Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[The39thStep]

It's mostly killed the elderly. And Brexit voters were older than Remainers, as you may remember.

Look at the voting intention in the polls , covid has had no impact on voting patterns .

 

[teuchter]

true but they're good for people to decide in general whether to have no vaccinations, one or two.

Not really, if anything they make the benefits look much smaller than they really are.

 

[Cid]

true but they're good for people to decide in general whether to have no vaccinations, one or two.

Er… no they really aren’t. Not how vaccination strategy works. And there should be no decision to have ‘one vaccine’.

 

[David Clapson]

Look at the voting intention in the polls , covid has had no impact on voting patterns .

I'm not talking about voting intentions, I'm talking about the vote which has already happened.

 

[Teaboy]

I'm not talking about voting intentions, I'm talking about the vote which has already happened.

In terms of the winning margin 150k odd people are not going to make any difference. In any case as we saw at the last general election most people in Britain think the result of a vote should be respected. Well, maybe not in Scotland but the rest of Britain...

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

This thread definitely needs more Brexit chat.

 

[Sunray]

I made no implications on those stats, other than I quite liked the pivot.

Most people can't understand all those graphs and number nonsense. Just give it to them like a bookie and people can make up their own mind to go to the pub.

45000-1 you might die

or

 

[cupid_stunt]

This thread definitely needs more Brexit chat.

Agreed.

Can we please keep fucking Brexit off this thread?

 

[Cid]

I made no implications on those stats, other than I quite liked the pivot.

Most people can't understand all those graphs and number nonsense. Just give it to them like a bookie and people can make up their own mind to go to the pub.

45000-1 you might die

or

View attachment 265750

It's not about whether you're looking at graphs or Zoe numbers. It's that those figures don't tell you anything about the risk of spread in a particular situation. They are generalised to a population level. They include people who live in Cumbria (rolling rate of 11.0), and people who live in Selby (rolling rate of 257.2). People in Cumbria, significantly less than 1 in 45000 chance, people in Selby, significantly greater (over-simplified, but hey).

And what that is capturing is the situation as it stands. Or as it stands with whatever lag Zoe has on data, but ignore that for now. So it applies to a situation where indoor socialising is still heavily restricted. As soon as you change that, the risk factor also changes at a population level. But it will also change based on individual choice. Someone going to the pub every day in Cumbria might be more at risk than someone shielding in Selby.

That's why you have a one off event in Liverpool. You can say Liverpool currently has a disease prevalence of X. We'll allow the event to happen, and see what effect it has. Then we can say that similar places, also with a disease prevalence of X, and given a similar event, have a decent chance of behaving in the same way. If it goes ok, you might want to run a few more tests, in areas with slightly different levels of prevalence and using different conditions. We've already had some test cases (snooker etc), so we already have some data points. Every new test case builds on these, and feeds into the risk calculations for each opening stage.

The 1 in 45000 cannot be used to work out your personal risk of catching covid. It's kind of daft that they publish it tbh, because people are bound to use it like this.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Just give it to them like a bookie and people can make up their own mind to go to the pub.

lol nobody understands odds - that's why bookies exist

 

[Cid]

More info on the Events Research Programme here:

Information on the Events Research Programme

Information for attendees and those hosting the Event Research Programme (ERP) pilot events.

www.gov.uk

 

[Sunray]

The 1 in 45000 cannot be used to work out your personal risk of catching covid. It's kind of daft that they publish in tbh, because people are bound to use it like this.

Kind of hard to find unless you know where to look.

The good news is that of the 1 million tests done per day, only 2000 people are testing positive, still out there, but it's now being called endemic rather than a pandemic. In the UK at least.

 

[elbows]

Kind of hard to find unless you know where to look.

The good news is that of the 1 million tests done per day, only 2000 people are testing positive, still out there, but it's now being called endemic rather than a pandemic. In the UK at least.

Dr Sarah Walker spoke to the media the other week about it moving from a pandemic to endemic in the UK, but that use of language made some other experts rather nervous, its too soon to strongly make that claim. And Dr Walker herself tried to balance what she said by going on about how it being endemic means its here to stay, not being able to predict the future, and also "Look at India... how quickly and badly it can go again."

Personally there is no way I would talk about the end of the pandemic yet, no matter how good UK numbers look, they need to stay that way for ages before I can reach that destination. I could speak about current levels of infection here being at 'endemic levels' but thats not the same thing as saying its not a pandemic anymore.

Its also perfectly fine to talk about how in general pandemics usually end and things tend to become endemic, with occasional epidemics. But I'm not really a big fan of everything Walker said in April, or at least the impression given by particular soundbites, I think some of it was ill-advised.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

It's up to you to tell the NHS the result though. You could easily lie. You'd be a massive dick but you could do it.

i have picked up a few things on anti-social media from twats talking about faking test results and / or vaccination certificates for going to events this year

what the fuck is the matter with some people?

 

[cupid_stunt]

We passed another milestone yesterday with the average daily deaths dropping to 19, not seen since the 3rd week of Sept., and down from 45 at the start of April.

It seems we got away with the last stage of unlocking on 12th April, with new cases down -10.7% in the last week, patients admitted to hospital down -17%, patients in hospital below 1,500, and deaths down -18.5%.

People vaccinated up to and including 29 April 2021
First dose: 34,216,087
Second dose: 14,532,875

So, all good news, and we are very likely to see the next stage happening on the 17th May, which is a lot more risky, because of indoor mixing again, we just need to hope the level of vaccination will help keep things under some control.

Here's the link to 'the road to de-mask us' -

COVID-19 Response - Spring 2021 (Summary)

www.gov.uk

 

[Badgers]

Roll up, roll up, get ya free test kits

 

[cupid_stunt]

Looks like two possible policy changes could be coming, an end to self isolation for contacts, replaced by daily lateral flow tests, which could be a good idea considering reports of how few people do actually self-isolate, whereas if they get an positive test may be more will.

Ministers have also taken steps towards ending the 10-day isolation rule for the contacts of Covid-infected people by authorising a new trial that replaces mandatory quarantine with daily tests.

Up to 40,000 participants identified as contacts will be given daily lateral flow tests then – as long as their result is negative and they display no symptoms – allowed to go about their lives as before.

And, jabs for secondary school pupils, which doesn't come as surprise, and seems logical.

Secondary school pupils will reportedly be offered Covid-19 vaccinations from September under plans being developed by the NHS.

Health service officials are compiling planning documents which include a measure to offer a single dose of the Pfizer jab to children aged 12 and older when the new school year starts, according to The Sunday Times.

Pfizer has said trials of its vaccine in children aged 12 to 15 showed 100 per cent efficacy and a strong immune response.

The plans, which the Times said it had confirmed with government and NHS sources, are contingent on advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) due this summer.

Double-jabbed ‘half as likely’ to suffer long Covid symptoms - follow live

Latest developments as they happen

www.independent.co.uk

 

[cupid_stunt]

More on the likely reduction in infection rates from the vaccination programme, overall conclusion is that if 6 got infected from an unvaccinated person, only 1 would from someone who had had a single jab, so that should improve further after people have their second dose.

There are two ways that getting vaccinated can slow the spread of the virus. First, it can help prevent you getting infected. Second, even if you are unlucky and catch the virus, it may reduce the risk of passing it on. It is crucial to understand how big these benefits are.

Two huge new studies have taken advantage of the successful UK vaccine rollout. An Oxford-ONS analysis of more than 370,000 survey participants found infections were reduced by 65% after a single dose. For protection against the virus, one dose was similar to having had a prior infection. There was no major difference between the two available vaccines.

Most important, the studies showed that if you are infected after vaccination, it tends to be much milder, both in terms of self-reported symptoms and viral load.

If vaccinated people develop a weaker infection, then they might be less likely to pass on the virus.

This seems to be the case. Public Health England studied more than 500,000 households in England and estimated that unvaccinated cases infected around 10% of people in their households. But that rate was nearly halved, to around 6%, if the original case had been vaccinated, with a similar reduction from either the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

Put these two studies together and it means that, for every six people that unvaccinated people infect, only one would have been infected had they had the jab.

Will Covid-19 vaccines reduce virus transmission? | David Spiegelhalter & Anthony Masters

Vaccinated people can still get infected, but they are less likely to pass it on

www.theguardian.com

 

[pogofish]

Is anyone else finding it odd seeing small groups of people in full-on going out gear going about in the middle of the day..?

Esp as a pub lunch in an outdoor setup is still the best they can look forward to.

Also, some/many of the “outdoor“ structures allowed for pubs here are so solid and well enclosed that I really wonder why they didn’t just let them in?

 

[cupid_stunt]

Also, some/many of the “outdoor“ structures allowed for pubs here are so solid and well enclosed that I really wonder why they didn’t just let them in?

They have been checking pub & restaurant structures around here, ensuring at least 50% of the sides are open to fresh air, they have stopped at least 2 or 3 from opening.

 

[tommers]

Is anyone else finding it odd seeing small groups of people in full-on going out gear going about in the middle of the day..?

Not really. Good luck to them.

 

[pogofish]

They have been checking pub & restaurant structures around here, ensuring at least 50% of the sides are open to fresh air, they have stopped at least 2 or 3 from opening.

I would have thought something similar might have been applied here, esp as these are essentially unventilated spaces (think festival marquees) - similarly the “easily dismantled“ part of the guidance is widely ignored. You would need a full crew and a small crane to get these things put away at night!

 

[pogofish]

Not really. Good luck to them.

Either way, it looks a bit sad/desperate - esp as some outfits don’t do well in daylight and the sort of cold it’s been here these last couple of weeks.

 

[andysays]

I would have thought something similar might have been applied here, esp as these are essentially unventilated spaces (think festival marquees) - similarly the “easily dismantled“ part of the guidance is widely ignored. You would need a full crew and a small crane to get these things down at night!

Are the rules relating to this in Scotland broadly the same as in England or are there significant differences?

 

[platinumsage]

They have been checking pub & restaurant structures around here, ensuring at least 50% of the sides are open to fresh air, they have stopped at least 2 or 3 from opening.

Same criteria as the smoking ban, so should be understood by everyone involved.

 

[elbows]

Looks like two possible policy changes could be coming, an end to self isolation for contacts, replaced by daily lateral flow tests, which could be a good idea considering reports of how few people do actually self-isolate, whereas if they get an positive test may be more will.

They have a bunch of motives for this change, including public & private sector staffing levels being heavily affected by self-isolation of contacts. They are also bothered by the amount of school days that people can still end up missing under the current rules.

I'm not surprised they are going to do a big trial of this, since recently some SAGE documents about a smaller trial of this were published:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/976324/S1146_SPI-M-O_Daily_contact_testing.pdf

KCL and Bristol: Engagement with daily testing instead of quarantine following possible exposure to SARS-CoV-2, 11 March 2021 (dated March but was only publicly published on SAGE site on April 30th).

There are quite a lot of factors and details that will affect whether this system is better or worse for controlling infections that the current one, and I expect some of these factors to change further as peoples perceptions of the pandemic evolve further due to less cases and more vaccinated people. And I think the lower prevalence rate at the moment means that these trials, and indeed many other sorts of trials and attempts to estimate the effects of things, will not really be capable of accurately determining the impact of policies across the full range of scenarios. ie I expect all manner of trials to have positive results that show risks to be low enough to go ahead with the changes, but I will not make the mistake of assuming such finding will still hold true in the event of us ending up in another situation where prevalence of the virus is high. On that basis, I think my position is that they should go ahead with much of this stuff, as long as they do not make the mistake of resisting further changes in the other direction in future, should the situation deteriorate. I do not want to hear future bullshit about how studies conducted at the current time, with the current low prevalence rate, are solid proof of stuff that will hold true in all circumstances. But in the meantime sure, its inevitable that there will be heavy relaxations on many fronts and I'm not going to stand in the way of that or make myself unwell by being obsessively negative about it.

But just to illustrate my point about how all manner of studies will have to place more caveats and an additional degree of uncertainty into their conclusions as a result of being conducting at a time of decreased prevalence, here is an example from a recent report in the series of reports monitoring hospitalisation after vaccination:

Important caveat. The risk of exposure has reduced since early January so the progressively lower number of PCR positive symptomatic cases admitted to hospital after vaccination is likely to under-represent a signal of vaccine failure.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/982499/S1208_CO-CIN_report_on_impact_of_vaccination_Apr_21.pdf

 

[pogofish]

Are the rules relating to this in Scotland broadly the same as in England or are there significant differences?

Very similar from what I understand - although maybe more of the detail has been left to local authorities to implement as they see fit.

And I don’t think I’ve seen one that allows smoking yet - even those that do meet the50% criteria

 

[elbows]

They were hoping to use sewage surveillance to help determine the extent to which vaccination reduces transmission. However because of everything else that was changing at the same time as the vaccine rollout, they werent able to reach tidy conclusions using the wastewater method:

Wastewater-based predictions are consistent with the decline in cases starting in early January. However, it was not possible to identify the extent to which ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 prevents onwards transmission of SARS-CoV-2 given the available data because there are three confounding factors that are considered in more depth in the Discussion. Briefly, the vaccination programme was rolled out at the same time as the proportion of cases associated with the B.1.1.7 variant increased, improved laboratory methods for wastewater samples were adopted, and NPIs were updated (Figure 1 (b)). Furthermore, it is currently not known whether and to what extent vaccination affects faecal RNA shedding.

(where NPIs = non-pharmaceutical interventions, ie lockdown etc).

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979870/S1192_Current_environmental_monitoring_cannot_constrainthe_effectof_vaccines_onSARS-CoV-2_transmission_Report_for_SAGE.pdf

And here is an interesting paper where they did a wastewater study of Bristol to see if this form of surveillance can help monitor the situation with mutations and variants of concerns.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/979864/S1193_Wastewater_Monitoring_of_SARS-CoV-2_Variants_in_England_Demonstration_Case_Study_for_Bristol__Dec_2020-March_2021_.pdf

• Overall, this case study demonstrated WBE is an effective tool for detecting VOCs, VUIs and mutations of interest within a population (Bristol and South Gloucestershire.).
• The tool provides timely, non-invasive, and unbiased community-level insights at lower budget and resource expense compared with mass clinical testing.
• When this approach is used continuously - across time and space - it has the potential to identify outbreaks and clusters of known VOCs and VUIs and elucidate their transmission and spread across England.
• It can also aid in targeting resourcing intensive clinical testing; and assessing the success of containment and the continuing effectiveness of NPIs.

There were some limitations discussed elsewhere in the paper, such as not always being able to get enough quality genomic info from samples from certain locations. But they also included a more general bit about how this stuff has been use more widely so far without much public attention:

Beyond the detailed Bristol use-case, EMHP are actively contributing to the national VOC/VUI response across England and have provided insight across several cities and regions to date. Noteworthy examples include the detection of all 13 signature SNPs of the B.1.351 lineage (VOC- 20DEC-02) from a sewer network site in Nottingham on the 19th March (Fig. 4), as well as the temporal detection of five signature SNPs of the P.2 lineage (VUI-21JAN-01) at a sewer network site in Manchester (Fig. 4). In both cases the majority of signature SNPs of the B.1.1.7 lineage (VOC-DEC20- 01) were also observed (Fig. 4), highlighting simultaneous detection of multiple VOC/VUIs from one sample. EMHP are working with local response teams to link virus detection in WW with clinical findings and to aid in monitoring the spread and containment of these localised VOC/VUI outbreaks.

There is even a map which shows how they are further able to analyse stuff by local area using sewage surveillance.

 

[andysays]

Very similar from what I understand - although maybe more of the detail has been left to local authorities to implement as they see fit.

And I don’t think I’ve seen one that allows smoking yet - even those that do meet the50% criteria

Possibly that's where the discrepancies have come from then

 

[elbows]

I'm hoping to take a rather long rest from going on abou things like the dangers of expecting vaccination to do all the heavy lifting on its own in this pandemic. But since something similar is being covered on the BBC live updates page, I may as well take the opportunity to state it again for hopefully the last time for a long time.

A government adviser has warned the public not to rely solely on the vaccine as a means of bringing an end to the pandemic.

Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, described the vaccine as "one of the tools in our toolbox".

But he told the Andrew Marr show: "It is absolutely vital that we don't think there's just one thing that's going to save us all.

"We really do know that lockdown works - and that public events, mass events, will feed the spread of the virus."

He added: "We mustn't take our concentration off that and think that just by vaccinating we are going to be out of the situation."

Thats from the 11:20 entry of https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-56961920

I suppose what I expect is that message will continue to be largely overlooked, and eventually a time will come where it goes wrong and people will be forced to learn that lesson the hard way, or not and we get away with it. Either way Im sick of going on about it.