Coronavirus

[Pureblood]

Agree with Dr Julia Grace Patterson 100%.  This country is in serious denial.

[Bjornebye]

My missus went for her 2nd jab earlier and said the fella who administered it was telling everyone there to send anyone they knew who is waiting to go to him and he will administer it. An email requesting volunteers to work overtime support, assisting with vaccines and testing etc has also gone around Liverpool City Council today as the government has said we are an area receiving an advanced support package. Worrying. Let's just hope they can up the speed of the second jabs this next 4 weeks. 

[Pidge]

I think it's unlikely to dodge the vaccines, particularly Pfizer as to adapt around the RNA-based design would likely result in the disease being much less dangerous. It's not impossible with AZ, but not sure it would have varied to that extent so quickly. But anyway, that's why I think we need to take a little extra time to observe what is happening. COVID patients in hospital in the NW has doubled in the last month, but local action (intense vaccination programme and local measures) appears to be bringing cases down in the same areas. People need to know how and where it's been spreading, how severe the illness has been and what the knock on effect in terms of deaths and hospital attendances are. 

 

 

[Moctezuma]

I've said this before on the thread but the publics understanding of the thin patina layer of service provision that we have as out healthcare system is one of the major issues here, combined with a lack of understanding of large data sets.

 

That and an endless supply of people who I can only describe as muck spreaders, in as much that wealthy donors money hits their current accounts each month via a make-work media vehicle. They then proceed to create a huge amount of disinformation and conjecture by spreading this muck on T.V., newspapers and websites. So much so it enters the brains of our elected politicians and the donors who guide their decisions.

 

At the start of the pandemic we had approximately 62 ICU beds, they were almost completely full with post op patients, people who had various accidents and all sorts of other maladies that effect the general public, we would consistently hit black alert status due to lack of bed capacity where no further complex operations could continue and our ability to admit patients was curtailed. This state of affairs is due to a number of reasons that I could explain, but I think most people understand; i.e. 

• cuts and lack of resources in part through political decisions and active reduction of tax bases via (again) political decisions, evasion and avoidance
• the ability of healthcare professionals to keep people alive who would have had no chance in the past through new advances
• other demographic trends including; increased life expectancy in part through (improvements in diet, hygiene, healthcare and pollution) expansion and concentration of the UKs population in certain locales

 

We expanded our "ICU" bed base by 3.5 times during the last surge, this of course meant that we had to stop significant sections of the hospitals activity, with only the most seriously ill or urgent patients being seen through non-covid pathways.

 

On the Covid side we added to the bed numbers outside of ICU with things that were called acute respiratory units (ACU), the notion was that people who were just pre-ICU in terms of their need for more intensive care or those post ICU could be stepped down. At the height of the surge (say a period of 3 weeks to a month) the people in these units would normally have been on ICU, there was also a backlog in getting people into the units. There was a huge amount of decanting and sending patients to other trusts in areas that weren't quite as hotspotish (for want of a better term) to cope.

 

Whether this constituted a collapse of our healthcare system one could debate, but at times it certainly felt like that, huge chunks of our workforce were mobilised solely for ICU duties. I would walk home after ludicrously long days next to stacked ambulances a significant chunk of whom had Covid patients inside waiting for a bed. The conditions in some of the ACUs which I did some ops work in relating to the vaccines were eye opening.

 

If non-pharmaceutical interventions are withheld even if the numbers being hospitalised are relatively low through the advent of the vaccine programme, this will cause significant issues due to the shear scale of the numbers infected and the exponential transmission, also the likelihood of your gran falling down the stairs breaking their pelvis and being stuck there while they wait for an an ambulance and potentially popping their clogs further down the line through a fat embolism significantly increases. You basically end up in a second/third world medical situation. I would assume the economic impact of this kind of thing would outstrip the impact of some curtailment on restrictions and the associated health impacts connected to that, but maybe I'm wrong and having a minimal healthcare set-up for a period of time with the associated death toll is something that our society needs to just deal with as a society.

 

This is starting to turn into a TLDR ramble, but fuck it I'm dyslexic and don't know how to structure a post to save my life. I have a good mate who I would state is extremely intelligent, he and I have had vigorous disagreements about what to do with regard the non-pharmaceutical interventions/public restrictions, but I can't help but feel a lot of this stuff is just a moral quandary i.e. do you want life to continue as normal and not really impinge on your existence, which would result in the collapse of the healthcare system in certain areas and result in India/Quito scenes or are you willing to give up some freedoms for a certain period of time to enable the rest of society to get vaccinated/protected from the virus to a certain degree?

 

I realise it isn't as simple as this, people's livelihoods are at stake with insufficient government support and perhaps the above framing of the question is somewhat disingenuous, but it would be interesting to hear what people think whether it is just a moral decision or does this exist in the realm of something that can be quantified?

 

Of course this also exists in the political realm as well because a significant number of deaths via Covid or other reasons in a third surge may be used as stick to beat the government in the future (not that it would likely effect their polling given how things have played out).

 

 

All of this chat in some ways is academic because if the Prime minister and his gang of imbecilies had actually implemented a border control policy then we wouldn't have the delta/indian variant rampaging through partially vaccinated populations and the potentiality of further controls in the event of hospitalisations being needed. I speak as someone with relatives abroad I would love to see, but understand the epidemiological necessity at keeping things controlled effectively across borders.

 

 

[Colonel Bumcunt]

16 hours ago, TK421 said:

In my opinion these numbers will not bear up to real world events.  There will be a lot of hospitalisations and deaths, comparable to and probably exceeding the winter wave, and they will be comprised of people who are both vaccinated and unvaccinated.

I believe they're actually based on real world data.  But, in addition to this, the unknown factor is how many fully vaccinated people in 100 will even contract covid in the first place, let alone the 6 in 100 likely to need support from a hospital.  

If the vaccines break chains of transmission by even 20%, then that again has a great knock-on effect.  

[Bruce Spanner]

From Marine Hyde’s column today...

 

‘But take a look at those names again – Gillian McKeith, Right Said Fred, the Wolf and the Fox, the Archbishop of Wootton – and ask yourself: are these honestly going to be the Guys? The ragtag band of misfits whose maverick clear-sightedness and courage takes them on a vast journey to save everyone else, all the way from the web browser to the GB News studio? Hand on heart: no. No, they aren’t. There is no outlandish movie plot, never mind any reasonable real-life scenario, in which this particular band of people could know more about science and virology than the scientists and the virologists. No matter how beaten you might think we are as a society, the only way we could be more completely spannered is if we started letting ourselves think that maybe the poo lady had a point. However completely over it all everyone now completely is … if that’s the passenger manifest of the Common Sense Ark, then we do still have to caution each other against boarding.’

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/15/covid-gillian-mckeith-truth-virology

 

Wonderfully put.

[Pureblood]

25 minutes ago, Colonel Bumcunt said:

I believe they're actually based on real world data.  But, in addition to this, the unknown factor is how many fully vaccinated people in 100 will even contract covid in the first place, let alone the 6 in 100 likely to need support from a hospital.  

If the vaccines break chains of transmission by even 20%, then that again has a great knock-on effect.  

All I can say is I simply do not believe the efficacy percentages being suggested. 

[Megadrive Man]

1 hour ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

 

 

What am I missing here though? 

 

In the UK over 30 million people have now had both doses, around a further 16 million have had 1 dose.

 

Are they suggesting that the vaccines won't work?

 

From my own perspective, I had the first dose (Pfizer) on the 6th of June, the second one is booked in for the 22nd of August, should I be looking to bring this forward?  

 

[Megadrive Man]

Israel have today announced that masks are no longer required, they have no restrictions in place at all now. I thought that's where we were heading?

 

 

[Pureblood]

2 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

Israel have today announced that masks are no longer required, they have no restrictions in place at all now. I thought that's where we were heading?

 

 

I'm guessing they don't have Delta variant issues yet.  They've got about twenty cases per day in the whole country, we've got seven or eight thousand. 

[SasaS]

India seems to be continuing with the decrease in number of cases, for some six weeks now. In two weeks they are likely to be where they were before the variant was discovered.
 

Still don't get where all this doom and gloom predictions in the UK are coming from. The cases look to have peaked already, deaths are as low as they were before, are hospitalizations much higher now?

[Mudface]

27 minutes ago, SasaS said:

India seems to be continuing with the decrease in number of cases, for some six weeks now. In two weeks they are likely to be where they were before the variant was discovered.
 

Still don't get where all this doom and gloom predictions in the UK are coming from. The cases look to have peaked already, deaths are as low as they were before, are hospitalizations much higher now?

I think they're about 20% higher than since the start of the month and about 10% higher this time last week-

 

 

There's an interesting comparison here with Israel- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/15/why-is-israel-lifting-covid-restrictions-as-england-extends-them

 

I really hope that the choice of vaccine isn't a major factor (Israel went with Pfizer only) and that we follow a similar trajectory. Israel had a flare up as restrictions were lifted but that's now under control, although they've been much stricter than our 'let's control our own borders' government in not allowing infections in from abroad.

[SasaS]

They have also reached their 57% of full vaccination some time ago. Plus they don't have a relatively large population with ties with India. Not an international travel hub and not as many people trying to sneak over the border ilegally.

High cases number in UK may also be in part due to much better testing now, much closer to actual number than any time before.

Or the type of vaccine may indeed be a factor, the US is mostly or exclusively mRNA, also holds pretty good.

 

[Strontium]

20 minutes ago, SasaS said:

They have also reached their 57% of full vaccination some time ago. Plus they don't have a relatively large population with ties with India.

 

Heh, the funny thing is my Israeli cousin lives in India, and had to go back to Israel to get vaccinated.

[s(k)aturation]

4 hours ago, Moctezuma said:

I've said this before on the thread but the publics understanding of the thin patina layer of service provision that we have as out healthcare system is one of the major issues here, combined with a lack of understanding of large data sets.

 

That and an endless supply of people who I can only describe as muck spreaders, in as much that wealthy donors money hits their current accounts each month via a make-work media vehicle. They then proceed to create a huge amount of disinformation and conjecture by spreading this muck on T.V., newspapers and websites. So much so it enters the brains of our elected politicians and the donors who guide their decisions.

 

At the start of the pandemic we had approximately 62 ICU beds, they were almost completely full with post op patients, people who had various accidents and all sorts of other maladies that effect the general public, we would consistently hit black alert status due to lack of bed capacity where no further complex operations could continue and our ability to admit patients was curtailed. This state of affairs is due to a number of reasons that I could explain, but I think most people understand; i.e. 

• cuts and lack of resources in part through political decisions and active reduction of tax bases via (again) political decisions, evasion and avoidance
• the ability of healthcare professionals to keep people alive who would have had no chance in the past through new advances
• other demographic trends including; increased life expectancy in part through (improvements in diet, hygiene, healthcare and pollution) expansion and concentration of the UKs population in certain locales

 

We expanded our "ICU" bed base by 3.5 times during the last surge, this of course meant that we had to stop significant sections of the hospitals activity, with only the most seriously ill or urgent patients being seen through non-covid pathways.

 

On the Covid side we added to the bed numbers outside of ICU with things that were called acute respiratory units (ACU), the notion was that people who were just pre-ICU in terms of their need for more intensive care or those post ICU could be stepped down. At the height of the surge (say a period of 3 weeks to a month) the people in these units would normally have been on ICU, there was also a backlog in getting people into the units. There was a huge amount of decanting and sending patients to other trusts in areas that weren't quite as hotspotish (for want of a better term) to cope.

 

Whether this constituted a collapse of our healthcare system one could debate, but at times it certainly felt like that, huge chunks of our workforce were mobilised solely for ICU duties. I would walk home after ludicrously long days next to stacked ambulances a significant chunk of whom had Covid patients inside waiting for a bed. The conditions in some of the ACUs which I did some ops work in relating to the vaccines were eye opening.

 

If non-pharmaceutical interventions are withheld even if the numbers being hospitalised are relatively low through the advent of the vaccine programme, this will cause significant issues due to the shear scale of the numbers infected and the exponential transmission, also the likelihood of your gran falling down the stairs breaking their pelvis and being stuck there while they wait for an an ambulance and potentially popping their clogs further down the line through a fat embolism significantly increases. You basically end up in a second/third world medical situation. I would assume the economic impact of this kind of thing would outstrip the impact of some curtailment on restrictions and the associated health impacts connected to that, but maybe I'm wrong and having a minimal healthcare set-up for a period of time with the associated death toll is something that our society needs to just deal with as a society.

 

This is starting to turn into a TLDR ramble, but fuck it I'm dyslexic and don't know how to structure a post to save my life. I have a good mate who I would state is extremely intelligent, he and I have had vigorous disagreements about what to do with regard the non-pharmaceutical interventions/public restrictions, but I can't help but feel a lot of this stuff is just a moral quandary i.e. do you want life to continue as normal and not really impinge on your existence, which would result in the collapse of the healthcare system in certain areas and result in India/Quito scenes or are you willing to give up some freedoms for a certain period of time to enable the rest of society to get vaccinated/protected from the virus to a certain degree?

 

I realise it isn't as simple as this, people's livelihoods are at stake with insufficient government support and perhaps the above framing of the question is somewhat disingenuous, but it would be interesting to hear what people think whether it is just a moral decision or does this exist in the realm of something that can be quantified?

 

Of course this also exists in the political realm as well because a significant number of deaths via Covid or other reasons in a third surge may be used as stick to beat the government in the future (not that it would likely effect their polling given how things have played out).

 

 

All of this chat in some ways is academic because if the Prime minister and his gang of imbecilies had actually implemented a border control policy then we wouldn't have the delta/indian variant rampaging through partially vaccinated populations and the potentiality of further controls in the event of hospitalisations being needed. I speak as someone with relatives abroad I would love to see, but understand the epidemiological necessity at keeping things controlled effectively across borders.

 

 

 

When you said dyslexic, did you actually mean thought-provoking, equanimous, compelling and extremely articulate.

 

I think you, both inadvertently and substantively, might have.

 

 

 

 

[sir roger]

Making the jabs compulsory for Nursing Home staff. 16 weeks to comply.

[Section_31]

Just now, sir roger said:

Making the jabs compulsory for Nursing Home staff. 16 weeks to comply.

I read that in the voice of ED-209.

[TheHowieLama]

@Moctezuma

Great post.

[Colonel Bumcunt]

1 hour ago, sir roger said:

Making the jabs compulsory for Nursing Home staff. 16 weeks to comply.

Good.  Thin end of the wedge though, bad news for conscientious objectors.  

[niallers]

3 hours ago, Section_31 said:

I read that in the voice of ED-209.

One for the kids there. And if any refuse

 

[Barrington Womble]

14 hours ago, Colonel Bumcunt said:

I believe they're actually based on real world data.  But, in addition to this, the unknown factor is how many fully vaccinated people in 100 will even contract covid in the first place, let alone the 6 in 100 likely to need support from a hospital.  

If the vaccines break chains of transmission by even 20%, then that again has a great knock-on effect.  

This is a small sample size I know, but I currently have 3 double vaxd family members who are positive with one in hospital. There seems an absolute reality this vaccine doesn't stop spread or the numbers wouldn't be so high all over the country. The only question is how much it stops hospitalisations and deaths. 

[Davelfc]

14 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

This is a small sample size I know, but I currently have 3 double vaxd family members who are positive with one in hospital. There seems an absolute reality this vaccine doesn't stop spread or the numbers wouldn't be so high all over the country. The only question is how much it stops hospitalisations and deaths. 

First of all I hope that your family members get well soon and hopefully the vaccine will contribute to a full recovery.

 

There are all sorts of numbers bandied about concerning the efficacy of the different vaccines, but none of them give 100%. It's pretty clear that the most recent variant would have seen a much higher hospitalisation and death rate without the vaccine though. That doesn't of course help the poor people and their families who find themselves in the small percentage for whom the vaccine has not fully protected them.

 

One story we can put to bed is the rumoured link between Christian Eriksen and the vaccine. Apparently he hasn't had any vaccine nor to his knowledge covid.

 

https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2021/06/15/christian-eriksen-collapse-euro-2020-euro-2021-danish-soccer-player-didnt-receive-pfizer-vaccine/7699737002/

 

The rumor about Eriksen came amid reports of a small but higher-than-expected number of cases of heart inflammation — called myocarditis and pericarditis — developing in mostly young people after they received doses of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced June 10 that it will convene an emergency meeting on June 18 to discuss a possible link between the condition and the vaccines. Other health organizations, like the European Medicines Agency, are also investigating.

But Eriksen’s collapse appears unrelated.

 

 

[Sugar Ape]

1 hour ago, Barrington Womble said:

This is a small sample size I know, but I currently have 3 double vaxd family members who are positive with one in hospital. There seems an absolute reality this vaccine doesn't stop spread or the numbers wouldn't be so high all over the country. The only question is how much it stops hospitalisations and deaths. 

Hopefully the vaccine will protect them from a severe outcome. Fingers crossed. Are your family members people who would have been classed in one of the vulnerable groups or people who you would expect not to be ill from the virus? Obviously it's fine if you don't feel comfortable talking about it.

 

My Nephew (11 years old) tested positive today. He had a blinding headache for a couple of days last week but only got a test when two other kids in his class tested positive. Backs up what they are now saying about the Delta variant having different common symptoms such as a headache.

[Vincent Vega]

Shocked I tell thee.

 

[Bjornebye]

1 hour ago, Barrington Womble said:

This is a small sample size I know, but I currently have 3 double vaxd family members who are positive with one in hospital. There seems an absolute reality this vaccine doesn't stop spread or the numbers wouldn't be so high all over the country. The only question is how much it stops hospitalisations and deaths. 

Hope they pull through fine mate, I'm sure they will. Best wishes