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Coronavirus - the new strain XI

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Tony L said:
We’ve got to hope for either a vaccine or effective treatment. It can’t be impossible, it has to happen.
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See Stephen's post; that really is a hope at the moment, not a given.

Tony L said:
Until that point we need to be smart, i.e. lockdown all but absolutely essential business and services. Certainly re-close all pubs, restaurants, hairdressers as opening them was clearly a disaster. Schools & universities need to work in a totally different way with maybe something like a ‘one week out of three’ split of the population to reduce class numbers by two thirds boosted by Teams/Zoom tutorials, online coursework etc at home. Get human to human contact right down without removing the core functionality.

There clearly needs to be more support for people struggling financially, and I’ve no idea how best to implement that. Maybe a mortgage repayment freeze via banking legislation rather than just helicopter money, I don’t know. Certainly more means testing is needed so the money goes to those at most risk. I don’t see why teachers, social workers etc need be impacted as the core supply/demand remains, and if something such as I describe above was implemented I’d expect more rather than less work. It will be harder and more labour-intensive to work in this restrictive climate.

In other job/business roles anyone who can work from home needs to work from home, by law. There is absolutely zero excuse for going to an office to stare at a computer screen or talk to people on the phone or in meetings. That can clearly all be done from home. The people who are going to be the most exposed are small public-facing business owners; cafes, restaurants, pubs, clubs, hairdressers, fitness instructors, sport centres etc etc. Logically they just have to be very firmly in the ‘closed until there is a vaccine’ category. They need a lot of support.
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Yep, all good and fits in with your personal strategy of "not going out into the world until it's all over" but another 6 months of social isolation from everyone isn't going to work for everyone. I'm lucky, I have a partner I live with with and I have a job I can do from home but the situation since March has affected me. I hate not having regular social interaction with others in the workspace (30 years of doing it tends to make it quite important and no, Zoom or Facetime or other technical solutions are not the same) and the only relief I get is the occasional trip into the office or to go out on a Saturday, have a coffee and a bun and mooch around a couple of shops. If I lose that until March next year, that is probably not all I will lose; I will probably also lose my s**t. I know I'm not the only one. Lockdowns only serve one purpose; they kick the can down the road in the (possibly vain) hope a vaccine is around the corner. I get the feeling that many people are now coming to the conclusion that a thin veneer of normality and risk of catching it is a small price to pay if it avoids mental and emotional health issues.

I would be interested to know how much of the current rise in cases is due to spread from cafes, pubs being open and how much is due to too many family members meeting up and so forth. The cafe I visit has very clear rules on social distancing, mask wearing and provides hand sanitizer gel so seems very low risk. Certainly lower risk than 20 people piled into a room for a family birthday.
 
This paper submitted to SAGE pretty much refutes the 'frivolous testing' claims being made here and elsewhere:

"Conclusions: Our results show that current national COVID-19 testing capacity is likely to be exceeded by demand due to baseline cough and fever alone. This study highlights that the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic must ensure that a high proportion of people with symptoms request tests, and that testing capacity is immediately scaled up to meet this high predicted demand."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.03.20187377v1.full.pdf
 
Seeker_UK said:
Se Stephen's post but that really is a hope at the moment, not a given.



Yep, all good and fits in with your personal strategy of "not going out into the world until it's all over" but another 6 months of social isolation from everyone isn't going to work for everyone. I'm lucky, I have a partner I live with with and I have a job I can do from home but the situation since March has affected me. I hate not having regular social interaction with others in the workspace (30 years of doing it tends to make it quite important and no, Zoom or Facetime or other technical solutions are not the same) and the only relief I get is the occasional trip into the office or to go out on a Saturday, have a coffee and a bun and mooch around a couple of shops. If I lose that until March next year, that is probably not all I will lose; I will probably also lose my s**t. I know I'm not the only one. Lockdowns only serve one purpose; they kick the can down the road in the (possibly vain) hope a vaccine is around the corner. I get the feeling that many people are now coming to the conclusion that a thin veneer of normality and risk of catching it is a small price to pay if it avoids mental and emotional health issues.

I would be interested to know how much of the current rise in cases is due to spread from cafes, pubs being open and how much is due to too many family members meeting up and so forth. The cafe I visit has very clear rules on social distancing, mask wearing and provides hand sanitizer gel so seems very low risk. Certainly lower risk than 20 people piled into a room for a family birthday.
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Winter is going to be psychologically challenging. This thing hit as we were going into a fine Spring and while freedom of movement was highly restricted for months, it wasn’t cold, dark and raining most of the time. This is going to be challenging for any government to control, never mind one that’s shown itself to be ill equipped to lead the public and manage in a crisis.
 
TheDecameron said:
Winter is going to be psychologically challenging. This thing hit as we were going into a fine Spring and while freedom of movement was highly restricted for months, it wasn’t cold, dark and raining most of the time.
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And it wasn't the second time we have been asked to do it in the space of twelve months.

TheDecameron said:
This is going to be challenging for any government to control, never mind one that’s shown itself to be ill equipped to lead the public and manage in a crisis.
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People will reevaluate what their priorities are and £10k fines irregularly and inconsistently applied by an overstretched police force is not going to change that.
 
tiggers said:
As for lockdown I wish we'd stop using the stupid term, we didn't have a lockdown, we had some restrictions, Spain had a lockdown
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Who defines what a lockdown?

My tenant in a major city in Spain, is in regular contact with with, and what he described as their restrictions were pretty similar to what i observed here. of course YMMV
 
gintonic said:
Who defines what a lockdown?

My tenant in a major city in Spain, is in regular contact with with, and what he described as their restrictions were pretty similar to what i observed here. of course YMMV
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Kids were not allowed outside at all! And so on..
 
gintonic said:
his played in the playground of the apartment block where my flat is.
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Well maybe there were different rules for different areas as my friend's kids in Barcelona did not go out for 7 week I think it was.

Anyway even if that's not the case a lock down is not a lock down if everyone can still go out in the name of doing their thing.
 
tiggers said:
Well maybe there were different rules for different areas as my friend's kids in Barcelona did not go out for 7 week I think it was.
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my flat is in central Barcelona, between Hospital Clínic station and Universitat station on the metro. Kids played out every day - he tells me.
 
Tony L said:
We’ve got to hope for either a vaccine or effective treatment. It can’t be impossible, it has to happen. Until that point we need to be smart, i.e. lockdown all but absolutely essential business and services. Certainly re-close all pubs, restaurants, hairdressers as opening them was clearly a disaster. Schools & universities need to work in a totally different way with maybe something like a ‘one week out of three’ split of the population to reduce class numbers by two thirds boosted by Teams/Zoom tutorials, online coursework etc at home. Get human to human contact right down without removing the core functionality.

There clearly needs to be more support for people struggling financially, and I’ve no idea how best to implement that. Maybe a mortgage repayment freeze via banking legislation rather than just helicopter money, I don’t know. Certainly more means testing is needed so the money goes to those at most risk. I don’t see why teachers, social workers etc need be impacted as the core supply/demand remains, and if something such as I describe above was implemented I’d expect more rather than less work. It will be harder and more labour-intensive to work in this restrictive climate.

In other job/business roles anyone who can work from home needs to work from home, by law. There is absolutely zero excuse for going to an office to stare at a computer screen or talk to people on the phone or in meetings. That can clearly all be done from home. The people who are going to be the most exposed are small public-facing business owners; cafes, restaurants, pubs, clubs, hairdressers, fitness instructors, sport centres etc etc. Logically they just have to be very firmly in the ‘closed until there is a vaccine’ category. They need a lot of support.
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My next door neighbour is a junior doctor on the front line and she says they've already learned a lot about managing the illness during the first wave, even though there is no new treatment or vaccine yet.

Regarding how to support people during the crisis, it helps to stop thinking about money (essentially abstract) and start thinking about real stuff. As long as people have food, shelter, heathcare and education, we can get through this. The rest of the paraphernalia of the modern economy can wait. That specifically includes mortgage payments, debt repayments (including interest) and rents - the government needs to remove people's anxiety about all of those things by declaring an amnesty, for as long as it takes.

How long it does take is very much up to the government. With an effective test and trace strategy, efficiently implemented, fine tuning of lockdowns becomes possible so we will not have to bring everything to a grinding halt every time there's a surge.
 
tiggers said:
Completely agree that is what we need to do now, sorry if my post implied otherwise, but in the longer term we are going to have to find a way to live with it.
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It's worth revisiting the famous Imperial College paper from March because this kind of scenario is influencing planning, I think. On page 12 is the modelling of a series of 'lockdowns' followed by periods of lesser restrictions. The model shows lockdown being in place 2/3 of the time. This has been picked up again by the Guardian this morning

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https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...083ee3ac1f3879#block-5f6854288f083ee3ac1f3879
 
gavreid said:
It's worth revisiting the famous Imperial College paper from March because this kind of scenario is influencing planning, I think. On page 12 is the modelling of a series of 'lockdowns' followed by periods of lesser restrictions. The model shows lockdown being in place 2/3 of the time. This has been picked up by the Guardian this morning

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/im...-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...083ee3ac1f3879#block-5f6854288f083ee3ac1f3879
Click to expand...

Yes I remember that, I think it has to be a balancing act, but one that is carefully considered as we need to live with this while ensuring those most vulnerable are protected to some degree and yet without being so draconian that we don't create more problems than we solve. One thing I am sure of is that doing what we are doing now which seems to be lurching from one disaster to another with no real forward planning or thought (at best) is not the answer.
 
Seeker_UK said:
See Stephen's post; that really is a hope at the moment, not a given.



Yep, all good and fits in with your personal strategy of "not going out into the world until it's all over" but another 6 months of social isolation from everyone isn't going to work for everyone. I'm lucky, I have a partner I live with with and I have a job I can do from home but the situation since March has affected me. I hate not having regular social interaction with others in the workspace (30 years of doing it tends to make it quite important and no, Zoom or Facetime or other technical solutions are not the same) and the only relief I get is the occasional trip into the office or to go out on a Saturday, have a coffee and a bun and mooch around a couple of shops. If I lose that until March next year, that is probably not all I will lose; I will probably also lose my s**t. I know I'm not the only one. Lockdowns only serve one purpose; they kick the can down the road in the (possibly vain) hope a vaccine is around the corner. I get the feeling that many people are now coming to the conclusion that a thin veneer of normality and risk of catching it is a small price to pay if it avoids mental and emotional health issues.

I would be interested to know how much of the current rise in cases is due to spread from cafes, pubs being open and how much is due to too many family members meeting up and so forth. The cafe I visit has very clear rules on social distancing, mask wearing and provides hand sanitizer gel so seems very low risk. Certainly lower risk than 20 people piled into a room for a family birthday.
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You have my sympathies. I'm solitary by nature but the lockdown definitely affected my mood. Since I found a local cafe with a small outdoor area I've felt much better.

I'm not pinning my hopes on a vaccine but I think that, as a society, we should insist on a high-functioning test, trace and isolate system that provides data at a sufficiently granular level to justify strict local lockdowns before we return to anything like normality. Obviously, this needs to be supported by other government action such as proper financial support for people who are forced to self-isolate.

Because I'm diabetic, my own personal calculation is slightly different: as well as effective TTI, I would like to see evidence of an effective treatment (short of a vaccine) before I relax my guard too much.
 
Vallance and Whitty are speaking now - Vallance starts with Spain and France linking daily case rates to death rates (as we've been arguing about here) his data are a week old already. I won't copy all the slides here but you get the drift...

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Cases are rising in every age group in the UK (less than 8% of the population have been infected, double in London)

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Hospitalisations are increasing, as we've also noted here (coincident with Schools returning in September, having remained flat through the August holiday season)

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...0802afd87fa501#block-5f687c8f8f0802afd87fa501

Importantly Whitty says "Fourth, we can address the virus through science." I don't know if this is a dig at the politicians...

Update on vaccine development:

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...0802afd87fa517#block-5f687e418f0802afd87fa517

end.
 
We all need to find our way through this, Drood; stay safe.

For me though, I can't see this ever going away and in my darkest mood I can see this going on from now until it kills me one day.
 
Whitty talking about the need to balance health risks with damage to the economy.

Why the f— is he saying this. That’s a political balancing act, to be managed and explained by politicians.

These 2 guys. Civil servants using their scientific credentials to lend authority to the political decisions of their masters. Undermining their scientific credentials in the process, undermining trust in science generally.

There needs to be some more clarity about what their roles are.
 
I missed the presentation, but from what I can tell from the news reports they at least made the concept of exponential growth perfectly clear along with the fact the NHS will become overwhelmed if things are allowed to continue as-is. We now need to see some real political leadership from Johnson, Hancock etc...

PS Yeah, right.
 
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