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Omicron news

Khan last did this on January the 8th 2021, two days after what was to turn out as the peak of patient admissions at 977/day. In this omicron wave the latest data is for 210 admission on the 15th. If Khan had declared a major incident at 210 admissions in the delta wave he'd have done it a whole month earlier on 7 Dec 2020 when admissions were exactly 210.
 
Khan last did this on January the 8th 2021, two days after what was to turn out as the peak of patient admissions at 977/day. In this omicron wave the latest data is for 210 admission on the 15th. If Khan had declared a major incident at 210 admissions in the delta wave he'd have done it a whole month earlier on 7 Dec 2020 when admissions were exactly 210.
then there is staff shortages in the ambulance service (100 ambulances down in London) and hospitals.
 
Yeah staff shortages are an even bigger issue this time, as expected with a variant this transmissible, this vaccine-evading and with such a low doubling time.

This was one of the non-hospital reasons for previous lockdowns, since by reducing all sorts of normal human activities massively, some non-covid pressure on emergency services is relieved a bit. The authorities actually acknowledged this the first time they had to start cancelling mass events in wave 1. Though part of the reason they acknowledged it back then was to downplay the extent to which they were u-turning on mass gatherings for covid transmission reasons, having previously claimed outdoor events werent a big transmission issue.
 
I might be growing paranoid, living under this government for what seems like decades, but it seems possible that they'll change the rules on isolation, to make it significantly shorter, to address the staffing disaster that is happening. The numbers are incredible, not just the firefighters and hospital staff but everything else too the less visible stuff.
Already we don't have to isolate at all if we are a vaccinated confirmed contact of covid positive people which tbh makes no medical sense really at all does it.
 
I might be growing paranoid, living under this government for what seems like decades, but it seems possible that they'll change the rules on isolation, to make it significantly shorter, to address the staffing disaster that is happening. The numbers are incredible, not just the firefighters and hospital staff but everything else too the less visible stuff.
Already we don't have to isolate at all if we are a vaccinated confirmed contact of covid positive people which tbh makes no medical sense really at all does it.

I dont think thats growing paranoid, its more like seeing whats on the front page of the fucking Daily Mail today.

I wont have a complete meltdown if they reduce it to 7 days, since thats better than essential services having a complete meltdown. If it must be done it should be done at the same time as compensatory measures to reduce number of infections in other ways. Which is not what the fucking Mail have in mind.

 
does this underlined bit make sense? Idk.
seems to not make much sense (guardian just now) . how can it not help.

Screenshot 2021-12-18 at 18.54.39.jpeg
 
I think it’s not that it won’t help at all, just that it won’t prevent hospitalisations rising through the early months of 2022.

Very roughly, if it takes 2 weeks from infection to hospitalisation, and 2 weeks from booster to extra protection, then vaccinations happening today don’t have an effect on hospitalisation rates for 4 weeks.
 
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I found this interesting. I asked all the old people I know (a princely sample size of 5) and they claimed it was actually pretty normal for family dispersed all over the country to meet up for Christmas: even before mass car ownership, people were pretty happy to make use of trains and buses, of which there were a far higher and more convenient number and route density than today, of course.

When we lived in the Outer Hebrides people came home for Christmas from all over.
 
Real numbers wont even need to come close to some of this modelling in order for very bad things to still happen:

The government’s SPI-M-O group of scientists, which reports to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), also warned that, based on their modelling, hospitalisations could peak between 3,000 and 10,000 a day and deaths at between 600 and 6,000 a day.

As well as the alarming scenarios above, Sage also modelled the impact of measures imposed under step 1 of the roadmap used last spring. If step 1 measures were imposed, the modelling suggested that infections could be limited to between 200,000 and a million a day. Hospitalisations could run at between 1,500 and 5,000 admissions a day and daily deaths would be 200 to 2,000.

 
Realistically, infections can't run at 2 million a day for very long. In a week, you'd have infected 20% of the UK population. After a month, there is literally nobody left to infect, but the bushfire would have burned out long before that point.

Don't get me wrong, this is a disastrous scenario that would totally fuck things up, and the systems would collapse for as long as the badly ill infected people that need hospitalisation stay alive, which means that many people would unnecessarily die. I'm just saying that you can't reduce it to the soundbite of "2 million infected a day."
 
Realistically, infections can't run at 2 million a day for very long. In a week, you'd have infected 20% of the UK population. After a month, there is literally nobody left to infect, but the bushfire would have burned out long before that point.

Don't get me wrong, this is a disastrous scenario that would totally fuck things up, and the systems would collapse for as long as the badly ill infected people that need hospitalisation stay alive, which means that many people would unnecessarily die. I'm just saying that you can't reduce it to the soundbite of "2 million infected a day."

You can talk about that as a peak value, especially if talking about the actual number of infections on a day rather than the number we manage to detect.

And yes we might expect a rapid variant like Omicron to burn through the population rather rapidly, at least if peoples behaviour doesnt change enough.
 
You can talk about that as peak values, especially if talking about the actual number of infections on a day rather than the number we manage to detect.
You can, but then the headline, "up to 2m daily infections" is misleading. "Daily" implies some kind of sustained rate, not a peak.
 
No claim is built into the headline as to how long that would be sustained, and previous stuff months ago from the likes of Javid warning of 100,000 cases a day were not so very different, in terms of lacking detail of the wider context. Such figures are really an illustration of how rapidly exponential growth can lead to staggeringly huge numbers. Such nubers often fail to come to full fruition due to the massive disruption to contact mixing patterns that arise from things like self-isolation, large behavioural shifts and new restrictions. And there is no way our testing system will manage to formally record a huge chunk of them once they grow that big, but some very large Omicron numbers will probably show up via different sorts of case estimates, whatever happens next.
 
I guess my point is that things are fucked up enough as it is. There is no need to create things unrealistically beyond fucked-up to talk about. If the paper talks about the rate reaching "2m daily infections" and then it actually "only" reaches 1m daily infections (and that for "only" five days, say), you give the establishment an out to say, "well, it wasn't as bad as they said it might get."
 
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FFS! Is that really the best that can be predicted? The high figures are ten times that of the low. Ten times.
 
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