What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
If Omicron is very dangerous we need to protect the NHS. If Omicron in not so dangerous we need to protect the NHS.
Must logically be a sweet spot somewhere in between - or are we being run the NHS now?
Yes, the UK is now basically an NHS with a country attached.
And the rest of the developed world (apart from the US) wondering why the hell they do it like that.
Numbers of developed countries are locking down in the face of a surge in COVID. To prevent their health systems being overwhelmed.
Don't do that! Let people enjoy their "nhs with a country attached" in peace.
Ah - facts.
Incidentally, I came up with the perfect windup to the post-modernist "There is no objective truth, only subjective, personal truth" brigade....
I see. And will I be sufficiently favoured to hear it?
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
Conflation of correlation and causation once again from master of statistics HYUFD.
Alternative explanation: leaders get kicked out by their own when the party has outlasted its sell-by date and is already in the electoral wilderness. I.e. the causation is the party has become rotten to the core. The effects are that the leader is kicked out AND the party takes a while to find a new leadership and recover.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
If Omicron is very dangerous we need to protect the NHS. If Omicron in not so dangerous we need to protect the NHS.
Must logically be a sweet spot somewhere in between - or are we being run the NHS now?
Yes, the UK is now basically an NHS with a country attached.
And the rest of the developed world (apart from the US) wondering why the hell they do it like that.
Numbers of developed countries are locking down in the face of a surge in COVID. To prevent their health systems being overwhelmed.
Don't do that! Let people enjoy their "nhs with a country attached" in peace.
Ah - facts.
Incidentally, I came up with the perfect windup to the post-modernist "There is no objective truth, only subjective, personal truth" brigade....
Tis a truth universally acknowledged that Michel Foucault liked to have sex with underage boys in Tunisia.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
But plan B isn't going to prevent that? We can see across the whole of Europe that plan b measures are of low value. France just clicked in 58k cases despite all having all of this in place, Germany has been clocking in 70k+ per day for a while despite tougher than plan B. The Netherlands is in pretty much lockdown and getting our equivalent of 80k cases per day.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
The view from the health experts and NHS managers is that it will help. Who am I to tell them they are wrong? The difference between us and the countries you mention is that because they kept restrictions on things like masks, they were able to keep case numbers very low. We did not and hence suffered 40k new cases a day month after month which put the service under such massive prolonged pressure.
And yet now the Netherlands has got more people in hospital than their first wave peak, Germany has got more in the ICU than their second wave peak, France is heading in the same direction. All that's different about what they did is they will end up with the same number of people hospitalised, except in a much shorter timeframe. However you slice this, everyone will get COVID and for unvaccinated people ~10% will end up in hospital for vaccinated people about ~0.5%, most countries are trending towards 70-75% people vaccinated, which means there's a lot of people who are potentially going to enter the funnel and end up in hospital. That is going to happen today, tomorrow or three months from now because COVID isn't going to go away.
That's the grim reality of COVID, we're all going to get it multiple times and people are going to die from it every year, it is the new influenza and will take the lives of the vulnerable every year just as the flu does. That's the reality, whether the NHS managers want to admit it or whether they think they can eliminate death is simply irrelevant. Chris Whitty has said multiple times that everyone in the country is going to get COVID, I sat around a table of pharma and academic experts who all said the same thing, there is no escaping COVID, it's coming for all of us and sadly for some older and more vulnerable people it is going to kill them, even with vaccines just as the flu does.
Since you mention Germany. It's far from clear what you say is true. Show me your workings.
On UK "Freedom Day" Germany had fewer than 2% of the daily cases that than the UK had. If Germany had had a Freedom Day at that time it would have taken weeks to reach similar case levels. Maybe all that would have happened is that the winter wave here would have started from a much higher base, and right now we would be in a proper lockdown, rather than a partial lockdown that only applies to unvaccinated adults.
Also on Freedom Day the UK had 87% of the adult population with at least one vaccine dose. In Germany it was 72%. If Germany waited until 87% of the adult population had a vaccine dose, we'd still be waiting now. The problem is the failure to vaccinate people, not making people put on a mask when shopping during the summer.
OK the government could have encouraged infections to spread during August-October, maybe it would have been a good idea. (Although the restrictions that were in place were put there by the Bundesländer, and generally amounted to wearing masks in shops, and barely enforced 3G rules for some venues. Plus of course test and trace and self-isolation, which I believe the UK also continued with). We would have had maybe 10% fewer people with no immunity from prior infection or vaccination. A small plus, but we would have gone into the very rapid increase of recent weeks from a much higher starting point. So I'm not at all sure we would be better off.
I think the point is that with that additional natural immunity there's less chance of the virus being able to reach escape velocity in the first place. That's the issue here, that getting the unvaccinated into the immunity funnel is only going to happen one way, they get COVID. Everyone is going to get COVID, pushing infections into the future was a poor idea and now lockdowns are back. Even here where Boris is shafting the nation to cover up his own deficiencies.
I understand that point. My point is that what might be very probably a good idea in one place might not be somewhere else, or at least require different timings. That is why I asked to see your workings - especially as different countries in, as you put it, "the whole of Europe" are, well, different. In Germany's case I don't think having maybe 1-2 million fewer people with no immunity out of roughly 20 million is going to be enough to stop "escape velocity", and would come at the price of starting the winter rise from a much much higher base so would there be any advantage. The calculations are going to be different in different places. Maybe your argument works better in countries like Portugal with high vaccination rates, though I have no idea what restrictions they kept in place over the summer, and whether they could have funnelled unvaxxed into natural immunity over the summer.
And are measures really so ineffective? (I have no idea what is UK's "plan B"). Germany's case rate is now slightly declining, despite a massive pool of people with no immunity, the weather getting worse, and christmas get-togethers happening - surely at least partly as a result of the recent restrictions for unvaccinated adults, tightening of a few other rules, and authorities finally starting to enforce the rules that we have.
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Alternative explanation: leaders get kicked out by their own when the party has outlasted its sell-by date and is already in the electoral wilderness. I.e. the causation is the party has become rotten to the core. The effects are that the leader is kicked out AND the party takes a while to find a new leadership and recover.
And are measures really so ineffective? (I have no idea what is UK's "plan B"). Germany's case rate is now slightly declining, despite a massive pool of people with no immunity, the weather getting worse, and christmas get-togethers happening - surely at least partly as a result of the recent restrictions for unvaccinated adults, tightening of a few other rules, and authorities finally starting to enforce the rules that we have.