The perennial lockdown makes no sense posts are back i see. Yawn.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
It doesn't make sense because you've just made up the numbers in your head. 23% of the adult population have antibodies from infection (source), in total. Last winter's peak (December and January) added 2.1m reported cases, 19% of the total cases reported since the pandemic started. We've already had 2m reported cases since the beginning of November. So for hospitalisations to double, the number would be much, much smaller than half the population being infected simultaneously.
98% have antibodies from infection or vaccination, that part's true. Having antibodies doesn't prevent infection though, what prevents infection is having a level of antibodies above a threshold. We know that antibodies wane from past infection (source) and vaccination (source), i.e. it starts to fall below the threshold, and Omicron offers a level of immune escape on top of that (source), i.e. it raises the threshold. Once you add those numbers into your calculation - using whatever part of the range of estimates you choose - it becomes a mathematical possibility again.
Torries put money and the economy above anything else. They always have and always will.
When they start proposing restrictions that are going to tank the economy you know things are genuinely bad.
When they start proposing restrictions that are going to tank the economy you know things are genuinely bad.
UK shoppers avoid High Streets amid Omicron fears
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59721526
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59721526
Our cnut Government would be better giving some clarity so people know where they stand...announce an 8pm curfew from tomorrow night on hospitality, and a 2 week lockdown to begin on 27th.
People will appreciate that a lot more imo that the constant worry around Xmas plans, the rumour mill, and ministers saying maybe this maybe that.
People will appreciate that a lot more imo that the constant worry around Xmas plans, the rumour mill, and ministers saying maybe this maybe that.
But then this doesn't explain the 6,000 deaths a day claim and also doesn't explain why this problem of short term admissions has only come into view now when it would have been something that could easily be pre-empted and would surely have been a problem during the first two waves?
We haven't got two pandemics. We've got a virus that's mutating which is exactly what viruses do and will continue to do, every single year.
The problem I have with this is we're still behaving and adopting plans/strategies based on the idea it is a short term pandemic and will just go away in a few months. Why is it any kind of surprise that a mutated version that is more resistant to vaccines and anti bodies would appear and would happen to spread more easily in the winter? There is a reason we have an updated flu jab every single year and there is a reason our health system is built to account for a surge in flu and other virus cases every year. We know enough about viruses and enough about covid to know this would happen and will continue to happen every year. Yet continue to rely on a strategy that demonstrably isn't sustainable or effective.
Yes there are unknowns about new variants but there forever will be. We can't even predict things like the harshness of the weather which also has a significant impact on the health system and people's ability to fight a virus. It'll be a guessing game for all time.
I don't know if people are just still trying to hide from the reality at this point which is that this is something we will need to learn to live with and adapt our health system to cope with. Not just keep adopting hide under the bed tactics and relying on politicians to make decisions they're neither qualified or objective enough to make.
It's a recipe for disaster every single time. Decisions will always be made at the wrong time because they are based on shutting down the system and people's lives/freedoms, rather than based on a system and way of life designed to account for covid.
This does make it all make a bit more sense but then essentially comes back to the vaccines being potentially next to worthless. If only the booster offers significant protection and even then only maybe/hopefully...and the next variant will be back in the same boat again but with twice as many leaks.
I just assumed when the vaccine was rolled out early in the year that the "booster" being talked about was an updated one to account for mutations. Turns out it's just the same thing again which leaves me back to being confused about what the actual plan is as that's obviously not one that was ever going to work for very long at all. Why was it being talked about as the "silver bullet" if there was no immediate plan to account for mutations?
The last point in people protecting their loved ones is where I think people still have tunnel vision. A lot of people who didn't see their granny last Christmas now don't have one to see this Christmas and a lot more won't have one by next Christmas. It is also taking a lot of the joy and freedom from the last part of a lot of people's lives.
My dad has been in hospital 3 times since covid for non covid rated reasons. His quality of life has been severely reduced by restrictions and lockdowns. Now he's facing spending a second Christmas on his own in order to "protect" him. Yet he'll get so lonely he'll end up at the pub instead the second it is open. The booster might protect him from covid but lockdowns and isolation have been astonishingly bad for his copd and drinking. It's undoubtedly taken years from his life.
My girlfriend's mum has multiple conditions and has spent the past 20 months as a prisoner in her own home. She's an anxious mess and doesn't even like going out for a walk anymore. She won't go near anyone and won't let anyone (including me and my girlfriend) in her house. This isn't helped at all by one minute us being told we don't even need to wear masks on a crowded train and the next being told the pandemic has somehow spiralled out of control in a way we couldn't possibly have helped to do anything about. Yesterday she was confused why we're talking about lockdowns and not seeing our own families at Christmas on the same day she's watching a football game on TV with 60,000 people there. She is also confused why it's not safe for a football game to go ahead if some players have covid, but you can still pack people into stadiums/trains to go and watch it. She thinks the world has gone completely mad and at times it's quite difficult to disagree because I can't answer some of what she says without agreeing it's bonkers.
This will forever be the problem with lockdown tactics. They aren't going to be all that effective when you're trying to balance them with the shock factor of a system and way of life not built to cope with them...and the inevitability of that is the more times you do it the more people will ignore or actively revolt against it.
This has descended slightly off topic but I am genuinely at a kiss at this point. Surely there are not people out there who think forever jumping in and out of lockdowns is a sensible or sustainable plan.
Get well soonJust tested positive on a lateral flow earlier. My partner has had it for a few days now (she got it from a Work Christmas Party) and was hoping I’d sneakily avoid it but nope. Throat felt a bit annoying yesterday, and had this slight headache all day that I just couldn’t get rid off.
Today however, just completely sapped of energy, constantly needing to nap. Head is banging. Had a fair few lemsips now. Gonna have to isolate Christmas Day which really sucks, not much to be done about it though.
We’ve both had the double vaccine but no booster.
Yeah it's ridiculous particularly after last year. If we're going to have a lockdown I'd rather know now and I'd rather it start now than suddenly get announced on Christmas Eve.
I don't see the point in curfews either. It won't help the hospitality industry much particularly not pubs. Could have closed hospitality for and from this weekend just gone and that would have bought some reassurance that people could at least spend Christmas with their families. It would have cost money in business support but that's going to need to happen one way or another anyway.
I'm not looking forward to potentially another Christmas sat in my flat on my own. I'm probably in a better place than last year but good fecking job as last Christmas day I spent on a 4 hour walk to avoid frankly feeling suicidal.
You’re forgetting this is unprecedented. The vaccines were developed before Omnicron raised its dirty head. Let’s see how it pans out. At this point they are rightly being cautious because if it’s super transmissible then the hospitals will be under more pressure during the winter months when they are already pushed from winter virals. And their own staff are isolating more too
Exactly. I don’t see why people would argue against that point. Money is the Tory god
Listening to the radio earlier and Leo Varadker (ireland) says that he expected that over the next few years we can expect winter shutdowns or “steps back” and we should take the opportunity to do our stuff in other months. Or words to that effect.
troubling
troubling
I heard that. It was unnecessarily bleak IMO. I mean, he could be right but still. Nobody needed to hear that right now. Read the fecking room, Leo.
It's not unprecedented for a virus to mutate though. It would be unprecedented for it not to. We know vaccines require updating and become less effective over time because we already have to account for this with other viruses.
We know we will have to adapt our health system to cope with the increased demands from covid because we already have to do this for other illnesses and viruses. Otherwise we wouldn't even need a health system as no one would ever be unwell.
We also know it isn't practical to vaccinate an entire population 3 times a year and cancel literally hundreds of thousands of vital operations and health appointments to do so, never mind when you have to factor in on top that it doesn't even prevent excess hospital admissions or a national lockdown which brings its own massive and unsustainable issues. Not least the panic and surge in last minute travelling it will create at this time of year.
A sustainable plan would be increasing health service capacity and targeting updated treatments/protection to the most vulnerable rather than blanketing the entire population with what seems to be near ineffective treatments.
I get that there are a lot of unknowns but we're doing things I know make absolutely no sense and aren't sustainable at this point and I'm not a scientist. I mean I know it makes no sense to have 60,000 people at a football game at the same time as the city it's in has declared a "major incident" due to a pandemic. This would have been incredibly dumb 2 weeks into the pandemic. We're nearly 2 years into it.
I know if makes no sense to do this and then 2 days later try to tell the entire country they can't see their family at Christmas and expect them to listen, after you've made them all get double vaccinated, but that is what we will try to do...and then people will moan or get on their high horse when loads of people ignore the rules or travel to be with their family before the rules are imposed in order to avoid being stuck on their own, as if this isn't completely predictable and expected human behaviour.
It's doing my head in at this point honestly Geebs
If our health service being overwhelmed at winter was the precedence for shutdowns then we'd have had lockdowns the past 20 years.
In fairness, Leo is/was a doctor so probably knows more than most politicians but it still seems unnecessarily bleak. Most pandemics last 3-5 years and that's without the radical improvements in medicine we've had as well as almost unfathomably quick access to vaccines.
Could be carnage in London looking at this
I’m far from being some sort of libertarian nut job but that’s a mission creep that I’m a little anxious about. Ending up doomed to spending every winter from now on with restrictions on our behaviour when hospitals get no more slammed with sick people than they have done every winter since forever, just because these sick people now happen to have covid.
I'd join the anti vaxxers in that case
8pm curfew when the majority of the population is off work, one of the stupidest policies I've ever heard, that will do nothing but just encourage people to ram all their social activity into smaller hours
Not just troubling, fundamentally bad messaging and if that's what they're planning, it's bad planning.
Plus, I don't think it's reasonable. We've got old people seeing out their final years alone - or being told that's how they ought to behave. We've got 20-something's who should be out meeting people, learning stuff, enjoying the world, building relationships who are being told it's wrong. We've got kids who don't know if they're going to school tomorrow or not.
Quality of life is a real thing, and we've all made sacrifices on that side to preserve life.
National health services need to be redesigned to protect us, not us redesigned to protect them. In the UK it's been death by a thousand cuts for the NHS, years of taking anything that look like a contingency plan out of the system, blaming patients for bed-blocking when they mean the care system has collapsed.
At any rate, I've ranted this all before, but if they mean anything more than the occasional warning not to show up at A&E unless it's actually urgent then I want the problem fixed, not the people.
That's a bit dramatic. Worst case we have this every year and it never goes away, society can most definitely cope with limited winter circuit breakers.
I said in the summer we should plan for a circuit breaker. If everyone had known first week of December and mid Jan there was going to be a week of soft lockdown that wouldn't come as a huge detriment.
It's this constant unknown thats the issue. Policy has to follow the data but wouldn't it have been better to cancel a circuit breaker if not needed.
Clearly all the Tory party leaks, are designed to force Boris into not locking down it seems.
A lot of the top Tories including the Chancellor are against restrictions also.
It would be sensible to have a 2 week lockdown, but I suspect, they will do what they are doing now, by forcing businesses to close through lack of trade, so that they don't have to take financial responsibility in helping them out.
A lot of the top Tories including the Chancellor are against restrictions also.
It would be sensible to have a 2 week lockdown, but I suspect, they will do what they are doing now, by forcing businesses to close through lack of trade, so that they don't have to take financial responsibility in helping them out.
If he'd said this year, or even for the next 18 months it wouldn't irritate me as much. When we talk about "next few years" I doubt the will or the serious intention to deal with the fundamental issues.
Then there's the epidemiology itself. We moved a lot of children's RSV (a virus that affects babies/infants mostly) into the summer this year, seemingly as a side-effect of winter lockdowns on children and what happened when we opened back up. We don't know when the next major covid variant will show up - Delta arrived in April/May. This one arrived at the ideal time for Christmas ready to hit the hospitals hard in time for the flu season.
Do we schedule our lives around the assumption that things can change in a month at any time of year, and therefore just book holidays, or weddings etc a week in advance? What about house moves, sporting events, going to university, starting a new job or a new business etc.
I've no problem with restrictions, but they have to be to deal with an unexpected problem, or to buy time for a specific action to take effect. Planning for annual boosters is one thing. Planning for intermittent shutdowns by guessing which months we can do things in is just that, playing a guessing game.
Cabinet meeting at 2pm - what are the bets? I’m going guidance only with no further legal restrictions relying on people to naturally take precautions. They gambled opening up restrictions with Delta in the face of some bleak scenarios and the hospitalisations were lower than some of the best case models - the fact the SA data looks very promising, the Danish data has started to show signs it may go a similar way, we’ll soon be giving over 1m boosters a day, the lack of political capital and that he’s always been a gambling opportunist makes me think Boris will go with option A. Even putting aside the hospitalisation numbers and assuming the best case models of around 2k a day turn out correct meaning it’s theoretically manageable - I don’t see how society functions with the case numbers we’re talking resulting in the numbers of people being unwell/having to isolate simultaneously…that’s the biggest risk for me.
Foregone conclusion they’re going to point to voluntary reduction in hospitality bookings over Christmas, parties etc to argue that legal restrictions aren’t necessary.
Plus how the feck can he legitimately legislate now given last couple of weeks?
8pm New Year’s Eve curfew would be a bit shit but oddly hilarious at same time
Plus how the feck can he legitimately legislate now given last couple of weeks?
8pm New Year’s Eve curfew would be a bit shit but oddly hilarious at same time
If you’re going all in on the take a punt and hope we’re ok approach I think you need to have a think about duration of self isolation for positive cases/close contacts. The available data points towards a possible reduced duration of illness with omicron and allowing people return to work a bit sooner than with previous variants might be the only way to keep hospitals (and other essential services) functioning if exponential growth continues at the current rate.
So many people will not keep that regardless.
I still swear Khan hasn't cancelled his Trafalgar Square celebration as yet?
I'm going to say they'll stick with advice only. We'll see some changes in rules around contact isolation and other things so there are still some people who can go out to work. They'll tell us that if we're naughty and fill up the hospital, they'll make us all stay home (apart from when we go to work) in January.
Routine confirmation of LFT by PCR will be dropped to preserve test capacity (and particularly turnaround times) and prioritise PCR based on medical need. Sick leave rules will change to match, but no one will know how to do this and the phone lines etc will be jammed and the registration site will crash when you attempt to report a test to get sick pay. One of the cabinet's pals will get a contract scanning LFT positive results for possible fraud. Sick pay well be handed out randomly several months later.
They'll announce hospitality VAT will go down to 5% for February (or maybe April if they're being cautious) before going up again.
Disclaimer: Pure guesswork, not backed up by watching the news etc today
Advice only, no one will listen and do their own thing .
Another way to potentially save time/money if current trends continue.
We have a separate issue with omicron compared to previous waves. Firstly we have no idea how it will play out, best estimates is for it to be "milder" clinical sequalae, because rather than a covid-naive population its been reintroduced into a part booster/part partially vaccinated/part previously infected population.
I don't honestly know how epidemiologists make some of the models they do, I don't pay too much attention to specific numbers.
What I have absolutely little doubt about is the importance of the booster programme. There are suggestions that this vaccination isn't so much a booster but essentially the third part of what might be a three-part vaccine
This is with precedence to other vaccinations. In addition to things like flu which need annual jabs adjusted sometimes to what is going around.
The booster is tolerated well, we have the logistics to administer it and gives everybody an enormous boost in neutralising antibody titres, especially relevant to elderly and those with underlying medical conditions. In addition to potentially reducing severe infection risks, catching covid, even with a vaccine-evading new variant.
And barring feeling a bit shit for a few days, despite what anti-vaxxers say it is remarkably well-tolerated.
I'm happy to see so many people coming forward for it in my vaccination clinics. Gladly given up my annual leave to be vaccinating daily till the new year.
We have logistics for mass vaccination programme. Rest of your suggestions pertaining of increasing hospital capacity to cope. More staff, more ITU beds are something NHS frontline workers are calling for ages but those are long term investments. In the interim, I want to get back to treating chronic illness better, to be monitoring my chronic kidney, diabetic, hypertensive patients, to have lower cancer waiting times (especially head and neck cancer diagnosis clinics), for my stage IV cancer patients to have beds available for post-operative care for those that are anaesthetic risks.
But with a massive covid spread, and if our beds are taken up by double pneumonia patients with suspected long clots on regular, prolonged hi-flow oxygen, all of that is not possible. Mass vaccination drive is a good way to prevent that from happening. Presently we have duty emergency GPs taking phone calls, I drew the short end and am doing that today with my colleagues jabbing, but we know the value of getting as many people jabbed as possible will bring
Quick and cheap, and I reckon if they included a question about age they'd be pretty specific as well.
Full lockdown from 28th I reckon.
No announcement today according to Harry Cole though
I wouldn't even say it's a nut job or conspiracy theorist argument. I don't think it's any real secret that the pandemic has been amazing for the HSE in the way it's taken the usual winter media about overloaded A&Es and record levels of people on trollies completely out of the spotlight. Still, I'm assuming the government themselves know it's absolutely awful for their polling numbers so ... there's that.
I guess the difference with Covid is that it can decimate health care workers, too? Meaning much less staff than normal in winter which makes things even worse. I dunno, I'm trying to see the upside and not be pessimistic for the future!
Just want to say my thanks to you and others who are doing this kind of work, and who are living with the impact of covid itself and it's knock-on into the rest of healthcare every day.
Thanks also for giving up your annual leave to help push the booster program forward. I'm grateful for your efforts.
Like minded and affluent people.
If there is no announcement tonight, I would say that means no further restrictions before January and Government will just let businesses fend for themselves.
Thank you, brilliant.
I think you either have to go full lockdown or nothing at all. Can’t see the new “measures” being enough.