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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

William of Walworth said:
(Masks re-introduced in our local Hospital too!) :cool:

There's a new and big local outbreak in the Swansea area ..... both my immediate boss and top boss have currently got it and are absent.

From an immature POV, that might sound great ( :D ).

But various things to do with peoples' (everyone's!) leave/CS flexitime/regaining time for Medical/Hospital appointments (very! relevant to my situation right now! :eek:: ), can't be sorted until they're back.

Which will be no earlier than next Monday (18/7), apparantly! :hmm:
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Can't the bosses WFH?
 
Numbers said:
It's not surprising, in London anyway. I was on an absolutely jam packed tube the other morning and there was only me and 1 other person wearing a mask, thankfully I was stood by the between carriages door facing away from everyone but it was quite scary.
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Yeah, felt totally inevitable that we would end up here/worse, ongoing. Such a fucking shit show.
 
Numbers said:
It's not surprising, in London anyway. I was on an absolutely jam packed tube the other morning and there was only me and 1 other person wearing a mask, thankfully I was stood by the between carriages door facing away from everyone but it was quite scary.
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I think this sort of stuff heavily overstates the importance/effectiveness of masks tbh. The point here is the packed carriage, plus the fact the people on there are going to offices/pubs/wherever, plus the massively more transmissible variants. Higher levels of mask wearing might mitigate it but it's not the difference between a big wave and no wave or between 'safe' and 'not safe'.

That's not an anti mask point btw but I do think the heavy focus on masks in public is a bit of a continuation of the 'all these other people are to blame' narrative that's been around since the start of the pandemic.
 
Always thought tubes fairly safe. TFL tested the air and published the findings that no rona was found. The air circulates far better than the pub, office (Aircon is definitely a strong vector in hospital transmission) and other settings.
 
Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
I think this sort of stuff heavily overstates the importance/effectiveness of masks tbh. The point here is the packed carriage, plus the fact the people on there are going to offices/pubs/wherever, plus the massively more transmissible variants. Higher levels of mask wearing might mitigate it but it's not the difference between a big wave and no wave or between 'safe' and 'not safe'.

That's not an anti mask point btw but I do think the heavy focus on masks in public is a bit of a continuation of the 'all these other people are to blame' narrative that's been around since the start of the pandemic.
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True. But wearing masks is a reminder to keep your distance, be careful etc. People are getting back to their old, relaxed, unhygienic ways. So many Tory ministers prattle on about how Boris got us through the pandemic. Wearing masks is that little nudge that lots of people need.
 
IC3D said:
Always thought tubes fairly safe. TFL tested the air and published the findings that no rona was found. The air circulates far better than the pub, office (Aircon is definitely a strong vector in hospital transmission) and other settings.
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Agree. I reckon a pub was where I got it and I had been using tube / DLR/ trains all the way through.
 
They’re better than nothing but the masks most people wear are crap. The ideas people have on what to use hasn’t been updated since 2020 for the most part. At that point there was a shortage of N95 standard masks, so it did make sense to reserve those for healthcare workers. That’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for ages.

Basic cloth or gappy medical masks worn by everyone was supposed to work as source control. I’m not sure that would work for an airborne disease, this was summer of 2020’s strategy… it was known it was airborne not droplet at that point but the info wasn’t communicated effectively.

In Austria the mask mandate was FFP2 for public transport. Don’t know if that’s still the case. (Hasn’t the whole of Europe decided it’s over?)
 
l'Otters said:
They’re better than nothing but the masks most people wear are crap. The ideas people have on what to use hasn’t been updated since 2020 for the most part. At that point there was a shortage of N95 standard masks, so it did make sense to reserve those for healthcare workers. That’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for ages.

Basic cloth or gappy medical masks worn by everyone was supposed to work as source control. I’m not sure that would work for an airborne disease, this was summer of 2020’s strategy… it was known it was airborne not droplet at that point but the info wasn’t communicated effectively.

In Austria the mask mandate was FFP2 for public transport. Don’t know if that’s still the case. (Hasn’t the whole of Europe decided it’s over?)
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I've just got a train from London to Berlin, no mask in the UK, full FFP3 mask wearing in Germany on trains. France was somewhere between the 2.
 
Is this version taking longer to show than others, do people think? Beginning of this year, it tended to be household members falling like dominoes, eg multiple +s on the same or within a few days, whereas now it seems like it's taking more like a week. gsv tested + last Sunday and isolated at home; I felt some symptoms this Friday but didn't test + until today; my dad also didn't test + until a week after my mum did. Or is it just because we are in households where we can isolate that that's slightly postponed the inevitable?

LFTs have cost me £50 in the last week and a half for a family of 4 with kids in school :eek: - we can afford that but it must be a prohibitive cost for so many. At least gsv can buy any further ones now he's imminently out of COVID jail ;)
 
A joint editorial from the BMJ and HSJ says the government are gaslighting the public over Covid, that there are multiple factors destroying the NHS but that Covid is the straw that is breaking the camels back, and that the NHS is not living with Covid, its dying from it:

www.bmj.com

The NHS is not living with covid, it’s dying from it

The government must be honest about the threat the pandemic still poses Today may be the most difficult day the NHS has ever experienced. The headlines will focus on the pressures created by the heatwave and that most visible sign of healthcare failure—ambulances queuing outside hospitals.1...
www.bmj.com www.bmj.com

They want some pandemic measures to be reintroduced and they point out various things, including some stuff I've probably already mentioned and some that I havent. eg:

One of the assumptions underpinning this hope was that covid-19 would be nothing more than an irritant for most of the year, with perhaps a winter wave in December. It is now July, and not counting the first omicron surge that peaked in January, the UK and the NHS have experienced two further covid waves, with gaps of just under three months between peaks (England Summary | Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK). The current wave of hospital admissions driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 variants is likely to peak in the next few days, but other variants will be ready for global distribution soon.
Click to expand...

What the hospital admissions figures hide is a rising tide of people with long covid, now at two million and likely to be a major burden on the health service and the nation’s productivity, for a generation. And there are many other much less recognised but still deeply disturbing effects of the continuing pandemic, including endangering the NHS’s supply of blood.
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How is the government responding to this crisis? Largely by pretending it is not happening or implying it is all under control. In the House of Lords last week government health spokesperson Lord Kammal repeated the spurious line: “We managed to break the link between infections and hospitalisations and hospitalisations and death.”

But the link between infections and hospital admissions has clearly not been broken, even if you just consider those being treated “primarily” for the disease. As for deaths, the latest ONS figures indicate just under 24 000 fatalities “involving covid” in the first six months of 2022. Yes, that figure is substantially smaller than the 66 000 recorded in the first half of 2021, but it is more than the 21 000 people who died in the last six months of that year. Excess deaths from all causes are also still running above five year averages before the pandemic.
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The constant pressure created by repeated covid waves is already the main reason that the NHS is nowhere near reaching the activity levels needed to begin to recover performance. By now the NHS had hoped to be operating better than before the pandemic; instead elective activity is around 10% below 2019.
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If anyone sees mainstream media coverage of that editorial, plese post links here. I've been too warm to look today. Generally I'm of the opinion that the media have been part of the problem during the 'learning to live with covid' period. So they can stick all that self-righteous shit about what they see as their vital duties and service to the public up their arse, they dont come close to living up to those aims except in the most obvious of emergencies, usually when the state asks the media to 'do the responsible thing'. There was a week or two early in the pandemic when certain journalists and publications actually rose to the occasion and occasionally challenged the governments blatantly shit original pandemic plan, but apart from that period, and a few times where it was clear the government were only delaying the inevitable in terms of further lockdowns, they've tended to go along with what they are told and what the establishment agenda is.

edit - I should probably have explicitly stated that I'm not including specialist publications such as the BMJ and HSJ in this rant. And there have likely been some journalists who work for newspapers who would like to have covered ongoing issues in a sensible manner too. My rant is mostly directed towards what gets on the front pages, what stuff gets to be a big, ongoing story that can affect the politics etc.
 
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William of Walworth said:
(Masks re-introduced in our local Hospital too!) :cool:
There's a new and big local outbreak in the Swansea area ..... both my immediate boss and top boss have currently got it and are absent.

From an immature POV, that might sound great ( :D ).
But various things to do with peoples' (everyone's!) leave/CS flexitime/regaining time for Medical/Hospital appointments (very! relevant to my situation right now! :eek:: ), can't be sorted until they're back.
Which will be no earlier than next Monday (18/7), apparantly! :hmm:
Click to expand...

wemakeyousoundbad said:
Can't the bosses WFH?
Click to expand...

You'd think so, but some of the more personnel-focussed systems aren't properly available to them except while on office-based systems! :mad:

Why that's actually the case, I have no real idea! :oops:, but them's the breaks apparantly! :hmm:
 
When I got to Scotland two weeks ago I was surprised that the majority aren't wearing masks. I, stupidly, followed suit. I've got covid.

I'm surprised that I don't have to isolate, it's only recommended that I do, and for only 5 days. If I'm not clear then another 5 days. But I'm allowed to go out shopping etc as long as I wear a face covering.

I'm not in the least surprised that there's a surge in cases. What else could there be?
 
Two neighbouring couples have just had it/got it for the first time, I'm presuming all caught it from the grandkids. Two friends who moved to Bristol have it (bloke for the third time :eek:, works as lorry driver).
 
Cloo said:
Is this version taking longer to show than others, do people think?
Click to expand...
(Princeton/McMaster/others) Dutch data re-analysed suggests delta v omicron incubation interval (time to exhibiting symptoms) is similar but generation interval (ie time to transmitting infectious virus) is ~1 day shorter for omicron. This, and anecdotal observations, may be variously clouded by degrees of (dynamic) population (infection and vaccine elicited) immunity.
DOI:10.1101/2022.07.02.22277186.
 
gsv tested a very faint line this morning on about day 8 I think, so probably clear tomorrow. Mine is just doing it's best impression of a common or garden cold.
 
Definitely appears to be a waning vaccine immunity issue to me - covid is ripping through the adults I know, but not the kids, who obviously were vaxxed more recently.

Neither of my kids seemed to know of anyone missing the final day of school with Covid, and although 3 of the 4 teachers who went on son's year trip to Isle of Wight a few weeks ago came back with covid, there doesn't appear to have been any significant infection among the kids.
 
Cloo said:
Definitely appears to be a waning vaccine immunity issue to me - covid is ripping through the adults I know, but not the kids, who obviously were vaxxed more recently.

Neither of my kids seemed to know of anyone missing the final day of school with Covid, and although 3 of the 4 teachers who went on son's year trip to Isle of Wight a few weeks ago came back with covid, there doesn't appear to have been any significant infection among the kids.
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Most kids are pretty asymptomatic and only got picked up because they were testing all the time - now they aren't.
 
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