I dont think the r rate will ever go down if schools are open
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
That won't have been the reason for their decision. If they don't enter a full lockdown it'll be entirely due to economic ideology. The idea that the government could suggest people work from home or not go to school when they have the power to legally enforce both those things for the public good is an idea of diminished public capacity which comes from four decades of neoliberalist free market politics. Which is also why the US, UK, and any countries closest to their economic model in the developed world seemed to do disproportionately bad.
There's a political danger now that there wasn't before. With multiple vaccine choices around the corner, any government which fecks this up can legitimately be accused of purposefully damaging the public's health. That wasn't entirely the case in March but it is now.
Do you have access to a Google machine?
Unfortunately most of the country will be over 600 in the next week or so . My area in Liverpool us at 210 but parts of the city are already at 500. January is going to be pretty awful for UK . We will have a complete lockdown soon and then things should get better in Feb
it was just me venting more than anything!Thanks for your time. I was not aware of the fact that Liverpool and London have not the same dominant strain of the virus.
I wouldn't have a problem with it if the said they were prioritising Primary schools because online learning is too limited for the younger ones. I'm more dubious about them allowing Secondary to continue - especially fulltime on-site - the autumn term contained a massive missed opportunity to improve online resources and complete the roll out of laptops/data hotspots where needed. That makes me suspect they hadn't even thought about it, crossing their fingers and hoping for the best isn't the same as prioritising it.
The continuing hesitation over advice to Universities and Colleges is even worse as it has less actual educational necessity behind it, and a lot of extra potential for spreading problems around the country.
Then finally we get the question of, "so what do we sacrifice to keep the schools open?" and we get the easy bits, the pubs, the restaurants, the gyms, the non-essential shops. But take a look at Tier4 rules - those aren't the March/April lockdown rules. Places of worship stay open, so do face to face support groups, and there are a whole bunch of other things there that we realised were essential whether for mental health reasons or sheer practicality - like house moves etc, that are listed there. The default "stay home" now only really applies to certain aspects of certain people's social lives and some businesses - who can't workaround the rules.
So basically I hear the "we've prioritised schools" - but I don't see the evidence that we've done enough elsewhere to match how we acted in March/April (against a less transmissible strain) let alone match that improvement and keep schools open. Especially not now as we head into winter, and we don't have the immense advantage that the "chance to say hello and hand the shopping over in the front garden" spring weather gave us.
Incidentally Manchester's numbers suggest that the new strain accounted for 25% of cases before Christmas. The regions are porous and the mutation is in community transmission across a lot of the country.
Is your partner getting vaccinated soon? An obstetrician friend of mine is livid that she seems to be one of the last specialities in the queue. All her patients are in the 18-44 age group with the highest incidence of cases and one thing you can never do at a two metre distance is deliver a baby!
She also said they’ve had a bunch of new mums re-admitted to hospital shortly after discharge, after contracting covid at home. In most of these cases the baby was also testing positive.
Went in an hour earlier on Thursday just to catch up with some death certificates that had unfortunately been racking up during the week. Yes, it is as morbid as it sounds.
When you write in a death certificate, you also write in a "receipt" that stays within the book (as you tear out the actual death certificate), which also includes the causes of death.
I had a quick look through the many, many, many receipts that were there and the vast majority of them were 1a - COVID 19.
Bollocks to those who still think that doctors put down shit like: 1a Myocardial Infaction/(Heart attack), 1b COVID; or 1a Subarachnoid Haemorrhage (Brain bleed) 1b. COVID.
That shit doesn't happen and I can't believe people still think it happens. The only times I've put COVID in the death certificate when it wasn't the primary reason for the cause of death is when a patient is in the process of getting over the oxygenation failure from COVID and then pick up a hospital acquired pneumonia which worsens their condition again. In that case it would be 1a - Bacterial Pneumonia, 1b COVID.
Anywho our hospital is changing to a 7 day working week from now on as it's too unsafe in "out of hours" like weekends and after 5pm when ward teams head home.
So for the foreseeable future, everyday will be 12 hour shifts with the occasional day off or two so we still keep within the rough range of hours of our contracts.
This is despite practically everyone exceeding the hours of our contract anyway. Think the earliest I've left work over the last few weeks is 17:45.
We'll hit a 1000 deaths per day sometime this week.
When you write in a death certificate, you also write in a "receipt" that stays within the book (as you tear out the actual death certificate), which also includes the causes of death.
I had a quick look through the many, many, many receipts that were there and the vast majority of them were 1a - COVID 19.
Bollocks to those who still think that doctors put down shit like: 1a Myocardial Infaction/(Heart attack), 1b COVID; or 1a Subarachnoid Haemorrhage (Brain bleed) 1b. COVID.
That shit doesn't happen and I can't believe people still think it happens. The only times I've put COVID in the death certificate when it wasn't the primary reason for the cause of death is when a patient is in the process of getting over the oxygenation failure from COVID and then pick up a hospital acquired pneumonia which worsens their condition again. In that case it would be 1a - Bacterial Pneumonia, 1b COVID.
Anywho our hospital is changing to a 7 day working week from now on as it's too unsafe in "out of hours" like weekends and after 5pm when ward teams head home.
So for the foreseeable future, everyday will be 12 hour shifts with the occasional day off or two so we still keep within the rough range of hours of our contracts.
This is despite practically everyone exceeding the hours of our contract anyway. Think the earliest I've left work over the last few weeks is 17:45.
We'll hit a 1000 deaths per day sometime this week.
Sounds brutal. Hang in there. One day this will all be a series of amazing anecdotes to impress your grandkids/hot young med students/whoever.
I'm also pissed about this new vaccination change. I was due my second vaccine dose this Thursday.
I understand that you want more people vaccinated but I didn't accept to be part of a clinical trial to see the effectiveness of the vaccine by waiting 12 weeks between doses. Pfizier has rightly condemned this as well as their "~90% effectiveness" is based on a 3 week gap between doses.
I felt like absolute death after my first dose, and I wouldn't have had it so early if I knew this was the case as I had COVID a second time in October which meant I was probably still deemed immune by the time I received the first dose. I genuinely would have declined it if I knew they'd mess around with the schedule like this. This was not what we agreed when we accepted to take the vaccine as early as we did.
I understand that you want more people vaccinated but I didn't accept to be part of a clinical trial to see the effectiveness of the vaccine by waiting 12 weeks between doses. Pfizier has rightly condemned this as well as their "~90% effectiveness" is based on a 3 week gap between doses.
I felt like absolute death after my first dose, and I wouldn't have had it so early if I knew this was the case as I had COVID a second time in October which meant I was probably still deemed immune by the time I received the first dose. I genuinely would have declined it if I knew they'd mess around with the schedule like this. This was not what we agreed when we accepted to take the vaccine as early as we did.
If you’ve already had covid a couple of times then the first dose probably acted as a booster (hence you felt so shit) I’d be furious at being denied the licensed regime in your shoes but I’m sure you’re reassuring yourself that the studies excluded anyone with documented prior infection, so you would have been a bit of an experimental case regardless.
Also, doesn't look good when they've already flipflopped on calls. Weren't going to close certain boroughs but now have, funny enough some of the ones included are the ones that they threatened before christmas. (So very scientific)
Very little information on Uni's so far, which means come Jan 11th ( might be wrong on that date) you're very likely to see millions of Uni students buzzing back to halls.
She’s heard nothing whatsoever about getting a vaccine. Her hospital only received the vaccine (Pfeizer obviously) on 23rd December. They all had to fill in a form saying they wanted it and including their risk factors and she hasn’t heard anything since.
She doesn’t have any risk factors - unless her black ethnicity counts, I’m not well informed enough to say - and hasn’t heard anything since.
Edit: this post really is awfully constructed grammatically
Last edited:
Seems to be a bit of a postcode lottery going on right now, for HCWs and patients. Hopefully get sorted soon now the Oxford vaccine is coming online.
Definitely. My mate who works 20 miles down the road as a podiatrist already has it.
I've asked the same questions myself. During the initial lockdown and even until today.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/03/swedish-model-failed-covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/03/swedish-model-failed-covid-19
We definitely need a lockdown now we have to try and keep control of the virus so that we can vaccinate enough people to get some degree of herd immunity by Easter.
Changing inter-dose lengths is hypothetical bad science, I feel mixing different vaccines is more concretely bad science.
Even if the Pfizer mRNA codes for the spke protein, and the Oxford contains the spike protein, do they both include the full-length protein, or different parts of it? I read Pfizer had to make modifications to the sequence to make the protein properly foldable after it is expressed in the cell. Similar modifications for Oxford or not?
So, will the antibodies made in response to both be the same? If not, is there any long-term benefit to a second dose?
I'm a microbiologist and the biggest thing I've worked with is a yeast cell, I know nothing special about vaccines or the human immune system. I knew no advanced biology at all till about 2014. Usually I'd assume that senior doctors and scientists in charge of these decisions would have answered these basic doubts, and many more I can't think of. Don't want to be a Dunning-Kruger case.
But the fact that they have just slipped in this line into a book, and no other countries agree with them (reminiscent of Sweden's public health experts), makes me doubt them.
Even if the Pfizer mRNA codes for the spke protein, and the Oxford contains the spike protein, do they both include the full-length protein, or different parts of it? I read Pfizer had to make modifications to the sequence to make the protein properly foldable after it is expressed in the cell. Similar modifications for Oxford or not?
So, will the antibodies made in response to both be the same? If not, is there any long-term benefit to a second dose?
I'm a microbiologist and the biggest thing I've worked with is a yeast cell, I know nothing special about vaccines or the human immune system. I knew no advanced biology at all till about 2014. Usually I'd assume that senior doctors and scientists in charge of these decisions would have answered these basic doubts, and many more I can't think of. Don't want to be a Dunning-Kruger case.
But the fact that they have just slipped in this line into a book, and no other countries agree with them (reminiscent of Sweden's public health experts), makes me doubt them.
Why compare anything to anything then?
Sorry but your initial point isnt valid because you were talking about something that was the case in march (testing at hospital's only). Since then, testing has been much more widespread and broadly consistent.
Yes? Close enough
For the record, the JCVI have been discussing using one dosage as far back as July last year. It's not new news, nor something that's been conjured as an idea at the last minute. It appears this approach is more a contingency approach, and they've hit a wall where they need contingent measures.
They've come out and said they don't be mixing vaccines though.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-vaccine-uk-mixing-b1781707.html
The only vaccine mix that makes sense to me is a boost with Sputnik, which is whole dead virus (or maybe that’s the Chinese vaccine?). I think they’ve already started trials with that combination.
From the article @rcoobc just posted
!!
And from the actual Green Book
"preferably using the same vaccine" isn't very strong language.
And then
This is where the denials are coming from. Fair enough (with all the caveats about the possible spke protein differences). However, it absolutely doesn't explain the cavalier phrasing of the previous screenshot, which doesn't appear to be specific to these situations.
Our older one's primary school has only just sent out communication stating which years should attend the school. The whole school thing is a total joke to be honest and it's clear that our local school doesn't really want to open. It will be interesting to see what the attendance is like tomorrow and which rule changes are going to come about as I don't think the situation can continue like this for much longer.
How was your school for providing work during lockdown in march?
Ours was poo. And our whole school is shut again but they aren't even doing work tomorrow it's starting Tuesday...
Idiots!!!
Thanks F-Red I've had a read of the recent JCVI statement and it clarifies the position regarding this option, based on the rising number of cases, hospitalisations and the new variant. It's an option and it's a good thing to have options. One unknown factor is the vaccines efficacy being compromised by the new variant. I understand It'll be a couple of weeks before we have a clear picture on that aspect. One thing's clear, time is not on our side and its a difficult balancing act. We also have to add into the equation a government who have a record of cherry picking scientific advice and in some cases disregarding it all together.
It wasn't great. They left a lot of things up to us to do and communication from the school was quite poor. The school sound like they are not bothered if some pupils don't go in. Our boy will be off tomorrow as we assess how things are panning out.
I honestly don’t think the government could have handled this situation any worse than they have from the very start. Absolute shambles.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Well. It got me. Tested positive.
Get well soon. Don't spread it, we know how South Carolina peoples are.
Get well soon. Don't spread it, we know how South Carolina peoples are.
I'm not sure if your'e located in the U.K but this gives guidance. Sorry to hear about your partner.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coron...preading-coronavirus-to-people-you-live-with/
I do believe that the Christmas gathering have had a massive effect on the new case load and considering this new variant the fact that people were legally able to gather was a massive clusterfeck by the government. They should have cancelled Christmas nation wide but after calling Starmer the Grinch BJ had backed himself into a corner where he wasn't willing to look foolish.
People are dying because of BJ's machoism.
Bugger. All the best.
Feck man I hope you are alright and stay alright.