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My work Xmas party turned out to be a massive flu super-spreader event. I know a few other people with it too. Lots of it about.
 
Did I hear this year's flu vaccine is only about 25 percent effective ?
I don't know if I will ever accept my sister's invitation to her 4 generation Xmas pox party.
I suspect she and my 87 year old mother would both think it was an excuse because I compete with my youngest brother for any claim of fittest and healthiest.
My last viral infection was Nov 2019 and earlier that year a crazy dose of flu kept me off work for 6 weeks. COVID made retirement a no-brainer for me

Maybe in a future life I will tolerate being incapacitated for a few days for human company, but right now, my daily couple of miles walk is far too important.
 
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Did I hear this year's flu vaccine is only about 25 percent effective ?
I dont know, it usually takes a long time for me to get any numbers, and the methodology and amount of detail is usually much less impressive than what we were treated to with the covid vaccine efficacy data. Maybe there is a provisional number out there already, but I havent found it. And they absolutely hate giving bad news on this front, especially early on, they much prefer to emphasise all the stuff that would encourage people to get vaccinated. Even when the numbers are awful they dont provide much of a narrative, and for years they avoided drawing heavy attention to bad numbers, until they were ready to offer a different vaccine to older people that was expected to perform better. Once that happened everyone including the media were far more prepared to point out how badly vaccines had often been performing in the older age group.

We might be able to get a rough idea, at least in terms of the resulting implications that matter, by looking at what numbers UK authorities came up with for the last bad season, and compare that wave of flu with what we are seeing so far in this one:

According to a chart that BBC article that I linked to a few posts ago included, 2017-18 would be the the most obvious season from recent years to compare this one to so far (looking for similar scale rather than similar wave timing):

Screenshot 2022-12-17 at 12.15.07.png
And here are the UK estimates for what the vaccine was like in 2017-18:


Public Health England (PHE) has today (Wednesday, 18 July 2018) published data on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the 2017 to 2018 season. The data show that overall, flu vaccine was 15% effective in all age groups. However, effectiveness varied considerably. By age-group, the vaccine was overall:
  • 26.9% effective in children aged 2 to 17 years (who received the nasal spray)
  • 12.2% in at risk groups aged 18 to 64 years
  • 10.1% in those aged 65 and over
There were higher levels of protection against flu B and H1N1pdm09, especially in children (60.8% effective against flu B and 90.3% against H1N1pdm09 in children).

If I look to Australia that had its winter ages ago, I get this kind of vague stuff for their most recent season:


Vaccine effectiveness is a measure of the protective effect of influenza vaccines against influenza and its complications and is typically around 40–60%. Based on preliminary estimates from sentinel hospitals (FluCAN), vaccine effectiveness appears at the lower end of the moderate range in 2022.

I would not try to use this to infer a very strong sense of what the number they come up with will be for this season in the UK, but all the same we can see that indicators are not pointing in a happy direction.
 
I havent had time to look at this weeks covid hospital data yet but others have and the familiar pattern is indeed repeating, including the notable increase in likely hospital acquired infections:

 
Possible hospital acquired covid infections in England in a broader context, second wave onwards:

Screenshot 2022-12-22 at 11.32.38.png

Number of covid patients in hospital beds in England, Delta wave onwards, with the 'primarily for covid' separation that they are keen on.

Screenshot 2022-12-22 at 11.25.06.png

As usual we cant really guess what level the peak will be at from these graphs in advance of it happening. In previous years we saw things like the school holidays and broader Christmas holidays/different mixing patterns help to damp things down, although the impact of this is laggy and so it wont affect the hospital side of the picture straight away.
 
From my point of view its still madness that we dont even have a sensible discussion in the media etc about the sustainability of having that many waves per year that place a strain on hospitals.

A lot of that is down to the 'learning to live with covid' agenda and peoples desires to move on. But its also down to the sustained change to the intensive care side of the picture, as demonstrated by the following graph. In theory there is still a certain level of broader hospital pressure that would force authorities to change their tune again, but thats last resort stuff as far as they are concerned, and these days that pressure can be described as a much more complicated picture where they wouldnt need to pin the need to act differently all on covid, but also on flu, and judging by recent government rhetoric, strikes.

Second wave onwards:

Screenshot 2022-12-22 at 12.04.27.png
 
Old attitudes towards respiratory infections are stubbornly persistent despite the obvious lessons of recent years.



Lots of our kids have been sent into school even though they're coughing constantly and look like they're at death's door.

Part of it is probably that a parent can't take time off work and stay home with them. The school has actually been great and instead of demanding that sick kids come in (as a lot of the batshit academies do) they've been persuading parents to keep them home.
 
I had a flu vaccine yesterday. Free on my work woo hoo.

My sister has flu at the mo. Loads of others around here too. Nasty. Hopefully xmas day will still be fine.
 
My sister hasn't bothered inviting me to her pox party this year - she has Ukranian guests in any case...
Hopefully in later life I will manage to acquire a small pool of similarly careful people to spend time with.. people who I spend enough time with generally to be confident of their health status...
My family have health vastly lower down their list of priorities...
 
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I have some slight sniffles, but I think enough for me to say "no sorry, can't really socialize I'll be getting the food and things in and watch some vids this christmas"
 
I have some slight sniffles, but I think enough for me to say "no sorry, can't really socialize I'll be getting the food and things in and watch some vids this christmas"
Given my lifestyle, no claims of my actually having any kind of lurgy would be credible as an excuse :D
(plus anything I managed to catch in Aldi by licking basket handles would doubtless have already ripped through my sister's household ...)
 
Covid could be causing heart issue around the world.

Vid is 19 minutes long, a heart Doc talking about the various differences and causes of heart attacks and cardiac arrests.

 
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Covid could be causing heart issue around the world.

Vid is 19 minutes long, a heart Doc talking about the various differences and causes of heart attacks and cardiac arrests.


This guy seems to be claiming it’s the vaccines causing the trouble. Got more than a whiff of conspiracy theorist about him. Especially with a copy of ‘We’ve been played’ prominently displayed on his desk (“How BIG PHARMA, BIG TECH, and BIG GOVERNMENT are destroying the American Healthcare System.”).

Link broken in quote.
 
I still have no handle on the specifics and likely mechanisms of morbidity of this virus as opposed to other respiratory viruses.... also on why there is a modest adverse effect on the heart for some people from the mRNA vaccines...

I "allowed" myself to get a moderate dose of the flu every year for decades due to where I worked.
(i.e didn't start to get the flu vaccine until COVID "normalised" vaccinations for me.)
I have to assume there would have been no significant physiological effects because there were no symptoms beyond exhaustion - which was presumably just my immune system doing its thing.
I always bounced back.
 
This guy seems to be claiming it’s the vaccines causing the trouble. Got more than a whiff of conspiracy theorist about him. Especially with a copy of ‘We’ve been played’ prominently displayed on his desk (“How BIG PHARMA, BIG TECH, and BIG GOVERNMENT are destroying the American Healthcare System.”).

Link broken in quote.
indeed he is all that this bloke and republican politician to boot, what's not to love.
 
Had a read back of this thread bit late now Orang Utan fyi I’ve taken a lot of coaches this year partly due to cost but also due to being guaranteed a seat.

I would say they feel safer than trains, I wear a mask when on a coach. it takes a little longer but the additional time is acceptable I think
 
This guy seems to be claiming it’s the vaccines causing the trouble. Got more than a whiff of conspiracy theorist about him. Especially with a copy of ‘We’ve been played’ prominently displayed on his desk (“How BIG PHARMA, BIG TECH, and BIG GOVERNMENT are destroying the American Healthcare System.”).

Link broken in quote.
Not watched the video but the usual suspects seem to have been pushing myocarditis as the new vaccines are bad angle. SARS-CoV-2 can cause heart problems though even without gaining entry to the cells. Cell surface interactions can lead to problems even without the presence of ACE-2.
 
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