I’m going to focus on the positive and only read the first sentence.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
And do you not understand that omnicron is just getting started and things will rise in proportion?
Just on hospitalisations, there's obviously a lag to the first reported case (roughly two weeks). However, we're starting to see London admissions increase daily having been steady since October (around 1k in hospital per day).
It's up 30% in the last week.
That's all from the government's dashboard, which is free for all to check.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhsregion&areaName=London
So the fact is that hospitalisations are definitely increasing in London, the Omicron epicentre. So yeah, it's obviously bad news and people need to stop looking at SA which is a totally different world.
It's up 30% in the last week.
That's all from the government's dashboard, which is free for all to check.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhsregion&areaName=London
So the fact is that hospitalisations are definitely increasing in London, the Omicron epicentre. So yeah, it's obviously bad news and people need to stop looking at SA which is a totally different world.
It is positive but at the same time I don’t think it’s falling fast enough to think that’s due to omicron displacing it. Omicron on top of delta does seem to be what’s happening.
There's a lot of talk in the press about a two week circuit breaker starting sometime after Christmas but before New Years. I'm not against the idea.
I've got a feeling in my waters that Omicron is the beginning of the end. So as painful as it would be, this might be the last big sacrifice we have to make as a population. I'm gonna stick my neck out and guess that the pandemic in the UK will be over by the end of January. If a circuit breaker gets us there, so be it.
I've got a feeling in my waters that Omicron is the beginning of the end. So as painful as it would be, this might be the last big sacrifice we have to make as a population. I'm gonna stick my neck out and guess that the pandemic in the UK will be over by the end of January. If a circuit breaker gets us there, so be it.
I would love for what you say here to be what happens.
Sadly I really doubt it.
My last posts have been negative so on the positive here - obviously if COVID is spreading the way it is in London more admissions will test positive as part of screening for it as more people have it. The key is whether they’re incidental (with COVID) like has been reported in SA or if they have been admitted due to having it. I don’t think we know enough from the data yet to make that call.
And I’m totally with @Dante in thinking Omicron speeds up the end of the pandemic in the West. We can’t contain the transmissibility of this thing and by mid February most will have had 3 doses AND have been exposed to Omnicron. It’ll then become likely seasonal due to waining immunity with boosters used to combat. The big question is what damage does it do before February as it spreads.
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I think people would. Every time something like this starts to happen you hear riots in the streets but that never actually happens. If you close to pubs, restaurants, cinemas and no crowds at football games for 2 week, nothing much else for people to do other then party at home. Which I’m sure some people (and politicians) will do but the majority won’t.
Apologies, I was mixing critical care with the kind of intubation/mechanical ventilation that people thought might be needed early in the pandemic (based on info from Italy and elsewhere) where death rates are still high globally.
Your critical care stat is similar overall to the UK one, where about 33% currently die either while still on the unit or in hospital after being transferred for continuing care. That figure was over 40% between September 2020 and May this year despite what we'd learned from earlier that year about drugs and strategies. A 50% rate assumption for the UK March 2020 was reasonable.
A potential big driver for the “incidental” hospitalisations will be intra-hospital spread. With the usual winter scenes of corridors packed full of A&E patients waiting for review/admission it’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of social distancing. Plus the wards themselves aren’t set up to contain a variant as this one. So there’s going to be loads of explosive outbreaks amongst patients in hospital for reasons other than covid. Which will continue to muddy the waters.
As always, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the covid ITU stats. That’s always been the best way to get a feel for severity of each wave.
Cross-country critical care comparisons are notoriously difficult because of different definitions of critical care. One hospital’s critical care bed is another’s “high dependency” bed.
Mortality of ventilated patients is the only way to get an apples vs apples comparison.
Yeah good point.
On the positive, I'm hoping that with the sheer speed of this wave we will have a very sharp peak that'll mean we're over the worst much quicker. Obviously there are inherent dangers with everyone getting it at the same time, as Whitty keeps pointing out, however in my mind the long term impact of the UK properly shutting for two weeks rather than partially shutting for months is more positive. Omicron potentially forces that hand, as it's likely the shutdown won't be government mandated but actually forced by the fact that a very large proportion of people will be off sick simultaneously (already starting to happen). Also means that a very large proportion will recover at the same time.
Caveat: that's based on pure speculation on my part. Probably will be wrong.
This is the first time that coronavirus has truly affected my wider circle. It's getting to the stage where you're an outlier if you haven't got it and any venture outdoors results in contracting it.
All in all, a total ball ache.
Yeah very good point. Hospitals struggled to stop the spread of the original variant let alone Delta and now this one. The other thing to watch is LOS - it’s not just about admissions - bed days are obviously vital so even if we end up with more daily admissions due to the sheer number of cases if the average LOS is less which the SA data indicates then it could still be manageable.
Yeah and there’s a tonne of ‘anecdata’ about people recovering far quicker from omicron. So much so you wonder if they could start to think about trimming duration of isolation? Could make a huge difference to NHS capacity (staffing levels)
The Anti Morons are protesting through London today.
Would be lovely to see them get Covid severely. But unfair on the NHS having to deal with them.
Would be lovely to see them get Covid severely. But unfair on the NHS having to deal with them.
Yeah I think they have to do something not just in terms of the NHS - but if a third of the country are testing positive and in isolation how do essential services and supply lines still function? Surely close contacts can’t still require isolation? We’d have 70% of the workforce off sick…the sheer scale of this in such a timeframe is so crazy.
Boris is adamant he will not cancel Christmas regardless.
But it wouldn't surprise me if on 27th there is a lockdown re all indoor venues as a minimum enforcement.
TBH, January is the worst month of the year, so a 2 or 3 week lockdown of sorts isn't a bad thing.
I was going to look for work in January after taking months off for a break but think I might delay that a month now see how things play out.
The way I see it, we managed to create these amazing vaccines. Not only could they defeat original Covid with only two doses. They could also combat closely related variants like Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.
Then along came Omicron. That was a heavily mutated variant that apparently contained aspects of Delta mixed with aspects of the Common Cold. And yet, despite being so different from what came before, all it took was a third shot of the un-edited original vaccine and we were all good.
There can't be too many more places for Covid left to hide or transform into now. Three jabs can beat not only the original but ALSO all of its brothers AND its cousin. Subsequent vaccine tweaks are going offer even more generalised protection on top of that.
With this level vaccine effectiveness, plus the transmissibility of Omicron adding an extra layer of immunity to the unvaccinated, I reckon we're in the final stretch. Just need to get those boosters into arms.
Obviously, we're still in the middle of massive wave in which lots of people are going to sadly get sick and maybe even die. A circuit breaker is probably still going to be necessary to flatten the curve for the sake of the NHS. So nobody with any power should be sounding the trumpets or raising the bunting. But I'm just some chode on the internet so I can get away with wild conjecture.
I've been saying that myself since January haha
Hope you're both feeling fine. We were really nervous about having the jabs with the wife pregnant as the official advice at the time was so sketchy; our GP basically said it's our risk to take. Didn't fill us with a lot of confidence but we decided to take our chances with the vaccine, rather than actual Covid. We both had two doses of Pfizer and our beautiful baby girl was born last month.
Our boosters are next week and hopefully our experience offers some reassurance to other expecting couples out there.
28th December Lockdown
Source: trust me bro
Source: trust me bro
Covid mutates while in a person. It can only mutate effectively when its infecting someone. The probability of these mutations happening rises when more people are infected. The mutations can happen even when infection numbers are low but the possibility of mutation increases with increased infection numbers. Every day you see rises in infections you see the chance of mutations rising. Its also possible for people who have had covid to become reinfected and in reduced numbers its possible for vaccinated people to catch covid. Unfortunately we are a long long way from having the majority of the worlds population vaccinated and that simply means we will see new variants appearing in the future and with that the chance of variants that could possibly have increased immunity to the vaccines.
There are lots and lots of places left for covid to hide in and transform.
WHO gets hammered a lot but they are absolutely right in their continual message of the huge need to get poorer countries vaccination rates up. A richer country might get covid completely under control but if a variant appears in a lower vaccinated country that can side step the vaccines it will eventually infect the well vaccinated country.
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The guy's an idiot.
It wouldn't surprise me if he dropped lack of TFL funding in their somewhere also.
Every week he cries about something, if he is that concerned, why hasn't he cancelled his own NYE event in London?
Further mutations should be less severe. A virus job is to infect, replicate, but ultimately survive, so if it kills the host, it dies with it, which defeats its own purpose. One of the ways it survives over time is to mutate into a less severe form. Reading the epidemiology of the Spanish flu would alleviate a lot of unfounded fears about future mutations, and there’s a reasonable probability that the quicker we move through them, the quicker we will just consider Covid a seasonal virus and not a major threat to life. The connotations of the word “mutation” are pretty negative, it’s not the nicest word, but they are a way out.
Probably not that long away from having the majority of the world vaccinated or infected. Which achieves the same goal, ultimately.
Well considering we are mostly vaccinated
and heavily booster jabbed up
we shouldn’t see a “rise in proportion” anywhere near…..remotely anywhere near, a rise like before the vaccines came in.
as for rises In hospital cases in London, it’s a City of several million people, of course cases and hospital admissions are going to be higher there, but as far as the nation goes, hospital admissions have gone up 2%
at the height of the second wave we had upwards of 50,000 people admitted in our hospitals with Covid
I know we still need to be cautious of course, we are still studying our findings of new variants and progress of vaccines…..but overall things are overwhelmingly positive in our progress….yet we keep having panic scaremongering news which I feel with where we are at is incredibly unnecessary and quite frankly ridiculous
Add this paragraph to this thread's long list of fecking stupid comments.
It's my in-law's 60th. There are 27 people here. Indoors. Every single person had a bemused look on their face when I asked where the sanitizer is. We are in the minority folks. It's happened. At least in South Africa it has.
The issue being they'd get it and not take any precautions and infect others.
You can't win with these people.
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Yer man in the grey sweatshirt badly needs a beating.
His door will be getting one about 5am next Monday.
What's the point in this carry on. CBA with more public disorder. Sigh.
Impossible they do anything before New Year surely?
The amount of places that have taken bookings etc
They seem like such triers.
Have you seen the number of cancellations the industry is already dealing with? At least a lockdown would surely come with financial support. Currently they’ve essentially scared people away while hanging businesses out to dry.
I'd have a tiny bit of respect for Boris, if he came out and told them all to fk off
