Not technically, anyone in a ‘risk’ category also qualifies for the booster. I’ve got mine in a couple of weeks. I’d still expect to see hospitalisations and deaths decline as the most at risk demographics as boosters take hold.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
I just can’t see how they will manage/police it effectively, seems almost like a prison approach of managing a public health challenge.
You weren't in favour of the Italian Green Pass for workers either and that's worked well. Cases are staying relatively low and virtually all hospitalizations are unvaccinated. It looks like it's here to stay and seems necessary to avoid the situation in Eastern Europe.
You need a two tier society if you don't want everybody to have some level of restriction. The primary spreaders (unvaccinated) need to be isolated from the rest, but also from each other to slow the spread amongst themselves. A few million unvaccinated can still overwhelm hospitals all on their own.
Or you can take the UK approach and let the virus roam free in everybody and get to herd immunity quickly. It will need to go extremely wrong for Europe to catch up to the death counts that approach has caused though.
I never once criticised the Italian green pass. In fact this is the first time I’ve ever objected to any measure intended to increase vaccine uptake.
Police roaming the streets doing spot checks, apparently. All very dystopian.
Why Eastern Europe in particular? Aren't Germany and the Netherlands in a bit of a situation too? Despite following a similar path to most of Western Europe for most of the year, as I understand it.
Real world evidence suggests the vaccination programs have not been able to reduce the incidence of cases. Even places with 80%+ fully vaccinated are experiencing record numbers. Pretty much all the northern hemisphere is seeing a seasonal? surge.
In the UK London has the lowest case rates:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/lon...er-hamlets-southwark-westminster-b965984.html
How can this make sense?
In the UK London has the lowest case rates:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/lon...er-hamlets-southwark-westminster-b965984.html
How can this make sense?
If you mean this, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the vaccines simply aren't as effective (short and longterm) regarding actual immunity as we hoped them to be. We are going to need periodical booster vaccines and improvements/adjustments. Vaccines won't end the pandemic alone, that has become pretty clear. We are going to need a variety of approaches to end this situation (better preventative strategies, medication, vaccines etc.). With the current course of some major nations Europe (looking especially at Germany here), the pandemic is here to stay. There's a possibility that this coming winter will be the climax of the pandemic. The virus is here to stay and despite vaccinations, we have absolute record numbers here. Government led people to believe this was over 14 days after getting the 2nd jab. Which is why many people let their guard down and many public events with recovered/vaccinated people were allowed recently. The effects of the carneval (especially in cologne) might be devastating. We're not far off a collapse of the health care system already and it's just the mid of november.
Not feeling optimistic at all at the moment.
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At this point, I'm absolutely in favor of drastic measures to prevent unbelievable amounts of suffering that are to come if we don't act now. If necessary and constitutional considerations make certain measures illegal, I'd like to see constitutional changes to be able to handle this situation properly. We can not let these old documents prevent us from living properly in this - in constitutional terms - novel situation. Also, mandatory vaccination is overdue. Events for vaccinated/recovered won't cut it, we have to limit the allowed amount of people attending events and make it mandatory for hosts to check tests from people who are vaccinated/recovered. Draconic punishment if these business owners not oblige and manage properly.
This is taking too long and I feel like the time for softer approaches is over. We need drastic changes, no more blabla about how people are sad that they're not able to follow luxus lifestyle choices when people's life and health are in danger left and right.
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Just a combination of random variation in geographic spread within a specific time period and the effects of herd immunity? (London had 1.2m positive cases, with however many untested)
I am hoping that once the Merck and Pfizer anti-virals are released next year we will be able to treat it as just another illness.
Hopefully everything will flatten down, but don't get your hopes up too high. We had a similar effect with vaccines only just recently.
You weren't too sure on the mandatory worker pass though:
Eastern Europe is driving it. I don't enough about whats going on in Benelux but it's the Eastern border states that are seeing the biggest increases in Germany and creeping into Italy.
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You could pretty much inversely overlay this map onto the vaccine uptake one.
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Yeah sure, you could do that, if you ignore the likes of Belgium having the same level of vaccine uptake but a completely different case rate. I’m not sure why you would do that but no doubt we can create some contrived explanation for the difference that once again paints Italy in a wonderful light. And when Italy experiences an increase in cases at some other time we’ll no doubt have a whole new explanation for why that’s not really the point. Rinse and repeat.
Same shit in Ireland. Delta is so contagious that it’s almost impossible to get vaccine uptake high enough to keep cases down if you’ve got a porous border with another countries that has extremely high community spread (for whatever reason, poor vaccine uptake or lack of non pharmaceutical measures)
Belgium is struggling due to its border with Germany, where vaccine uptake is poor. Italy seems to be better geographically isolated from the Eastern European “non vax wave”.
Given that Belgium has more cases and more people in ICU per capita than Germany, then obviously they are not sruggling due to Germany.
Germany borders these Eastern European countries and has a lower vaccination rate yet has a lower case rate than Netherlands and Belgium, while France also borders Germany and has a lower vaccination rate than Belgium yet has a lower case rate then those two…so yeah we can create contrived explanations that fit a narrrative but are full of holes in the data. As long as you both can say those nasty neighbours of ours are the problem, we’re doing it right, there’s nothing more we could have done, that’s mission accomplished. It’s not a sober analysis of the results.
That’s just not very apparent because this place is an echo chamber from the same people and it’s tiresome to point out the logical flaws and it’s a little comical to watch the narratives repeat irrespective of changing conditions, so it’s mostly people listening to their own voices having the same debates.
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Mate, Mallorca is not officially German, we just pretend it is
would be nice. But many deemed these borders pretty offensive.
Fair point. One country too far! Duly edited.Not to be pedantic but Spain also doesn't border Belgium
Also, I don't think - geographically speaking - that Germany has any borders with eastern europe. czech republic, Poland and Austria aren't in my books.
Got lost in the paragraph - of course meant France! Bordering both of those countries with varying case rates and varying vaccination rates that don’t fit the correlation.Not to be pedantic but Spain also doesn't border Belgium
@Rektsanwalt agreed I wouldn’t call Poland and co. Eastern Europe, they’re straight up central for me, but I was just sticking with 11101’s definitions to avoid regional pedantry. Failed miserably there!
Of course Czech Republic and Poland are Eastern Europe, it is mainly a geopolitical term, not only a geographic.
There's many different understandings of said term and obviously there's the rather historical connotation becaues of the cold war. Most approaches I read about while googling don't include czech republic and poland, though, which I feel like is appropriate in 2021. But to each their own, I just wanted to share my opinion as a german that saying germany has borders to eastern europe feels antiquated.
Maybe I should say “parts of Germany” seeing as it’s an extremely diverse country in terms of how this pandemic is/was being handled. That’s been one of their biggest challenges, it’s been impossible to get a consistent approach in every region. The trend of higher cases as you traverse Europe, west to east is fairly fecking obvious anyway.
Like I said, I don't know enough about Belgium or the Benelux countries to comment. I do know there's a pretty high correlation across the rest of Europe between vaccine uptake/lack of anti-vaxxers, level of restrictions, and deaths. And yes Italy is one of a few countries coming out well in that. Its almost like this virus should be taken seriously.
When you compare the strictness of our lockdown with the British one, it's like night and day.
Rinse and repeat
What is going on in Ireland ? Cases are one of the highest in Europe, I thought there was a high level of vaccination there. Is this impacting the health system or is it just high cases with lower serious illness because of vaccines?
Very high level of vaccination so hospitals less stressed than they would be otherwise. This many cases 12 months ago would have completely overwhelmed hospitals/ICU’s. Still a shit show though. We have major hospitals already cutting back to essential services only. And thousands of HCWs off sick (only boosted in last week, should have been done two weeks ago IMO)
Hard to know why case numbers take off so quickly in Ireland. Same thing happened at around this time last year. Obviously doesn’t help that cases also extremely high in UK (with loads of cross border travel) but there has to be something else going on, unique to us, that means cases skyrocket every time we take the brakes off. It makes it incredibly difficult to open up when things get out of hand so quickly. My personal theory is that we rely too heavily on poorly ventilated boozers for our social life.
Tagging @Massive Spanner because this sort of insane rise in cases is exactly why I have more sympathy with the reluctance to open up that he’s found annoying in the past.
I think we need to boost the whole population pronto. We just seem unable to keep on top of community transmission by any other means.
I wouldn’t just blame the pubs but they obviously do play a part. We socialise here in a very different way than most other countries, that much is apparent. I also weirdly think our incredible vaccination rates have gone against us in some ways because we just assumed they were a silver bullet as a result and people haven’t been taking care like they used to. It’s largely been a big shit show.
the schools are a massive contributor too, though, despite constantly being told over and over that they’re not. I work with people with kids who have said that most parents at the schools are basically resigned to getting Covid from their kid at some point.
I’m hoping they’ll reintroduce WFH and power through until the winter is over then but new restrictions wouldn’t surprise me
The schools don’t explain why cases are taking off here way worse than most other places. They’re an issue everywhere. If anything, our schools should be less of an issue as we’ve been ahead of the curve on getting 12-18 year olds vaccinated.I wouldn’t just blame the pubs but they obviously do play a part. We socialise here in a very different way than most other countries, that much is apparent. I also weirdly think our incredible vaccination rates have gone against us in some ways because we just assumed they were a silver bullet as a result and people haven’t been taking care like they used to. It’s largely been a big shit show.
the schools are a massive contributor too, though, despite constantly being told over and over that they’re not. I work with people with kids who have said that most parents at the schools are basically resigned to getting Covid from their kid at some point.
I’m hoping they’ll reintroduce WFH and power through until the winter is over then but new restrictions wouldn’t surprise me
If I was a betting man I’d go with WFH/power through. But it will be touch and go.
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But they're not less of an issue. They are a massive contributor. I never said they are the explanation as to why we are such an outlier (yet again), but whenever our cases do spiral, the schools are open and we always get pedalled some shit that they aren't a big part of the problem when they clearly are. You constantly told me on here that the schools were not a big a problem!
Anyway I don't really know why you tagged me. My problem has never been reintroducing restrictions when they are necessary, it's keeping them in place when they're not and opening too late. The whole point of this incredibly slow opening vs almost every other european country was to not have to reimpose restrictions so if they do happen again, that slow opening seems really fecking pointless.
But that’s exactly my point. For some reason I can’t quite work out (and I’m sure NPHET are baffled too) every time we ease off the breaks, covid takes off like a runaway train. Accelerating far more dramatically than almost any country you can think of. So that’s why they’re so nervous about opening up and why we stayed in lockdown so much longer. There’s something unique to our situation here that justified what seems like an overly cautious approach. That’s the point I made to you in the past and our exponential increase right now (despite excellent vaccine uptake) endorses all the caution to date. Imagine where we’d be right now if we’d opened up even earlier?!
Re the schools. They opened up months ago and we’re only really taking off now. Plus half term didn’t make a jot of difference. If anything that coincided with an acceleration in our cases. All of which confirms they’re not the main driver here.
Eh, probably where we'll be in a month regardless? Not sure what your point is.
I never said they're the main driver, why do you keep at that? I'm saying they clearly play a big part in our overall caseload. There's obviously a myriad of other factors at play but you and many others tried to claim they were practically irrelevant whenever they opened up in the past which is clearly nonsense. My best guess is that the schools being open by themselves wasn't a massive issue but now a combination of schools being open combined with the teachers and parents of those children being able to fully socialize again as well as the kids being able to do loads of shit outside school has made them a bit of a covid gathering ground. Pretty much everyone I know with kids has been getting them and their kids covid tests in recent weeks due to outbreaks in their schools.
Like I said, I dunno why you tagged me. I agree, we're a massive outlier, probably because of how we socialize, it sucks, we'll probably need to reintroduce restrictions, but I hope we can keep schools, pubs etc. open in some capacity and power through. Let's see.
My understanding was that it was not quite that extreme: you can leave to go to work, for instance.
You can go to work, go to buy food, go for medical appointments. Basically, you just can't go out and wander about or go socialising/ to restaurants etc.
All over 40's in the UK are to be offered a booster 6 months after the second dose. That should be around now with most of the age group having the booster by Christmas.
Covid booster doses to be offered to over-40s - BBC News
Covid booster doses to be offered to over-40s - BBC News
So with Ireland (and presumably other countries too) talking about bringing back some measures, despite having a massive percentage of the population vaccinated, it makes me wonder what more we can do to stop this? In previous lockdowns, it was waiting for a vaccine to be produced and then it was waiting for said vaccine to be given to enough people, but now what is it? What's the next thing that we need to change to bring the numbers down long-term (without lockdowns)?
I'm not against more restrictions if that's what needs to be done. I'm just wondering what is next on the horizon to help against this. I can't really think of anything?
I'm not against more restrictions if that's what needs to be done. I'm just wondering what is next on the horizon to help against this. I can't really think of anything?