Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

The government messaging has been to obfuscate and talk down the risk to children for most of 2021. The claim for so long was that kids didn't spread the disease in schools/nurseries which the data at the time showed was clearly nonsense, especially after Delta hit. It has been pretty clear that it spreads like wildfire through schools and then out into the wider community ever since the mitigations were dropped and, for a time, there was endless quoting of 2 weak PHE studies which claimed to show no evidence of spread among schools. One of these was carried out before Alpha emerged at the end of 2020 and the other was before Delta took over everywhere when most mitigations were still in place! In fact, this is one of the reasons why we didn't see a vaccine rollout among older teens during the summer whereas most of our peers were doing their best to get them vaccinated. These claims continued even after the massive waves in schools before the summer and the same studies were quoted before schools went back where every mitigation was dropped. Oddly enough, they haven't been repeated as much of late because it's so bloody obvious that kids are the ones driving the spread of the virus through the community, picking it up in schools, taking it home and passing on to older family members.

The JCVI advice for children has been very suspect and contradictory at times. They've supposedly been cautious of authorising vaccination because of the rare cases of mild myocarditis the vaccine can cause in the young. However, they somehow completely ignore the fact that infection with Covid causes myocarditis at much higher levels and that's just one of the serious health issues it can cause. They've ignored the wealth of data coming out of the US and other Western European countries and we're left with this halfway house where young teens are allowed to be half-vaccinated - eventually - as the virus rips through their age group. The minutes of their meetings are supposed to be released monthly, but aren't so we're still none the wiser as to their reasoning. JCVI fundamentally seem to think that 'Long Covid' is mostly psychological in nature which is a little odd given the myriad of health issues we know the virus can cause. If you look at the Hart Group (well-funded anti-vax group full of whacko conspiracy theorists) chat leaks which you can find on twitter, you'll see that there appears to have been some collusion with Robert Dingwall, a sociologist who was a member of JCVI earlier in the year. He was clearly liaising with Hart and muddying the waters and I wonder if this steered the approach that way?

As mentioned, I'm pretty certain that they have decided that getting kids infected in large numbers through the warmer months is the better way to keep infections down during the winter, but this seems to be based on assumptions which were guesses which don't seem to have been good ones. We're assured that immunity in children is increasing greatly due to infections, but we now have data that shows the vaccines provide a stronger immune response than prior infection and the numbers of infections are once again racking up following the pause around half-term.

There is going to be a lot for the independent inquiry to unpack when it is eventually commissioned, that's for sure. I'm pretty sure it will be damning for the government and some of the advice which has been given.

Please, please, don't post polls from local Reach newspapers. As I know from our local rag, they are now even worse than when they were owned by Northcliff Media - the very worst sort of clickbait nonsense and pretty much everyone I know does all they can to avoid their web sites. You're unlikely to get a balanced response from any survey on there. The ONS survey from the summer seems a reasonable enough one. Not that it would surprise me if quite a few parents were against vaccinating their children given the vast amounts of unmitigated anti-vaxx bullshite they will have read on social media over the past couple of years.

 

Here's a good article about the way in which we have failed to look after our children in comparison to most of our peers:

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2021/11/how-the-uk-sleepwalked-into-another-covid-disaster

Some inexplicable decisions made in the way the pandemic has been handled.

You should be able to view the article as a freebie without a subscription.

 

It was a placebo, and last Friday, the researchers told me the truth.
I had more lab and clinical exams, and after that, I received the third shot and signed more papers.
My Garmin smartwatch registered continuous stress for 36 hours with no significant temperature variation.
I will keep responding to weekly reports until 2023.
I just relaxed at home and studied a little.
Since yesterday back to work.
Take care!

 

My parents had their boosters a couple of weeks ago (all 3 doses Pfizer). My Mum didn't feel too bad afterwards, but my Dad felt quite poorly the following day - a bit fluey. Fine the day after that.

In the UK, boosters are going to start being given to my age group soon, though I'll have to wait until 6 months after the second dose was given at the end of May. Therefore, I'll be getting the booster during December. Probably a week or two into the month if it is easy enough to book it. I was vaccinated with the AZ so my protection against infection is probably getting relatively low now. Pfizer or Moderna booster will hopefully get me through the winter without much illness, although all bets are off if/when my children catch it.

 

Could be wrong but i think they changed the 6 month wait to 5 months

 

I think that's just for the older age groups where risk of serious illness is so much higher. I'm in my late 40s which they only announced are going to be offered the booster at the start of this week. We're supposedly getting it to reduce transmission as much as health risks (notably, people my age tend to be parents of teens among whom infections are rife).

 

I think that's when you can book it isn't it? i.e. you can book the booster injection after 5 months, a month ahead of when you're due to have it.

 

This must really suck.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boy-11-long-covid-wont-25449083

 

It seems to me that corona either mutated and has caused multiplication somewhere in the respiratory system to become unsuppressed by the existing vaccine regardless of illness or the vaccine was never really able to do so from the start. Whether because of delta or not, R0 and vaccines seem almost completely orthogonal.

If it's because of mutation, then if you want to eradicate the virus, new variant boosters will have to be developed and distributed far faster. As far as distribution is concerned, aerosol in my opinion is the only way.

 

There was never enough of a study done on the effectiveness of the vaccines and then it got politicized so questioning it gets you mocked. But research out of Israel shows the vaccines fall off at about 3% a month. So even if The pfizer vaccine (lets just use this as an example) was 95% effective . It would only be 92% effective after the first month , 89% second , 86% the third and so on. That was against Alpha. IF you look at Delta then Pfizer was only 42% effective and if it had the same rate of decline well that is a recipe for disaster. Moderna ws 76% effective against delta.

There is all this nuance that the average person doesn't understand , they equate vaccine with no longer getting covid and to be fair the media and doctors are making it worse. They label people with the vaccine who get sick as break through cases making it seem like its really rare. But they don't understand what is going on and just go about their lives like nothing has changed.

So my wife had her second shot in april. Her pfizer shot would only be 21% effective against delta right now.

 

The vaccine possibly was never able to stop the disease spreading. We may be looking at a situation where the vaccine provides a person's immune system the opportunity to train up ahead of a real encounter, but beyond that it's down to the individual whether they happen to be vulnerable or not. Quite possibly, everyone who can die from it will and there's really nothing that can be done to stop that at the prevention level - it'll be down to treatments to help those caught out by the DNA lottery.

Really, like flu. We never stop it spreading but just provide a modicum of protection. If we're lucky, SARS-CoV-2 is no different to the other low-risk coronaviruses. It'll always be present, flair up as a series of colds and symptom-less infections, spread very rapidly through the population until everyone's had it within 2 months at which point the virus has no-one left to infect and dies down until the next epidemic.

Hopefully also, long covid is only an initial response and those who go through that end up with suitable protection from subsequent epidemics. Otherwise I guess, like flu, the focus will be preventative vaccinations against the strain doing the rounds.

Personally, I hope there's more investigation into variolation - the deliberate exposure to very low levels of pathogen to train the immune system. We are hearing that SARS-CoV-2 dosage affects the severity of the disease, and lower doses from using masks can result in lower level disease. Now we have the understanding and capacity to measure precise loads and responses, we could see what happens if someone is dosed with...10 virions. Or 100. Or 1x10^9, or whatever. We don't understand the particulars of how much exposure is necessary to start an immune response and how much affects the outcome, only knowing that exposure == disease sometimes with different responses from different people in uncontrolled and very variable exposures. There's the chance that very controlled dosage could provide the fastest way to tackle new viruses, but it's a theory medical science isn't that keen on investigating. The cynic would argue because it'd result in very cheap treatments and Big Pharma would rather sell expensive, complicated vaccines.

It's not just that, but what you are intending to do with the vaccine. If antibodies prevent infection, you can potentially vaccinate everyone and suppress the disease, but then you have to do that every year or whatever cycle if the notion is suppression. The other aspect to vaccination is training the body's own cellular response so you end up with something like RSV or rhinovirus which spread freely and are fended off by mostly everyone, though they are still potentially fatal in people who can't mount an adequate immune defence.

 

It wont ever go away cause it mutates to quickly. We are still using vaccines targeting Alpha and delta is 6+ months old. There are apparently even more variants past Delta are worse.

I think the smartest way forward is therapeutics. I never got the flu shot , if I got the flu i would just take teraflu or whatever its called and feel better in a day.

 

That is why they also specify the Mask safety provisions.

 

Masks don't stop it spreading - they only reduce the rate of spread, and possibly severity of disease if you catch C19. Nothing short of biocontainment level policies can stop the disease spreading (including complete isolation aka Lockdown). Vaccine + mask == same number of people getting infected as just vaccine, just over a longer period. That may be a good thing, reducing pressure on medical services. It may also be a bad thing, decreasing the proportion of actively resistant people at any given time so there's always opportunity for the virus to find another vulnerable host meaning higher general prevalence and no clear cycle of most of the year virus free. It may be neither good, nor bad, and just different with different outcomes that people subjectively determine as better or worse than the alternative.

 

I was checking out the UK Covid dashboard again tonight, as I typically do, and was again frustrated at the lack of data normalisation by tests - obviously if you are testing more people, you are detecting more positive cases. Then I twigged I could grab the data and plug it into Excel. Here's the current cases data in blue with positive case rates crudely overlaid in red.



Ironing out some of the peaks and troughs caused by changes in sampling gives a much clearer idea of disease growth over the long term. The UK is at about 5% of people testing positive, suggesting 5% percent of the populace is presently infected. C19 spread ramped up over the summer with the end of most restrictions and has largely settled, perhaps with a subtle long-term upward trend.

 

should be much smaller than this. The tests are biased, you only go for a test if you have symptoms. So of those who have symptoms and want to be tested, of that population approximately 5% of them with covid (daily).

I don't think UK is doing random covid tests on the whole population everywhere everyday?

litmus test: approximately 1-2% of those infected with COVID hit the emergency room or hospitalized.

If 5% of all of UK population with covid and 2% of that would be in emergency, I suspect the hospitals would be overflowed.

 

The ONS infections survey (which samples people across the country whether or not they have symptoms) reckons roughly 1 in 60 or thereabouts in the week up to 13th November. Lower than it has been but there is certainly growth in general now we're a couple of weeks after the school holidays. The different countries of the UK (with slightly different policies and mitigations) have different rates, oddly enough. Or perhaps unsurprisingly? 1 in 65 people in England and Northern Ireland, 1 in 55 in Wales (down from 1 in 40 in the previous survey), 1 in 95 in Scotland - where children are required to wear masks in schools. Hmmm. Probably not a coincidence, that.

The NHS is at breaking point, it must be said. Queues of ambulances outside of hospitals with patients waiting hours to be admitted and people waiting hours for an ambulance to arrive if they require one which is obviously leading to excess deaths. However, the government messaging has done its trick as pretty much nobody other than the very elderly is wearing masks in shops or indoors. A big shrug from the same people who were stood on their doorsteps applauding NHS workers last year. They don't give enough of a shit about them any more to even bother wearing a mask in a shop.

 

In the UK a lot of testing is often symptomless and precautionary; there are about 1 million C19 tests conducted every day. The beginning of my graph shows selective testing of people suspected of having C19. Once lateral flow test rolled out in the summer, tests became more of a general sampling and not focussed on being potentially infected. eg. All secondary (high) school age children are testing every week. I test every week a lateral flow test - these are free from the government. However, breakdown of tests by age groups isn't provided.

So yeah, it's not 5%, brain fart on my part. Should have said 5% of those testing. But it's also not a self-selecting sampling of possibly-positive people either.

The main point though is how the raw case numbers present different trends. Ideally we want case rates filtered by testing. At least we have the ONS numbers, although sampling in the smaller nations is so low as to be potentially very inaccurate.

 

You can't really blame them. Human beings largely base decision making on their direct info, which means prioritising their sphere of experience. At the beginning, it was all unknown and so they took the government's word for it. Now, they can see people getting C19 and not suffering. They see their children get C19 and get nothing more than a cold, and their friends get C19 and nothing more than a cold. They don't know anyone who has long covid, nor anyone who knows anyone who has long covid. And as such, within their natural sampling, they can't see the evidence to support the information coming from elsewhere. Those who have experienced the worst of C19 infections will have different behaviours to those who haven't encountered it; it's human nature. It's why, post COP26, no-one's changed a single thing to deal with climate change at the household level. All behaviour is exactly the same after the climate warning as it was before, save a bit of talk about it. Won't even inch their thermostat down one degree.

Getting people to stick to a plan is not easy. China manages it by shooting people if they disagree. If you have less control-freak nations, you'll have less conformance to ideas that someone doesn't naturally agree with. Great leadership is required...I think the world lost all its great leaders many decades ago and now we are stuck with muppets. Consistent messaging is necessary - we lost that with the invention of Social Media and now every idea will exist in it's dipole of for/against.

It's worth pointing out that the same resistance to vaccination exists in most of the EU nations, that have the same levelling off of uptake as the UK. If it were purely the fault of our government and not the way people roll, we should see France, Germany, Italy all at ~100% vaccination. Instead they have been sitting at the ~60-70% full dose mark for the past 3 months.

 

I disagree