Coronavirus (2021) thread

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Ban-jani said:
Definitely going in the right direction fast.

Is it too early to say that we’ll never return to those higher numbers again?
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Its always too early in a pandemic sadly.

As what happens here is to an extent dictated by what happens in the rest of the world.

We can only do what we can do to control things here.

Once people start travelling for holidays again - as they will before this is over in many other countries - who knows?

The biggest risk here is celebrating victory too early and letting Covid sneak up behind your back and force extra time.

Patience will be the most difficult virtue in coming weeks to a nation craving normality.

The right decisions are more important than ever in next few months.

But it would be silly not to agree we have one of the best chances of any nation of surfacing for air soon.

As long as we judge when wisely.
 
The under noted is from @adamjkucharski (verified epidemiologist) this morning. I'd be interested to hear people's views on this, surrounding vaccination/infection/'opening up'. A few interesting points raised, I suppose the question would be how to prevent such situations arising?

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I sometimes see people making the mistaken assumption that once a group that make up X% of COVID hospitalisations/deaths are vaccinated, it will reduce hospitalisations/deaths by the same %, even if control measures are lifted. There are two main problems with this...

First, there is a trade off between level of infection in the population and risk reduction through vaccination. Disease outcomes (e.g. hospitalisations/deaths) can broken down into the following: new infections x average-risk-per-infection...

If we remove 50% of the hospitalisation risk within a population through vaccination, for example, but have a large increase in level of infection, it could mean no reduction (or even an increase) in overall hospitalisations...

Second, vaccination won't necessarily reduce risk of severe outcomes by 100% if infected – we all hope effectiveness is high, of course, but it's still unclear exactly what the level of protection will be several months down the line...

When discussing potential impact of vaccines, important to remember just how much control measures are current reducing infection, and that recent hospitalisations/deaths only reflect fraction of people potentially at risk of that outcome if infection levels were much higher.
 
258 all settings deaths

10 972 cases.


Better than I expected. A lot of discounted deaths there and England cases under 10 K for first time in months.

Sunday data so testing may be low and of course they do not bother telling us till tomorrow as it is weekend and Covid apparently is off duty.
 
Healdplace said:
Its always too early in a pandemic sadly.

As what happens here is to an extent dictated by what happens in the rest of the world.

We can only do what we can do to control things here.

Once people start travelling for holidays again - as they will before this is over in many other countries - who knows?

The biggest risk here is celebrating victory too early and letting Covid sneak up behind your back and force extra time.

Patience will be the most difficult virtue in coming weeks to a nation craving normality.

The right decisions are more important than ever in next few months.

But it would be silly not to agree we have one of the best chances of any nation of surfacing for air soon.

As long as we judge when wisely.
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What were the figures for August.
`The biggest risk here is celebrating victory too early and letting Covid sneak up behind your back and force extra time.`
The biggest risk was allowing it to drag on into the winter and mutate possibility mix with the Flu, I heard an English man the other day that had moved back to China near to where Covid started, and found life back to normal
 
To back up the figures that Healdplace has been posting, a study by the University of Oxford has found that the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) has fallen by twice as much in the over 80s group as with the under 65s (32% compared to 14%). Although not yet definitive they say it points to the effect vaccination has had with this group.

You'd expect this to become much clearer in the next few weeks as it did in Israel.
 
ayrshire_blue said:
The under noted is from @adamjkucharski (verified epidemiologist) this morning. I'd be interested to hear people's views on this, surrounding vaccination/infection/'opening up'. A few interesting points raised, I suppose the question would be how to prevent such situations arising?

________________________________________


I sometimes see people making the mistaken assumption that once a group that make up X% of COVID hospitalisations/deaths are vaccinated, it will reduce hospitalisations/deaths by the same %, even if control measures are lifted. There are two main problems with this...

First, there is a trade off between level of infection in the population and risk reduction through vaccination. Disease outcomes (e.g. hospitalisations/deaths) can broken down into the following: new infections x average-risk-per-infection...

If we remove 50% of the hospitalisation risk within a population through vaccination, for example, but have a large increase in level of infection, it could mean no reduction (or even an increase) in overall hospitalisations...

Second, vaccination won't necessarily reduce risk of severe outcomes by 100% if infected – we all hope effectiveness is high, of course, but it's still unclear exactly what the level of protection will be several months down the line...

When discussing potential impact of vaccines, important to remember just how much control measures are current reducing infection, and that recent hospitalisations/deaths only reflect fraction of people potentially at risk of that outcome if infection levels were much higher.
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It's essentially the same point made by the modeling I posted a few days ago; if we open up too fast there is still potential for another wave as severe as the one we're only just starting to emerge from, as rapid spread amongst the unvaccinated or those unprotected causes high deaths overall.

So we need to be cautious about reopening, take it a bit at a time and have clear case and hospital metrics to judge things by before proceeding.

We should aim to get case numbers low enough that track, trace isolate can prevent another wave. That would also allow us to pre-empt new variant outbreaks.

Of course, there are those here who regard such views as "pessimistic" and don't want to believe experts like Kucharski.
 
Invisible Man's Bandage said:
To back up the figures that Healdplace has been posting, a study by the University of Oxford has found that the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) has fallen by twice as much in the over 80s group as with the under 65s (32% compared to 14%). Although not yet definitive they say it points to the effect vaccination has had with this group.

You'd expect this to become much clearer in the next few weeks as it did in Israel.
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That is good to hear and supports the data roubaix posts.

It is not a surprise that it shows only bit by bit in the England hospital deaths reported daily given the pace with which we have vaccinated. As deaths are the very last number to record or change.

But the very big falls in deaths and cases - today is the lowest case number since the first week in October - in winter even in lockdown probably is being rocket fuelled by the vaccinations too.
 
roubaixtuesday said:
It's essentially the same point made by the modeling I posted a few days ago; if we open up too fast there is still potential for another wave as severe as the one we're only just starting to emerge from, as rapid spread amongst the unvaccinated or those unprotected causes high deaths overall.

So we need to be cautious about reopening, take it a bit at a time and have clear case and hospital metrics to judge things by before proceeding.

We should aim to get case numbers low enough that track, trace isolate can prevent another wave. That would also allow us to pre-empt new variant outbreaks.

Of course, there are those here who regard such views as "pessimistic" and don't want to believe experts like Kucharski.
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Yeah, I read that post of yours and noted the similarities whilst I read Kucharski's comments. He's not the only one who's said similar over the past few days. I suppose as you say it's a question of how low infection and/or hospital figures have to be to loosen x y or z restrictions. But does this imply that things could theoretically loosen before having to be tightened again later down the line? I just wonder how the public would respond to that. I'd much rather advocate for loosening slowly with as close to possible guarantee that we won't take 'backwards' steps further down the line. Ie, if schools have to open slowly then so be it, but it would be better than completely opening as normal only then having to take a step back again in a few months. Only using schools as an example but would imply the same for every sort of restriction.
 
Unfortunately, todays good news is once again NOT shared equally. The North West is down but not by much at all and increasingly obvious the one problem area.

Every indicator shows this. Patients are falling like everywhere in England but not as fast as elsewhere.

The NW percentage of deaths in the England total has risen in past weeks and whilst not alarmingly up is clearly the one area still not falling as rapidly as elsewhere.

And cases are stubbornly inching down at best.

Today for instance ALL of the southern regions - London included - are below 1000 for the first time in a very long time.

But the North West only fell today by 147 to still be up at 1813 - double the southern regions that just after Christmas were the other way around.


Yesterday the patient number fall in the NW in my evening hospital report was starting to look a bit more healthy as it has plummeted everywhere to take both England and the UK below the patient numbers we had at the peak of the first wave (we have been way ahead on that score but happily no longer).

So hopefully this will change soon too.

Looks like being in high tiers kept the NW from ever really going out of control but is also now seeing it not drop as rapidly as those who needed to do so are doing.

The higher you climb the further you fall I guess.
 
ayrshire_blue said:
Yeah, I read that post of yours and noted the similarities whilst I read Kucharski's comments. He's not the only one who's said similar over the past few days. I suppose as you say it's a question of how low infection and/or hospital figures have to be to loosen x y or z restrictions. But does this imply that things could theoretically loosen before having to be tightened again later down the line? I just wonder how the public would respond to that. I'd much rather advocate for loosening slowly with as close to possible guarantee that we won't take 'backwards' steps further down the line. Ie, if schools have to open slowly then so be it, but it would be better than completely opening as normal only then having to take a step back again in a few months. Only using schools as an example but would imply the same for every sort of restriction.
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I agree that it's better to open gradually but with certainty than go fast then have to retrench later.

So, opening schools looks very doable for March, *but* need to leave some time before doing anything else major.

And all relaxing steps should be contingent on caseload, hospital load, and whether those are rising, even if the level is low.

All just my opinion, there are no absolutes here.
 
roubaixtuesday said:
I agree that it's better to open gradually but with certainty than go fast then have to retrench later.

So, opening schools looks very doable for March, *but* need to leave some time before doing anything else major.

And all relaxing steps should be contingent on caseload, hospital load, and whether those are rising, even if the level is low.

All just my opinion, there are no absolutes here.
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Yeah I fully agree on that. As difficult as things are, that extra few weeks or month wait to be able to get back to the things we love is much more worthwhile than going too fast only to have it taken away again. I guess a lot of this still comes down to the rate in which we can get people vaccinated. I don't know to which specific age it would be made comfortable to have pretty much everything open.
 
ayrshire_blue said:
I don't know to which specific age it would be made comfortable to have pretty much everything open
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I think that's essentially all ages before pretty much everything opens. Otherwise an outbreak in the unvaccinated agegroups will spread exponentially and spill over into the residual unvaccinated older people and those who the vaccine has not proved effective against.

And the virus is so transmissable you get a rapid peak and hospitals overrun yet again, even though the proportion unprotected in vulnerable groups is low.

Then there's variants to consider.

All of which is just theory, there are other scenarios that could play out.
 
Healdplace said:
That as I said in my post earlier - the biggest risk we face given the apparent success right now is opening up too fast.

Here is a catchphrase for Boris.

Slowly slowly catches monkey.

Not so slowly slowly catches Covid.
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Same group that didn't want current lockdown, didn't want restrictions before Christmas.

The very kindest way to view their stance is that it's naive, ill-informed and demonstrates an inability to learn from past mistakes.
 
Healdplace said:
That is good to hear and supports the data roubaix posts.

It is not a surprise that it shows only bit by bit in the England hospital deaths reported daily given the pace with which we have vaccinated. As deaths are the very last number to record or change.

But the very big falls in deaths and cases - today is the lowest case number since the first week in October - in winter even in lockdown probably is being rocket fuelled by the vaccinations too.
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A huge ‘thank you’ for your posts from both me and my husband. We have religiously checked them throughout the pandemic so far and have really appreciated them. In fact, without this thread and the Blues, I can’t imagine what it would have been like. It’s been a great deal worse for many people I know and my heart goes out to them, but a big thank you for your posts.
 
sky tot said:

What are people’s thoughts on these proposals ?
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The accompanying letter contains no references to long Covid, nor does it mention anything about unvaccinated teaching staff possibly still being at risk from the virus.

So I would have concerns about both these significant omissions.
 
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