COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[roubaixtuesday]

You clearly didn't get the point I was making.
I'll take the the next Covid-19 vaccine that is designed to cope with expected new mutations (as per flu). There is absolutely no point in taking the vaccine that covers current Italian/Spanish variants of SARS2 descended from the Singapore variant.

I certainly didn't get that point from what you posted, no.

No Covid vaccines are designed to cope with mutations, and the trial readouts do not distinguish between variants.

This coronavirus mutates much more slowly than flu.

Interesting article here on mutations, with some detail on the expected (lack of) effect on vaccines.

The coronavirus is mutating — does it matter?

Different SARS-CoV-2 strains haven’t yet had a major impact on the course of the pandemic, but they might in future.

www.nature.com

 

[Healdplace]

There is absolutely no need for a circuit breaker in the South West, South, South East (expect near SW London) or East (excluding Essex).
None at all

Only if you seal them all off and let nobody from the outside come in - like Wales plan to do.

A pandemic in a small island will not obey boundaries if the people carrying it choose to find reasons to go elsewhere for the weekend.

Nicola Sturgeon has spent ages this morning still trying to stop people from Glasgow travelling to Carlisle and Blackpool to watch a football match and even has people telling her to cancel it because it is such a risk.

If we had simple rapid testing to control outside access you can run this via local lockdowns. We dont. And we saw how well it worked for Greater Manchester making Wigan immune from the restrictions beause its numbers were so low.

The result was turning Wigan into a basket case that nobody saw coming. But likely should have.

 

[Tb1981]

Really hope Burnham will be able to justify ecomonics over health in the coming weeks if Miseryside infections drop whilst GM continue to rise.

Lost a lot of respect for him over this

 

[The Black Shed]

View attachment 3894

A depressing trend this past 2-3 months over here.

That's what a tracker app should look like. I wonder who's behind that one.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Not remotely mystifying. Your words like "Close to France" for example.View attachment 3893

Well yes, expand the graph, you can see Denmark way ahead, and we're closer to France than anyone else. And clearly something odd going on with the France data overlapping ours, then dipping and rebounding.

But even if you disagree with that, how is it "knocking"? There's no criticism offered. You're looking for something that just isn't there.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Well yes, expand the graph, you can see Denmark way ahead, and we're closer to France than anyone else. And clearly something odd going on with the France data overlapping ours, then dipping and rebounding.

But even if you disagree with that, how is it "knocking"? There's no criticism offered. You're looking for something that just isn't there.

So how about you have a go at praising the UK government for managing to get us from bottom of the testing league to having the highest capacity and doing the most tests of any country in Europe then?

Most objective observers would look at that and say fair play, we've done a good job there. The lack of recognition of that, preferring to downplay it and find alternative interpretations, speaks volumes.

Anyway, I'm done on this subject. From a terrible starting position, we've done a decent job on testing capacity and anyone who says otherwise is just wrong.

 

[Summerbuzz]

My best shot:

Success was always about targetted testing. Since day one. Germany showed it.

 

[Tb1981]

People of Manchester are not following the rules at all
Until burnham has the balls to point this out all he is doing is posturing for political gain
We know the whole thing is a mess but if a load more deaths follow on our area I won’t be prepared to listen to him blame the Tory’s (standard fall back position)
As more regions move into tier 3 he will look like a dick
Hope he sees sense soon

 

[Healdplace]

I imagine GM will have to go into tier 3 today now. Regardless. Otherwise the same drift from Tier 3 regions encircling it to here will drive cases up from all the people making 'essential' journies from there to here.

 

[kaz7]

I feel much the same, no chance I'm allowing my 2 year old Son to have it, the risks of an unproven vaccine are much greater than Covid19 for his age group.

I'm certainly no anti-vaxxer either, he's had the rest of his jabs that have proven over a long time, are perfectly safe for the majority of kids.

I'm torn whether I would have it, at 30 it sounds great but if in 20 years I'm told that it is the reason I'm on my hypothetical death bed I'd be pretty annoyed at myself!

It wont be unproven , it will proven effective and safe , it has been done in record time because every scientist in the world was working on finding and testing potential ones, take no notice of china and russia already injecting their citizens , theirs is not tested properly and their population have no choice in the matter , ours will be as safe as the flu vaccine

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Could be absolutely miles off with this, and don't want to be seen as peddling utter bullshit, but interesting to see the figures from London and New York which both had an awful first wave. Could the herd immunity threshold be much lower than the 65% or so anticipated or could the seroprevalence rate be much higher than the 10% or so estimated? As I say, only speculating and could be miles off.

Quick Google gave this for London, up to Oct 12th.

Very clearly not herd immunity. Looks like an exponential increase just a few weeks behind the North.

What you would expect is that the seroprevalence would reduce R proportionately. So if London would have an R of 1.5, but has 20% seroprevalence, then it's actual R would be 1.2 (20% lower). So you might expect London's rate of increase to be lower due to the bigger outbreak there earlier. All assuming that immunity is defined by serology and persists.

But all of this is overwhelmed by behaviour - the R for normal population is about 3.5.

 

[jimharri]

That's what a tracker app should look like. I wonder who's behind that one.

It's the official HSE (our version of the NHS) app.

 

[artfuldodger]

I imagine GM will have to go into tier 3 today now. Regardless. Otherwise the same drift from Tier 3 regions encircling it to here will drive cases up from all the people making 'essential' journies from there to here.

Press conference by Boris at 4pm. Meeting of GM politicians at 3. I assume related.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

and doing the most tests of any country in Europe then?

We're not, per capita.

I agree with you that we've done a good job increasing test capacity from a poor start.

 

[Healdplace]

Between 240 and 690 deaths per day predicted in UK in 10 days time by a Cambridge study. Hopefully not. But it is the upward path we seem to be on and the problem is THAT will shake us into acting - too late as it will be then.

So we would get all the pain but little of the gain.

Hopefully someone will explain why those guesstimates are way off. They are certainly higher than I would have expected and that I think will be acceptable to the nation if we get there.

 

[True_Blue69]

Do you have proof of that ?

Nobody knows if having antibodies makes you fully immune, in fact there is a story from this week, about a woman who had it, fully recovered, got it again and subsequently died.

Well we might as well sack the vaccine off now then and just carry on as that is what they will hopefully do.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

My best shot:

Success was always about targetted testing. Since day one. Germany showed it.

I really, *really* hope Germany can get on top of the 2nd wave.

To date they've been a beacon of hope for how large, inter connected countries can manage this.

 

[roubaixtuesday]

Well we might as well sack the vaccine off now then and just carry on as that is what they will hopefully do.

No, vaccines and natural infection can elicit different strengths and durations of response. And of course vaccines can be administered regularly as boosters.

 

[feedmpenzaandhewillscore]

People of Manchester are not following the rules at all
Until burnham has the balls to point this out all he is doing is posturing for political gain
We know the whole thing is a mess but if a load more deaths follow on our area I won’t be prepared to listen to him blame the Tory’s (standard fall back position)
As more regions move into tier 3 he will look like a dick
Hope he sees sense soon

The Tory Mps in Manchester agree with him are you getting suckered in by the gaslighting from Hancock and Raab as well?

 

[The Light Was Yellow Sir]

What are you basing that claim on? The consensus amongst the vast majority (all?) the experts is that the virus is not becoming less deadly, merely that so far, most of the infections are in a group of people less likely to die.

i.e. for any given person, the risk of death is not much smaller at all. Perhaps marginally smaller due to better treatments, like 20% better chance perhaps. Not "massively smaller".

Half the daily deaths in April were Covid and daily excess deaths were huge, compared to less than 10% of daily deaths in October with excess deaths tracking 5% over or under throughout September and October. ICU mortality rates are falling month on month (so far, at least) and hospital treatments are much better.

Don't forget there was a massive IFR because nobody other than severely ill hospital patients were being tetsed in April, but a much reduced IFR because young people are testing positive is somehow skewed? Truth is, I suppose that we will never work out the real IFR mid infection and it will only be once we have measure all excess deaths that we will get a true idea of the lives lost through this pandemic. It was estimated at 3.2% in April and it is now thought to be below one, varying between 0.27 and 0.9 with age specific rates of

Fact is mate, if you are from a deprived area, are over 75 and have other issues, or over 85 with not many issues, if you get a respiratory infection in the winter, you are likely to be shuffling off this mortal coil, Coronavirus or no Coronavirus. The average age of death for this in the UK is 82.4 (84 for women and 81 for men), which is actually higher than the average age of all the other deaths.