Isn’t it true that the best vaccines have shown no major drop in efficiency despite the variances in the virus? Also, isn’t it also possible for a virus to become more tranmissable while also becoming less virulent and deadly to the host or even remaining as tranmissable while losing virulence?
I think I said this a few months ago when I was losing my shit over our government scrapping their AZ rollout (because it didn’t show as much efficiency in stopping the beta(?) variant while still having enough data to show it lessened hospitalisation and lower risk of severe illness or death) that anything reducing severe illness or death to a fraction of what it was is still a win given that we’re realistically not getting rid of Covid-19.
You said yourself earlier that we’re already pretty much open - we can do most things. If this is really just a question of masks and nightclubs, why not just wait until we’ve got everyone their second jab? It feels like the gain of scrapping these last restrictions (mostly around convenience and ideological notions of ‘freedom’) are far outweighed by the damage that could be caused by a third wave, even if that third wave doesn’t necessarily lead to deaths.
Watching PMQs today, and it was a shitshow as usual. Boris refusing to answer anything and just shouting ‘world beating vaccine rollout’ to any question, to bovine cheers of approval.
But he did say that by 19th July all those over 40 will be double jabbed. Maybe I’m being cynical, but I think you can swap ‘over 40s’ for ‘people who vote’ and more specifically ‘people who vote conservative’
I hadn’t even thought about the effects of long covid on the way the government are handling this wave. Does anyone know of any research on whether long covid occurs equally amongst age groups? Do the young (<18) get it in large numbers?
I don’t follow the logic. Quite obviously the current restrictions in the UK apparently aren’t enough to stop it from spreading rapidly either. By continuing like this all you’d be doing is just slightly delaying the inevitable. If the argument is buying time so that more people can get vaccinated, then I understand that. But then it would make a lot more sense to do something that actually lowers reproduction rates.
Because there are still general travel restrictions between the 2 countries. What I said was that the US in unlikely to follow an individualized vaccine passport approach that disqualifies vaccines approved by the EMA and MHRA and in widespread use in otherwise approved countries
According to the FT charts above which are likely to be a source that is acceptable the figures are:
May 0.0088 deaths per 100k
July (today) 0.0344 per 100k
that’s nearly a 300% increase by my reckoning. That is not flat. In raw numbers its 23 people
Yes the numbers are small but if you carry on in the same vein, throw in a few super spreader events and fully open up then the number is open to the imagination.
Say the case numbers reach 100k a day, as predicted by Javid in parliament. At a 0.03% death rate that’s roughly 100 deaths a day I think (assuming a flat death rate which is clearly not the case at the moment). Continued vaccinations may help to curb that figure but the potential is still frightening IMO.
I dont think that is acceptable given the potential to go higher than that. As you know I work in construction. Allowing deaths by not enforcing PPE is not really defensible, even in law.
The idea is that no one approach can stop all bad outcomes, and so the right approach to risk mitigation is the layering of multiple different approaches. It should be a message about how to try to return to some level of normality while still taking appropriate precautions…things that arent eliminated just because you’re double vaccinated. And especially not because we’ve reached freedom day.
The FT takes its numbers from the UK coronavirus dashboard, which is the image I’ve given.
The FT data is presented in log scale which emphasises an up tick in numbers when the base line is low (as it is with deaths). There was an exponential curve to infections, which is now levelling off, but deaths have not shown a sign of increasing exponentially (yet) so a log scale presentation of that data may be misleading.
My calculation of 100 deaths per day assumes no growth from the current position. This is not what the curve shows. Sure the rate is a small number when you look at it at face value but what it equates to is a number that should not be acceptable to anyone.
If you have 100 people dying a day, how many people does that equate to being in hospital? How many more cancelled or delayed operations or procedures does that equate to? How many more NHS staff does it break?
Remember that figure assumes no change in the current death rate. The shape of the curve suggests otherwise.
Deaths are going up by 3x a month if that isn’t exponential I don’t know what is. (… and those figures only include deaths within 28 days of being tested positive for covid).
our average has climbed a little bit since we hit “phase3” re-opening. But nobody I know is hitting the nightclubs anytime soon. I’m having a BBQ on Saturday for 20 but it’s the same group of people we’ve been seeing since all this shit started. and I have a big yard for everyone to space out.
