My sons school has had 3 outbreaks in the past 3-4 weeks. Schools are still a risk for those of us cocooning
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Outbreaks in schools are to be expected, so long as we have ongoing community transmission. Especially when you live in an area with higher than average case loads.
The good news about schools is that opening them didn’t cause anything like the huge surge we saw before Christmas, as many predicted they might. In fact cases have gradually come down since schools re-opened. Which has been one of the rare good news stories coming out of this pandemic!
Obviously not comparable as we don't have any covid at the moment but we are vaccinating very slowly. The government is trying to report as little as possible but we seem to have only given 2.7 million shots (the breakdown by vaccine is not released) for a population of 25 million. So some will have had both shots and some/most just the first. 400,000 last week was the highest weekly total and that will rise as AZ production ramps up but then call once all over 50's have been given AZ and we have to rely on the dribble of Pfizer that we get.
Read a BBC article this morning saying at least 40 bodies have washed up on the banks of the Ganges in India and it looks like they're COVID victims where it's assumed families couldn't go down normal burial/cremation routes.
Can you imagine 40 bodies turning up on the banks of one of our rivers in the UK?
Can you imagine 40 bodies turning up on the banks of one of our rivers in the UK?
Give boris time.........
Imagine actual slums in the UK (Hull doesn’t count)
Everything now spreads more easily than the original Wuhan strain, it's the evolutionary pressures and survival of the fittest amongst virus strains. What's more important is how deadly they are, from my reading there is no indication that it causes more serious disease or avoid vaccination.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...f-prison-like-conditions-in-quarantine-hotels
UK travellers complain of ‘prison-like’ conditions in quarantine hotels
Concerns raised over food, lack of fresh air and social distancing after coming back from red list countries
UK government in doing things on the cheap shocker.
UK travellers complain of ‘prison-like’ conditions in quarantine hotels
Concerns raised over food, lack of fresh air and social distancing after coming back from red list countries
UK government in doing things on the cheap shocker.
Don’t come back from a red list country then!
My first thought too but none of the examples in the article are people pissing off for a week in the sun.
As someone who's caught out by travel restrictions and unable to be where I'd ideally like to, I do wish that people were a bit less reflexively dismissive of those that still want to travel when there's 14-day quarantines, additional expenses, all-out bans, etc. The deterrent for "frivolous" travel is already there in the 14-day quarantine requirement in the UK's case (and I do applaud that the UK has still left an option for people to make these trips if they deem them necessary), there's no need to wish additional challenges on these people because you somehow really really don't want them to travel.
Anecdotal but reassuring all the same.
It seems that it's not the case in Maldives where they are using Covishield from India. Over half the population of the capital had been fully vaccinated with the two doses but the infection rate is rising rapidly along with the hospitalisation. Maybe it's the Indian variant but for sure it's not working in The Maldives right now.
About a third of the population of the Maldives have had two doses. Just over half have had a single dose. That’s not enough to keep R < 1 even if the vaccine was 100% effective.
Considering they’ve been inundated with Indian tourists and don’t seem to have any social distancing measures in place (gyms, cinemas, mosques etc all fully open until last Friday) what’s happening there isn’t surprising and doesn’t tell us much about how effective the viruses are or aren’t against the Indian variants. They’re also reporting that nobody who has been vaccinated has died. Which is good news.
To me this isn’t a red flag about vaccines failing against new variants so much as a red flag about opening up too quickly and allowing too much travel into your country without the necessary checks and protections in place.
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Can R value be actually <0 though?
I think Ro needs to be less than 1 for herd immunity to occur. A typo I'm guessing.
No it can’t. That should read < 1.
Data like this is so reassuring after so many thought the big surges in autumn/winter last year was driven by schools reopening. Now we see what happens when schools open without pubs/restaurants/indoor socialising i.e. not much.
Only a month left of the school year for most kids. Thank feck we got them back when we did.
The B1617 (Indian) variant does appear to be more transmissible than earlier variants, at least anecdotally from what is happening in Singapore. For context, we have largely contained the virus previously, with pretty low community cases per day (in the range of 0-3 or 4) for months. Over the last couple of weeks, the number of cases here have increased quite sharply, with two major clusters, one in a hospital and one in the airport. The B1617 appears to be the culprit in both clusters. This uptick in number of cases is despite our vaccination drive making pretty good progress over the past months. Several of the cases were fully vaccinated, as both the hospital and airport are considered frontlines and most employees there are fully vaccinated.
Bodies now found in rivers in 2 different states.
At this stage it does look like B1617 is going to be the next globally dominant variant. Remains to be seen how resistant it is to vaccines and to what extent. Based on the pre-clinical data vaccine resistance shouldn’t be a huge problem, considering how effective they seem to be against similarly resistant strains. Do you know if any of the vaccinated people who got sick ended up hospitalised/dead?
It is a concern, seems north west cases are slowly rising just like Kent or wherever it was was stubbornly high between October-November and that eventually lead to discovery of new variant.
I really don't want to go all doomsday....but what is the actual plan if a new variant emerges over next 12 months that nulifies vaccination? Is it so unthinkable the government will errrr get round to thinking up stuff when the time comes or did they announce a detailed plan on the quiet? So far it's just been that vaccination will solve everything and we'll be back to Jan 2020 very soon e.g. sometime in next 12 months and I obviously very much hope that will happen and it's working well so far so we have to be patient still.
Just curious as we obviously can't have the next 2-3 years disrupted like the last 14 months has been for all sorts of reasons.
The overall death rate in Singapore is very low (31 accumulated death in total), so I won't look at that as an indicator unless there is a huge spike now.
Just found this: 30 vaccinated people caught covid, 57 per cent of these cases were asymptomatic, and none were severe cases that require more intensive care.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bu...est-positive-for-covid-19-with-mild-to-no?amp
Small sample size. But does looks like vaccines help. In Singapore as of now we have been using Pfizer and Moderna
Interesting. Thank. Like you said, very small samples size but reassuring all the same.
One thing that I may be clueless about and may need educating on. But I always thought vaccines worked by giving you the tools to fight off an infection before it makes you actually sick, which surely would mean there’s a period where you are infected before your body drives it off? So surely you could be positive and vaccinated but don’t then get actually sick?
I'm not so worried about countries using Pfizer and Moderna, as they have ample clinical data and ongoing research to track the efficacy against newer strains. My biggest worry is on the vaccines which lack data on the original strain, let alone mutant strains. Many less developed countries are now using these unproven vaccines and they could become a perfect incubator for the virus.
Yes
Thread, patient-family-doctor dynamic. A very common scene as I'm hearing from doctors and other medical professionals.
Some vaccines are sterilising and prevent infection. These vaccines stimulate an immune response that deal with the virus before it gets into cells to multiply. I think Measles is an example of this. However, the majority aren't but usually prevent severe symptoms, often to the point of being asymptomatic. They almost always also hugely reduce the transmission of a virus by reducing viral load and the symptoms that promote transmission such as coughing and sneezing.
Thanks, so in this case I guess vaccinated people becoming infected isn’t necessarily something to worry about unless lots of people start actually becoming sick
38-40 year olds can now book their vaccinations - https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coron...rus-vaccination/book-coronavirus-vaccination/
edit: In the UK.
edit: In the UK.
Should have taken that appointment last night as it's 'you're in a queue' now! It will probably be hard to get an appointment for a week at least.
Should have taken that appointment last night as it's 'you're in a queue' now! It will probably be hard to get an appointment for a week at least.
Oof, i must have just snuck in and then immediately realised my first jab is booked for 2 days before I'm meant to be going to Manchester for the Crystal maze. Fingers crossed that I don't get the same side effects as my missus did, she was as sick as a dog for a couple of days, if I miss the first social event for over a year I will not be chuffed and neither will the friend who organised it and paid for my ticket as an early 40th present!
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Sterilising is ideal but we have virtually eliminated many diseases with non-sterilising vaccines. What we really need is getting to HIT which is likely 60-75% (likely the higher figure given the new variants) and if a vaccine isn't sterilising that doesn't necessarily directly equate to 60-75% of people having been given a vaccine. That might mean reaching HIT won't be possible especially when we are talking about the whole world needing to be vaccinated. That said we don't always get to HIT for a number of viruses and that doesn't mean that we don't control them hugely.
With the amount of non-vaxxers & people afraid of vaccines in the world you’d expect we aren’t gonna reach HIT anyway
Definitely not, zero COVID is a pipe dream for a long while yet.
I think there'll be a vaccine surplus towards the end of the year, and those of us who had one type could get another if we want (maybe the more knowledgeable can share if this can cause problems).
My neighbour got it after the 2nd jab, she had a snotty nose for 2 days then tested negative. The rest of the family had symptoms for 2 weeks.
There have been few anti-vaxxers in HK over the years, but the government politicalizes the issue and now many people become afraid of vaccines. Now we have ample vaccines but no one to take.