Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[Sunray]

Sure, its just bothersome that it is happening now in the midst of a national lockdown. As was evident in December there is a critical mass out there who have thrown the towel in to one degree or another.

I think the vast majority are still being good and the ones that aren't. don't generally die. There will always be dumbasses. Just as long as they are in the 95 percentile we're ok.
One dose of either vaccine has been shown, after 21 days, to have high levels of protection from you going into hospital and/or dying. The second dose isn't going to add much, it will probably stop it from dropping off too quickly. A massive 80-90%! Compare this to the flu vaccine in 2018-2019 which was just 15%, or 10.1% in over 65's. We all still dutifully take it.

Looking at the stats, there are 20 Million people under 29 in the UK so once we hit 40 million vaccinated.....

 

[Pickman's model]

I think the vast majority are still being good and the ones that aren't. don't generally die. There will always be dumbasses. Just as long as they are in the 95 percentile we're ok.
One dose of either vaccine has been shown, after 21 days, to have high levels of protection from you going into hospital and/or dying. The second dose isn't going to add much, it will probably stop it from dropping off too quickly. A massive 80-90%! Compare this to the flu vaccine in 2018-2019 which was just 15%, or 10.1% in over 65's. We all still dutifully take it.

Looking at the stats, there are 20 Million people under 29 in the UK so once we hit 40 million vaccinated.....

And let's hope a new variant which resists the vaccine doesn't emerge in the meantime.

 

[elbows]

I don't think anyone is too bothered if someone gets sick and recovers. No national lockdowns when there is a cold or flu going around.
I think its an inevitability case rates will go up if we unlock. Time to worry if people end up in hospitals.
There are 30000 healthcare workers who have been tested every two weeks after the vaccine to see how well it's performing under scientific conditions. Data is looking very positive.
Dr John Cambell with all the facts.

Viruses can mutate to milder variants too. It's not always bad, or we would be living out resident evil for real life. This is how the 1917 flu pandemic ended, it just became something people could survive more easily.

I think part of the problem with that perception is that people may not really understand quite how much weight the vaccine is being asked to carry, because they dont understand what level of death we would have faced if there was no lockdowns to carry much of the weight of the waves. The weight that the vaccines will have to carry in future to enable the chosen strategy to deliver a 'business as usual'.

I'm only just starting to read the various February modelling papers that SAGE looked at. I'm nto ready to get into all the detail. But there is one particular detail in the first one I read which might help people understand how much weight vaccines will have to carry.

Under one scenario they looked at which involves the current vaccination programme and the various bits of lockdown being released at very different times, they came up with the figures for peak number of deaths per day in the subsequent wave. A complete relaxation of measures in February would be expected to lead to a peak where there were 12,000 deaths per day! A March relaxing of all measures would give a peak of 7,400 deaths per day. April relaxing gives a 4,100 deaths per day peak, and a June release of all measures would still lead to a death peak in the region of 2,500 per day. So even if waiting till June before abandoning other measures, there is still about twice as much death as there was at the peak levels of daily death we ended up with in late lockdown-controlled waves.

Those scenarios are not aligned with actual policy and they've had to make loads of assumptions about the vaccine which will be refined over time. So I'm not mentioning these numbers as any sort of prediction, just to try and give people a sense of quite how much death is still possible under conditions where the vaccine has been given to millions but becomes the only thing protecting us, with other measures and behaviours removed.

Numbers I mentioned are from https://assets.publishing.service.g...963360/S1077_Vaccination_and_NPIs_Warwick.pdf but thats only one small part of that paper and there are many other papers I havent even looked at yet.

 

[weltweit]

I feel a sorry for teachers. Logic says being in confined spaces with lots of children or young adults who could be carrying Covid-19 will mean that teachers are likely to catch the bug.

However it seems the gov logic is that because teachers don't make up a large contingent of the people that are hospitalised and dying, they don't qualify for a priority.

 

[Sunray]

And let's hope a new variant which resists the vaccine doesn't emerge in the meantime.

Viruses don't resist vaccines, they aren't antibiotics, vaccines don't cure you. You cure yourself with a previous hint of how by a vaccine.

I'm not too worried about varients, there is a limit to how far it can go with its spike protein, too far and while it might evade vaccines it stops being able to enter cells too.

Plus, the mRNA vaccine, 50 years in the making, delivered in the nick of time, can be altered to match given the genomic sequence of any mutations in as little as a week. The issue isn't changing the vaccine, the issue would be regulations and manufacturing. I don't think it would have to go through all the trials as the 1st one did. Pfizer could have a new variant vaccination booster in the Autumn.

 

[StoneRoad]

Even after the short holidays (Easter & Crimble) the effect of school kids mixing is, usually, a rash of coughs, sore throats etc. and tghat's without adding in 'flu ...
The petri-dish affect that my OH always expected after anything longer than the half-term weekends.
I can't see the return to school having any other result than a spike in cases.
To me, not vaccinating academic and support staff before the students and secondary schools go back is madness.

 

[Sunray]

Those scenarios are not aligned with actual policy and they've had to make loads of assumptions about the vaccine which will be refined over time. So I'm not mentioning these numbers as any sort of prediction, just to try and give people a sense of quite how much death is still possible under conditions where the vaccine has been given to millions but becomes the only thing protecting us, with other measures and behaviours removed.

Numbers I mentioned are from https://assets.publishing.service.g...963360/S1077_Vaccination_and_NPIs_Warwick.pdf but thats only one small part of that paper and there are many other papers I havent even looked at yet.

By saying 'the only thing' you seem to suggest it's like a sword of Damocles. But 'the only thing' preventing us from getting polio, measles etc is a vaccine. Its a fairly solid thing to base policy on. We don't vaccinate for smallpox since 1980, we eradicated it. This is a disease that historians estimate killed 25% of the Roman empire, in 6 months.

We can't go on sitting in the house for years at a time. You can float predictions and stats and point to probabilities, but I said at the start of this pandemic it will always end up about risk. What are we willing to accept?
Vaccines lower the risk to a level I think I am comfortable with.

I also think there are some treatments that are going to become approved when you catch covid which will alter outcomes, like the treatment for AIDS has transformed the illness.

 

[SpookyFrank]

We can't go on sitting in the house for years at a time.

Like people in New Zealand are right now you mean?

Oh wait...

 

[Sunray]

Even after the short holidays (Easter & Crimble) the effect of school kids mixing is, usually, a rash of coughs, sore throats etc. and tghat's without adding in 'flu ...
The petri-dish affect that my OH always expected after anything longer than the half-term weekends.
I can't see the return to school having any other result than a spike in cases.
To me, not vaccinating academic and support staff before the students and secondary schools go back is madness.

First week of each term at Uni started to really get on my nerves. They should have a quarantine week before term.

I think people have missed the switch from 'catching it' to 'not dying from it'. The cases are going to go up, yes.
Will the hospitalizations? Depends on how many teachers are left who haven't caught it and recovered? It's pretty transmissible, they work with kids indoors in poorly ventilated rooms.

 

[existentialist]

Viruses don't resist vaccines, they aren't antibiotics, vaccines don't cure you. You cure yourself with a previous hint of how by a vaccine.

Are you familiar with the concept of "vaccine escape"? Exactly the same mechanism that produces antibiotic resistance can operate with viruses and vaccines, too.

 

[elbows]

By saying 'the only thing' you seem to suggest it's like a sword of Damocles. But 'the only thing' preventing us from getting polio, measles etc is a vaccine. Its a fairly solid thing to base policy on. We don't vaccinate for smallpox since 1980, we eradicated it. This is a disease that historians estimate killed 25% of the Roman empire, in 6 months.

We can't go on sitting in the house for years at a time. You can float predictions and stats and point to probabilities, but I said at the start of this pandemic it will always end up about risk. What are we willing to accept?
Vaccines lower the risk to a level I think I am comfortable with.

I also think there are some treatments that are going to become approved when you catch covid which will alter outcomes, like the treatment for AIDS has transformed the illness.

I'm trying to explain that risk, because you seem to be at risk of painting a picture that is far away from the scenarios we likely face for the rest of 2021.

I'm trying to find the right balance as indicated by many of my posts in the last week. I cant cover the whole subject in single posts and individual posts of mine are not going to provide the full balance, the posts need to be taken together to find the balance.

I have completed my skim of the modelling documents and SAGE minutes from February that have been released so far. People absolutely need to be aware of how much weight the vaccines are going to need to carry, and how much behavioural changes are still required even under optimistic scenarios, otherwise people will end up with lockdown again and crushed hope. I want hope that is sustainable, not doomed. And I'll strongly resist being shot for spreading that message.

I would describe the modelling from February as having a significant degree of uncertainty in it, in many cases relating to detail about quite how well the vaccine will work in a number of different ways. Pretty much all of the scenarios they have modelled show future levels of hospitalisation and death that are beyond what people thing of as tolerable, if the vaccines are asked to carry all the burden alone, and everything else is abandoned realtively quickly. But when the relaxation happens much more slowly, and if people are still behaving in ways that dont involve the same amount of contact mixing as was happening before the pandemic, then the numbers that come out of the model begin to resemble a tolerable range of hospitalisation and death.

I certainly dont rule out the possibility that vaccines may perform better in several key areas than the assumptions that were used for this modelling. In which case we end up with added wiggle room, which is good. It would be nice to experience a subsequent wave that does not feature such scary numbers. But I have no intention of misleading people about this stuff, too much vaccine optimism and unrealistic timescales easily have the potential to unleash a wave as bad or worse than those seen previously.

 

[Mation]

I wish the UK would take the Manx attitude to this ... and sling the non-compliant into the slammer.
(and their version of TT&I seems to work !)

If you mean this literally, I would ask: have you been inside?

 

[Pickman's model]

Viruses don't resist vaccines, they aren't antibiotics, vaccines don't cure you. You cure yourself with a previous hint of how by a vaccine.

I'm not too worried about varients, there is a limit to how far it can go with its spike protein, too far and while it might evade vaccines it stops being able to enter cells too.

Plus, the mRNA vaccine, 50 years in the making, delivered in the nick of time, can be altered to match given the genomic sequence of any mutations in as little as a week. The issue isn't changing the vaccine, the issue would be regulations and manufacturing. I don't think it would have to go through all the trials as the 1st one did. Pfizer could have a new variant vaccination booster in the Autumn.

if it's so easy to amend a vaccine, to make it work fine, why do they guess every year with the flu?

 

[elbows]

if it's so easy to amend a vaccine, to make it work fine, why do they guess every year with the flu?

The have to guesstimate northern hemisphere influenza vaccine strains in February in order to allow time for manufacturing for the next autumn/winter. For the southern hemisphere they make the decisions in September.

 

[Sunray]

if it's so easy to amend a vaccine, to make it work fine, why do they guess every year with the flu?

It's not been easy to amend a vaccine until the advent of mRNA vaccines. A solid explanation of mRNA vaccines
It's not a guess for the flu, they use data from the southern hemisphere. There are hundreds of flu viruses. This is why they are still struggling to identify something they all share to teach the body to fight them all. They have been working on this for a long time.

 

[elbows]

One way to consider what I've been trying to explain would be to look at the following chart from the SAGE modelling groups 17th February paper. Its an interesting chart in its own right, but in terms of my comments about how much weight vaccination is being asked to carry, there is another way of thinking about these percentages of population protected and still left vulnerable. Comapre them to the sorts of protection people gained by cutting off human contacts and staying at home. Not that I have such percentages handy right now, but a lot of older adults changed their behaviour a lot. Away from the obvious horror stories about hospital and care home spread, that was often beyond residents control, there were lots of vulnerable older people that were independent and were very careful in the pandemic so far. If their behaviour changes a lot post-vaccination, this will be an area where the vaccine has its work cut out in coming up with equivalent levels of protection.

In other words if 70-80% of people were protected from the virus by the lockdown and behavioural changes in the first waves, and the vaccine and natural immunity end up confering a similar level of protection, then if behaviours go back to normal then we might epect a similar strain on hospitals and a similar level of death. Just vague back of the envelope calculations which in reality would have plenty of caveats, but the broad concept remains. And what we saw in the first waves was not, I would suggest, a tolerable level of hospitalisation and death.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/963565/S1130_SPI-M-O_Summary_of_further_modelling_of_easing_restrictions.pdf

 

[elbows]

It's not been easy to amend a vaccine until the advent of mRNA vaccines. A solid explanation of mRNA vaccines
It's not a guess for the flu, they use data from the southern hemisphere. There are hundreds of flu viruses. This is why they are still struggling to identify something they all share to teach the body to fight them all. They have been working on this for a long time.

They try to take flu activity seen around the globe into account but the February northern hemisphere decisions come quite a long time before the southern hemispheres flu season.

 

[lazythursday]

One way to consider what I've been trying to explain would be to look at the following chart from the SAGE modelling groups 17th February paper. Its an interesting chart in its own right, but in terms of my comments about how much weight vaccination is being asked to carry, there is another way of thinking about these percentages of population protected and still left vulnerable. Comapre them to the sorts of protection people gained by cutting off human contacts and staying at home. Not that I have such percentages handy right now, but a lot of older adults changed their behaviour a lot. Away from the obvious horror stories about hospital and care home spread, that was often beyond residents control, there were lots of vulnerable older people that were independent and were very careful in the pandemic so far. If their behaviour changes a lot post-vaccination, this will be an area where the vaccine has its work cut out in coming up with equivalent levels of protection.

View attachment 256316

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/963565/S1130_SPI-M-O_Summary_of_further_modelling_of_easing_restrictions.pdf

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, even after a pretty comprehensive vaccine rollout about a quarter of people remain unprotected? And an uncontrolled spread of covid even in just a quarter of the population is still likely to cause a pretty horrendous amount of death, yes? (as we've never really seen uncontrolled spread except in early March)

However, if the vaccines work pretty well for most people there is going to be so much less incentive to maintain social distancing - especially if that is perceived as just being about protecting those who refuse the vaccine...

 

[Sunray]

They try to take flu activity seen around the globe into account but the February northern hemisphere decisions come quite a long time before the southern hemispheres flu season.

Why predict the future when the past is a fact? It's an imperfect science.

 

[elbows]

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, even after a pretty comprehensive vaccine rollout about a quarter of people remain unprotected? And an uncontrolled spread of covid even in just a quarter of the population is still likely to cause a pretty horrendous amount of death, yes? (as we've never really seen uncontrolled spread except in early March)

However, if the vaccines work pretty well for most people there is going to be so much less incentive to maintain social distancing - especially if that is perceived as just being about protecting those who refuse the vaccine...

Yes thats what I'm getting at. Just chuck in a load of unknowns about seasonality, the extent to which behaviours will go back to normal, whether the government get a clue about aspects like test, trace & isolate, etc.

I spent much of the initial vaccine rollout phase feeling a bit sick about the giddy nature of much of the coverage and attitudes. It seems there are some lessons people arent going to learn unless the media bother to tell them, and unless we actually get to see the consequences unfold.

Just one example, ehre is a chart from some early Feb Uni of Warwick modelling paper that was part of SAGE discussions. I'm sort of expecting that despite knowing that vaccines arent 100% effective for everyone, people might still be surprised at what proportion of hospitalised cases were vaccinated in the following modelling results. Cautious assumptions are where they've been much more cautious than in their ventral assumptions about what effects to expect from the vaccines in practice. My point doesnt really rely on this more gloomy scenario being the one closer to reality, since the proportion of those hospitalised is what I'm getting at with this example, and that proportion is still large in the central assumption modelling.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/963444/S1118_Roadmaps_for_relaxation_of_NPIs__Warwick.pdf

 

[elbows]

What will be nice is if real world vaccine data shows better performance in key areas than they modelled for, in which case I'd then want to see the same modelling exercises repeated with the new parameters for the vaccines abilities. Whether I'll actually get to see that depends not just on the vaccines actually working better than hoped, but on whether a situation arises again where SAGE are asked to do such modelling again, and the results then being published in a timely manner.

 

[Artaxerxes]

Big changes at the V&A, partly blamed on the Rona of course.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London will undergo a radical restructuring across its curatorial and research departments in order to reduce costs by at least £10m by 2023 in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. It will also cut around 140 posts out of its complement of 980.

V&A to say goodbye to departments by material—woodwork, metalwork etc—and 20% of its curators

Museum's director Tristram Hunt says that government help has not been enough to cover all costs incurred by pandemic and admits “curators will be more stretched”

www.theartnewspaper.com

Back office curators and the inevitable front of house staff losses.

 

[SpookyFrank]

if it's so easy to amend a vaccine, to make it work fine, why do they guess every year with the flu?

Different type of vaccine altogether. The pfizer one is just some RNA in a bag. Changing the RNA to match changes in the vaccine is (in theory) a pretty trivial task.

 

[Pickman's model]

It's not been easy to amend a vaccine until the advent of mRNA vaccines. A solid explanation of mRNA vaccines
It's not a guess for the flu, they use data from the southern hemisphere. There are hundreds of flu viruses. This is why they are still struggling to identify something they all share to teach the body to fight them all. They have been working on this for a long time.

Yeh it is a guess, an educated guess but still a guess. Flu Vaccine Selections Suggest This Year’s Shot May Be Off the Mark

 

[blameless77]

I also don't see any particular problems with timing... seems reasonably cautious in general. I don't particularly like the whole dates thing though, and as mentioned 'irreversible' is just stupid.

The one thing that leaves me pretty uncomfortable is schools... It's difficult to know exactly how that could be managed, given that it is kind of important to get kids back in. But I suspect the absolute minimum will be done. I know that Korea, for example, staggered attendance to keep overall numbers down. And a wider vaccine programme in teaching staff would make sense... I would feel a lot more comfortable if back to school was left until after easter holidays I think. We're just now vaccinating those of us who are younger, but with moderate risk factors after all; were I a teacher I'd be going back just under 3 weeks since first dose.

i guess they are trying to reduce that risk with testing?

 

[blameless77]

The plan seems ok. All pupils on 8th March seems a bit optimistic but otherwise it's all reasonable.

It appears to hinge on the assumption that any new variants are (a) handled by the vaccine or (b) squished by track & trace.

Schools can stagger return and students have to be tested (negative) according to the letter we got today?

 

[Sunray]

Yeh it is a guess, an educated guess but still a guess. Flu Vaccine Selections Suggest This Year’s Shot May Be Off the Mark

I just looked at the stats published by the government.
Nobody got flu this season. So no way to know. Maybe we should have a yearly lockdown for flu. Much more effective than the flu vaccine.

 

[purenarcotic]

Schools can stagger return and students have to be tested (negative) according to the letter we got today?

But the shitter is that when the kids test at home, that’s not enforceable, it’s voluntary. So kids could well be going into school positive and nobody would know. I don’t see why they didn’t just say kids back from after Easter. Another few weeks to get another couple of million vaccinated and cases further down. Would have made a much better difference I think.

 

[redsquirrel]

Big changes at the V&A, partly blamed on the Rona of course.

Back office curators and the inevitable front of house staff losses.

Done under the management of that nice former-Labour MP (and presumably still member) Hunt. But hey vote Labour!.

 

[Cid]

Schools can stagger return and students have to be tested (negative) according to the letter we got today?

As I understand it lateral flow testing has major flaws, especially as applied to recalcitrant teenagers... staggered return is good... But seems to be for only 2 weeks?

Iirc schools are projected to bring R well into the low 1.x range (I think I've read 1.1-1.5), so there is that as a quantifiable risk. Though I'm not sure which measures that takes into account.