountability from the company. Yet when one of the team tested positive, we were told you can only isolate if you're contacted by track and trace, or if you admit to breaking the rules and open yourself up to disciplinary.
 
UK figures - 595 deaths, 22,950 cases.

Total deaths are now over the 50k mark at 50,365.
 
I suddenly know loads of people who have lost loved ones due to covid recently, 6 deaths all really recent. One of them was only in their late 40s as well. My childminder has lost two relatives to it this year.

With a vaccine seemingly round the corner as well :(
 
Awful to see 595 deaths

Italy today with 623 deaths and 33k cases. Belgium with 345

What's been bad to see is how Poland and some other eastern European nations have been doing and how unaffected they were before. I don't see it making the news and it's 430 deaths today, that would be like UK or France posting 800+ and has been going on for a few weeks now.
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I wonder if a lot more people have been returning back to Poland and other Eastern Euro countries from Western Europe and now its really taken hold. Seemed to fizzle out before.
 
P-Nut said:
The extremely vulnerable are back in shielding again until at least 2nd of December. The strange difference this time around is that my wife hasn't been told to shield with me, and there are no restrictions on spending time together like there was the last time around. So she can still go to work as normal, and then be around me when she gets home.

It is supposedly down to the workplace being 'covid secure' yet in the 2 weeks before shielding resumed I think there was 4 or 5 cases between less than 100 staff, working in 2 separate locations.

It's the little shithousery parts of the workplace that really get me though. We are both key workers and although there is guidance on staying 2m apart, and wearing gloves, masks etc if you need to break that 2m it isn't always possible, and due to the job needing to be done to keep the railway moving you'd expect some sort of accountability from the company. Yet when one of the team tested positive, we were told you can only isolate if you're contacted by track and trace, or if you admit to breaking the rules and open yourself up to disciplinary.
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My dad has COPD and a heart condition, and has also undergone a serious operation since the summer which he's still technically in the recovery phase from. First lockdown he was literally told not to leave his house. This time he's been told nothing at all and his work expect him in the office 2 days a week.

The problem is the workplace can be as covid secure as you want but there will still be other people there and you'll still be in the same building as them, so even if the risk is really low its still a lot higher to a vulnerable/at risk person than not being there is. I think it's important people are back in workplaces as well, but if we're in lockdown surely we're in lockdown and at the very least the mor eat risk people shouldn't be there?

I have to go into the office most days and regularly go into people's houses and onto building sites, and like you say although we're given all the PPE equipment we need and given guidelines to stick to, it just isn't possible to do that all the time. It doesn't bother me from a personal point of view because I'm a key worker and it's my job, and I'm not really worried personally about getting covid...but again, the first lockdown if I did catch covid doing my job it was much more limited who I could then go and pass it on to. This time I could be going to one house, catching covid off the person there, then going to the next, passing it on to someone there who's similar to my dad and ending up killing them. All I can do is make a personal judgement and refuse to go in but then that will potentially land me in hot water.

Just seems bizarre to me as it's going to be more dangerous to people who haven't had it yet now than it was in the summer.
 
Some interesting data has been published relevant to the discussions in here about prioritising keeping the schools open, at the expense of other elements of society.

Lockdown had a significant detrimental effect on educational attainment, with the most disadvantaged kids worst affected.

Disadvantaged students, who are eligible for free school meals and attract additional pupil premium funding, suffered the biggest drop in attainment, particularly in areas of high deprivation in the North and Midlands, widening the attainment gap “significantly”.
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noodlehair said:
I think you're misreading the information to be honest. I don't doubt the death rate varies somewhat from place to place depending on the conditions and the level of care available, but there is nowhere that it will be anything even slightly close to 1%. The biggest difference in the rate from one place to another actually seems to be the level of testing.

For example in the UK, if you take the number of deaths compared to the number of confirmed cases, then the death rate is around 0.04%...and that's before you factor in that not every person who has covid will be tested. Someone with no symptoms will not be tested unless done so at random, and depending on what study you look at the number of people who contract covid without getting any symptoms is anywhere between around 50% to as high as 85%...so even going by the lower figure there you're looking at a death rate of around 0.02%. You can argue that can come down more if you consider that covid deaths are people who tested positive within a certain time frame of death, and that a percentage of those were already terminally ill. As well as the fact that the demand for tests has been greater than the capacity at various points in time, so some positive cases have simply been missed. So even being pessimistic, looking at the maths and science available you would have to concede that 0.02% is more likely to be a high figure than a low one, which makes the 0.01% figure actually seem very plausible.

I can easily believe there will be some variation to that based on the unknown factors and lack of exactness in some of the numbers, but there is just no way it jumps from that to suddenly being 1% or 0.4% or anything close. If it was close to either of those numbers you would be looking at potentially 50-100 times the number of deaths we have seen if not more. The number of deaths in the UK alone would be in the hundreds of thousands

It's all pretty useless information as well since it's so generalised. For example if I were to get covid (again) I'd have a much lower chance of dying than even 0.02%, due to being at a healthy and young age, and living in a country where I have access to healthcare and a warm roof over my head. My chances of dying are basically 0...where as for an 80 year old with a lung condition living in deprived conditions it's probably significantly higher than even 1%...as it also would be if they contracted flu or even potentially a common cold....and this is why it's such a big problem, because this still actually amounts to an awful lot of people, and there are also countless other conditions and illnesses going round, and adding another on top is in many places simply too much for the healthcare systems we have in place to cope with.

Herd immunity is a nonsense but I think we've always kind of known that. We've never had enough information about covid to know if something like that would work, and the more information we do get, the more it seems that it wouldn't.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but usually we only test people with symptoms when determining if they're ill, so you can hardly compare a situation where people without symptoms are being tested. When we say we have the "cold" we mean we have symptoms, if we tested everyone we'd find a lot of asymptomatic cases, and that would drive the death rate way down.

To my mind, if we want to compare death rates, we should only count cases with symptoms as the population we divide by deaths, because that's how it would work with any other disease.
 
noodlehair said:
My dad has COPD and a heart condition, and has also undergone a serious operation since the summer which he's still technically in the recovery phase from. First lockdown he was literally told not to leave his house. This time he's been told nothing at all and his work expect him in the office 2 days a week.

The problem is the workplace can be as covid secure as you want but there will still be other people there and you'll still be in the same building as them, so even if the risk is really low its still a lot higher to a vulnerable/at risk person than not being there is. I think it's important people are back in workplaces as well, but if we're in lockdown surely we're in lockdown and at the very least the mor eat risk people shouldn't be there?

I have to go into the office most days and regularly go into people's houses and onto building sites, and like you say although we're given all the PPE equipment we need and given guidelines to stick to, it just isn't possible to do that all the time. It doesn't bother me from a personal point of view because I'm a key worker and it's my job, and I'm not really worried personally about getting covid...but again, the first lockdown if I did catch covid doing my job it was much more limited who I could then go and pass it on to. This time I could be going to one house, catching covid off the person there, then going to the next, passing it on to someone there who's similar to my dad and ending up killing them. All I can do is make a personal judgement and refuse to go in but then that will potentially land me in hot water.

Just seems bizarre to me as it's going to be more dangerous to people who haven't had it yet now than it was in the summer.
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Yeah the shielding is only for specific areas with high case numbers. With me being from Oldham we've basically got the highest case numbers in the country I believe. So the extremely vulnerable have been told to shield. How long it carries on for is a bit vague at the moment, as it just says until Dec 2nd, but that they'll write before then to explain if it's extending, which if I've learnt anything from the previous time I assume that means it will be extended.
 
Beans said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but usually we only test people with symptoms when determining if they're ill, so you can hardly compare a situation where people without symptoms are being tested. When we say we have the "cold" we mean we have symptoms, if we tested everyone we'd find a lot of asymptomatic cases, and that would drive the death rate way down.

To my mind, if we want to compare death rates, we should only count cases with symptoms as the population we divide by deaths, because that's how it would work with any other disease.
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Kind of what I was getting at with the numbers being unreliable and any calculated "death rate" being likely to be higher than the actual death rate...just ignore the part where I got all the maths completely wrong.
 
P-Nut said:
Yeah the shielding is only for specific areas with high case numbers. With me being from Oldham we've basically got the highest case numbers in the country I believe. So the extremely vulnerable have been told to shield. How long it carries on for is a bit vague at the moment, as it just says until Dec 2nd, but that they'll write before then to explain if it's extending, which if I've learnt anything from the previous time I assume that means it will be extended.
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Yeah. My mum is in Derby though and hasn't had a shielding letter and the case numbers there are very high. Her office has had to colose twice in the past few weeks because someone there has tested positive, and they only have around 20 employees.

Numbers here are going up but still quite low by comparison so might explain why my dad hasn't had anything. Although who knows if they're still monitering things by area while we're in "Lockdown"
 
Beans said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but usually we only test people with symptoms when determining if they're ill, so you can hardly compare a situation where people without symptoms are being tested. When we say we have the "cold" we mean we have symptoms, if we tested everyone we'd find a lot of asymptomatic cases, and that would drive the death rate way down.

To my mind, if we want to compare death rates, we should only count cases with symptoms as the population we divide by deaths, because that's how it would work with any other disease.
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Yes and no.

Don’t forget that for diseases like flu the vast majority of people never get tested. How many people do you know who have caught the flu at least once in their life? Now how many of them had that diagnosis confirmed with a blood test? Very few, right? Yet only confirmed cases are counted in mortality calculations. And only people who are very unwell with flu are likely to get a blood test.

So we know that the death rate for flu is calculated based on a massive underestimation of the real number of cases. So the death rate we read about for flu is likely to be many multiples higher than the true mortality rate.

All of which means the comparison betwen the mortality rate of the two diseases is a lot fairer than you think.
 
noodlehair said:
Yeah. My mum is in Derby though and hasn't had a shielding letter and the case numbers there are very high. Her office has had to colose twice in the past few weeks because someone there has tested positive, and they only have around 20 employees.

Numbers here are going up but still quite low by comparison so might explain why my dad hasn't had anything. Although who knows if they're still monitering things by area while we're in "Lockdown"
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Yeah it definitely seems like it's still by area mainly, as that is supposedly what we revert back to after lockdown so I expect some areas to stay on this 'tier 4' and basically be in local lockdowns.

Dreading Christmas as my Mrs is from London and hardly gets to see her family so always looks forward to Christmas for months. If her family can't come up it's going to cause some pretty big arguments.
 
africanspur said:
What do people think of this idea? Seems quite interesting to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-from-home-after-pandemic-should-pay-more-tax

Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax'
Deutsche Bank report argues that the proceeds should help lower-paid workers
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I like the idea but the horrific truth is that the tax raised from that in the UK will be used not to subsidise the wages of people who work in hospitality and travel who have been effected by the reduced football but to instead subside the corporate landlords who can no longer charge their eye watering rates for office space.
 
Pexbo said:
I like the idea but the horrific truth is that the tax raised from that in the UK will be used not to subsidise the wages of people who work in hospitality and travel who have been effected by the reduced football but to instead subside the corporate landlords who can no longer charge their eye watering rates for office space.
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there’s that, and what about those of us who can walk to the office and take a packed lunch and now are paying to heat our houses and use electricity during the day? Pay an extra 5% for what exactly?
 
africanspur said:
What do people think of this idea? Seems quite interesting to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-from-home-after-pandemic-should-pay-more-tax

Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax'
Deutsche Bank report argues that the proceeds should help lower-paid workers
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Bizarre idea, most call centre workers are working remotely now and the majority of entry roles there pay minimum wage. Taxing them a further 5% for the privilege if they continue to work from home? It doesn't make much sense.

Plus also the benefits to the environment from less commuting should be promoted more, and certainly not penalised.
 
Snowjoe said:
there’s that, and what about those of us who can walk to the office and take a packed lunch and now are paying to heat our houses and use electricity during the day? Pay an extra 5% for what exactly?
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Very true
 
I am using less public infrastructure.. decongesting the roads, saving the environment and paying a higher electricity bill by being at home.

I should be getting a tax break.
 
africanspur said:
What do people think of this idea? Seems quite interesting to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-from-home-after-pandemic-should-pay-more-tax

Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax'
Deutsche Bank report argues that the proceeds should help lower-paid workers
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A daily 5% working from home tax would cost an employee earning £35,000 just under £7 a day, according to Templeman’s calculations. He suggests the £6.9bn raised in the UK by taxing remote workers could provide a grant of £2,000 to the 12% of people aged over 25 who earn the minimum wage.
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That’s a monumentally dumb and enormously unfair suggestion for a tax.
 
Snowjoe said:
there’s that, and what about those of us who can walk to the office and take a packed lunch and now are paying to heat our houses and use electricity during the day? Pay an extra 5% for what exactly?
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In Ireland we can claim tax back on stuff like electricity bills if our employer confirms we’ve been shifted to home working this year.
 
Rado_N said:
That’s a monumentally dumb and enormously unfair suggestion for a tax.
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Where I work people who earn below a very generous threshold are getting a one off £400 (or 400 in local currency) to pay for the increased utility bills. Nice touch.
Can imagine the company is saving millions in not having to heat offices, provide drinks/snacks, decreased cleaning etc so good they are giving something back.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
In Ireland we can claim tax back on stuff like electricity bills if our employer confirms we’ve been shifted to home working this year.
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You can claim tax relief here on £6 a week, and they’re letting people claim for a full year this tax year regardless of how much they’ve actually had to work from home.

The Purley King said:
Where I work people who earn below a very generous threshold are getting a one off £400 (or 400 in local currency) to pay for the increased utility bills. Nice touch.
Can imagine the company is saving millions in not having to heat offices, provide drinks/snacks, decreased cleaning etc so good they are giving something back.
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Yea that’s cool. We’ve all been given a flat £25 per month tax free WFH allowance.

The idea of imposing a 5% per day tax on WFH is beyond stupid.
 
A tiny bit of decent news. The govt here has now changed its mind about the English family on a yacht in Tahiti who tragically lost their sons life in an accident who wanted to come to NZ to sell their yacht. They are now given the all clear to sail to NZ and sell their yacht here.
 
africanspur said:
What do people think of this idea? Seems quite interesting to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-from-home-after-pandemic-should-pay-more-tax

Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax'
Deutsche Bank report argues that the proceeds should help lower-paid workers
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I guess there's a disproportionate number of people working from home here so the responses are the usual reaction of "I don't want to pay more tax for doing something I like".

To me there's two sides of the story. Any tax that is designed to disincentivise people to work from home to "save the city" is short sighted and likely to piss off home workers without solving the core problem. Buying a plaster to stick on a gaping wound is a terrible waste of (public) money, especially if it just creates another pain point.

On the other hand the move to home working is increasing income inequality and is accelerating the tendency for people to live in bubbles, both of which inevitably leads us further down a path of a more fractured society, which at a point becomes an unstable society. That's without even getting into the ethics of it.

So I do think we need a set of serious policies to fix the problems but any policy motivated by that knee jerk instinct to save the city will only make things worse. This seemingly underpins their entire logic and it's hardly a self justifying statement:

“A big chunk of people have disconnected themselves from the face-to-face world yet are still leading a full economic life. That means remote workers are contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits. That is a big problem for the economy.”
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Stack said:
A tiny bit of decent news. The govt here has now changed its mind about the English family on a yacht in Tahiti who tragically lost their sons life in an accident who wanted to come to NZ to sell their yacht. They are now given the all clear to sail to NZ and sell their yacht here.
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Excellent news.
 
africanspur said:
What do people think of this idea? Seems quite interesting to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-from-home-after-pandemic-should-pay-more-tax

Staff who work from home after pandemic 'should pay more tax'
Deutsche Bank report argues that the proceeds should help lower-paid workers
Click to expand...
feck me, they always find a way dont they, marginally better off by working at home? Cant have that! GIVE IT BACK PEASANT! How about taxing scumbag bankers bonuses at a higher rate, clamping down on tax avoidance by the super wealthy and multibillion dollar corporations? Nah feck it, lets squeeze a few more quid from joe bloggs, he always eats a shit sandwich without complaint.
 
acnumber9 said:
Is that as well as already paying more in electricity and heating? Perhaps the savings made by employers should go towards more tax.
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That's one of the options listed in the report, but The Guardian being The Guardian, that headline doesn't stir up the Islington activists to the same degree.
 
Brwned said:
I guess there's a disproportionate number of people working from home here so the responses are the usual reaction of "I don't want to pay more tax for doing something I like".

To me there's two sides of the story. Any tax that is designed to disincentivise people to work from home to "save the city" is short sighted and likely to piss off home workers without solving the core problem. Buying a plaster to stick on a gaping wound is a terrible waste of (public) money, especially if it just creates another pain point.

On the other hand the move to home working is increasing income inequality and is accelerating the tendency for people to live in bubbles, both of which inevitably leads us further down a path of a more fractured society, which at a point becomes an unstable society. That's without even getting into the ethics of it.

So I do think we need a set of serious policies to fix the problems but any policy motivated by that knee jerk instinct to save the city will only make things worse. This seemingly underpins their entire logic and it's hardly a self justifying statement:
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They could save the city by repurposing some of those massive office buildings to providing much needed apartments and community facilities.
 
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