Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

[degsy]

Australia and NZ have withdrawn from the rugby league World Cup over here.

They are going to be hermits for years and years if they don't sort out their vaccine drives.

They have kept cases far lower than any other "Westernised" countries but will need to keep themselves isolated and in perpetual lockdowns.

Re. the RL World Cup...I can't speak for the kiwis but the large laddish tendency in Aussie RL cant be trusted to stay in a lockdown bubble from one day to the next...allegedly

 

[BlueToff]

Is the UK’s pingdemic good or bad? Yes.

A covid surge was meant to be the moment that digital contact tracing apps finally came into their own. So why are so many Britons turning sour on the technology?

www.technologyreview.com

I'd say good in that it shows the app can work and if people definitely followed the rules then that could see it be controlled.

I'd say bad in that it shows how bad the rules are, hence a lot of people not or not wanting to follow them (me included btw, though I am isolating right now given I have COVID, bar a short dog walk round the block on an eve) and it shows the flaws with contract tracing.

 

[BlueToff]

That's the trouble when poorly run government starts playing politics with matters of health. Which they clearly have with vaccines both nationally and internationally to detract from massive failings in the basics of rudimentary good governance... I get the gamble just don't go down the hubris route this knobhead government always does, it's amateurish and does not install confidence.

It's not detracting.

We didn't need vaccines because they cocked up. We needed vaccines because unlike what some on here seem to think, they're the only way out - every country on earth is showing that. Look at everyone's wet dream Japan, unable to even have crowds at the Olympics, look at Aus, with its cities in snap lockdowns.

Every country needs the vaccines.

Now, where the UK cocked up initially meant they needed, absolutely desperately, to get the initial vaccine roll out dead on. And thankfully they did. They could have bought themselves time by being better last year, but they didn't. It doesn't make up for what they messed up on at all, it's just good that they got it right.

 

[BlueToff]

So my mate/colleague yesterday who’s double jabbed and needs to do his PCR to travel to work which he got done in the hospital in Spain where he lives got a positive result! He didn’t believe it so went to another place and paid for another test and got the results this morning, Negative! WTF is going on? He’s now taking a 3rd test to see if he can travel! Problem with this is if he’s negative he will still be part of the statistics for a positive test and will add to the numbers of ‘new cases’ when it’s simply not true..

Utter Bollocks!

PCRs can pick it up in your system for months.

And yes, they're unreliable, just like LFs. They're just supposedly less unreliable.

It's crap.

 

[JLW]

PCRs can pick it up in your system for months.

And yes, they're unreliable, just like LFs. They're just supposedly less unreliable.

It's crap.

Then doesn’t that make the reported Covid cases unreliable?

 

[BlueToff]

Starting early on the drink today pete. At the risk of getting you to post a load more crap, the misreading of my posts above breaks down as follows:

The 12 weeks point was around two things - how the vaccines received emergency use authority, and how the plan (which was for two doses given over four weeks) was discarded overnight. AZ were able to support a 12 week gap, but Pfizer did not support it and said as much. These changes were brought in without solid data, and without informed consent from the people taking the jab. Now I know you are happy with this because the Tories did it, but there were real risks run with many very vulnerable people’s health.

The “fully vaccinated” point was tied into the above - we had loads of first dose people with partial protection, but not as many with full protection. At the time these were 70 year olds and above and we were locked down; they were the ones put at risk. If we’d dosed at the same rate as initially planned, we’d have ended up at exactly in the same place we did (given the same number of vaccines) but without running that risk with the most vulnerable.

Finally my point about track and trace is, and has always been, that this governments handling of it has been a disgrace. The system I’d like is nothing like what we have, would have cost less, worked better and wouldn’t have caused the pingdemic.

It wasn't about that.

There were lots more people vulnerable than just over 70s (as people liked to point out last year when people asked why everyone had to lockdown rather than just older people or people with underlying conditions).

My mum and dad aren't clinically vulnerable, yet both had received their first dose by the end of Feb and mid- March respectively.

That wouldn't have happened if they were still clocking through over 70s.

It meant a lot to a lot of people to get them sooner. Just to have that peace of mind if anything that they had some added protection.

Every single step in this process is a gamble, because it's all unprecedented.

 

[BlueToff]

Then doesn’t that make the reported Covid cases unreliable?

Of course it does mate, but what can we do?

Deaths are still counted 'with COVID'.

People are still tested for COVID when they go into hospital even with no symptoms and would go on 'as COVID'.

To balance it though, there'll also be people who haven't tested positive who do have the virus, or people who have the virus, know they have it, so - and this is like me - what's the point in me going and doing a PCR? For some massive need to be pestered by test and trace and so I can think 'oooh, I'm one of those numbers'.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is it will eventually cancel out to be around about that ballpark of figures.

 

[degsy]

In May Covid was the 24th leading cause of death in the UK. 91% of them already had preexisting conditions.

Don't think it's jump up on the leader board in July

I think that's what the Govt. is hoping for, ride it out now and keep pushing, pushing, the vaccine before the winter infections hit.

 

[LinekersLegs]

... and if we were changing our policy based on that work it would be great; I just thought doing it in January without any of this work being done was ludicrous.

At the time an epidemiologist at irrc Cambridge recommended doing something like quarter of the Pfizer jabs on the manufacturer’s 3 week timescale and then the rest on longer timescales as a randomized trial and then you’d have the logistical benefit of most of the jabs being spread out but still be able to get fast data on whether there were any drawbacks and get informed consent of the participants.

Waiting until July to get data, and tbh this is still a small sample as only 500 people, is far from ideal.

 

[Nymzee]

 

[LinekersLegs]

 

[LinekersLegs]

 

[LinekersLegs]

Presumably Wales‘ better vaccination rate is helping at least part of this

 

[tsubaki]

It wasn't about that.

There were lots more people vulnerable than just over 70s (as people liked to point out last year when people asked why everyone had to lockdown rather than just older people or people with underlying conditions).

My mum and dad aren't clinically vulnerable, yet both had received their first dose by the end of Feb and mid- March respectively.

That wouldn't have happened if they were still clocking through over 70s.

It meant a lot to a lot of people to get them sooner. Just to have that peace of mind if anything that they had some added protection.

Every single step in this process is a gamble, because it's all unprecedented.

They probably would have had first jabs around that date; maybe a bit later but not that much (the issue was around Pfizer, not AZ).

Also don’t forget doing it as per the original plan would have given people who *were* clinically vulnerable confirmed levels of protection of the Pfizer vaccine. Spreading it around might have been more popular but I still think it ran a great deal of risk without a justification.

 

[LouReedwalkonthewildside]

Crazy queuing in supermarkets, we've progressed from toilet roll, it's fresh foods and beer that people are snapping up.
It's end of days.

I was speaking to a friend of my missus the other day and she was predicting Armageddon again in the shops, she came to this conclusion because when she was at Morrison's the shelves were empty of bottled water, I pointed out that maybe they were empty because of the hot weather we were having, she then looked at me as if I was stupid.