Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[Doctor Carrot]

Gah this fucking government!

'We've got it under control we should get back to normal now' - Andrew Bridgen on LBC just now.

 

[klang]

I'm not talking about accurately judging population-scale risks.

I'm talking about simply recognising that our individual behaviours have consequences for those around us and that, especially in a pandemic situation, we need to modify our behaviour even if we don't (can't) have an accurate calculation of the potential consequences of not doing so. And I mean independently of an authoritarian government telling what we must do.

Obviously, some people can and have done that. But my contention is that four decades (more, probably) of indoctrination into individualistic ways of thinking and behaviour make it more difficult, in general, for people to do that.

I thought the spirit was there last March / April, in the early days of Covid. People (at least in my immediate neighbourhood) looked out for each other, helped with shopping, kept their distance, enquired about each others' wellbeing, set up neighbourhood support groups, etc etc.
There doesn't seem to be too much left of it, it's developed into a more each-on-their-own-attitude.
Sparse mask wearing, not taking the vulnerable into consideration, worrying about oneself. Can't blame people for it, and I'm probably no different.
As you say, services have been cut for 40 odd years, essential bodies have been privatised, and people had to learn to fend for themselves. Plus covid and lockdowns are getting stale. Add to this the under-reporting of school closures and latest stats, everything seems scary but dandy.

 

[andysays]

I thought the spirit was there last March / April, in the early days of Covid. People (at least in my immediate neighbourhood) looked out for each other, helped with shopping, kept their distance, enquired about each others' wellbeing, set up neighbourhood support groups, etc etc.
There doesn't seem to be too much left of it, it's developed into a more each-on-their-own-attitude.
Sparse mask wearing, not taking the vulnerable into consideration, worrying about oneself. Can't blame people for it, and I'm probably no different.
As you say, services have been cut for 40 odd years, essential bodies have been privatised, and people had to learn to fend for themselves. Plus covid and lockdowns are getting stale. Add to this the under-reporting of school closures and latest stats, everything seems scary but dandy.

You're right, there was some of that stuff at the beginning. I don't want to dismiss that, because to do so would be to risk suggesting that social thinking and collective action has become impossible.

I guess I'm talking in super-broad brush strokes here, which inevitably covers up a lot of important detail.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Gah this fucking government!

'We've got it under control we should get back to normal now' - Andrew Bridgen on LBC just now.

 

[elbows]

She's chosen the dates so it doesn't show the much worse second wave. I prefer the government one which has a bit more context.

Could also be a lot better though, and it's a worrying trend.

She chose that range so that we can actually see the rise properly. see the change in trajectory. I do the same myself. She is not trying to disguise the fact that the current levels are nothing like the peak levels seen in the past, and indeed in yesterdays video when she presented these and other graphs the broader context was made quite clear, as was the 'good news' so far in terms of hospitalisations and deaths (thanks to vaccines).

 

[elbows]

Government reportedly considering making it so that if you have been fully jabbed you're exempt form having to isolate after contact with an infectee, you'd just be 'advised' to test yourself thats all.
This seems problematic in various ways. I get why they would want to do it though.

Yeah this is the sort of thing the Daily Mail have heard and are pushing for, hence their stupid front page today that I was moaning about last night.

It comes up in this BBC article too, which also includes the British Medical Association calling for verious things to remain and for there to be much better public health messaging about the need for ventilation.

Covid: Doctors want to keep some measures after 19 July

Ministers are considering allowing fully vaccinated people to avoid isolation if exposed to Covid.

www.bbc.co.uk

I expect the government to include all sorts of stupid moves when they announce the July 19th details. But I dont think they will instantly be able to do everything they would like to on that date, there will be pressure from different directions due to what the number of cases etc are likely to be like by then.

I do expect that some of the moves will have 'pressure more people into getting vaccinated' as one of the underlying aims, but they will probably botch it and do it in a very unfair way.

 

[elbows]

Oh and in regards those hospital graphs, as I've also been focussing on recently the other way to show the current increases clearly whilst still preserving a look at the previous wave in the same graph, is to use logarithmic scales.

 

[elbows]

Thread: "We are planning for a peak of hospital admissions around early August."

I see they are also hinting in that thread at the same kind of 'change the self-isolation rules' stuff we are hearing elsewhere at the moment.



On a related note, I'm not seeing large signs of hospital infections yet this time, but that might change as overall numbers rise and if rules start getting bent for specific reasons involving enabling the system to cope.

 

[elbows]

You're right, there was some of that stuff at the beginning. I don't want to dismiss that, because to do so would be to risk suggesting that social thinking and collective action has become impossible.

I guess I'm talking in super-broad brush strokes here, which inevitably covers up a lot of important detail.

Broadly speaking, what happened near the start was way more than authorities and experts expected. People overall passed that test as far as I'm concerned and demonstrated that some of what Thatcherism etc tried to sell people was rather superficial and simply falls away in many segments of society if the situation demands it.

But such things certainly rely on peoples impressions of a situation, and this time around the picture is very partial and deliberately distorted. And some portion of the good will that existed has been eroded by shit authorities, the rich, toxic newspapers and the usual unfairness.

 

[zahir]

I wonder if there will be a reaction in a while from young people realising that they've become the subjects of a medical experiment in herd immunity.

 

[klang]

Broadly speaking, what happened near the start was way more than authorities and experts expected. People overall passed that test as far as I'm concerned and demonstrated that some of what Thatcherism etc tried to sell people was rather superficial and simply falls away in many segments of society if the situation demands it.

But such things certainly rely on peoples impressions of a situation, and this time around the picture is very partial and deliberately distorted. And some portion of the good will that existed has been eroded by shit authorities, the rich, toxic newspapers and the usual unfairness.

Politics aside, I think boredom plays a part too. Bored with the situation, oneself, the grind, the routines, the bad news. Bored with not seeing something amazing instantly happening when displaying kindness and good will. By everybody doing the right thing things wouldn't improve, they'd just stay at a certain standard, if that. It gets boring after a while.
Not going to the pub and sitting on the sofa was exciting for a while but got boring. So got online gigs and supporting each other through hardship.

 

[elbows]

Well things certainly got messier once the initial shock had worn off. But I wont forget in a hurry that as far as I was concerned at the time, it was sections of the media that got lockdown fatigue before everyone else, and the shit questions and emphasis on holidays and 'when will we be able to...' etc began in earnest.

 

[elbows]

What really dooms us this time around is the ridiculously narrow framing that even those entities that are normally on the side of caution are willing ti indulge in this time.

Note for example this Guardian article about the aforementioned plan to remove self-isolation for double-vaccinated people. Note that the emphasis is all about whether its fair or will lead to resentment, and what the hospital figures are doing. Nowhere does the concept of trying to prevent the spread of the disease and keep the numbers down feature.

And its not just the government, the media are going along with it, and plenty of experts will also see no problem with these plans. Vaccines truly have unlocked the standard UK approach to all this stuff, an approach which is an appalling corruption of public health principals, a cold and shitty form of pragmatism. The sort of stuff that informed the original plan a (dont bother doing much, use herd immunity to justify inaction), a plan they had to ditch back then but have always been desperate to return to.

Covid: letting fully vaccinated skip quarantine in England ‘will cause resentment’

Expert warns that plans to drop all legal requirements after 19 July could lead to mass non-compliance

www.theguardian.com

 

[elbows]

If sufficient people go along with all of this without a fight, then we are just asking to be fucked over by mutants. Which isnt necessarily what will actually happen, but I wouldnt bet against it.

 

[Dystopiary]

Trying not to blame members of the public so much, and to focus my anger on this shit government and a lot of the media, but honestly it's going to be hard to forgive people who wouldn't look at the bigger picture and thought only of themselves during the pandemic. At least conspiracy theorists have some "reasons" (in their mind) not to wear a mask, social distance etc, although they are infuriating. The "I'm alright Jack" types are just obnoxiously selfish.

 

[elbows]

Medway Foundation Trust has a bad reputation in some ways, including in matters relating to this pandemic. Here is the latest revelation:

Regulator criticises covid-hit trust over infection control

Concerns have been raised about a trust's approach to infection prevention and control issues - more than a year into the pandemic - including that it stopped screening those arriving at the hospital entrances for covid after 5pm.

www.hsj.co.uk

People entering the hospital after 5pm were not being screened for covid. Staff members who checked temperatures and asked about covid symptoms at hospital entrances went off duty at 5pm

 

[LDC]

To me it does look like the link between infection and deaths is much more weakened than the link between infections and hospitalizations. Kinda obvious I know, but just looking at the recent figures.

 

[2hats]

Ah yes, the monitoring of Scottish waste water...

Has been ongoing by groups in the academic community (with the support of the ONS, DEFRA, water companies), including Scotland, since early summer 2020. Google and various telecoms companies have been providing mobility data to numerous academic research groups for a year or more now.

 

[StoneRoad]

Just been looking at the cases map.

Bliddy 'ell !

I'm at the point of being scared, double-jabbed or not, I'm really worried now.
Especially as I'm booked to work about 300 miles away from home next week ...

 

[miss direct]

How many in your area, StoneRoad ? Or what's the rate per 100,000?

 

[StoneRoad]

miss direct
Locally, the 'current' case rate was 256 per 100,000 - for the seven days ending 28th June 2021(an increase of 500%) ... up from almost nothing a few days before that. County-wide that rate is 270 / 100,000.

Have a look at Tyneside on the dashboard map - that's gone the pale purple for the same period. Which I'm finding very worrying.

However, we're doing better than the national and county averages for both first and second doses in the vaccination stakes.

 

[Cat Fan]

miss direct
Locally, the 'current' case rate was 256 per 100,000 - for the seven days ending 28th June 2021(an increase of 500%) ... up from almost nothing a few days before that. County-wide that rate is 270 / 100,000.

Have a look at Tyneside on the dashboard map - that's gone the pale purple for the same period. Which I'm finding very worrying.

However, we're doing better than the national and county averages for both first and second doses in the vaccination stakes.

Worth remembering that 256 in 100,000 means less than 3 in every thousand people so the chances of any random person on the street having it are still pretty low!

The government colour coding of their infection map is a bit arbitrary and in low population areas the colours flip around all over the place. One small outbreak can move it from white straight to blue.

 

[Cat Fan]

Worth remembering that 256 in 100,000 means less than 3 in every thousand people so the chances of any random person on the street having it are still pretty low!

The government colour coding of their infection map is a bit arbitrary and in low population areas the colours flip around all over the place. One small outbreak can move it from white straight to blue.

(Not least because most people who have it should be isolating not out on the street...)

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

To me it does look like the link between infection and deaths is much more weakened than the link between infections and hospitalizations. Kinda obvious I know, but just looking at the recent figures.

I wonder if the threshold for taking someone into hospital has changed? Maybe not but it's not necessarily fixed I don't think - if the hospital is already overwhelmed maybe there's a higher bar.

 

[elbows]

Worth remembering that 256 in 100,000 means less than 3 in every thousand people so the chances of any random person on the street having it are still pretty low!

The government colour coding of their infection map is a bit arbitrary and in low population areas the colours flip around all over the place. One small outbreak can move it from white straight to blue.

But also worth remembering that number of people actually testing positive is not at all the same as the estimates for what proportion of the population are actually infected.

eg the ONS infection survey:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK - Office for National Statistics

Estimates for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. This survey is being delivered in partnership with University of Oxford, University of Manchester, Public Health England and Wellcome Trust. This study is jointly led by the ONS and the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC)...

www.ons.gov.uk

• In England, the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) continued to increase in the week ending 26 June 2021; we estimate that 211,100 people within the community population in England had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 185,200 to 239,300), equating to around 1 in 260 people.

Obviously there is considerable variation per area and even more variation when we zoom in closely. And the infection survey doesnt have sufficient numbers to do accurate estimates for small geographical areas. The North East is in especially bad shape.

 

[elbows]

To me it does look like the link between infection and deaths is much more weakened than the link between infections and hospitalizations. Kinda obvious I know, but just looking at the recent figures.

I require more time to let the death figures catch up, since there is bigger lag with those and they were starting from a very low level. I also expect they have been affected by the fact that something happened with the North West regions rise of all figures in the last month, it was a messy picture rather than a very clean, dramatic picture as seen more recently with the North East. And since the North West was 'first' as far as England and this wave goes, that can have more of an impact on deaths etc.

Anyway here is an attempt to shed light on what you are on about, using logarithmic scales. This data is for the whole of the UK. Where average is mentioned, its because I've used 7 day averages to smooth things out. Cases and deaths are by date of specimen and date of death, so most recent figures for those are incomplete in the latest data. I may repeat the exercise with just Englands figures, or specific regions of England, later. But as I said before, its still quite early as far as the death picture goes, so ideally I'd wait a bit longer before reaching conclusions on that. Plus the death figures I'm using are the standard dashboard ones with the 28 day limit that I dont like. But that only makes a very small difference at this stage, because all of the death figures are small at this stage.

 

[Pickman's model]

I require more time to let the death figures catch up, since there is bigger lag with those and they were starting from a very low level. I also expect they have been affected by the fact that something happened with the North West regions rise in the last month, it was a messy picture rather than a very clean, dramatic picture as seen more recently with the North East. And since the North West was 'first' as far as England and this wave goes, that can have more of an impact on deaths etc.

Anyway here is an attempt to shed light on what you are on about, using logarithmic scales. This data is for the whole of the UK. Where average is mentioned, its because I've used 7 day averages to smooth things out. Cases and deaths are by date of specimen and date of death, so most recent figures for those are incomplete in the latest data. I may repeat the exercise with just Englands figures, or specific regions of England, later. But as I said before, its still quite early as far as the death picture goes, so ideally I'd wait a bit longer before reaching conclusions on that. Plus the death figures I'm using are the standard dashboard ones with the 28 day limit that I dont like.

View attachment 276634

You need to sort out your X axis, to reduce the number of numbers down there

 

[quimcunx]

I wonder if the threshold for taking someone into hospital has changed? Maybe not but it's not necessarily fixed I don't think - if the hospital is already overwhelmed maybe there's a higher bar.

I am sure I read somewhere that hospital stays are also shorter on average.

 

[glitch hiker]

Cases down slightly today. Perhaps a corner has been turned?

 

[Supine]

Cases down slightly today. Perhaps a corner has been turned?

why would it turn? look at the 7 day average rather than individual data points.