advertisement


Coronavirus - the new strain XIX

Status
Not open for further replies.
Did our Sainsbugs run a couple of days ago. No fizzy water, virtually no soft drinks or ice cream, and three freezers used for frozen fruits, cheesecakes, etc were completely empty, almost like they were faulty and had been emptied by staff. This is obviously weather related, but usually stocks are managed a bit better than this.
 
Seanm said:
I’ve read proposals for a system that leans more heavily on lateral flow tests. That’s now a difficult sell because iSage’s scare story
Click to expand...

1. I think questions about the effectiveness and appropriate use of lateral flow tests have been an ongoing discussion since their introduction. There's been plenty on this thread - which I've found extremely helpful.

2. I wonder if you aren't attributing iSage with more influence than they actually have. Most people aren't following their every tweet (or are even aware of their existence!) Lots of folk are just trying to muddle through a difficult time best they can, trying to make some sense of the headlines and what seems to be a different message from the government every day.
 
What I find bizarre is that Johnson insists the app will continue to alert tens of thousands of key workers to self isolate while still allowing the abandonment of masks and night clubs/ indoor venues to fully reopen without mitigation.

Food shortages will be portrayed as pingdemic except in Northern Ireland where they will be EU punishment beating. This government is utterly incoherent.
 
TheDecameron said:
What I find bizarre is that Johnson insists the app will continue to alert tens of thousands of key workers to self isolate while still allowing the abandonment of masks and night clubs/ indoor venues to fully reopen without mitigation.

Food shortages will be portrayed as pingdemic except in Northern Ireland where they will be EU punishment beating. This government is utterly incoherent.
Click to expand...

Maybe their models suggest that the ditching the masks and opening the clubs don't have as much impact as the app.
 
gavreid said:
As you know, soon after a contact LFT will have insufficient sensitivity and there isn't the capacity to offer pcr tests to everyone who doesn't then show symptoms. Positivity is already over 10% indicating a shortage of testing - I think that's why case numbers are saturating. As you know too, once you are positive by LFT you are already highly infectious. More than a third of contacts go on to be positive themselves at the moment - that is why isolation is so critical.
Click to expand...
I wish you'd cut out this "as you know" crap. I don't hold these things in my head and if they're true (pretty big if at the moment isn't it) I don't know their significance and neither do you.

I do know, because it's common sense, that the current system isn't sustainable. Your guys know it too:

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1417960238964256768?s=20

Not least because of this:

https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1417960238964256768?s=20

Now you can say "It's not the detection system's fault it's the pandemic's fault!" but that's ultimately true of everything about the pandemic. The point is what do you do about it. People who actually know about tests think that despite the limitations of lateral flow tests they *can* actually play a key role in a refined testing system, along with other changes. Short article:

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1625

Now whatever about what I know, Pagel certainly knows about this, because she is engaged in dialogue with the author of the article - but not on this issue. iSage have backed themselves into a corner with their usual crude take and will not be able to participate in redesigning the testing system as a result.
 
We already learned that during the first, second and third wave that men were significantly more affected than women. However, I had an online hospital update yesterday where I learnt that 100% of COVID patients in 2 out of 3 Norfolk Hospitals were male. In the third it was 80%. This feels different, even though anecdotal & numbers are (currently) relatively low in this area.
 
gavreid said:
They abandoned the models a while ago - this is all at the behest of big industries and the banks.
Click to expand...

There's something St Dominic said when at the HoC committee which stuck in my mind.

We could not persuade him that if you basically took the view, “Let it rip, and don’t worry about covid,” you would not just get all the health disasters but also a huge economic disaster, because if people are faced with not having any health system—which is what we were faced with in March if we had gone with plan A, or what we would have been faced with if we hadn’t finally put the brakes on in October—then they will lock themselves down out of terror. We could never persuade him of this argument. He also essentially thought that he’d been gamed on the numbers in the first lockdown, and he thought that the NHS would somehow have got through.
Click to expand...

The last thing that big industry and banks want is the public terrified. And I've seen someone post here I think, someone who knew about health, words to the effect that the NHS is a big complex system which can adjust itself and will "get through."

But anyway I think that testimony of Cummings is possibly quite revealing.
 
paulfromcamden said:
1. I think questions about the effectiveness and appropriate use of lateral flow tests have been an ongoing discussion since their introduction. There's been plenty on this thread - which I've found extremely helpful.

2. I wonder if you aren't attributing iSage with more influence than they actually have. Most people aren't following their every tweet (or are even aware of their existence!) Lots of folk are just trying to muddle through a difficult time best they can, trying to make some sense of the headlines and what seems to be a different message from the government every day.
Click to expand...
It has been part of quite a discussion that's been effectively derailed by ISage's bombing campaign a couple of months ago.I don't know how helpful it's been if the upshot is that participants in the discussion are dismissing out of hand what looks like it could be the key element in a redesigned testing system.

I don't believe I'm overestimating the influence of iSage. They have developed a very effective media ecosystem for amplifying what they call "disruptive" information and setting the critical agenda. You don't need to be following every Tweet to find yourself in this ecosystem absorbing its common sense: these guys are on the news every night, publishing in newspapers and journals, working their International contacts, and very successfully manipulating the mainstream understanding of what constitutes "the scientific consensus". The common sense of this thread tracks the media strategy of iSage very closely. We're a special case here because of Gav, but also representative of a lot of mainstream middle class opinion. The dominant critical position on any given issue is the iSage position.

Now, they're pushing on an open door on most things it's true - the basis of their strategy is to beam the prejudices and assumptions of their middle class audience back at them - so in *that* sense you could say I'm overestimating their influence. They are definitely meeting a demand.
 
The current situation is bizarre:

covid restrictions mean i am not allowed to visit my brother in the Royal Free but I could go down to a Covent Garden boozer and stand 6-deep at the bar from lunch time until late at night.
 
mhv said:
We already learned that during the first, second and third wave that men were significantly more affected than women. However, I had an online hospital update yesterday where I learnt that 100% of COVID patients in 2 out of 3 Norfolk Hospitals were male. In the third it was 80%. This feels different, even though anecdotal & numbers are (currently) relatively low in this area.
Click to expand...

At a guess they all went to Wembley, Silverstone or one of the cricket matches!:)
 
hc25036 said:
At a guess they all went to Wembley, Silverstone or one of the cricket matches!:)
Click to expand...

I saw a post today that the football effect has mostly played out now and the m/f ratio in cases has evened up again - except for the more serious cases that remain of course.
 
hc25036 said:
You'll need to show me some data to support that. The vast majority of children have no or few issues with COVID and there are documented serious events like cardiac damage with (roughly) known rates of incidence. No examination before vaccination (probably 2 minutes of a hassled nurse looking at the child) is going to pick up whether they are likely to have a cytokine response that will take out chunks of their myocardium, however rare that is.

You are spot on about mumps etc, except they are all diseases that kill children predictably and at a decently high rate. Childhood vaccination against those is a no-brainer, whereas vaccinating children against COVID potentially offers more protection to adults at a risk:benefit ration that is at best marginal for the children.
Click to expand...

It is very difficult to determine the only correct opinion. It may be really inappropriate to vaccinate children against COVID or to use not vector vaccines for vaccination of children, but vaccines of the type to which mankind has become accustomed by and large. I am not an infectious disease specialist and not a doctor at all, I only voice my thoughts.
 
"Scientists have backed proposals for Covid boosters in the autumn after blood tests on hundreds of people revealed that protective antibodies can wane substantially within weeks of second vaccine shots being given."

The UCL Virus Watch study found that antibodies generated by two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines started to wane as early as six weeks after the second shot, in some cases falling more than 50% over 10 weeks.

This, coupled with the evidence from Israel, suggests that if you had your 2 doses early on then the message has to be to very careful out there just now...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...s-as-study-finds-post-jab-falls-in-antibodies
 
Burrrrrton said:
It is very difficult to determine the only correct opinion. It may be really inappropriate to vaccinate children against COVID or to use not vector vaccines for vaccination of children, but vaccines of the type to which mankind has become accustomed by and large. I am not an infectious disease specialist and not a doctor at all, I only voice my thoughts.
Click to expand...
Hiya, welcome to pfm!
 
gavreid said:
"Scientists have backed proposals for Covid boosters in the autumn after blood tests on hundreds of people revealed that protective antibodies can wane substantially within weeks of second vaccine shots being given."

The UCL Virus Watch study found that antibodies generated by two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines started to wane as early as six weeks after the second shot, in some cases falling more than 50% over 10 weeks.

This, coupled with the evidence from Israel, suggests that if you had your 2 doses early on then the message has to be to very careful out there just now...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...s-as-study-finds-post-jab-falls-in-antibodies
Click to expand...
And the vaccines don't provide 100% coverage to start with: more like 60 to 90%, depending on which vaccine and which study you look at.
Other findings suggest that natural infections generate 10 times fewer antibodies than 2 shots of vaccination.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.


advertisement


Back
Top