When will this shit end?

[SDSM]

Just now, Leyrulion said:

Mentioned it a while back, no need to panic. These things are normal.

aaa ok!! I saw it and instantly thought the worse! Hopefully its an anomoly

[JoeyT]

1 minute ago, Leyrulion said:

Mentioned it a while back, no need to panic. These things are normal.

Completely normal, highlighted the important context to view this in:

"At first glance this may seem alarming. A vaccine trial - and not just any vaccine, but one receiving massive global attention - is put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction. But such events are not unheard of. Indeed the Oxford team describe it as "routine". Any time a volunteer is admitted to hospital and the cause of their illness is not immediately apparent it triggers a study to be put on hold.

This is actually the second time it has happened with the Oxford University/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine trial since the first volunteers were immunised in April. An Oxford University spokesperson said: "In large trials, illnesses will happen by chance but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully."

[morph100]

someone i know has symptoms in the family and they need a COVID test, we are near Leicester pretty much in the middle of the country, nearest test.......Aberdeen!

[Ozanne]

14 minutes ago, Andre91 said:

Doncaster race course is literally across the road from my weekend and non-term time address. I can see the racecourse out of my bedroom window and can walk over to it in about three minutes. If St Leger goes ahead with 6000 people as has been said, we are absolutely fucked, both Donny and the country at large. Our cases up here were +19 last week compared to the week before and I’m sure it will shoot up further after the racing. 

If Dido Harding has anything to do with it, it’ll go ahead. I hope it’s not too bad for you. 

[efcfanwirral]

@Toilet Duck another question for you- I may be misinterpreting but when you mentioned using the saliva tests to test inactivity, does that mean perhaps asymptomatic cases don't spread as much as first feared? Could Matt Hancock be right in encouraging those with symptoms to get tested only? 

[Padgey]

21 minutes ago, Andre91 said:

Doncaster race course is literally across the road from my weekend and non-term time address. I can see the racecourse out of my bedroom window and can walk over to it in about three minutes. If St Leger goes ahead with 6000 people as has been said, we are absolutely fucked, both Donny and the country at large. Our cases up here were +19 last week compared to the week before and I’m sure it will shoot up further after the racing. 

they are saying there's going to be up to 3,000 people today, didn't realise it was going to rise for Leger Day.  I actually thought they would have cancelled the spectators as they did with Goodwood after yesterday's announcement.

[squirrelarmy]

If you needed to know if 2020 could get any more fucked up then buckle your seatbelts. 
 

Trump has just been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. 
 

This is not a joke. 

[Matt42]

I haven’t had my results back yet.. had my test on Monday.

Is there some super long backlog or something? Surely it can’t take them that long to find out if I have it or not.

[Toilet Duck]

29 minutes ago, st dan said:

Probably a silly question, but when a vaccine is found and readily available - will it require its own ‘jab’ - i.e. the elderly will be having two jabs each winter (one flu and one COVID-19), or would it be possible to bundle/package them both together into a one ‘super winter vaccine’?

To begin with, it'll be a separate jab, however, if it can be bundled together with something else, then I'd expect that to be explored. Some vaccines can be administered together, others can't. It will require trials to see if the different vaccines interfere with each other in any way, or if they work fine when mixed. So, not something that would happen quickly and would require its own clinical trial, but certainly something that would be looked at down the line. 

[JoeyT]

5 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

I haven’t had my results back yet.. had my test on Monday.

Is there some super long backlog or something? Surely it can’t take them that long to find out if I have it or not.

I've spoken to a few people who had tests Sunday / Monday and are still waiting on results.

I also know someone who had one last Tuesday and had results by 9am on the Wednesday.

So much for us not being near capacity when we've clearly hit the ceiling of it!

[efcfanwirral]

7 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

I haven’t had my results back yet.. had my test on Monday.

Is there some super long backlog or something? Surely it can’t take them that long to find out if I have it or not.

 

Just now, JoeyT said:

I've spoken to a few people who had tests Sunday / Monday and are still waiting on results.

I also know someone who had one last Tuesday and had results by 9am on the Wednesday.

So much for us not being near capacity when we've clearly hit the ceiling of it!

A way of spreading out the positives til they can get them down perhaps? Imagine what the numbers would be if they'd all been processed....

[Toilet Duck]

6 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

@Toilet Duck another question for you- I may be misinterpreting but when you mentioned using the saliva tests to test inactivity, does that mean perhaps asymptomatic cases don't spread as much as first feared? Could Matt Hancock be right in encouraging those with symptoms to get tested only? 

So, we honestly don't know. Some reports suggest that asymptomatic carriers are at least half as infectious as those with symptoms. The dynamics of the spread fo the infection strongly suggest that asymptomatic carriers play a key role in transmission. The suggestion with the rapid tests versus the highly sensitive PCR test is that some of the rapid tests detect viral protein rather than the genome of the virus. The rapid ones would be more likely picking up intact virus, whereas the PCR tests can pick up traces of virus that are possibly not infectious. So, negative on the rapid test suggests that at least at that point in time, you are unlikely to be infectious. You might be tomorrow, or in a few days, but at that point in time, it's less likely (but the beauty of the rapid tests is that repeated testing is feasible). Most of the rapid tests that have been approved have a sensitivity over 98% and a specificity approaching 100%, so they are less likely to give false positives but will generate some false negatives. However, way back at the start of this thread (or maybe one of the earlier CoV threads), the role of the prevalence of the infection in how useful tests with this level of accuracy was discussed. Now we have a convergence...we have the rapid tests developed (which takes longer to do than developing a PCR test) and the disease is prevalent enough for the false negatives to be outweighed by how many you would miss by not testing at all. 

 

TLDR: asymptomatic people play a role in transmitting the virus...how much, nobody can say with absolute certainty! While we are still in this phase of managing the disease, testing possible cases and close contacts remains and important part of the contact tracing and the management of outbreaks...so I would still be testing entire classes or workplaces if someone in close contact to them has symptoms.  

[Zoo Music Girl]

49 minutes ago, onthebeach said:

More (deliberate?) confusion. In lockdown areas we have been actively encouraged to get tested, symptoms or not - but it’s now our fault for overloading the system?

Also, once again, we are not there on the ‘world beating’ testing - point 3 on the screenshot

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/developing-nhs-test-and-trace-business-plan/breaking-chains-of-covid-19-transmission-to-help-people-return-to-more-normal-lives-developing-the-nhs-test-and-trace-service

 

Yeah I was thinking this. We have relatives living in one of the northern lockdown areas who were encouraged to get tested, symptoms or not. Just more lies and backtracking.

[Simsy]

 

[thrillhouse188]

32 minutes ago, morph100 said:

someone i know has symptoms in the family and they need a COVID test, we are near Leicester pretty much in the middle of the country, nearest test.......Aberdeen!

It's ridiculous, here in Southampton our nearest test sites are apparently Gosport (40 min drive) or Poole (1hr drive)

[chris_nre]

This was posted on Facebook yesterday by a friend who works at a testing centre near Cambridge:

I don't care if this is in violation of our media policy. It's such utter bullshit.

I work at one of these testing sites. 

Until today someone didn't need to book a test before coming to us. They'd simply need to register after their test to receive their results. Nice and easy.

We found out at about midday that we were from that point on, no longer allowed, by government directive to accept people who haven't prebooked. 

The website is practically busted. It's telling some people that our site is fully booked, we have never even gotten halfway to bring fully booked before. The Coronavirus hotline is barely fuctional, sometimes leaving people on hold for hours before they speak to someone. We get people turn up saying that they've been trying since yesterday to book an appointment , by phone and online but can't get through. A drive through center is an absolute (possibly literal) lifesaver for some people. 

The BBC is painting the picture that we are running out of tests. There are literally hundreds of tests on our site that could be used. Yet we are being told to turn people away for literally no other reason than the government tells us to.

This directive has come so soon that even GPS and hospitals apparently weren't told as we're stilling getting people sent by their doctors turning up for an unbooked test. 

It's so utterly stupid. I am sat down writing this when the site I'm currently on shift at could be testing people. 

Everyone here is furious. We're angry and upset. The government has utterly let us down and it is letting the public down. The government keeps claiming it wants as many people tested as possible. Apparently that just isn't true. 

 

[Matt42]

19 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

 

A way of spreading out the positives til they can get them down perhaps? Imagine what the numbers would be if they'd all been processed....

God bloody hope not. I really don’t want to be positive. I’ve kept myself locked up since Friday and the only time I’ve left my house is to have my test. I have bloody plans this weekend. I want to get a negative result so I can go on with my life.

[Leyrulion]

35 minutes ago, squirrelarmy said:

If you needed to know if 2020 could get any more fucked up then buckle your seatbelts. 
 

Trump has just been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. 
 

This is not a joke. 

I thought they only released the winner. There isn't any sort of shortlist published? So anyone who's eligible could nominate him.

 Edit:

"Neither the names of nominators nor of nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize may be divulged until 50 years have elapsed."

So they might have said they nominated trump but we won't actually know until 2070. 

 

Edited September 9, 2020 by Leyrulion

[Fuzzy Afro]

Thought experiment. What about shutting literally everyone in their house for 14 days, even key workers. Everyone stock piles food beforehand and then everyone stays home for 14 days. That would mean that all clusters would die out. The big disadvantage with it obviously is that if you become seriously ill during that two weeks, it would not be possible to get medical treatment and you just need to fend for yourself 

[Toilet Duck]

33 minutes ago, SDSM said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-54082192

@Toilet Duck please let us know your opinion on this

Yes, as @Leyrulion says above, discussed briefly last night...its not uncommon and is how a trial like this would normally be run. The complete transparency and adherence to normal trial protocol is reassuring (despite the massive pressure they must be under). I should point out that it may turn out that the event was indeed triggered by the vaccine. But this doesn't mean the end of the vaccine. Guillain-Barré syndrome was observed in some patients following flu vaccination (older generation vaccines), but we still used the vaccines. It was very rare (less than 1 patient in 100,000) and the incidence was lower than in those who got flu naturally (GBS is a rare autoimmune disease that can happen after viral infection), so it made more sense to prevent increased incidence by using the vaccine. The chronic effects of COVID in many more patients would probably outweigh the risk of rare autoimmune events in those vaccinated (it seems the event in the Oxford trial is another rare autoimmune reaction), so would not prevent the vaccine from getting approved, it will just be listed as one of the possible side effects so you can make an informed decision to take it (how many of you actually read the little slip of paper that comes with every drug you buy...and after reading it, how many of you decide not to take the pill based on a 1:100,000 or 1:1,000,000 chance of something happening if you do?)...Have a read of them sometime, even completely innocuous drugs have rare or very rare side effects, but we still use them. So, in terms of COVID, if infection leads to a 1:1000 chance of chronic fatigue, or heart damage, or lung scarring (I'm making that incidence up, we don't know yet, but it does look significant), but the vaccine has a 1:1,000,000 or 1:100,000 chance of an autoimmune reaction that most people can fully recover from, then I know how I would assess the relative risks. But everyone gets to make that choice themselves (or they should). Of course, it could turn out to be much more common, in which case, that really would put the kibosh on this vaccine (it's only 1 event so far in thousands of trial participants, but this is why large phase 3 trials are run). 

I should also add that the GSK/Sanofi vaccine is not a viral vector vaccine, it's based on synthetic CoV protein, so the chances of this type of reaction are even smaller (hence I think if that one generates a good, safe immune response, it will eventually become the vaccine of choice). 

[stuie]

43 minutes ago, Padgey said:

they are saying there's going to be up to 3,000 people today, didn't realise it was going to rise for Leger Day.  I actually thought they would have cancelled the spectators as they did with Goodwood after yesterday's announcement.

What the bloody hell is this? 

How come they can have a mass gathering but we can’t go to a normal outside gig. 

Outrageous. 

Edited September 9, 2020 by stuie

[Homer]

I seem to be late to the party on this one, but Mark Francois has been stepped down as head of the ERG very quietly and is now trending on Twitter.

[Homer]

REMINDER: it's PMQs at midday if you fancy a laugh.

[st dan]

2 minutes ago, Homer said:

REMINDER: it's PMQs at midday if you fancy a laugh.

That’s what it’s become hasn’t it .. like waiting for the next weekly episode of that cringey new comedy drama on Netflix. Except this is real life, with people’s livelihoods at stake! 

[efcfanwirral]

21 minutes ago, chris_nre said:

This was posted on Facebook yesterday by a friend who works at a testing centre near Cambridge:

I don't care if this is in violation of our media policy. It's such utter bullshit.

I work at one of these testing sites. 

Until today someone didn't need to book a test before coming to us. They'd simply need to register after their test to receive their results. Nice and easy.

We found out at about midday that we were from that point on, no longer allowed, by government directive to accept people who haven't prebooked. 

The website is practically busted. It's telling some people that our site is fully booked, we have never even gotten halfway to bring fully booked before. The Coronavirus hotline is barely fuctional, sometimes leaving people on hold for hours before they speak to someone. We get people turn up saying that they've been trying since yesterday to book an appointment , by phone and online but can't get through. A drive through center is an absolute (possibly literal) lifesaver for some people. 

The BBC is painting the picture that we are running out of tests. There are literally hundreds of tests on our site that could be used. Yet we are being told to turn people away for literally no other reason than the government tells us to.

This directive has come so soon that even GPS and hospitals apparently weren't told as we're stilling getting people sent by their doctors turning up for an unbooked test. 

It's so utterly stupid. I am sat down writing this when the site I'm currently on shift at could be testing people. 

Everyone here is furious. We're angry and upset. The government has utterly let us down and it is letting the public down. The government keeps claiming it wants as many people tested as possible. Apparently that just isn't true. 

Taking the Trump approach to it and hoping for the best on hospitalisations and deaths then...

17 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

God bloody hope not. I really don’t want to be positive. I’ve kept myself locked up since Friday and the only time I’ve left my house is to have my test. I have bloody plans this weekend. I want to get a negative result so I can go on with my life.

Ah sorry I didnt mean to insinuate you would get a positive! Only that if positives are going up overall they'll want to spread out when they're reported - you probably still have only a small chance of testing positive.