Coronavirus Thread

[Nod.E]

23 minutes ago, z-layrex said:

Brighton admitted 20 covid patients just today, TWENTY. That's in one small city on the south coast. Stop washing your hands of it and take some personal responsibility. There wont be anything slow about it once it hits that point of exponential growth it's just going to take a bit longer.

 

The government is throwing us under the bus, the least we could do is try and look after each other while this all goes tits up AGAIN. By I dunno, wearing masks!

How can you be so sure? 

 

If it's the wild force you're talking it up to be still, then surely we're doomed whatever we do mask wise. As I type there are thousands dancing and sweating within inches of one another.

[dsr-burnley]

5 hours ago, Steve_Guppy_Left_Foot said:

I don't get that. You don't have to be anti vaxx to see that's a damning statistic for the idea these vaccines are at all effective. 

Look at the statistics more closely - or let me do it for you.

 

1.  As you may have seen since your post, 60% are unvaccinated, 40% wholly or partly vaccinated.  Vallance was (presumably) away with the fairies at his first conference and got it the wrong way round.

 

2.  Hence, of the 600 admissions per day with coronavirus, 360 have no vaccine and 240 are fully or partly vaccinated.

 

3a.  0.2% of over 70's have coronavirus, per government estimates, and about 17,000 of them are admitted to hospital each day.  On average, 34 of them would have coronavirus purely if admissions were at random.  Remember everyone gets tested for coronavirus on admission; at least some of them are admitted for completely separate reasons and just happen to have coronavirus, asymptomatically or almost so.

 

3b.  1% of other ages have coronavirus, and about 22,000 of them are admitted to hospital each day.  Purely by average, 220 of them will have coronavirus.

 

So of the 600 admissions, we're up to 250 (back of the envelope calculations) where it's just random; they aren't admitted because of coronavirus, they just happen to have it.  There's no doubt that some people, particularly the already-sick or old, can be and are being badly affected by coronavirus even after double doses.  But the stunningly low numbers of them going to hospital is a very good sign that the vaccine works.  

[Carl the Llama]

1 hour ago, UpTheLeagueFox said:

One cannot control what others get the ridiculous hump about 

Your employer would be out of business if that were remotely true.

[Lionator]

8 hours ago, BrokenRecord said:

I'm so confused please can somebody shed light? So they assume there's gonna be a peak right? But people with previous infections and double vaccine are still getting infected. So surely it's never gonna peak and just spread and spread? Like sure, most people won't feel the effects of it, but surely we have to accept that due to lack of seasonality we are gonna have covid hospital admissions all year round? I just can't understand how there can logically be a peak when we don't have a sterilising vaccine, and prior infection doesn't stop another infection

 

Not an antivaxxer or anything, I'm genuinely curious about the science behind it. I understand locking down opening up etc is a fruitless endeavour, I just want to understand the long term goal. Obviously living with the virus is the aim, but I don't understand how it will peak when reinfection as z-layrex has had is a possibility. 

So vaccines are around 80% effective at stopping infections. So if 100 unvaccinated people get covid, 20 vaccinated people will (this changes the more people are vaccinated but that ratio remains). So for every 1 vaccinated infection, 4 have been prevented? If that makes sense.

 

Furthermore, as @st albans fox said, once more younger people have immunity through vaccination (or infection), the spread will slow down as there are less hosts for the virus. As numbers reduce in the unvaccinated population, they will naturally come down in the vaccinated population. 
 

For the previous variant, we’d probably be at some sort of collective immunity by now but delta gets through vaccines a teeny weeny bit better. When you put a teeny weeny % of 65 million people, it’s still a lot of vaccinated infections. But remember the majority who would’ve caught covid before, but are vaccinated will not catch it. 

Edited 20 July 2021 by Lionator

[CosbehFox]

I’m neither here or there on a vaccine passport. It looks inevitable that you’ll need one to travel abroad and that won’t be our country/govt dictating that. 
 

However I have sympathy when there is blatant lies such as this - particularly when the Tories go on their prickly defence versus media stories like here 

 

 

[st albans fox]

1 minute ago, Lionator said:

So vaccines are around 80% effective at stopping infections. So if 100 unvaccinated people get covid, 20 vaccinated people will (this changes the more people are vaccinated but that ratio remains). So for every 1 vaccinated infection, 4 have been prevented? If that makes sense.

 

Furthermore, as @st albans fox said, once more younger people have immunity through vaccination (or infection), the spread will slow down as there are less hosts for the virus. As numbers reduce in the unvaccinated population, they will naturally come down in the vaccinated population. 

I’m not convinced about the vaccine stopping re infections.  They will be gathering plenty of live data at the moment but I suspect that the vaccines won’t stop you catching it, especially as it mutates further.  They will massively enhance your chances of avoiding a severe case requiring hospitalisation or a subsequent strong immune response which attacks your organs. I expect they will also reduce your viral load which makes you less infectious.
 

I actually wonder if this is potentially a good thing - as the variants continue to emerge, will natural contraction hone your immune system to deal better with the nuances of the virus.  Hence, less likely that we find ourselves as a society completely unprotected against a new strain ?? Someone better qualified than me can comment on that thought ….

[st albans fox]

8 minutes ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

I’m neither here or there on a vaccine passport. It looks inevitable that you’ll need one to travel abroad and that won’t be our country/govt dictating that. 
 

However I have sympathy when there is blatant lies such as this - particularly when the Tories go on their prickly defence versus media stories like here 

 

 

it’s a moving feast though …….ministers are clearly incapable of understanding that the virus is more intelligent and long lasting than them. They simply couldn’t appreciate that a variant would emerge which was twice as transmissible as alpha.  I think we under estimate how good a position we would currently be in without delta ………. 

[leicsmac]

9 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

it’s a moving feast though …….ministers are clearly incapable of understanding that the virus is more intelligent and long lasting than them. They simply couldn’t appreciate that a variant would emerge which was twice as transmissible as alpha.  I think we under estimate how good a position we would currently be in without delta ………. 

I think a lot of people, not just ministers, underestimate viruses and just how good they are at what they do.

[Buce]

Dominic Cummings tells BBC Johnson denied Covid would overwhelm NHS

Former aide says Boris Johnson held out on October lockdown because those ‘dying are essentially all over 80’

 

Boris Johnson denied the NHS would be overwhelmed and said he was not prepared to lock down the country to save people in their 80s, texting his adviser “get Covid and live longer,” according to new WhatsApp messages released by Dominic Cummings.

In his first TV interview, the prime minister’s former chief adviser said Johnson held out on reimposing Covid restrictions because “the people who are dying are essentially all over 80.”

 

Cummings also told the BBC that Johnson had been determined to go to see the Queen in person, despite people in Number 10 already falling ill with Covid in March 2020. Downing Street denies the account.

In WhatsApp messages, shared with the BBC, that were sent to aides in mid October, Johnson appears to say: “I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 – 81 for men 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive.

“And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate.”

Johnson also appears to text aides “There are max 3 m in this country aged over 80” and says “it shows we don’t go for nationwide lockdown.”

The new messages will cast further doubt over the actions of the prime minister in the run-up to the November lockdown, a time during which Cummings and other senior scientists have said the prime minister was fiercely opposed to lockdowns.

Cummings told the BBC that Johnson, who came close to death after he was hospitalised with Covid in April 2020, told meetings in Number 10 that he should never have agreed to the first lockdown.

He said Johnson referred to the Telegraph as “my real boss” and was extremely concerned about the reaction of the right-wing press and the Conservative party.

“He then basically reverted and said, actually the whole thing was a disaster, we should never have done it, I was right in February, we should basically just ignore it and just let the thing wash through the country and not destroy the economy and move on,” he said.

Cummings said Johnson had repeatedly ignored the advice of his chief scientific and medical advisers.

“When you get to the week of around about 15 to 19 September, by that point the data was clear about what was happening and Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty came to Downing Street and said erm, it’s clear where this is going, we think that you should consider hitting it hard and early … the prime minister said no, no, no, no, no, I’m not doing it.”

In the BBC interview, Cummings claims that he had to stop Boris Johnson going to see the Queen in person at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when staff in Number 10 were already falling ill and the prime minister had already instructed the public to avoid all unnecessary contact, especially with elderly people.

“I said, what are you doing, and he said, I’m going to see the Queen and I said, what on earth are you talking about, of course you can’t go and see the Queen. He said, ah, that’s what I do every Wednesday, sod this, I’m gonna go and see her,” Cummings said.

Downing Street denied that this incident took place. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

Cummings said he eventually convinced Johnson not to take the risk. “I said to him, there’s people in this office who are isolating, you might have coronavirus, I might have coronavirus, you can’t go and see the Queen. What if you go and see her and give the Queen coronavirus?

“You obviously can’t go … I just said if you, if you give her coronavirus and she dies what, what are you gonna, you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane. And he said, he basically just hadn’t thought it through, he said, yeah, ‘holy shit, I can’t go.’”

A Number 10 spokesperson told the BBC: “Since the start of the pandemic, the prime minister has taken the necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice.

“The government he leads has delivered the fastest vaccination rollout in Europe, saved millions of jobs through the furlough scheme and prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed through three national lockdowns. The government is entirely focused on emerging cautiously from the pandemic and building back better.”

Cummings has launched multiple attacks on his former boss after leaving Downing Street in December, including at a seven-hour committee meeting with MPs and through a new subscription blog.

The former chief adviser was subject to vociferous public criticism after the Guardian revealed he had travelled to Durham with his family, and later to Barnard Castle, during the national lockdown.

Cummings repeated his explanation that he had left London because of threats against his family – which he told MPs in May but declined to say at a press conference he gave about the incident. “Everything that I said in the Rose Garden was true … but I didn’t go into all of the security concerns in the background,” he said.

“The way we handled the whole thing was, was wrong on the Monday. What I should have done is either just resigned and said nothing about anything, or I should have spoken to my family and said, listen we’re just gonna have to come clean about the whole thing.”

[st albans fox]

Can’t believe what cummings says any more than I can believe boris!  but the truth is somewhere between the two ……which is pretty scary 

[Steve_Guppy_Left_Foot]

He's like a scolded ex. Sure there's many things he's done that warrant him being locked up. Bin. 

[Lionator]

59 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

I’m not convinced about the vaccine stopping re infections.  They will be gathering plenty of live data at the moment but I suspect that the vaccines won’t stop you catching it, especially as it mutates further.  They will massively enhance your chances of avoiding a severe case requiring hospitalisation or a subsequent strong immune response which attacks your organs. I expect they will also reduce your viral load which makes you less infectious.
 

I actually wonder if this is potentially a good thing - as the variants continue to emerge, will natural contraction hone your immune system to deal better with the nuances of the virus.  Hence, less likely that we find ourselves as a society completely unprotected against a new strain ?? Someone better qualified than me can comment on that thought ….

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001354/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_17.pdf 

 

It does, this is the Public Health England data. Two doses leads to 79% efficacy in delta infections. But yeah essentially the more times you catch covid, the milder it'll be on average each time and that includes through immunisation. The mortality rate has gone from about 1% to 0.01% due to vaccination (source https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/nowcasting-and-forecasting-15th-july-2021/). 

[Soup]

Not surprised at all with Vaccine passport's. It'll end up with pubs,bars and restaurants etc. Sad times indeed. 

[The People's Hero]

I wonder how long it will take them to work out that there is another big opportunity here for them and their mates?

 

Virtual covid-immunisation passports? Sure; just sign up here; its just a one-off fee of £59.99 to initially validate you, a £7.99 annual charge and a £19.99 fee everytime a provider has to check the database?
 

Physical passports? Yeah, sure. £199.99 each and they last 2 years. You have to get a replacement (for just £89.99) if you move, change your hair colour, get married, change your name and in any case on every age you reach that end in 3, 7 or 8.

 

Don't have your passport on you? Wow. £60 fine.

 

Forgotten your login details? No problem; £34.99 and we can re-set your access codes.

 

 

[fox_up_north]

It saddens me that I can actually see them trying that and I really don't generally believe in "big brother government" tactics in the West

[LVFox]

Apologies if this has been asked before, but are we guessing covid-passports will be needed to attend matches? 

[Leicester_Loyal]

3 minutes ago, LVocey said:

Apologies if this has been asked before, but are we guessing covid-passports will be needed to attend matches? 

'He also said "other venues where large crowds gather" could also be made to adopt the checks, opening the door to their potential use at concerts, theatres and sports matches.

 

Mr Johnson did not even rule out requiring them in pubs, stressing that was not his desired outcome but making it clear that it remained an option the Government could adopt.'

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/07/19/nightclubs-legally-forced-adopt-covid-passports-end-september/

 

Sounds like no decision yet (on paper), but they'll already know what they plan to do. If they bring them in for nightclubs they'll bring them in for loads of different venues, why wouldn't they?

[filbertway]

I don't really see the issue tbh. It won't rule anyone out, as long as you can register your negative lateral flow on the app then you're golden. 

You don't need to risk the vaccine but you do have to prove you've tested negative. It doesn't discriminate against anyone

[dsr-burnley]

2 hours ago, Cardiff_Fox said:

I’m neither here or there on a vaccine passport. It looks inevitable that you’ll need one to travel abroad and that won’t be our country/govt dictating that. 
 

However I have sympathy when there is blatant lies such as this - particularly when the Tories go on their prickly defence versus media stories like here 

 

 

This isn't government lies - it's just extreme dithering.  They may say twenty times in January to June that they won't have vaccine passports, but then on 1st July they change their mind and say they will.  They might be opposed in principle, but it's a very weak principle which they are willing to sacrifice if they see which way the wind is blowing.  They are not prepared, so far as I know, to make a serious attempt to explain why they have changed their mind - I doubt they will even admit they have changed their mind.  It would give a lot more confidence if they did.

[KrefelderFox666]

2 minutes ago, filbertway said:

I don't really see the issue tbh. It won't rule anyone out, as long as you can register your negative lateral flow on the app then you're golden. 

You don't need to risk the vaccine but you do have to prove you've tested negative. It doesn't discriminate against anyone

Negative test results will not be good enough from end of September though...that's the problem and ridiculousness.

[filbertway]

4 minutes ago, KrefelderFox666 said:

Negative test results will not be good enough from end of September though...that's the problem and ridiculousness.

Oh is that so? I haven't read that. Got an article or anything where you've seen that mate? That's mental if so haha

[filbertway]

6 minutes ago, filbertway said:

Oh is that so? I haven't read that. Got an article or anything where you've seen that mate? That's mental if so haha

I assumed it'd be based on using this. It's pretty poor if they're insisting on it being vaccination only.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-55718553

 

[Legend_in_blue]

36 minutes ago, Leicester_Loyal said:

'He also said "other venues where large crowds gather" could also be made to adopt the checks, opening the door to their potential use at concerts, theatres and sports matches.

 

Mr Johnson did not even rule out requiring them in pubs, stressing that was not his desired outcome but making it clear that it remained an option the Government could adopt.'

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/07/19/nightclubs-legally-forced-adopt-covid-passports-end-september/

 

Sounds like no decision yet (on paper), but they'll already know what they plan to do. If they bring them in for nightclubs they'll bring them in for loads of different venues, why wouldn't they?

Left deliberately vague so that the govt can do as it pleases.  

 

If people can't see through this level of manipulation, particularly in coercing younger people to get a vaccine to do as they please, then there is no hope.  

 

As for large crowds, how large is considered large?  50, 100, 1000, 5000?  What about 6 people in a lift?  I'd call that crowded tbf.

[st albans fox]

35 minutes ago, Legend_in_blue said:

Left deliberately vague so that the govt can do as it pleases.  

 

If people can't see through this level of manipulation, particularly in coercing younger people to get a vaccine to do as they please, then there is no hope.  

 

As for large crowds, how large is considered large?  50, 100, 1000, 5000?  What about 6 people in a lift?  I'd call that crowded tbf.

On a Monday morning it’s dangerous aswell!  (Although if you’ve got covid you may be protected by the lack of sense of smell!!)

[KrefelderFox666]

1 hour ago, filbertway said:

Oh is that so? I haven't read that. Got an article or anything where you've seen that mate? That's mental if so haha

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57893788

 

This was the one from yesterday's news story. I must say, it is not always crystal clear with this government what they are trying to say. However, it sounds like vaccinations only will be accepted, not COVID status (which would include negative tests and recently recovered).

 

"Guided by science" no doubt! They just want to get to as close to 100% double vaccinated adults as they can. I am sure the government will make plenty more U turns yet (not a rare occurence with them). Once people have been pressured into getting vaccines, they will change tone.