Coronavirus

[River Don]

Looking like good news on the vaccination front. We were up to 320,000 in a single day yesterday. If we managed that, just five days a week from now to Easter, we'd pretty much have all the top 9 most vulnerable categories covered with a first dose.

And I'd expect the daily rate to continue going up and there to be some vaccinations over the weekend.

24/7 is the way to go, I’d certainly go in the middle of the night to get vaccinated

It does look like pharmacies are going to be enrolled into the vaccine effort too.  The bigger Superdrug and Boots are already on the cards but before long I could see your local doctors chemist doing them as well.

[BillyStubbsTears]

If we are able to carry on at this rate or better, that is going to be a very big success. Hats off to all involved if it does come off.

[albie]

Good explainer in the FT about why it is not just a bad flu season;
https://www.ft.com/video/0cd6f9f9-664e-40f9-bad4-dde59d7c746c

Not sure if the vid is free to view, so some of the charts are in his twitter feed;
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch

One for the stattoholics!

[River Don]

News today that the first large regional vaccine centre is set up at Askham Bar to the SW of York too.

So long as they get the manufacturing and distribution up to speed, I think we're going to see a real national effort to get the inoculations done quickly.

[BillyStubbsTears]

When I talk about the importance of countering misinformation, it is precisely t**ts like Toby Young here that I'm thinking about.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55676037

The man gets paid to churn out demonstrable shite.

He's just been picked up on it by the Press Watchdog and in his response, publicised by the f**king BBC here without comment, he peddles another lie that he's been picked up on countless times.

He says the WHO initially said the IFR was 3.4%.

They didn't. Ever.

They said in the early stages the CASE Fatality Rate was 3.4%. That is a totally different thing as he damn well knows.

He also said yesterday that everyone now agreed that the IFR was actually 0.025%. And he used the difference between those two numbers to pour scorn on people who accept the word of "experts" when they can obviously get stuff so wrong.

But hold on. We've had very nearly 100,000 COVID deaths in the UK. If the IFR was 0.025%, that would mean that 400 million people in the UK had been infected.

But that's what he does. Peddling dangerous b*llocks for the desperate and gullible to pick up and repeat.

Oh aye. And this Govt gave him a job looking over education standards a while ago. That's right. A man incapable of telling truth from lies or doing primary school maths.

[BillyStubbsTears]

In fairness the person who has most taken You g to task for his tsunami of bullshit is the Tory MP Neil O'Brien. Keep an eye on him. He looks like a good one.

[Donnywolf]

Some humour (maybe)

[idler]

Don’t give up the day job John.
Oh, you already have.

[selby]

  Stated on Talk Radio that over 300k vaccinations were achieved on Thursday I haven't heard it anywhere else though.
   If true brilliant, The centre at York is already working.

[turnbull for england]

When I talk about the importance of countering misinformation, it is precisely t**ts like Toby Young here that I'm thinking about.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55676037

The man gets paid to churn out demonstrable shite.

He's just been picked up on it by the Press Watchdog and in his response, publicised by the f**king BBC here without comment, he peddles another lie that he's been picked up on countless times.

He says the WHO initially said the IFR was 3.4%.

They didn't. Ever.

They said in the early stages the CASE Fatality Rate was 3.4%. That is a totally different thing as he damn well knows.

He also said yesterday that everyone now agreed that the IFR was actually 0.025%. And he used the difference between those two numbers to pour scorn on people who accept the word of "experts" when they can obviously get stuff so wrong.





But hold on. We've had very nearly 100,000 COVID deaths in the UK. If the IFR was 0.025%, that would mean that 400 million people in the UK had been infected.

But that's what he does. Peddling dangerous b*llocks for the desperate and gullible to pick up and repeat.

Oh aye. And this Govt gave him a job looking over education standards a while ago. That's right. A man incapable of telling truth from lies or doing primary school maths.


About 10 years ago we had a family trip to Legoland and I helped carry a pushchair for a lady down some steps , she thanked me and said I was far more thoughtful than her husband, who had left her to struggle. He promptly appeared and was none other than Toby Young took great pleasure in  beating them hands down on the fire engine ride too

[BillyStubbsTears]

  Stated on Talk Radio that over 300k vaccinations were achieved on Thursday I haven't heard it anywhere else though.
   If true brilliant, The centre at York is already working.

https://www.drfc-vsc.co.uk/index.php?topic=275849.msg1017036#msg1017036

[BillyStubbsTears]

This is an important read.

https://mobile.twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1350416428025962498

Both hopeful (in terms of how quickly the excellent vaccination progress should start to bring the death toll down) but also sobering (in terms of how many of the serious hospitalisation cases are in younger people, who won't be vaccinated for some time yet).

This is the first time it's dawned on me that it's not just about preventing COVID deaths. Until everyone over 35-40 is vaccinated, we will still need some form of lockdown, or the NHS still gets overwhelmed.

[River Don]

Some more positive news, a few extracts from an article in the paper.

Britain will be able to vaccinate the entire nation against dangerous new Covid strains within four months after a £158m super-factory opens later this year, The Telegraph can disclose.

Dr Matthew Duchars, chief executive of the Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre (VMIC), revealed the Oxfordshire facility will be capable of producing 70m doses of an emergency vaccine manufactured entirely on British soil.

Currently under construction at the Harwell Science & Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire, the VMIC was first conceived in 2018 and originally planned to open in 2022. When the Covid pandemic struck, the UK government pumped a further £131 million into the not-for-profit company to bring the project forward by a year.

Much of the Pfizer and Oxford vaccine doses currently being rolled out in the UK are made in factories in Belgium and the Netherlands.

[ravenrover]

Raab speculated that a relaxation of the current lockdown would be a return to the Tier system possibly late Feb but more likely late March

[BillyStubbsTears]

Raab speculated that a relaxation of the current lockdown would be a return to the Tier system possibly late Feb but more likely late March

The big question is, why was this lockdown delayed so long? We knew from early December that something fundamentally different had started happening from late November, and that cases had started increasing again despite the lockdown-lite. What logic was being applied, in those circumstances, to justify easing, not intensifying the lockdown measures?

If we had kept new cases down at 12,000 a day as they were at the start of December, we would, with the vaccines taking effect, have been able to move back to the Tier system much earlier, and 10-20,000 people who have died or are going to die over the next 6 weeks would be alive.

It's part of the consistent pattern of response. Hope for the best and don't plan for the worst. Failing to learn the key lesson over and over again - that if you don't get ahead of the curve, this virus hits you f**king hard. And you don't save your economy by delaying the hard decisions and crossing your fingers. That is guaranteed to make the damage worse than acting hard and early.

Fortunately it does look as though the vaccine distribution process has been better managed. But by the time that makes a real difference, we will have had by a long way the highest death toll and worst economic hit in Europe. And it didn't have to be that way.

[River Don]

I heard a government spokesman explaining to Adrian Chile's that they could not bring in restrictions on flights from Brazil because there wasn't enough data yet to support doing it. When they had the data and they were sure restrictions were necessary then rest assured they would it swiftly.

Chile's replied with some exasperation why can't we just do it now? The answer was we must look at the data first.

It was Friday and I think that was the afternoon that they finally decided to toughen access at airports up.

And I think one of the problems is highlighted right there. They won't anticipate. They need proof to do anything. With a virus that requires swift action, such an approach is literally fatal.

[BillyStubbsTears]

News on the reduction in new positive tests continues to look about as well as we can hope. It's beyond doubt now that there has been a sustained reduction in new positives, following the peak around the turn of the year. Over Xmas and the New Year, new cases were going up by 10% a day, which equates roughly to a doubling every week. Frightening territory. At the moment, the new cases are falling by about 2.5-4.5% a day, which means they will halve every 15-30 days. Long way to go, but it looks like the peak in new cases is gone and the peak in hospitalisations and deaths should be coming very soon. Hopefully, this is as bad as it is going to get.

[i_ateallthepies]

Raab speculated that a relaxation of the current lockdown would be a return to the Tier system possibly late Feb but more likely late March

The big question is, why was this lockdown delayed so long? We knew from early December that something fundamentally different had started happening from late November, and that cases had started increasing again despite the lockdown-lite. What logic was being applied, in those circumstances, to justify easing, not intensifying the lockdown measures?

If we had kept new cases down at 12,000 a day as they were at the start of December, we would, with the vaccines taking effect, have been able to move back to the Tier system much earlier, and 10-20,000 people who have died or are going to die over the next 6 weeks would be alive.

It's part of the consistent pattern of response. Hope for the best and don't plan for the worst. Failing to learn the key lesson over and over again - that if you don't get ahead of the curve, this virus hits you f**king hard. And you don't save your economy by delaying the hard decisions and crossing your fingers. That is guaranteed to make the damage worse than acting hard and early.

Fortunately it does look as though the vaccine distribution process has been better managed. But by the time that makes a real difference, we will have had by a long way the highest death toll and worst economic hit in Europe. And it didn't have to be that way.

BST, if you look at it in the context of their declared policy of 'running it hot' all of your questions are answered.  I suppose we can then switch our disbelief to asking how can an unethical, amoral set of bas**rds get away with knowingly doing this to us.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Pies.

Agreed. Sunak was driving policy through the Summer and Autumn. He was the one who apparently arranged for the arch COVID denying academics (Gupta, Tegnel, Heneghan) to see Johnson to convince him not to lock down in September, when this wave first got out of control. Three academics who have been consistently wrong on the key points, personally chosen by Sunak.

And then, when it all got out of control, Sunak vanished off the scene. He was away from Parliament, and Parliamentary scrutiny for over a month. He's clearly got a future ahead of him, knowing how to vanish and let others take the flak for his monumental f**k up.

[River Don]

Sunak also went out on a limb and suggested the public get on with things despite covid and of course there was eat out to help out. That initiative alone must've been responsible for a lot of unnecessary infections.

Is he still considered a rising star of the tory party?

He's certainly lying low these days.

[Filo]

Sunak also went out on a limb and suggested the public get on with things despite covid and of course there was eat out to help out. That initiative alone must've been responsible for a lot of unnecessary infections.

Is he still considered a rising star of the tory party?

He's certainly lying low these days.

Richest man in HoC, telling us all to pay our way, and abandoning loads of self employed

[BillyStubbsTears]

Tentatively, I'm thinking there is some VERY good news starting to show through the COVID data.

All the way through the summer and autumn, the rise and fall in the new daily COVID deaths tracked the new positive cases from three weeks ago almost exactly. That makes sense because it takes a while between catching the virus, getting a positive test and people dying.

Following that trend, we would have expected the daily deaths to top out in about 2 weeks time, because the new positive cases didn't top out till last week. And looking at where we were at the end of last week, another 2 weeks of the daily deaths rising would have taken us up to an average of maybe 1400-1500 deaths per day.

However, it is starting to look like the new deaths might have actually topped out over the weekend. If this is the case (and let's hope it is) it is difficult to see what the cause is. It might be the first effect of the vaccine, but I doubt it. The vaccine takes a couple of weeks to take effect, and the people who died over the weekend were infected maybe three weeks earlier. So no vaccinations after about 10 Dec shouldn't have had time to have an effect on those numbers. Unless (top of the head thinking) there are some people who would normally die very quickly after getting infected and some who die very late, with 3 weeks just being an average. Perhaps the vaccine has now started to kick in, in protecting those who would have died very quickly.

Whatever the reason, here's hoping this is a real effect. if it is, it will probably mean 10-20,000 fewer deaths between now and March than we'd have otherwise had.

[River Don]

I think it takes two weeks to start seeing immunity from the vaccine and the first vaccines I knew of were taking place just a few days before Christmas Day. These were pretty much all vaccines of the over 80s, which is the most at risk group.

I guess we should expect the first vaccines were starting to become effective a couple of weeks ago. And the vaccination program started out more slowly, so I wouldn't have thought there are a vast amount of immune people yet. I can't think of anything else that would be bringing the figures down though.

[River Don]

Unless those two inhibitor drugs they licensed recently are having an effect as well.

[wilts rover]

This latest wave has seen a lot more younger people (under 50's) in hospital than the first wave. Although they might become seriously ill they are less likely to die.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55586994

So together with RD's post about improved treatments, you have a pretty good explanation as to why the survival rate has been better this time around.

[drfchound]

Agreed wilts.
I was listening to a senior COVID nurse on the tv a few days ago saying that this time round, although the threat to life is the same, the hospital staff are more aware of how to keep patients alive.
That, added to your points, helps enormously.

[ravenrover]

I heard it was 2 weeks for the Pfizer and 3 weeks for the Oxford to take effect

[drfchound]

I heard it was 2 weeks for the Pfizer and 3 weeks for the Oxford to take effect

Also, I believe there isn’t 100% immunity from the virus after having the jabs.

[normal rules]

Indeed. The vaccines don’t necessarily stop you getting the virus, they just lessen the effects rendering you less likely to be hospitalised. They also do not prevent you passing on the virus.

[BillyStubbsTears]

NR.
Initial evidence seems to show that the vaccines are having a big effect on reducing transmission of the virus,through reducing the viral load in the lungs. If that is correct, it's a game changer.