When will this shit end?

[andyrhodes24]

2 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

See that doesn't worry me all that much - the inpatients testing positive number is the number on top of yesterday. And that's always going to happen. 

It's balancing out OK between admissions and discharges. 

And these numbers are still tiny across the entire country. Could get worse but not guaranteed infinite growth.

This. All along the line from the media has been that the oldest unvaccinated age groups has been causing the bulk of hospital admissions. First it was the oldies before they were vaccinated, then the middle aged, now it's the youth that are mainly in hospital. Numbers are going down as hoped, there was always going to be bumps in the road

[zahidf]

 

[st dan]

3 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

42 more surely?

 

82 people were admitted and a further 84 who were already in hospital caught covid, so 166 people are in hospital with covid who weren’t yesterday.

 

However this is partially offset by 124 discharges. 

Yeah you’re right - but I guess it depends how you look at i.e. the 84 inpatients who tested positive were already in and taking up bed space. So it’s only the 82 new admissions against the 124 discharges, meaning 42 more beds available. 

Edited June 10, 2021 by st dan

[Fuzzy Afro]

Calling it now, time to start AZ’ing the young ones 

[incident]

Just now, st dan said:

Yeah you’re right - but I guess it depends how you look at i.e. the 84 inpatients who tested positive were already in and taking up bed space. So it’s only the 82 new admissions against the 124 discharges. 

It's complicated and those patients will always muddy the numbers.

Do those patients need to be moved to a COVID ward? Are they needing any COVID-specific treatment, or are they entirely asymptomatic? Probably a mixture - but yeah it does mean that they'll inflate the numbers somewhat, though how much is anyones guess.

[steviewevie]

7 minutes ago, zahidf said:

Theresa May goes anti lockdown

"It is incomprehensible that one of the most heavily vaccinated countries in the world is one that is most reluctant to give its citizens the freedoms those vaccinations should support"
 

mainly about travel abroad.

[Fuzzy Afro]

1 minute ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

Calling it now, time to start AZ’ing the young ones 

Just to acknowledge my privilege here, I’m in my late twenties and had Pfizer ages ago due to underlying health conditions. I know not many young ones wilk want the AZ 

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, incident said:

It's complicated and those patients will always muddy the numbers.

Do those patients need to be moved to a COVID ward? Are they needing any COVID-specific treatment, or are they entirely asymptomatic? Probably a mixture - but yeah it does mean that they'll inflate the numbers somewhat, though how much is anyones guess.

yeah...too much uncertainty still and they need to make a decision in a few days time.

[incident]

Just now, Fuzzy Afro said:

Calling it now, time to start AZ’ing the young ones 

It's not.

In fact I'd argue that we should be binning off at least one of the vaccines entirely for reasons nothing to do with Blood Clots and/or Efficacy and/or Public Perception - and if we're going to do that then those reasons make AZ the obvious choice of the 3.

My opinion is that having multiple products makes the vaccination centres significantly less efficient and actively slows down the rate they can run at. We'd probably benefit from having vaccination centres all going back to a single product at a time, as it tended to be in the early days when we were only really delivering first doses.

I can't back this up with any numbers, but it's based on having worked in a vaccination centre and seeing how things operate first hand.

[andyrhodes24]

Just now, Fuzzy Afro said:

Just to acknowledge my privilege here, I’m in my late twenties and had Pfizer ages ago due to underlying health conditions. I know not many young ones wilk want the AZ 

I'm late twenties and due my 1st Pfizer one on Saturday. I've never been bothered which I get, as long as I do get one in a reasonably timely manner and getting the vaccine actually contributes to restrictions easing

[Toilet Duck]

10 minutes ago, st dan said:

Not to cover old ground, but I just think using Occam’s razor theory, it would be extremely, extremely coincidental for it to originate just a few miles from a lab which is known for storing and analysing coronavirus. 

To be fair, in areas where certain viruses are prevalent and outbreaks have occurred, it's pretty common to find labs that study those viruses close by (the regions are at risk, so that's why they study them...and coronaviruses are common in Hubei..in fact some of the early documented outbreaks of this CoV were in more rural areas of Hubei, pretty far away from Wuhan and there's good evidence here that it was circulating in the province maybe even as early as October 2019). The closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 detected to date is about 96% identical (described in the original paper on the virus in Nature and it was indeed being studied in the virology lab in Wuhan), which sounds very similar, but it's actually a reasonable amount of divergence (we are almost 99% genetically similar to chimps for example). I'm not saying it's impossible that it leaked (I've worked in many labs in different parts of the world, some have better biohazard safety protocols than others and protocol lapses in BSL4 labs can have serious consequences), but the original Wuhan variant wasn't so infectious that it likely emerged from a single infected person that picked it up in the lab and then spread it all around them. An animal reservoir that could repeatedly infect a bunch of people is more plausible to me...it's likely that this may not have even been the first time it jumped from bats to humans, just the first time it didn't fizzle out and actually built up into a major outbreak. There have been a bunch of simulations done based on how the outbreak would develop using the known properties of the original variant, and about two thirds of the simulations fizzle out and don't progress into epidemics (in the Science paper linked above, about 95% of the time if the original infections started in rural settings they would fizzle out...so Wuhan had the correct environment for it to have a better chance of getting a foothold). Anyway, we may find the original host and intermediary species and we may not, but there's a lot more evidence in favour of zoonotic transmission (jumped from animals) than there is for a lab leak. 

[northernringo]

For those thinking admissions and discharges are similar...

NW hospital beds occupied up 40% in a week. Things are only going to get worse on the hospitalisation front over the next few weeks (seeing as they lag cases, which we have seen have gotten worse).

[incident]

2 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

yeah...too much uncertainty still and they need to make a decision in a few days time.

You would hope though that the Government would have access to, and the intelligence to ask for, more context than is visible in the raw numbers we see.

Certainly can't rely on that though.

[st dan]

3 minutes ago, incident said:

It's complicated and those patients will always muddy the numbers.

Do those patients need to be moved to a COVID ward? Are they needing any COVID-specific treatment, or are they entirely asymptomatic? Probably a mixture - but yeah it does mean that they'll inflate the numbers somewhat, though how much is anyones guess.

Speaking from my wife’s experience of the respiratory wards she works, they are doing everything they can to avoid having to create a designated Covid ward again, after shutting them all down over the last few months. 
The small number of recent admissions she’s had have been placed in side rooms on their own and away from other late owners, where they are receiving minimal amounts of oxygen, but their condition is far from critical at this stage.

I wouldn’t imagine this is too dissimilar from the state of hospitals and patients around the country. 

[DeanoL]

2 hours ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

Just another thought @DeanoL - but if you’re going down the line that anti-vaxxers should be lower priority in a triage because they have effectively self-inflicted by refusing the vaccine, shouldn’t that also apply to obese people (most under 70’s hospitalised with covid are obese) or those with underlying conditions that have been brought on by unhealthy lifestyle choices?

Getting the vaccine isn’t the only way we can protect ourselves against becoming seriously ill with covid and I think if we go down the route of prioritising “deserving” patients then we need to bring other factors into the conversation too. 

I don't actually disagree with the idea that maybe that should be taken into account too. But I do think it's really different to taking the vaccine or not.

If you're going into the NHS with COVID, you're asking for a medical intervention by the NHS. But you were already offered that medical intervention by the NHS months ago, in the form of a vaccine, and you refused it. The NHS is free at the point of use, but I think part of the social contract around that is that you should accept their choices around how best to treat you. I know you do still have some control over your care in the NHS, and they require consent for a lot of things, and you can request alternative treatment, but I also sort of feel like that's not on either - the NHS should offer the best solution they have and if you want something different you can get it elsewhere. 

In the case of COVID, the best solution is getting vaccinated now. 

57 minutes ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

That’s not social distancing. Fwiw I do agree that some trains are too crowded and there should be capacity limits like there are on buses (i.e. 100% of the seats available + however many can safely stand)

 

No idea how you’d enforce that but anyhow, it’s not the same thing as a 1m/2m social distancing rule. 

Fairly easily - most of the franchises have a booking system for their trains where you book specific seats already. They'd just have to change it so you *had* to book a seat before you could board a train, instead of having open tickets and walk-ups. You could still buy an open ticket but you'd have to then book the train you wanted when you got to the station, and if the next was full you'd have to wait, so it's not like it'd stop people being spontaneous. It's how a lot of high speed rail travel works in Europe already.

53 minutes ago, st dan said:

Not to cover old ground, but I just think using Occam’s razor theory, it would be extremely, extremely coincidental for it to originate just a few miles from a lab which is known for storing and analysing coronavirus. 

Yeah - Wuhan has the world's leading laboratory for the study of Coronaviruses. If there's zero link between that and the outbreak starting there it would be a massive coincidence. But that doesn't necessarily mean it leaked from the lab or was done on purpose. One of the factors of being a city with the world's leading lab for studying Coronaviruses is you often send scientists out to places to gather potential Coronaviruses and they come back - if they picked up something on site that'd easily explain it.

I don't think anything would happen to China if it was just a genuine accident. But the way they're hiding things is making people think it's possibly something worse - certainly trials were being done in the labs on how to make the Coronaviruses more infectious. That's not as evil as it sounds, it's valid science as that's how you learn what will make them more infectious, so you can avoid that in the case of an outbreak. It's done in US labs too. But if the strain that kicked this off really was a strain that was engineered to be more infectious and then leaked from the lab... then China would be in the shit..

[Fuzzy Afro]

1 minute ago, incident said:

It's not.

In fact I'd argue that we should be binning off at least one of the vaccines entirely for reasons nothing to do with Blood Clots and/or Efficacy and/or Public Perception - and if we're going to do that then those reasons make AZ the obvious choice of the 3.

My opinion is that having multiple products makes the vaccination centres significantly less efficient and actively slows down the rate they can run at. We'd probably benefit from having vaccination centres all going back to a single product at a time, as it tended to be in the early days when we were only really delivering first doses.

I can't back this up with any numbers, but it's based on having worked in a vaccination centre and seeing how things operate first hand.

The reason I want AZ opened back up is that it’s plentiful in supply though. In the next few weeks we’ll have finished second doses for those in their 40’s (mainly AZ), at which point we’ll have a very large stockpile of AZ vaccines and no one to use them on, whereas Moderna we only have a small batch of and Pfizer sounds like it’s about to run into supply issues 

 

If we open up AZ again, we can jab our way out of this much more quickly 

[JoeyT]

 

[JoeyT]

 

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, incident said:

You would hope though that the Government would have access to, and the intelligence to ask for, more context than is visible in the raw numbers we see.

Certainly can't rely on that though.

well yeah...I mean Johnson will be wanting to see anything positive to allow him to release restrictions as much as poss I'm sure....just think next Monday will just be too early. We will hopefully end up ok this summer, but I just thinks it's too early to say...and if they fuck up again then would be politically very damaging.

Saying that, there isn't an election any time soon, and Johnson just gets away with stuff anyway...so maybe he'll just say fuck it..let's do this.

[zahidf]

1 minute ago, JoeyT said:

 

About bloody time. Lets get a more accurate picture

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

 

also...isn't risk higher for women than men?

[zahidf]

2 minutes ago, JoeyT said:

 

Hopefully someone asks them at the press conference next Monday

[danbailey80]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to move a second jab forward? I got my first AZ/ Oxford jab 5th May and am due to get the second 21st July. Any chance I can move this forward or is it set in stone? I'm 42 is that's relevant. 

 

[Hannibal Schmitt]

9 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

To be fair, in areas where certain viruses are prevalent and outbreaks have occurred, it's pretty common to find labs that study those viruses close by (the regions are at risk, so that's why they study them...and coronaviruses are common in Hubei..in fact some of the early documented outbreaks of this CoV were in more rural areas of Hubei, pretty far away from Wuhan and there's good evidence here that it was circulating in the province maybe even as early as October 2019). The closest relative to SARS-CoV-2 detected to date is about 96% identical (described in the original paper on the virus in Nature and it was indeed being studied in the virology lab in Wuhan), which sounds very similar, but it's actually a reasonable amount of divergence (we are almost 99% genetically similar to chimps for example). I'm not saying it's impossible that it leaked (I've worked in many labs in different parts of the world, some have better biohazard safety protocols than others and protocol lapses in BSL4 labs can have serious consequences), but the original Wuhan variant wasn't so infectious that it likely emerged from a single infected person that picked it up in the lab and then spread it all around them. An animal reservoir that could repeatedly infect a bunch of people is more plausible to me...it's likely that this may not have even been the first time it jumped from bats to humans, just the first time it didn't fizzle out and actually built up into a major outbreak. There have been a bunch of simulations done based on how the outbreak would develop using the known properties of the original variant, and about two thirds of the simulations fizzle out and don't progress into epidemics (in the Science paper linked above, about 95% of the time if the original infections started in rural settings they would fizzle out...so Wuhan had the correct environment for it to have a better chance of getting a foothold). Anyway, we may find the original host and intermediary species and we may not, but there's a lot more evidence in favour of zoonotic transmission (jumped from animals) than there is for a lab leak. 

This was stated by Germanys best known virologist Christian Drosten of Charite Berlin a few days ago:

The Berlin virologist Christian Drosten sees the path via the fur industry as the most plausible of the various hypotheses on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “I have no evidence of this, except for the clearly established origin of SARS-1, and this is a virus of the same species. Viruses of the same species do the same things and often have the same origin, ”Drosten told the Swiss online magazine Republik.

In 2002 and 2003, a wave of infections emanating from China resulted in around 800 deaths worldwide. The condition has been called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The pathogen SARS-CoV-2, which was detected for the first time at the end of 2019, is very closely related to the virus of the time.

With the first SARS virus, the transitional hosts were raccoon dogs and crawling cats, said Drosten. “That is certain.” In China, raccoon dogs are still used extensively in the fur industry. Wild raccoon dogs that may have previously eaten bats - which are considered the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 - are repeatedly brought into the breeding farms.

"Raccoon dogs and crawling cats are lively pulled over their ears," explained the Charité virologist. They utter death screams and roar, and aerosols are created in the process. "Humans can then become infected with the virus."

For him it was surprising that this breeding would even be considered as a possible starting point for a pandemic - until recently he lived “in the naive idea” that crawling cats and raccoon dogs, as known potential transitional hosts, are now being controlled. “It was a closed story for me. I thought that this kind of pet trade had been stopped and that it would never come back. And now SARS has come back. "

There are no concrete indications that the transition to humans took place via fur farms - there are no studies in this area at all, at least none have become public.

It is therefore completely unclear whether raccoon dogs in Chinese farms or other carnivores in such breeds - such as minks - carry SARS-CoV-2. "In 2003 and 2004 there were large studies that were done in China and that showed the connection to raccoon dogs and crawling cats for SARS-1." This time - at least so far - apparently it did not happen. Now to take a closer look there may not make sense:

“What you have to be aware of, of course, is that if you were to examine such stocks now, you might not find the virus that - possibly - was there a year and a half or two years ago. If there was a cull in between. Or if the virus died in some other way. "

[andyrhodes24]

1 minute ago, danbailey80 said:

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to move a second jab forward? I got my first AZ/ Oxford jab 5th May and am due to get the second 21st July. Any chance I can move this forward or is it set in stone? I'm 42 is that's relevant. 

 

Was it at your GP or a mass vaccination centre? If it was your doctors they might be more flexible if they have more open supplies at the end of any given day