COVID19

[RED-DOG]

I went for my flu jab today - a reminder for all you who have to have them to start battling to get thru on the phone to your local surgery.

Also when I got there, in a proper medical mask with a ventilator, before they unlocked the door I was told to take it off & put it away, they gave me sanitiser for my hands and a new disposable mask. They said that all reusable masks were only that if they were washed after each use and a new filter was put in.

As they didn't know if it was the first time I was using it or I had walked there picking up germs, to them it could be carrying the plague. A bit melodramatic they said, but better safe than sorry. Their procedure was the same what ever mask you had on.

Anyway - don't forget to get your flu jab - before the rush!

Mine is booked for October 29th.

[Ironside]

seems about right

[StuartHopkin]

will admissions and deaths rise if the its mainly the young and healthy contracting ? as we have seen despite rising numbers and society open for a number of months deaths are incredibly low.

This going round in circles cannot go on..if people arnt dying why lock down fully... if the important numbers of admissions and deaths were rising sharply and not the meaningless number of infections i could understand this

if you want to lock a country down for a disease that isnt killing people and not overloading the NHS then its just the same as any othe virus you can catch. We gonna hide under the bed at every little thing and let the world go to shit.

More deaths will be attributed to suicide and mental health issues than covid could ever achieve.

Admissions are rising sharply, you can see it in the link I posted; in a couple of weeks deaths will rise sharply.  This will happne even if they some up with a measure that naturally understates them. 

If we could just stick to 10 deaths a day, 5000 a year, that would be an ok trade off for a resonably functioning economy, but that wasn't going to happen on the measures we had in place.

The disease is increasing exponentially again, albeit at a slower pace than it did orginally.  So 200 admissions this week, is 400 next week and 800 the week after.   Then before we know it we are up to 100 deaths a day and so on.  It doesn't really matter if 10 is the base point, if it doubles every week or so.  Again we can see what is happening in France and Spain, so saying lets just crack on isn't the best strategy.

So the Government have to do something?  It would be bad strat to let it blow through the population now if you weren't prepared to do it when the other deaths were naturally lower (in the summer), and surely yoyu hold out now when any vaccine is likely to be nearer?  I don't like the Government, but I don't think they have much choice here.

And it is just bullshit on the suicide thing, there were 50,000 deaths in a few months from covid, which is about 8x the number of suicides each year.  And suicides happen for a number of reasons, sure there are likely to be more because of lockdown, but not nearly on the scale of the Covid deaths we would have had without lockdown.   There are trade offs with all these difficult decisions, but be honest on the numbers, and don't just repeat something somebody has just made up.

Deaths have risen in both France and Spain but it has not been a sharp rise.
They are both over their March/April infection rates but are seeing no where near the same level of deaths.

Why would we expect to here?

Because there is a lag.  So cases rise, then admissions rise, then deaths rise.   You can't wait for deaths to get severe before bringing in measures as there is going to be 8x as many by the time your measures come in to effect. 

There shouldn't be as many deaths this time as we know what to do, a younger population is affected, treatments are better and there are more beds.   

So it the lag going to look different this time because we didn't measure the number of cases well the first time?

I thought the lag was 1 week for infections, 3 weeks for hospitals and 5 weeks for deaths? Very roughly of course.

France are 6 weeks in with no real rise in deaths to match the rise in infections, and Spain are 8 weeks in only a very slight rise in deaths?

I was talking about the lag between infection and death, which is a bit less than 5 weeks on average.  It is going to be roughly the same as last time, though medical interventions will be better.  Maybe there will be a difference on a younger population as they should be able to fight better, but won't that just mean more survive and not they will take longer to die?  I can't be sure.
 We didn't measure cases well last time, but we knew the rough average times between infection, hospital and deaths. 

I think you are wrong on France.   They have announced 156 deaths today vs 10 or so for much of August.  13,000 cases vs 1,000 or so a few weeks ago.   

The numbers can get away pretty quickly.

What we are picking up with the testing is obviously very different to the first time round though, surely that makes a difference? I'm not sure what the testing situation is in France, but I am assuming it isn't the same shambles it is here.

Click to see full-size image.

Click to see full-size image.

Surely even with the lag they would be expecting those deaths to have started to ramp up already inline with the increased infections first week of August?

[Jon MW]

...
What we are picking up with the testing is obviously very different to the first time round though, surely that makes a difference? I'm not sure what the testing situation is in France, but I am assuming it isn't the same shambles it is here.
...

Context for the amount of testing.

Click to see full-size image.

[TightEnd]

no politicians at that

no questions to the scientists

it’s pretty incredible that, as of now, the way to tell the public it’s not a joke is to keep the joker away.

--

Big takeaway from sobering Whitty/ Vallance press conference - this is serious, have to stop weekly doubling of infections, don’t misunderstand the currently low hospitalisation rates, vaccines are on way

- but some specific types of social restrictions required for six months

--

[TightEnd]

Whitty: "We have to break unnecessary links between households in the least damaging way". That points the way to not mixing with any other households beyond your own

The other measures mentioned by Whitty - handwashing/masks, self-isolation, vaccines - either already in play or works in progress.

[jakally]

no politicians at that

no questions to the scientists

it’s pretty incredible that, as of now, the way to tell the public it’s not a joke is to keep the joker away.

One positive from this whole situation has been that more air time seems to have been given to people with expertise, and without a predetermined bias or agenda.

[DaveShoelace]

Whitty: "We have to break unnecessary links between households in the least damaging way". That points the way to not mixing with any other households beyond your own

The other measures mentioned by Whitty - handwashing/masks, self-isolation, vaccines - either already in play or works in progress.

Seems like it's going to be a 'together alone' six months where we probably can go to the cinema, the pub, a restaurant, clothes shopping etc, but literally just with the folks at our house (hopefully support bubble). How those things are policed is anyone's guess.

[Jon MW]

.... How those things are policed is anyone's guess.

That's the most depressing part about the whole pandemic.

With a total lockdown there was almost universal compliance.

But with any measure in any way less than a total lockdown there's been widespread avoidance.

It's a pretty bleak reflection of the general population that most people's first thought seems to be 'how can I get around COVID restrictions' rather than 'how can I avoid spreading COVID'.

[TightEnd]

the selfishness is quite incredible, but understandable i suppose

1 barnard castle lost the government a lot of compliance
2 people can't see how it will be enforced.
3 general conspiracy theory nut jobbing spread in social echo chambers eg gates, 5g, anti-vaxx etc
4 a big venn diagram overlap between libertarianism/anti authority and pro-brexit views...

[Doobs]

This is a bit depressing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/d_spiegel/status/1306998434679975940

Here Spiegelhalter tries to explain to Julia Hartley Brewer that the positive rate is very low then false positives can dominate.  

He realises that people are then misunderstanding and assuming that 90% of the positives are false positive.   So he replies to the tweet and stats that no it doesn't mean that, the increase is real and that most positives are real positives.   The correction only gets 10% of the retweets and today, the usual deniers are still pretending the correction never happened.  So if you see someone saying that only 10% of positives are genuine then you know what happened.

ho hum.

[nirvana]

.... How those things are policed is anyone's guess.

That's the most depressing part about the whole pandemic.

With a total lockdown there was almost universal compliance.

But with any measure in any way less than a total lockdown there's been widespread avoidance.

It's a pretty bleak reflection of the general population that most people's first thought seems to be 'how can I get around COVID restrictions' rather than 'how can I avoid spreading COVID'.

Good point this. We can argue about whether testing is a shambles or not but it's only in the context of rising cases which is all about behaviours.

We've been pretty successful at developing testing capability and not terrible at execution, perhaps a finite resource could be targeted better. Germany conducts much less testing than us but cases aren't rising as fast as here. What I am sure about is more draconian legislation is not the answer. Better leadership, openness and ongoing education is. Unforch the better leadership looks unlikely in the short term

[Pokerpops]

the selfishness is quite incredible, but understandable i suppose

1 barnard castle lost the government a lot of compliance
2 people can't see how it will be enforced.
3 general conspiracy theory nut jobbing spread in social echo chambers eg gates, 5g, anti-vaxx etc
4 a big venn diagram overlap between libertarianism/anti authority and pro-brexit views...

1. Barnard Castle was a storm in a tiny tea cup, magnified by the fact that Cummings has plenty of enemies and it provided easy laughs for the so-called satirists on HIGNFY.

2. People need to see a few example cases of enforcement if they lack the imagination to see how it could be done. People returning from their trip to Magaluff or wherever and going out on the lash with their mates the night they get back need a solid bit of enforcement IMO. A gathering of seven from two houses in the garden, not so much.

3. How many people do you think are actually influenced by the bollox on fb etc? It seems unlikely that they are a major cause of any upswing in infections.

4. Wait, so all of the spread in infection numbers is down to people having pro-Brexit views? All those libertarians and anti authority folk who glue themselves to trains and throw statues into docks are pro-Brexit?


I’ll go back to being socially distanced and just visiting this thread for the content from doobs and JonMW now.

[RED-DOG]

the selfishness is quite incredible, but understandable i suppose

1 barnard castle lost the government a lot of compliance
2 people can't see how it will be enforced.
3 general conspiracy theory nut jobbing spread in social echo chambers eg gates, 5g, anti-vaxx etc
4 a big venn diagram overlap between libertarianism/anti authority and pro-brexit views...

1. Barnard Castle was a storm in a tiny tea cup, magnified by the fact that Cummings has plenty of enemies and it provided easy laughs for the so-called satirists on HIGNFY.

2. People need to see a few example cases of enforcement if they lack the imagination to see how it could be done. People returning from their trip to Magaluff or wherever and going out on the lash with their mates the night they get back need a solid bit of enforcement IMO. A gathering of seven from two houses in the garden, not so much.

3. How many people do you think are actually influenced by the bollox on fb etc? It seems unlikely that they are a major cause of any upswing in infections.

4. Wait, so all of the spread in infection numbers is down to people having pro-Brexit views? All those libertarians and anti authority folk who glue themselves to trains and throw statues into docks are pro-Brexit?


I’ll go back to being socially distanced and just visiting this thread for the content from doobs and JonMW now.

Make sure you don't read this post then.

[bergeroo]

the selfishness is quite incredible, but understandable i suppose

1 barnard castle lost the government a lot of compliance
2 people can't see how it will be enforced.
3 general conspiracy theory nut jobbing spread in social echo chambers eg gates, 5g, anti-vaxx etc
4 a big venn diagram overlap between libertarianism/anti authority and pro-brexit views...

I think you would be surprised by number 3 perhaps. A lot of people get their 'news' from Facebook these days and don't really question sources.
1. Barnard Castle was a storm in a tiny tea cup, magnified by the fact that Cummings has plenty of enemies and it provided easy laughs for the so-called satirists on HIGNFY.

2. People need to see a few example cases of enforcement if they lack the imagination to see how it could be done. People returning from their trip to Magaluff or wherever and going out on the lash with their mates the night they get back need a solid bit of enforcement IMO. A gathering of seven from two houses in the garden, not so much.

3. How many people do you think are actually influenced by the bollox on fb etc? It seems unlikely that they are a major cause of any upswing in infections.

4. Wait, so all of the spread in infection numbers is down to people having pro-Brexit views? All those libertarians and anti authority folk who glue themselves to trains and throw statues into docks are pro-Brexit?


I’ll go back to being socially distanced and just visiting this thread for the content from doobs and JonMW now.