Covid - coming out of Lockdown 3 - no politics, less opinion and more facts and information.

[Rivercider]

18 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

At the moment, in large swathes of London, somewhere between 2 and 3% of people must be “off sick” with it*, and there will be others staying home to look after poorly members of their families, and I think (subject to correction) that there will be some people isolating due to contact too, although the rules on that have changed, so I’m a bit at sea with it.

 

I’m not sure if I should or shouldn’t be surprised, but I am surprised, that that level of “out of action”, maybe 5% of the populace on top of other, routine, “unavailability”, is having the impact it is so quickly. I guess it’s all about “the one key person”, but I thought it would need 10% out of action to really start causing problems, and that it wouldn’t become apparent as a problem until between Christmas and new year.

 

* (2000 cases/100k.week) x 1.5 weeks off each.

Thinking back to my traincrew rostering days, we were constantly in need of drivers working some of their rest days to cover the vacancies. Around xmas time some of the regular RDW men were not always making themselves available which might account for some of the train service cancellations even if it does not explain any additional stress elsewhere,

 

cheers

Edited December 22, 2021 by Rivercider
spelling

[John M Upton]

The week or two leading up to Christmas has always been poor for train crew availability with the perfect storm of less rest day working combined with more people on adhoc annual leave as they have to use it up before 31st December. 

 

The Covid debacle has merely made it a bit worse this time around.

[Oldddudders]

Cautious optimism?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59758784

 

[LNER4479]

5 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Cautious optimism?

 

... for those of us with our glasses half full?

[Oldddudders]

22 minutes ago, LNER4479 said:

... for those of us with our glasses half full?

Cheers!

[Nearholmer]

Fingers crossed.

[Reorte]

Certainly milder on the balance of probability, and although I'd say just about all evidence there is points towards that none of it adds up to beyond reasonable doubt yet. Whether the increased transmissability will outweigh that, in this country, is still entirely up in the air right now I feel, although a week after Omicron numbers really took off the lack of any noticeable change in admissions rates is reassuring, but not to be counted on.

 

[Hobby]

Glass half empty...

[Andy Kirkham]

I feel like we're in the final scene of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, set in the Daily Express office. Everyone sitting silently wondering which of the two alternative editions they will be running.

 

[Bernard Lamb]

1 hour ago, Oldddudders said:

Cautious optimism?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59758784

 

Or an alternative spin.

The vaccines are working as well or even better than expected.

Bernard

[Nearholmer]

Part of what I’m waiting for is clarity on whether “vaccine affect” has been factored out of the numbers. My expectation is that it has been, but it would be good to understand that properly.

 

Of course, it will be the net of severity, transmissibility, vaccine effectiveness, mandated behaviours, and voluntary behaviours that will decide what happens in the round, but it must be important to understand the contribution of each, otherwise wrong moves could be made on the chessboard.

 

Anyway, fingers doubly crossed now: my youngest brother has it, and is feeling distinctly ropey.

[APOLLO]

1 hour ago, Andy Kirkham said:

I feel like we're in the final scene of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, set in the Daily Express office. Everyone sitting silently wondering which of the two alternative editions they will be running.

 

 

A superb film.

 

Brit15

[Hobby]

12 hours ago, Andy Kirkham said:

I feel like we're in the final scene of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, set in the Daily Express office. Everyone sitting silently wondering which of the two alternative editions they will be running.

 

How times have changed, no-one does it silently these days, as this thread proves!!  

Edited December 23, 2021 by Hobby

[hayfield]

 

Yesterday the Essex director of health was being interviewed by the BBC, he was asked about how many non vaccinated people were in hospital with covid, he said there was no up to date figure, but the last information he received was that 60% of hospital admissions were of those who had not been vaccinated. He had no numbers of the make up of those on ventilators

 

More importantly he called the boosters/third dose a game changer. He was talking I think about antibodies (certainly something in the bodies immune system to protect us) without the booster in the numbers were in low hundreds, with the booster a staggering increase of above 26,000.

 

Also I think the make up of the boosters differs from the earlier vaccines.  

 

He made the point about even if this strain is milder the sheer additional volume of cases could cause an issue, also the amount of NHS staff becoming ill will affect the NHS's ability to treat people.

 

The clear message is to get fully vaccinated

 

Looking on to the continent all of a sudden the states which have kept covid at bay recently (Spain and Portugal) are now also seeing growth in infections, and France is not far behind the UK with daily infections. The good news is the the recent measures taken by Germany and Italy are seemingly supressing the numbers

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, Hobby said:

How times have changed, no-one does it silently these days, as this thread proves!!  

I don’t reckon they ever did, it’s just that the internet, for good or ill, allows us all to grumble, mumble, and think out loud with global visibility, whereas “in the old days” there was only a series of grumbling, mumbling, thinking out loud islands, in pubs, coffee shops, round kitchen tables, at the parish pump etc, and letters to newspapers. Both of the latter still exist, of course.

There was also “pamphleteering’, which seems to have died-out, but was popular with the fringe-bonkers, as well as more moderate people; you only have to study the huge range of pamphlets produced during the English Civil War period to know that totally implausible conspiracy theories have a long history!

[EddieB]

It seems that the BBC has caught up with the cold/flu-like symptoms we'd reported (and experienced):

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59768366

 

I see that Wales is keeping the isolation period at ten days.  That seems sensible when it would appears that omicron only gives a positive test result (LFT/PCR) for a much shorter period, yet remains symptomatic for longer - is the decision in England for convenience or because infectiousness has actually been measured against LFT testing? 

 

[Andy Hayter]

My understanding is that the LFT looks for live virus so it is measuring whether you are likely to transmit or not.  So 2 consecutive negative tests  24 hours apart is a good indicator of not being infectious.

[Nearholmer]

More cautiously optimistic news about severity of omicron https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59769969

 

I was mentally comparing with this day twelve months ago while wrapping presents earlier. There might be uncertainty, and only room for cautious optimism now, but we are in a sight better place than we were then.

 

Locally we'd gone from Tier 2, which from what I recall wasn't much different from now in restriction terms*, to the newly invented Tier 4, which was getting on for a complete lockdown, in the space of two days over the preceding weekend, no household mixing, including on Christmas Day, and case rate was 800+/100k.week, with nobody vaccinated. It was obvious that complete lockdown was needed, that the elderly were at high risk, and I was already saying to the children that they would probably be home-schooling in January. It felt very bleak. And, it didnt add to confidence that HMG seemed not to be able to read the runes properly.

 

Now, its beginning to feel as if we are facing a month of disruption of all sorts of services, that schools could still shut, but probably on a "too few teachers" basis, perhaps not everywhere all at once, and with vaccine inside us we're much better placed to put up a fight when (not if) we are exposed to it. I do expect that more will need to be done to prevent hospitals overloading, but I wonder if it might be feasible to do that in a locally targetted way. The rate of rise of cases is ruddy steep, but to me it looks more linear than exponential, which would be very good news if correct. And, although HMG are clearly arguing/debating among themselves, there doesn't seem to be the same air of "trapped in the headlights" as last year. Still worried about younger bro though.

 

*Having checked, it actually was a lot more restricted than now. Rule of Six outdoors, no household mixing indoors. I now recall drinking coffee in the garden on a very cold day with my BiL.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 23, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Andy Hayter]

AS I see it, the dilemma is that the NHS is a bit like a careless person stepping out into the road.  There are two possibilities:

1.  To be struck by a heavy and dangerous but relatively slow 40t truck doing 20mph (Delta and earlier versions)

or

2.  To be struck by  light weight super fast sports car doing 70mph.  (Omicron)

 

Which is going to do the most damage?

 

As described probably option 2 but I think the balance (speed of transmission versus weight of the impact) are still not clear.

 

[Nearholmer]

26 minutes ago, Andy Hayter said:

As described probably option 2 but I think the balance (speed of transmission versus weight of the impact) are still not clear.

 

Not clear enough, certainly.

[EddieB]

3. A Greyhound bus going in the opposite direction?

[EddieB]

Interesting piece here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-59697807 that suggests that highly mutated variants (such as omicron) could have developed during longer periods of infection in the immuno-compromised (such as HIV sufferers).

 

It's a plausible explanation of why omicron may have long remained undetected while accumulating some thirty substitutions in its spike protein.  As such, it would indicate evolutionary drift at predictable rates, tending towards loss of virulence and supporting hypotheses that omicron is a milder form.

[Nearholmer]

I recall exactly the same hypothesis being proposed to explain the emergence of Delta: a person ill enough to be carrying a huge viral load for a very long time, acting as the breeding ground that led to a variant arising. Unpleasant, to put it mildly.

[Joseph_Pestell]

On 22/12/2021 at 18:46, Oldddudders said:

Cautious optimism?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59758784

 

 

Milder for most...but not all.

 

I got a sad wake-up call earlier this week about the ongoing seriousness of this pandemic. The guy who did plastering work for one of my cousins has died from Covid. He was just 37 years old and fully vaccinated.

[Jol Wilkinson]

On 25/12/2021 at 13:40, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Milder for most...but not all.

 

I got a sad wake-up call earlier this week about the ongoing seriousness of this pandemic. The guy who did plastering work for one of my cousins has died from Covid. He was just 37 years old and fully vaccinated.

Tragic news but is it known which variant he was suffering from? Delta still has a significant impact and has played a major part in the 147,000 Covid related deaths in the last two years.

 

My brother in law tested positive for Covid on 24 December and has suffered from little more than moderate cold symptoms. Being fully vaccinated and boosted he  continued to socialise regularly in his local pub.