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Coronavirus

Grays_1890 said:
I thought it was proven now that the return to School and Uni caused this spike?
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I was referring to what’s going on now. The lateral tests were used to ‘allow’ students to ‘safely’ return home from universities for Christmas. Both my daughters had one before arriving home with us. Doesn’t look like their negative results meant much.

The government have also said that they would use lateral testing in the first week of the school term to ensure that schools were ‘safe’ to return to. Again, doesn’t look like that’s going to work.

And in the least surprising news of the pandemic so far...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-covid-vaccine-rollout?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
 
SpurMeUp said:
If we or science had a deep understanding we could answer this question definitively: does the amount of virus received by a person, make an impact on the severity of their illness? We suspect it does but we can't definitively answer even this quite basic question right now. From there, we could look at other variables such as transmission frequencies e.g. does aircon increase spread, do filters on aircon units work to clean the air of virus in planes, how/can these be improved used elsewhere, are airborn droplets a more frequent way to transmit viruses or is picking up viruses through touch, then rubbing your eyes etc. more transmittable.

Bearing in mind the world has been closed for almost a year due to a viral infection, we don't have clear answers to some key quite basic questions. There is a presumption that science just knows. We saw it at the beginning of this epidemic. A belief that there was a one right answer that science already knew. But really science is patchy at best and like many other things follows the money. If there is lots of funding, then we'll research stuff throughly.
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Glad I don’t live in an apartment block...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1341231066091286530
 
Mikey10 said:
I’d say that’s pretty much bolted on until February half term at least. Of course, no one will be told until the beginning of January.
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You mean just at the point where teachers have spent the Christmas break organising the in-school covid testing, recruiting agency staff and volunteers, re-planning lessons to allow for mixed in-class and at-home teaching, etc. ?
 
scaramanga said:
He is.

The govt realised the real value in schools is that they're daytime childcare. Without that, the economy shuts - that won't be happening again.
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We will see.

It’s already been announced in Scotland (not returning to school until 18th January at the earliest) and Northern Ireland (some year groups not returning until post-half term, with the hope that exam year groups may be able to attend in person before then).

In school we have been receiving some doublespeak information from the DfE over the last couple of days which could easily come from Orwell’s 1984. They are very obviously planning for schools not to reopen in the first half of January. My bet is that will run on for longer.

The indicators are that this new variant spreads more easily amongst children, so there will be little hope of getting any sort of grip on cases by packing children into rooms 30+ at a time in the middle of winter.
 
P.D. said:
He has no evidence that this mutation started in the UK, infact some scientists argue that since the UK has carried out 50% of all sequencing since Covid came into existence the only thing that's fact is that the UK is able to notice these things. Wales sequenced more cases last week than France has done all year for example.
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I don’t think that’s what the article is really about.

I think he contrasts our (and it could really be any Western nation’s) approach with the countries that have tried to adopt a zero Covid approach. His point is that if you let a virus run rampant then the virus will adapt and become more adept at spreading - that’s the additional risk that you create by opening up large numbers of virus hosts. Fine, perhaps, if it’s the common cold - but not when it’s a virus that requires hospital treatment in a significant number of cases.

As he says, the government (and a few on here) said that countries like China and South Korea couldn’t escape the virus - that it would eventually rip through their populations. Well, that hasn’t yet come to pass, and both of these countries (and others like NZ and Australia) have escaped the huge death rates we have suffered. These countries have all started vaccination programmes now, so it’s unlikely they will ever suffer the large numbers of covid deaths Western countries have.

The counter argument (again, frequently voiced on here) is that we in the West are freedom loving nations. We couldn’t have shouldered the lack of liberty needed to squash the virus. Yet it was interesting to see Beijing on the BBC News yesterday, and Sydney on Sky a few days before that. They looked a lot more normal than any British city does at present, or is likely to for a few months.

It could certainly be argued that we (with lorries stacked up at Dover; Tier 4 restrictions in place; a new national lockdown not being ruled out; unable to travel to many countries around the globe) are the ones who are ultimately finding our everyday freedoms stifled for a much longer period.
 
scaramanga said:
He is.

The govt realised the real value in schools is that they're daytime childcare. Without that, the economy shuts - that won't be happening again.
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Only if the numbers plummet at Xmas - which they won't.
Closing the economy, especially retail, in Jan and Feb is far more politically palatable than doing it in Mar and Apr.
 
scaramanga said:
I don't think there's nearly enough money to do that.
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I think the world is going to be printing money or finding alternative trading mechanisms for decades to come - right now is edge of a knife balance of savings as many lives Vs keeping economies limping along.

We've ruled out letting the virus run through the population, so it's impact levers now. Jan and Feb see lower economic activity by habit, so you have to gamble that spending after that period will help balance it out.
 
monkeybarry said:
I think the world is going to be printing money or finding alternative trading mechanisms for decades to come - right now is edge of a knife balance of savings as many lives Vs keeping economies limping along.

We've ruled out letting the virus run through the population, so it's impact levers now. Jan and Feb see lower economic activity by habit, so you have to gamble that spending after that period will help balance it out.
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From what I can see in our markets, Jan and Feb are due to be huge as everyone's still catching up on lost time from the initial shutdown.

In a normal year Jan & Feb would be as good a time as any, but I don't think that's the case this time around.
 
Mikey10 said:
I don’t think that’s what the article is really about.

I think he contrasts our (and it could really be any Western nation’s) approach with the countries that have tried to adopt a zero Covid approach. His point is that if you let a virus run rampant then the virus will adapt and become more adept at spreading - that’s the additional risk that you create by opening up large numbers of virus hosts. Fine, perhaps, if it’s the common cold - but not when it’s a virus that requires hospital treatment in a significant number of cases.

As he says, the government (and a few on here) said that countries like China and South Korea couldn’t escape the virus - that it would eventually rip through their populations. Well, that hasn’t yet come to pass, and both of these countries (and others like NZ and Australia) have escaped the huge death rates we have suffered. These countries have all started vaccination programmes now, so it’s unlikely they will ever suffer the large numbers of covid deaths Western countries have.

The counter argument (again, frequently voiced on here) is that we in the West are freedom loving nations. We couldn’t have shouldered the lack of liberty needed to squash the virus. Yet it was interesting to see Beijing on the BBC News yesterday, and Sydney on Sky a few days before that. They looked a lot more normal than any British city does at present, or is likely to for a few months.

It could certainly be argued that we (with lorries stacked up at Dover; Tier 4 restrictions in place; a new national lockdown not being ruled out; unable to travel to many countries around the globe) are the ones who are ultimately finding our everyday freedoms stifled for a much longer period.
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I get what he means, the more cases the more chance a virus has to mutate but it's a very light touch article because he doesn't highlight that variants could be happening all over but no other country sequences the virus like the UK.

I replied because I read this yesterday (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55413666) and I was surprised to hear so few countries bother to do any sequencing, really countries should be reducing cases AND sequencing so we can identify all the variants. Until other countries do this we don't know what other mutations even exists or the implications of this.
 
P.D. said:
I get what he means, the more cases the more chance a virus has to mutate but it's a very light touch article because he doesn't highlight that variants could be happening all over but no other country sequences the virus like the UK.

I replied because I read this yesterday (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55413666) and I was surprised to hear so few countries bother to do any sequencing, really countries should be reducing cases AND sequencing so we can identify all the variants. Until other countries do this we don't know what other mutations even exists or the implications of this.
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South Africa are obviously sequencing. Another even more transmissible variant has emerged there apparently, according to Hanrooster. Much of the south in Tier 4 by Boxing Day.

Hesitation to put everyone under Tier 4 now risks repeating the mistakes of March.
 
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Judging by what they have been saying today, ie hospital admissions near Aprils peak and new tier 4 areas on as a rapid increase of new infections as existing tier 4 areas are/were, previous lag times (2 weeks from infection to hospital) would suggest we are not even close to peak admissions from the first wave of tier 4 areas let alone the second wave of tier 4 areas announced today, so NHS...good luck:(

We really are playing catch-up and if it really is because this strain is super contagious, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that we could (like it or not) be on a sweep thru.
 
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