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

😂

i also lolled

It does look like a real drop in cases, at least in Scotland, rather than a data issue.

And of course Scottish schools break up earlier than English ones ...

…and we exited the kickball competition earlier as well.

Two posts where the suggestion is that it is other factors rather than herd immunity
https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1419193587170959361

https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1419762154274791424

A friend shared this Reddit thread about going back to normal. It’s Reddit, so one can’t take anything that’s posted there too seriously, but there was an influx of posts a while ago weighted towards the ‘if not now, when’, ‘general consensus is covid will be here forever let’s just move on’ side of the covid scale.

Some of the posters are questioning their grip on reality. It’s convoluted, but it does seem that the thread is convincing people to just go about life like before.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/comments/osh65t/have_you_gone_back_to_normal/

I hope people are able to return to normal in as much of their lives as possible, as long as they’re not becoming complacent or pretending like covid isn’t a real risk anymore. It’s a risk we can manage, we just can’t afford to ignore it.

Went out to get some shopping and it looks like quite a few shops no longer have hand steriliser and trolley and basket wipes have gone too.

Can’t view!?

Long shot I know, but anybody have any idea whether the UK would consider a Chinese national who has been vaccinated in China to be fully vaccinated for the purpose of a business trip to the UK? So much confusing info out there.

Can you "call" something with a question?

Yes can I?

Next.

Yes that can be my next tweet.

Really hoped that people wearing masks on public transport if they’re ill might be a positive hangover from the pandemic but the two people closest to me on this train are both clearly ill and relentlessly coughing, blowing their nose and wiping their snot with their hands. I guess Freedom Day really means the freedom to make other people sick.

guess Freedom Day really means the freedom to make other people sick.

Yep.

The ONS study may help with this, but hospital admissions are the only thing that can really provide that idea of its prevalence in the population (with a two week lag).

I'm not sure I understand why.

ONS data will lag by a week or so, but it will give a reasonably accurate measure of the prevalence of the virus (including those who are asymptomatic and unaware they even have it, and those who are symptomatic but have mild enough symptoms that they just stay at home).

The ONS study is up to 240,000 households now, so that means roughly 60,000 households being tested a week. Testing 1% of the population a month should be pretty reliable.

Hospital admissions has tended to lag infection data by 2 weeks, and the assumption is that "double vaccination plus two weeks" will mean that most people who get it again will be far more likely to get no symptoms or just very mild symptoms that are more like hayfever than the "classic" Covid symptoms (cough, temperature, anosmia - as per the gov.uk site currently). So measuring hospital admissions alone means you're going to miss asymptomatic cases and mild cases, thus giving an inaccurate representation of prevalence amongst the general population.

Anecdata but I know 15 people who've tested positive in the last three weeks and none of them have been a hospital admission.

I suppose it's because it's not clear to me how herd immunity will present itself in terms of testing data.

I'm expecting to test positive for some time having had covid a few weeks back. As you say, plenty of asymptomatic folk may also test positive but have some immunity to serious illness due to previous infection / vaccine. Perhaps these people are also less infectious, preventing the onward transmission?

I dunno. All I do know is that if hospitalisations fall during a period with no restrictions in place, something pretty seismic has changed. This has not happened before. All the other data might help understanding of how this could happen, but hospitalisation remains the key metric in my view.

Caught a Doctor on BBC, said there was a 1000 a day entering hospital, the same as you get in winter with respiratory problems.

.

This last push at vaccinating those who are not vaccinated is going to be hard.

Is it critical that they're vaccinated? I obviously know that they should be and appreciate that 100% vaccinated is the ideal, but isn't the point of a vaccination program not necessarily to get everyone but to get a sufficiently large percentage so that the virus cannot spread.

Are there enough refuseniks out there to put that percentage in jeopardy, and is there a point where the effort taken to get them to take it is better spent elsewhere?

.

Are there enough refuseniks out there to put that percentage in jeopardy

As I understand it while we aren't vaccinating 20% of the population (under 18s) we are unlikely to get to herd immunity so it is kind of a moot point. People should get the jab to protect themselves as much as anything else, plenty of very unwell under 40s I'm hospital.

At some point, infection of the refuseniks will result in similar levels of immunity. One of the 'advantages' of high rates now is that this bunch are more likely to infected before winter.

The government policy seems to be vaccinate as many as possible + infect as many as possible while trying to surf the wave of NHS collapse and hope we can turn this round through heard immunity before it gets cold and rainy.

This policy is about "getting back to normal" as soon as possible and has no regard for mitigating overall deaths, the risks of long covid and the risks of new and worse variants. Isn't it exciting !

Daily positive cases in Scotland peaked end of June, and daily hospitalisations peaked 12th of July.

Daily positive cases in England peaked on 15th July, and daily hospitalisations appear to be peaking about now.

I think we can be confident this isn't just a data glitch or a drop in testing.

Given Wales seem to be on a similar trajectory to England, it is probably more to do with school term dates than the euros.

So close schools over winter to allow the rest of us to go to the pub/spend christmas with families? 🙄

I think we can be confident this isn't just a data glitch or a drop in testing.

Remind me of your experience working with national data systems again?

(I only worked with a small subset of hospitals sending data to SGSS for routine infections, data is often delayed, lost down the back of a sofa, resent late, found, held hostage by jerry built systems by teams held to ransom by big it firms and their service contracts)