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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

StoneRoad said:
I still think doing that would be wrong when depiffle is encouraging more testing, and there is a logistical SNAFU with demand vs supply because we're in the middle of a pandemic.
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That's irrelevant because it's not happening now. If and when it does happen, it should be judged against the testing/prevalence etc situation at the time.
 
Soz for ignorance/forgetfulness but in what circumstances should you do a PCR test? Is it just if you test positive from an LFT?
 
S☼I said:
So you'd argue in favour of charging for LFTs if the circumstances were right?
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Sure. If we've got a new sterilizing vaccine and zero prevalence, and people are grabbing millions of free ones and selling them abroad, then yes. And some line in between there and here. As I said, if it's actually proposed I'll make a judgement at the time on whether I agree with it or not.
 
StoneRoad said:
And that was despite an on-going (& increasing) wave of Delta infections ...
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The article doesn't say they planned to start charging now, simply that they planned to enable that functionality to be ready by now. Any decision on whether to charge would have taken into account the actual prevalence of delta etc at the time.
 
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platinumsage said:
The article doesn't they planned to start charging now, simply that they planned to enable that functionality to be ready by now. Any decision on whether to charge would have taken into account the actual prevalence of delta etc at the time.
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sorry, not sorry, but those cynical amongst us might not credit our current government with enough sense of social / public health priority to avoid the opportunity for profit by one of their cronies.
 
platinumsage said:
It is really. If there was a conspiracy to restrict supply there would have to be lots of people involved and it wouldn't be possible to keep it from leaking.
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That's not really true. The shortage of LFTs over the Christmas period was caused by the country's main distribution company shutting down for a break. The decision to do that was likely made by one or two people.

If the government had a hand in that, with the goal of deferring the Omicron peak until after Christmas, it would have taken one call and would be nigh on impossible to prove.
 
platinumsage said:
The article doesn't say they planned to start charging now, simply that they planned to enable that functionality to be ready by now. Any decision on whether to charge would have taken into account the actual prevalence of delta etc at the time.
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The decision to charge or not is driven by the daily stats being an inconvenience to the government. They can't tell us to ignore the pandemic and go back to our pre-covid lives when we know that there are hundreds of thousands of new daily cases, the hospitals are overflowing and hundreds of people are dying each day.
 
contadino said:
That's not really true. The shortage of LFTs over the Christmas period was caused by the country's main distribution company shutting down for a break. The decision to do that was likely made by one or two people.

If the government had a hand in that, with the goal of deferring the Omicron peak until after Christmas, it would have taken one call and would be nigh on impossible to prove.
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No, a company shutting down for a Christmas break is completely different from that company being inexplicably ordered to shut down via a phone call from a government official. For a start it would obviosuly be in that company’s interests to say publicly that they didn’t shut down for a holiday but because they were ordered to. The number of people both within government and within the company that would have to be permanently silenced for such a scheme to work would be significant. The notion that people would risk such a plot leaking “in order to make people more willing to pay for tests in the future” is conspiraloon territory.

Don’t let your hatred of the government affect your rationality.
 
Did not someone post a tweet from an ltf supplier who couldnt get hold of govt procurement saying he has thousands of the things. So much corruption while the Pandemic rolls on hidden from us.
 
platinumsage said:
No, a company shutting down for a Christmas break is completely different from that company being inexplicably ordered to shut down via a phone call from a government official. For a start it would obviosuly be in that company’s interests to say publicly that they didn’t shut down for a holiday but because they were ordered to. The number of people both within government and within the company that would have to be permanently silenced for such a scheme to work would be significant. The notion that people would risk such a plot leaking “in order to make people more willing to pay for tests in the future” is conspiraloon territory.

Don’t let your hatred of the government affect your rationality.
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The public didn't give them the contract to distribute LFTs. A government minister did.

I generally prefer to believe in cock-up rather than conspiracy, but that particular cock-up was very convenient for some people.
 
contadino said:
The public didn't give them the contract to distribute LFTs. A government minister did.

I generally prefer to believe in cock-up rather than conspiracy, but that particular cock-up was very convenient for some people.
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Cockups happen all the time, of course some of them will be convenient for the government. Claiming that distribution problems over Christmas were due to politicians trying to make the public more amenable to paying for tests is batshit and distracting from genuine criticism.
 
platinumsage said:
Cockups happen all the time, of course some of them will be convenient for the government. Claiming that distribution problems over Christmas were due to politicians trying to make the public more amenable to paying for tests is batshit and distracting from genuine criticism.
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Except that wasn't what I said. I said that it wouldn't be difficult to do and that it's purpose would be to defer the rise in cases until after Christmas.

Separately I said that business as usual can't happen until the number of daily cases and deaths fall. I don't think anyone can argue that making test something you have to pay for won't suppress reported case numbers.
 
contadino said:
I said that it wouldn't be difficult to do and that it's purpose would be to defer the rise in cases until after Christmas.
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Yes it would. And I was referring to catbum’s conspiracy rationale, not yours which is equally ridiculous.

contadino said:
Separately I said that business as usual can't happen until the number of daily cases and deaths fall. I don't think anyone can argue that making test something you have to pay for won't suppress reported case numbers.
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Yeah, it’s really stopped restrictions in all the other countries where tests are chargeable hasn’t it.
 
bimble said:
This is not about fewer tests being done, its some actual good news right?


View attachment 305151
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Note the graph shows growth in case numbers. So 0% near the bottom of that graph means a steady number of cases week-on-week, not a fall in the number of new cases. What we don't see from that graph is what the actual case numbers are or which regions have the highest case rates.

Haven't looked at the daily case numbers for a while but I understand they're still horrendous.
 
contadino said:
Except that wasn't what I said. I said that it wouldn't be difficult to do and that it's purpose would be to defer the rise in cases until after Christmas.

Separately I said that business as usual can't happen until the number of daily cases and deaths fall. I don't think anyone can argue that making test something you have to pay for won't suppress reported case numbers.
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Their primary aim was to avoid having to impose further restrictions, both before and after Christmas.

And those decisions are being driven by hospitalisation data, not case data. The staggering number of positive cases didnt stop them sticking to this, continued explosive growth in daily hospitalisations would have forced more action if those figures went beyond a certain level, but they didnt.

If we were not in a vaccine era then the link between cases and hospitalisations would have been stronger, and there would have been more political pressure to act on soaring case numbers alone. Because it would have been reasonably well understood that the ratio of cases to hospitalisations didnt give them so much wiggle room, and that a giant rise in cases would have translated to a giant rise in hospitalisations. But we've gone beyond that stage, they have had more wiggle room from the Delta wave onwards. There is still a link so huge rises in case nubers do force them to act, but in much weaker ways - with Delta that was most visible as a delay to 'freedom day' and with Omicron it caused them to activate plan B and a few other things. Their reluctance to impose much heavier restrictions, and their greater chances of getting away with this approach, means they were only going to be forced into that via hospital data, not case data. And they've tried to do that in every wave really, which is why our lockdowns were always rather late, but in the pre-vaccine era they didnt have much chance of being able to stick to that beyod a certain point, the hospital data was always going to breach their thresholds. Not so simple these days.
 
SpookyFrank said:
Note the graph shows growth in case numbers. So 0% near the bottom of that graph means a steady number of cases week-on-week, not a fall in the number of new cases. What we don't see from that graph is what the actual case numbers are or which regions have the highest case rates.

Haven't looked at the daily case numbers for a while but I understand they're still horrendous.
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There are plausible peaks all over the data these days, and attention has turned to seeing the same thing play out in the hospital data, watching what happens with cases in older age groups, and crucially seeing what happens in terms of how low the figures can go, whether they get stuck at levels that will cause the sort of gradual pressure that would still fore further action to be taken if high levels were sustained for too long.

If there are no nasty surprises ahead then overall figures are at the delicate point where admissions vs discharges are balancing in a way that overall number of covid patients in hospital beds figures may start to fall rather than grow. This is not a perfect guide to hospital pressure due to the numerous other issues hospitals are facing right now. And there is obviously regional variations in timing and both covid and non-covid pressures.
 
The LFT stories are about the future, the story of 2022, and how the government will want to move on in some key ways. But there are limits as to how far they will be confident in going. Their 'back to normal' agenda will run the risk of backfiring if they push too hard, so there may be gradual tweaks rather than the sudden abandonment of big chunks of the testing system. So its no surprise to see that further reductions to the length of self-isolation are now being mentioned, which is a slightly different twist on the 'reduce disruption' agenda. Plus their confidence in proceeding with such things has a seasonal component, ideas will be floated in winter but thats not the season to actually implement them, unless there is an emergency where the self-isolation disruption is deemed to be a bigger risk than the risk of too many hospitalisations. And we did see a bit of that this time, hence the initial changes to self-isolation rules some weeks ago.
 
The government didnt mind talking up the huge number of infections that could occur by Christmas, because their strategy did not require them to totally distort that picture, and they needed to get people to adjust their behaviour and take the threat seriously. So I dont think they had a clear and obvious reason to suppress the number of positives. There were just inevitable limits to supply of tests, some of which could have been much better planned for in advance.

Indeed Johnsons 'carry on going out but take a test first' approach ended up looking more silly than they would have liked, due to problems accessing enough tests at a crucial moment.
 
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