peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Apparently it’s also peaked in that hotspot area of South Africa…we are allowing the Ferguson’s to frighten us all over again. I think the hospitality trade should take some of these scaremongers to court….
Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!
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Apparently it’s also peaked in that hotspot area of South Africa…we are allowing the Ferguson’s to frighten us all over again. I think the hospitality trade should take some of these scaremongers to court….
I don't think so because they brought in the half-arsed mask mandate first, which was equally nonsensical.
I just think they want to be seen as 'doing something' ahead of the COVID inquiry. So if it does go bad again they can say we learned and 'acted early'.
But what they're lacking is any sort of evidence it will go bad again. There's literally nothing whatsoever except the mutations in the strain; but we've had a lot of strains that have mutations that would aid transmissiblity or could evade vaccine response in theory and they've ended up as nothing.
Mu COVID variant: All you need to know about the new UK coronavirus strain - BBC Science Focus Magazine
There have been no new instances of the Mu coronavirus variant in the UK, but the strain continues to be monitored as a variant of interest.
It really should be evidence led - if it's rampaging and hospitalising/killing people, fine, act. If it isn't, don't.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
hahahaha……
Bingo.
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
And the baby, don’t forget the baby…..Boris using the dead cat strategy again…..
Ghost Rider
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Stuck out for me when Chris whitty was going through his data yesterday and all his graphs for deaths / hospitalisations were clearly decreasing.
Surprised nobody else made a noise about that, the data they presented was the opposite of justification for restrictions!
Cases going up and deaths going down, hmmmmmmmmm.
Yeah but CASES GOING UP LADS STAY HOME SAVE LIVES
There is an obsession with cases and it needs to stop. I don't understand why case numbers are even reported on the news, it makes no sense.
Agree the boosters have been very effective at dropping case and hospitalization rates in those age groups covered so far. However, although less, cases are still related to hospitalizations - prior to boosters for Delta looks like ~ 4% of UK cases were hospitalized and that was reduced to ~2% when a decent chunk of vulnerable were covered.
As I understood it you didn’t think the restrictions put in before plan B, ie the masking, were effective in any case so presumably you don’t think them being dropped would make any material difference on Omicron vs Delta spread. As we’ve discussed previously I believe they do make a moderate difference.
As for plan B I’d generally agree with the analysis below.
However originally I was commenting on the “remove restrictions to promote Omicron over Delta” which I don’t think holds up mathematically but am open to being convinced otherwise if you have data/modeling to demonstrate it.
Indeed, I don't think the mask mandate does sod all, because vast majority of transmission is at home and people will bring it back to those settings from work/school etc. Not going into it again but it really is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a virus spreads exponentially - you either cut routes of transmission or you don't; there's no middle ground. Masks stop one to one transmission to a degree but not exponential community/home transmission.
I don't think removing restrictions will make it outcompete Delta quicker, because they'll both be subject to the same scenario in terms of transmission opportunity. But what I am saying is that with Delta pretty much flatlining in terms of hospitalisations/deaths without restrictions then it doesn't make sense for any restrictions for a variant that evidence suggests is less lethal.
I think a lot of the concern at least in the research/academic world revolves around the number and type of mutations Omicron has and what that could led to when it spreads/replicates especially as cold and flu viruses are circulating and folks have simultaneous infections.
People hear it's not "deadly" and let their guard down.
More spread/infections > more replication > more mutations > potential for a mutation that evades current vaccine and/or causes more severe disease/high fatality rate.
I think we need to get rid of this idea that it can be stopped spreading. It can't. Even with 100% vaccine uptake it's impossible. The reason we locked down at all is because the human race as a whole had no developed immune response to a new threat. But we do now - the vast majority of the UK population has a T-cell response bare minimum, if not antibody. Until we see evidence of that being evaded to a significant degree, we can't just strip away civil liberties every time a scientist sees something possibly alarming under a microscope. If we did that, you'd be doing it for the current Bird Flu outbreak, Swine Flu, hell, we'd be doing it every year for the normal flu.
And COVID will always mutate. Forevermore. There's no stopping it but we're still acting like it can be stopped. All you can do is delay it, but given we now have vaccines then delay is unnecessary until they are broken, and even then 'delay' would be simply to adapt the vaccine to it.
ForeverBlue92
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I see Scotland are asking people to sack off Xmas lol
We’ll agree to disagree on masks and their role in community transmission
This is your comment that gave me that impression on outcompete.
“Rather than restrictions, we should be doing the exact opposite IMO. It's a golden opportunity to see off Delta completely.”
As for ” with Delta pretty much flatlining in terms of hospitalisations/deaths without restrictions then it doesn't make sense for any restrictions for a variant that evidence suggests is less lethal.”
I think there was a worry that the “booster effect” against Delta was changing even before Omicron which , combined with higher than normal non Covid seasonal pressures, could lead to trouble for the NHS
Add in a worry that South Africa hospital rates (much younger population, lot of natural immunity vs vaccine acquired and some of that from a Beta wave) would not be the same in Uk and Europe.
I honestly don’t know what the right decision was to make, just glad I didn’t have to make it.
FWIW I have high confidence that Omicron is more transmissible via a combination of immune evasion and inherent transmission but very low confidence on what exactly that balance is. Similarly the data from South Africa is encouraging re severity but I don’t know how much of that will be duplicated in UK/Europe/US given the different variables.
Hoping for the best but planning for worse would generally be my approach with such low confidence in data but I appreciate that others can come to different conclusions based on the exact same data.
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