Why not? (ten things)
I think he means that because an infection can be mild it can be handled. Hospitalisations and deaths are a better measure.
I’m with Mascot, the worry is that letting the virus run wild increases the chances of mutations and one of them may be vaccine resistant.
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Is this proof the vaccine is working?
A friend’s wife was due to have a hip replacement tomorrow. She is early 70s, double jabbed very early on. Her pre-op PCR test was positive much to her surprise and distress, but no obvious symptoms at all. She has been isolating for the last 10 days to ensure this didn’t happen…her husband told me he has been careful, only going out for a walk or a game of tennis and in any case he has had a negative test today.
For me infections are always a good yardstick as they increase before hospitalisations and death.
Death should not be a play thing. deaths carry on increasing after the infection rate starts decreasing. If in a month they are at 60 a day a month later they could be at 180 a day (you start entering the ‘embarrassing’ numbers game).
The vaccination program isn’t over yet so I can not believe they have sufficient data to accurately predict the curves. If they have then all the better.
The relaxing I believe to be a politically motivated move. After hypying the success of the vaccination program an increase in cases intervenes. To keep the narrative constant they make decissions that are saying the increase in cases is not important. It really is Torygraph territory imo.
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That was of course the case pre vaccination …if that proves still to be the case we truly are in deep trouble.
The argument I understand it is that the link or previous relationship between the virus, deaths and serious illness has now changed. They use the word broken. I agree it has changed but to me that still doesn’t mean you should just jump off the cliff.
I liken it to driving a car. Just because you enter a 30mph zone and the relationship between you going 30mph and dying in a car crash is different to you driving at 70mph, doesn’t mean you can take your seat belt off or simply ignore the fact that an elderly person is crossing the road in front of you.
How that relates to restrictions is another matter but maintaining simple PPE in crowded areas seems kind of sensible to me and last time I checked hasn’t impacted my FWEEDOM in any shape or form. It’s not comfortable but sometimes, so are new shoes.
PS I did order a pair of new slippers yesterday
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It’s clear that hospitalisations and death have decreased in report to infections (though the link is never broken it just changes). Vaccinations are helping tremendously however much of the world is a long way behind the UK.
Your interpretation is not what I meant, we have seen in the UK that hospitalisations and deaths rise a lot slower since the vaccination started. What I a seeing though is the number of infections per day going well over what we have seen before (one forecast was saying 100000 a day).
Given that we test as much as Germany, Spain and Italy combined I think it’s safe to say we’re identifying a much higher % of cases than pretty much anywhere and certainly more than countries of equivalent size. Infection numbers are neither a good yardstick nor a good comparator.
Just to back this up, I’m getting a barrage of emails from my daughter’s school daily (multiple per day) for positive cases. 66 kids were sent home in a single day yesterday. My daughter is isolating as a close contact today. 
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Don’t know which data you used, but as for Germany vs UK the comparisions I’ve seen are usually misleading, as RKI data in Germany only counts PCR tests and not the gazillions of rapid antigen tests in their statistics whereas the UK numbers do include antigen tests.
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Um, just a thought. We’re identifying more cases because we’re testing more. Why are we testing more? Because more people have symptoms maybe??
I’m not convinced that say a country like Germany (for example) has less cases because people aren’t being tested. Not unless they’re just sitting at home literally sweating it out. Is that the case?
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Exactly. It doesn’t explain Germany 500 odd new cases daily, UK 25,000 new cases daily.
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80% is the magic number at which transmission naturally falls through lack of vulnerable contacts. If every adult were double vaccinated it would pretty well come to that number (78.3%) so it might not be necessary to include children in the vaccination programme.
Would you care to state what you consider to be an “acceptable number of deaths”? 100 per week? 1000 per week? Or maybe more?
How do you arrive at your figure. More to the point, how do you justify it?
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Of what?
What has Germany, Spain or Italy got to do with UK numbers?
I’m looking for some logic!
I don’t know what the specifics of the earlier conversation was, but haven’t we justified 30k deaths from flu each year since forever? Either that or we just never realised that many people died from flu before Covid-19 drew attention to viruses. I know I never realised that many people died from it.
For me if it’s thousands of Covid deaths on top of flu deaths then it’s difficult to justify doing nothing about it. What was the article last month where either the flu virus blocks Covid’s ability to infect or vise-versa? Will be interesting to see how these viruses interact this winter.
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Firstly I agree that once the country reaches a certain level of vaccination and Covid becomes Endemic, infection numbers are no longer necessary but to manage the clinical conditions of those seriously ill that need hospitalization to prevent death.
However, what I don’t agree is the measure of the degree of opening up as much as UK is going to. Firstly, your FULL 2 dose vaccination rate is very high only in certain age groups. The age groups that are low happen to be the age groups who are most likely to be out and about and mixing around without social distancing and mask. So you can imagine what is going to happen when 19 July comes and you tell them all restrictions are off.
Secondly, before you reach the herd immunity through inoculation, why move from 0-100 immediately? Because there are so many unknowns, what would be so wrong to move from 0-50 first for a couple of week or a month or so, observe, move again, observe, move again?
I keep saying, reopening is the key but reopening with wild abandon is not.
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The above partly explains why I believe we ought to look at hospitalisations and deaths rather than infections. Here’s an extract
Covid no longer the deadly virus it was
The rollout of the vaccination programme has altered everything, reducing both the individual risk and the wider one to the health system.
Back in January, about one in 10 infections could be expected to translate into a hospital admission 10 days later. Now that figure appears to be somewhere between one in 40 and one in 50.
What is more, those ending up in hospital seem to be less sick, and need less intensive treatment.
The risk of death, as a result, has reduced even further. In January about one in 60 cases resulted in someone dying. Today it’s fewer than one in 1,000.
This is not new. Published March this year. Study initiated in May 2020.
This is just how clinical science works. What has got repeated push back since the beginning of this outbreak is the presentation of therapies as being beneficial that are only speculated to help given the absence of data. No one has ever blocked the study of any of these things, especially with generics as that is an open playing field for research clinicians to do for themselves. The issue is that most therapies speculated to work have, after careful testing, shown to do little to fuck all.
There are therapies that do show success, but they are pretty fucking expensive, can have serious side effects and so have to be provided in a very controlled setting making them not viable for widespread use. Essentially, despite the entire industry being reorganized to focus on covid for 18 months, nothing has been found that ticks all the boxes of being sufficiently effective, benign side effects, easy and safe to administer, and cheap that would justify any change in public health policy being based on their existence.
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