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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Saul Goodman said:
How shit a designer do you have to be to design multiple things that either can't be built or fall to pieces once built.
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He's designed dozens of things all around the world, one of which has fallen apart due to substandard construction because, yes, it was difficult to build (in the UK, at least - there've been some pretty challenging builds elsewhere with fewer problems). You have to remember he's not an architect, he comes up with things that get handed off to architects to realise. You can debate about whether that's wanky or not 'til the cows come home, but I happen to like a number of his projects.
 
Chz said:
He's designed dozens of things all around the world, one of which has fallen apart due to substandard construction because, yes, it was difficult to build (in the UK, at least - there've been some pretty challenging builds elsewhere with fewer problems). You have to remember he's not an architect, he comes up with things that get handed off to architects to realise. You can debate about whether that's wanky or not 'til the cows come home, but I happen to like a number of his projects.
Click to expand...
His company employs architects, as well as engineers and others who work out if the design is feasible. So you can’t really use that as an excuse.

(I like the rolling bridge, but that thing in littlehsmpton looks well shit)
 
cupid_stunt said:
Apparently Johnson is fuming, fuming I tell you, at how many young people haven't had a jab, not that they couldn't have spotted that one coming down the line, when so many polls showed a higher level of hesitantly, as you work down the age groups. :rolleyes:

Yet they didn't get any real messaging out to help solve that, when it was needed months ago, instead they waited until it unfolded, and are now throwing their toys out of their pram, and making all sorts of threats over covid passports.
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Now if this is true, and it does make a lot of sense, it is indeed down to Johnson fuming at the low uptake in jabs amongst the younger folk, and the threat of covid passports, something they probably know will not get past parliament, or certainly not the current proposal, and are basically just a knee-jerk reaction, to push people into getting jabbed

The vaccine passports plan for nightclubs was forced through despite a majority of ministers calling for it to be postponed at a meeting just hours before it was announced, it has emerged.

The Telegraph can disclose that widespread concerns have been raised in the Cabinet after Boris Johnson last week stated that people attending nightclubs would be required by law to be double jabbed by the end of September.

Following the announcement on July 19, multiple sources have claimed that the policy was “railroaded” through at a Cabinet Covid O subcommittee meeting, which took place earlier that day.
Click to expand...

It is understood that during the discussion, a “majority” of those taking part raised concerns over the timing of the announcement, as well as fears over equalities legislation and the potential risk of legal action against venues.

Another source said that “every member of the meeting”, with the exception of Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, and Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary - who all reportedly spoke in favour - called for the announcement of the policy to be postponed.
Click to expand...

And, so the reason...

Those advocating for the plan are said to have argued that there was a need to drive up vaccine uptake among 18 to 30-year-olds. There are currently three million people in this age group who have failed to take up the offer of a first jab.
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Recounting last week’s meeting, one senior minister involved said: “Quite a few of us are okay with passports. However, the rush was not okay and as a consequence there were things that needed to be ironed out that weren’t.

“There has been no assessment, no legal advice … they haven’t provided it to other committee members. That’s what is frustrating.

“The big push was, ‘No, we’ve got to get young people vaccinated.’ It’s only been a month since we allowed 18-year-olds to get vaccines.

“That was the frustration, that it felt like a knee-jerk reaction. Michael [Gove] acknowledged the concerns but said they would press on.”
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www.telegraph.co.uk

Vaccine passports plan ‘railroaded through’ despite ministers’ concerns

Sources claim that the majority of ministers attending a Covid O meeting last week raised concerns over the policy, but were ignored
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk
 
Chilli.s said:
What with the 28 days and the only counted the first time it seems that the figures on the dashboard are much less useful than they were
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Their usefulness hasnt really changed much but peoples perceptions change a bit as they learn the detail.

My perception of them hasnt really changed, although it would be foolish of me to claim that I know how many reinfections have been picked up and not reported there due to the current rules. I expect the number to be modest compared to the positive cases that do show up, but the nature of Delta and this wave means that they really should change the definition soon to include reinfections. The lack of testing in the first wave actually helps us with this, because many people infected in the first wave and the current wave will still show up in this waves positive case figures, because as far as the system is concerned this is the first time they've had it since they simply didnt have access to testing in the 1st wave.

As for deaths I'll do another post about that shortly.
 
Last edited:
BillRiver said:
Done.

Thread 'Thomas Heatherwick & National Covid Memorial' https://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/thomas-heatherwick-national-covid-memorial.375492/
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Link doesn't work.

www.urban75.net

Thomas Heatherwick & National Covid Memorial

Ministers ask Heatherwick for ideas to help nation mourn "Thomas Heatherwick has been asked by the government to advise on how to commemorate the pandemic and help the nation mourn. The designer met Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith earlier this year for what a spokesperson termed an...
www.urban75.net www.urban75.net
 
two sheds said:
I find this a bit confusing

www.theguardian.com

People shielding five times more likely to die of Covid, Scottish study finds

High-risk individuals were still much more vulnerable to catching virus and dying in first wave of pandemic
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

So caught it from family members or delivery people or ...?
Click to expand...
Should be very careful interpreting the results of that due to the terribly limited testing in the first wave. Therefore in the first wave they were mostly picking up people who were really ill or required hospital treatment for other reasons, because thats the setting where testing was most likely to actually happen and the general population had very little access to tests during that period. I'll try to read the actual study rather than the Guardian writeup later.
 
cupid_stunt said:
The "within 28 days of a positive result" figures are a method of gathering data quickly, whilst it may capture a small number of people that died from totally unrelated reasons to covid, it will also miss some that weren't tested, the figure since mass testing has been available, are similar to the number of people with covid on their death certificate, suggesting it is a good proxy.

There's some lag in reporting the figures for 'covid on their death certificate', but they are on the dashboard* for all to see, but that lag means only fairly accurate 7-day averages are currently only going up to 18th June.

Death certificates are filled out by medical professionals who may take covid test results into account, but are not required to include covid as a cause of death if it isn’t relevant to the death of someone, so will exclude non-covid related deaths, such as being run over.

* scroll down here - https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths
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Its been a while since I went on about this so I'll provide some indicative figures again now. And as usual I will state that I would expect death certificates to underestimate Covid deaths too, although the extent of that will have varied over time.

Figures are for the UK as a whole.

Where I say '60 day deaths' this is actually me replacing the figures for England dying within 28 days of a positive test, with figures for England within 60 days of a positive test. I cannot repeat this for the other nations as the data isnt available or they used other criteria in the first place.

Dates I'm using:
Wave 1 - March 2020 till end of August 2020.
Wave 2 - September 1st 2020 till end of May 2021. (Was actually 2 waves rolled into one in most places, pre-Alpha and Alpha, but cant separate them properly)
Wave 3 - June 1st 2021 onwards.

Wave 1:
28 day deaths: 41,648
60 day deaths: 45,607
Death certificate deaths: 57,893

Wave 2:
28 day deaths: 86,210
60 day deaths: 100,433
Death certificate deaths: 95,799

Wave 3:
28 day deaths: 1,314
60 day deaths: 1,574
Death certificate deaths: 966 (lags further behind the other measures)

Totals so far:
28 day deaths: 129,172
60 day deaths: 147,614
Death certificate deaths: 154,658

My figures may vary a little from those shown on dashboards due to the way I use figures by date of death rather than by reporting date, and other tedious details.

I would also factor in that in the first wave it was possible to use excess deaths as a guide, and there may have been around 65,000 of those in that period. We could argue for a long time about how many of those were Covid deaths, but I would certainly use that figure to suggest that death certificate figures did not capture the full death burden during that wave.

Overall when combining different figures, I would not like to claim that there have been less than 160,000 Covid-related deaths in the UK so far.
 
I see the media, various experts and the government are in a quandry about the current situation.

Governments dont usually like to go on about being past the peak until there has been a clear and sustained fall in hospitalisations. But because whats happened does not fit with the expectations they set publicly, they are forced to say things now. Also they will be nervous because experts have probably told them that the nature and geographical uniformity of the recent falls is not indicative of an effect thats purely down to immunity. Which means human behaviour is a big part of the mix, causing the likes of Johnson to have to take the following stance because if people relax then fortunes could in theory be reversed:

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid: UK cases fall for seventh day in a row

Despite falling numbers, the PM is urging people to "remain cautious" and "not jump to conclusions".
www.bbc.co.uk

And then we have articles like this one, which begins 'Who thought we would be here, now?'

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid: Have we passed the peak and can we relax?

Nobody really expected cases to fall so fast in the UK, so what does it mean for getting back to normal?
www.bbc.co.uk

I cannot claim that I thought we would be here now, but I can certainly claim that I didnt rule the possibility out and tried to draw peoples attention to this scenario in recent weeks. So the question I would ask is different, it is 'Why did all these people who came out with simple positions not pay more attention to what happened in Scotland?'. Now they are scrabbling around, not quite sure what position to adopt, and with public trust that any experts know what will happen next eroded.

I have no idea what will happen next. It could be messy, it could be simple. A resurgence might not come, or it might not come until schools are back. Or things could start to rise again within days or weeks. I'm certainly not at all surprised that a combination of the Euros ending, self-isolation, other disruption, schools ending and people acting appropriately in response to the step 4 delay and gloomier mood music of July, and better weather for a time, made a real difference. But that doesnt offer me all that many clues about what will happen next on the behaviour front either.

Nor do I really know how long the tory government will manage to maintain cautious rhetoric, when the shift to gloating about success may emerge.

I didnt like the very end of that 2nd BBC piece by the way, "But for now, it looks like we're in a better position than we've ever been.". I know what they mean but I consider it inappropriate to express it in that way given the current level of daily hospitalisations.
 
Oh some Nick Triggle analysis was added to that piece about Johnson since I wrote the above, but he mostly says the same sort of thing as me anyway in regards why Johnson hasnt been celebratory so far.
 
i remember you saying elbows cases could come down quicker than expected
and even a few weeks back there were some local figures - Bolton IIRC? - where cases went high and came down again quickly as the virus ran through younger people and then seemed to run out of hosts because of vaccination on older population?
whats the hypothesis for whats happening here with this sharp drop?
 
two sheds said:
I find this a bit confusing

www.theguardian.com

People shielding five times more likely to die of Covid, Scottish study finds

High-risk individuals were still much more vulnerable to catching virus and dying in first wave of pandemic
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

So caught it from family members or delivery people or ...?
Click to expand...
"Advised to shield" - they may not have been able to do it, e.g. if they still needed to go into work or were living in the same household as people not shielding.

We know that the first wave hit deprived areas hardest, where people are also more likely to have health conditions, and be living in overcrowded or unsuitable accomodation.

Also may have been hospital acquired infections.

And as others have said, tests were only available for those displaying symptoms. Symptoms are more likely to be bad for shielding groups.

Lots of possible things could have undermined shielding. Which is why people should wear masks!
 
ska invita said:
i remember you saying elbows cases could come down quicker than expected
and even a few weeks back there were some local figures - Bolton IIRC? - where cases went high and came down again quickly as the virus ran through younger people and then seemed to run out of hosts because of vaccination on older population?
whats the hypothesis for whats happening here with this sharp drop?
Click to expand...
Bolton was misused by those whose agenda means they wanted to 'prove' that population immunity levels were responsible for the drop there.

They soon stopped going on about Bolton because it stopped serving their narrative, since cases went back up again there (see #40,983 )

The picture is messy and complicated. Its likely a combination of multiple factors, very much including behaviour when confronted by a bad situation and dire warnings about how bad things could get. What happens next may offer more clues about whats happened recently. I expect really huge numbers of people being told to self-isolate helped. As did the weather, the end of the Euros, the end of university term and the end of school term.
 
elbows said:
Bolton was misused by those whose agenda means they wanted to 'prove' that population immunity levels were responsible for the drop there.

They soon stopped going on about Bolton because it stopped serving their narrative, since cases went back up again there (see #40,983 )

The picture is messy and complicated. Its likely a combination of multiple factors, very much including behaviour when confronted by a bad situation and dire warnings about how bad things could get. What happens next may offer more clues about whats happened recently. I expect really huge numbers of people being told to self-isolate helped. As did the weather, the end of the Euros, the end of university term and the end of school term.
Click to expand...
...and who knows, maybe all those pings worked!

Cheers elbows
 
Is it possible that cases are, in general, rising, but that the big peak (and now decline) we've seen thus far was a temporary artifact of the football?
 
Interesting piece here

While anecdotal accounts of breakthrough infections can make such cases feel widespread, the real numbers have remained small and were generally in line with expectations, experts said. “There’s no such thing as a perfect vaccine . . . with Covid it’s no different,” said Professor William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University.

The yellow fever jab, for example, is widely understood to be the most effective live-virus vaccine ever invented, with a single dose generating long-lasting immunity in 98 per cent of those vaccinated. But even that means that on average 2 per cent of people will still get infected.

Phase 3 trials for most of the leading Covid-19 jabs showed an efficacy against symptomatic infection of more than 90 per cent. Real-world studies of effectiveness in the UK, Israel and Canada suggest that vaccines are displaying a slightly lower effectiveness outside of the trial environment, probably because of the spread of the more vaccine-resistant Delta variant. Estimates put protection against symptomatic infection, depending on the vaccine, at between 60-90 per cent.
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1627402522299.png

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication
www.ft.com www.ft.com
 
glitch hiker said:
Is it possible that cases are, in general, rising, but that the big peak (and now decline) we've seen thus far was a temporary artifact of the football?
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I don't think so. In that if there's a general rise excluding the football effect, ie R is above 1 anyway, then once the football was done then that rate would continue to apply to the previous cases - so including the rise caused by the football. I don't think there's any mechanism by which those ones would just fall away without leading to increasing cases while other cases kept on rising.
 
glitch hiker said:
Is it possible that cases are, in general, rising, but that the big peak (and now decline) we've seen thus far was a temporary artifact of the football?
Click to expand...
Probably not. The fall is across all age groups.

If we think of it like a fire burning through a forest, the faster it spreads then the quicker it reaches its maximum.

Delta spreads much more quickly than Alpha, so it's not crazy to assume that it would peak more quickly.

I'm not ruling out a second peak in the same wave, but to be honest at this point I don't think it's that likely.

I think the next peak will be in autumn or winter when respiratory viruses normally thrive.
 
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