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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

I only just got round to noticing that Public Health England was finally no more as of the start of October. We've known for a long time that a lot of its functions were to be replaced by the UK Health Security Agency, and others by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. But the switchover happened in phases, and the UKHSA was only said to be fully operational on October 1st. Its headed by Harries so I dont expect people to be hugely impressed by its work at this stage.

So for example the weekly surveillance report is now branded UKHSA rather than PHE.

 
By the way I remember one or two people here in the past expressing surprise that London wasnt even more severely affected in the pandemic.

Well I've just briefly mentioned a health impact paper on the nerdy detail thread ( #118 ) and I thought I better mention this bit here too:

Regionally, the pandemic shock and its impacts on the healthcare system varied significantly. Greater London experienced greatest direct health impacts of COVID-19: it had the highest rate of deaths to April 2021 once population size and age were taken into account; it also had the greatest QALY losses from death and morbidity. It experienced relatively lower reductions in elective and outpatient activity than other regions, though the drop in emergency activity in Greater London was greater than most regions (28.4% reduction compared to median of 24.9%).
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elbows said:
By the way I remember one or two people here in the past expressing surprise that London wasnt even more severely affected in the pandemic.

Well I've just briefly mentioned a health impact paper on the nerdy detail thread ( #118 ) and I thought I better mention this bit here too:



Click to expand...

This might have been me but I was referring to the current situation and the comparatively low levels of infection in SE London.
 
Teaboy said:
This might have been me but I was referring to the current situation and the comparatively low levels of infection in SE London.
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Yeah, though I was mostly thinking of longer ago than that. I dont know how good my memory is in that regard, maybe it was something FridgeMagnet said that I was remembering. In any case it wasnt a complaint by me, I just remembered the viewpoint generally and wanted to provide a glimpse of how badly London was affected once things like age of population was factored in.

In terms of more recently, ie this current wave, I probably already answered that areas that had less infection in previous waves were expected to do worse this time. This does tend to show up to a certain extent in figures for non-vaccine-induced antibody levels in blood donors by region, where London has always tended to come out with the highest proportions of those already infected. eg the following from the weekly surveillance report ( https://assets.publishing.service.g...910/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w40_v2.pdf )

Screenshot 2021-10-07 at 16.48.jpg
 
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2hats said:
Could be a new variant defeating the PCR (eg deletion causing dropout on all three S, N and ORF1 tests) or simply that the RNA window for one of the latest delta lineages is typically too short/variable or that there is a defective batch of test materials from the vendor or some combination of these.

Latest RT-PCR targets 8 RNA sequences over 3 separate regions (ORF1a, ORF1b and N), avoiding S where most mutagenic variation frequently occurs between variants (and alpha/B.1.1.7 caused a drop out), so that should be more robust. But I have no idea if that is deployed (or deployed widely) in the UK yet.
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There’s plenty of anecdata under this Twitter comment:



There‘s others reporting positives only after they sent in postal test, which was our circumstances too. I wonder if it could be a dodgy batch of tests used at walk up/drive through centres, but postal kits are OK? Although postal tests are more likely to be done later when not well enough to travel or isolating so that could also be a factor, showing up when the illness is more severe.
 
I dont really feel like fully exploring the released document about Operation Alice at the moment. Some of the detail will likely be of interest to me, although I already knew that lessons learnt from these exercises werent acted upon. Because all my expectations about the nature of the UK pandemic response and how shit it was likely to be were based on plans from a much earlier period of time, and unfortunately those did turn out to be a reliable guide as to how authorities would respond. It was a very bad sign that I was still able to guess various things correctly despite my knowledge and attention paid to the subject of pandemics not stretching much past initial reports into how the UK performed in the swine flu pandemic.

cygnusreports.org

Exclusive - Seven Secret Pandemic Reports (including Alice) - CygnusReports.org

We can now publish reports from seven secret pandemic exercises conducted by the British Government between 2015 and 2018, including Exercise Alice – the secret coronavirus exercise which could have helped us prepare for COVID-19, but which politicians and healthcare leaders failed to act on...
cygnusreports.org

www.theguardian.com

Coronavirus report warned of impact on UK four years before pandemic

Exclusive: Report from planning exercise in 2016 alerted government of need to stockpile PPE and set up contact tracing system
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
On the one hand, we have Mary Beard, beloved Classics academic, who uses her knowledge to entertain, intrigue and delight. Millions enjoy her learning.

On the other, we have Chris. Chris put the wrong valve on the inlet to our house from the LPG tank, causing a dangerous build up of gas, which fortunately tripped the system before — rather than after — it exploded. Less fortunately, it left us without any heating or hot water for three days in the heart of winter. Worse was to come. When he came to fix his fuck-up, he managed to rip a hole in the outlet system of the tank, sending 2000L of LPG into the soil and atmosphere, at considerable environmental and, it must be said, financial cost. In turn, this required an entire fire crew to spend their afternoon supervising its repair.

I have to wonder: who would society miss more? Mary? Or Chris?
 
kabbes said:
On the one hand, we have Mary Beard, beloved Classics academic, who uses her knowledge to entertain, intrigue and delight. Millions enjoy her learning.

On the other, we have Chris. Chris put the wrong valve on the inlet to our house from the LPG tank, causing a dangerous build up of gas, which fortunately tripped the system before — rather than after — it exploded. Less fortunately, it left us without any heating or hot water for three days in the heart of winter. Worse was to come. When he came to fix his fuck-up, he managed to rip a hole in the outlet system of the tank, sending 2000L of LPG into the soil and atmosphere, at considerable environmental and, it must be said, financial cost. In turn, this required an entire fire crew to spend their afternoon supervising its repair.

I have to wonder: who would society miss more? Mary? Or Chris?
Click to expand...

Game, set and match :thumbs:
 
kabbes said:
On the one hand, we have Mary Beard, beloved Classics academic, who uses her knowledge to entertain, intrigue and delight. Millions enjoy her learning.

On the other, we have Chris. Chris put the wrong valve on the inlet to our house from the LPG tank, causing a dangerous build up of gas, which fortunately tripped the system before — rather than after — it exploded. Less fortunately, it left us without any heating or hot water for three days in the heart of winter. Worse was to come. When he came to fix his fuck-up, he managed to rip a hole in the outlet system of the tank, sending 2000L of LPG into the soil and atmosphere, at considerable environmental and, it must be said, financial cost. In turn, this required an entire fire crew to spend their afternoon supervising its repair.

I have to wonder: who would society miss more? Mary? Or Chris?
Click to expand...
I'll take your word for it, I've not heard of either of em
 
Kabbes' anecdote just reveals that we are investing too much in classics academics instead of plumbers. As a result all of our classics academics are intriguing and delightful, but our plumbers are incompetent. A strong argument for shutting down universities and opening more technical colleges if you ask me. A badly trained classics scholar is unlikely to blow up your house, and in fact even if they just made stuff up, that sounded vaguely convincing, most people would still be intrigued and delighted.
 
quimcunx said:
If a classics scholar delights your with some stories about ancient roman plumbing misadventures they should also blow up your house?
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If their stories are failing to delight me, they should fix some leaking taps while they are at it, so that they are not completely wasting my time.

Actually if all academics could do something practically useful while they are waffling on about stuff, that would be good.
 
teuchter said:
If their stories are failing to delight me, they should fix some leaking taps while they are at it, so that they are not completely wasting my time.

Actually if all academics could do something practically useful while they are waffling on about stuff, that would be good.
Click to expand...

Almost all academics I know are very practical and useful - almost as if their competence is general and spans more than one narrow field.

By contrast the most useless outside-their-field people I know are those involved in “entertainment” - especially people in tv.

These comments brought to you by Sweeping Unhelpful Generaliz-a-SHNZ.com. Why not check out our app?
 
teuchter said:
If their stories are failing to delight me, they should fix some leaking taps while they are at it, so that they are not completely wasting my time.

Actually if all academics could do something practically useful while they are waffling on about stuff, that would be good.
Click to expand...

Maybe fit you up with a lead-lined aqueduct?
 
teuchter said:
Kabbes' anecdote just reveals that we are investing too much in classics academics instead of plumbers. As a result all of our classics academics are intriguing and delightful, but our plumbers are incompetent.
Click to expand...
The original postulate from our bad-tempered elderly philistine was that every single existing plumber is more valuable to society than every single existing classics scholar (or, strictly, Ancient Greek lecturer). Your suggestion as to how to remedy the problems with existing plumbers implicitly acknowledges and agrees with me that his postulate was incorrect.
 
I'm just an ordinary bloke who has done fings like welding and muchining fings for a livin and built a little aeroplane that I now fly around (arrgh ungreen), I didnt have an upbringing like you clever classics people...or sumfing or nuffin

I wish I was cleverer too
 
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