Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
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cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
What a difference in the SE -
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It would so interesting to know what percentage of these people are preparing for school next week, either for their children or if they work in a school and those gallivanting for different reasonsWent into town ealier to get a few essentials and it was fucking heaving with cars and pedestrians.
Busiest I have seen it all this yearbig queues outside shops like Wilko, M&S, Poundland and similar places.
Good to know they are in busy shops/queues before sending their kids into schools eh?
This should not have been an issue for the parents in the first place. It is just pouring petrol on a fire.
The evidence won't come in for years, though. That's part of the problem and I guess that's why some people are reluctant to consider the possibility, which is understandable. Kudos to you for being willing to consider it though. Given that plenty of places have opened up to differing extents or had limited lockdowns (Sweden, Pakistan, Florida, Japan, etc) and not seen anywhere near the predicated death tolls from certain models, I'd also say it's not as simple as "more lockdowns=always better." It will be interesting to see in the future if anyone actually does a proper study of the whole thing and the differences that have sprung up between different places.
Fair points and again as I've said before, I agree that we had little option but to implement the lockdown in the first place and then at Christmas/early January. I'd also definitely agree with you that the reason some of the East Asian countries have done far better is because they had experience with SARS that we didn't here in the west. As to free market ideology, of course it has its drawbacks, and evidently one of those may well be dealing rapidly with a pandemic, though it's certainly not as simple as that and you can't blame a free market ideology for all the failures at various points across the world in responding to this.
There are a lot more complexities to why different countries have succeeded or failed in certain aspects of the health or economic response (state of healthcare funding and provision, who was in charge, centralised v. localised responses, if border closures were practical, funding or lack of it for furlough-type schemes, pre-existing state of public health, number of ICU beds, reliance of the economy on certain sectors such as tourism, etc), but you're right that certain ideologies can definitely influence things. I'd say that perhaps the initial reluctance from those countries was not necessarily entirely down to their economic ideology, but from a viewpoint of shutting down the entire country being something completely untested before for any other disease. Various countries have shown there are ways of controlling the virus without a total lockdown (either strong test and trace like South Korea, closing borders like New Zealand, or very strong local quarantine measures like China)- unfortunately here in the UK we didn't bother to pursue any of those avenues until it was too late, leaving lockdown as the only alternative. On that we can certainly agree.
Supine
Newt Member
Lockdowns work. Play it smart and you don't need them.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
There are likely different types of Long Covid so I think it's likely one of the subsets of Long Covid will turn out to be pretty much the same as ME/CFS. But that has its own variants too, so where the overlap comes we won't know until a lot more research is done. I'm pretty annoyed that the UK government has so far announced peanuts for research on this. The US, thankfully, has announced an enormous amount of money for long covid research, which I'm pretty sure will include ME/CFS research to see where they overlap. It's good, but of course research takes 5-10 years to feed through into medical practice so the right time to have put shitloads of money of into post-viral conditions would have been 10 years ago, or preferably fifty years ago when they first realised it was a big problem. Anyway, better late than never I guess.
US funding: $1.1bn US health agency will invest $1 billion to investigate 'long COVID'
UK funding: £18.5m
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Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
Yet another cracking day on the figures.
Vaccinations - 1st dose just under 21.8m & 2nd dose under 1.1m.
New cases - 6,040, down -34% in the last week, and down 1,394 on last Saturday's 7,434, bringing the 7-day average down to 6,118.
New deaths - 158, down -34.1% in the last week, and down 132 on last Saturday's 290, bringing the 7-day average down to 221.
Excellent.
Wondering, is there a stat showing hospitalisation? This statistic rising that pushes out the dates of the lockdown easing. Very much getting sick, you deal with it. Going to hospital or worse, we all have to deal with it.
One to watch from tomorrow.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
The government dashboard only seems to update hospital data once a week, the last date was 2/3/21, patients admitted were around 800 a day for that week, down from the Jan. peak of over 4,000, and back to where we were early Oct.
Patients in hospital down to under 11k, from the peak of almost 40k in Jan., 1,542 on ventilation, compared to the peak of over 4,000.
elbows
Well-Known Member
They update the individual nations data more often than that, but sometimes get behind compared to what is available on individual nations NHS data sources. So the overall UK figure can get quite badly backlogged, but even on the main dashboard the individual nations are not as far behind if you drill down. I'm bored of saying this.
The following is daily hospital admissions/diagnoses for England using data from Statistics » COVID-19 Hospital Activity
Sunray
Its sunny somewhere.
In a lockdown, still quite a lot of people going to hospital! I wonder where those 800 people are catching it?
elbows
Well-Known Member
Well I've always doubted that the following data, which shows hospital admissions/diagnoses for England where the person is listed as living in a care home, is a complete guide to the care home side of hospitalisations, but here it is anyway. Same data source as my previous post.
In their homes mostly, as has always been the case.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I dont have a prediction. For a number of reasons including:
Things like ZOE already showed a worrying period where numbers flattened off or had a modest rise, with their R estimates above 1 in a number of regions. But that didnt last and things looked better again within a few weeks.
Attitudes towards getting tested may have changed in the vaccination era, and may change again with schools back.
Also the lateral flow tests seem to be part of the main dashboard daily 'number of tests conducted' figures these days, and more of such schemes are coming into effect with businesses and schools participating. So the headline figures we will see in the coming weeks reflect not just changes in the amount of infections, but also in the way we detect and measure such things.
Certainly the authorities have prepared expectations by saying that R will go up quite a bit with schools open, but I intend to resist jumping the gun.
elbows
Well-Known Member
With that last graph in mind, one prediction I will make is the government bragging about conducting more than a million tests a day, assuming that moment comes (the last figure on that previous graph was 992,812).
They dont make it that easy to see how many of those tests were lateral flow ones rather than PCR ones, but if I drill down to England only rather than the UK, there is a graph:
They dont make it that easy to see how many of those tests were lateral flow ones rather than PCR ones, but if I drill down to England only rather than the UK, there is a graph:
2hats
Dust.
Already rising in some areas ("the study has picked up a suggestion that infections are rising again in London, the South East and the Midlands"), and no prizes for guessing which age cohorts the highest prevalences have most recently been seen in.
Fall in coronavirus infections has slowed in England – REACT study | Imperial News | Imperial College London
Coronavirus infections continue to fall in England but no longer at the sharp rate seen in early February, according to new data from REACT.
www.imperial.ac.uk
purenarcotic
Conveniently Pocket Sized
It’s always seemed clear to me that they are expecting rises, potentially quite big ones. What it’s felt to me is that they are banking on vaccinations preventing the hospitals from being overwhelmed again and preventing big rises in deaths as those most likely to fall into those are protected. So essentially they don’t care if people get it, as long as they don’t require intervention.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Indeed, and they quite deliberately framed things in that way in some press conferences a few weeks back. All the stuff about shitting ourselves when R is above 1 is gone from the way they seek to frame things going forwards. There are still limits as to how far this can be pushed though, but I dont know if we will come anywhere close to reaching them.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Already rising in some areas ("the study has picked up a suggestion that infections are rising again in London, the South East and the Midlands"), and no prizes for guessing which age cohorts the highest prevalences have most recently been seen in.
View attachment 257636Fall in coronavirus infections has slowed in England – REACT study | Imperial News | Imperial College London
Coronavirus infections continue to fall in England but no longer at the sharp rate seen in early February, according to new data from REACT.
Although I think its worth noting that the picture shown by that study is likely covering the same time period where ZOE picked up these changes and I went on about them a bit. Things have moved on again since then, and there is currently no straightforward national or regional trends story that I am confident to tell. Other than things not dropping at the impressive rates seen for a good while after the peak.
2hats
Dust.
Round 9a was sampled 4-12 February, round 9b sampled 13-23 February.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Yeah thats a match then, since I recall it was around Feb 19th that I commented on ZOE showing some tentative worrying signs, and their stuff doesnt have as much lag as most other surveillance methods. Things have since gone back to dropping in their analysis, albeit not at impressive rates.
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