Dr Duncan Robertson (@Dr_D_Robertson)
Policy & Strategy Analytics academic at Loughborough University; Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford. Focusing on COVID-19 modelling and analysis.
Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
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Dr Duncan Robertson (@Dr_D_Robertson)
Policy & Strategy Analytics academic at Loughborough University; Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford. Focusing on COVID-19 modelling and analysis.
I've already pointed out to you in the past that the tokenistic offers to developing countrie are woefully inadequate. For example in South Africa there is currently a slow roll out to health workers only. The prediction is that at this rate, the entire population will be vaccinated in 18 years. Excuse that.
What I find most endearing about you is how you defend a race to the bottom. It's ok for the Uk to be shit because others are.
Covax is woefully inadequate, see my other post to the other person defending vaccine inequality.
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cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
I doubt that prediction is right, considering South Africa will be manufacturing the J&J vaccine.
This is the J and J vaccination, they don't have anything else.
I'd need some help/explanation if I wanted to understand that!
For instance, there don't seem to be any notes about which of those variants are more serious compared to others .... </
x 1,000 
>ETA : Some of that Doctor's tweets are pretty good, but they don't provide much help (for non-scientists anyway!) with understanding the above table!
Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
It is a bit scaremongering but it does come with some data from the Robert Koch institute. Doubt (hope) we will see a third wave as bad as January here in the UK but Europe is in a really bad state with more national lock downs kicking in.
The Europe situation is different due to vaccine pace and also the UK variant
The vaccination combined with lockdown has got this almost under control. Still think reopening schools was too soon.. My sister is a teacher at one school and she has two girls at two further schools. All three schools have now had news cases and years sent home to quarantine.
Kinda inevitable after they reopened schools. I see the number of cases has levelled out but the number of people in hospital is still on a steep decline. It takes up to 2 weeks for sickness to get so bad you need to go to a&e and we are on day 11. This is the trend we are all awaiting.
I'm assuming the school children aren't going to hospital or even know they are sick.
Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
Sure about that?
Cape Town company to manufacture Covid-19 vaccine
Biopharmaceutical company Biovac will collaborate with US-based ImmunityBio to manufacture a second-generation Covid-19 vaccine.
www.sowetanlive.co.za
are you talking about 18 years for the whole of Africa or just South Africa? Because the J&J, its 300 million doses for a population of 60 million.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
Same here, at the peak we were testing around 600k a day, they are now reporting around 1.5m tests a day, so with such a massive increase in testing, it's surprising that new cases haven't started going up by a fair bit.
But we probably need two or three more weeks or so (?),to get the full picture for post-schools-opening infection rates??
(Very much questions not statements there, btw -- as I said above, I'm no scientist!
)
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Sure about that?
Cape Town company to manufacture Covid-19 vaccine
Biopharmaceutical company Biovac will collaborate with US-based ImmunityBio to manufacture a second-generation Covid-19 vaccine.
are you talking about 18 years for the whole of Africa or just South Africa? Because the J&J, its 300 million doses for a population of 60 million.
Yes, I'm very sure. This is about things that may happen in the future, not what is happening on the ground now. I am talking about SA only. For whatever reason, the J and J vaccinations are not out and about. While I'm sure that the vaccination program will speed up eventually (they were told they'd receive international vaccines in April, many months after us) this gives you a sense of how little is actually available right now.
tommers
Busta Rhymes is an unstoppable movement
they've been in for two weeks already.But we probably need two or three more weeks or so (?),to get the full picture for post-schools-opening infection rates??
(Very much questions not statements there, btw -- as I said above, I'm no scientist!
I guess by Easter we'll see better.
2hats
Dust.
This was made clear in the Warwick modelling preprint back in January (DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.27.20248896), which formed the basis of the paper published yesterday.
Additionally, as alluded to a couple of weeks ago...
South African variant of Covid cannot be kept out of UK for ever, Neil Ferguson warns
Senior scientific adviser says some countries are seeing a ‘significant fraction’ of cases with the variant
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tommers
Busta Rhymes is an unstoppable movement
But we probably need two or three more weeks or so (?),to get the full picture for post-schools-opening infection rates??
(Very much questions not statements there, btw -- as I said above, I'm no scientist!
Yes I think I was commenting more on getting a truer picture rather than the impact of schools being back. Its the whole more you test the more you find and I had assumed that mass testing of kids would have unearthed quite a few asymptomatic cases.
Of course that may have happened and been offset against the fall in the general populace but that doesn't appear to have been the case.
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
Covid: UK death rate 'no longer Europe's worst' by winter
Six other countries were worse affected during the second wave of the pandemic, according to ONS figures.
www.bbc.co.uk
Take that Slovenia. We weren't the shittest because it was a race to the end of the year, nuh. I always feel good when I know we aren't as crap as Bulgaria.
tommers
Busta Rhymes is an unstoppable movement
This was made clear in the Warwick modelling preprint back in January (DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.27.20248896), which formed the basis of the paper published yesterday.
Additionally, as alluded to a couple of weeks ago...
South African variant of Covid cannot be kept out of UK for ever, Neil Ferguson warns
Senior scientific adviser says some countries are seeing a ‘significant fraction’ of cases with the variantwww.theguardian.com
Hasn't Israel reported something like 97% reduction in symptomatic cases? Citing Israel data, Pfizer says vaccine 97% effective against symptomatic COVID
Appreciate that doesn't really affect variants.
2hats
Dust.
Pfizer claims that for vaccinees (at 2 weeks after second dose) which isn't the same as saying "97% reduction in symptomatic cases". That's also in the presence of degrees of on-going NPIs and predominately one variant that the vaccines available there are pretty effective against (in respect of efficacy to [a]symptomatic infection). Interesting to note that for the most recent sequencing data (sadly lags the most industrious sequencers a couple of weeks for some reason), after B.1.1.7, B.1.351 is the next fastest growing variant there...
e2a: There is likely also an association effect at work too skewing that particular metric - most vaccinated, particularly in older cohorts, predominately associate with other vaccinated (their partners, carers).
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elbows
Well-Known Member
Well I guess it takes time for viral momentum to build. And the first thing to expect is not a big rise in cases, its an end to the decline in cases.
Very similar expected dynamics are a big part of why I was advising people last June not to spend that side of summer waiting for the next wave to show itself imminently. It took quite some time for the virus to build momentum then, and then further time for modest increases to more obviously resemble explosive increases.
If we take what happened with University students, infection rates in some of those settings exploded so quickly that I think we were looking at a scenario where the virus had already gained much momentum in that age group before they went back. And start of term social events and shared accommodation etc gave the virus the opportunity to multiply from that base that had already been built over time.
Likewise although there had been problems at schools for some time last autumn, it still took quite a long time, including November national measures that left schools open, before some cruel explosive tipping point having been reached became really obvious to people.
I'm not complacent about the current situation though, and if I take the following sort of graph from the weekly surveillance report, we can see pretty clearly what stage we reached recently. Various factors should be different to last time we we are that stage. There are a whole bunch of reasons why the virus might struggle to regain momentum quickly, and a few ways it might manage to.
From https://assets.publishing.service.g...212/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w11_v2.pdf
Buddy Bradley
Pantheistic solipsist
Hardly surprising when they're all doing multiple tests per week in school now.
elbows
Well-Known Member
One difficulty I have when presenting such graphs is that there are many more in the document, and I cannot begin to cover them all.
For example there are a large number of graphs in the supplimentary document which cover age groups in schools etc from a variety of angles. Here is just one. Further demonstrates that in terms of this weekly format of data, its still a bit early to be judging much.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Covid: UK death rate 'no longer Europe's worst' by winter
Six other countries were worse affected during the second wave of the pandemic, according to ONS figures.www.bbc.co.uk
Take that Slovenia. We weren't the shittest because it was a race to the end of the year, nuh. I always feel good when I know we aren't as crap as Bulgaria.
I think this was earlier presented with a different headline, before they decided to spin a positive aspect.
Many of the details are grim regardless of headline:
Comparisons of all-cause mortality between European countries and regions - Office for National Statistics
Mortality patterns of selected European countries and regions, week ending 3 January 2020 (Week 1) to week ending 1 January 2021 (Week 53).
www.ons.gov.uk
In regards to the "the UK's highest peak was 101.5%" bit, this is consistent with my comments earlier in the pandemic that at the peak of our first wave, twice as many people as normal were dying.
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
I put it here because I'd just heard it presented on the radio news as a very positive thing and got a bit irate at the reporting.
I think the article I've picked from the website is actually more damning than the report I heard, which was sickeningly "we're not so bad after all eh, eh, eh"
Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
We are far in advance of the curve because the AZ vaccine was developed and tested in the UK. To test a vaccine at an even modest scale, you need to make it 1st. So we already had the manufacturing set up and ready to go. I seem to remember they were having some manufacturing issues in early November, long before it was approved. Clearly, this came with a large financial risk because it's all wasted if it didn't work. A risk times all the manufacturing plants across the world if they had got in early, sensibly they waited for the data to show it was working.
Now it works, manufacturing is being set up all over but it takes quite a while to make even once they start, it's not an instant process. This is why I was saying all the bluster about vaccines and vaccine nationalism will go away when all these plants come on stream in their respective locations.
Nothing is instant, however much we want and need it to be. Look at the PPE and stuff that was really needed and how everyone was talking about it at the beginning of the pandemic. Those dumb homemade ventilators!
Ventilators were expensive for a reason.All forgotten a year later as manufacturing has stepped in and made lots more. Good quality masks hanging off Tescos shelves 3 for a fiver. This will be true of vaccinations, just not in Tescos.
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
ventilators up to £25k apparentlyWe are far in advance of the curve because the AZ vaccine was developed and tested in the UK. To test a vaccine at an even modest scale, you need to make it 1st. So we already had the manufacturing set up and ready to go. I seem to remember they were having some manufacturing issues in early November, long before it was approved. Clearly, this came with a large financial risk because it's all wasted if it didn't work. A risk times all the manufacturing plants across the world if they had got in early, sensibly they waited for the data to show it was working.
Now it works, manufacturing is being set up all over but it takes quite a while to make even once they start, it's not an instant process. This is why I was saying all the bluster about vaccines and vaccine nationalism will go away when all these plants come on stream in their respective locations.
Nothing is instant, however much we want and need it to be. Look at the PPE and stuff that was really needed and how everyone was talking about it at the beginning of the pandemic. Those dumb homemade ventilators!
All forgotten a year later as manufacturing has stepped in and made lots more. Good quality masks hanging off Tescos shelves 3 for a fiver. This will be true of vaccinations, just not in Tescos.
think the vaccination is more than a fiver a pop tho
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