But admissions are a third of the UK's, new cases are a third of the UK's and total vaccination is close to 70% against 65% UK; We also have Covid passports and we have some idiots who don't wear masks and also have antivaxxers spurred on mainly by the far right.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
But admissions are a third of the UK's, new cases are a third of the UK's and total vaccination is close to 70% against 65% UK; We also have Covid passports and we have some idiots who don't wear masks and also have antivaxxers spurred on mainly by the far right.
Buster is a boomer... so I am not surprised by what he wrote...
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If the number of people in hospital in France is higher, how are hospital admissions lower?
France has about 10k in hospital and UK 8k but admissions are around 300+ in France and 1000+ in the UK, maybe France don't chuck them out so quickly
Perhaps. But if figures were reversed I'm fairly sure the conclusion wouldn't be that France chuck them out too quickly.
But if the admissions in the Uk are over 1000 and only 8000 are in hospital that's an 8 day turnaround for every single one. Sounds odd.
It’s unreal how ignorant so many are to this when making claims of “people are happy for others to die”. I think looking from here the UK people have been extremely compliant with lockdowns and with vaccination rates.
No-one is happy about anyone dying, it’s just a fact of normal life for a social animal.
Buster knows full well that 30,000 or so die every year from flu (much higher in bad years), but would be outraged that 40,00 die from Covid?
Not according to an eminent virologists I have listened to. She was pretty clear that simply wearing proper face coverings inside public places and on public transport would have a significant effect on transmission.
But I assume you know better?
Oh really.
I was actually quoting facts. Facts that are in the public domain.
Maybe you should re-read my post, which is in the correct Covid thread.
If you don't agree with me, then that is your right.
And by the way. When were the public required to wear face coverings prior to the covid pandemic.
Thanks. Hopefully just a common cold, they will be off at least 48hrs because even if not covid they have to stay out of school so they aren’t spreading it around
Somewhere between 5m to 15m have died due to covid, either directly or it affecting your life expectancy, depending on what you read.
in just over a year.
I don’t find anything that buster has written warranting a double team attack simply because you both want to go back to normal now.
this is unprecedented.
In the case of the UK, I find the following link quite interesting to put things in perspective
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/tran...mofinformationfoi/deathsintheukfrom1990to2020
No. There’s a direct line of sight there. Deaths are at 100-200 a day and people are living without caution.
We don’t have to both sides this. The callous and the idiots have won. Edit : Not calling you either of these.
You seem to be quite happy to write off several thousand additional deaths under the guise of ‘We have to open up sometime, we don’t mitigate for other transmissible disease’. Simply by Buster saying he’d keep mandated mitigation’s in place to ensure the death toll was as low as possible, he shows himself to be a more compassionate person. You are happy for more people to die than him. And me for that matter. That’s kind of ok. Oddly.
Have the courage of your convictions. If you think 70,000 a year instead of 40,000 is acceptable in exchange for unlimited freedom, do you. But don’t berate another for not being cool with bigger numbers.
If I were in charge I’d have;
- Extended indoor mask mandates until Spring for many events without adequate mitigation’s
- Required evidence of vaccination for indoor dining
- Mandated masks on all public transport
- Required evidence of a negative test inside 24 hours for those ‘risky’ events not requiring a mask.
- Lowered the cost of tests to £25 and have them centralised, out of Private companies hands.
I’ve seen this level of day to day ‘restriction’ in play in the last two months in France, Croatia, Hackney, Airports, Taxis. None of them are a big deal and all are easy to comply with. I’ll happily do them to see 10-30,000 people not die.
I’d then reset in Spring next year when we would hopefully be close to 90%+ vaccination and communicate plans centred around the newest facts, adequate ventilation and is probably ignore the dumbest people In The room instead of considering their voices to be valid simply because they voted for me.
Thank you. Now imagine how many more there would have been if there had been no lockdowns, either from covid or other infectious diseases which didn’t have a chance to spread, road accidents etc. Safe to say it would have been 1m+
Buster claimed the UK is “happy” for 40,000 people a year to die from Covid. My response is, Buster, and everyone else, including yourself have been “happy” to spread respiratory viruses that kill at similar rates to that (40,000 /year). That’s part of life.
No-one is arguing about the past 18 months.
How much would it reduce transmission by? What are the current numbers of people wearing masks? We still have a mask mandate in Northern Ireland and our cases have been amongst the highest in the U.K.
If you are going to quote me then please don't be quite as selective with what I posted.
Sorry…
Seems like the British people are happy to accept a death rate from covid of about 40,000 a year based on the current rate.
Well if that’s your argument let’s mandate wearing masks in flu season. I’d be down for that.
You know what difference that makes on flu death rates in Asia compared to the West.
None.
You can mandate things but why would you want to live in a World like that where it makes little to no difference?
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You know as well as I do that people in the north do what they want in their own homes etc as well as the no mask & no vaccine lot.
Explain how you know that it makes no difference to those people that don’t catch the cold/flu etc when someone is sneezing or coughing in public transport?
I wish I’d cottoned on years ago. I used to travel by bus to work and usually about this time of year I had without fail, someone coughing or sneezing in the seat behind or besides me. Then I’d end up with it.
off course masks make a difference otherwise a whole continent wouldn’t bother their arses. We all used to think ‘look at them with their masks on’ when they walked around london etc. Who’s laughing now?
Flu death rates in Asian mask wearing countries are no different to the West, there’s decades of data, hence the huge mask debate when Covid kicked off.
France had 4248 admissions in the week ending 5 Sept (down 20% on the week before) - I'd be surprised if they are at 300/day now as that would constitute a 50% drop in one week. Not impossible, but it would be impressive and analysis-worthy, as I'm not aware of any major policy/other changes in France that could do that in a week.
In any case, where case rates are falling fast, hospitalisations are the trailing indicator and the total number hospitalised will trail that. The current stats of around 10k hospitalised and 2k in intensive care (vs UK 8k/1k approx) may just be showing that some patients take a long time to treat, and longer to discharge if they can't return home until completely virus free. That's almost certainly a demographic issue rather than a policy one. Averages tend to flatten stories but in general younger patients stay in for less time.
The UK is also seeing the start of what might be an uptick in hospitalisations in the older vaxxed groups. We don't know why yet, maybe just that the at risk group have decided to take more risks, or maybe we are starting to see a decline in vaccine effectiveness and they need boosters. At any rate it's a recent phenomena and it could be a couple of months before it's a major factor for over 70s in France.
Anybody aspiring to a form of normality (pre-covid life) is an awful psychopath delighted to see a lot of people dying from Covid. Gotcha.
Ok. Seems like I have raised a few hackles.
So, just to set the record straight.
I was listening to an eminent virologist this morning.
She was arguing that the UK has gone from having one of the strictest set of restrictions, which with the vaccination programme brought daily infections down to a manageable number and deaths down to some of the lowest since the pandemic.
And after all that hard work, new infections and deaths have increased to unacceptable numbers, unless we are happy to pay that price for the current freedoms.
I find it difficult to understand how an annualised figure of about 40,000 deaths could be seen as acceptable, when that number could be reduced significantly (not my words) by the wearing of face coverings....
Can't see much wrong with that logic. Hence my post.
So, just to set the record straight.
I was listening to an eminent virologist this morning.
She was arguing that the UK has gone from having one of the strictest set of restrictions, which with the vaccination programme brought daily infections down to a manageable number and deaths down to some of the lowest since the pandemic.
And after all that hard work, new infections and deaths have increased to unacceptable numbers, unless we are happy to pay that price for the current freedoms.
I find it difficult to understand how an annualised figure of about 40,000 deaths could be seen as acceptable, when that number could be reduced significantly (not my words) by the wearing of face coverings....
Can't see much wrong with that logic. Hence my post.
https://www.linternaute.com/actuali...-se-poursuit-3e-dose-dans-les-ephad-ce-lundi/
Sorry it's in french but in summary the lastest is 322 admissions, people in hospital falling, down 500 in the last week, deaths down, starting booster vaccines in old people's homes from Monday and surprise, Marine Le Pen is against covid passports.
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I see where you are coming from and don't understand the outrage. It's a really fecked up situation where you will be just left to die because there are not enough resources to help you, that's essentially what we will end up with in the winter. Not calling for a complete lockdown but a bit of caution will save a lot of lives.
Of course. Which is why I question how much will change with a mask mandate.
I'm looking at:
https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/content/download/373773/3154180
Wandering around a bit more there's:
https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/...ion-de-la-covid-19-en-france-et-dans-le-monde
Which I guess updates daily currently showing around 500/day suggesting a 20% week on week decline - which is more in line with the other data. Hopefully it's a trend that will continue and you'll keep seeing the numbers fall.
Exactly that.
Compare the things we do when driving a car. Seat belts, drink driving etc and not to mention the safety features built into the cars. And the annual deaths of less than 2,000.
That is the point.
Yes it's a day or two behind the figures I showed but trends are continuing downwards which is good; with good mask wearing by most people, vaccinations still going strong, social distancing and covid passports for events and restaurants etc, long may it continue to improve.
Oh right I get your angle now. Fair point.
At the same time a lot of especially older people do listen to what the political parties and experts tell them. So If it were me, I’d mandate masks at least on public transport during flu seasons. That way the hospitals aren’t having to deal with a rise in flu and covid coming into winter. It could be relaxed again after winter
Thank you for clarifying, though personally I don’t think you had too.
You quoted projections, and presented them as facts. But those projections have a lot of variables attached to them, much of which are tied to unpredictable social behaviour and an evolving virus that still manages to upend our understanding of things. There are lots of projections with conflicting answers because of that. So when you were presenting your "facts" back in July about what would happen in mid-August, there were other projections like this:
If you're curious about what the modelling is actually looking like and what the appraisal was in June (that led to the opening being delayed until July) this will give you an overview:
https://www.covid-arg.com/post/modelling-the-return-of-freedoms
You need to download the pdf file to see the modelling summaries from Sage. Basically they have three models - imperial College, Warwick and LSHTM. These start with various scenarios relating to how much more infectious Delta is, what the hospitalisation rate would be (unvaccinated) and how well the vaccines are working. Then they try and describe what might happen if...
Currently cases are rising as fast as predicted in early June but hospitalisations are lower (but rising). The black/orange lines were the Warwick predictions of what would happen if we reopened fully on June 21 as planned v July 19. The blue is the actual hospitalisation data so far.
This seems to be down to the cases not really moving out of the under 29 group in the same way as they did in previous waves. That's assumed to be part vaccine and part behaviour related (the vaxxed mixing mostly with the vaxxed for example). Unfortunately it now looks like it's spreading into the very highest risk group 80+ probably from unvaxxed or single vaxxed family members or carers, hence why hospitalisations are starting to rise, having not risen as early as was expected.
Next week's data will give people an idea of how the infection is moving through age groups and the vaccinations given in June are part of the equation.
Right now it really is too close to call, but there is an assumption in all the Sage scenarios that not only will there be an exit wave, there will be a lot of hospitalisations over the next year and thousands more deaths. That's what "living with covid" means - we're just not used to seeing it as a calculation.
None of which is problematic of course. Models have error margins built into them and the people who designed them were always careful to add caveats about the unknowns.
One expert saying one thing at one point in time is not a fact, it's an interpretation of complicated evidence that should be weighed up accordingly.
If after doing that, you think it's a fair assessment, that makes sense. But you can't then re-brand them as facts. If you describe them as facts then you'll misinform people, might increase their anxiety, etc. And if you convince yourself they're facts, then when someone on the other side of the discussion presents an alternative argument, you'll find it much easier to dismiss that argument - but that's your error, not theirs.
The more you do that, the more you convince yourself you're "right" and people simply aren't listening to "the facts", the more likely you are to sneer at people for responding differently to ambiguous scenarios. Which is where we're at now.
The public weren't required to wear face coverings prior to the pandemic. But then your point was about morality, not legality. There are many things that are now legal to do - no masks on public transport, going to large events - that you think is not quite right. It's not a good trade-off, and it's causing unnecessary harm for a very small sacrifice.
The same thing applies in 2019. You weren't forced to wear face coverings, but you could've. It was an unusual thing to do in the UK, mostly foreign people did it, mostly from Asia, and most of us thought it was kind of weird, surely unnecessary. We thought that at a time when tens of thousands of people died from viruses every year, many of which spread in exactly the same way. That's now your red line that's unacceptable, so you have to judge yourself by the same standard then.
If it's immoral to allow that number of deaths to happen in society, and you believe simple preventative measures could reduce that, then how do you judge your prior behaviour? Maybe you didn't know what the value of masks was, but if preventing deaths was so key to your sense of morality, it wouldn't be that hard to google something like "mask flu study" and see this, from 2012, in the UK. If you did read it you'd probably be a little confused, though. Complicated and contradictory evidence outside of your expertise has that effect on people.
Personally, my judgement at the time was people wearing masks in 2019 were a bit silly, while now I think...yeah we probably should've worn them. I think we as a society were a bit slow to catch up to it. But I don't feel ashamed for not doing it.
I wasn't very familiar with how to wear them, why to wear them, where to get them...it was all a bit distant to me. I didn't worry about the flu, I got it once, it was pretty rubbish but no big deal. I didn't think too much about how viruses spread, and there wasn't anyone immediately close to me that suffered badly from a virus. Whereas the folks in Asia, some of them had experienced a pandemic, some of them were used to wearing it for other purposes, it was a socially acceptable or benefical thing to do...they did it more often not because they're "better" people, who care more about preventing lives than other people, it was just normalised through experiences.
The people that you ridicule now, I think of in much the same way. They're still a bit unsure about the value of them - people they know that wore masks got covid, people that didn't wear masks didn't get covid, one minute the experts say this the next they say that, it's not really socially acceptable in their circles, they've changed all these rules so what's the point of masks, etc. It hasn't registered with them in the ways that drive action, because many people don't understand the world using the same tools. They haven't gotten to the point where they think of masks the same way you do, in the same way we took a while to think of masks in a vaguely similar way to folks from Asia.
If you want to cast that kind of judgment on others you have to cast it on yourself too, and not only in the situations you're comfortable with. So how do you judge yourself?
Yeah you've just invented my opinion I'm afraid. But no worries, you obviously don't need to listen to what other people are saying because you've got all the answers. Have fun with it.
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I’ve moved to GP land since last month after quite an intense last year working on Respiratory.
Last week I had to admit three patients on three separate home visits with COVID. All double-vaccinated, but looked truly terrible when I reviewed them.
Think we are in for a harsher Winter than normal. Maybe not like peak-January, but certainly rough ones.
I cant see further lockdowns happening unless deaths go above 600-700/daily again, but I do feel restrictions should be brought back within the next couple of months. People may not like it, but I feel it’s inevitable.
Last week I had to admit three patients on three separate home visits with COVID. All double-vaccinated, but looked truly terrible when I reviewed them.
Think we are in for a harsher Winter than normal. Maybe not like peak-January, but certainly rough ones.
I cant see further lockdowns happening unless deaths go above 600-700/daily again, but I do feel restrictions should be brought back within the next couple of months. People may not like it, but I feel it’s inevitable.
I think that’s a fair enough compromise for normality. As much as I don’t like mask wearing in general.
I’m not convinced that masks make a big difference all on their own. Where I think they do move the dial is in reminding people life is not back to normal yet and to continue to do their best to behave in a way that will slow down/reduce viral transmission. Take away the masks and human nature dictates we’ll all start to behave exactly as we did pre-covid. Which is a problem while the UK remains only partially vaccinated. The un-vaccinated will become immune eventually after catching covid but there’s a whole lot of collateral damage if that many people all get infected over the next two or three months.
...
there's a large-scale paper on masks, they make a minor but significant difference:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y
emphasising that the 9% they observed is for 42% masking vs a 13% background, so the results will be much much better if you compare, say, 80% to 5%.
university talk on their surveillance testing of students. nothing groundbreaking but it was interesting from a biology point of view.
Strains detected
only weeks with positive tests are shown so there are gaps. numbers on top are total cases seen in a given week. percentages refer to each strain.
effect of masking/gathering:
data from students alone, not staff/faculty.
march outbreak was caused by many off-campus gatherings.
current semester (fall 21) started mid-august, and there were gatherings on and off campus and lenient rules. we had stricter rules on masks and gatherings end-aug. pretty drastic effect!
other notable results, both scientific and policy:
spike protein is undergoing a lot of mutations. another gene, the polymerase, is seeing less mutations than the baseline, it is highly conserved. but there are other proteins (some surface protein whose name i missed) also being rapidly mutated, so it could be involved in evading immunity/vaccines.
mutations are happening so fast that for contact tracing, they expect to see at least some difference between 2 cases if they weren't acquired at the same contact. so basically contact tracing without using wifi/bluetooth location, but relying on positives being honest about where they were after detection.
but each mutation doesn't mean a new variant, each variant has some signature mutations and then further mutations that arise and don't seem to change its behaviour.
based on their models of infection: if vaccines were 90% effective at stopping transmission, surveillance testing and isolating of detected asymptomatic cases would be unnecessary. at 50-75%, there is a *massive* (5-10X) difference in infections if there is surveillance testing and isolation of positives. in fact, without surveillance testing and isolations, every student would have to be infected before the curve dropped. so, they decided to continue with testing despite having very high vaccination rate. they also found that instead of asymptomatic quarantine, they can get the same results with 3X weekly testing of positive asymptomatics.
e - zoned out during the q&a. one point was that they don't expect it to become less severe over time like other viral diseases, since in its current state it usually doesn't kill, and transmits before it kills. so that selective pressure to help it spread isn't there.
Strains detected
only weeks with positive tests are shown so there are gaps. numbers on top are total cases seen in a given week. percentages refer to each strain.
effect of masking/gathering:
data from students alone, not staff/faculty.
march outbreak was caused by many off-campus gatherings.
current semester (fall 21) started mid-august, and there were gatherings on and off campus and lenient rules. we had stricter rules on masks and gatherings end-aug. pretty drastic effect!
other notable results, both scientific and policy:
spike protein is undergoing a lot of mutations. another gene, the polymerase, is seeing less mutations than the baseline, it is highly conserved. but there are other proteins (some surface protein whose name i missed) also being rapidly mutated, so it could be involved in evading immunity/vaccines.
mutations are happening so fast that for contact tracing, they expect to see at least some difference between 2 cases if they weren't acquired at the same contact. so basically contact tracing without using wifi/bluetooth location, but relying on positives being honest about where they were after detection.
but each mutation doesn't mean a new variant, each variant has some signature mutations and then further mutations that arise and don't seem to change its behaviour.
based on their models of infection: if vaccines were 90% effective at stopping transmission, surveillance testing and isolating of detected asymptomatic cases would be unnecessary. at 50-75%, there is a *massive* (5-10X) difference in infections if there is surveillance testing and isolation of positives. in fact, without surveillance testing and isolations, every student would have to be infected before the curve dropped. so, they decided to continue with testing despite having very high vaccination rate. they also found that instead of asymptomatic quarantine, they can get the same results with 3X weekly testing of positive asymptomatics.
e - zoned out during the q&a. one point was that they don't expect it to become less severe over time like other viral diseases, since in its current state it usually doesn't kill, and transmits before it kills. so that selective pressure to help it spread isn't there.
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