Covid the *** and the final stage.

[Chippy_Tea]

The situation with Covid will get worse before it gets better with cases "rising dramatically", medical leaders have warned.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges said people should remain cautious, taking measures such as wearing face coverings in crowded indoor spaces.
It has warned that the NHS is "under unprecedented pressure".
On Monday the government is expected to confirm whether the easing of measures in England will go ahead on 19 July.
The UK is experiencing a marked increase in cases according to the Office for National Statistics, while Health Secretary Sajid Javid has previously said he would expect numbers of infections to reach about "50,000 new cases a day" by that date.
On Friday the latest government figures showed an increase of 35,707 Covid cases across the UK - the highest daily figure since 22 January.
Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairwoman of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the academy was "cautious about issuing dire warnings" but she had become "profoundly concerned" over the last couple of weeks about the idea of removing all restrictions on 19 July.
"There seems to be a misapprehension that life will return to normal from then and that we can throw away all the precautions and, frankly, that would be dangerous," she said.

• How many people are deleting the Covid app?
• How could life change on 19 July?
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• What travel rules will change by England's school holidays?

In a statement the academy, which represents 23 medical bodies responsible for training and development in various specialties, said it was essential that people took a responsible approach when restrictions were formally lifted.
It warned that there was "little doubt that things will get worse before they get better".
The academy said there were reports of routine care being postponed due to healthcare professionals isolating amid mounting pressure as people who had stayed away from the NHS during the pandemic now sought treatment.
It added that the growth of long Covid, as well as the backlog of elective work which had built up during the crisis, meant that "it is like the worst of a bad winter in July".
"There is no doubt that we will get to a position when this dangerous and erratic disease is largely under control for the population as a whole and we can 'learn to live with' Covid-19.
"However, we are not in that position yet and sadly, we have to expect things to get worse again."

Full article - Covid to get worse before it gets better, doctors warn - BBC News

 

[Justin Dean]

I don't see why the prospect of another lockdown should be a conspiracy theory. Remember the third test for releasing lockdown :

"Infection rates do not risk a surge in hospitalisations which would put unsustainable pressure on the NHS "

The 7-day average for hospitalisations in England was up 44% in the last week of June (243 to 351). That's roughly where we were on 21 September, three weeks before the tiers were announced. That rate of increase implies it's doubling every 2 weeks, and as of the end of June we were 1.4 doublings away from the level of hospitalisations when the tiers kicked in, and 3.6 doublings away from the absolute peak in January. Exponential growth is a bugger - and it makes no sense to reduce precautions when R is clearly some way above 1.

For hospital beds it's 1.4 and 4.2 doublings.
For ventilation it's 0.7 and 3.6 doublings.

This while hospitals are still struggling with staff having to self-isolate and need to be catching up on the backlog of non-Covid cases. And frankly the staff just need a flipping break after 16 months on a war footing. And there are already signs of stress in the NHS in parts of Great Britain - hospitals from Aberdeen to Inverness are effectively closed to new admissions :

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/f...ys-enter-code-black-as-covid-third-wave-hits/
Now I'm no expert on hospital management, but that has to be a warning sign for English hospitals. Particularly given the uneven distribution of the disease - it's hitting northern cities (and university towns) far more than the south, so individual hospitals will start maxing out before things look bad at a national level.

View attachment 50437

I just wish there was some acknowledgement that this stuff was complicated, and that the NHS remains under severe stress. Instead we have 50-something politicians in the South cheerfully telling northerners and the young "to make their own informed decisions about how to manage the virus" when eg schoolkids aren't jabbed but are made to go to school and nobody has to wear masks when they get there. And 20-somethings may only have one *** and if they want a job they still have to work in pubs, meat factories etc. again with no protection from customers. It all feels like those 50-something southerners are more interested in being able to go to the football and Wimbledon rather than the well-being of their voters.

The only hope is that things ease off in coming weeks due to end of term and people continuing to be sensible. As Japan has successfully proved, to minimise Covid transmission you just need to avoid the three C's -

confined spaces
crowded places
close contact

And in particular avoid those kinds of places at times when people are generating lots of aerosols through singing or shouting.

No worries.
View attachment 50434

Ageism and thinking Southern and Northern are different as people. Well done.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

 

[simon12]

Just a few observations from looking at the case and vaccination map here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/vaccinations
As expected the worst cases seem to be in areas where vaccinations are lower and densely populated cities seem to have a much lower vaccine rate than more rural areas especially around London and cities in the north and midlands, I assume this is because the average age is lower in these areas.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

The map is showing this for us -

1st dose
85.3%
2nd dose
67.4%

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Javid: We can withstand summer wave

Waiting longer to ease England's would risk pushing the virus towards winter - when it would have an advantage - or "worse still, not opening up at all", the health secretary tells MPs.

Step four was delayed from June so the "vaccine wall" could be built higher, and it means we can withstand a summer wave, says Javid.

While the wall would be higher if the government waited until winter, the wave would also be more dangerous, he adds.

The decision was made by balancing the harms caused by Covid with the "undeniable harms" restrictions bring.

He says he has to be upfront about the impact of keeping the restrictions - and cites rises in domestic violence, mental health problems and undiagnosed cancer.

Sajid Javid says lifting restrictions on 19 July is the "most responsible decision we can take".

But it is "not the end of the road" but the "start of a new phase of continued caution while we live with the virus and we manage the risks".

He says: "We simply cannot eradicate this virus, whether we like it or not. It is not going away."

Reaching the next stage of the roadmap "gives us the best possible chance of a return to normal life", he adds.

A little later than billed, Health Secretary Sajid Javid has begun giving his coronavirus update to MPs. He says that all the way through the battle of the pandemic, the country has looked forward to the time when all restrictions can be lifted.

He says “carefully removing” all the measures will be a major milestone for the country.

“We’ve all be yearning to get there and we all want this to be a one-way journey”.

He says certain tests need to be passed to proceed, the first being the success of the vaccination programme. He says as a result of this nine out of 10 adults in the UK now have antibodies against the virus.

He also says the government is on track to offer all adults a first vaccine by 19 July. He says the programme has prevented thousands of hospitalisations.

Cases are rising he says, because of the Delta variant, and could reach 100,000 a day in the summer. However, he says the evidence does not show that infection rates will put too much pressure on the NHS.

Covid: Health secretary confirms England rules will be eased next week - BBC News

 

[Crappyfish]

Think this may be spreading to other countries..................................... No jabs, no job: Fiji threatens unvaccinated workers with sack.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

No jabs, no job: Fiji threatens unvaccinated workers with sack.

Have they a very high number of cases?

 

[Crappyfish]

Have they a very high number of cases?

86 new cases on Friday 9th July. We were discussing this at work apparently South Africa are doing similar just wondering if it may become compulsory over here as my works place is still collecting data about who's been jabbed.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

86 new cases on Friday 9th July. We were discussing this at work apparently South Africa are doing similar just wondering if it may become compulsory over here as my works place is still collecting data about who's been jabbed.

SWMBO works in a care home and they are not being given an option, the majority had already had it but there are a few conspiracy theory believers who are digging their heels in and saying they will not have it but i have a feeling they will have changed their minds come the cut off date.

The new legislation means from October – subject to Parliamentary approval and a subsequent 16-week grace period – anyone working in a CQC-registered care home in England for residents requiring nursing or personal care must have 2 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine unless they have a medical exemption.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

 

[dad_of_jon]

Surely you will need your little vaccine card.

or as mentioned on dr john campbells channel exposure to covid19 now could have a similar effect but he does state quite specifically this is NOT RECOMMENDED however maybe the govt have considered best for this to happen during summer?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The context behind what they were saying this was well before the vaccine programme got up to speed was that regardless of our vaccine roll outs and boosters and what not with everything that could have been done we will still be put back under control on and on forever.

Sorry, I should have put it better, just because the conspiracy lot are promoting an idea, doesn't mean it isn't something that isn't a fair point for debate. Sounds like somebody needs to be introduced to Occam's Razor. And also some of the writing of the current Prime Minister, which contains probably the most libertarian, anti-nanny-state views of anyone in government going back decades (See eg here). It's one hell of a long con to go from that to "Johnson wants to control us all".

I do not subscribe to it as such however I do wonder what more can do we after this.

Ooh, where to begin? Obviously "I wouldn't start from here" - anyone sensible would have closed borders with India at the same time as Pakistan/Bangladesh, delayed the May reopening until we had better understanding of Delta and so on. But there's all sorts of things that could be done even now. First off - total vaccinations have been going down since 24 May :

What's going on? Is it just that at 87.2% of over-18's they are just running out of people to ***, are they being constrained by the fact that they're relying on Pfizer for pretty much all new jabs, or some other factor? Probably a bit of all of them, but it's too soon to be running down the vaccination programme. They can start by not quoting vaccination percentages in terms of over-18s - 87% may look better than 68%, but it's not much good unless the over-18s are magically isolated from kids. We'll only get on top of this thing when the vulnerable (non-jabbed and the unlucky vaccinated) are < 1/R of the population; since the R of Delta is meant to be 6-7, that means we need <15% vulnerable - which means jabbing signficant numbers of kids.

And we need to look at eg approval for mixing jabs - provisional data suggests it works a bit better, and eg Canada now allow any RNA vaccine after Zeneca or RNA first. Obviously it would be more helpful if it was the other way round, but anything that improves the flexibility of inventory management has to be A Good Thing. Canada moved on the provisional data from the Oxford Com-Cov study, I guess UK is waiting for the final results. Will probably come too late for us, but be more important for other countries.

Hopefully a protocol can be found that can solve the problem of rare blood clots with Zeneca - it now seems to be related to the jabber hitting a vein rather than going into muscle. And given the fact that a single *** really doesn't give that much protection against Delta, we should probably be shortening the gap between jabs to get as many folk as possible with two jabs ASAP. Seems to be happening a bit unofficially anyway - at the weekend my missus got a second *** at 6 weeks as we're planning to go away, they weren't asking too many questions.

But really we need to look at getting teenagers double-jabbed before the start of the academic year - the MHRA has approved Pfizer for 12+ and we need to get on with it. But there's so much more we can do to protect kids - who are obliged to go to school after all. There's been almost no discussion of ventilation in public buildings and that is something we really need to fix. Again, it's something that should have been done last year, but go round every classroom with a CO2 meter before the end of term, to see which classrooms have insufficient ventilation with kids in under "summer" and "winter" conditions. It's not a perfect proxy, but it's a quick and dirty way to target investment in better ventilation. And then over the summer holiday - get as many classrooms as possible up to HEPA levels of filtration. It's not perfect, but it's doable and not too expensive, portable ones plus enough filters to last a few years work out at around £10/child. It will also help reduce time off from other bugs. "Corsi boxes" using MERV13/F7 filters can be DIY'd for £30 or so, and will filter around 75% of infectious particles. Far from perfect, but it all helps.

Then there's young adults who are not yet fully jabbed, and often in customer-facing jobs at minimum-wage, so don't have much budget for buying their own PPE. By now N95/FFP2 masks should be the norm for customer-facing jobs, there should have been a big push to set up domestic manufacturing facilities and subsidise them/give them away, to SMEs at least. But of course that hasn't happened, so we're dependent on what we can get from the international market. Subject to availability, goverment should be making clear that for the purposes of health & safety regulations, if you expect non-double-jabbed people to deal with the public, they shouldbe wearing N95/FFP2. And masks should be compulsory for customers too.

And then there's the superspreading event yesterday - getting excited over the football down the pub ticks boxes for all the wrong reasons, lots of singing/shouting to generate aerosols when in close contact, in a confined space, in a crowd. A government more interested in people-protecting than people-pleasing would have said - sorry, you just can't do that. I would have reintroduced the rule or 6/2 households for watching football indoors - and done everything possible to get people outdoors, if need be eg getting Parliament to bypass the usual rules on road closures just for Sunday night to allow pubs etc to hold mini-fanzones out on the street. Not popular, but necessary.

That's the easy bit. It would have been near impossible to get UEFA to agree to a change of time, but they should have tried. I know what it's like after a game at Wembley on a school night, everyone's desperate to get the last trains home. It was daft holding it at 8pm BST when extra time was a strong possibility. Move it to 5pm, or even earlier if possible, and then put on some entertainment afterwards to try and stretch out the departures - sometimes happens at Twickenham with either eg a women's match or music after the main match.

So there's plenty "more can do we after this", it just depends on whether politicians want to keep people safe or not - the above is just a start.

And to the politicians who say we must rely on the common sense of the Great British Public to keep us safe, I present Exhibit 1 -

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Ageism and thinking Southern and Northern are different as people. Well done.

Read it again - that's not what I was saying. I was criticising decision-makers in government who see northerners as "different" to them.

And there are asymmetries in virus distribution - as per my map above, there's a lot more in northern cities whereas Westminster has relatively free of late - and in age, there's a lot more cases in the 12-30 age groups at the moment.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

This is a sad story - a 23-year-old A&E nurse in Louisiana was tweeting this kind of stuff a year ago

https://www.theadvocate.com/acadian...cle_8a4b8208-e1cb-11eb-ba04-37f42eb02e90.html

 

[Chippy_Tea]

SWMBO's sister was adamant she was not going to have the vaccine she had listened to the morons at work spouting out similar stuff as the poor woman in your post and she believed them, SWMBO pointed out the likelihood that at her age if she got it she would probably end up in hospital (underlying health issues) and would she want to put her young daughter through that, fortunately she saw sense and has now had both jabs.

 

[Covrich]

Where I live still quite a huge shortage in number of vaccination uptake. Same in a lot of big cities.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Where I live still quite a huge shortage in number of vaccination uptake. Same in a lot of big cities.

I wonder what is causing it, is there a shortage or are people being talked out of getting it by the same people in my last post?

 

[Covrich]

I wonder what is causing it, is there a shortage or are people being talked out of getting it by the same people in my last post?

I don't have the hard facts but from people I know in various communities I do think it is certain ethnic communities who are not so keen on it. I don't think it is a shortage by any means the big centres near me are dead when you go there..

What can you do?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

It's interesting looking at the new vax map on the government site :

If you look at it closely, it's mostly city centres in general, and university areas, it's not just obviously "ethnic" areas of town. I suspect a lot of it is just down to unreliable data - people in city centres tend to move around a lot, and if the hassles SWMBO had getting a GP in central London are anything to go by, they may not be keeping the NHS up to date with their movements. Students may be registered at the university but may take a view that they don't want to risk suffering side-effects during their exams, and then end up getting jabbed at home after the end of term, which will show up as a non-*** in their university district. Same possibly with some people in London with second homes, who may have decamped to the country during lockdowns - see how places like Kensington Gardens have one of the lowest rates, at 47% first jabs. And just generally, cities tend to have younger populations who have only recently been invited to get jabbed, and may have had life getting in the way for the first few weeks.

Around us is pretty much in line with the national average and they have noticeably started winding down this week - last weekend they closed the main local "bulk" jabbery, and they're now doing a few hours here and there at the smaller towns with longer hours in the districts that show up paler on that map.

So in terms of "what to do" that seems to be the strategy, bring jabbing closer to people to make it easier for the people without transport - we worked out a while ago what SWMBO would do if I was away, and getting to any of the local jabberies was a bit of a pain by public transport, but some of the "new" places would be easier. And better databases as always - updating people who move and/or aren't registered with the NHS for one reason or another, and in particular tracking what's happening with students.