The two go hand in hand. Social distancing and further lock downs are mitigation whereas vaccination eliminates root cause. My point still stands that vaccination must proceed at the maximum possible speed.As I posted above, the spread of the new variant will easily outrun any feasible vaccination programme. It's the inexorable mathematics of exponential growth.
The only way out is to suppress with the strictest possible social distancing whilst vaccinating. There is no alternative.
When loads were out Christmas shopping for some old tat instead of taking a step back and leaving the commercialisation behind for a changeIts pretty clear that it was the week and a half BEFORE Christmas when everything took off.
Shutting schools for Christmas has plateaued the rise.
Sadly the England hospital data for the past 24 hours is terrible and the North West has not escaped a huge uptick.
By the time Boris gets off his backside we will be just as screwed as London at this rate.
England Patients UP 1400 in the day to 24. 957.
It never went above 18, 669 in the first wave peaking on 10 April.
Ventilators UP a gigantic 164 to 2181.
These are the worst rises yet.
We are getting scarily close to the peak in April during the first wave of 2881.
Before this new strain arrived we were way behind that number as we were ventilating fewer and fewer.
But as I mentioned in here a week or two ago since London and the South East spiked with this second wave built around the new variant their numbers on ventilators were higher as a percentage of patients in with Covid than was true in October when the NW had its peak of the second wave and had the most in hospital.
But that was on the old variant which hade yet to reach the NW.
This appears now to be if anything getting worse.
I said then one possible reason was this new strain was making people more sick and at risk of ventilation.
We are told there is no evidence for this. But these escalating ventilator numbers need watching as we were around 60% of the total when the NW peaked and we are above that now largely thanks to London and the SE who have 1081 of those 2181 on ventilators on their own.
It means, for example, that you must provide recent evidence of numerous courses attended such as ‘conflict resolution’ ‘fire safety’ etc etc.What does that even mean?
Found out from two drs on this morning that the vaccine gives you 100% protection against being hospitalised and death , where are the media in this
The two go hand in hand. Social distancing and further lock downs are mitigation whereas vaccination eliminates root cause. My point still stands that vaccination must proceed at the maximum possible speed.
Statistically the longer the virus coexists alongside antibodies to its spike protein the greater the chance that we force change we don't want to see so my suggestion is we vaccinate as fast as possible. Hardly revolutionary! Reducing travel would also help. Variants will develop independently. We need to reduce their opportunity to evolve still further.
I think scientists and governments know a lot more than they are letting on which worries me. COnsider that the Astrazeneca has been running a trial in South Africa. It is inconceivable that they haven't been looking at this. On the plus side the South African epidemic though growing is not exploding, Africa remains quiescent and the vaccine companies tell us they can adapt their vaccines if necessary.
I think you can figure all this out for yourself, and have probably done so;
They must have based it on more than ten patients , they are gp's who have been on since the start and must have read clinical trials and unpublished data that we havent seen ? They were both very adament about itThis is true, but based on very small numbers, so caution required.
In the Oxford/AZ trial on the placebo :
- ten were hospitalised
- two of those suffered "severe" disease
- none died
On the active, there were zero of any of these.
So in terms of comparing death, there's no direct evidence whatever that deaths are reduced - there were zero deaths on placebo and zero on active. We can infer that deaths are likely to reduce significantly, but it's quite impossible to quantify.
And to say that there is 100% reduction in hospitalisation based on just ten cases is rather optimistic. The margin of error on such a small sample is very high.
None of which is to say there's any question mark over the efficacy being excellent.