Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[Cat Fan]

Since people seem to doubt the numbers on vaccine protection against Delta, I went back to the Lancet article.

Two things to note. 1) It was based on a test negative analysis, i.e. this is protection against all types of infection (symptomatic and non-symptomatic). 2) they used a model to fit to the entire population so it should be a reliable population estimate.

It's the Lancet not the daily mail, to get published it has to be peer reviewed by experts.

DEFINE_ME

Considering the whole population cohort (rather than just hospital cases), the test-negative analysis to estimate vaccine effectiveness in preventing RT-PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection showed that, compared to those unvaccinated, at least 14 days after the second dose, BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine) offered very good protection: 92% (95% CI 90–93) S gene-negative, 79% (75–82) S gene-positive. Protection associated with ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine) was, however, substantial but reduced: 73% (95% CI 66–78) for S gene-negative cases versus 60% (53–66) for those S gene-positive (appendix p 6). These estimates were obtained from a generalised additive logistic model adjusting for age, temporal trend when the swab was taken, and number of previous tests using splines plus sex and deprivation.

 

[Cat Fan]

Good luck identifying the average individual.

They used a mathematical model to predict the probability for the average individual. That's about as useful information as you can get without going into each person's age and medical history.

 

[Brainaddict]

What about the large numbers of people not getting jabbed? I have no agenda with this question. Waiting a few months would have been my idea too, I don't want a forever limited life but numbers of non vaxxers in my area are high.

Yeah, my area too, but you've got to make the best of a bad job sometimes. This is not making the best of it. That would have meant at least waiting until everyone who wanted the jab had got both doses, and even offering some incentives towards the end of the vaccination program to shift a few more people. With that done I could at least understand the attitude of 'we have to learn to live with it now', even though I'm pretty pissed off at the path we've taken to get here that caused a lot more death and disability than necessary and wish we could have taken a more precautionary approach to virus spread all along.

What doesn't make ANY sense to me is the attitude of 'we have to learn to live with it' before we've vaccinated as many people as possible. The truth is they've opened up at a point where they can drastically reduce the death rate because older people are vaxxed but the disability rate will be very high - and we should be thinking of long covid as disabling because it is for many, many people. We also run the risk of more variants with the high circulation rate - and that could fuck us even further. Grrr.

 

[Brainaddict]

As an aside, I've thought in the past that it's a bit shit that no-one is keeping track of the disability rate in the same way as the death rate. To my mind it should be being reported alongside the death rate. It's trickier to measure, because you have to class the degree of disability (highly variable with long covid) and also keep track of recoveries. But it's not impossible in a rich country with centralised healthcare system if they set their minds to it, and we could at least be getting a weekly figure for it. The lack of reporting on it has helped the government to downplay it as it's not one of the figures making headlines all the time.

 

[elbows]

Its been about a month since I started going on about how it looks like they are going for herd immunity via infection for kids and younger adults.

 

[elbows]

 

[StoneRoad]

OH has an urgent referral hospital appointment this afternoon.
at what is touted as the "clean" hospital ...
in an area with much higher case rates than we have locally, and the latter is already far too high for my peace of mind..

 

[elbows]

Im sort of expecting that at some point, government will decide that some of the routine data that gets published is getting in the way of the 'learning to live with covid' agenda, and they will attempt to suppress that data. I dont know when they will be stupid enough to try this, but I bet the urge is there.

 

[Teaboy]

Yeah I saw this in yesterday's standard.

I think the one thing learnt (if anything actually has been learnt) from these 'test events' is that things like vaccine passports and proof of negative tests are not really a viable plan. There is just no way to really do it without it being so leaky as to make it a largely worthless scheme.

Of course the obvious answer should be that if we can't make it safe it shouldn't happen but here we are...

 

[platinumsage]

I still haven't seen any stats on the people are currently being hospitalised (age/gender/comorbidities/length of stay etc). I think we've had this previously in the pandemic, but not for this wave? Surely this is important stuff, especially for people who are clinically vulnerable.

 

[elbows]

I still haven't seen any stats on the people are currently being hospitalised (age/gender/comorbidities/length of stay etc). I think we've had this previously in the pandemic, but not for this wave? Surely this is important stuff, especially for people who are clinically vulnerable.

Although it doesnt show up on the main dashboard, the download section of the dashboard does include daily hospital admissions in different age groups, which isnt quite what you've asked for. There are two reasons I havent published graphs of this data very much yet - I was waiting for this wave to get going more, and for hospital figures to rise more first. And there is another issue that one of the age groups is stupidly broad - 18 to 64.

There is also a version of that data which is released once a month via the NHS England stats website, in spreadsheet form.

When todays figures come out I will update my graphs and will try to share some of them here this evening, or tomorrow if I run out of time to do this today.

In terms of more detailed reports that includes outcomes, what you are probably after is the dynamic CO-CIN reports to SAGE. These are available sporadically via released SAGE documents, eg the last one I can currently see is from June 9th: https://assets.publishing.service.g...a/file/994736/S1291_CO-CIN_Dynamic_Report.pdf

Again its been a bit too early for me to draw attention to that sort of report yet, as they have reset everything to only include cases from 1st May onwards, so there isnt that much data in the June 9th version.

 

[elbows]

From the BBC live updates page at 11:01 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57676408

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has accused the European football governing body, Uefa, over its handling of the Euro 2020 Championship.

"I think Uefa's position is utterly irresponsible because we live in a time of a pandemic and in countries like Great Britain, where there’s a high incidence rate," Mr Seehofer said.

"Looking at the footage, people being very close to each other, it’s a foregone conclusion that this will drive the rate of infection. I have the suspicion that this is about commercial interests, and commercial interests must not supersede the protection of the public from infection."

I have resisted repeatedly ranting about this but its certainly been surreal to see some of the scenes. Covids coming home, its coming home.

 

[l'Otters]

Im sort of expecting that at some point, government will decide that some of the routine data that gets published is getting in the way of the 'learning to live with covid' agenda, and they will attempt to suppress that data. I dont know when they will be stupid enough to try this, but I bet the urge is there.

They did this already with the data on infection levels schools, around when the decision to take masks away went ahead.

 

[elbows]

They did this already with the data on infection levels schools, around when the decision to take masks away went ahead.

They delayed PHE publishing some analysis of that, which was eventually published.

What I'm on about is the really regular data that we currently get, including various daily figures.

 

[Teaboy]

From the BBC live updates page at 11:01 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57676408



I have resisted repeatedly ranting about this but its certainly been surreal to see some of the scenes. Covids coming home, its coming home.

UEFA are very much to blame for this along with the individual governments of course. There were stipulations around now many supporters must be allowed for grounds to be a host venue. Ireland is the only exception I think who gave up their host status because of this insanity.

I mentioned previously that I went to the first England game at Wembley. It was 25,000 people in a 90,00 stadium and it all felt very well done and I felt safe. The more recent scenes from Wembley and other grounds have been pretty mental.

 

[magneze]

It's not just the football. Wimbledon had 7,000 people in Centre Court last night with the roof closed all screaming at Murray. What pandemic?

 

[elbows]

They think its all over, it isnt now.

 

[maomao]

They think its all over, it isnt now.

If it works out and we don't have hundreds of deaths a day or a vaccine resistant escape variant it will be a grand victory for Johnson.

 

[elbows]

If it works out and we don't have hundreds of deaths a day or a vaccine resistant escape variant it will be a grand victory for Johnson.

Yes that prospect has informed my thinking in recent months. In terms of cases there is little doubt that this wave is a complete shitshow, in terms of everything else the painful wait continues. But since there is still a relationship between cases and deaths, I'm not looking forward to finding out exactly how bad it gets.

 

[bimble]

I just read Johnson's latest burbling / statement. In which he says 19th of July opening up will be done "cautiously and irreversibly".
Strikes me as odd choices of adjective both. Past experience would suggest he's just saying whatever he thinks the person he's talking to wants to hear so maybe nothing to read into.

 

[Smangus]

Even if death rates remain relatively low I really worry about the levels of long covid this is all encouraging.

 

[bimble]

Even if death rates remain relatively low I really worry about the levels of long covid this is all encouraging.

thats what i'm scared of too, for myself. Sounds in some cases a lot like what they used to call M.E, which i've seen from a friend what it can be like I don't think i'd cope at all well.

 

[Teaboy]

Even if death rates remain relatively low I really worry about the levels of long covid this is all encouraging.

Me too but I also think the potential issues around long covid are not enough in themselves to restrict personal freedom in the way we have seen.

 

[BillRiver]

UEFA are very much to blame for this along with the individual governments of course. There were stipulations around now many supporters must be allowed for grounds to be a host venue. Ireland is the only exception I think who gave up their host status because of this insanity.

I mentioned previously that I went to the first England game at Wembley. It was 25,000 people in a 90,00 stadium and it all felt very well done and I felt safe. The more recent scenes from Wembley and other grounds have been pretty mental.

Yes and for me the most worrying sight was all the Scottish fans in Leicester Square on the evening of the England v Scotland match. I was fuming, thinking about how predictable that was and therefore how easy to have organised to be less dangerous. Large screens at multiple sites across Central London, well publicised, well stewarded, etc.
I don't blame the fans, I blame the government.

 

[Smangus]

Me too but I also think the potential issues around long covid are not enough in themselves to restrict personal freedom in the way we have seen.

Maybe, but from now on in it's likely to be the younger/unvaccinated 20ish-40ish people that are affected as that's where the highest infection rates are (I think).

What a future this country is offering our young people.

 

[bimble]

Me too but I also think the potential issues around long covid are not enough in themselves to restrict personal freedom in the way we have seen.

This is true, for proper lockdowns, if only because overwhelmed emergency departments and huge numbers of deaths are a very obvious kind of catastrophe, many thousands of people quietly off sick for ages are just kind of invisible compared to that.
But at the same time, preventing that seems enough of a reason to do something past the 19th of this month, like keep wearing a little mask when you go on a tube etc.

 

[teuchter]

In the longer term, a convention that if you've got cold or flu symptoms, you wear a mask in places like shops and public transport (which is what happens in many Asian countries) is something that would be very welcome.

I reckon the best we can hope for is that a certain portion of the population might start doing this, a bit. But there will be some kind of threshold of number of people doing it, under which most people (perhaps including me) would decide it's not worth participating.

 

[elbows]

Maybe, but from now on in it's likely to be the younger/unvaccinated 20ish-40ish people that are affected as that's where the highest infection rates are (I think).

What a future this country is offering our young people.

Weekly surveillance reports and media coverage of them will have created the impression that cases are mostly in younger people these days. And its certainly true that those age groups were ahead of the game this time. But a far wider range of ages are being infected again, and so plenty of other age groups are showing explosive growth in cases these days.

This graph is for England using the data that came out at 4pm yesterday. It features smoothed results via 7 day averages, of positive cases by specimen date. The full version of the data is broken down into age groups that span 5 years each, so I have lumped a lot together into wider age groups of my own choosing, in order to reduce the number of lines shown.



edit - oops I have actually posted the graph for the North East of England above, rather than for the whole of England. I will post the latest England one later on, once todays figures are out. Sorry about that!

Its important to note that correction because the North East has the scariest graph in terms of how steep the lines are getting. England as a whole isnt that steep, yet.

 

[Hollis]

Anecdotal I know, but a guy I was at school with is now spending some nights in hospital with Covid - he'd had both injections..

 

[elbows]

I decided its better to post Englands graph now, using yesterdays data, rather than wait, given the trajectories and levels reached relative to previous wave are different for England as a whole compared to the North East graph I posted by mistake in my previous post.

Still the cases in older age groups are going up with the usual curves.