Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[elbows]

"Triple mutant"

Britain is the bestest, precious...

To be honest, I've never thought the ZOE app has enough data to produce reliable predictions.

I suppose I should point out that my views of him as a general pandemic commentator are seperate from my views on the ZOE data & analysis.

I have found the ZOE data useful at times. No single surveillance source is good enough to rely on in isolation, and certainly when it comes to looking at things on a per region basis, they didnt have enough active users in some places to do an adequate job (eg Northern Ireland). We have to understand the limitations of their data & methodology. I suppose the value for me in the ZOE data is that unlike the other sample based surveillance studies, the ZOE one had less lag, much quicker reporting and on a daily basis rather than weekly etc. Some detail on limitations was discussed recently because they have a proportion of vaccinated users that is not the same as the wider picture across the nation, theirs is much higher, so they recently had to take steps to try to take this into account when they do their estimates.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Regarding Spector, generally his positions are much closer to those of someone like Anders Tegnell of Sweden than those of the likes of Neal Ferguson. Sweden gets much maligned because it's done worse than its Scandinavian neighbours, but it's had about half the number of excess deaths of the UK. It's not absurd to question the effectiveness of the lockdowns that have been imposed just as infection levels have peaked or even passed their peaks.

Coming back to the BiB, when did the UK impose lockdowns 'as infection levels have peaked or even passed their peaks'?

Every time, new cases continued to increase after lockdowns were imposed, and only started to drop after restrictions kicked in.

FFS, much of the south-east went into lockdown [tier 4] on Boxing Day, where the Kent variant was causing a major issue, and having not spread much beyond that region, at that point - with new cases at national levels being over 36k daily, even when that lockdown became a national one over a week later, cases continued to increase.

We hit a peak of almost 60k around 9th Jan., after the area driving the new wave had been in lockdown for over 2 weeks.

In November, we were on around 22k cases as we went into that 'mockdown', peaking 2 weeks later at 25k, before seeing a dip after we came out of that to fucking early, only to witness the shit storm that unfolded after.

 

[glitch hiker]

I really don't fancy facing another winter like that.

I found it horrible, and I wasn't sick, living in poverty, nor watching friends and family die.

I guess a repeat seems unlikely but cases are stubborn which tells me the virus will persist in the community for some time, evolving or adapting, hopefully getting weaker.

 

[The39thStep]

I've only speed read it as I have no idea what he's on about with some of the delivery structure stuff but some interesting stuff from Cummings. Which if true asks questions not only of the Government but also to those who assumed Cummings was the architect of the herd immunity approach.

Thread by @Dominic2306 on Thread Reader App

@Dominic2306: 1/ Covid… Summary evidence on lockdowns. For UK political pundits obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden/lockdowns, cf. SW econ did a bit WORSE than Denmark which locked down, AND far more deaths i...…

threadreaderapp.com

 

[elbows]

I've only speed read it as I have no idea what he's on about with some of the delivery structure stuff but some interesting stuff from Cummings. Which if true asks questions not only of the Government but also to those who assumed Cummings was the architect of the herd immunity approach.

Thread by @Dominic2306 on Thread Reader App

@Dominic2306: 1/ Covid… Summary evidence on lockdowns. For UK political pundits obsessed with spreading nonsense on Sweden/lockdowns, cf. SW econ did a bit WORSE than Denmark which locked down, AND far more deaths i...…

threadreaderapp.com

Most of it is consistent with my views, perhaps with an exception here or there, especially some of the stuff on vaccines which I dont know enough about to judge properly.

And he is certainly correct about the SAGE 'minutes' not really being proper minutes that actually give a sense of how those meetings went.

When it comes to vital detail and response in pandemics, I have to be prepared to use sources like Cummings that are shits in other ways. Whether he is responsible for any failings at the start and whether his attitude only shifted after a certain point I cannot say. But many of his complaints about the way the establishment dealt with the pandemic over a longer period ring true to me. There are plenty of terrible attitudes and grotesque failures for him to choose from, that much is evident to me as an outsider since quite early on so an insider should really be able to add weight to specifics.

Its especially painful when he goes on about how if SAGE etc were more open we'd have been able to spot some of the colossal errors they were making at crucial moments early on. Because even without that access to info they said enough publicly in March that we could see some of the terrible errors in play, including the timing where as I often point out, various people on the internet including people here were aware that '4 weeks behind Italy' was bollocks and was off by several weeks. I think near the start of the pandemic I was going on about what a fan of open, shared info on the internet etc I was, althogh I doubt that I realised quite how strongly the advantages of such things were to be demonstrated in March 2020 and beyond.

 

[The39thStep]

Most of it is consistent with my views, perhaps with an exception here or there, especially some of the stuff on vaccines which I dont know enough about to judge properly.

And he is certainly correct about the SAGE 'minutes' not really being proper minutes that actually give a sense of how those meetings went.

When it comes to vital detail and response in pandemics, I have to be prepared to use sources like Cummings that are shits in other ways. Whether he is responsible for any failings at the start and whether his attitude only shifted after a certain point I cannot say. But many of his complaints about the way the establishment dealt with the pandemic over a longer period ring true to me. There are plenty of terrible attitudes and grotesque failures for him to choose from, that much is evident to me as an outsider since quite early on so an insider should really be able to add weight to specifics.

Its especially painful when he goes on about how if SAGE etc were more open we'd have been able to spot some of the colossal errors they were making at crucial moments early on. Because even without that access to info they said enough publicly in March that we could see some of the terrible errors in play, including the timing where as I often point out, various people on the internet including people here were aware that '4 weeks behind Italy' was bollocks and was off by several weeks. I think near the start of the pandemic I was going on about what a fan of open, shared info on the internet etc I was, althogh I doubt that I realised quite how strongly the advantages of such things were to be demonstrated in March 2020 and beyond.

I was surprised by , but supportive of his advocacy of openness and scrutiny tbh

 

[elbows]

I suppose I wasnt that surprised because although I havent spent too much of my life researching him, he is a somewhat complicated character and some of his views on data, processes and the establishment have plenty in common with mine. Its just we are very different in terms of what our politics and priorities are, and what we would try to do with such changes if they were brought about.

His final tweet of that thread is a fair example of stuff that it was possible to say here at the time (assuming he is talking about the crucial week in March 2020 which I have mentioned many times as being the week where plan A went down in flames). He knows much more than me about how explicitly herd immunity was baked into plan A, although its been possible to deduce a fair chunk of that during and since those times.

 

[muscovyduck]

What does SW1 mean in this context? Is it the postcode?

 

[Orang Utan]

What does SW1 mean in this context? Is it the postcode?

I was confused by that but that’s Victoria/Belgravia not Whitehall isn’t it?

 

[elbows]

I'm not a Londoner but if you want to approach that question the long way round and vomit your brains out at the same time then reading the about us page of the PR company that was unsubtle enough to name itself the SW1 Group may offer some hideous clues.

ABOUT | The SW1 Group | London

www.thesw1group.com

 

[Smangus]

I take it to meane the establishment, civil service etc.

 

[elbows]

The media were actually useful in one or two respects on the week he mentions there. I recall that I was preoccupied with the things said in press conferences etc that week which indicated their timing was all fucked up, and although I likely criticised their approach in various ways, I didnt pick up on it fully till the Friday(? need to check) when Vallance explicitly mentioned herd immunity to the press or to a committee, and the likes of Nick Triggle from the BBC wrote stupid things about how the message was we should carry on with our lives and how the virus was already with us so we'd catch it sooner or later. But some of the media in the press conferences earlier that week did react to what was being said with questions that left little doubt that the governments plan A was proving to be a difficult sell and looked a bit doomed. So the media did end up helping me to think that the writing was on the wall for plan A by the end of that week, even without knowing that behind the scenes the government were also being told that modelling etc indicated their plan would generate totally unsustainable numbers in hospital etc. By the end of the weekend we'd heard more about that modelling side of things too and it was clear plan A was dead, but then it took a further week+ for Johnson to properly initiate the necessary replacement for that plan.

But yes some of the useful indicators some sections the media provided during that period were of the 'look how these media herd managers will try to sell the public whatever shit plan the government throws our way' and it was quite interesting to see how they had to quickly change the trajectory of their propaganda when a very different plan emerged. Some even tried to do this without acknowledging that a huge u-turn had happened. And in terms of then holding the government to account over the herd immunity aspect of the original plan in a more sustained way, Cummings criticism is certainly right when it comes to some types of journalists. The very narrow game and useless worldview of political commentators was on ugly and stark display when performed in front of a pandemic background, although even some of them managed to ask the right question at the right time at least once. Some others who didnt specialise in living inside a crap Westminster bubble probably did better.

 

[elbows]

I was also at least partially fooled by their original approach. There was a certain rationale to 'pushing down on the peak' as they described it for days before Vallance described it explicitly as seeking herd immunity. I could understand that rationale and was more concerned about whether they were going to push down at the right time, or hard enough. Coupled with me probably not knowing what sort of numbers of hospitalisations and deaths would be involved in seeing plan A all the way through, stretching the pandemic out over a much longer period rather than trying to prevent anyone from ultimately getting infected, I dont think I went nuts about it till the limits of their ambition were made clearer that Friday. And then much of my stance that remains to this day would have been formed the following Monday by the Imperial College report that gave me my first proper look at modelled UK numbers.

With a proper open system we should have been able to get get that picture and reject the original plan much earlier, probably weeks before that crucial March week. Not that the European Centre For Disease Control was much better in touch with reality until the same sort of time in March, just to give one example of orthodox establishment failures elsewhere that also had to be quickly abandoned.

Anyway the exercise NIMBUS thing he mentioned is of interest to me. For all manner of reasons including the eyewatering numbers he mentions, and how the schools stay open bit rings true because one of the really striking aspects when rewatching the press conferences from the week of 9th March 2020 is how hard they were trying to set the scene for keeping schools open. Thats one of the things that ruined the credibility of their plan and how it went down with the press, because by then other countries close to home were announcing school closures.

I dont seem to be able to post the tweet Im on about without the previous one also showing up, sorry about that.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

What does SW1 mean in this context? Is it the postcode?

I was confused by that but that’s Victoria/Belgravia not Whitehall isn’t it?

Whitehall, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace are all in SW1

The post office did not use anything as simple as the river to decide what counted as SW London...

 

[elbows]

Spot the spin:

Covid: Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs work against Indian variant - study

They are effective against symptomatic disease but protection is low after only one dose, a study says.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[bimble]

What does it mean when it says for instance '60% effective'?
I still don't understand it. Effective against what - getting infected or getting really ill or passing it on or all of these?

All the headlines say 'Yay the jabs work here we come Freedom Day' but tbh this looks like a really low number to me.

"The analysis, carried out between 5 April and 16 May, found the Pfizer vaccine was 88% effective against symptomatic disease from the India variant two weeks after a second dose, compared with 93% effectiveness against the Kent strain.
For its part, the AstraZeneca jab was 60% effective, compared with 66% against the Kent variant over the same period.'

Pfizer and AstraZeneca ‘highly effective’ against India Covid variant

A Public Health England study has revealed the vaccines can be up to 88% effective after a second dose

www.theguardian.com

 

[Supine]

Here we go. Gov fucked up again.

 

[glitch hiker]

Government covering up data about spread of variant in schools. This from a concerning thread:

 

[Buddy Bradley]

What does it mean when it says for instance '60% effective'?
I still don't understand it. Effective against what - getting infected or getting really ill or passing it on or all of these?

It means "this is all really complicated science stuff that we can't be bothered to explain properly, so here's a simple number you dumb fucks can read and then forget about".

 

[Artaxerxes]

Absolute bullshit going around today.

 

[two sheds]

Absolute bullshit going around today.

Gupta talked to Johnson didn't she? So it was certainly discussed.

Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown

Exclusive: Johnson ruled out lockdown 24 hours after meeting with Sunetra Gupta – resulting in ‘1.3m extra COVID infections’

www.opendemocracy.net

 

[MrSki]

Absolute bullshit going around today.

She also said said that Cheltenham was safe & masks not needed. Definitely the government's scientific mouthpiece.

 

[elbows]

Gupta talked to Johnson didn't she? So it was certainly discussed.

Tory billionaire bankrolled ‘herd immunity’ scientist who advised PM against lockdown

Exclusive: Johnson ruled out lockdown 24 hours after meeting with Sunetra Gupta – resulting in ‘1.3m extra COVID infections’

www.opendemocracy.net

That was later and to do with trying to avoid the 2nd ( and as it turned out third) lockdowns.

All this recent denial about herd immunity is to do with what Cummings has said, and is to do with the original government plan A which died somewhere around March 13th-15th 2020.

The government are desperate to deny it and have got Patel to issue the same denial today, Coronavirus: Patel denies No 10 pursued herd immunity policy

However this is a fucking stupid game and we dont even need Cummings to demonstrate that the original approach involved letting people catch it. We had more than enough indicators at the time. A little bit later I will fish out the most obvious evidence of this that was public at the time.

 

[MrSki]

'Take it on the chin' from Johnson's own mouth.

 

[elbows]

'Take it on the chin' from Johnson's own mouth.

That was actually a distorted snippet because there are clips going round of that which cut what he said off at a point which changes the meaning of what he was saying.

 

[2hats]

What does it mean when it says for instance '60% effective'?
I still don't understand it. Effective against what - getting infected or getting really ill or passing it on or all of these?

60% effective with respect to symptomatic infection. Efficacy at reducing any degree of transmission would be lower than that (symptomatic plus asymptomatic infection leads to degrees of transmission). Efficacy to severe illness (hospitalisation, death) would be higher.

As per PHE, AZD1222 might achieve an efficacy closer to that reported for BNT162b2 when measured over a longer period (antibody studies would suggest). Perhaps something around 12 weeks post second dose ie 6 months after the first dose if we are sticking to the original, trial ascertained, 'optimal' 12 week dosing interval (this would perhaps not be entirely unsurprising as one moves up the age cohorts anyway, considering the inevitability of immunosenescence).

Vaccines highly effective against B.1.617.2 variant after 2 doses

New study by PHE shows for the first time that 2 doses of the COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective against the B.1.617.2 variant first identified in India.

www.gov.uk

Preprint.

As ever, longitudinal studies are needed and it won't be clearer how these vaccines mediate immunity in the long term for a year or two (do antibody levels drop so infection and transmission increase, perhaps necessitating further interventions, whilst cell mediated immunity is maintained, still protecting from serious disease?).

 

[elbows]

The main public evidence I would present on herd immunity all relate to the crucial week of March 9th 2020. There will be much greater info that isnt public yet, but this public info and the reporting of it at the time is still enough.

Exhibits a and b involve Patrick Vallance and things he said in press conferences and in interviews that week. I'm not going to go back through it all in detail now but will instead rely on this sort of story from the Guardian:

Coronavirus: science chief defends UK plan from criticism

Patrick Vallance says aim is to broaden peak of epidemic as Jeremy Hunt raises concerns

www.theguardian.com

“Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it. Those are the key things we need to do.”

But Vallance sought to underline that it is the epidemiology that is guiding the decision not to impose more draconian restrictions on the public’s day-to-day lives immediately.

“If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time,” he said. The government is concerned that if not enough people catch the virus now, it will re-emerge in the winter, when the NHS is already overstretched.

If I had more time I would go back and extract the exact press conference quotes that mention wanting to avoid a second wave in the winter, stuff that lines up with that last part of the above Guardian quote.

My other exhibit is something I have shouted about many times on this thread, including on the day it was published (and later removed). This was briefly part of a BBC article on Friday 13th March 2020.

 

[teuchter]

60% effective with respect to symptomatic infection.

Does this effectively mean, 60% of people (with relevant vaccine) exposed to the virus will not experience a symptomatic infection?

Or does it mean 60% of people generally going about their business (maybe or maybe not coming into contact with the virus) will not experience a symptomatic infection?

 

[two sheds]

Or does it mean 60% of people generally going about their business (maybe or maybe not coming into contact with the virus) will not experience a symptomatic infection?

That wouldn't make any sense would it? The 60% would vary depending on how many people around you were infected.

 

[prunus]

Does this effectively mean, 60% of people (with relevant vaccine) exposed to the virus will not experience a symptomatic infection?

Or does it mean 60% of people generally going about their business (maybe or maybe not coming into contact with the virus) will not experience a symptomatic infection?

It means that 60% of people who would have developed a symptomatic infection due to their exposure (or exposures) to the virus had they not been vaccinated will not develop one because of the effect of the vaccine. NB it’s not per exposure, it’s total risk over the timeframe of the whole study - ie for every 10 unvaccinated people who develop a symptomatic infection at any time over a period, only 4 vaccinated people will over the same period (assuming the populations are properly randomly selected). The period in question is I believe still increasing (ie I don’t think we’ve seen evidence of immunity drop off in the study populations yet - anyone know?).