So, coronavirus...

[eldanielfire]

.......and of course Johnson over-promised and under-delivered every time he opened his mouth last year.
Perhaps he is finally taking good advice?

To be fair, I don't think anybody predicted we would be still in the pandemic a year later.

Before the development of vaccines which themselves look (hopefully) set to see Covid19 remain with us for at least a few years to come surely people thought the pandemic was going to stay more than a year? Unless they agreed with Trump it was going to magically go away

It wasn't literal (there is always someone who says something at some point). It was said COVID was here to stay. But as a pandemic with enforced lockdowns a year later was in mainstream thinking of any country at the time, only a possibility, the actions a year ago were said to be something that could suppress it over months.

[tc27]

After some really low days looks like about 350k doses given today.

Government says it has capacity for many hundreds of thousands per day so hopefully will some massive daily numbers starting around this time next week when the supply ramps up.

[Blackmac]

After some really low days looks like about 350k doses given today.

Government says it has capacity for many hundreds of thousands per day so hopefully will some massive daily numbers starting around this time next week when the supply ramps up.

SG claiming that after a two week lull they should be able to ramp up to a regular 400000 weekly which would be great.

[Dogbert]

After some really low days looks like about 350k doses given today.

Government says it has capacity for many hundreds of thousands per day so hopefully will some massive daily numbers starting around this time next week when the supply ramps up.

SG claiming that after a two week lull they should be able to ramp up to a regular 400000 weekly which would be great.

I don't see that being much on an issue between the week Monday 8th to Sunday 14th over 380K had their first jab , so the infrastructure / capacity is already proven to be there

[Rhubarb & Custard]

To be fair, I don't think anybody predicted we would be still in the pandemic a year later.

Before the development of vaccines which themselves look (hopefully) set to see Covid19 remain with us for at least a few years to come surely people thought the pandemic was going to stay more than a year? Unless they agreed with Trump it was going to magically go away

It wasn't literal (there is always someone who says something at some point). It was said COVID was here to stay. But as a pandemic with enforced lockdowns a year later was in mainstream thinking of any country at the time, only a possibility, the actions a year ago were said to be something that could suppress it over months.

People might not have assumed HMG would allow significant spread and lockdown too late (and on repeat basis), and fail on the track on trace front to such a spectacular degree (partly because they allowed the disease to become too widespread).

[dpedin]

After some really low days looks like about 350k doses given today.

Government says it has capacity for many hundreds of thousands per day so hopefully will some massive daily numbers starting around this time next week when the supply ramps up.

SG claiming that after a two week lull they should be able to ramp up to a regular 400000 weekly which would be great.

I don't see that being much on an issue between the week Monday 8th to Sunday 14th over 380K had their first jab , so the infrastructure / capacity is already proven to be there

Plenty of capacity it is just a known and anticipated supply issue as explained previously, I understand the supply will come back online and increase over next few weeks. It will accelerate pretty quickly from here on in.

[tc27]

Dpedin..

I know we have had discussions on this before and I was wondering what are your thoughts on the elimination debate?

It looks like to me the overton window has shifted and we are pretty much giving up on elimination - even the SG is only paying lip service to the idea. I assume Devi Sridar is furious with the SG about this but she doesn't seem to have mentioned it.

The vaccination data seems to suggest the optimistic scenarios in terms of effectiveness are playing out - and even in Australia/NZ the debate seems to be moving towards vaccination and then re-opening borders.

Edit - some interesting comments also related to our earlier debates:

[Biffer]

I think elimination of community transmission is possible but only if the UK closes the borders to auch more rigorous degree.

[dpedin]

Dpedin..

I know we have had discussions on this before and I was wondering what are your thoughts on the elimination debate?

It looks like to me the overton window has shifted and we are pretty much giving up on elimination - even the SG is only paying lip service to the idea. I assume Devi Sridar is furious with the SG about this but she doesn't seem to have mentioned it.

The vaccination data seems to suggest the optimistic scenarios in terms of effectiveness are playing out - and even in Australia/NZ the debate seems to be moving towards vaccination and then re-opening borders.

Edit - some interesting comments also related to our earlier debates:

Elimination - the reduction to as low a level of community transmission as possible - should still be the aim. To treat covid19 as a flu type illness and accept a level of transmission in the community, when we know there is ongoing impact of long covid, is the wrong approach as far as I am concerned. Devi Sridhar suggests we should treat it more like measles and use the vaccination as a key weapon in our aim to eliminate it as much as possible from the community and I am far more comfortable with that approach. We know that covid is far more dangerous than flu, (about 5 times more deadly) and to accept the known consequences (min of 10% have long cover symptoms months after infection, blood clots increased in patients with covid), and accept there is still much we don't know of the long term effects of infection, of letting it spread to whatever level is deemed acceptable within the community is for me not ideal. If we have a vaccine with the efficacy levels they have shown then elimination is even more of an achievable target and should be pursued with all our public health resources.

Border control is almost non existent, a pantomime, it is just a show for the public, as was discovered by Yvette Cooper in Home Office Committee yesterday. Only 1% of overseas visitors arriving in UK are being put into quarantine hotels - 99% are going home via public transport or car to self isolate and very, very few are followed up.

It will be interesting to see how it develops as we come out of lock down and in England in particular which is starting with highest existing numbers of cases per 100k. The sequence and timetable of exiting lock down in effect accepts there will be higher transmission and increase in number of cases amongst the younger population during the spring/summer. The UK Gov has said so and seems to have accepted that case numbers will increase but have said that is not one of their key measures. There is a calculation that the under 50's and children will see increasing numbers of cases but the possible impact of this in terms of their ill health and death is going to be minimal and acceptable given the need to come out of lock down. It is a bit of a calculated gamble with the lives of the young and they may be right ... I hope they are right.

[Biffer]

Got to agree. The whole 'just like flu' thing is still dangerous. It'll need a more rigorous public health response imo, not identical to measles but maybe closer to it than to flu.

Measles is on the notifiable disease list, and Covid was added to it last year. I think it should stay on that list (flu isn't).

[tc27]

More Mark Woolhouse contesting the Shridar/Leitch 'we eliminated CV19 in the summer but the English bought it back' narrative.


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark ... -qn9bqv3m9

An adviser to Nicola Sturgeon has challenged the first minister’s claim that coronavirus was “reseeded” into Scotland from other parts of the UK and claimed her “elimination” strategy is unattainable.

The first minister has claimed coronavirus was “almost eliminated” in Scotland last summer and it was brought back into the country from travellers coming in from outside.

Mark Woolhouse, the Edinburgh University epidemiologist who sits on Sturgeon’s Covid-19 advisory group, challenged these claims at the Scottish parliament’s Covid-19 committee.

Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, claimed that “following the first lockdown the majority of the Covid virus strains that had been circulating in the population were eliminated”.

Woolhouse said: “Scotland was not close to elimination at any stage during this epidemic. We had low numbers of reported cases during the summer, but . . . the estimates were that we never fell below 500 cases in Scotland.


“The majority of those cases were not reported because the virus was circulating at that stage among young adults who do not show many symptoms.

“As soon as testing increased in August there was a dramatic increase in the number of cases we were detecting in those groups.”

Woolhouse said “genome sequencing work . . . showed quite clearly that the lineages that were present in the first wave in Scotland were still present in the second wave . . . so we were not close to elimination in Scotland”.

He said future elimination “will not be practical” in the short term and will only be achieved in future if vaccine cuts transmission, which remains inconclusive.



Scottish ministers point to New Zealand, which has managed to keep coronavirus at minimal levels, but Woolhouse said the country is nowhere near as cosmopolitan and connected as the UK.

He said: “If the UK had put border controls in place in mid-March, as the home secretary has suggested in the past, it would have been far too late.

“The UK’s epidemic was seeded in mid-February, around about half term, by thousands of cases being brought in from France, Italy and Spain.

“Even if we put our border control measures in place when New Zealand did it would have had very little effect. New Zealand went into lockdown on March 25, after the UK on March 23.”

He added: “I heard a lot of voices over last summer saying ‘all these tourists from England were a potential epidemiological threat’ for the Highlands.

“I didn’t think they would be — and it turned out they weren’t . . . there were no outbreaks of any significance linked to tourists . . . there were a small number of lineages of the virus that could be linked to England — not necessarily linked to tourists, but it could have been tourists at 6 per cent of the total, but it wasn’t where Scotland’s viruses were coming from.”

He added: “No country with an epidemic the size of Scotland has managed to have a smaller second wave than the first . . . no country with one tenth of the epidemic size of Scotland has avoided a bigger second wave.

“There appears to be no route that any country in the world has found to get to where Scotland is now to where New Zealand is now.

“We missed our chance to be like New Zealand in February 2020 and by March it was already too late for us, and now it is far too late because there is no way back . . . we have had two full lockdowns in Scotland and those have not managed to achieve elimination . . . to get to where we are now to elimination via lockdown would require a very strict lockdown for many, many months.

“You can’t have an elimination strategy and also be relaxing measures — those are contradictory aims.”

Woolhouse said the death rate in Scotland is so high “because we have concentrated so much on lockdown and otherwise trying to suppress the virus”.

He said: “Between half and three quarters of all the people who died during the first lockdown got coronavirus after lockdown began . . . which tells me that we didn’t pay nearly enough attention to doing things beyond lockdown to protect the vulnerable in care homes and the wider community — all we had was shielding, which wasn’t particularly effective and a bit of extra advice for the over 70s.

“We could have put so much more effort into protecting the people that needed protected. . . lockdowns did not save those people and that is something we need to reflect on very hard.”

Woolhouse also challenged claims by Leitch that “the best way for the virus to mutate is high numbers” of people infected.

Woolhouse said: “It goes without saying that if you have more cases there are more opportunities for evolution to happen, but that is not quite how it works.

“Our best understanding is the new Kent variant arose in a single patient that was infected with coronavirus, was immunocompromised and was being treated with an antibody therapy — a very special case — and a large number of mutations was able to happen in that one patient.

“That is not just a typical case, that is a particular combination of circumstances which we can learn about and understand to take more targeted measures to monitor patients . . . particularly with vaccine failures.

“The final point of interest about the evolution of the Kent variant is it happened in September, but we didn’t even see it as a problem until December . . . so we won’t even recognise them as a problem until they are already well established, so we do have to find a sustainable way to deal with that reality.”

[BnM]

Had the AstraZeneca yesterday. Got the side effects, injection arm achy, ran hot a few hours ago now cold and weirdly my butt muscles ache. I might have blamed the bed but it started before bed last night. I'm also very tired.

Men don't just wear a shirt to it, put a t-shirt underneath or plan your clothes to make it easier. Way too many bare torso's on view, you have no real privacy.

[dpedin]

Had the AstraZeneca yesterday. Got the side effects, injection arm achy, ran hot a few hours ago now cold and weirdly my butt muscles ache. I might have blamed the bed but it started before bed last night. I'm also very tired.

Men don't just wear a shirt to it, put a t-shirt underneath or plan your clothes to make it easier. Way too many bare torso's on view, you have no real privacy.

Side effects a good sign? Means body is reacting and building up antibodies?

[Openside]

Had the AstraZeneca yesterday. Got the side effects, injection arm achy, ran hot a few hours ago now cold and weirdly my butt muscles ache. I might have blamed the bed but it started before bed last night. I'm also very tired.

Men don't just wear a shirt to it, put a t-shirt underneath or plan your clothes to make it easier. Way too many bare torso's on view, you have no real privacy.

Jeez I am disappointed adults need to be told this

[dpedin]

Had the AstraZeneca yesterday. Got the side effects, injection arm achy, ran hot a few hours ago now cold and weirdly my butt muscles ache. I might have blamed the bed but it started before bed last night. I'm also very tired.

Men don't just wear a shirt to it, put a t-shirt underneath or plan your clothes to make it easier. Way too many bare torso's on view, you have no real privacy.

Jeez I am disappointed adults need to be told this

Worse than Portobello Beach?

[Saint]

480K doses yesterday, of which 31K were 2nd doses.

[Insane_Homer]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56200738

UK Covid alert level drops as NHS threat 'recedes'

The UK's coronavirus alert level has been lowered from level five to four in all four nations as the risk that the NHS could be overwhelmed "has receded".

The four UK chief medical officers and NHS England's national medical director agreed the change following advice from the Joint Biosecurity Centre.

The alert level had moved to level five on 4 January, shortly before England and Scotland began fresh lockdowns.

The top medics urged people to "remain vigilant" by following lockdown rules.

A change in the alert level does not automatically mean restrictions can ease, but it helps to inform government decisions on lockdown rules.

...

excellent.JPG (67.05 KiB) Viewed 924 times

[FalseBayFC]

Haha the UK survives and thrives by being a pirate haven for the laundering of stolen cash from the third world. Your universities are funded by international students. Your infrastructure built by the imperial rapine of the colonies will soon crumble. Close your borders and within a decade you'll paint your faces blue and slaughter each other.

[tc27]

Haha the UK survives and thrives by being a pirate haven for the laundering of stolen cash from the third world. Your universities are funded by international students. Your infrastructure built by the imperial rapine of the colonies will soon crumble. Close your borders and within a decade you'll paint your faces blue and slaughter each other.

[JM2K6]

I don't think anyone's advocating for the borders to be shut for a decade.

[SaintK]

Haha the UK survives and thrives by being a pirate haven for the laundering of stolen cash from the third world. Your universities are funded by international students. Your infrastructure built by the imperial rapine of the colonies will soon crumble. Close your borders and within a decade you'll paint your faces blue and slaughter each other.

I'll make a note in my diary now!

[sturginho]

you'll paint your faces blue and slaughter each other.

Pre-Covid we called that Saturday Night

[Sandstorm]

I don't think anyone's advocating for the borders to be shut for a decade.

Leave voters?

[Enzedder]

you'll paint your faces blue and slaughter each other.

Pre-Covid we called that Saturday Night

[Sandstorm]

Reports from South African GPs that young people are suffering from depression post having Covid.

[dpedin]

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/dro ... -1.9566113

Interesting article - worth keeping an eye on Israel and how this story develops? Remember they have higher levels of vaccination than we do when they reduced lock down but also had pockets of very low vaccination rates too.

[Sandstorm]

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/dro ... -1.9566113

Interesting article - worth keeping an eye on Israel and how this story develops? Remember they have higher levels of vaccination than we do when they reduced lock down but also had pockets of very low vaccination rates too.

"The increase began about two weeks after preschools and lower grades reopened in areas where the rate of infection was lowest, and a few days after the second stage of reopening began with more children back in school and shops reopening."

Helen Lovejoy was wrong!!!!

[tc27]

In fairness rises in cases are expected after every lockdown easement - the government here has being fairly open about this and that's why each step has a fairly large interval.

[Biffer]

Also demonstrates the need for high uptake of the vaccinations in all age groups

[tc27]

JCVI keeps age based criteria for vaccinations - younger keyworkers will not be able to jump queue.

[Biffer]

JCVI keeps age based criteria for vaccinations - younger keyworkers will not be able to jump queue.

It's the logistics of doing anything else that's difficult. Doctors surgeries have everyone's date of birth. it's easy to produce a priority list. They don't have people's professions. How do you actually get the priority list made up? How does that then get passed to the medical organisations implementing the vaccines? How does that then get matched back to NHS records so that we don't end up inviting everyone twice, causing huge confusion about whether it's a second invite for the first dose or the first invite for the second dose?

I know a lot of people will give it 'och it can't be that hard', usually they're people who've never had to do something like that and will equate it to some idiotic and irrelevant example from their own personal experience.

[TheNatalShark]

JCVI keeps age based criteria for vaccinations - younger keyworkers will not be able to jump queue.

It's the logistics of doing anything else that's difficult. Doctors surgeries have everyone's date of birth. it's easy to produce a priority list. They don't have people's professions. How do you actually get the priority list made up? How does that then get passed to the medical organisations implementing the vaccines? How does that then get matched back to NHS records so that we don't end up inviting everyone twice, causing huge confusion about whether it's a second invite for the first dose or the first invite for the second dose?

I know a lot of people will give it 'och it can't be that hard', usually they're people who've never had to do something like that and will equate it to some idiotic and irrelevant example from their own personal experience.

Hopefully, for me, it can prompt discussion around a centralised and singular national ID number similar to Denmark's, for which separate databases can be conjoined when existing data might be helpful in some scenarios.

[SaintK]

JCVI keeps age based criteria for vaccinations - younger keyworkers will not be able to jump queue.

Police Federation not at all happy. Something Cressda Dick mentioned earelier this week

There’s real palpable anger from all levels within policing about how we have been completely disregarded and ignored in this phase.
What is expected of policing does put them at risk, it does put them at risk of transmitting this virus.
They’re being spat at, coughed at, rolling around on the ground with people, working in hospital environments, going into people’s homes, they can’t mitigate the risk of the virus.
All of that means absolutely nothing. This is a very deep and damaging betrayal and it will not be forgotten.

[Paddington Bear]

I have a lot of sympathy for the police, but vaccination remains at this stage a zero sum game. Who should not get a vaccine so that otherwise healthy policemen can get one?

[Raggs]

I have a lot of sympathy for the police, but vaccination remains at this stage a zero sum game. Who should not get a vaccine so that otherwise healthy policemen can get one?

Otherwise healthy individuals that aren't going to be coming into close contact with arseholes who may well be screaming and shouting into their facists?

For instance, I should be absolutely bottom of the list. I'm not a fantastically healthy mid 30s, but I work from home, and am only exposed by my family basically. So do them first and I'll be 99% covered.

[Biffer]

I have a lot of sympathy for the police, but vaccination remains at this stage a zero sum game. Who should not get a vaccine so that otherwise healthy policemen can get one?

Otherwise healthy individuals that aren't going to be coming into close contact with arseholes who may well be screaming and shouting into their facists?

For instance, I should be absolutely bottom of the list. I'm not a fantastically healthy mid 30s, but I work from home, and am only exposed by my family basically. So do them first and I'll be 99% covered.

wee freudian slip there.

[Sandstorm]

I have a lot of sympathy for the police, but vaccination remains at this stage a zero sum game. Who should not get a vaccine so that otherwise healthy policemen can get one?

60+ people working from home

[Saint]

There's lots of groups of people that can make reasonably strong case's for being given priority- essential retail workers would be another group for instance. You reach a point where nearly everyone has priority for one reason or another

[Raggs]

I have a lot of sympathy for the police, but vaccination remains at this stage a zero sum game. Who should not get a vaccine so that otherwise healthy policemen can get one?

Otherwise healthy individuals that aren't going to be coming into close contact with arseholes who may well be screaming and shouting into their facists?

For instance, I should be absolutely bottom of the list. I'm not a fantastically healthy mid 30s, but I work from home, and am only exposed by my family basically. So do them first and I'll be 99% covered.

wee freudian slip there.

Missed that one!

[Lemoentjie]

The main problem with sorting by jobs is it can be hard to check who actually works where.

In a small country with good social cohesion (Iceland) it's definitely possible, but in SA or USA or UK it can be very difficult. And because a large minority people are scumbags, they will lie about their job so they can skip the normal order of vaccinations.