UK politics: Veni Vidi Vaccinati

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Stonehenge: I came for the history, I stayed for the orgies.

Guerilla marketing for tourist traps in the times of corona. But as a potential customer, and I can't stress this enough, you should really keep Boris out of the sex.

[Pebble thats Stubby]

Vaccination rollout for Phase II has been announced.   Sorry teachers you don't get priority.

• all those aged 40 to 49 years
• all those aged 30 to 39 years
• all those aged 18 to 29 years

[BigFatCoward]

5 minutes ago, Pebble thats Stubby said:

Vaccination rollout for Phase II has been announced.   Sorry teachers you don't get priority.

• all those aged 40 to 49 years
• all those aged 30 to 39 years
• all those aged 18 to 29 years

I cant understand why priority isnt being given to high risk occupations. I'm alright as my role isnt risky, but my staff are at risk. And I think everyone by and large would support it. Every police officer could be done with 1/3 of the daily vaccines being delivered. 

[Heartofice]

24 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I cant understand why priority isnt being given to high risk occupations. I'm alright as my role isnt risky, but my staff are at risk. And I think everyone by and large would support it. Every police officer could be done with 1/3 of the daily vaccines being delivered. 

Ok but what does ‘at risk’ mean? At risk of catching it? Lots of people are going to catch it, the real question is what happens to you once you catch it. If you are in a vulnerable group then you should receive the vaccine by that point

[BigFatCoward]

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Ok but what does ‘at risk’ mean? At risk of catching it? Lots of people are going to catch it, the real question is what happens to you once you catch it. If you are in a vulnerable group then you should receive the vaccine by that point

At risk of realistically being unable to avoid it no matter how many precautions you take. Unlike a significant % of the rest of the population. Also long term health impacts are worse for people who need a degree of physical fitness to do their job. 

[Pebble thats Stubby]

2 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I cant understand why priority isnt being given to high risk occupations. I'm alright as my role isnt risky, but my staff are at risk. And I think everyone by and large would support it. Every police officer could be done with 1/3 of the daily vaccines being delivered. 

I think the main reason is where do you draw the line at what is a Key worker is and how you manage the list.

I think its very reasonable to give the vaccine to all emergency workers,  so that is Ambulance (already done) fire and Police.   that is probably easily managed as the government should already have a list of those people.

 

Opening it up to school teachers, grocery workers, anyone in food production  starts the - Does this person count?  how to manage the list?  how do you prove someone is entitled to the vaccine?  What order of occupations gets it first? 

 Do I qualify as a Key worker?   I work in a factory and make stuff.  I can't work from home as I need to support the plant and we need a physical presence (ok when on early shift I work from home 3 days, as others are in the office) as a factory worker I'm vulnerable, but I'm one of the most protected in the plant as I rarely have to go out on the shop floor.  but others in the plant are working in close proximity to lots of people.

Working out exactly who should get it by occupation is really hard and some people will get it who shouldn't and others will miss out.  it is also open to abuse.

Right now its done via the NHS and our GP's know the ages and health conditions of their patients so its very manageable and fast.   Doing something different would require a big IT government database/project  and we don't have a good track record with those.  + it would need someone other than the NHS to really run the thing.  so lets say vaccine rollout by Serco.     I can see it taking longer to vaccinate everyone and more expensive.

 

 

[Maltaran]

3 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I cant understand why priority isnt being given to high risk occupations. I'm alright as my role isnt risky, but my staff are at risk. And I think everyone by and large would support it. Every police officer could be done with 1/3 of the daily vaccines being delivered. 

I think they decided the bureaucracy of working out which jobs qualified would take too long

[Spockydog]

3 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I cant understand why priority isnt being given to high risk occupations. I'm alright as my role isnt risky, but my staff are at risk. And I think everyone by and large would support it. Every police officer could be done with 1/3 of the daily vaccines being delivered. 

Totally agree. Rozzers, bus drivers, and frontline health care workers should have been amongst the first in line.

[Heartofice]

Ok but the question is do you prioritise vaccinations based on people’s jobs or how likely they are to die and get hospitalised from it? Makes sense for health care workers because less people die if they are protected but otherwise you are putting people’s lives at risk

[Which Tyler]

3 hours ago, Maltaran said:

I think they decided the bureaucracy of working out which jobs qualified would take too long

As mentioned on the Covid thread - they're right.

They thought "healthcare professional" would be nice and easy, they were wrong.

It took them 4 weeks to realise that private practice exists.

Even now they got thrown a curve ball when they discovered that some people are self-employed!

Basically, wherever you choose to draw the line, there's going to be cases on the edge, and cases of disagreement.

Eg "let's vaccinate teachers" sounds easy.

But don't forget hat private schools exist (like this government would forget that)... So do teacher's assistants... And admin staff who might sit it on a few lessons... Groundskeepers and cleaners? Private tutors? How about nurseries? Even the single-handed ones? If nurseries, what about parent collectives or babysitters?

 

Absolutely that teachers, and emergency services should be vaccinated early on, but is not worth the hassle, and delays, that trying to do so would cause? We don't live in that ideal world where it's easy.

[DaveSumm]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Ok but the question is do you prioritise vaccinations based on people’s jobs or how likely they are to die and get hospitalised from it? Makes sense for health care workers because less people die if they are protected but otherwise you are putting people’s lives at risk

I can’t find anything too clear on how much more likely key workers are to get Covid, if at all (and that would obviously change depending on the occupation), but the hope would be that by vaccinating the people who are interacting with other people much more, you take the sting out of the R number and save more lives in the long run. 

I said some months back, and it’s still my chief concern, that the coming months of opening back up could be the greatest risk of catching it for most people. To put some crude numbers on it, if 10% of 1000 people were dying before, and we vaccinate older people and all go out, and then 1% of 10,000 people are dying, we’re in the same boat. The actual spread doesn’t come down until those people doing the interacting get vaccinated, and I was hoping there’d be a quicker way to that goal by targeting them ahead of certain age groups.

[Heartofice]

8 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I can’t find anything too clear on how much more likely key workers are to get Covid, if at all (and that would obviously change depending on the occupation), but the hope would be that by vaccinating the people who are interacting with other people much more, you take the sting out of the R number and save more lives in the long run. 

I said some months back, and it’s still my chief concern, that the coming months of opening back up could be the greatest risk of catching it for most people. To put some crude numbers on it, if 10% of 1000 people were dying before, and we vaccinate older people and all go out, and then 1% of 10,000 people are dying, we’re in the same boat. The actual spread doesn’t come down until those people doing the interacting get vaccinated, and I was hoping there’d be a quicker way to that goal by targeting them ahead of certain age groups.

Well the point is that if you vaccinate the demographic of people who die or get hospitalised from the virus first then there should be less concern about the spread.
 

You can do rough numbers like you did but the virus doesn’t affect everyone equally, it overwhelmingly affects older, more vulnerable people. That point has to keep being restated because I think it seems to get lost.

[DaveSumm]

12 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well the point is that if you vaccinate the demographic of people who die or get hospitalised from the virus first then there should be less concern about the spread.
 

You can do rough numbers like you did but the virus doesn’t affect everyone equally, it overwhelmingly affects older, more vulnerable people. That point has to keep being restated because I think it seems to get lost.

I don’t disagree, I just wish we could say ‘we can go out now because it’s not spreading’ rather than ‘we can go out now, you might get it but you’ll probably be fine’. My rough numbers were just trying to convey that, despite the drastically reduced chance of death/severe cases in younger people, there is still an amount of spread that would result in the same figures.

[Heartofice]

13 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t disagree, I just wish we could say ‘we can go out now because it’s not spreading’ rather than ‘we can go out now, you might get it but you’ll probably be fine’. My rough numbers were just trying to convey that, despite the drastically reduced chance of death/severe cases in younger people, there is still an amount of spread that would result in the same figures.

Ok but what would that number be? If you have vaccinated everyone is phase one, and that accounts for 99% of all Covid deaths.. then just how many people have to catch the virus all at once for it come anywhere close to making up those numbers? 

[Which Tyler]

7 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Well the point is that if you vaccinate the demographic of people who die or get hospitalised from the virus first then there should be less concern about the spread.
 

You can do rough numbers like you did but the virus doesn’t affect everyone equally, it overwhelmingly affects older, more vulnerable people. That point has to keep being restated because I think it seems to get lost.

That only works if you think in terms of Dead/Hospitalised or Healthy - which completely ignores things like Long Covid (though at least "Hospitalised" is now recognised as a bad thing)

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

That only works if you think in terms of Dead/Hospitalised or Healthy - which completely ignores things like Long Covid (though at least "Hospitalised" is now recognised as a bad thing)

Well I do think that hospitalisations and deaths are by far the most important metric so yes.

[The Anti-Targ]

5 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

That only works if you think in terms of Dead/Hospitalised or Healthy - which completely ignores things like Long Covid (though at least "Hospitalised" is now recognised as a bad thing)

I don't think long COVID has really reached political consciousness yet. I listened to an interview with the interviewer having recovered from [mild?] COVID several months ago talking to a doctor (didn't catch names), the interviewer mentioned that his is still suffering from low energy and fatigue. The doctor was surmising that there is a chronic effect of the infection on your cell's mitochondria. Used the analogy of a 3 year old cell phone that holds charge for half or less as long as when it was new. Also said it appears people who had mild COVID get it in higher proportion than you would expect, and reckons it's possibly because people treated it like a mild cold and so didn't rest and carried on as normal, and this wore out the batteries. Just a hypothesis at this point I imagine, and not as bad as people with serious COVID who will be living with scarred lungs and diminished lung capacity for life. But this could significantly affect a lot of people's quality of life, and productivity, for an extended period. 

From an academic perspective it will be interesting to see what effect long COVID has on countries' QALY, after the pandemic is over. Assuming it becomes endemic, and possibly not ever eradicable, long COVID will also be a thing we continue to see, and it will be a significant driver of needing to continue vaccinating even when the risk of significant outbreak events has been eliminated.

In some respects, long COVID is an argument for reversing the age order of vaccination. You vaccinate young people who have more years of quality life left, and so benefit a great deal more from not risking long COVID. I think if you pumped all relevant data into Skynet it would probably conclude that avoiding long COVID in the young benefits society more than avoiding a few more deaths in the older folks. Though not long after it would start launching the nukes and the terminators.

[mormont]

If I had to name one thing that has contributed to making the pandemic worse than it needed to be in the UK, it's the attitude that 'really we only need to worry about old-timers who might die, otherwise COVID is no big deal'.

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, mormont said:

If I had to name one thing that has contributed to making the pandemic worse than it needed to be in the UK, it's the attitude that 'really we only need to worry about old-timers who might die, otherwise COVID is no big deal'.

How so?

[JoannaL]

21 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

In some respects, long COVID is an argument for reversing the age order of vaccination. You vaccinate young people who have more years of quality life left, and so benefit a great deal more from not risking long COVID. I think if you pumped all relevant data into Skynet it would probably conclude that avoiding long COVID in the young benefits society more than avoiding a few more deaths in the older folks. Though not long after it would start launching the nukes and the terminators.

That would only make sense if really a lot of people of all age groups get long covid. While it is now proven consensus that long covid exists, I do not know of any study that gives detailed numbers of how high the percentage is of infected people that get it. Is it 10% or only 1% or only 0,01%?