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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

elbows said:
Like I said earlier, the usual pre-pandemic politics infecting your opinion on pandemic matters.
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Are you aware of Sturgeon's comment that it was older people who were opposing independence, but time was on her side? A nasty comment from a nasty person.
 
Speaking of politics, I have skipped over PMQs today but am now forcing myself to watch Johnsons covid statement to parliament. I'll only draw attention to anything that seems any different to what he said in yesterdays press conference.
 
Sasaferrato said:
Are you aware of Sturgeon's comment that it was older people who were opposing independence, but time was on her side? A nasty comment from a nasty person.
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I'm not asking you to magically change your opinion of her or her party. I was just pointing out that this is the usual political argument which remains relatively unchanged by the pandemic itself. Save it for other threads eh.
 
Johnson is happy to mention again some large hospital number rises when it means he can use it to stop his own party calling for an end to current restrictions.
 
He didnt say anything extra apaprt from mentioning some of the changes that came up in the news today, such as changes to the travel testing regime.

Rayner responded by saying that in regards 'riding the Omicron wave', the NHS isnt surfing, its struggling to stay afloat. Then moves on to broader points about the erosion of the NHS before the pandemic.
 
Sasaferrato said:
Are you saaying that Sturgeon's response, which was different from England, has not seriously harmed the hospitality industry? If that is your stance, I can assure you that it has. There were dozens of business owners interviewed on the STV news who were seriously doubting if the business would survive. New Year is the time that pays for the flat Jan and Feb.

STV benefits from about £20m of Scottish government advertising each year, and as result has become the house organ of the SNP. So for STV to be highlighting this, the situation is serious.
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Probably best we give them independence and let them get on with it then.
 
by the by, speaking in general terms rather than statistically, it feels like johnson's gamble has already failed. Even if things don't get worse the fact that so many trusts are close to breakdown means they got too close to the wire. That it's got so close to disaster means they should have done more and earlier.
 
Wilf said:
by the by, speaking in general terms rather than statistically, it feels like johnson's gamble has already failed. Even if things don't get worse the fact that so many trusts are close to breakdown means they got too close to the wire. That it's got so close to disaster means they should have done more and earlier.
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That's not really the gamble he's making is it though. He's chancing it on being able to get through this without enough pressure being brought on him to sort it the fuck out that he has to try and react to that and face up to the Tory right wing who might well kick him out as a result. So far he'll feel he's winning.
 
Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
That's not really the gamble he's making is it though. He's chancing it on being able to get through this without enough pressure being brought on him to sort it the fuck out that he has to try and react to that and face up to the Tory right wing who might well kick him out as a result. So far he'll feel he's winning.
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He even thinks there's a win there as well, being able to say 'we kept our nerve when others were calling for restrictions, and we were right'. The chances of that happening are real, but receding rapidly. But yes, as you say this is about johnson's weakness in his own party.
 
Wilf said:
by the by, speaking in general terms rather than statistically, it feels like johnson's gamble has already failed. Even if things don't get worse the fact that so many trusts are close to breakdown means they got too close to the wire. That it's got so close to disaster means they should have done more and earlier.
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Johnson's gamble was that the early anecdata from South Africa that Omicron was milder would be borne out. So far it looks like he (and we) will get away without a repeat of last winter. As cases have rocketed, ICU and death stats have barely moved. Hospital admissions continue to rise but new cases seem to have plateaued in London, so hopefully will everywhere else in the next couple of weeks. January currently looks like chaos instead of carnage.

How bad the chaos gets, how badly hit the NHS, schools and everything else gets still has to play out. But I think many people will put up with a lot of chaos to avoid another lockdown, in a way they wouldn't put up with thousands of people dying every day. I'm sure there'll be plenty of politics and debate around how bad things are, but unless it gets really bad, or death rates start rising significantly, Johnson will aim to ride it out.

Doesn't mean I think his gamble was right. It could easily have gone the other way, with an 'oh shit' realisation that it wasn't significantly milder once it was too late to do anything about it. If he does get away with it he'll crow like a 12 pint deep drunk getting out of their slightly scraped car having driven home and shouting 'look, I told you I was safe to drive'.
 
Yes. Although it wasnt just about inherent properties of Omicron severity, but also how well vaccines would hold up. And they were lucky in that a large booster programme was already well underway for non-Omicron reasons, so they could accelerate that to take a chunk of the strain.

Plus the timing of school holidays worked somewhat in their favour. And they had resisted doing plan B earlier, so that was another set of stuff they could do so as to be seen to be doing something when things took a turn for the worse. And they relied heavily on grim mood music at a key stage, and the fact we hadnt scrapped mass testing or self-isolation before Omicron arrived. Chuck in appeals to work from home and we still ended up with something equivalent to a very weak lockdown in some ways, with associated damage to the hospitality industry etc. If the balance of coping turns out to be delicate, then peoples voluntary behavioural changes enabled the balancing act to just about work out.

A bunch of unknowns remain, some of which are due to greater uncertainty about data over the holiday period. And obviously the school holiday advantage has now ended. And the Delta wave didnt meet all of their hopes, so we have to see whether Omicron causes a repeat of any problems in terms of a relatively high level of infections persisting long after the peak, rather than the constant declines we saw when we had lockdowns. I expect the hope is that the sheer number of people infected with Omicron during the main peak part of the wave will help things to fall to a much lower level once that period ends. If that doesnt happen and things then drag on, then there could come a point where they become nervous about vaccine effect waning in those who had their boosters longest ago.
 
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For example the holiday season means I cannot simply use mobility data to cleanly prove a point about massive behavioural changes.

But all the same, looking at the following sort of mobility data from Google we can see that things were not back to the old normal before Omicron, and that Omicron behavioural changes and normal Christmas changes to behaviour have temporary impacts that arent subtle.

For 2022 to be a much larger journey back to the old normal, we need not just to have managed to cope witht he Omicron wave, but to have changed the picture of the potential the virus still has, so that we can actually get away with returning to the old normal sustainably in future. Its not just about whether we can get away without strong lockdowns or not.

Screenshot 2022-01-05 at 17.31.jpg
www.google.com

COVID-19 Community Mobility Report

See how your community is moving around differently due to COVID-19
www.google.com
 
Yes there are big backlogs at the moment, equivalent to longer than normal weekend backlogs, and some other forms of temporary non-reporting.

If the deaths by actual date of death ever change notably in this wave, I'm sure people will talk about it.

Patients in mechanical ventilator beds figures tended to trend in the same ways with similar timing in past waves, and those havent done anything horrible this time around either.
 
Also in regards whether Johnsons gamble will work or not, I'm still at least two days data away from providing updated thoughts on the hospital picture, but in the meantime:





Its a rather long twitter thread with other interesting details but I only posted a fraction of it.
 
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IC3D said:
Test kits Shrinking like Mars bars
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The latest ones we have at work are massive packs of 25 with confusing instructions. We previously had the Forex nasals in packs of 7 and a later cheap Chinese analogue version which does the same. Before that we just had the NHS branded old school double penetration tests that i only ever managed to use properly on two occasions before giving up and waiting for the nasal only LFTs As for the 25-packs that must have been redirected from nursing homes (cos who gives a fuck about gasping codgers being deaded, eh?)c they offer a variety of testing options - nasal, mouth or sputum (coughing phlegm into a small beaker). The instructions are a bit tl;dr but I think you only need to do one of those to get a reliable result. I choose to get fucked in the nostril. Would rather not cough a loogie into a container that looks like a shot glass. I can do that in a shitty cocktail bar for free.
 
I think you can obviously say it should have done much earlier but it doesn't make it pointless now IMO. It's about the message more than anything isn't it. Previously the message has been 'weeeelll, technically you should wear a mask but if you don't then meh' so this is about changing that. The message 'yes this actually something you have to do' is more important than the actual threat of a fine I think.
 
StoneRoad said:
Another, thank g+d, at long last :

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid: Anti-vaccine campaigns are mumbo jumbo, says PM

Boris Johnson says it is time for him to call out those spreading false information on Covid jabs.
www.bbc.co.uk

some of these CTs have been left to fester for far, far too long ...
but whether having depiffle pour scorn on them will have any affect at all will be interesting to see.
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Boris Johnson has accused anti-vaccine campaigners of speaking "mumbo jumbo"
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Well, he should know, when it comes to speaking "mumbo jumbo".
 
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