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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Badgers said:
Hopefully he did not take any/many with him.

www.standard.co.uk

‘Covid denier’ dies from the virus alone day after testing positive

The family of a “Covid denier” said they begged him to wear facemask before he died alone in his flat from the virus that has claimed over 100,000 Brits.
www.standard.co.uk www.standard.co.uk
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You get a kind of twin track emotional response to stories like this. He was someone spreading, literally, deadly advice and undermining public health messages. It's an 'ironic death'. But then it's a fucking grim way to go. :( In similar vein, I heard a local news story yesterday about care home staff in the north east refusing the vaccine (I think it was 11% in Stockton). This was particularly younger workers and even higher for those carers going into client's homes. The story was in part about people getting their messages from social rather than 'official' media. Putting themselves and others at risk, but also 'victims' of conspiracy shite?

Not really sure where that logic takes you, a core of ideological conspiracists and anti-vaxxers, then a wider group of 'victims' spreading their shite? Not sure I like that logic as it has large groups as ideological 'dupes'. Maybe it's more about day to day life in neo-liberal Britain and the place it leaves people. Anyway... not really stuff for this thread or even a direct response to what you posted... :oops:
 
Wilf said:
You get a kind of twin track emotional response to stories like this. He was someone spreading, literally, deadly advice and undermining public health messages. It's an 'ironic death'. But then it's a fucking grim way to go. :( In similar vein, I heard a local news story yesterday about care home staff in the north east refusing the vaccine (I think it was 11% in Stockton). This was particularly younger workers and even higher for those carers going into client's homes. The story was in part about people getting their messages from social rather than 'official' media. Putting themselves and others at risk, but also 'victims' of conspiracy shite?

Not really sure where that logic takes you, a core of ideological conspiracists and anti-vaxxers, then a wider group of 'victims' spreading their shite? Not sure I like that logic as it has large groups as ideological 'dupes'. Maybe it's more about day to day life in neo-liberal Britain and the place it leaves people. Anyway... not really stuff for this thread or even a direct response to what you posted... :oops:
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My uncle works in a care home, apparently only about half the staff had the vaccine when offered.

I thought that nothing much could surprise me but with this and the Qanon crap I am genuinely shocked at just how many people will believe utter bullshit on this scale.

What really gets to me is politics seems to be shifting from anything approaching a left/ right conflict. To one between people with a grasp on reality against those that don't.
 
emanymton said:
My uncle works in a care home, apparently only about half the staff had the vaccine when offered.

I thought that nothing much could surprise me but with this and the Qanon crap I am genuinely shocked at just how many people will believe utter bullshit on this scale.

What really gets to me is politics seems to be shifting from anything approaching a left/ right conflict. To one between people with a grasp on reality against those that don't.
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The irony is, some of this is going to play out very much down the lines of left-right/class politics. I don't see care homes being quite at the point of suspending/sacking staff who refuse the vaccine as they'll be short staffed. But that point can't be far off.
 
Wilf said:
The irony is, some of this is going to play out very much down the lines of left-right/class politics. I don't see care homes being quite at the point of suspending/sacking staff who refuse the vaccine as they'll be short staffed. But that point can't be far off.
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And I have no idea where to stand on that.
 
emanymton said:
My uncle works in a care home, apparently only about half the staff had the vaccine when offered.

I thought that nothing much could surprise me but with this and the Qanon crap I am genuinely shocked at just how many people will believe utter bullshit on this scale.

What really gets to me is politics seems to be shifting from anything approaching a left/ right conflict. To one between people with a grasp on reality against those that don't.
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Much can be learnt from the history. I know people will be shocked at uptake figures that are lower than they had expected, but I think a lot of that is due to a lack of familiarity with the subject in non-pandemic times. And even a bad pandemic does not suddenly blow all the usual factors away from the picture overnight.

An obvious example to look into is the struggles that have been had in increasing the proportion of NHS workers who get the flu jab every year. Uptake was often very poor and its taken some concerted campaigns to get the figures up by an appreciable amount.

I dont have a collection of links to the best web articles that cover this history. So I will just offer one for now, a 2018 story about why the majority of NHS staff dont get the flu vaccine.

www.bbc.co.uk

Why do the majority of NHS staff not get the flu vaccine?

Less than half of healthcare workers in Scotland are taking up the offer of a flu jab. Why?
www.bbc.co.uk

It includes themes we will hear about again now, such as this in regards the flu vaccine at that time:

Earlier this week, Sir Bruce Keogh, national medical director of NHS England, called for a "serious debate" over whether NHS staff should be forced to have the vaccination.
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This old flu article also contains a couple of things which make me groan given some of what we've heard, and who we've heard it from in this pandemic.

For a start its got quotes from fucking Carl Heneghan in it, a name I have sadly become all too familiar with in this pandemic. Dont get me wrong, I dont always disagree with everything he says in this pandemic, but I do consider him to be a narrow, rigid fucker and thats can be a dangerous thing when you have a voice during a bad pandemic.

And then there is this quote, which I would like to draw to the attention of anyone who has ever been tempted to fall for the 'oh there was so much we didnt expect from this pandemic coronavirus, that we have now learnt about with the benefit of hindsight, such as the role of asymptomatic cases in transmission'.

England's top doctor said flu was a "double whammy" for the NHS, increasing the number of patients and putting staff out of action.

He said a third of people with the virus do not know they are carrying it so staff may not be aware they are putting patients, colleagues and their own families at risk.

In 2011, the then chief medical officer in England, Dame Sally Davies, criticised those who did not get the jab, describing them as "selfish".
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smmudge said:
Well actually yes. During "training" they topped up her wage to 100%. But they aren't now, so she's told them to stick any future night shift they may want her to do (which she contractually doesn't have to) up their arse. And possibly she has whistleblown to hrmc now :hmm:
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I think her company may be in for a rude awakening when this is over. HMRC are going to be told to look into a lot of companies and self employed people's claims and I know of quite a few who are bending the rules to blag extra money. Once this is over and the govt realise how skint they are, they will be instructing the tax man to look at everything. And anyone who has had dealings with the tax man in the past knows that you never get away with it. It might take a while, but that letter always comes eventually.
 
Overall it seems to me that not much can change in the UK restriction-wise this year compared to last - too much chance of miscalculation being disastrous, and I think even this government might actually be realising that's the case. It feels like we'll have to get through next winter with it being significantly better than this one before they can even start thinking about any 'normality'.
 
Cloo said:
Overall it seems to me that not much can change in the UK restriction-wise this year compared to last - too much chance of miscalculation being disastrous, and I think even this government might actually be realising that's the case. It feels like we'll have to get through next winter with it being significantly better than this one before they can even start thinking about any 'normality'.
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Yup. I still think it will be 2023 before we're back to something that by then will feel like it's what normal used to be. Assuming no random curve balls.
 
elbows said:
I see the BBC marked the anniversary of what they laughably call the first UK Covid case with a tedious article. Perhaps people might find some of the small details interesting. I am moaning about it mostly because it was not the UKs first case, it was just the first case we actually detected, because for ages we were only looking for potential cases that had the most obviously risky recent travel history.

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: How the UK dealt with its first Covid case

A year ago, the UK was yet to record a Covid case. Then a family rang NHS 111 from a hotel in York.
www.bbc.co.uk

What I consider to be a complete and utter joke that partly explains how we ended up being repeatedly behind the curve in a deadly way is this:



I didnt have a crystal ball, I dont have special training, I dont have insider knowledge or connections, or a habit of being lucky with guesses, or a history of predicting pandemic doom prematurely and inappropriately. None of those things were necessary in order to quickly get a sense of what was likely to come, and what was likely already here. And I was hardly alone, I did not conclude these things in isolation, many figured it out in reasonably good time. And yet we still have to listen to the people who should have known better talking shit about crystal balls and hindsight.
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I can't "like" this enough. Before it was even known to have hit the UK there should have been a COBRA meeting, flights stopped etc. Even after the virus was known for sure to be here, there were people going to and from risky areas; iirc school trips to North Italy were still going ahead
 
Mation said:
Yup. I still think it will be 2023 before we're back to something that by then will feel like it's what normal used to be. Assuming no random curve balls.
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It depends what people are thinking of when they say normality.

I expect that if vaccine-related data shows them what they want to see, they will push hard to ease all sorts of restrictions as much as they can, as quickly as they can get away with. Some things wont go back to normal in a hurry, eg the lieks of Van Tam have in the past gone on about how they dont forsee a day when everyone can suddenly throw away their masks. But when it comes to the big restrictions, if the government think they can push things without seeing insane surges in hospitalisations, they will get rid of as many of the big restrictions as they can.

One of the big complications when envisaging that possibility is down to the various mutations, strains and international travel concerns. And various other details about quite how well the various vaccines do at different aspects of managing the virus. So I dont have an exact prediction. But since the government has on more than one ccasion pushed its luck in ways that turned out to be rather deadly, I cannot predict anything that relies on them really having learnt all those lessons and changed their priorities.

I dont have a well formed sense of how well the vaccines will do at protecting the very eldest and most vulnerable cases. Even a relatively small percentage of people in that category being left exposed to serious illness can add up to some numbers that hospitals etc would struggle with, if we had 100% normal behaviour and the vaccines were asked to carry the full burden alone. By this I mean that it only seems to have required a small fraction of the country to catch the disease in order to generate a level of hospitalisations that we struggle to cope with. If 90% of people werent catching it because they were hiding from it and reducing their personal risk, then if those peoples behaviours all went back to 'normal' then a vaccine that reduced the burden by 90% would still be inviting a similar high number of hospitalisations. I dont really expect the reality to turn out quite that bluntly, this is just a very simplified and crude example that may help understand how good the vaccine needs to be to compensate for a return to complete normality.
 
If the virus is not dealt with and is left to infect some populations then there will continue to be variants of interest and some of them might escape our immunity so ongoing vaccination may be required.

The virus won't continue to produce variants if it has been beaten back in all populations so as not to have an infected base within which to develop variants. Hence it is important to distribute current vaccines worldwide because we won't be safe here until everyone is safe.
 
weltweit said:
If the virus is not dealt with and is left to infect some populations then there will continue to be variants of interest and some of them might escape our immunity so ongoing vaccination may be required.

The virus won't continue to produce variants if it has been beaten back in all populations so as not to have an infected base within which to develop variants. Hence it is important to distribute current vaccines worldwide because we won't be safe here until everyone is safe.
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The Whittys and Vallances of this world will still tell us in press conferences that they expect the virus to be with us for all times in a way that will require ongoing management via vaccinations.

This is a conventional view that exists for good reasons, its not a completely crazy view. But it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps them on orthodox tracks that have been in place long before this pandemic and which this pandemic has not really changed, no matter how much lip servie they pay to how much we have learnt.

I'e always had mixed feelings about this stance because its an assumption that is born out of reason and history. But also of narrow rigidity, and it gets in the way of any reasonable zero covid agenda being sought. And it will take more than the typical, expected setbacks with certain vaccines at certain moments in time, to really shift this aspect of orthodox thinking in this country. Zero Covid is a difficult thing with big implications and long timescales and its still probably completely unthinkable to our establishment and many others. I think the entire approach being undertaken in many countries will have to completely blow up in their face before this would really begin to doubt this orthodox stuff. And I dont know how many times they would have to fail at their preferred approach before zero covid would actually start to look more reasonable and achievable to them than their conventional approach is. Probably lots.
 
Plus even countries that have taken an approach that looks like zero covid, have mostly done it as a temporary thing to buy time for the conventional vaccine-based approach to become possible. Because without a vaccine exit strategy the zero covid approach becomes a perpetual burden unless every single corner of the globe eradicates Covid. And I doubt any leaders would bet on that, which is understandable but again unfortunately ends up turning into a lack of ambition.
 
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I find it hard to see why any country would attempt zero Covid (in the long term) without knowing that every other country was doing it. Which seems highly unlikely.

New Zealand hasn't proven anything that's useful in the long term for an interconnected world.
 
Might not be able to achieve 100% but surely it’s worth having it as a goal.
I was thinking, where are all these people contacting the virus. It’s it at work?

Didn’t the country spend £22 billion on test and trace, which has turned out to be financial gift to serco, and nothing more. Has there been any benefit? What are they doing? Instead of doing nothing, they could be working this out so we could do something about the main ways people are getting sick.
 
Sunray said:
Might not be able to achieve 100% but surely it’s worth having it as a goal.
I was thinking, where are all these people contacting the virus. It’s it at work?

Didn’t the country spend £22 billion on test and trace, which has turned out to be financial gift to serco, and nothing more. Has there been any benefit? What are they doing? Instead of doing nothing, they could be working this out so we could do something about the main ways people are getting sick.
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If they proved that people were mostly getting infected at work, they might have to do something about it though.
 
Like revolution. a zero covid
emanymton said:
My uncle works in a care home, apparently only about half the staff had the vaccine when offered.

I thought that nothing much could surprise me but with this and the Qanon crap I am genuinely shocked at just how many people will believe utter bullshit on this scale.

What really gets to me is politics seems to be shifting from anything approaching a left/ right conflict. To one between people with a grasp on reality against those that don't.
Click to expand...

I'm NHS and the trust has started running info/support groups to try and counter the propaganda, I'm guessing take up has been lower than expected.
 
weltweit said:
Vaccines are not the only way to zero covid, as Wuhan has proven, and New Zealand, etc ..

If we want travel to return to any sort of normal, zero covid has to be a serious option.
Click to expand...
teuchter said:
I find it hard to see why any country would attempt zero Covid (in the long term) without knowing that every other country was doing it. Which seems highly unlikely.

New Zealand hasn't proven anything that's useful in the long term for an interconnected world.
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I think that one of the medium term consequences of Covid will be that international travel won't return to the level we have recently come to view as normal and the world won't be so interconnected, at least in terms of people and goods moving around so much, for some time to come.

And that could potentially be a good thing, in various non-Covid related ways.
 
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