France have banned all travel and people from the UK for 48hrs including all accompanied freight by road, sea, air or rail. Dover blockages will continue.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
So I listened and Susan Hopkins was much clearer about that. It was definitely not understood in September or October.
So PHE confirming that only in December did they pay particular attention to the cluster with this strain, and only this week did they even start to understand the transmissibility of the virus. And they still only have a limited understanding. The 70% figure from that modelling is based on quite flimsy evidence. They have good reason to believe it is more transmissible but the number ascribed to it is just based on the rate of spread of this virus vs. other ones, controlling for no other factors in a limited period of time. That's kind of silly. Maybe they are scaremongering a bit. But the higher viral load explantion for being more infectious does make sense.
Just goes to show how easy things are misunderstood, misinformation is spread and blame is readily attributed.
Flight bans, travel bans, London locked down all because this strain is more contagious?
Feels like some other shit is going on that they're not telling us about
Feels like some other shit is going on that they're not telling us about
You make it sound like a small thing.
Apparently the french ban is for all flux, there is no way it last a month. The UK needs supplies.
I’m quite baffled Poland didn’t close its borders and didn’t cancel the flights from UK yet, seems like another ridiculous and late decision from these incompetent bunch. Got tested and arrived here for Christmas from Europe easily, but considering the number of Poles living in UK I am already looking forward to the drama that will unravel in upcoming days.
It's already in Europe, its been weeks / months since we mapped the new L variant and all across Europe there has been spikes.
We (British) and the Dutch have been runing sequence testing for a while.
Watching the news now...and they're suggesting that it could be 71% more contagious, and it could increase the R rate by up 0.9
That was posted before the French announcement, I don't expect freight to be stopped for any longer than 48hrs. A travel ban I could see lasting a month for people travelling for either business/leisure.
France, Belgium, Holland, and now Turkey shutting borders to UK for at least 2 days.
I suspect by the morning all of Europe will have shut its doors to us
I suspect by the morning all of Europe will have shut its doors to us
Explains the reaction, they have always been petrified about the health services not been able to treat the ill, this would surely do it if true, which does seem a strech it has to be said.
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Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Israel, Iran and Bulgaria have all announced a ban on flights to varied extents with the UK.
They absolutely do not have the evidence to suggest that with any conviction. It's like their modelling that suggested 2m people could be hospitalised. Too many assumptions built into too limited a model to make these statements without huge caveats. You can talk to epidemiologists that way because they will know how to contextualise the numbers and their reliability but I can't see how this is good public health messaging, unless its only goal is to cause mass fear. The tests next week could very easily provide a completely different pair of numbers. The direction is reasonable to communicate but the specificity is miscommunicated.
I hope you are right, I hope it's much less than 75%.
Because with 75% or 71% more infections I don't see how at anyone point we'd have had the virus under control
I hope you are right, I hope it's much less than 75%.
Because with 75% or 71% more infections I don't see how at anyone point we'd have had the virus under control
The number 0.9 to me didn't sound right because I'm sure the PM said 0.4 yesterday. I can see where the breakdown in communication is. This comes from Nervtag's meeting minutes that were framed for a particular audience, and the media are reporting on it very, very badly if the takeaway people are getting is it will increase things by 0.9.
Their esimates range from 0.4 to 0.9 and it's based on correlation studies which "suggest" those numbers. The media are bad at science reporting in general but I think this is particularly bad. These correlation studies and models are very limited, and it's at a very early stage. We conclusively do not know what impact it will have on the r, they just had to provide their best estimate so the PM could make a call pre-Christmas.
Their key conclusion is that they have "moderate" confidence it demonstrates a substantial increase. They by definition have significantly lower confidence in the precise estimates, and presumably high confidence that it demonstrates some kind of increase, but it may not be significant.
For some reason we're focusing exclusively on the grave news. There are plenty of other details that paint a more complex picture. For example, they know someone from the UK with that virus strain brought it to Australia. Presumably they used a form of transport that exposed them to other people on the journey, and after the journey. No-one else got infected by it. It isn't some kind of super-strain.
If it increased the r rate by 0.4 then some of the measures imposed during the lockdown were estimated to have reduced the r rate by that amount too. No catastrophes. Maybe if you close schools temporarily you achieve a kind of equilibrium.
Have the Nightingale Hospitals been opened yet? Not heard a thing about them.
They're still open.
It's not childish. When you are dealing with large groups of people, you have to treat them as exactly that. Some people are stupid, some people are selfish, some people are going through different struggles to others. Some people need to do different things to cope or survive to what others do. You can't even have a classroom of people without a few who won't listen or do as they're asked, or who need extra support, never mind an entire country.
You're not going to achieve or change anything by sniping at the actions of people who you know literally nothing about and have no control over. You might get somewhere though by holding the government to account for changing the goalposts every five minutes and generally making it much more difficult than it should be for anyone to follow the part sof the guidance that are actually important.
Transport to and from the UK halted at midnight tonight, does that include the vaccine's?
Eurotunnel said trains would still be running services from France to the UK that were vital for medical supplies and other essential goods. A spokesman said: “Eurotunnel recognises the importance of combatting the spread of coronavirus and we will be implementing the measures as we have done throughout the pandemic.”
Ok cool, just haven’t seen anything mentioned about them. Probably missed it as try to avoid COVID news generally.
To be clear, I don't think people generally should be left to make their own judgement, because it's a road to disaster and the eventual outcome will be a lockdown anyway. I don't really disagree with you on any of that.
The point is more that when you have a government who does stuff like pretends Christmas can go ahead until literally just before Christmas, and then suddenly changes their mind and imposes a quarantine on half the country and gives people only hours to escape it, then what that is doing is forcing a lot of people into a position where they have to make their own judgements, or do so out of panic. Going down any route where you end up blaming and criticising people for behaving exactly as you can expect large groups of people to behave, is as pointless as it is useless.
The rules are quite inconsistent as I have found out through trying to do my job, and some of the logic behind them is beyond any sense. People at our work were literally getting emails threatening them to not keep their kids out of school the week before the end of term, but at the same time being told they were at high risk of infection if they sent their kids into school due to that being the main area of infection. As a result several used their own judgement to not send their kids in. If you give people tripe to eat and tell them its pancakes, some of them wont eat it. You are pushing people to make their own minds up.
I don't buy that anything happened on Friday to "suddenly" make this new strain more of a problem, because I've been monitering the cases in my area every week, and it's been VERY obvious there is a problem that needed to be addressed for well over a month now, and there have been plenty of people saying it too. Hosptials at nearly 90% capacity, and cases that have gone up more than 10 fold in two months...I mean anyone that can count could have decided before yesterday that something needed to be done.
Are they giving out estimates of a 0.4 to 0.9 increase?
I assumed you just, you know, increase the R number by 75%? It's (allegedly) 75% more contagious? The R Number is effectively a measure of the viruses contagiousness over it's lifespan? You can't just add a standard number to it, that's ridiculous.
Regardless I feel really really shit right now sitting in the middle of Tier 4 Lockdown. Christmas is cancelled. Everyone I know is devastated and feeling like they've been punched in the gut. Friends jobs are fecked again, but also schools closing is going to be a killer. If the 70% or 75% more infectiousness is correct then I don't see how that even the most extreme measures we took at the height of lockdown would have been enough to get R below 1.0
Like you say, maybe the media are exaggerating. If the one thing the media are known to do, it's to take a figure and run with it without context.
But god.
What the feck are you on about? Where have I said anything is not my responsibility?
I simply think it is quite important during a world pandemic that the people in charge aren't complete idiots who have no regard for anyone else's wellbeing, and I don't think that's what we have unfortunately .
In fact at this point if you think Boris is in any way competent and not a dangerous person to have in charge of managing a pandemic, then I think you have to be somewhat mad. They guy came on national television in March and TOLD you to go visit a covid ward and shake hands with everyone there.
Blaming every single other person in the country for not thinking or doing exactly what you want them to do is quite a strange way to approach what is going on. A lot of people actually need help or support and would probably behave a lot more safely if they got it, and a vast majority are doing absolutely everything they can within the realms of what they need to in order to survive.
The only thing i can think with some of the weird posts in this thread is that some of you still aren't even living in the real world and seeing what is really going on out there. Just judging from the odd photo being thrown around London for example has been an absolute ghost town for months. There aren't people just roaming the streets in massive packs. The only thing that's been busy is the trains, which is because its a massively populated city with many people in it who still have no choice but to travel around. It's actually quite spooky and anxiety enducing to walk around there due to how dead it is. The chaos last night was caused by making a ridiculous announcement at a ridiciulous time, 3 days after telling everyone that it was something that defintiely wouldn't happen.
What a shit few days. I expect panic buying tomorrow due to the news around ports.
Yeah this is their translation of the R number. It is more easily interpretable the 71% more transmissible estimate.
NERVTAG said:
We have achieved much bigger drops in the R number so you shouldn't panic. E.g. here is the reference point from NI:
It's from this article. People are getting arried away because of the way this being communicated and contextualised, IMO.
Shouldn't be much really, most retailers have stockpiled for Brexit. Exports will be worst affected.
At least we get an early insight into what Brexit looks like on January 1st.
I work for a local council who have access to the data and they have been telling the government for weeks that the tiers needed to change. I see the data every week and the problem has been obvious for a long time now. Go by case rates or hospital capacity or both. It doesn't matter. The basic numbers alone are the equivalent of not only the fire alarm going off but being able to literaly see the fire burning on your desk in front of you, and still thinking "yeah I'll just sit here a bit longer". They did nothing at all until Wednesday and also blocked the Council's attempts to close or stagger schools. Now I'm supposed to believe there was no prior warning of any major issue until THIS Friday
My work place alone has literally been saying directly to the government "look there's a bit of a problem here" for fecking ages now. Local Councils have been asking them to let the schools close due to how out of hand the case rises have been getting. Essex County Council have been saying it for even longer.Are the vaccine centres staffed by retired medical staff?
my father-in-law was given his by an old guy on crutches!
my father-in-law was given his by an old guy on crutches!
The thought had crossed my mind
Yes but it's not a simple as saying "we dropped the R-Value from 3.7 to 0.7 previously and we can do it again" well no, we went from a completely open economy to a completely shut economy. We do not have a completely open economy now. If the R-value in March-April was 0.6 then and it's 70% more infectious, and we can just do 0.6*1.7 which, you know, maybe I am wrong about, then that is 1.0 back in March-April.
feck. What else can you close?
Also, It's winter. March-April was an (actually very nice) Spring-Summer.
Also, March-April wasn't good. My kids weren't at school. Their school was shocking at providing home learning. The government spent large percentage points of GDP to keep going and the economy subtracted by large percentage points of GDP.
Ergh
Hi guys,
Reading reports here in NA about the bew coronavirus strain in UK.
Will the Covid vaccine be affective against this new strain?
Reading reports here in NA about the bew coronavirus strain in UK.
Will the Covid vaccine be affective against this new strain?
Yeah very much likely but they maybe have to tinker with it like the do with the flu jab every year.
Alright I'll leave you to your despair but I'll just say that isn't the right way to use the 71% transmissibility estimate, even if it were accurate
I've been looking up some old news articles from January this year to check quotes from authorities. Gotta say, it's alarming to read those quotes from today's perspective. Makes you wonder how much you can trust whatever they're saying today.
Random quotes from January:
Random quotes from January:
33.5 k on Wednesday rather than the reported 25.1k then.
Does anyone know of all of the other countries with this new varient of covid? Surely its very widespread if it has been around since September? I've just been looking at the figures for Germany from around the 9th of December until now, and both new infections and deaths appear to be going through the roof.
The whole thing seems to be running like a fire out of control through the world now { with a small number of exceptions}, genuinely I can see things getting far worse until summer next year and only then improving. And that's just from a medical point of view.
From an economic point of view I think its going to be carnage for quite some time longer.
The whole thing seems to be running like a fire out of control through the world now { with a small number of exceptions}, genuinely I can see things getting far worse until summer next year and only then improving. And that's just from a medical point of view.
From an economic point of view I think its going to be carnage for quite some time longer.
What are they comparing this new variant to? Are they sure it is a different Ro? Or just a different R? If they are comparing it to other variants in areas that were locked down harder then the difference could just be R due to different conditions.
That's just ridiculous. Wear masks, dont mix, keep distance. It's not that fkin hard.
At some point we have to look past Boris and address the elephant in the room, that being a significant number of the populace put their full trust into him not once (Brexit) but twice (the last election).
Boris never at any point tried (or was able) to hide what a nasty piece of work he is yet people voted for him anyway.
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Also, anyone know exactly why this variant is more virulent and what adaptations covid19 has made to itself to become much more contagious?
Eg: Has it grown wings for itself? Does it fly further through the air?