Coronavirus

[Pureblood]

1 minute ago, TheHowieLama said:

In the early days of bodybuilding/pro wrestling the fellas shot horse steroids.

 

 

Pioneering forefathers.

[TheHowieLama]

1 minute ago, TK421 said:

Pioneering forefathers.

Yea, God rest their souls.

 

I have a small pillow of horse placenta that I put on whatever ails me.

[Pureblood]

1 minute ago, TheHowieLama said:

Yea, God rest their souls.

 

I have a small pillow of horse placenta that I put on whatever ails me.

Have you had it furlong? 

 

Oh god no, what am I doing. Don't start loads of puns. They're shit, fucking shit. 

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Have you had it furlong? 

 

Oh god no, what am I doing. Don't start loads of puns. They're shit, fucking shit. 

I just hope this last variant is the final hurdle 

 

[Scooby Dudek]

I can sell some, if you're looking for a fence.

[Section_31]

22 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

That 34 yr old woman in the US was incredible. Thirty fucking four and she helps develop a vaccine.  I couldn’t fill out my expenses form correctly at 34. 

Yeah I feel uncouth saying it but my main takeaway from the show is that she and the Oxford bird are bang tidy, dunno if I'm seeing it through brains-tinted glasses though. Smart is sexy.

[Rico1304]

30 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Real men take horse paste. 

Some of you straight from the horse.  Fucking edge Lord. 

[Pureblood]

Whoa there.

[TheHowieLama]

22 minutes ago, TK421 said:

 Don't start loads of puns. 

That horse has bolted.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

Curevac clinical trial results released. A disappointing 47% effectiveness. 

[Pureblood]

I'd rather have shake 'n' vac. 

[Section_31]

Just now, TK421 said:

I'd rather have shake 'n' vac. 

 

Could put reopening back.

[Pureblood]

Just now, Section_31 said:

 

Could put reopening back.

Hah.

[Bjornebye]

12 minutes ago, TK421 said:

I'd rather have shake 'n' vac. 

Thought you had the hoof 

[Harry's Lad]

28 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Curevac clinical trial results released. A disappointing 47% effectiveness. 

They should have tried putting it on a Shergar cube.

[Bruce Spanner]

Oooof!

 

Stick another +2 in the polling...

 

SCOOP: The U.K. government suppressed access to sick pay for people isolating with the coronavirus at the height of the pandemic, emails between senior civil servants seen by Playbook reveal. Self-isolation has been one of the government’s fundamental policies in the battle against COVID, but the emails leaked to Playbook show that in January and February this year — when the second wave was surging — the Treasury instructed senior government officials to conceal from the public how a little-known part of the furlough scheme could be used to access isolation sick pay, as the cost of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme soared. The bombshell emails show the Treasury’s instruction was opposed by other senior civil servants and will raise searching questions over whether the government did enough to support people who needed to isolate.

 

The leak: In the emails, senior civil servants and ministers talk about a relatively unknown provision in the furlough scheme which allows for employers to temporarily furlough staff who are isolating, so they can get more financial support. As infections rocketed earlier this year, a senior official protested that the Treasury was blocking guidance that would have explained to employers and employees how to access this money. “Furlough can be used to cover self-isolation, but HMT are reluctant to say this explicitly in guidance because it could lead to employees being furloughed who do not need to be,” they complained. “This is a live issue being worked through.” Playbook has seen other emails between senior officials, advisers and ministers where the issue was repeatedly raised.

Inadequate support: The senior official explained in their complaint why they felt the Treasury needed to approve the guidance for how to help people access furlough money when isolating: “Incentive payments are too low to incentivise employees to take tests due to risk of loss of income.” The failure of the government to offer adequate financial support to those isolating has been one of the main criticisms of its handling of the pandemic, and ministers have repeatedly insisted that they have made enough money available to those forced to take time off work. These emails however reveal the concerns of senior civil servants that the incentive payments for isolation were not enough.

[Moctezuma]

10 hours ago, s(k)aturation said:

 

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

 

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

 

9 hours ago, TheHowieLama said:

@Moctezuma

Great post.

 

Thanks both,

 

I have real trepidation about going through a third surge (mainly around staff burnout), you got the feeling in the trust that the first wave was met with heady mix of emotions; excitement, determination, fear and sadness about the colleagues we had lost. The second one felt like a desperate slog which was only tempered by; the vaccine programme, the slow trickle of positive data around the numbers saved via trialed therapeutics and advances in care (in comparison to the first wave) and when the forces medics came in to help out the ICU teams. I'm unsure how people would react to another big influx, though one would assume that the numbers who have a positive outcomes would increase again, with further advance in our understanding of how to treat patients and the vaccines taking the edge off it for some people admitted*.

 

As previously mentioned it's pretty deleterious to see endless government fuck ups, the Cummings testimony was grim, the affirmation that the Prime Minister and (reading through the lines) the Chancellor have a pretty flagrant disregard for the scientific advisors and modelers was confirmation of something that was abundantly apparent, but the added element that they are clearly totally amoral actors doesn't help.

 

Hancock's constant lying I'm assuming is to protect himself in the event of legal recriminations in the future, on occasion this is reality jarring ("There was never a point at which NHS providers couldn't get access to PPE"- the old 'access' chestnut in there, imported from the US healthcare debates), but understandable from his point of view.

 

In terms of the slandering Hancock effectiveness is receiving from Johnson and Cummings what they are actually criticising is the long term hollowing of the state undertaken by the Conservative party. Had so many functions not been cut, outsourced or run into the ground the department of Health's ability to respond to the pandemic would have been far greater, the issue isn't to do with the individual it's to do with the ideology, systems and corruption.

 

Regardless of the active muck spreaders in the media I mentioned in the last post, I have found the press on the whole to be pretty toothless throughout the entirety of this and I think they should be included in any proper inquiry of the pandemic. I once caught a podcast on the way to work where Laura Kuenssberg was extolling the size of Chris Whitty's brain which felt like a nadir. Is there a particular reason why there not honing in on the borders issue? as I can't really explain it, it's clearly a massive open goal and yet they constantly shank the ba deliberately into row Z.

 

The armies of lockdown deniers I see tramping through London each weekend might not be as great if the press had held the government more effectively to account rather than rallying round the flag**. In particular had ventilation been highlighted sooner and greater measures brought in to stop the spread in schools from press critique rather than bashing the unions we may have ended up in a better situation with control of the virus.

 

 

One thing I have noted is the vaccine uptake for different areas of the country never seems to be linked to population distribution and pyramids, perhaps this is really difficult to manifest in GIS mapping, but if I was sat in somewhere like Kettering General I'd be pretty worried about the combination of vaccine uptake in the local population in Corby and the age distribution of said population. People consistently point to some of the London boroughs having a low uptake, but given the age profiles of the people who live there it's not a huge surprise to me, unless this stuff is factored in already, but I get the impression its just a baseline of population against the numbers of vaccines delivered.

 

*This is a bit of an issue in some of the young people who come in unvaccinated as many of them tend to think they aren't as ill as they are and will seek medical help further down the line than older peers

** Though given the propensity for people to fall down Youtube wormholes and embed themselves in social media covens of confirmation bias it's not surprising. Having seen some of these marches up close they seem to be a weird mix of low information voters consuming pravda style propaganda derived from financiers in industries that are being effected combined with the long term contrarians who are birthed out of the fringes of the conspiratorial left and drug cultures 

[Dr Nowt]

21 minutes ago, Moctezuma said:

In terms of the slandering Hancock effectiveness is receiving from Johnson and Cummings what they are actually criticising is the long term hollowing of the state undertaken by the Conservative party. Had so many functions not been cut, outsourced or run into the ground the department of Health's ability to respond to the pandemic would have been far greater, the issue isn't to do with the individual it's to do with the ideology, systems and corruption.

This can't be said enough really. As criminally inept as the current government and it's various lightweights and charlatans are, the previous ten years of cutting away all our safety nets can't be allowed to escape a spotlight which *should* be turned on them all. Having a front row seat to the accelerated decline in NHS care over the decade preceding COVID, despite the continuing best efforts of the individual clinicians and teams involved, was sobering. Great posts by the way mate.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

A new preprint study has just been released showing that coronavirus case numbers are now doubling every 11 days with 90% of the new cases being the Delta variant. 

 

Thankfully* the majority of the new cases are in the younger, not vaccinated age groups. This indicates that vaccines are having an effect and that it's likely that the accelerated vaccine drive will likely slow down infection rates over the ckmjnb weeks. Also, the NHS will get increased admissions, but there's nothing yet to suggest that the NHS will be overran as the younger age groups now mainly getting infected tend to suffer lesser symptoms than older/vulnerable people and don't usually require hospitalisations. 

 

* Thankfully comes with the long covid caveat. We don't know enough yet about whether it's a life long/long term condition and how debilitating it can be. Potentially condemning loads of young people to a chronic disability which could significantly effect the rest of their lives might not necessarily be something to be thankful for! 

[No2]

On 15/06/2021 at 18:31, MegadriveMan 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?  

 

I got Pfizered on June 3rd and am due the 2nd one on June 22nd.

[Bjornebye]

Got my 2nd Astra Zombienica on Tuesday night. Missus had her 2nd two days ago and apart from a sore arm hasn't had any side effects. Oh hang on I've just heard a loud thud ... 

[YorkshireRed]

1 hour ago, Bjornebye said:

Got my 2nd Astra Zombienica on Tuesday night. Missus had her 2nd two days ago and apart from a sore arm hasn't had any side effects. Oh hang on I've just heard a loud thud ... 

Sorry - that was me. The branch on this tree overlooking your bedroom window is no friend of my additional lockdown weight. 

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, YorkshireRed said:

Sorry - that was me. The branch on this tree overlooking your bedroom window is no friend of my additional lockdown weight. 

Makes sense, I haven't heard a peep since 

[Mudface]

Spot on, this- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/17/hancock-care-homes-health-secretary

 

The evidence is clear – there was no excuse for Hancock’s care homes strategy
William Hanage
The health secretary’s failure to act on scientific worst-case scenarios informed policy, with catastrophic results


The UK has suffered some of the worst consequences of the pandemic among developed nations, in terms of both deaths and economic disruption. But instead of learning from its mistakes, all the evidence suggests that the British government is trying to rewrite history while the pandemic is still going on.

When the health secretary, Matt Hancock, appeared in front of MPs last week to answer questions about the government’s early handling of the virus, part of the questioning centred on the devastation that the virus had been allowed to wreak in care homes among residents and staff.

While it is genuinely hard to pick the worst failure of the UK’s pandemic response, this has to be a contender. The numbers remain to be fully catalogued and may never be fully known, because testing was in such short supply early on in the pandemic, but the Office for National Statistics estimates 42,000 care home residents in England and Wales have died of Covid. This outcome was entirely predictable in the absence of meaningful infection control.

Care homes are an example of what epidemiologists call a “congregate setting”. These are places where people are gathered together in tight groups, making a lot of contacts and with little ability to distance, guaranteeing the virus a captive audience. Other examples include prisons and cruise ships.

We worry a lot about respiratory viruses in care homes, because they are lethal. During the very early days of the pandemic in China scientists indicated that older people were especially vulnerable to the virus. As a result of these two facts, well known in January and February 2020, care homes were a disaster waiting to happen. However, until the middle of April last year UK hospitals were discharging patients into care homes without requiring that they be tested for Covid first, sparking goodness knows how many introductions, outbreaks and deaths.

Hancock has claimed that only 1.6% of care home outbreaks were seeded from hospitals, citing Public Health England (PHE) research. But the research in question is biased by the fact that to detect an outbreak you need testing, and tests were in short supply over the most serious period of the spring surge in 2020. You cannot detect something if you do not look for it. Nobody is claiming that all outbreaks occurred via this route, but it was a known way the virus could get into vulnerable populations, and action was not taken to stop it. In fact, the same PHE research states that “the majority of these potentially hospital-seeded care home outbreaks were identified in March to mid-April 2020, with none identified from the end of July until September where a few recent cases have emerged”, which suggests that once testing was finally mandated for discharge from hospitals to care homes in mid-April, it was helpful in preventing outbreaks.

Before mid-April, testing was also limited to those with symptoms – which was disastrous, given the potential for unwitting transmission from currently asymptomatic people. Hancock claimed that asymptomatic transmission was not appreciated at the point that decisions were being made, but that is nonsense. The minutes of the Sage meeting held on 28 January dwell on the issue – rightly so because this was one of the most important questions that would have determined what was needed to control the outbreak. The minutes state: “There is limited evidence of asymptomatic transmission, but early indications imply some is occurring.” Did Hancock read this? If so, why did he not recognise that the consequences for the most vulnerable under his care would be catastrophic?

As it happens, a more reasonable explanation for the discharge policy is on offer, but if anything it reflects even less well on the early handling of the virus. The recent experience of the pandemic in northern Italy had made it clear that a serious surge of infections was headed towards the NHS, and planning for that meant that beds needed to be freed up. This surge was the consequence of delaying locking down until after a large wave had become inevitable. Hancock claims that to have taken action earlier would have meant “overruling scientific consensus” – which Stephen Reicher, a member of the independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), described as “quite simply untrue”.

When it comes to the consensus, I cannot claim to know the mind of every expert at the time, but I do know that I was very far from alone during February and March 2020 in my very great concern for the UK, which was escalating with every passing day of inaction. As revealed in texts between the prime minister and Dominic Cummings, the former aide warned in March about the seriousness of the situation facing care homes and drew attention to the delay in rolling out testing.

Taken together, this collection of excuses unintentionally reveals the mindset that led to the UK’s abysmal pandemic response throughout 2020. Whenever scientists conveyed the message “We don’t know exactly how bad it is, but it might well be really bad and you should act accordingly,” the political response was: “So you mean it might not be that bad,” and to avoid making hard decisions. Uncertainty is not a reason for inaction, and unpalatable realities cannot be subservient to hopeful fantasies when you are dealing with a pandemic.

Among those realities is the Delta variant, which has just delayed England’s long-promised reopening on 21 June. Even with the successful vaccine rollout, in which the UK has excelled, reopening was always expected to lead to more cases, more hospitalisations and more deaths. The question is how much vaccination blunts those worse outcomes, and if you’re comfortable with that price – because people will still get sick and die, just in fewer numbers. Brilliant and urgent work by scientists with PHE has shown that the Delta variant is more transmissible, with some limited ability to evade vaccination, and is more dangerous. The most recent briefings suggest infection with Delta is about twice as likely to land you in hospital, especially if you are unvaccinated.

Setting a deadline for the end of a pandemic ahead of time is the very definition of offering a needless hostage to fortune. I am hopeful that vaccination will limit the resulting damage from Delta in the UK, even as I feel desperately anxious for those parts of the world not lucky enough to have ready access to vaccines.

Epidemiologists will be the first people to admit that managing a pandemic is extremely difficult. But the UK has not simply made a few errors here and there: there has been a persistent and pathological pattern, exemplified by Hancock, of serious mistakes from which nothing is learned, and which are soon repeated. As a result the country is waking up to yet another false dawn. Close to 130,000 have already lost their lives so far. They deserved better. So does the country.

Dr William Hanage is a professor of the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease at Harvard

[SasaS]

The CureVac thing is a major disappointment, this was going to be an easy to store mass produced poundland Pfizer.

On the other hand, with all the hesitancy around the world, it doesn't really matter, does it.