Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Millions of people shedding virus loads they personally have immunity to all over people who have refused vaccines = awkward

Long covid is quite a serious condition, some people are unable to work for months afterwards. It seems to affect 1/20 to 1/5 depending on who you ask.

Austerity is a political choice. Enormous amounts of cash pissed away on Brexit, if the government uses that as an argument "we have to reopen cos economy" pfff really.

They pissed away millions on their mates on crappy PPE mates contracts.

It is all really hard to weigh up, how to do you calculate death rates due to covid lockdown which are NOT part of their political choices AND which they can fix short-term if they want to VS long term problems with long covid which can also cause depression/leave people on permanent PIP which is...not great.

I'd be happy if they could do something like give vaccines first to very affected areas and let those kids / workers go back to school / work first, we can hold out another 2 months if we have to.

Again the problem of hunkering down too long to be "better safe than sorry" will likely cause more deaths due to the ongoing detrimental effects on mental and physical health, and (more specifically) the austerity it creates than are saved due to avoiding Covid-19 deaths.

I see a lot of people say this but is there any data/studies to suggest it's true? I feel like a lot of people (Telegraph types) repeat this as gospel but are not actually informed in any way

Edit: I mean obviously it is true by default that at some point lockdown is worse than COVID. But I'm interested to know where that point is, because I don't think we're even close to it yet (lockdown would have to be pretty bad to be worse than 100,000s dead)

Austerity causes deaths. There are some links to non-pandemic specific research from here:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme#Mortality

"
In 2017, the Royal Society of Medicine said that government austerity decisions in health and social care were likely to have resulted in 30,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2015.
"

Those were funding/policy decisions not in a time of a pandemic. Do you think it's better or worse during a pandemic? How many excess/preventable deaths have there been and will there be due to much of the healthcare system being shutdown?

I understand the reasoning. I'm just wondering if there's any data/cost-benefit analysis on the subject yet.

Suicides are often quoted as a consequence of lockdown, for example, but it seems to be the case that the suicide rate actually went down around the start of the pandemic. But this doesn't seem to stop Tories from using as an excuse to call for opening up ASAP.

How many excess/preventable deaths have there been and will there be due to much of the healthcare system being shutdown?

In theory if you keep the rest of society shutdown then healthcare might do better. When there are fewer Covid patients hospitals will be able to get back to the usual heart disease and cancer treatment.

One measure for a successful relaxing of lockdown is hospitals are busy with Covid patients but not swamped. In that situation regular healthcare suffers again.

It seems likely that we have a new endemic disease. Perhaps we need to increase the number of hospitals/beds/doctors/nurses/etc so we can do the pre-Covid healthcare as well? It will of course take lots of money and a decade to do that.

I understand the reasoning. I'm just wondering if there's any data/cost-benefit analysis on the subject yet.

I think the obvious answer is that it is impossible to measure/predict/model, otherwise it would exist and be driving the decision making.

The only answer you can derive is a retrospective estimate, and that may just show that the guess at the time was dreadful but won't provide any context as to where it stood against the other possibilities.

Unless you have a time machine to be able to try every possibility out, and see how it plays out in the end, it is mostly guesswork.

It does a bit, but, to be fair, Neil Oliver is not a radical - he's an archaeologist / conservationist / author / TV presenter (and former President of the National Trust for Scotland) who just happens to not agree with Scottish nationalism.

When he was appointed to the National Trust position cybernats tried to chase him from the job in a pretty hateful way despite him being eminently well-qualified for it:
https://tfn.scot/news/charity-faces-fury-as-indy-bashing-historian-given-top-job

So I can understand why he's angry. Unfortunately this isn't a one off - it's what happens in Scotland at the moment. I know a high profile unionist journalist who found it impossible to get a job in Scotland: he now lives and works in London (in Westminster, ironically) because he was effectively backlisted for being opposed to independence.

This is the context within which Sturgeon's ambition to continue her briefings within purdah should be viewed.

Austerity was a political choice...it still is.

I appreciate lockdown cannot go on forever and there are economic trade offs.

But the UK low UC benefits, total disregard for disabled people, mental health care and council cuts when there was money again are all due to the Tories.

Not seeing much of a change there, of course we are stuck with that lot, but easy for them to make those calls as they all WFH (so do I, and while I rather NOT pay more tax you could argue a temp tax on me is more than fair) and I understand due to check and balances... wait what I am saying, the Belfast City Council has to audit every small charity grant while these feckers pissed hundreds of millions up the wall to their mates.

/rant but would be nice to see some alternative models rather than "austerity is just a fact of life" models...

while I rather NOT pay more tax

I'd rather pay more tax. Great public services cost money to deliver.

Indeed. I'd rather pay more tax and would vote for a (non-right) party who had this in their manifesto.

While I wholeheartedly agree, currently I'd rather not line the pockets of tory donors with my taxes...

Paying more when 22bn is being pissed away on a failed system while I still have to donate to food charities to prevent ignored folk from starving stings a touch.

I always vote left, but if I am perfectly honest it is nice to keep the £ myself. Especially with that awful pension system, the non existing benefits... if the tax rate would increase but health/benefits/pension would improve and bottom incomes would be raised, totally go for it!

I think higher taxes should happen, but a big problem is that people don't trust the government not to waste it. Not sure I do.

The alternative though is clearly that people just keep the money completely for themselves, so perhaps paying tax to a "wasteful" government is still better.

And of course people could give it all away, but in reality that means me donating more and others just buying a bigger house :)

Christina Pagel, who has been pretty on the money with this so far, is basically saying if you open up this summer you create the perfect breeding ground for a vaccine resistant strain.

I don't mean this in a snarky way, but not sure how to word it in a none snarky tone: What's the other option? Give millions of people a vaccine and tell them to stay indoors over the summer?

The lockdown has to end at some point, and as the weather improves it will end, legally or not.

as the weather improves it will end, legally or not

It hit 17 degrees here in Amsterdam last weekend and the rules went out the window.

Not sure there is a particularly viable other option - there certainly isn't a popular one -but that doesn't mean its not all going to go shit again and certainly doesn't mean scientists shouldn't point this out.

The lockdown has to end at some point, and as the weather improves it will end, legally or not.

Indeed, the Government can't prevent people meeting up in parks/homes/etc, they can only police it, but they're still in control of the non-private indoor gatherings by means of continued closures of schools, non-essential retail, libraries, pubs, restaurants, sporting venues, etc. It's a very crude tool but it's all they have if the numbers start to climb alarmingly and large swathes of the population have no fucks left to give.

certainly doesn't mean scientists shouldn't point this out.

I agree: absolutely does not and they should.

Yup - and a tool that should be used to respond to rising numbers, and not to keep the population in a perpetual state of limbo because of potential risks. It's that distinction that I worry about as a number of people seem to think that because the risk of numbers rising again is unknown/unquantifiable lockdown should keep going indefinitely.

Does Scotland have a similar road map to what was announced yesterday and if so where might I find it?

It's literally the top news item on the BBC News website right now.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56170916

Haha thanks

It’s not quite as clear it would seem

Has anyone on here had older friends/relatives/parents react incredibly badly to the vaccine?

My parents (mid 70's) received the Pfizer vaccine nearly 6 weeks ago.
My father didn't get anything worse than a sore arm, whereas my mother took ill in the evening of the injection and from then on presented what her GP said was the worst case of shingles they'd ever seen. Her symptoms worsened to the point she was taken to hospital for overnight observation two weeks back.
The local GP was initially keen to get her notes passed to the vaccination centre has now said words to the effect, you may have this for a year, deal with it.

Any medical types on LFGSS who can recommend a course of action for massively acute shingles? She was given an antiviral by the GP a few days after the vaccine reaction, but only painkillers thereafter.

Happy to receive PMs if people would rather not reply here.

I am sorry to hear this. I hope she gets better soon!