UK Politics - Wanted: 50,000 Lorry Drivers. Long hours, Crap Conditions, All The Schadenfreude You Can Eat

[Pebble thats Stubby]

29 minutes ago, Werthead said:

223 COVID deaths today, the highest total since March.

The direction of travel remains upwards, although more haphazardly then at earlier points in the pandemic. The question is at what point is further action warranted?

Is your Question  When should we take further action?   or When will we take further action?

 

They will be vastly different dates.    I'm betting the later will be 22nd December?

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

223 COVID deaths today, the highest total since March.

Aye. And the Johnson Variant is beginning to emerge, apparently. 

My brother told me today that the UK accounted for 20% of new reported global cases. Turns out that figure got fact-checked down to 15%, but still. For a nation of our size, that is fucking wild.

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The direction of travel remains upwards, although more haphazardly then at earlier points in the pandemic. The question is at what point is further action warranted?

Who knows with these ghouls? Whatever ends up happening, it will likely happen far too late, and cause countless avoidable deaths. Y'know, just like last time. 

[The Anti-Targ]

I hear that the age group with the highest rate of infection is the 12-18s. And here some people said there would be no surge in England when schools went back after the summer break. The good thing is that while there is absolutely still a link between case numbers and deaths, the proportion of deaths to cases is much lower, I assume the same applies to hospitalisation in proportion to case numbers.

If you look at the govts response, in terms of putting additional control measures in place, it's not based on case numbers, it's based on demands on hospitals and deaths. Christmas got canceled in 2020 after the average daily death rate went over 400. At present it is sitting down at about 120, almost exactly the same daily death rate on this day in 2020. If the daily death rate is 120 with a daily case rate in the mid 30Ks, then if the govt is true to form it will only act when the daily death rate goes over 400 for. So assuming the relationship between cases and deaths holds as case numbers rise, you need a roughly tripling of deths for control measures to be put in place, which means a tripling of cases. So a sustained period of 90K cases per day would probably see the govt reacting to try to get numbers down. The UK's current one day record is 67K cases.

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

I don’t suppose there’s a statistic for the number of deaths of fully vaccinated people?

[BigFatCoward]

8 minutes ago, Stannis Eats No Peaches said:

I don’t suppose there’s a statistic for the number of deaths of fully vaccinated people?

From Jan-July 51,281 deaths, 640 for people fully vaccinated. 

I assume the % remains constant ish. 

[Which Tyler]

9 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Aye. And the Johnson Variant is beginning to emerge, apparently.

 

Second Johnson Variant, surely.

Or is Alpha now thought to have been grown elsewhere, and we were just the first to pick it up?

[Heartofice]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

223 COVID deaths today, the highest total since March.

The direction of travel remains upwards, although more haphazardly then at earlier points in the pandemic. The question is at what point is further action warranted?

The question is what action would need to be taken, but also why. So while cases are going back up again, the average age of those testing positive has been the mid to low 20s. The biggest increase in cases has been in the under 20s. 

Most notably that while cases have fluctuated up and down since 'opening up' the death and hositalisation rate has remained pretty consistent. Its also worth mentioning the tuesday death number is always a bit bigger than normal. Its really unlikely the case rate will go up to such an extent that it causes the levels of deaths and hospitalisations to shoot up, especially given the vaccination status of older people and the age of those people who are catching the disease. 

What we probably need to be more worried about is flu. The whole point of opening up early was so that flu season and covid season don't intersect too much and over burden the NHS. Had we waited even longer to open up we might be seeing that during the winter. I think we might in fact be in the middle of flu season now actually, just personally knowing the amount of people who have been knocked out by colds, I've had about 3 in the past month, what with kids going back to school and nursery, and a lot of my workmates have had to take time off. 

Clearly the issue with locking everyone away for almost a year is that we aren't mixing and our immunity to other diseases drops off, and flu is probably going to hit us a lot harder than norma.l. 

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

From Jan-July 51,281 deaths, 640 for people fully vaccinated. 

I assume the % remains constant ish. 

Really? 1%? That sounds very low. 

EDIT: Checked, yup that’s correct.

[ljkeane]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

From Jan-July 51,281 deaths, 640 for people fully vaccinated. 

I assume the % remains constant ish. 

Possibly not. One of the reasons suggested for the UK’s high Covid rates is waning immunity from the early vaccination drive so it’s possible that could get worse.

[DaveSumm]

5 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

And here some people said there would be no surge in England when schools went back after the summer break.

To be fair, there was a bit of a bump and then it levelled out more quickly than most thought it would. I’ve been following the figures pretty much daily since all this began and the last 2 months have been the dullest period, cases have just cruised at around 30,000 for a long time. I don’t really understand where this recent spike has come from, maybe just an accumulation of waning immunity and general easing of how worried people are. Half term should help us out a little, but we should probably focus more on booster roll out, which doesn’t seem to have anything like the momentum of the first doses earlier in the year.

[Which Tyler]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

Really? 1%? That sounds very low. 

EDIT: Checked, yup that’s correct.

Bear in mind that that's January through to July -  when Vaccination was in progress.
Most of those deaths would have been in January-March, when vaccination rates were low, especially "double vaccinated + 2 weeks" to get AHARA immunity

[Impmk2]

As the proportion of the at risk groups becomes increasingly vaccinated the number of deaths amongst the vaccinated in those groups increases too.

The extreme example is if you had 100% vaccinated - all the deaths in those groups would be vaccinated. That doesn't mean the vaccines aren't working, just that they're not 100% protective. So no, I doubt the latest data still shows a 1% mortality amongst the vaccinated, as the % of over 65s vaccinated is now very very high.

[Werthead]

8 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

As the proportion of the at risk groups becomes increasingly vaccinated the number of deaths amongst the vaccinated in those groups increases too.

The extreme example is if you had 100% vaccinated - all the deaths in those groups would be vaccinated. That doesn't mean the vaccines aren't working, just that they're not 100% protective. So no, I doubt the latest data still shows a 1% mortality amongst the vaccinated, as the % of over 65s vaccinated is now very very high.

Whilst the percentage of people over 65s vaccinated is very high, they also mostly received their vaccinations over six months ago, so the immunity is starting to wane. They're still better off for getting the vaccination (which will encourage antibodies to be relatively rapidly produced in the event of infection) but the effectiveness does weaken over time. That's why the booster programme is now spooling up, though surprisingly slowly.

Even with the vaccines, the effectiveness in the elderly is not as great as it could be. My doctor said the comparison was that someone in their nineties who got the vaccine had their chances of avoiding COVID hospitalisation or death improved to that of around someone in their sixties without the vaccine: an excellent improvement that would dramatically improve things, but the chances of someone in their sixties dying from COVID or getting seriously ill is still nontrivial.

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The question is what action would need to be taken,

At the moment it looks like reinstating the basic measures - working from home where possible, reinstating mask wearing on public transport and in shops, encouraging social distancing where possible and reinstating the hand washing facilities where they've grown lax - would have a positive impact whilst not having to close schools or colleges or go into a lockdown (firebreak or full-blown). Most countries with a far lower infection rate and number of deaths than the UK have simply maintained those measures all along, and are asking if we've gone stark raving mad for abandoning them.

Britain's problem all along has been its insistence on having this binary state: either in full lockdown or things are completely normal and nobody needs to worry. We've done poorly at maintaining the interim stage of having normality but with a few trivial adjustments that would dramatically improve public health.

[Spockydog]

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

At the moment it looks like reinstating the basic measures

They are not going to do any of that.

[Derfel Cadarn]

The Tory donors who own all that city centre real estate won’t stand for more working from home! 

[Heartofice]

22 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Whilst the percentage of people over 65s vaccinated is very high, they also mostly received their vaccinations over six months ago, so the immunity is starting to wane. They're still better off for getting the vaccination (which will encourage antibodies to be relatively rapidly produced in the event of infection) but the effectiveness does weaken over time. That's why the booster programme is now spooling up, though surprisingly slowly.

Even with the vaccines, the effectiveness in the elderly is not as great as it could be. My doctor said the comparison was that someone in their nineties who got the vaccine had their chances of avoiding COVID hospitalisation or death improved to that of around someone in their sixties without the vaccine: an excellent improvement that would dramatically improve things, but the chances of someone in their sixties dying from COVID or getting seriously ill is still nontrivial.

At the moment it looks like reinstating the basic measures - working from home where possible, reinstating mask wearing on public transport and in shops, encouraging social distancing where possible and reinstating the hand washing facilities where they've grown lax - would have a positive impact whilst not having to close schools or colleges or go into a lockdown (firebreak or full-blown). Most countries with a far lower infection rate and number of deaths than the UK have simply maintained those measures all along, and are asking if we've gone stark raving mad for abandoning them.

Britain's problem all along has been its insistence on having this binary state: either in full lockdown or things are completely normal and nobody needs to worry. We've done poorly at maintaining the interim stage of having normality but with a few trivial adjustments that would dramatically improve public health.

Well again the issue is really not about cases any more. If cases are mostly amongst the young and deaths and hospitalisations are steady and at a reasonable level then there isn’t really much more to do. This is really it now I think. It’s not really clear at what point we would expect to stop measures. Hate to quote Boris but if not now, when? 
 

Sure more could be done to get boosters for the elderly but it’s hardly encouraging that we need to do that so soon ( and also not quite so clear if we are using Israel data as well).

Then there is more data coming out that suggests natural immunity from previous infection has basically the same protection against infection as AZ and Pfizer vaccines. So it’s becoming a little unclear what more can be done or if the measures to reduce the numbers of cases have too many negative consequences in comparison to any imagined benefits.

The measures you’ve mentioned, like hand washing for instance will probably have little to no impact given  what we’ve learnt about the virus. 

Encouraging people to work from home is a fine idea, but don’t pretend it has no down sides, with city hospitality and lunch outlets going out of business, office space going empty and turning the cities in ghost towns. 
 

So really the question is whether the NHS gets overwhelmed during flu season, not really Covid 

[DaveSumm]

53 minutes ago, Impmk2 said:

As the proportion of the at risk groups becomes increasingly vaccinated the number of deaths amongst the vaccinated in those groups increases too.

The extreme example is if you had 100% vaccinated - all the deaths in those groups would be vaccinated. That doesn't mean the vaccines aren't working, just that they're not 100% protective. So no, I doubt the latest data still shows a 1% mortality amongst the vaccinated, as the % of over 65s vaccinated is now very very high.

Yea I remember this coming up before, hence why I was surprised the deaths were as low as 1.2%. So crudely speaking, the vaccine is 98.8% effective at preventing death?

[Impmk2]

@Werthead I'm not saying vaccine waning isn't a thing. Just that you wouldn't expect the % of vaccinated deaths to remain constant even if it wasn't.

@DaveSumm it's late here and stats aren't my strong suit tbh, but I think that analysis would only work if you had equal sized groups vaccinated vs unvaccinated over the time period.

[The Anti-Targ]

It may be more complicated than that. It might be that IF you get sick from COVID-19 after being vaccinated your chance of death is actually higher than if you get sick without having been vaccinated

Say you have a population of 100,000, 80,000 are vaxed, 20,000 unvaxed. You have a daily case rate of 100 for disease X of which 80 are unvaxed and 20 are vaxed. That means an infection rate among the vaxed of 0.25/1000 people, and for the unvaxed its an infection rate of 4/1000 people. A substantially different infection rate.

If that 20 vaxed people who catch the virus, 5 get sick of the 5 who get sick 2 go to hospital, of the 2 in hospital 1 dies. So that's a infection death rate of 5% for vaxed people

For the 80 unvaxed who catch the virus, 30 get sick, 15 go to hospital and 4 die. That is also an infection death rate of 5%.

For the overall population the chance of dying from COVID 19 is 0.00125% for vaxed people, for unvaxed people its 0.02% so that's a 16x higher death risk. But if you wind up catching the virus vaxed or not you have the same chance of dying from disease X.

Note, not a real world example and not even using the COVID-19 rates of infection, just an illustration of how risk calculates different at different stages of disease.

How could a vaxed person getting sick with COVID end up having the same death risk as an unvaxed person? Because death from COVID is more about how your immune system is responding and not about the damage the virus causes.

[Which Tyler]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

At the moment it looks like reinstating the basic measures - working from home where possible, reinstating mask wearing on public transport and in shops, encouraging social distancing where possible and reinstating the hand washing facilities where they've grown lax - would have a positive impact whilst not having to close schools or colleges or go into a lockdown (firebreak or full-blown). Most countries with a far lower infection rate and number of deaths than the UK have simply maintained those measures all along, and are asking if we've gone stark raving mad for abandoning them.

Britain's problem all along has been its insistence on having this binary state: either in full lockdown or things are completely normal and nobody needs to worry. We've done poorly at maintaining the interim stage of having normality but with a few trivial adjustments that would dramatically improve public health.

https://www.facebook.com/aidan.barry.967/posts/1022648724975494