Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[Humberto]

"Does anyone else have any thoughts about what would surprise them if it happened next in this wave? Because I've mostly got very little sense of what will happen next."

They are still the jingoism sell/chumocracy profiteers. Political charlatans and incompetent layabouts. So you are left with guesswork.

 

[Humberto]

You could make a long list of governmental clueless dickheads. The Prime Minister and Bill Cash and most of the cabinet with them. It is frankly an incompetent and atrocious parliament, including the PM.

 

[two sheds]

Here's an unhelpful slant on things

The latest terrible pandemic trend? Vaccine hypocrites | Arwa Mahdawi

Some people have been wearing disguises to vaccine appointments, because they don’t want to be seen by anti-vax friends. The culprit? Culture war capitalism

www.theguardian.com

they're getting the fucking vaccination - in secret because otherwise they'd be marked down

 

[gentlegreen]

I'm sufficiently lonely that I spend time in Paltalk chatrooms and that probably explains quite a lot of the crazy opinions expressed on there.

 

[existentialist]

Here's an unhelpful slant on things

The latest terrible pandemic trend? Vaccine hypocrites | Arwa Mahdawi

Some people have been wearing disguises to vaccine appointments, because they don’t want to be seen by anti-vax friends. The culprit? Culture war capitalism

www.theguardian.com

they're getting the fucking vaccination - in secret because otherwise they'd be marked down

Must be a grim choice for them - the obvious disguise would be a mask, only...

 

[andysays]

Here's an unhelpful slant on things

The latest terrible pandemic trend? Vaccine hypocrites | Arwa Mahdawi

Some people have been wearing disguises to vaccine appointments, because they don’t want to be seen by anti-vax friends. The culprit? Culture war capitalism

www.theguardian.com

they're getting the fucking vaccination - in secret because otherwise they'd be marked down

It's slightly concerning, but

It has been reported that some people in Missouri, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the US, are wearing disguises to their vaccine appointments

is perhaps not the knockout punch the Guardian appear to think it is.

 

[Supine]

 

[Buddy Bradley]

I do hope they will change their minds re: vaccinating kids

Ask and ye shall receive (in some limited fashion). Although given they still haven't updated the GOV.UK website to work for those that are almost 18, it might be a while before 16-17 year olds can actually book a vaccine, and I doubt it's all going to happen fast enough to make much of a dent in the back-to-school explosion of infections in September.

 

[two sheds]

I hope he wasn't going in disguise to keep the vaccination secret

 

[Cloo]

Ask and ye shall receive (in some limited fashion). Although given they still haven't updated the GOV.UK website to work for those that are almost 18, it might be a while before 16-17 year olds can actually book a vaccine, and I doubt it's all going to happen fast enough to make much of a dent in the back-to-school explosion of infections in September.

Hmm, better than nothing but 12+ would be good.

 

[zahir]

Does anyone else have any thoughts about what would surprise them if it happened next in this wave? Because I've mostly got very little sense of what will happen next.

I'll be surprised if cases don't start to rise again when schools go back. Then again I wasn't expecting the current fall.

 

[Plumdaff]

Yes, I'd be shocked if we didn't find ourselves in a bit of trouble with case numbers in the autumn. I hadn't anticipated this drop either, and wonder if once it's pissing it down and cold again we'll see behaviour change that could ramp up the infection rate.

 

[souljacker]

Ask and ye shall receive (in some limited fashion). Although given they still haven't updated the GOV.UK website to work for those that are almost 18, it might be a while before 16-17 year olds can actually book a vaccine, and I doubt it's all going to happen fast enough to make much of a dent in the back-to-school explosion of infections in September.

Every time they have changed the qualifying age, they have failed to update the website text to reflect the change. The website might not say 16-17yo can book but they probably can.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Every time they have changed the qualifying age, they have failed to update the website text to reflect the change. The website might not say 16-17yo can book but they probably can.

I doubt that, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation hasn't yet announced that 16 & 17 years will be offered the jab, but they are expected to later today.

 

[souljacker]

I doubt that, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation hasn't yet announced that 16 & 17 years will be offered the jab, but they are expected to later today.

I wasn't really saying that 16-17yo could book, just that the website doesn't necessarily say what the actual available age groups are. It certainly didn't when they opened up to over 45s and over 30s.

 

[elbows]

Looks like the vaccine announcement is about to be discussed officially in a press conference that does not feature government ministers.

Speakers:

• Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England
• Dr June Raine, Chief Executive, Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency
• Prof Wei Shen Lim, Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation

 

[Raheem]

Seems a bit risky. They could say all sorts of unhelpfully sensible stuff.

 

[elbows]

Seems a bit risky. They could say all sorts of unhelpfully sensible stuff.

Van-Tam started by saying how pleased he was to see journalists back in the room in person, and said that they wanted to stick to the vaccine topic today rather than discuss other stuff.

 

[elbows]

If the modest decline in numbers in English intensive care seen today continues, then it is reasonable to think that the peak in deaths will turn out to be around this period too, give or take a few days. But since the numbers of deaths per day are lower than in previous waves, they may be buffetted around more by the usual random nature of things, so I should avoid too narrow a prediction. And due to lag it will take some time for this weeks and last weeks death figures to solidify. Last time I checked the highest number of deaths by date of death for the UK was still 'freedom day', July 19th, but there are now some later contender dates for that dubious honour.

The last part of what I said there is no longer true by the way, the 30th July is currently showing the most deaths by date of death, but that can easily change again in future.

 

[elbows]

I dont have anything much to say in regards the important bits of the vaccine press conference and this new policy for vaccinating 16-17 year olds. Instead I distracted myself with some slightly awkward moments in the press conference due to the lack of detail and evidence they wanted to go into in regards risk-reward balance etc. And I commented on part of that in another thread and thought perhaps I should repeat it here too. But I'm not trying to make a big deal out of this, I just like to make observations about how public communications are handled, obvious omissions and what they fall back on to fill the gap.....

In todays press conference the JCVI didnt offer the sort of risk numbers the press were after, or much info on whether the risk estimates/risk-reward balances had actually changed recently in light of new data. The press were after these sort of numbers given the sort of number that were used in some previous vaccine press conferences, plus the press were aware that the chief medical officers of the four nations had asked the JCVI to look again at this issue now. So instead we got a lot of talk about how data confidence increases over time, how independent the JCVI are, and then Van-Tam talking about how many hundreds of years worth of expert experience sit on the JCVI.

 

[elbows]

Current levels of positive cases detected by specimen data make it quite tempting to start pondering what happens if levels of infection remain in this sort of zone throughout August. If that happens it doesnt really leave much wiggle room in terms of future doublings if things start rising again when schools go back. If things stopped declining now then it would involve us being at quite similar levels to those we found ourselves with during the November lockdown.

This thought is premature since levels may continue to fall. Its just hard not to start thinking like this when the curves currently show some signs of levelling off at still very high rates. In past waves when we have concerned ourselves with the possibility if things getting stuck at a certain level, the dynamics havent ended up that way at all. But that doesnt mean I should exclude the possibility when looking to the future, especially as the current situation is complex and doesnt feature a lockdown.

 

[zahir]

Thread on today's briefing from Deepti Gurdasani

 

[elbows]

Thread on today's briefing from Deepti Gurdasani

The official document has this to say about that last bit:

JCVI statement on COVID-19 vaccination of children and young people aged 12 to 17 years: 4 August 2021

www.gov.uk

Following disruptions in routine immunisation programmes because of the pandemic, there is an urgent need to catch-up on non-COVID-19 school immunisations such as human papillomavirus (HPV) and meningitis (MenACWY) vaccinations, and there may be a need to offer other routine vaccines (such as mumps, measles and rubella (MMR)) in the school setting as part of overall recovery. In addition, for 2021 to 2022, the childhood influenza programme has been extended in the expectation that influenza activity may be earlier and more pronounced this year. The health benefits from these various non-COVID-19 school-based immunisation programmes are well established, and some may provide the last effective opportunity to complete an individual’s immunisation course and provide timely and/or lifelong protection. Further deferral of the delivery of these immunisation programmes may be associated with permanent decreases in uptake of these vaccines in affected school age cohorts.

Delivery of a COVID-19 vaccine programme for children and young people is likely to be disruptive to education in the short-term, particularly if school premises are used for vaccination. Adverse reactions to vaccination (such as fevers) may also lead to time away from education for some individuals.

Considerable additional resource will be required to minimise the operational impacts of a COVID-19 vaccine programme on the wider health of children and young people.

 

[elbows]

By the way, there are a number of reasons why they only announced the first doses for that age group.

Reasons include potential supply issues and giving authorities future wiggle room on that front. And allowing more time for data and research to accumulate, which was the main justification they mentioned int he press conference. But also I believe that the patterns seen in some other countries involving the heart inflammation side effect also has an influence on the second dose decisions. eg see this from the document I linked to in previous post. I have highlighted the most relevant bit via bold font.

In recent weeks, reports have been submitted in the UK and other countries of the extremely rare occurrence of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart), following the use of Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 and Moderna mRNA- 1273 vaccines[footnote 3]. These extremely rare adverse reactions have been more frequent shortly after the second dose, and in younger individuals and males; data from the United States indicate about 60 reported cases per million second doses in younger males, with reporting rates after the first dose being 6 to 7-fold lower[footnote 4]. The mechanism of action underlying these rare events is not currently known. Israel and the United States have reported most of the cases and experience from these countries indicate that the reported cases of myocarditis following mRNA vaccination are of a ‘milder phenotype’ with the vast majority of persons recovering swiftly from the acute episode, compared to more typical cases of myocarditis (which are mostly viral or idiopathic in aetiology). Follow up of reported cases in Israel and the United States is on-going. These reports will continue to be closely evaluated by MHRA and JCVI. See MHRA reports on COVID-19 vaccines.

 

[elbows]

The Independent recently ran some stories about a UK SARS planning document from 2005.

In 2005 a blueprint was drawn up to fight a coronavirus – then it was ‘lost’

The Coronavirus Files: After Sars swept across the globe, the UK drew up a plan for fighting an airborne virus arriving in Britain from China. The 2005 document was filed away in Whitehall, and apparently never used. Now uncovered, its recommendations – from limiting travel to stopping...

www.independent.co.uk

In full: The 2005 coronavirus plan that predicted outbreak response from ‘super-spreader’ events to travel

The Coronavirus Files: Samuel Lovett looks at what the uncovered Sars blueprint recommended – and what the UK government did at the same point in the pandemic

www.independent.co.uk

I would rather be able to read the full document myself, but I dont know if thats possible.

Anyway from the info I can read via those articles, it doesnt change much for me. The problem was not so much a lack of understanding of many of the details, it was a lack of will to invest in systems that could have hoped to cope, and not wanting to 'think the unthinkable' in terms of stuff like border controls and hospital capacity.

Much of the Independents angle is about how this sort of planning fell off the radar some years after that document was created. I'm not as interested in that angle because we now know that there was a MERS exercise, Exercise Alice in 2016. And to be honest even if all prior knowledge was lost, a team of experts could have cobbled together an appropriate response to the current pandemic from scratch in a number of hours. But that would not have helped make what needed to be done to become compatible with actual capabilities and capacity (including travel screening and mass testing and the right quality of PPE).

Probably of most interest is that they were well aware in 2005 of how important ventilation was, airborn transmission of this sort of virus etc. Stuff they were very slow to acknowledge in this pandemic, although it should have been bloody obvious and was not a secret at all. You only have to look at images of what sort of PPE hospital workers were wearing in South Korea once they'd had a hospital outbreak near the start. So again I dont think how obvious it was was actually the problem, it was the implications of actually having to respond appropriately to such factors that led to failures on that front. A proper response was not deemed practical or achievable, so they didnt bother.

The excuses that authorities are left with when all this other shit is stripped away, are that SARS and MERS were not as transmissible as this pandemic virus, and that asymptomatic transmission is a bigger deal with the current virus. So I doubt the 2005 documents envisaged the same scale of outbreak as the one we've had this time, and this sort of thing is also visible via the fact the 2005 plan envisaged a stage where the virus was eradicated here. This stuff is easily joined with oversimplified explanations for failure such as 'we followed a flu plan instead of a coronavirus plan' which has never impressed me. Mostly because our influenza plans would not have coped with a bad influenza pandemic virus either, and this narrative ends up as a distraction from the bottom line which was our unwillingness to invest in capacity that could have hoped to cope with a bad pandemic of any sort.

Also largely missing from these sorts of stories about why the failures happened, is the long history of cold calculations that the UK establishment indulge in. And one of the biggest barriers to having a sane system which placed the greatest emphasis on saving as many lives as possible is that most stuff that requires huge effort and investment is written off as being impractical. A question of values and priorities, rather than a simple story of bureaucratic ineptitude or accidentally looking in the wrong direction.

 

[Fruitloop]

elbows nailed it

 

[Chilli.s]

elbows nailed it

Yet again...he shoots, he scores!

Thanks@elbows

 

[elbows]

Cheers. I probably neglected to cover everything about that story that I could have, and it seems I ended up repeating my main point rather too much. And I've ranted about that sort of thing before, so I'm a bit set in my ways on that particular subject. I still hope to be surprised and better informed by future leaks, public inquiry etc, but I have my doubts about what else will actually emerge that really adds to the picture. Plus in terms of my knowledge from before this pandemic, much of it came from knowing what our standard pandemic plans were like, I've never gotten my hands on any of the juicy details from non-flu planning documents and exercises.

Oh and the 'funny' thing about how come I always expected asymptomatic transmission to be a fairly big deal in this pandemic is that I got that impression via influenza knowledge! So maybe I just lucked into guessing that one right in a way some experts did not. This does make a further mockery of the two largest remaining excuses though, 'followed flu plan' and 'didnt appreciate role of asymptomatic transmission' are excuses that are not fully compatible with each other, there is an awkward contradiction.

Frankly I always assumed authorities played down the asymtomatic possibilities in the early months becase it was a highly inconvenient truth with massive implications. Authorities and some experts therefore had many reasons not to want to believe asymptomatic transmission was a big deal, and it isnt easy for me as an outsider to know which experts and people in authority actually convinced themselves it wasnt a big factor, and which ones knew the probable reality but decided to bullshit.

I would love some estimates about what proportion of cases are superspreader events. Thats another thing they already knew to expect from SARS-like viruses via the original SARS experience.

Speaking of experts and what they genuinely believed, these days many themes that relate to children are where the greatest contentions within the scientific community that share their thoughts publicly are to be found. It can get quite nasty at times, rows between scientists may involve less swear words but get personal just as quickly as any other disagreement. There will be the usual mix of reasons for this - emotive issues that come automatically from issues involving children, but also the same stuff I mentioned earlier about unthinkable implications that it is more convenient to deny (eg matters with an impact on the merits of schools closures = childcare issues = workforce issues). And the continual friction between 'what should really be done' and things like vaccine supply realities. Its no surprise that Indie SAGE get into scraps about issues on this front all the time, and that nearly everyone cherry picks angles that serve their overall stance well.

Speaking of children, there is a long list of things where the UK ends up looking especially bad in this pandemic compared to many other countries. But somtimes the amount of effort and resources actually put into mitigation within schools, and the educational needs of children is an especially embarrassing stain.

Half arsed and absurd. Deranged noises from some quarters to distract what our priorities should be.

 

[editor]

And up she rises

 

[elbows]

There is probably angry song potential in something like:

Learning to live with Covid-19,
Hospital admissions aged 0 to 17.



(dont take first wave levels at face value due to a lack of testing in that period and the start of that wave being missing from the data)