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

Fluctuation0161 said:
I get the sense this now has the potential to be like flu. With a different strain every year. But more deadly than flu of course.
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So far we don't have any variants that require a new or adjusted vaccine as far as we know. It isn't impossible that we will but as coronaviruses mutate less/slower than influenza I doubt it will mirror flu with its multiple and rapidly evolving strains.
 
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noodlehair said:
How come the supermarkets and shops are so relaxed this time compared to the March lockdown?

First lockdown there were limits on the amount of people in the supermarket, one way systems, people cleaning and aitizing all the baskets and trolleys. This time you can just go into Asda along with half the capacity of Wembley stadium, pick up your corona basket, head up the milk isle in either direction and barge someone's nan out the way to smear your germs over all the Cravendale.

Did it turn out none of this makes any real difference or is it just down to laziness creeping in?

I reckon how many people are in a supermarket at once and how clean things are makes 10x as much difference as whether there's one random idiot not wearing a mask.
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Contact transmission seems to be a very minor contributor to infection so masks are likely far far more important. That said supermarkets should be following best practice in all respects.

We still have to wear masks and supermarkets provide disinfectant wipes for trolley handles and hand sanitisers and I'm seeing close to 100% compliance here, despite us having zero cases again. We just need to start vaccinating now.

I imagine in the UK compliance fatigue has set in largely due to the government's clueless response and confused messaging. I hope vaccination and spring start to get this thing under control soon.
 
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balaks said:
Extremely worrying news about the new variants. It really is not getting better anytime soon is it?
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Yeah the variant stuff isn't good at all, just have to hope they don't completely nulify this phase of vaccine rollout at least.

I was optimistically hoping we'd be in the April 2020 phase already. The daily death toll is horrific as it was then but a further two months later things had considerably calmed down and all with vaccine being a distant dream at that point so was hoping this April and even late March would see many counties go back to tier 3 but looks very unlikely, at best may get schools re-opened by then but they'll probably stay shut until after Easter.

Summer just seems so far away at this point compared to last year when it was a sudden and sharp shock but we were only 6 weeks away from some normality. Likes of Whitty did say this wave's peak would plateau much slower than the first and certainly playing out that way.
 
Is there any expected time frame for when we might see vaccinations in the UK start to help the infection rates decrease etc?
 
Sandikan said:
It's if they find that the vaccines don't work against new strains it'd feel like back to square 1.
Fingers crossed it stays as expected that it works the same against all strains!
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Bit of a doomsday question but given we have many good medical guys in the firing line here (which I commend for likes of Hernandez and I think Arruda for still coming on here to post from time to time when they get a spare 5 minutes) what would their gameplan be if the above from Sandi happened. Just hope things calm down for a few months when the temperature rises and then lock down really hard from September e.g. no education at all in group settings or is it time to produce some sort of action plan on living with virus day to day once we get to second part of the year regardless e.g. how to work with virus in mass public groups like tens of thousands in a football stadium? Or is that scenario still years away, same for live music etc.
 
Stack said:
Is there any expected time frame for when we might see vaccinations in the UK start to help the infection rates decrease etc?
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Hopefully March given the three week lag after first dose (if that still works effectively....!) Does seem a significantly higher amount of under 50s being hospitalized this time compared to first wave so will be interested to see the percentages if they're available online so just vaxing the over 70s won't solve everything in short run.
 
FootballHQ said:
Hopefully March given the three week lag after first dose (if that still works effectively....!) Does seem a significantly higher amount of under 50s being hospitalized this time compared to first wave so will be interested to see the percentages if they're available online so just vaxing the over 70s won't solve everything in short run.
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Thats faster than I expected, good news if it happens. Cheers
 
Stack said:
Thats faster than I expected, good news if it happens. Cheers
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I'm only a layman term guy on this thread so don't take it as gospel. :lol: Wibble and co would give more detailed breakdown I'm sure. Just assuming by March 20m + will have had at least one dose and that will surely start to make significant different to the daily rate. Estimate tonight was the peak was still a week or two away so nothing is improving this month anyway.
 
Wibble said:
Contact transmission seems to be a very minor contributor to infection so masks are likely far far more important. That said supermarkets should be following best practice in all respects.

We still have to wear masks and supermarkets provide disinfectant wipes for trolley handles and hand sanitisers and I'm seeing close to 100% companies here despite us having g zero cases again. We just need to start vaccinating now.

I imagine in the UK compliance fatigue has set in largely due to the government's clueless response and confused messaging. I hope vaccination and spring start to get this thing under control soon.
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I mean it didn't really take a genius to know that things would be tougher in the winter than the summer and that fatigue would set in by then. There hasn't been a point since covid surfaced where there was any reason to believe it wouldn't behave like other viruses and come in waves..and even without fatigue the winter was always going to be tougher for people restrictions wise due to the lack of daylight hours, colder temperatures, etc.

Places like supermarkets though are where you can put control measures in place so people have no choice, and actually waiting in a queue for 10 minutes to get in a supermarket was very little hassle. Particularly as half that time was made up not having to feck about longer or wait in queues once you were inside...and even more time than that saved by it being easier and insentivised to do all your shoppnig in one go (going to a supermarket 3 times a week as opposed to 1 is also an infection risk factor).

Masks still confuse me really. I've seen plenty of knowledgeable people explain why they are important, but the infection numbers and the places infections seem to occur in (according to the data) just don't back it up at all. If they were that important for example then not wearing them in a school or workplace, but then wearing them to go in a shop, makes absolutely no sense...and they'd also have had a tangible impact on numbers in places like London with the amount of people on public transport every day...and they just haven't. They either just don't very much or we are using them stupidly.

I mean here for example there was a high proportion back in March-June of the type of idiot who made a point of not wearing one, yet through the whole first wave the infection rate here remained low and rose very moderately compared to other areas of the country. THen in December when there was generally a lot more compliance it's shot up here faster than anywhere in the Country including London. Hard to put a finger on why but it does suggest there's far more significant factors at play than how many people are wearing masks when they are told to.
 
FootballHQ said:
I'm only a layman term guy on this thread so don't take it as gospel. :lol: Wibble and co would give more detailed breakdown I'm sure. Just assuming by March 20m + will have had at least one dose and that will surely start to make significant different to the daily rate. Estimate tonight was the peak was still a week or two away so nothing is improving this month anyway.
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Sounds about right to me. Like many things in this shitshow the exact peak will only be really obvious in retrospect though. You would hope that vaccination combined with the restrictions and improving weather will break the back of this wave and then hopefully see a rapid return to something approaching normality.
 
Masks were only actually made compulsory on public transport in mid June and public places and Supermarkets in mid July which really surprised me when I looked back a few weeks ago considering case rates were already declining at that stage and many people were out and about on beaches and other public places from late May.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speec...datory-in-shops-and-supermarkets-from-24-july

Perhaps the question is are the ones the majority of public are currently wearing the most effective to stop catching covid. Generally in my area mask wearing is pretty high even in outdoor settings when I walked 2-3 times a week down the hill to local town centre and people coming back with shopping all usually still have masks on.
 
FootballHQ said:
Bit of a doomsday question but given we have many good medical guys in the firing line here (which I commend for likes of Hernandez and I think Arruda for still coming on here to post from time to time when they get a spare 5 minutes) what would their gameplan be if the above from Sandi happened. Just hope things calm down for a few months when the temperature rises and then lock down really hard from September e.g. no education at all in group settings or is it time to produce some sort of action plan on living with virus day to day once we get to second part of the year regardless e.g. how to work with virus in mass public groups like tens of thousands in a football stadium? Or is that scenario still years away, same for live music etc.
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If we discover new strains are resistant to the vaccine it can be tweaked in a fraction of the time it took to make a vaccine from scratch. Probably just a few weeks. They have to make vaccines for new strains of influenza every season. So it definitely won’t be the end of the world. Just a lot harder to get herd immunity. Which means the virus is here to stay, albeit at much lower levels.
 
noodlehair said:
I mean it didn't really take a genius to know that things would be tougher in the winter than the summer and that fatigue would set in by then. There hasn't been a point since covid surfaced where there was any reason to believe it wouldn't behave like other viruses and come in waves..and even without fatigue the winter was always going to be tougher for people restrictions wise due to the lack of daylight hours, colder temperatures, etc.

Places like supermarkets though are where you can put control measures in place so people have no choice, and actually waiting in a queue for 10 minutes to get in a supermarket was very little hassle. Particularly as half that time was made up not having to feck about longer or wait in queues once you were inside...and even more time than that saved by it being easier and insentivised to do all your shoppnig in one go (going to a supermarket 3 times a week as opposed to 1 is also an infection risk factor).

Masks still confuse me really. I've seen plenty of knowledgeable people explain why they are important, but the infection numbers and the places infections seem to occur in (according to the data) just don't back it up at all. If they were that important for example then not wearing them in a school or workplace, but then wearing them to go in a shop, makes absolutely no sense...and they'd also have had a tangible impact on numbers in places like London with the amount of people on public transport every day...and they just haven't. They either just don't very much or we are using them stupidly.

I mean here for example there was a high proportion back in March-June of the type of idiot who made a point of not wearing one, yet through the whole first wave the infection rate here remained low and rose very moderately compared to other areas of the country. THen in December when there was generally a lot more compliance it's shot up here faster than anywhere in the Country including London. Hard to put a finger on why but it does suggest there's far more significant factors at play than how many people are wearing masks when they are told to.
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Whatever the infection rates they would be even worse without masks. They protect you a bit from getting infected and if you have covid they significantly reduce your ability to pass it on., but like most individual measures they aren't a silver bullet.
 
Stack said:
Well take heart from the fact that you wearing a mask doing physical work is helping make it safer for other people. You are a good bugger as far as Im concerned
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I have no problems with wearing a mask while this is going on, but once we get back to normality, this is one of the few things I look forward to.

On a different note my aunt uncle and and 5 cousins got it over Xmas the aunt and uncle came through it alright one of the cousins lost 2 stone because of it and he's going to take a while longer to recover, the uncle was the one we were worried about as he had to get his leg amputated last year because of cancer.

Hearing of more sever cases in the last 2 weeks than the whole time since it started and not in the at risk group but 40s and 50s age bracket
 
Sitting here in Sydney with zero cases of community transmission it is still upsetting watching what most of you are having to go through. Fingers crossed that vaccination and better weather brings huge improvements for you all.
 
golden_blunder said:
You might have a point in that one example but I say to you that by saying everything is scaremongering you are doing more harm than good.’people need to realise the severity of what’s going on.
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I never said everything was scaremongering i said some things are, there's also been reports in the last few days that give convenient sensational headline's implying the vaccine efficiency of the first dose isn't looking great only to read the full article and see it's not near as bad as the headline makes out. There's also been a bit of "X variant may evade vaccine" headline's when reading the full article the jist actually is (paraphrasing) "research is still be done but the likely worst case is it will marginally weaken vaccine efficiency and even if it completely evades it they can be modified within weeks at most", I'm sure someone will pop up soon with a way to justify it but in what way is that responsible reporting?

Never said the situation wasn't serious (and if you look at the thread "should football be suspended" i actually countered an argument by someone ,mildly not to denying level, playing it down) that was Pogue trying to twist my words to suit his narrative (yet again). However there's some corners of people who appear to be absolutely revelling in this and the fact that so many are leaping to the defense of those types show exactly why they will carry on doing it, because they have an army of sheep/cheerleaders who will act as their free marketing team and give them this platform.

To give you one example of someone who appears to be revelling in this (and has an army of apologist's ready to justify his every move) Piers Morgan. After months of exaggerated statements/tweets (for example never tweeting when there was a week by week decrease but whenever a week by week increase came about he was all over it) then buggered off to France in the summer, returned while gloating about dodging quarentine (he actually tweeted branding himself a quarentine dodger) did the same relentless campaign again and then flew to Antigua just before Christmas not only while living in a tier 3 area but also days after aggressively trying to shame people into staying at home over Christmas. Why is he not being called out on such blatant double standards? Why is he not being "held to account" as he likes to put it? In what way is that anything other than dispicable behaviour? There's no defense for his behaviour although it's certainly not for the want of trying.

But above all else, that type of biased/selective reporting is exactly why a lot of the country were so complacent with this in the first place, because we heard the exact same song with Ebola/Swine Flu/Bird Flu etc al, so when one turned up that actually was a serious problem for the Western world people thought they were crying wolf again and just carried on as you were.

People who deny/defend the type of people/stories I mentioned aren't that much better than the lunatics denying there's a virus. Infact long term their actions are probably more damaging, eventually by hook or by crook this pandemic will end, the likes of Piers Morgan and their fan clubs will still be here.
 
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Personally don't expect there to ever to be an end to this. I see little evidence that vaccination will provide a permanent solution. End game is COVID-19 becoming seasonal and permanent like influenza imo. In northern hemisphere we should at least see some easing through spring and summer.

Sure vaccines might take the edge off deaths every winter, as the yearly influenza vaccine does. I don't see covid zero being viable long term because there are enough countries in the world where that is impossible to allow SARS-CoV-2 to continue evolving, it will then spread back to rest of the world via freight and migration legal and illegal.

Sure you can keep it out of cut off islands for very long periods of time, it will just mean no one from the rest of the world will ever be able to visit again without strict quarantine and vice versa as people in those places won't have up to date immunity for it due to lack of natural exposure.
 
Mb194dc said:
Personally don't expect there to ever to be an end to this. I see little evidence that vaccination will provide a permanent solution. End game is COVID-19 becoming seasonal and permanent like influenza imo. In northern hemisphere we should at least see some easing through spring and summer.

Sure vaccines might take the edge off deaths every winter, as the yearly influenza vaccine does. I don't see covid zero being viable long term because there are enough countries in the world where that is impossible to allow SARS-CoV-2 to continue evolving, it will then spread back to rest of the world via freight and migration legal and illegal.

Sure you can keep it out of cut off islands for very long periods of time, it will just mean no one from the rest of the world will ever be able to visit again without strict quarantine and vice versa as people in those places won't have up to date immunity for it due to lack of natural exposure.
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I don't think there's ever been any doubt it will still be here in some capacity even when the Pandemic is declared over.

The only virus that's ever been eradicated is smallpox, even the Bubonic Plague is still lurking around to a (very) small degree.
 
Mb194dc said:
Personally don't expect there to ever to be an end to this. I see little evidence that vaccination will provide a permanent solution. End game is COVID-19 becoming seasonal and permanent like influenza imo. In northern hemisphere we should at least see some easing through spring and summer.

Sure vaccines might take the edge off deaths every winter, as the yearly influenza vaccine does. I don't see covid zero being viable long term because there are enough countries in the world where that is impossible to allow SARS-CoV-2 to continue evolving, it will then spread back to rest of the world via freight and migration legal and illegal.

Sure you can keep it out of cut off islands for very long periods of time, it will just mean no one from the rest of the world will ever be able to visit again without strict quarantine and vice versa as people in those places won't have up to date immunity for it due to lack of natural exposure.
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So thats it then. We may as well end it all now if this is how we have to live.
End of the world has begun.
 
Mb194dc said:
Sure you can keep it out of cut off islands for very long periods of time, it will just mean no one from the rest of the world will ever be able to visit again without strict quarantine and vice versa as people in those places won't have up to date immunity for it due to lack of natural exposure.
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Being an Island helps but Britain is an island.
 
My wife’s granddad sadly died this morning. He caught COVID end of November and tested positive on 1st December. He died of complications from COVID so in theory due to the date of the test he won’t count in the figures of who died from COVID (not within the last 28 days).

begs the question how many others have died from complications after 28 days and then aren’t being added to the figures.
 
Stats

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In England, London and the North East had the highest infection rates in the week ending 16 January. We estimate that in London, 1 in 35 people had #COVID19
 
Parts of Norway (10 municipalities) are closing down as of today, with the strictest lockdown rules since the 12. of march.
Numbers of newly infected and dead are still pretty low in Norway though, but areas being locked down because of a spread of the UK mutation.
 
noodlehair said:
First lockdown here the local Morrisons had a queue system, security guards, someone cleaning all the baskets and trolleys before they were re-used, and were only allowing 1 person in per family unless it was someone who needed assistance.

It's a free for all now. Kids runnign up and down the isles and wiping their snot on all the vegetables (probabably). Queues for all the tills and packed isles....and they've come up with the genius idea of putting the baskets next to the self service checkout so they don't have to bother moving them so people can use them again...but it means you literally have to barge through the queue for the tills to get one.

If there's some scientific data showing all the supermarket precautions mean feck all then fair enough, but I really doubt that's the case since we never had a spell in the first lockdown where supermarkets were just letting people do whatever they want, so there's no way to make a comparison.

I also found it a lot easier to do a weekly shop in one go with the restrictions as once you got into the shop there was no hassle and everything was stocked, where as now it's back to being rage inducing and having to go 3 times just to get all the essentials.
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The first lockdown I used to go later to Tesco and had to queue outside, it was orderly and like Morrisons they only let one in at a time. I now go around seven o'clock and there are not enough people there to form a queue. They have the traffic light so it will change colour once the limit of people is reached. I was back home before eight o'clock. I only do my shopping once like you. If I forget something it is just tough.
 
SalfordRed18 said:
Does it really bother you that much?
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What a bizarre thing to ask.
I've worn a mask for two hours when they temporarily opened footy games again.
Was quite unpleasant and i wouldn't be in any hurry to get back into a ground if you still need one.

This guy wears it all day. Doing physical work.
That would be really horrible.
 
What’s the advice on exercise (indoors obviously) when you’re positive? Don’t do it even if you feel ok?
 
Whilst I don't necessarily agree with the media "fear-mongering" I do think that news papers are very poor at reporting science effectively. By now they've all carried hundred of articles over the years with headlines stating "X causes cancer" based on a small study, without fully contextualising it. Hence why people joke "everything causes cancer". They effectively desensitise people to potential risks and cause mistrust of science by poorly reporting it.
 
Dancfc said:
Sorry for your loss.

The metrics need redefining as we'll never truly know the true figures.

Your grandad in law was a Covid death but won't be acknowledged as such and there's probably people who's death had nothing to do with Covid but will count as a Covid death because they had a positive test within 28 days, which means theoretically someone could be eaten by a crocodile and have Covid put down as cause of death.
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That’s complete nonsense. A fiction spread on social media. Which has been corrected multiple times in this thread, including by the doctors that sign their name to the cause of death on death certs. Most recently @Hernandez - BFA.
 
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