Coronavirus Thread

[Super_horns]

12 hours ago, Paninistickers said:

I never quite understand the flu. I'm in my mid 40s and had the flu twice in my life. TWICE. 

 

At a rough guess, I've had well over a hundred colds. Probably over 150. 

 

No point to this post, other than  it's (flu) obviously quite hard to get.

 

8 hours ago, WigstonWanderer said:

My wife had a bout of real flu when she was in her late thirties and took about 3 months to recover. Until then I’d just thought it was like a nasty cold.

 I had the flu once and was in bed for days tired and unable to move.

 

Usually have some sort of cold most winters but carry on as normal .

 

 Definitely found there was a big difference .

Edited 11 October 2021 by Super_horns

[Babylon]

On 05/10/2021 at 23:03, foxile5 said:

The mentally ill cannot educate themselves well; this woman can. 

Alas they believe themselves to be the most educated out there.

[FLAN]

21 hours ago, String fellow said:

The 'flu vaccine appears to be in short supply at present. My surgery has twice cancelled everyones' appointments for the 'flu jab in the last three weeks, blaming the problem on a shortage of HGV drivers. I didn't know vaccines were considered to be heavy goods! One wonders if the COVID-19 booster vaccines will be similarly affected.

Did you think they deliver them in single doses?

[KrefelderFox666]

14 hours ago, gerblod said:

The maxim is that you'll 'know to it' when you get influenza. It leaves you incapable of carrying out normal activity. The Germans call it 'Grippe', I suspect because it seizes you, whereas a cold isn't as completely enervating.

Last time I had 'flu, in the early 2018 infection, I was suffering severe symptoms for two weeks. I think people interpret the symptoms to suit how bad they feel - hence the man-flu jibes. The 'flu vaccination scheme is to protect oldies against potential fatality. Colds are miserable but don't often kill.

I have always wondered if I had a flu or something else. I can tell when I have a cold, a sniffle and sore throat is not that bad to deal with. However, there are times when my whole body just aches (like today) but I have very little other symptoms (potentially an upset stomach was has been lingering for days but is mild at best).

 

I thought about a PCR but I have none of the three symptoms required to "qualify" for one. No temperature, no cough, can still smell/taste.

[String fellow]

15 hours ago, gerblod said:

Wow! And Army transport has been allocated to the fuel non-emergency. 

Vaccines for flu and for Covid are sent via HGV because there's such a huge amount. Flu vaccine will be given to c. 12m people. That's 12m single shot syringes + packing. It might not weigh as much as other commodities but the volume is the factor. 

Pehaps the H in HGV refers to the tare weight of the goods vehicle, not the goods it carries. 

[dsr-burnley]

22 hours ago, gerblod said:

The maxim is that you'll 'know to it' when you get influenza. It leaves you incapable of carrying out normal activity. The Germans call it 'Grippe', I suspect because it seizes you, whereas a cold isn't as completely enervating.

Last time I had 'flu, in the early 2018 infection, I was suffering severe symptoms for two weeks. I think people interpret the symptoms to suit how bad they feel - hence the man-flu jibes. The 'flu vaccination scheme is to protect oldies against potential fatality. Colds are miserable but don't often kill.

I find it very hard to believe that it's impossible to get a mild dose of flu.  If two people in the same house get ill at the same time, but one feels worse than the other, is it definitive that they can't have the same flu virus?

[Buce]

 

 

Covid response ‘one of UK’s worst ever public health failures’

Early handling and belief in ‘herd immunity’ led to more deaths, Commons inquiry finds

 

Britain’s early handling of the coronavirus pandemic was one of the worst public health failures in UK history, with ministers and scientists taking a “fatalistic” approach that exacerbated the death toll, a landmark inquiry has found.

“Groupthink”, evidence of British exceptionalism and a deliberately “slow and gradualist” approach meant the UK fared “significantly worse” than other countries, according to the 151-page “Coronavirus: lessons learned to date” report led by two former Conservative ministers.

The crisis exposed “major deficiencies in the machinery of government”, with public bodies unable to share vital information and scientific advice impaired by a lack of transparency, input from international experts and meaningful challenge.

Despite being one of the first countries to develop a test for Covid in January 2020, the UK “squandered” its lead and “converted it into one of permanent crisis”. The consequences were profound, the report says. “For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in 100 years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.”

Boris Johnson did not order a complete lockdown until 23 March 2020, two months after the government’s Sage committee of scientific advisers first met to discuss the crisis. “This slow and gradualist approach was not inadvertent, nor did it reflect bureaucratic delay or disagreement between ministers and their advisers. It was a deliberate policy – proposed by official scientific advisers and adopted by the governments of all of the nations of the UK,” the report says.

“It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy. In a pandemic spreading rapidly and exponentially, every week counted.”

Decisions on lockdowns and social distancing during the early weeks of the pandemic – and the advice that led to them – “rank as one of the most important public health failures the United Kingdom has ever experienced”, the report concludes, stressing: “This happened despite the UK counting on some of the best expertise available anywhere in the world, and despite having an open, democratic system that allowed plentiful challenge.”

The report from the Commons science and technology committee and the health and social care committee draws on evidence from more than 50 witnesses, including the former health secretary Matt Hancock, the government’s chief scientific and medical advisers, and leading figures from the vaccine taskforce and NHS Test and Trace.

It celebrates some aspects of the UK’s Covid response, in particular the rapid development, approval and delivery of vaccines, and the world-leading Recovery trial that identified life-saving treatments, but is highly critical of other areas.

Some of the most serious early failings, the report suggests, resulted from apparent groupthink among scientists and ministers which led to “fatalism”. Greg Clark, the chair of the science and technology committee, said he dismissed the allegation that government policy sought to reach “herd immunity” through infection but the outcome came to be seen as the only viable option.

“It was more a reflection of fatalism,” Clark said. “That if you don’t have the prospect of a vaccine being developed, if you think people won’t obey instructions to lockdown for very long, and have a wholly inadequate ability to test, trace and isolate people, that is what you are left with.”

The report questions why international experts were not part of the UK scientific advisory process and why measures that worked in other countries were not brought in as a precaution, as a response was hammered out.

While Public Health England told the MPs it had formally studied and rejected the South Korean approach, no evidence was provided despite repeated requests.

“We must conclude that no formal evaluation took place, which amounts to an extraordinary and negligent omission given Korea’s success in containing the pandemic, which was well publicised at the time,” the report says.

The MPs said the government’s decision to halt mass testing in March 2020 – days after the World Health Organization called for “painstaking contact tracing and rigorous quarantine of close contacts” – was a “serious mistake”.

When the test, trace and isolate system was rolled out it was “slow, uncertain and often chaotic”, “ultimately failed in its stated objective to prevent future lockdowns”, and “severely hampered the UK’s response to the pandemic”. The problem was compounded, the report adds, by the failure of public bodies to share data, including between national and local government.

Further criticism is levelled at poor protection in care homes, for black, Asian and minority ethnic groups and for people with learning disabilities.

 

Prof Trish Greenhalgh, of the University of Oxford, said the report hinted at a “less than healthy relationship” between government and its scientific advisory bodies. “It would appear that even senior government ministers were reluctant to push back on scientific advice that seemed to go against commonsense interpretations of the unfolding crisis,” she said.

“It would appear that Sage, Cobra, Public Health England and other bodies repeatedly dismissed the precautionary principle in favour of not taking decisive action until definitive evidence emerged and could be signed off as the truth.”

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said the report was damning. Hannah Brady, of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, said the report found the deaths of 150,000 people were “redeemed” by the success of the vaccine rollout.

“The report … is laughable and more interested in political arguments about whether you can bring laptops to Cobra meetings than it is in the experiences of those who tragically lost parents, partners or children to Covid-19. This is an attempt to ignore and gaslight bereaved families, who will see it as a slap in the face,” she said.

 

The report:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/12/extraordinary-omission-key-findings-in-scathing-uk-covid-report

Edited 12 October 2021 by Buce

[StanSP]

Wonder what excuse they'll hide behind on this one. 

 

They have blood on their hands. And need to face the consequences. 

[fox_up_north]

They'll spin it, as always and I think most will lap it up

[ealingfox]

Yes but remember they couldn't possibly have done anything different.

[StanSP]

24 minutes ago, ealingfox said:

Yes but remember they couldn't possibly have done anything different.

'yeah but what about Labour, why didn't they do more?!' 

[Dunge]

Before they spin it, I thought I’d throw out there what I thought about the report:

 

 

- The big criticism here seems to be that the government were guilty of listening to their scientists, including world-renowned experts on epidemiology. They’re accused of not “pushing back”. I could understand such criticism far more if they were ignoring their scientists, but that’s emphatically not the conclusion here. That said, there is an argument that the government should have locked down first and then considered whether herd immunity was the right course of action, rather than just allowing the debate to rumble before anything was done about it. It does suggest a lack of decisive leadership on the matter, which doesn’t come as a surprise with Boris.

 

- There is something to be said for not having pandemic plans up to date to take into account a SARS-type virus, although I haven’t seen that mentioned much here.

 

- There is criticism of the care homes response, and I do believe it was an afterthought and it’s fair to point to that. That said, I can’t see what could have been done specifically about care homes once the virus was in and circulating. Care home staff always needed to come into work, surely couldn’t be expected to live there, various residents will always need to go to hospital or get medical visits, etc. I think care homes faced massive, unprecedented challenges regardless. Surely the only way to stop the virus there would have been to stop it everywhere.

 

- Test & Trace was and remains a shambles, and to me contains some the biggest avoidable mistakes. I appreciate there were issues with testing capacity that had to be resolved, but the whole thing lacked organisation as has been demonstrated by many tracers’ accounts, while the app was, as usual for such things, expected far sooner than could be delivered and had a false start through the arrogance of expecting an individual solution rather than an “off-the-shelf” one.

 

- Overall, I think the major comment about it all is that the UK went it’s own way, relied on its own scientists and policies, rather than looking to copy abroad. The reports states that there’s British Exceptionalism in that decision. There is likely a point there given the government’s attitude following Brexit. Although I suspect also there’s a point to be made that western countries in general initially balked at the idea of eastern-style lockdowns, believing the populace wouldn’t go for it. What would have happened if such a lockdown had been attempted without some local visibility to this virus is something of an imponderable.

However, the approach of going our own way was a double-edged sword and led to the impressive vaccine research and delivery. Essentially, the government put a lot of faith in the UK’s own scientists; in some areas that had good results, in others not so much.
 

 

I think claims they have blood on their hands are easy in hindsight, but for me the strongest criticism here is not locking down earlier as a precaution. I do have sympathy here given that this was a difficult political call at the time, coupled with the fact that similar, deadlier respiratory diseases haven’t had the same impact over here without any sort of lockdown. The alarm bells probably should have rung loudest when it piling through Italy. Although frankly, by then it could have been too late anyway.

[Super_horns]

I think a lot of people were very complacent about how serious this was and even when it became apparent there was a major crisis we still heard some say “well it only kills a few elderly people who are going to die anyway”

 

Fortunately they saw sense but too late for some .

 

Obviously the vaccine  roll has been a great success so the organisers , scientists and NHS deserve great credit for that.

[String fellow]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I wonder how many FTers were happy to attend that game against Aston Villa, when it was already clear to a lot of us that things were starting to get very dicey. (I imposed my own lockdown 10 days before the PM announced restrictions.) What I'm really saying is that both the government and much of the population at large were slow to realise the gravity of the health emergency in equal measure. The awful effects of the virus witnessed in northern Italy were clear for everyone to see on the news every day. 

[StanSP]

14 minutes ago, String fellow said:

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I wonder how many FTers were happy to attend that game against Aston Villa, when it was already clear to a lot of us that things were starting to get very dicey. (I imposed my own lockdown 10 days before the PM announced restrictions.) What I'm really saying is that both the government and much of the population at large were slow to realise the gravity of the health emergency in equal measure. The awful effects of the virus witnessed in northern Italy were clear for everyone to see on the news every day. 

The game was on 9th March. 

 

Lockdown happened on 23rd March. 

 

So you could have attended the game before your self-imposed lockdown anyway 

 

 

[fox_up_north]

For context - music is a big part of my life. I played a gig in a pub two weeks before lockdown and had tickets for a gig that was scheduled a week before lockdown.

 

For the gig I played (which we had committed to and been paid for), we turned up, played and were fairly as normal.

 

Come the week later, I binned off the other gig because it felt too risky. I know I'm not alone in that. I do think there was a blasé attitude from people but it wasn't everyone and I think it's wrong for governments to assume people won't sacrifice a little "freedom" for a bit to be safe.

[David Guiza]

I think it's worth remembering that whilst the specifics of the disease were clearly not going to be known by anyone, a global pandemic had been spoken about for a number of years and the government had ample time to have some form of plan of action in place. This isn't something that happened overnight.

 

The government were slow to cancel events, slow to enforce lockdown, slow to review the border situation, and slow to have any form of plan of action. This then continued throughout the year, when they had weeks, and possibly even months, to clarify the Christmas situation and waited until what was essentially the last minute to do so. The mutated strain that was responsible for about half of all cases was seemingly known about for a decent period of time before a further lockdown was enforced and the public made aware. Of course the plan of action was never going to be infallible as a result of myriad unknown and variable factors, but it was amateur to the point of culpability and liability on more than one occasion. 

 

People buying into the 'captain hindsight' bollocks, and convincing people to feel sorry for Johnson as the poor loveable rogue protagonist who didn't sign up for this difficult job is what will see this shambles of a government past yet another catastrophic failing of its people. 

[gerblod]

10 hours ago, dsr-burnley said:

I find it very hard to believe that it's impossible to get a mild dose of flu.  If two people in the same house get ill at the same time, but one feels worse than the other, is it definitive that they can't have the same flu virus?

I'd think it's down to a perceived sense of severity reported by the greater number of people who've contracted the same virus. But some people survived bubonic plague, so, in an objective comparison, it's down chiefly to immune response and subsidiary factors. If you get a 'mild 'flu' then you could say you'd had a cold when ones co-dweller could be bedridden with the same virus.

[String fellow]

4 hours ago, StanSP said:

The game was on 9th March. 

 

Lockdown happened on 23rd March. 

 

So you could have attended the game before your self-imposed lockdown anyway 

 

 

Not so, because I was slightly inaccurate with my politicians. It was Matt Hancock, not the PM, who told the Commons that all unnessary social contact should cease immediately on the 16th March. My own lockdown occurred 10 days before that, just before the weekend prior to City's fixture. The day before City's game, I had tickets for a concert, which I decided not to attend because of the risks.  

[StanSP]

25 minutes ago, String fellow said:

Not so, because I was slightly inaccurate with my politicians. It was Matt Hancock, not the PM, who told the Commons that all unnessary social contact should cease immediately on the 16th March. My own lockdown occurred 10 days before that, just before the weekend prior to City's fixture. The day before City's game, I had tickets for a concert, which I decided not to attend because of the risks.  

To be fair, I attended the game and haven't had Covid-19 so if anything I think I'm vindicated in going... 

[daddylonglegs]

Despite being double jabbed for a few months, both my girlfriend & I have recently tested positive. Both fine but can't taste or smell a thing. Pain in the arse!

 

Not particularly arsed about the isolation - it is what it is.... but, would be interested to hear if anyone else lost their sense of taste & smell and when it came back? 

 

 

[Paninistickers]

4 hours ago, David Guiza said:

I think it's worth remembering that whilst the specifics of the disease were clearly not going to be known by anyone, a global pandemic had been spoken about for a number of years and the government had ample time to have some form of plan of action in place. This isn't something that happened overnight.

 

The government were slow to cancel events, slow to enforce lockdown, slow to review the border situation, and slow to have any form of plan of action. This then continued throughout the year, when they had weeks, and possibly even months, to clarify the Christmas situation and waited until what was essentially the last minute to do so. The mutated strain that was responsible for about half of all cases was seemingly known about for a decent period of time before a further lockdown was enforced and the public made aware. Of course the plan of action was never going to be infallible as a result of myriad unknown and variable factors, but it was amateur to the point of culpability and liability on more than one occasion. 

 

People buying into the 'captain hindsight' bollocks, and convincing people to feel sorry for Johnson as the poor loveable rogue protagonist who didn't sign up for this difficult job is what will see this shambles of a government past yet another catastrophic failing of its people. 

I don’t think the PM was frozen by inaction. I suspect he just wanted things to largely remain normal, be stoic, soldier on and quickly achieve herd immunity. Controversial, but that was a good a plan as any at that time (no hindsight here).

 

Panic set in when it Fergusons graph came out and looked as if the NHS faced collapse and bodies might be burned in fire pits. Not a vote winner.

 

I 'fell out' with the government thereafter and the utterly shambolic handling of lockdown, tiers, Christmas, local lockdowns, travel restrictions, tracktrace, covid snoopers, restraint of trade and spending hundreds of billions of money we haven't got. 

 

Even with hindsight, I'd have preferred a liberal Swedish or some  US states approach. 

[leicsmac]

9 minutes ago, Paninistickers said:

I don’t think the PM was frozen by inaction. I suspect he just wanted things to largely remain normal, be stoic, soldier on and quickly achieve herd immunity. Controversial, but that was a good a plan as any at that time (no hindsight here).

 

Panic set in when it Fergusons graph came out and looked as if the NHS faced collapse and bodies might be burned in fire pits. Not a vote winner.

 

I 'fell out' with the government thereafter and the utterly shambolic handling of lockdown, tiers, Christmas, local lockdowns, travel restrictions, tracktrace, covid snoopers, restraint of trade and spending hundreds of billions of money we haven't got. 

 

Even with hindsight, I'd have preferred a liberal Swedish or some  US states approach. 

Was the idea of the NHS collapsing not likely enough to consider, then? Because if it was then that just seems like a way to have vastly more hats on the ground than there was anyway.

[Corky]

35 minutes ago, pmcla26 said:

Not closing the borders from the start was where we ****ed it. We were in prime position to shut off from the rest of the world with living on an island. 

The Delta variant sweeping in whilst we had a domestic lockdown was another huge setback.

[Paninistickers]

13 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Was the idea of the NHS collapsing not likely enough to consider, then? Because if it was then that just seems like a way to have vastly more hats on the ground than there was anyway.

Sweden and hard line republican US states (interstingly, hardly political or ideological bedmates) seemed to have both survived without a societal collapse. 

 

But that's old argument. My point was I don’t think the PM was passive in the early days of the outbreak. It was deliberate. A bit like, it'll be OK, it'll blow over. And it has. Whether by accident or design is arguable..but covid is today's fish and chip paper.