cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
Basically, yes.
Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
- Start date
Basically, yes.
Numbers
an ting!
Devi is brilliant, IMO.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
They physical reality of virus incubation periods is nothing to a man such as Johnson.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
So, stop me if I’m missing something, but Plan B is “what Scotland’s been doing all this time”?
weepiper
I fix the machines that fight climate change
Plan B (as a response to the increased threat of Omicron) is to move to what Scotland has been doing all this time to mitigate Delta.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Yes, that.
Balbi
Hey, Dean Yager!
The vaccine passport thing, we've brought that in here recently. Relatively simple if you're documented - sign into the platform, confirm your ID using your driving license etc and it gives you a QR code with your name and DOB on it that flashes up when you use the scanner app. I used it the other day to go to the pub and the cinema, not sure if it does anything but read and interpret the QR code to confirm its a valid pass - people on the door can ask for confirming ID to check it is you, but most don't.
That's here though, in weird fash spiral Britain I'm sure it'll be different and worse and especially worse for immigrants, undocumented people etc etc
That's here though, in weird fash spiral Britain I'm sure it'll be different and worse and especially worse for immigrants, undocumented people etc etc
weepiper
I fix the machines that fight climate change
Pretty much exactly the same in Scotland. I've only had to use it once so far, at a gig. I had no bother with installing the app but my daughter and my dad both had a nightmare trying to get it to recognise their passport photo as them (her because she's dyed her hair, I think, and him because his passport photo shows him without glasses but he couldn't see to do the facial recognition scan with his smartphone without his glasses on
) so they both have a PDF that they can show instead.
Supine
Newt Member
I get an error message at the moment ‘to many requests’
I think they need to scale up their servers
Numbers
an ting!
I checked earlier and was fine, no errors and full history.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I used the Covid pass on the NHS app for entry to a venue a month or so ago. As I expected, the door staff weren't interested in verifying it or anything. A screenshot of a random QR code would probably have done the job. It seems fairly pointless to me, especially if you can bypass it with a negative test result that is trivial for anyone to fake.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Not everyone would agree with me on this but this plan was not necessarily going terribly badly prior to the emergence of Omicron. At least the jury was still out on whether it was going to prove unsustainable. Because case numbers have been high-ish and wobbling up and down but so far no definite indications of hospitalisations starting to rise again, and deaths have been at a fairly low level and gradually dropping.
I'd say I was moderately ok with this approach, the only thing I'd have kept for a while longer would be masks in shops and public transport and other places people have to go as part of basic life. That out of courtesy to people at higher risk or who feel at risk, and have no option to go to those places.
That would all be with the caveat that things are kept under review. And the early indications of what Omicron might mean certainly justify the reintroduction of some measures.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Well thats no surprise, as your instincts arent far removed from the UK establishments standard cold calculations and how they originally expected to deal with the pandemic and justify a fair amount of death, before the estimates of the sheer scale of probable hospital admissions scuppered their original plans.
If you are 'moderately ok' with over 17000 deaths and over 150,000 hospitalisations since the start of June 2021, in a vaccination era, then you'd not have any trouble justifying the amount of death they originally had in mind when envisaging a 'business as usual with a few concessions here and there at the worst moments' approach at the start of the pandemic. And you've made various posts during various stages of the pandemic that make your attitude towards this stuff now as thoroughly unsurprising to regular readers as my rather different stance is. And I'm pretty sure there have been a number of moments where we would have been treated to further explanations of how you can justify various sorts of and amounts of death, except the figures got too high and became an entirely unsuitable foundation on which you could build such a case without seeming utterly indecent.
And of course when looked at from the classic establishment angle, what counts when it comes to 'proving unsustainable' is hospital admissions, thats what has forced them to concede they have to go further at various stages of the pandemic. And by staying just 'within range' on that metric during this long, drawn out Delta wave, the pre-winter part of their plan was sustainable as far as they were concerned, and not yet proven otherwise once Delta met winter. And now there are some Omicron scenarios that mean we'll never get that question as it pertained to Delta fully answered, although there are I suppose still a few possible scenarios where we might yet gain enough clues about that in the coming weeks.
Theres a second sort of unsustainable when it comes to hospital figures, which involves what would have happened if the levels of infection and hospitalisation were not to shoot up alarmingly this winter, but had kept going at the rates seen in recent months for many more months. Plenty of people can be encouraged to learn to live with the quantity of deaths seen during that phase, even when they add up to quite large totals that I can throw around at moments like this. But when it comes to the establishment and health services, there are big questions about how you'd ever expect to begin to catch up with the backlog and burnout if covid-related healthcare demands remained this high. So rather than just argue with you about theoretical questions involving whether the pre-Omicron plan would have been enough to deal with Delta during the winter season, I'd encourage you to think about other ways that 'learning to live with covid' as a viable strategy needs to be different to what we've seen since June. I dont want to keep locking things down either, but clearly other mitigations were required for reasons that go well beyond courtesy, in order to successfully sustain an approach that involves a big chunk of normal life. I expect this is something we will have plenty of opportunities to talk about in future, when we are not at the moment of facing acute new waves/variants and scary peaks, but rather the constant grind at lower levels. We still dont yet know whether there will be proper equilibrium or at what levels of infection that will be at, how immunity picture and the virus evolves long term, what rhythm of epidemic waves there might be. But I think it would be sensible to assume that covid will have some ongoing degree of healthcare burden that needs proper steps to deal with one way or another, and even those who are comfortable with various amounts of ongoing death will need to deal with that more convincingly than was the case in recent months. Because yes you can get the public not to go crazy about certain levels of death, you can tap into peoples desires to live their lives, but I really dont think you'll be able to sell people on a healthcare system being left in such a worn down and perilous state for prolonged periods outside of those periods involving waves.
If you are 'moderately ok' with over 17000 deaths and over 150,000 hospitalisations since the start of June 2021, in a vaccination era, then you'd not have any trouble justifying the amount of death they originally had in mind when envisaging a 'business as usual with a few concessions here and there at the worst moments' approach at the start of the pandemic. And you've made various posts during various stages of the pandemic that make your attitude towards this stuff now as thoroughly unsurprising to regular readers as my rather different stance is. And I'm pretty sure there have been a number of moments where we would have been treated to further explanations of how you can justify various sorts of and amounts of death, except the figures got too high and became an entirely unsuitable foundation on which you could build such a case without seeming utterly indecent.
And of course when looked at from the classic establishment angle, what counts when it comes to 'proving unsustainable' is hospital admissions, thats what has forced them to concede they have to go further at various stages of the pandemic. And by staying just 'within range' on that metric during this long, drawn out Delta wave, the pre-winter part of their plan was sustainable as far as they were concerned, and not yet proven otherwise once Delta met winter. And now there are some Omicron scenarios that mean we'll never get that question as it pertained to Delta fully answered, although there are I suppose still a few possible scenarios where we might yet gain enough clues about that in the coming weeks.
Theres a second sort of unsustainable when it comes to hospital figures, which involves what would have happened if the levels of infection and hospitalisation were not to shoot up alarmingly this winter, but had kept going at the rates seen in recent months for many more months. Plenty of people can be encouraged to learn to live with the quantity of deaths seen during that phase, even when they add up to quite large totals that I can throw around at moments like this. But when it comes to the establishment and health services, there are big questions about how you'd ever expect to begin to catch up with the backlog and burnout if covid-related healthcare demands remained this high. So rather than just argue with you about theoretical questions involving whether the pre-Omicron plan would have been enough to deal with Delta during the winter season, I'd encourage you to think about other ways that 'learning to live with covid' as a viable strategy needs to be different to what we've seen since June. I dont want to keep locking things down either, but clearly other mitigations were required for reasons that go well beyond courtesy, in order to successfully sustain an approach that involves a big chunk of normal life. I expect this is something we will have plenty of opportunities to talk about in future, when we are not at the moment of facing acute new waves/variants and scary peaks, but rather the constant grind at lower levels. We still dont yet know whether there will be proper equilibrium or at what levels of infection that will be at, how immunity picture and the virus evolves long term, what rhythm of epidemic waves there might be. But I think it would be sensible to assume that covid will have some ongoing degree of healthcare burden that needs proper steps to deal with one way or another, and even those who are comfortable with various amounts of ongoing death will need to deal with that more convincingly than was the case in recent months. Because yes you can get the public not to go crazy about certain levels of death, you can tap into peoples desires to live their lives, but I really dont think you'll be able to sell people on a healthcare system being left in such a worn down and perilous state for prolonged periods outside of those periods involving waves.
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Raheem
Well-Known Member
Needs to take the edge of his cuntishness for the Westminster crowd.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
I sort of agree with most of this, but I do feel the hospital admissions & deaths were allowed to drift up too far, and if they had started the booster jab roll-out earlier, based on the data from Israel, and started vaccination of younger people earlier, as other counties had, they could probably have been brought down to a more acceptable level, where they would be similar to a bad flu year, over a 52 week period.
I still think delaying some of the 'freedom day' measures by just a few more weeks could have been useful too, and mandating of masks should never have been lifted.
Those hospital admissions & deaths were coming down more recently, which seems to have been due to the booster jabs, and one would have hoped that that would have continued, but Omicron is clearly a threat now.
All in all, a bloody difficult balancing act, especially when you consider the mental health crisis caused by the restrictions over time.
Hopefully if the booster jabs hold, and Omicron does turn out to be fairly mild, with luck we can avoid the NHS melting down, and a further lockdown.
There's lots of 'ifs' and 'buts', and only time will tell, which is scary.
platinumsage
HaveMyPassword123
I'm not clear about how much influence government has over MHRA and JCVI and their timelines for approving and recommending stuff?
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
Well, they clearly have the ability to make the JCVI jump into action quickly when they want, as we've recently seen with the speeding up on the booster roll-out.
Supine
Newt Member
They can certainly influence timelines
_Russ_
Never not Knowingly Misunderstood
Presumably you mean the promised speeding up?
I notice the wording changing last few days from getting all adults boosted by january to getting all adults offered a booster by then, a subtle backtrack our tinpot guvnors have used a couple of times before
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Very little to none. I'd say none for MHRA, less sure about the JCVI, but I'd still say very little at most. E2A: Timelines at most. And even then I think it's minimal.
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Buddy Bradley
Pantheistic solipsist
Far easier to commit to sending everyone a text than to giving everyone an injection.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
It is speeding up.
And, the promise was always that everyone would be offered a jab by the end of Jan.
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