When will this shit end?

[zahidf]

 

[Crazyfool01]

9 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

I hate it when Manchester seems to randomly stall its case drops for a day. Hopefully back to decent drops in the next couple of days like last time. It's so weird, not as if the schools will have made an impact yet - maybe it's surge testing?

 

School testing numbers in there ? 

[zahidf]

1 minute ago, crazyfool1 said:

School testing numbers in there ? 

A lot of testing also happened end of last week didn't it? So the cases are probably being picked up by that

[steviewevie]

Lots of cases being recorded in France and Italy...they really need to get jabbing.

[ShakeyCrash]

5 minutes ago, TheSheriff said:

The man is so frustrating, he is so pessimistic and negative. As a lifelong Welsh Labour member, it was Drakeford that made me leave the party in April last year. And what I have seen from him since has cemented my opinion I made the right choice. I predict a very poor showing for Labour in the elections in May. 

If he’s carrying on that rhetoric then yes indeed. The thing is i agree with the  approach (3 week reviews, not setting arbitrary dates, staggered school returns) and they’ve knocked the vaccination out the park but it’s all substance over style. I’m wondering if he got burnt after the firebreak (no pun intended) and as he appears even more cautious than the first time around. The problem is, and what he does not seem to understand, is you need to make hay when the sun shines. You lift restrictions while it’s right to do so, which is the summer. Else you waste the opportunity... this is my concern in a nutshell. If another wave is inevitable then why waste the exact time when we can have freedom?  
Saying all the above Drakeford is absolutely  right about foreign travel

[efcfanwirral]

3 minutes ago, zahidf said:

 

Just playing devil's advocate here...what's to say he isn't the one telling the truth (at his own expense) while the "roadmap" is a load of bollocks to get the Tories a landslide in May? Nothing is really lifted until after those local elections and they arent exactly known for being truthful...

[zahidf]

9 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

Just playing devil's advocate here...what's to say he isn't the one telling the truth (at his own expense) while the "roadmap" is a load of bollocks to get the Tories a landslide in May? Nothing is really lifted until after those local elections and they arent exactly known for being truthful...

Well maybe but I don't think that's rhe case or the govt have the votes with the tory MPs for it

 

And I dont want to go around in a circular argument but once most the population have the vaccination, we should be free to do whatever. 

Edited March 10, 2021 by zahidf

[stuartbert two hats]

12 minutes ago, BobWillis2 said:

It’s 4 days old data. 

I know. Another reason why it's definitely not the schools.

[steviewevie]

1 minute ago, stuartbert two hats said:

I know. Another reason why it's definitely not the schools.

it's those bloody vaxed over 80s.

[BobWillis2]

9 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

I know. Another reason why it's definitely not the schools.

Not necessarily. Some schools started their testing last week as kids need 3 on site tests before they can start their home testing. 

[Ryan1984]

19 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

Just playing devil's advocate here...what's to say he isn't the one telling the truth (at his own expense) while the "roadmap" is a load of bollocks to get the Tories a landslide in May? Nothing is really lifted until after those local elections and they arent exactly known for being truthful...

A friend told me today that he’s heard ‘on the grapevine’ all restrictions from 12 April will be pushed back. Could be bollocks but he’s not normally one to lie. Also, Boris has started with his ‘out friends in Europe are having a surge in cases and we normally follow them a week or two later’...

I really hope we can still stick to the roadmap as laid out.

[stuartbert two hats]

8 minutes ago, Barry Fish said:

It might be schools - testing started early last week.

But not a real effect from schools, that's what I meant. Be interesting to see if cases continue to drop once the extra testing is "priced in"

[gizmoman]

4 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

Howdy, so, we’ve kinda been through this before in a couple of guises...antibody enhanced disease and variants that escape neutralising antibodies. On the first, as it happens, this was brought up by one of the Oxford team in a talk he gave us this morning. Despite the evidence from SARS being poor quality pre-clinical studies, they checked for it anyway and simply saw no evidence for it. The data from the trials doesn’t support it either, nor does our real world use (effectiveness). Israel and the UK are in the period he is suggesting here and morbidity and mortality continue to fall in vaccinated populations rather than any signal of increasing. So, lots of people have looked at this, even though it was only a remote possibility and just don’t see any evidence for it. The second part is immune escaping variants. While variants that evade neutralising antibodies have emerged, variants that evade every part of our immune response are extremely unlikely. One of the key things about the genetic vaccines compared to subunit ones, is that the antigen that stimulates our immune response has to be made inside our cells. This means it gets displayed on the surface of our cells and elicits a far more complex immune response compared to older while killed/attenuated/subunit vaccines. The amount of changes required to escape all of that would likely render the virus inactive. The selection pressures he talks about are already there and they are driving independent evolution of the same changes. This in itself is reassuring as it means there’s only so many places the virus actually can change and still function. So the scenario presented is unlikely. 

As I understand it (and it's not easy!) his theory is not that the virus will mutate to defeat the vaccinated (at least not initially) but that those who are vaccinated will still carry the virus and act as spreaders once society starts to open up. He does think that the current restrictions put pressure on the virus to mutate and become more infectious and so there is going to be a large increase in cases in the coming weeks, we will soon see, but if there was an increase it may well be put down to schools opening etc. rather than the mechanism he suggests. He also claims that young people can rely on innate immunity to defeat the virus and that giving them the vaccine suppresses that innate immunity and replaces it with the specific immunity of the vaccine, this will reduce resistance to any new variant. There's a long interview posted yesterday that goes into all this, he seems to know what he's talking about (doesn't mean he's right though) just goes to show how different scientists can have wildly different opinions.

 

[incident]

24 minutes ago, Ryan1984 said:

A friend told me today that he’s heard ‘on the grapevine’ all restrictions from 12 April will be pushed back. Could be bollocks but he’s not normally one to lie. Also, Boris has started with his ‘out friends in Europe are having a surge in cases and we normally follow them a week or two later’...

I really hope we can still stick to the roadmap as laid out.

Think that your mate has been fed some bullshit. There'd be no logical reason why that decision had been taken already, or even that it was thought likely, because as it stands right now all of the four the metrics that they claim to be using (as laid down in the roadmap) are either meeting or outperforming expectations:

Quote

The decision will be based on four tests:

• the vaccine deployment programme continues successfully
• evidence shows vaccines are sufficiently effective in reducing hospitalisations and deaths in those vaccinated
• infection rates do not risk a surge in hospitalisations which would put unsustainable pressure on the NHS
• our assessment of the risks is not fundamentally changed by new Variants of Concern

- The vaccine programme is going as expected and easily on-track to meet the next target (all over 50s by April 15th). If it scales up as expected next week onwards then it'll beat the target by at least a couple of weeks.

- The evidence definitely shows that the vaccines have a huge impact on both deaths and hospitalisations - even more now than it did when the roadmap was published.

- Infection rates are still going down, and hospitalisations are going down even faster - the number of people in hospital today with COVID-19 is less than half of what it was when the roadmap was published, that was only just over 3 weeks ago.

- The existing Vaccines are being shown to have a strong effect on Variants of Concern, we've had lots of new evidence to that extent.

Basically, unless something changes dramatically between now and April 12th, then by their own measures there's no plausible justification for pushing back the date (and arguably plenty for bringing it forward), and so I can't see any scenario under which they'd try.

[Toilet Duck]

47 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

As I understand it (and it's not easy!) his theory is not that the virus will mutate to defeat the vaccinated (at least not initially) but that those who are vaccinated will still carry the virus and act as spreaders once society starts to open up. He does think that the current restrictions put pressure on the virus to mutate and become more infectious and so there is going to be a large increase in cases in the coming weeks, we will soon see, but if there was an increase it may well be put down to schools opening etc. rather than the mechanism he suggests. He also claims that young people can rely on innate immunity to defeat the virus and that giving them the vaccine suppresses that innate immunity and replaces it with the specific immunity of the vaccine, this will reduce resistance to any new variant. There's a long interview posted yesterday that goes into all this, he seems to know what he's talking about (doesn't mean he's right though) just goes to show how different scientists can have wildly different opinions.

 

I had a look at the start (to be honest, you should be able to make your case in less than an hour and 48 minutes!)...basically what he is describing are the current selective pressures the virus is under and suggesting that we stop vaccinating in order to stop the virus evolving (I’m basing that conclusion on the earlier post as I can watch 2 hours of this!). I don’t really understand his argument as vaccines or not, eventually everyone either gets infected or gets vaccinated, so stopping vaccination doesn’t really solve the problem he presents. The innate immune stuff I didn’t get to, but our innate immune system and our adaptive immune system work in concert, so one of the functions of the innate response is to trigger the acquired response. It’s how all vaccines work, so if it’s a problem for this virus and it’s vaccine, then it’s a problem for all of them and this is disguised anti-vax rhetoric.

The notion of a fully vaccine/immune resistant variant is almost implausible given the complexity and variety of our immune response to this virus, but even if by some one in a trillion bazillion chance it happened, new sequences can still be inserted into the genetic vaccines and we start the dance again (I think it’s very unlikely though). We already seen more infectious variants emerge. We’ve already seen variants that reduce neutralising antibody activity emerge. They will evolve as the virus spreads and our natural immune response or random changes will facilitate that. But, as I said earlier, the fact the these random events cluster at specific sites in the virus tells us where it has some wiggle room for change. And our existing vaccines still elicit good neutralising antibodies to these variants and the immune response mounted still provides excellent protection from severe disease, hospitalisation and death. Honestly, if we stop vaccinating based on a hypothesis that has little empirical evidence (and indeed contradicts the empirical evidence we actually have), then a lot more people will get very sick and die. I don’t disagree that cases could rise when we open up with a vaccine that isn’t 100% sterilising, but I don’t think the infection fatality rate will be remotely close to what it was in an immunologically naive population. I would say though that the sterilising effect of the vaccines is way better than I hoped it would be, so this will contribute to suppressing case numbers more than was originally hoped.

 

edit: I should also note that dissenters are completely normal in science, but consensus evolves when many review the same evidence and draw the same conclusions (or can repeat the observation themselves). 

Edited March 11, 2021 by Toilet Duck

[gizmoman]

17 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

I had a look at the start (to be honest, you should be able to make your case in less than an hour and 48 minutes!)...basically what he is describing are the current selective pressures the virus is under and suggesting that we stop vaccinating in order to stop the virus evolving (I’m basing that conclusion on the earlier post as I can watch 2 hours of this!). I don’t really understand his argument as vaccines or not, eventually everyone either gets infected or gets vaccinated, so stopping vaccination doesn’t really solve the problem he presents. The innate immune stuff I didn’t get to, but our innate immune system and our adaptive immune system work in concert, so one of the functions of the innate response is to trigger the acquired response. It’s how all vaccines work, so if it’s a problem for this virus and it’s vaccine, then it’s a problem for all of them and this is disguised anti-vax rhetoric.

The notion of a fully vaccine/immune resistant variant is almost implausible given the complexity and variety of our immune response to this virus, but even if by some one in a trillion bazillion chance it happened, new sequences can still be inserted into the genetic vaccines and we start the dance again (I think it’s very unlikely though). We already seen more infectious variants emerge. We’ve already seen variants that reduce neutralising antibody activity emerge. They will evolve as the virus spreads and our natural immune response or random changes will facilitate that. But, as I said earlier, the fact the these random events cluster at specific sites in the virus tells us where it has some wiggle room for change. And our existing vaccines still elicit good neutralising antibodies to these variants and the immune response mounted still provides excellent protection from severe disease, hospitalisation and death. Honestly, if we stop vaccinating based on a hypothesis that has little empirical evidence (and indeed contradicts the empirical evidence we actually have), then a lot more people will get very sick and die. I don’t disagree that cases could rise when we open up with a vaccine that isn’t 100% sterilising, but I don’t think the infection fatality rate will be remotely close to what it was in an immunologically naive population. I would say though that the sterilising effect of the vaccines is way better than I hoped it would be, so this will contribute to suppressing case numbers more than was originally hoped.

 

edit: I should also note that dissenters are completely normal in science, but consensus evolves when many review the same evidence and draw the same conclusions (or can repeat the observation themselves). 

Thanks for the detailed response, To be fair to him he has posted a technical video explaining his theory in 35mins but I hadn't seen it prior to posting the long interview. if you're eager for more Geert it's here!

 

[Reckoner]

 

19 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

But, would you be happy with only a trickle of people allowed in and out of the country for who knows how long (years in reality) after everyone is vaccinated until the virus is eliminated? That’s zero Covid/zero risk. What I thought he was saying was if it’s not zero, then what is it? What number? Society has accepted that people die (it’s pretty much the only thing in life we can guarantee), so where do we draw the line with this disease?

I didn't reply initially as i like to do my posting on work time, but also there wasn't much really to respond with! Come at the King, you best not miss....

That's a good explanation of his intent though. I thought he was arguing the semantics of "Zero" which is what you'd expect to see on twitter or other forums less reputable than this one, but i can see how I've misinterpreted that in the broader context of his answers. 

20 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

I would expect that once Australia and NZ have vaccinated their populations, they’ll open up to the world again, and that will mean cases, morbidity and mortality as some people won’t get vaccinated and others will but will be in that % for whom it doesn’t work very well.

In somewhat coincidental timing, yesterday was the first time that a relevant Australian politician has started talking about what comes next (after she had the jab mind you...) calling for focus to shift from cases to hospitalizations and concerns about being left behind if they don't manage the transition in opening up. The UK's Vaccine success is going to really help everyone chart their course out of this. 

20 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

I hope you do open up again! my wife’s cousin and her family were supposed to be heading over to stay with us from Brisbane last Easter...then it was Christmas...then it was this Easter...now it’s maybe next Christmas! And we were supposed to be heading over this summer, but hopefully next year...haven’t been down under in over 10 years and I’d like to get back! 

As do I. Over a year since I've been home.  It's going to be interesting to watch the process. Just as the narrative that was set early in the UK of Variant = Bad leading to a fair bit of continuing overreaction in some circles, Community Cases = Bad will need to be overcome in Australia, especially in places like Melbourne  and WA ( the zero-covid/hard border Premier is on track to win all but 2 seats in this weekends election)  where one case sends them straight into lock-down. Sydney (similar tactics to here in  Singapore, albeit less restrictive) has been a lot better about managing the risks, going through the TTI process when cases pop up and only seeking harsher restrictions as a last resort.

[mcshed]

10 hours ago, Leyrulion said:

@gizmoman this is one of those be careful of your online sources situations as the guy is effectively spreading a dangerous conspiracy

That is why @gizmoman is posting it as he loves a dangerous conspiracy.

[Andre91]

7 hours ago, BobWillis2 said:

Not necessarily. Some schools started their testing last week as kids need 3 on site tests before they can start their home testing. 

Why has this been downvoted? This is definitely the case in many, many school, my own included. Days 1, 3 and 5 in school and then it switches to home testing. 

[zahidf]

Jab jab jab

 

[Ryan1984]

7 hours ago, incident said:

Think that your mate has been fed some bullshit. There'd be no logical reason why that decision had been taken already, or even that it was thought likely, because as it stands right now all of the four the metrics that they claim to be using (as laid down in the roadmap) are either meeting or outperforming expectations:

- The vaccine programme is going as expected and easily on-track to meet the next target (all over 50s by April 15th). If it scales up as expected next week onwards then it'll beat the target by at least a couple of weeks.

- The evidence definitely shows that the vaccines have a huge impact on both deaths and hospitalisations - even more now than it did when the roadmap was published.

- Infection rates are still going down, and hospitalisations are going down even faster - the number of people in hospital today with COVID-19 is less than half of what it was when the roadmap was published, that was only just over 3 weeks ago.

- The existing Vaccines are being shown to have a strong effect on Variants of Concern, we've had lots of new evidence to that extent.

Basically, unless something changes dramatically between now and April 12th, then by their own measures there's no plausible justification for pushing back the date (and arguably plenty for bringing it forward), and so I can't see any scenario under which they'd try.

These are my thoughts (plus they wouldn’t delay anything - unless they HAVE to - in the weeks leading up to the local election?) but they never said what they are judging these metrics against: https://unherd.com/2021/03/will-we-pass-the-boris-roadmap-tests/

Let’s hope we get there - two and a half weeks until we can see groups of people again.

[Ryan1984]

The tabloids this morning are full of stories about over 30s being vaccinated by the end of next month after the delivery.

[Zoo Music Girl]

1 hour ago, Andre91 said:

Why has this been downvoted? This is definitely the case in many, many school, my own included. Days 1, 3 and 5 in school and then it switches to home testing. 

I think it's some personal downvote politics between the two posters, not the actual content of the post.

In other news, this is a shitter (both generally and for me personally as was hoping to see two loved ones with cancer soon. Both have had Pfizer and on the 12-week wait):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56351084

[Ozanne]

32 minutes ago, Ryan1984 said:

These are my thoughts (plus they wouldn’t delay anything - unless they HAVE to - in the weeks leading up to the local election?) but they never said what they are judging these metrics against: https://unherd.com/2021/03/will-we-pass-the-boris-roadmap-tests/

Let’s hope we get there - two and a half weeks until we can see groups of people again.

How does your mate have the connections that would be able to tell him this info?

[zahidf]

15 minutes ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

I think it's some personal downvote politics between the two posters, not the actual content of the post.

In other news, this is a shitter (both generally and for me personally as was hoping to see two loved ones with cancer soon. Both have had Pfizer and on the 12-week wait):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56351084

But Cancer Research UK said the small study had not yet been reviewed by other scientists and people undergoing cancer treatment should continue to follow the advice of their doctors.