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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
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Countries ranked on prevalence of diabetes as proportion of population:
Countries ranked by Diabetes prevalence (% of population ages 20 to 79)
India is at 46.
Countries ranked by Diabetes prevalence (% of population ages 20 to 79)
India is at 46.
muscovyduck
Good IT skills and food hygiene competent
I've completely lost track of understanding it all and I'm beginning to panic a bit, anyone else feel like this?
Not at the moment but regardless how I'm feeling - it's totally valid for you to feel that.
What might help?
Supine
Newt Member
Reading Sunray’s thought experiment ideas probably isn’t helping
I’m feeling pretty chipper at the moment. The next few weeks will be important as the impact of the India variant is determined. I’m trying to stay positive and plan to go to a pub tomorrow for the first time in over a year.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its also understandable if some are feeling anxious because the government have passed the buck back to 'personal responsibility'. Although I'd say that regardless of how draconian the rules were at any point, its always been about how everyone behaves anyway.
Risk is currently still lower than the moments of maximum danger that previous waves offered. Unless you are somewhere where case numbers have gone in an alarming direction or where specific variants of concern have been highlighted locally, this is supposed to be a stage where people can somewhat recharge their mental batteries.
Risk is currently still lower than the moments of maximum danger that previous waves offered. Unless you are somewhere where case numbers have gone in an alarming direction or where specific variants of concern have been highlighted locally, this is supposed to be a stage where people can somewhat recharge their mental batteries.
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muscovyduck
Good IT skills and food hygiene competent
It's this Indian variant thing that's confusing me I think. I sort of feel like how I felt in early March 2020 (and then again in the autumn) when it felt like everyone was sleepwalking towards doom but then I'm fairly sure that's not what's going to happen this time because we have vaccines. But then there's all this stuff about booster vaccines which is worrying me and the fact that even if you are vaccinated it's not 100% effective? But I can't figure out how worried to be about that?Reading Sunray’s thought experiment ideas probably isn’t helping
I’m feeling pretty chipper at the moment. The next few weeks will be important as the impact of the India variant is determined. I’m trying to stay positive and plan to go to a pub tomorrow for the first time in over a year.
Like back in 2020 it was scary but I felt like I had a good grip on how to keep myself safe and what was going to happen next. But now I'm a bit
and I can't remember what I was doing back then that had me feeling so confident. I suppose I'm wondering if there's going to be another wave and if so how bad it's going to be.thanks elbows, do you mean that as in the risk of a third wave? I think I'm just confused about whether there's another one coming or not and it's the unknown that's freaking me out. Do I just have to accept that for now everything is unknown?
This latest lockdown was nowhere near as tight as the first one, yet numbers fell even more rapidly, despite the Kent variant that is much more transmissible than the original. They also fell without the benefit of summer and seasonality, which began early last year in terms of higher temperatures, and has barely even started yet, and yet we are at similar levels of cases, deaths and hospital admissions at the moment as we were last mid-summer. Why play down what the vaccines have achieved? Of course the lockdown helped, and hat's not to say that other restrictions MIGHT be needed again (though I fucking pray not for a thousand reasons), but the vaccines have helped massively, not just here but in the USA too, and elsewhere (Israel being the most prominent example so far). It's fucking stupid and pretty damn ignorant to try and claim otherwise.
elbows
Well-Known Member
In that particular case I meant sense of personal risk of infection, illness etc, but also risk that a third wave will arrive in a big way 'any day now' weighing people down at a time when they can actually take their eyes off that ball for a bit if they want to. I took this stance last summer too, some people were not sure if they should be sitting around expecting news to suddenly appear any day that the next wave had arrived. I couldnt tell them that there wouldnt be another wave, but I could give a vague indication that it would take time to get back to that point, and that I personally was going to try to take June off, in terms of where my mental energies were pointing. Then I managed to extend the same thing into July, and even into August although we didnt make it to the end of August before that phase ended.
There are some similarities to that again now, although its even more complicated this time because we understand more about variants and some of the things they can cause, but also because there is more good stuff in the picture like vaccinations, which make it harder to tell if or when there may be another wave, and how large it will be. Or how long governemnt might resist doing things that could end up being necessary once again.
And yes, sometimes the uncertainty is the worst thing, eg in the past there are some sides of my brain which are more at ease when some uncertainty was replaced with the government finally ordering another lockdown and other stuff like that.
People are going to progress at different rates in terms of recovering from this pandemic mentally. A lot of the uncertainty and questions about personal risk, personal protection from the virus, how to behave, are far more like the sorts of things we've had to get used to dealing with in the rest of our lives. People vary in how they cope with big issues like death and the fragility, uncertainties and somewhat random nature of life and the stuff it throws at us, good and bad. So I cant give 'one size fits all' advice about that, other than looking to whats worked for you in the past when confronting lifes unknowns.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Combination of lockdown/other behavioural changes, the number of people who still had immunity via infection in the first wave, number of vulnerable people that had already died the first time, and very much improved hospital infection control (not universal, better in some hospitals than others), and also a different approach to discharge into care homes and other matters that reduced the care home wave size in the second wave compared to the first.
But yes, also vaccinations. Impossible to say quite how acurate various attempts to estimate the real impact of this have been so far, but at the very least such things offer some clues and sense of how much goof vaccines may already have done. I will fish out some details shortly.
On the local "don't go there unless you have a vital reason" farrago today, it was interesting to see that the local authorities were quick and loud in their complaints about Bojo and co, yet made not a peep about Sturgeon doing the exact same thing in Scotland a few days ago, advising people not to travel to Bolton, Blackburn etc. Wonder if they will ask Cummings anything about local lockdowns tomorrow? Do we know what his stance was/is on them?
elbows
Well-Known Member
No idea what his stance was on most things to be honest, most of his revelations so far have not been about his own opinions. A lot of what he will say about pre-first wave cockups is already known, less so about what he will reveal about the cockups before/during the second wave. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about it.
Anyway here are the vaccine-related numbers I was on about. These are from Public Health England and are only estimates but they still offer some sense of how much good the vaccines are already though to have done:
Those quotes are from the weekly vaccine report, which also contains graphs directly relating to what was said in those quotes. I haent had time to look for any equivalents for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. https://assets.publishing.service.g...193/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_20.pdf
Anyway here are the vaccine-related numbers I was on about. These are from Public Health England and are only estimates but they still offer some sense of how much good the vaccines are already though to have done:
Those quotes are from the weekly vaccine report, which also contains graphs directly relating to what was said in those quotes. I haent had time to look for any equivalents for Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. https://assets.publishing.service.g...193/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_20.pdf
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Yes, all those other factors will have fed into the current levels of infection too, it's obviously a combination of things. It just pisses me off whenever people seem to deliberately play down the effectiveness of vaccines (both on social media and the mainstream media), though maybe I'm just misinterpreting what they're trying to say sometimes. They work. We know they work. Of course they're not 100%, but they were never expected to be. I think the government estimates were either 13 or 30-thousand lives saved so far by vaccines in the UK (I forget which, and take it with a pinch of salt since it's from Boris etc, but still).
That's the one, 13,000 deaths and 39,000 hospitalisations prevented. Just an estimate as you say, but it still shows how effective the vaccines are against a variant (the Kent one) that didn't even exist when they were being developed and tested. That's pretty decent, I'd say, even if they might end up being less effective against the Indian jab (though not by a huge amount, according to the preliminary studies, after two doses at least). How exactly will the booster jabs play into that? Will they just be another dose of the current stuff, or will they have enough time to tweak them against the Indian variant by the autumn when they seem to want to start administering them?
elbows
Well-Known Member
Well people might have got that sort of impression about my stance at times, because I spent quite a lot of time warning people not to ask vaccines to carry more pandemic weight than they were reasonably expected to be able to do at this stage. And loads of people do seem to have trouble not thinking about these things in binary terms, which is a mistake, especially when we know some vaccinated people will still get sick and die, and that the programme of vaccination isnt finished.
Of course I think I've expressed balanced views about all this stuff. But there is still a risk that the sorts of things I find it most important to talk about involve concerns and common misconceptions, and thats often negative stuff and sad, deadly possibilities rather than the happier stuff. And a cautious approach inevitably means that good news from me will be late rather than early, although I do ocasionally try to compensate for that.
elbows
Well-Known Member
It gets all complicated, there are lots of factors. I started reading about how they were going to figure all this stuff out longer term, but the document contained a lot of detail and its mostly questions rather than answers at this stage.
Certainly there were recent stories about how they are starting a trial involving boosters. I forgot the detail, eg whether its looking at giving people a different brand of vaccine compared to the one they had for their first and second dose.
I dont know quite how quickly they expect to be able to adjust the vaccines to include details from newer variants rather than the original Wuhan strain. That stuff needs sorting well in advance for flu vaccines, but thats partly because a lot of flu vaccines use old tech which involves growing stuff in eggs. The Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing process should be a fair bit more nimble than that, but there are other parts of the jigsaw such as how nations and the whole world will decide what strains to use over time.
Some of the talk in the news etc has been about how big a chunk of the population will be given boosters later this year too, eg whether they will they stick to the over 50s for this.
I dont know how closely I will follow this stuff till more detail has firmed up.
Just saw something on Sky News' website saying 'boosters won't be given until 2022,' but the facts behind that must be buried somewhere in their live update thing. I suspect they don't actually know how quickly they'll be able to adjust things yet either! Guess we'll see in due course.
This might have been posted before, but has anyone seen this?
covid19.sanger.ac.uk
An interactive map from the Wellcome Sanger Institute that lets you track the spread of each variant within your local council area. Pretty useful, though for god's sake don't look at it too closely if you suffer from Covid anxiety.
COVID-19 Genomic Surveillance – Wellcome Sanger Institute
The Wellcome Sanger Institute's COVID–19 Genomic Surveillance Initiative, part of the COVID–19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium
covid19.sanger.ac.uk
An interactive map from the Wellcome Sanger Institute that lets you track the spread of each variant within your local council area. Pretty useful, though for god's sake don't look at it too closely if you suffer from Covid anxiety.
2hats
Dust.
Moderna mRNA-1273 has already been adapted and new versions, one specifically targeting E484K based variants (eg B.1.351, P.1) and another multivalent (targeting both ancestral variants, ie based around D614G, and more recent E484K variants), are already in clinical trials (promising results from phase II thus far - ie appropriate antibody responses have been measured). Takes less than a month to produce trial samples. The details of accelerating regulatory approval are still being thrashed out and then there is the delay in switching and ramping up industrial production.
Determining any booster interval (if any is needed at all) will of course only become apparent in the fullness of time (ie roughly when the relevant time interval has passed since a given vaccine was administered to early trial participants).
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elbows
Well-Known Member
Clive Dix said some stuff about that to the telegraph earlier in May, such as thinking boosters wont be needed till January or February, but he also said other stuff I dont think is wise to say at all, or that at the very least involved sloppy language.
Outgoing vaccine chief claims Covid will not be circulating in UK by August
Dr Clive Dix believes British population will be protected from the virus and all its known variants by the summer
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
The NHS site has been updated, book a jab now if...
- you're aged 30 or over
- you'll turn 30 before 1 July 2021
The kabbess was due her jab tomorrow (having had to book it originally about three weeks in advance due to a lack of slots) but got a text last night saying the appointment had been cancelled. Fine, she rebooked it and there was actually a slot on Friday. But this means she had to rebook her second appointment too, whence this post.
She had the option to book a second jab as early as mid-July (something like six or seven weeks’ time). However, she is more interested in the reports saying that twelve weeks gives better antibody protection and so delayed her second appointment for the full twelve weeks. I was less convinced that this was a smart move, given that we know that the Indian variant really needs you to be double-jabbed ASAP. Any views on who was right?
She had the option to book a second jab as early as mid-July (something like six or seven weeks’ time). However, she is more interested in the reports saying that twelve weeks gives better antibody protection and so delayed her second appointment for the full twelve weeks. I was less convinced that this was a smart move, given that we know that the Indian variant really needs you to be double-jabbed ASAP. Any views on who was right?
platinumsage
HaveMyPassword123
Personally I am going for 12 weeks+ based on the published antibody research. However an important factor is the chance of contracting COVID in the 8 to 12 week window, and this depends on its general prevalence in your area at that time, and how many contacts she has (e.g. working from home or not) etc.
Depends what she's concerned about, but the data for the Indian variant isn't great at this stage with some huge confidence intervals, and it relates only to mild illness or yielding a positive test, rather than severe disease against which a single jab is likely to offer very strong protection especially in those under 50.
It should be trivially easy to move the second appointment forward/back in a few weeks when more data is available
It’s the 8-12 week window but it’s also the 12-16 week window too, bearing in mind that full protection only seems to come about 4 weeks after the second jab. I think that waiting until mid-August means you aren’t fully protected until mid-September, which sounds to me like prime time for the next wave. Going for late July fully protects you before any September wave hits.
prunus
Tick tock.
There isn’t really enough data to say for
sure I don’t think - the differential response between 6 and 12 week boosters hasn’t I don’t think been studied in detail. However, to speculate:
I think that the optimal strategy depends in part on how she plans to behave in the 6 or so weeks that would have been post one week after the earlier second jab; if she intends to continue lockdown-like protocol during this time then the (likely) significant additional immune response she will benefit from going forward from the longer interval booster is probably worth the small (because mitigated) temporary increase in risk in the inter-jab interval. If she intends to make full use of the new freedoms coming in 4 weeks from now and do extensive indoor social mixing etc then I think, given the uncertainty about the immediate future trajectory of the ‘Indian’ variant 2, I think the better protection earlier would be the better pay off.
It’s also important to remember that (I think - if I’m wrong then obviously not important to remember!) the studies showing better immune responses are so far just that - I don’t think there are any yet showing differential efficacies, and efficacy is not linearly proportional to response.
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teuchter
je suis teuchter
If it were me, I'd go for getting the second jab sooner rather than later, because my understanding is that the difference in protection post 1st and post 2nd seems fairly clear and significant while the difference caused by length of gap seems less clear and less significant. And I'd want it to kick in before any 3rd wave happens (which I'm hoping won't happen of course).
I can't really see social distancing ending on 21/6. That not only entails everyone no longer wearing masks, but moving into closer proximity (sitting in the adjacent seat on buses again, currently not allowed, for example).
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