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Coronavirus - the new strain XXII

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:rolleyes:
 
^Interesting that the airline believes it can run this in the UK without losing too many customers.
 
kensalriser said:
Feels as though you're inventing scenarios here that are just clouding the picture and are probably spurious, eg not locking down at all will lead to all medical treatment being seriously impacted, and the increased number of suicides during the pandemic is a tiny fraction of covid deaths.

All I'm doing is looking at what has happened and what is happening and extrapolating the very likely direction of travel from there. It's very simple. Not mitigating will almost certainly lead to a situation that is overall very much worse than mitigating. That's pretty much where all informed (ie professional and qualified) opinion is at.
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Correcting myself, it turns out the suicide rate actually decreased in 2020 (caveats apply, see link). So the narrative that covid has caused excess suicides is a myth.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula.../suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2020registrations
 
Andrew C! said:
Just back from Human League in Nottm. Sporadic mask wearing, but we kept ours on.
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Well done!! I of course wouldn't have been there and certainly not for Human League. Even if Joni re-appeared in her stunning 1965 guise, I wouldn't be there. You can't catch viruses from CDs.
 
hc25036 said:
..and better than 2 million on New Years Day....
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It 'won't' of course, not least because there isn't the testing capacity, that didn't occur to me when you said this yesterday. Positivity rates will start to climb and we should see cases reaching an apparent peak after Christmas but then the hospitalisations will just continue to rise...
 
kensalriser said:
Feels as though you're inventing scenarios here that are just clouding the picture and are probably spurious, eg not locking down at all will lead to all medical treatment being seriously impacted, and the increased number of suicides during the pandemic is a tiny fraction of covid deaths.

All I'm doing is looking at what has happened and what is happening and extrapolating the very likely direction of travel from there. It's very simple. Not mitigating will almost certainly lead to a situation that is overall very much worse than mitigating. That's pretty much where all informed (ie professional and qualified) opinion is at.
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I genuinely wasn’t trying to cloud the picture. Simply pointing out that the options for locking down are not a no-brainier, and there are various factors that need considering in the mix before any such decision is taken. This isn’t controversial. I heard a report on R4 this morning that SA experience is starting to suggest Omicron isn’t causing anything like as much severe disease. It’s early days, so we need to keep the lid on until we know more, but there is always a tipping point where the solution creates more problems than the disease and we need to remain alive to that.
 
If the vaccines are found to offer very little protection from Omicron in terms of transmission and severity then we are almost back to March 20 and a national lockdown will be the only way of preventing an intolerable number of deaths over the coming months.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I genuinely wasn’t trying to cloud the picture. Simply pointing out that the options for locking down are not a no-brainier, and there are various factors that need considering in the mix before any such decision is taken. This isn’t controversial. I heard a report on R4 this morning that SA experience is starting to suggest Omicron isn’t causing anything like as much severe disease. It’s early days, so we need to keep the lid on until we know more, but there is always a tipping point where the solution creates more problems than the disease and we need to remain alive to that.
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Agree with all that - the snag of course is keeping a lid on a variant as incredibly spread-y as omicron.
 
paulfromcamden said:
Agree with all that - the snag of course is keeping a lid on a variant as incredibly spread-y as omicron.
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I'm not sure that I do. It's looking like ca 1% leading to hospitalisation (small numbers at present etc) so there is an urgent and pressing need to control case numbers.

There are currently 10 patients in hospital - let's say they have had covid for about 10 days, that's on the high side for the known case numbers at that time (they could have been hidden of course but they'd have picked up the S gene dropout in testing pretty quickly.) There are 5000 cases now so we could be seeing 50 in hospital early next week and by then it'll possibly be too late to act if they get this call wrong.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I genuinely wasn’t trying to cloud the picture. Simply pointing out that the options for locking down are not a no-brainier, and there are various factors that need considering in the mix before any such decision is taken. This isn’t controversial. I heard a report on R4 this morning that SA experience is starting to suggest Omicron isn’t causing anything like as much severe disease. It’s early days, so we need to keep the lid on until we know more, but there is always a tipping point where the solution creates more problems than the disease and we need to remain alive to that.
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But we are not 'keeping a lid on it'. Work from home if you can, but go to Xmas parties. Schools open, retail open, pubs open, restaurants open.... how is this 'keeping a lid on it''?

Anyway I suspect that the mathematics of the situation will very soon make comments like this irrelevant. This is not a good time to 'wait and see', but we have a government who seem to have this as their mantra, except when they do 'see' they do not learn. It's going to be a huge mess and the really annoying thing is it doesn't need to be.
 
Spraggons Den said:
If the vaccines are found to offer very little protection from Omicron in terms of transmission and severity then we are almost back to March 20 and a national lockdown will be the only way of preventing an intolerable number of deaths over the coming months.
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Sadly I think that is the way it is going. The longer we leave things like they are now the worse it will be of course. We'd better start hoping we can tune the vaccines to better handle this variant sooner rather than later. 2022 is going to be as bad as 2020 I fear.
 
Sky are running a story based on some new South African research on Omicron which suggests two doses of Pfizer offers 33% protection against infection but 70% protection against hospitalisation. This is fairly positive news. I’d be interested to know what the third booster does to those figures. The suggestion is it significantly stacks things in our favour, but I’d like to see some numbers hung on that.
 
I think we do need to calm down a bit. I doubt there’s a single serious credentialed figure who thinks vaccines/infection won’t offer significant protection against severe disease, and balance of opinion seems increasingly to be that there *may* be some decrease in severity, at population level. This thread does a great job of explaining the logic and rounding up some of the evidence:

https://twitter.com/jamesward73/status/1470680953643319305?s=21

The flipside of catastrophism is the idea that it could all be very different, I.e we could just stop Omicron given enough political will. How? Obviously I hate this government and think it’s the worst possible government to be in charge during this kind of crisis. But I don’t know how another government would fare much better. There are going to be massive Omicron waves all over the world and I suspect the outcomes are going to differ according to things like health care capacity, social care, demographics. Short of *absolute* lockdown there’s no way to stop a lot of people catching Omicron in a very short space of time.
 
Tony L said:
Sky are running a story based on some new South African research on Omicron which suggests two doses of Pfizer offers 33% protection against infection but 70% protection against hospitalisation. This is fairly positive news. I’d be interested to know what the third booster does to those figures. The suggestion is it significantly stacks things in our favour, but I’d like to see some numbers hung on that.
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Plug that 70% into the equations in the James Ward thread above…doesn’t sound great! But consider his other points too.
 
“This is v. important as there are currently more 'medically fit for discharge' patients in UK hospitals (about 10000) than with Covid (7400).
This is mainly due to shortage of care workers so govt. should look at giving generous one-off payments
1/3”

https://twitter.com/drraghibali/status/1470669991309717505?s=21

We think of health and social care capacity as being pretty fixed - not much we can do in the short term. But if he’s right then that is a huge thing that could be done right away to massively improve likely outcomes. I’d love the government to be under pressure for this kind of thing rather than speeding up vaccine passports or whatever.
 
Somafunk said:
“So many “Facebook anti vaccine conspiracy theories” packaged up in easy to post outpouring of non scientific utter bile that it’s not worth picking through to educate further.
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Ah 'science', everyone is an expert now. No conspiracy theories in my post that I can see, I just simply think a bit more than you it seems. Best just stay inside for the next twenty years in case you get ill or die and keep sucking up everything your see on TV. I find that is the best way to approach life. Stay safe and all that.

Can't actually have sensible conversations with people on this subject as they lose their sh*t if you disagree.
 
hc25036 said:
I have great sympathy with your situation, but dismissing data from a professional body that generates decent estimations in a difficult field - and provides error estimations if you look at the data in detail - is not the way to go.
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At least your response was measured and reasonable! I didn't say it should be discounted, not at all, just that it should not be taken as 100% accurate.
 
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