Just heard it on the news but they issued caution as it is a small sample in South Africa
Well let’s hope it’s wrong because if it’s right the future looks more Black Rook than MaxPB, I fear.
This damn virus mutates too fucking fast. And we can’t lockdown forever as we attempt to update vaccines continuously
Hmm. At some point we may just have to build a billion hospitals, then let it burn through the population
No it doesn't. It still protects us against severe symptoms, hospitalisation and death. The AZ vaccine is already being updated to fight this and other variants. We've signed a deal for domestic mRNA mass manufacturing specifically to fight future variants. We are going to beat this and by the middle of April we won't be looking back.
Between our contracts with GSK/CureVac, Novavax, AZ and Valneva we'll have 800m domestic manufacturing of 4 different types of vaccine. The UK is simply the best placed nation in the world to win this war against the virus.
We should probably keep the general limiting measures in place till everyone has had one shot of a vaccine. We don't want this Saffer variant becoming dominant.
1. Lockdown until about July 2. About five minutes of freedom 3. Disease rips through all the AZ recipients, tsunami of sickness, hospitals stuffed with gasping bodies, NHS overwhelmed panic, lockdown until Spring 2022
Bloody great.
I think you enjoy making up these domesday scenarios.
Are you related to SeanT ?
Relax.
There's ups and downs in everything but things are going much better than we hoped for only a month ago.
I don't enjoy it, it's absolutely bloody awful.
As I was saying for months before I allowed myself to be fooled into a false sense of optimism by the mood music around the vaccination drive, never assume that things can't get any worse, because they can and they always will.
Remember SeanT’s Rule of Covid all those many months ago?
When it comes to Covid, imagine your reasonable worst case scenario: because that is what will happen.
Hm.
I miss Sean T 😊
I don’t. A vain, boastful man, even if he was superbly funny, seriously talented and sexually well-endowed.
Yes, I remember him.
I could spot his posts immediately without even scrolling up to see the name.
Still gives protection from severe symptoms, hospitalisation and death. I think that's fine and part of why we've got the CureVac deal is as a long term way to beat variants.
Possibly. For about the next five seconds, until the next mutant form cricket bats us around the head.
And the Brazilian strain? And the Bristol? And the Liverpool?
Haven't thousands of variants been detected ?
And doubtless many more exist which haven't been detected whether or not they have subsequently died out.
More evidence that the best strategy is stop international travel until covid has been crushed throughout the world.
Yes. I don't fucking care if Brits are stuck abroad. Fuck em for travelling in the first place. They can come back when there's room in the quarantine centres to accommodate them, as the Australians have done. And the cost of halting business travel is certainly minuscule compared with that of spending years and years and years in fucking lockdown.
We should cut ourselves off from the rest of the world, as thoroughly and completely as possible. Raise the drawbridge, and keep it raised.
I wouldn't worry too much, aiui they are using pretty cutting edge modelling to predict likely mutations so we stay ahead of the game and we pre-jab people before the mutations arise.
Countries like the UK will hopefully always be one step ahead in the future and over time it will naturally become less deadly as people build up a wide range of neutralising antibodies against various mutations.
The light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming train, at least not because of this.
At the end of the day, humans have superior AI and biotech capability, and are far more intelligent than a virus.
Well.. most of us are.
Viruses are 100% anti-vaccine (from their own POV). Humans are only about 70% pro vaccine, falling to 40% in France. Which is the more intelligent?
The two big things we need to do, close the frigging border and expand jabbing capacity to a million a day...
If we could do a million a day, even if we need to do loads of people again with a booster shot of a new formulation, we could get through the whole population in 2 months.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
The two big things we need to do, close the frigging border and expand jabbing capacity to a million a day...
If we could do a million a day, even if we need to do loads of people again with a booster shot of a new formulation, we could get through the whole population in 2 months.
Yup, 10 weeks for a booster to the whole country and that's hoping we get reasonably good take up. We probably wouldn't as people become less open to boosters after they've done the original one.
Just heard it on the news but they issued caution as it is a small sample in South Africa
FT headline: "Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid jab far less effective against S African strain, study shows" then: “A two-dose regimen of [the vaccine] did not show protection against mild-moderate Covid-19 due to [the South African variant]” The sample was of 2026 HIV negative individuals, with a median age of 31.
Whether that is a small sample can only be decided with respect to the standard error with which to test the null hypothesis, or the width of the error band. Simple assertion that it is "small" does not cut it.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
I would gently suggest you need to reduce the panic as there will be many stories like this as we progress through this crisis
It is not being reported as cataclysmic and the vaccines will adjust to mutations
Maybe listen to Andrew Marr tomorrow who is talking to AZN, vaccinations and mutant strains
This kind of crap reporting needs to be pulled up...
Inside the care home in Bristol where residents were vaccinated 'well before' Covid-19 outbreak
“Throughout the pandemic the home remained Covid-19-free until two weeks ago,” said Ms Desai, who outlined all the measures they’d undertaken to prevent this from happening.
Then, into January, residents and staff began to receive the Covid-19 vaccine
So you realised you had an outbreak ~23th Jan...it takes at least a week from infection to show up, so we are back to 16th Jan....
So residents were vaccinated "well before"....they were at best 2 weeks post vaccination, probably more like 1 week. It takes at least 3 weeks for AZN to provide significant protection.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We could easily afford to supply Ireland with vaccines as well. If they're willing to accept them and the EU don't confiscate them.
As I understand it AZ was only designed to work on Original Covid. The fact it works effectively against cockney Covid is a huge bonus. The fact it appears to help against SA variant is a small additional bonus. They announced weeks ago that they were working on a modification to cater for the SA variant, so the fact that the unaltered version doesn't knock it out completely is hardly news.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
I would gently suggest you need to reduce the panic as there will be many stories like this as we progress through this crisis
It is not being reported as cataclysmic and the vaccines will adjust to mutations
Maybe listen to Andrew Marr tomorrow who is talking to AZN, vaccinations and mutant strains
I was going to 'like' your post, until you suggested listening to Andrew Marr ; )
You're quite right to counsel that people shouldn't allow press reports to put them on an emotional rollercoaster. Not least since all we have is a press report and no scientific paper until Monday. (As a scientist I think the press-release model of publication is shoddy and irresponsible.)
Those who are worried should get away from the computer and read a book. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
I would gently suggest you need to reduce the panic as there will be many stories like this as we progress through this crisis
It is not being reported as cataclysmic and the vaccines will adjust to mutations
Maybe listen to Andrew Marr tomorrow who is talking to AZN, vaccinations and mutant strains
I was going to 'like' your post, until you suggested listening to Andrew Marr ; )
You're quite right to counsel that people shouldn't allow press reports to put them on an emotional rollercoaster. Not least since all we have is a press report and no scientific paper until Monday. (As a scientist I think the press-release model of publication is shoddy and irresponsible.)
Those who are worried should get away from the computer and read a book. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.
--AS
I chuckled about Marr, but it is relevant as he is talking to AZN about the issue tomorrow at 9.00am on BBC
Dakar is also another battle, but again not on the high seas.
At Dakar, the British battleships WERE on the high seas and fired on there even if the Richelieu was in harbour. Likewise at Mers-el-Kebir.
No,. not the high seas, which means the relatively open seas. e.g Jutland, Glorious First of June, Trfalgar.
Dakar and Oran were coastal bonbardment by comparison, no different from Overlord even if the enemy artillery was on hulls rather than gun emplacements.
This kind of crap reporting needs to be pulled up...
Inside the care home in Bristol where residents were vaccinated 'well before' Covid-19 outbreak
“Throughout the pandemic the home remained Covid-19-free until two weeks ago,” said Ms Desai, who outlined all the measures they’d undertaken to prevent this from happening.
Then, into January, residents and staff began to receive the Covid-19 vaccine
So you realised you had an outbreak ~23th Jan...it takes at least a week from infection to show up, so we are back to 16th Jan....
So residents were vaccinated "well before"....they were at best 2 weeks post vaccination, probably more like 1 week. It takes at least 3 weeks for AZN to provide significant protection.
The outbreak was 'tested positive for the virus in the seven days to January 26' so from 20th January.
So first infection no later than the 15th January.
Once the adult population is vaccinated, I expect Covid will be statistical noise within the country's mortality and morbidity statistics, even with slightly different variants. In that scenario, the case for significant domestic restrictions falls away and we simply have to accept it as an additional risk of living life - just as we do with the flu or car accidents.
The real risk is of a new variant where there is no cross immunity at all and we go back to square one. I think that's unlikely, but I'd support very strict controls and quarantine on foreign travel until we can be more certain. If people have sacrificed their jobs, businesses and not seeing loved ones for over a year for this, then people can live with not going to Spain for a year or two.
Where it gets tricky for the government is if we get a spike in cases and deaths next winter but the impact of the vaccines and natural immunity means the numbers remain manageable for the NHS. My worry is that the media start demanding the government do more to save lives etc etc.
Ultimately, as sad as any death is, the reason we’ve had to take such drastic measures is that our health service can’t cope if we just let the virus spread.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
This kind of crap reporting needs to be pulled up...
Inside the care home in Bristol where residents were vaccinated 'well before' Covid-19 outbreak
“Throughout the pandemic the home remained Covid-19-free until two weeks ago,” said Ms Desai, who outlined all the measures they’d undertaken to prevent this from happening.
Then, into January, residents and staff began to receive the Covid-19 vaccine
So you realised you had an outbreak ~23th Jan...it takes at least a week from infection to show up, so we are back to 16th Jan....
So residents were vaccinated "well before"....they were at best 2 weeks post vaccination, probably more like 1 week. It takes at least 3 weeks for AZN to provide significant protection.
The outbreak was 'tested positive for the virus in the seven days to January 26' so from 20th January.
So first infection no later than the 15th January.
Its day of death stats stuff all over again....but this is worse as it knocks people's confidence in the vaccination process.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
And off we go again. I should've known. It's the hope that kills you (if Covid doesn't do it first.) That's another year of lockdown to add on (six months whilst they dick around modifying the vaccine, followed by another Winter) and by the time that's done the bastard fucker will have changed again.
This is never going to end, is it?
“Does not offer protection again mild and moderate symptoms”
=
“Offers protection against hospitalisation and death”
I’ll take that.
Fucking catastrophising journalists scaring people for a story
“A two-dose regimen of [the vaccine] did not show protection against mild-moderate Covid-19 due to [the South African variant]”, the study says, adding that efficacy against severe Covid-19, hospitalisations and deaths was not yet determined."
How does that work? You have identified your mild-moderates, so what's left are either disease free/asymptomatic or hospitalised/dead, but you can't tell which by eyeballing them?
This kind of crap reporting needs to be pulled up...
Inside the care home in Bristol where residents were vaccinated 'well before' Covid-19 outbreak
“Throughout the pandemic the home remained Covid-19-free until two weeks ago,” said Ms Desai, who outlined all the measures they’d undertaken to prevent this from happening.
Then, into January, residents and staff began to receive the Covid-19 vaccine
So you realised you had an outbreak ~23th Jan...it takes at least a week from infection to show up, so we are back to 16th Jan....
So residents were vaccinated "well before"....they were at best 2 weeks post vaccination, probably more like 1 week. It takes at least 3 weeks for AZN to provide significant protection.
The outbreak was 'tested positive for the virus in the seven days to January 26' so from 20th January.
So first infection no later than the 15th January.
Its day of death stats stuff all over again....but this is worse as it knocks people's confidence in the vaccination process.
To be honest, I very much doubt people will turn down their chance to be vaccinated other than some who are anti vaccination anyway
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
And off we go again. I should've known. It's the hope that kills you (if Covid doesn't do it first.) That's another year of lockdown to add on (six months whilst they dick around modifying the vaccine, followed by another Winter) and by the time that's done the bastard fucker will have changed again.
This is never going to end, is it?
“Does not offer protection again mild and moderate symptoms”
=
“Offers protection against hospitalisation and death”
I’ll take that.
Fucking catastrophising journalists scaring people for a story
“A two-dose regimen of [the vaccine] did not show protection against mild-moderate Covid-19 due to [the South African variant]”, the study says, adding that efficacy against severe Covid-19, hospitalisations and deaths was not yet determined."
How does that work? You have identified your mild-moderates, so what's left are either disease free/asymptomatic or hospitalised/dead, but you can't tell which by eyeballing them?
Dakar is also another battle, but again not on the high seas.
At Dakar, the British battleships WERE on the high seas and fired on there even if the Richelieu was in harbour. Likewise at Mers-el-Kebir.
No,. not the high seas, which means the relatively open seas. e.g Jutland, Glorious First of June, Trfalgar.
Dakar and Oran were coastal bonbardment by comparison, no different from Overlord even if the enemy artillery was on hulls rather than gun emplacements.
.
Saw this last week, French shells straddling RN ships off Dakar.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No it isn't, it's exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise (ignoring the moon).
Dakar is also another battle, but again not on the high seas.
At Dakar, the British battleships WERE on the high seas and fired on there even if the Richelieu was in harbour. Likewise at Mers-el-Kebir.
No,. not the high seas, which means the relatively open seas. e.g Jutland, Glorious First of June, Trfalgar.
Dakar and Oran were coastal bonbardment by comparison, no different from Overlord even if the enemy artillery was on hulls rather than gun emplacements.
.
Santo Domingo was only just of the coast, judging from how the French were able to beach some of their crippled ships.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No-one will be saying things like this if, a few months down the line, loads of young and middle-aged people are very poorly with Long Covid symptoms *and* we're also still stuck in lockdown, because some vaccine-resistant form of mutant SuperCovid has arrived from Paraguay or goodness knows where else and started to kick down our defences.
When will we learn to stop under-estimating this disease?
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
Domestically our bet in CureVac looks great. Again the UK seems to be making all of the right decisions on vaccines, I'm almost certain that the government had a hand in GSK buying up the non-Germanic rights to the vaccine because the government announcement of domestic manufacturing and a long term mutation busting supply deal with CureVac came just days later.
That news has really perked me up because it shows the government has a long term plan to beat this, we aren't just going to rely on pharma companies/the market to do the work for us, we're fully incentivising them to do the work and supply the UK first with their mutation busting vaccines.
They've had a lockdown since the end of December, and from what I've read their variant isn't necessarily more transmissible, but better at evading immunity against previous variants.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No it isn't, it's exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise (ignoring the moon).
And off we go again. I should've known. It's the hope that kills you (if Covid doesn't do it first.) That's another year of lockdown to add on (six months whilst they dick around modifying the vaccine, followed by another Winter) and by the time that's done the bastard fucker will have changed again.
This is never going to end, is it?
“Does not offer protection again mild and moderate symptoms”
=
“Offers protection against hospitalisation and death”
I’ll take that.
Fucking catastrophising journalists scaring people for a story
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No it isn't, it's exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise (ignoring the moon).
Indeed. Whoever coined the phrase "the darkest hour is just before the dawn" clearly never had to get up early.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No-one will be saying things like this if, a few months down the line, loads of young and middle-aged people are very poorly with Long Covid symptoms *and* we're also still stuck in lockdown, because some vaccine-resistant form of mutant SuperCovid has arrived from Paraguay or goodness knows where else and started to kick down our defences.
When will we learn to stop under-estimating this disease?
Speedy global rollout + tweaking + easy self vaccines + better treatments = No armeggedon
But you're right there could be some twists in the tale
Dakar is also another battle, but again not on the high seas.
At Dakar, the British battleships WERE on the high seas and fired on there even if the Richelieu was in harbour. Likewise at Mers-el-Kebir.
No,. not the high seas, which means the relatively open seas. e.g Jutland, Glorious First of June, Trfalgar.
Dakar and Oran were coastal bonbardment by comparison, no different from Overlord even if the enemy artillery was on hulls rather than gun emplacements.
.
Santo Domingo was only just of the coast, judging from how the French were able to beach some of their crippled ships.
Also, Dakar and Mers-el-Kebir were entirely different from Overlord, because the exchanges were ship firing on ship not ships firing only on land based targets. In addition, at the latter the Strasbourg left harbour.
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No it isn't, it's exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise (ignoring the moon).
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
There is zero evidence that AZ does not work with the elderly (against normal variants). There is just a certain lack of evidence that it DOES work. But the chances are high that it will work, even for the old, and is therefore definitely worth having
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
Nah, don't worry about it, there's already an October mutation busting booster shot coming for AZ recipients and it still protects people from severe symptoms, hospitalisation and death with the less optimal 6 week dosing schedule. It may have better efficacy against it with the 12 week gap that we're using in the UK.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
Whilst closing all the borders has a certain degree of dystopia, I personally think that 1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
Nah, don't worry about it, there's already an October mutation busting booster shot coming for AZ recipients and it still protects people from severe symptoms, hospitalisation and death with the less optimal 6 week dosing schedule. It may have better efficacy against it with the 12 week gap that we're using in the UK.
Why cant we find a way of giving all oldies Pfizer?
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
Whilst closing all the borders has a certain degree of dystopia, I personally think that 1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
I don’t know why Starmer isn’t arguing for this. He needs a stand-out policy. Seriously
And off we go again. I should've known. It's the hope that kills you (if Covid doesn't do it first.) That's another year of lockdown to add on (six months whilst they dick around modifying the vaccine, followed by another Winter) and by the time that's done the bastard fucker will have changed again.
This is never going to end, is it?
“Does not offer protection again mild and moderate symptoms”
=
“Offers protection against hospitalisation and death”
I’ll take that.
Fucking catastrophising journalists scaring people for a story
Who cares if they get mild symptoms?
They might pass it on, no?
Given there had been uncertainty about transmissability even when people were asymptomatic, even if it is the case people might pass it on its still a major major win if those who do catch have mild symptoms.
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
Nah, don't worry about it, there's already an October mutation busting booster shot coming for AZ recipients and it still protects people from severe symptoms, hospitalisation and death with the less optimal 6 week dosing schedule. It may have better efficacy against it with the 12 week gap that we're using in the UK.
Why cant we find a way of giving all oldies Pfizer?
People we don't have enough of it and more people vaccinated sooner is better than waiting for more to be available.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
Whilst closing all the borders has a certain degree of dystopia, I personally think that 1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
Now is the perfect time to close the borders: our virus incidence is lower than surrounding places and the gap is about to become bigger.
But we also need to be ready to start opening them once we get a serious portion of the population vaccinated. Because vaccination is not just about making CV19 a little less unpleasant, it's about making it harder to spread. And all the evidence in the last week - from Pfizer and from AZN - is that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the disease, irrespective of the variant.
Once we have 70-80% of the population vaccinated (and yes, we'll need to do top-ups with vaccines that cover new variants), then it's really going to be really hard for CV19 to spread. Plus, of course, the fewer people (globally) that have severe CV19, the fewer mutations there will be.
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
If the virus has partially worked its way around the current version of AZ then that has no age-specific implications. It will simply wallop any susceptible person who's had that vaccine - up to a point. Hopefully it will still stop people kicking the bucket but the worse the disease the more Long Covid cases it will probably end up precipitating.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
We have no idea how widespread, serious or long-lasting the effects of Long Covid are. Not enough work has been done on the subject, partly, of course, because the disease hasn't existed for long enough.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Can I politely suggest, for your own sake, you have a cup of tea and listen to some nice music
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
No it isn't, it's exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise (ignoring the moon).
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
Worst case scenario. Oxford/AZ turns out to be OK but flawed enough that everyone ends up using mRNA vaccines for preference. Fine, there will soon be gallons of those.
The UK's vaccination lead falls off a bit and the Frenchies get to laugh and point at us.
Not good, but not that bad.
Except for the bit about the Frenchies, obviously.
Well surely that has been a risk since the 14th century, what a ridiculous headline!
Indeed. We could also be hit by an extinction level asteroid. The chances of either in our lifetimes have neither increased nor decreased.
Not true about plagues, there's a very solid argument that the more you invade and disturb the environment the more likely you are to prod something nasty and zoonotic into life. And another to say that increased travel and urbanisation increase the damage it can do.
I doubt any country has reached herd immunity and certainly not without significant cross contamination of neighbouring countries.
I wonder if its possible that new variants might be more contagious but have shorter lives - so steeper rises and steeper falls.
No, the thing is: The way I see it, these days there's no Spanish Flu, right? And, ages ago, there was a Spanish Flu, right? So, there must have been a moment when there being a Spanish Flu went away, right? And there not being a Spanish Flu came along. So, what I want to know is: How did we get from the one case of affairs to the other case of affairs?
Jesus, bad enough getting fined for partying during lockdown, but it was a birthday party for a one year old? You're not even going to get any fun out of the experience.
More than £11,000 in Covid fines have been handed out to 14 adults after they attended a one-year-old's birthday party.
Well surely that has been a risk since the 14th century, what a ridiculous headline!
Indeed. We could also be hit by an extinction level asteroid. The chances of either in our lifetimes have neither increased nor decreased.
Not true about plagues, there's a very solid argument that the more you invade and disturb the environment the more likely you are to prod something nasty and zoonotic into life. And another to say that increased travel and urbanisation increase the damage it can do.
Yes. Plagues come after spells of globalisation and greater interaction with animals. It’s known.
Also, after the Neolithic Revolution, when we first domesticated animals, human lives grew shorter because of all the new diseases we caught from the sheep and pigs etc. Humans themselves became physically scrawnier
I believe modern Greeks are still slightly shorter, on average, than their Hunter gatherer forefathers.
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
If the virus has partially worked its way around the current version of AZ then that has no age-specific implications. It will simply wallop any susceptible person who's had that vaccine - up to a point. Hopefully it will still stop people kicking the bucket but the worse the disease the more Long Covid cases it will probably end up precipitating.
The way you talk, it's almost like you think it would be better if the AZ vaccine hadn't come along.
The best vaccine is what you have on hand. Better to give people some protection now.
But you know what. Let's imagine that AZ turns out to be completely ineffective*. Well, then we'll end up revaccinating everyone in three months with Pfizer or Moderna or CureVac.
In that scenario, we'll have had to endure a few more months of restrictions than we would have liked.
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
Whilst closing all the borders has a certain degree of dystopia, I personally think that 1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
I don’t know why Starmer isn’t arguing for this. He needs a stand-out policy. Seriously
Starmer doesn't set out policies.
He waits to criticise government policies without offering alternatives. It's called hindsight! 😊
It's still difficult. There's lots of uncertainty. But it's getting better.
Let's see it through.
Here's my analogy.
When we discovered Pfizer and Moderna were 95% effective, that was DDay.
The South African variant, that's the Battle of the Bulge.
But it doesn't stop the fact that world CV19 vaccine capacity is increasing at a monstrous pace, and that we can easily tweak mRNA vaccines to deal with CV19 mutations.
We will overwhelm this virus, and sooner rather than later.
(Guys: watch Israel. They are seven weeks away from having vaccinated everyone in the country at least once. See how they're doing in April. If CV19 has essentially disappeared from the country, then we'll know freedom is just a few pricks away.)
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
Worst case scenario. Oxford/AZ turns out to be OK but flawed enough that everyone ends up using mRNA vaccines for preference. Fine, there will soon be gallons of those.
The UK's vaccination lead falls off a bit and the Frenchies get to laugh and point at us.
Not good, but not that bad.
Except for the bit about the Frenchies, obviously.
Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Not really given that we've got 57m mRNA doses by the end of May and we've just signed a long term domestic manufacturing deal with GSK/CureVac for rapid trials and immunisation against future variants.
In terms or vaccines we really have got all avenues covered. We also have Novavax which has 60% efficacy against the SA variant, and 60m doses of that arriving from April.
There's no scenario where we're not done with this shit by the end of May. A round of booster shots for the over 50s in October with our fancy new AZ mutation busting vaccine will cover off all possibilities.
Well. Indeed. However the most recent poll put Unionists split 3 ways to total 41%. And a SF First Minister.
Time to get ahead of things and retitle the Deputy post as 'Co-First Minister'. Since I'm given to understand the posts are already equal in a duumvirate (doesn't sounds as good as triumvirate) that should be fine.
Well surely that has been a risk since the 14th century, what a ridiculous headline!
Indeed. We could also be hit by an extinction level asteroid. The chances of either in our lifetimes have neither increased nor decreased.
Not true about plagues, there's a very solid argument that the more you invade and disturb the environment the more likely you are to prod something nasty and zoonotic into life. And another to say that increased travel and urbanisation increase the damage it can do.
Well. OK. The chances of it being like the Black Death are however, counter balanced by our general better health and medical knowledge. Who knows what the Covid 19 death toll would have been in the Middle Ages.
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
I agree with that but it doesn't offer much comfort to those of us that have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine.
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
If the virus has partially worked its way around the current version of AZ then that has no age-specific implications. It will simply wallop any susceptible person who's had that vaccine - up to a point. Hopefully it will still stop people kicking the bucket but the worse the disease the more Long Covid cases it will probably end up precipitating.
The way you talk, it's almost like you think it would be better if the AZ vaccine hadn't come along.
The best vaccine is what you have on hand. Better to give people some protection now.
But you know what. Let's imagine that AZ turns out to be completely ineffective*. Well, then we'll end up revaccinating everyone in three months with Pfizer or Moderna or CureVac.
In that scenario, we'll have had to endure a few more months of restrictions than we would have liked.
That is - literally - the worst case scenario.
* Which it won't be.
Or more likely Novavax which we know has 60% efficacy and we're getting from April.
Well. Indeed. However the most recent poll put Unionists split 3 ways to total 41%. And a SF First Minister.
The main gainers in that poll were Traditional Unionist Voice and the Alliance.
It would probably require the DUP to regain votes lost to TUV to ensure Foster stays First Minister and leader of the largest party at Stormont and the UUP to win votes from the Alliance to ensure a Unionist majority overall
If that was the situation - which I don’t expect - you’d expand capacity in the healthcare system
An answer so good you gave it three times
Though, even if serious illness on that scale were deemed remotely tolerable, quite where we're meant to rustle up all those extra hospitals and medical staff up from in a timescale of anything less than about seven or eight years is quite beyond me.
Everything in triplicate...
You set the timeframe as “an eternal merry go round”... 😉
A fair point, though OTOH seven or eight years might as well be forever, for the state that the pitiful survivors would be in by the time such a scenario had played out.
That’s the point. But wouldn’t sell as many papers as scaring people like poor @Black_Rook
I have been spooked by two things:
1. Indications of a substantial reduction in performance, which would be suggested if people are no longer protected from getting really rather ill, but not quite ill enough to have to be put on oxygen. If we're at that stage already then (a) how much worse will it get? and (b) what protection do we have against worse mutations? The answer to (a) is unknown and the answer to (b) is absolutely nil because our catastrophically incompetent Government will do almost nothing about the borders. And, even if enough people don't get sick enough from the SA variant to have us back in lockdown again then what about the next one, or the one after that? 2. Even if it doesn't get any worse then presumably, if all the AZ recipients are vulnerable to being bed-ridden, then they are probably also vulnerable to Long Covid? At my age and state of health, that frightens me a lot more than the quite remote possibility of actually dying from the damned thing. The idea of shambling around, possibly for the rest of my life, with half my internal organs shot really doesn't appeal.
Look, I like a nice bit of doom porn as much as anyone. But that is *slightly* histrionic
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
Whilst closing all the borders has a certain degree of dystopia, I personally think that 1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
Now is the perfect time to close the borders: our virus incidence is lower than surrounding places and the gap is about to become bigger.
But we also need to be ready to start opening them once we get a serious portion of the population vaccinated. Because vaccination is not just about making CV19 a little less unpleasant, it's about making it harder to spread. And all the evidence in the last week - from Pfizer and from AZN - is that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the disease, irrespective of the variant.
Once we have 70-80% of the population vaccinated (and yes, we'll need to do top-ups with vaccines that cover new variants), then it's really going to be really hard for CV19 to spread. Plus, of course, the fewer people (globally) that have severe CV19, the fewer mutations there will be.
If a vaccine evading form of the virus arises elsewhere in the world then how do we know that existing vaccines will be any better at controlling transmission of such a variant than they are at preventing illness?
In at least one important respect the WHO is right: this disease isn't beaten anywhere until it's beaten everywhere. It needs to be crushed into submission all over the world. Even if it can't be eradicated, which may be unrealistic, then it needs to be given as little chance as possible to mutate, which will maximise our ability to suppress it going forward with a combination of regular inoculation and improved treatments.
We risk throwing everything away if we do manage to crush it in Britain and get the bulk of the population jabbed, only to let it back in a new and more dangerous form from some other part of the world where Covid remains rampant.
We should raise our defences and keep them up until it makes sense to lower them. It is better by far to chuck the affected segments of the economy on the bonfire than the whole thing and our society along with it. Nothing is more important than getting rid of lockdown, whether cyclical or continuous.
Well. Indeed. However the most recent poll put Unionists split 3 ways to total 41%. And a SF First Minister.
The main gainers in that poll were Traditional Unionist Voice and the Alliance.
It would probably require the DUP to regain votes lost to TUV to ensure Foster stays First Minister and leader of the largest party at Stormont and the UUP to win votes from the Alliance to ensure a Unionist majority overall
Indeed. A bit straw clutching to posit a Unionist majority to magic away the current impasse then.
But we also need to be ready to start opening them once we get a serious portion of the population vaccinated. Because vaccination is not just about making CV19 a little less unpleasant, it's about making it harder to spread. And all the evidence in the last week - from Pfizer and from AZN - is that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the disease, irrespective of the variant.
Once we have 70-80% of the population vaccinated (and yes, we'll need to do top-ups with vaccines that cover new variants), then it's really going to be really hard for CV19 to spread. Plus, of course, the fewer people (globally) that have severe CV19, the fewer mutations there will be.
I don't think I agree here. If the AZ vaccine is comparatively ineffective against say the SA variant then it makes little difference how many people we've jabbed with the AZ vaccine - if we go back to normal life with it present, it will rip through the population and before we know it we'll be back in lockdown, and fairly close to square one again.
I think that the solution to unlocking borders will be for counties to lock down their borders hard until they have things under control via vaccination - and then to only open up travel to countries in similar positions. So once the EU gets it's act together, maybe in 9 months time we could look at reopening the EU-UK borders. Maybe the same with the US.
Obviously booster vaccines will have their place, but I don't think we can afford to be as complacent as to assume we'll be able to keep pace with variants whilst having the borders open to anywhere where the disease is out of control.
Comments
Between our contracts with GSK/CureVac, Novavax, AZ and Valneva we'll have 800m domestic manufacturing of 4 different types of vaccine. The UK is simply the best placed nation in the world to win this war against the virus.
I could spot his posts immediately without even scrolling up to see the name.
Obvs.
If we could do a million a day, even if we need to do loads of people again with a booster shot of a new formulation, we could get through the whole population in 2 months.
Very few people get Long Covid as bad as THAT. Most recover fully, or almost completely, within a few months
Also, this closed borders thing. Is it really do-able? We’d have to hermetically seal the island of Britain. Which also means shutting out Ireland and Ulster. Tourism would be abolished. All airports would close except for freight. For how long? Years?
London would collapse. Universities too.
We’d wipe off 30% of GDP. And of course similar crises would be raging all over the world. It is beyond dystopian.
then:
“A two-dose regimen of [the vaccine] did not show protection against mild-moderate Covid-19 due to [the South African variant]”
The sample was of 2026 HIV negative individuals, with a median age of 31.
Whether that is a small sample can only be decided with respect to the standard error with which to test the null hypothesis, or the width of the error band. Simple assertion that it is "small" does not cut it.
It is not being reported as cataclysmic and the vaccines will adjust to mutations
Maybe listen to Andrew Marr tomorrow who is talking to AZN, vaccinations and mutant strains
Inside the care home in Bristol where residents were vaccinated 'well before' Covid-19 outbreak
“Throughout the pandemic the home remained Covid-19-free until two weeks ago,” said Ms Desai, who outlined all the measures they’d undertaken to prevent this from happening.
Then, into January, residents and staff began to receive the Covid-19 vaccine
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/inside-care-home-bristol-residents-4965298
So you realised you had an outbreak ~23th Jan...it takes at least a week from infection to show up, so we are back to 16th Jan....
So residents were vaccinated "well before"....they were at best 2 weeks post vaccination, probably more like 1 week. It takes at least 3 weeks for AZN to provide significant protection.
You're quite right to counsel that people shouldn't allow press reports to put them on an emotional rollercoaster. Not least since all we have is a press report and no scientific paper until Monday. (As a scientist I think the press-release model of publication is shoddy and irresponsible.)
Those who are worried should get away from the computer and read a book. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.
--AS
Bit like sample size of over 65s was
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1358182643939102724?s=20
Presumably they’ve reached herd immunity. Already. With a death rate about half of the UK’s
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-africa/
Dakar and Oran were coastal bonbardment by comparison, no different from Overlord even if the enemy artillery was on hulls rather than gun emplacements.
.
So first infection no later than the 15th January.
The real risk is of a new variant where there is no cross immunity at all and we go back to square one. I think that's unlikely, but I'd support very strict controls and quarantine on foreign travel until we can be more certain. If people have sacrificed their jobs, businesses and not seeing loved ones for over a year for this, then people can live with not going to Spain for a year or two.
Ultimately, as sad as any death is, the reason we’ve had to take such drastic measures is that our health service can’t cope if we just let the virus spread.
Ireland is in as good or better a position than the UK to seal itself off. They can join us in a bubble.
Outgoing tourism is already effectively dead, except for small numbers of very rich and very stupid people whom we can happily shut out of the country and leave to rot in Dubai or wherever, until the airport quarantine capacity is available to let them back in. Nobody wants to come here to do sightseeing and we don't want to encourage them to start until the pandemic is over.
People will still be able to come if they're settling here or to study, up to whatever capacity the quarantine system can handle. Work will be needed to build it, over time. A lot of hotels that depend mostly on international tourism can keep operating for the housing of arrivals. The better off universities could help in this by funding places so that some incoming students can come here; others will have to study remotely. Government can bail the universities, if necessary keeping some of them on life support for the period that it's going to take to tame the disease.
The flow of truck drivers between Britain and the continent will have to stop. The resultant damage will be severe. Not as bad as lockdowns though.
It is hard to know how long this will take, whilst the world gets on top of the disease. Yes, it probably would take several years. But much better, under those circumstances, to pull up the drawbridge than endure endless lockdown in response to the large-scale importation of new variants.
Remember the darkest hour is just before the dawn
I wonder if its possible that new variants might be more contagious but have shorter lives - so steeper rises and steeper falls.
How does that work? You have identified your mild-moderates, so what's left are either disease free/asymptomatic or hospitalised/dead, but you can't tell which by eyeballing them?
A little reminder: (1) there is plenty of evidence that Moderna and Pfizer are pretty effective against the SA variant; (2) J&J is also reasonable effective; (3) CureVac and Valneva will almost certainly have been tweaked against SA Covid before they are released.
Both most importantly of all: the big issue in this whole thing is capacity to produce mRNA vaccines, which can be tweaked incredibly quickly to deal with new mutations and strains. Remember, the Pfizer vaccine was designed in a day, a year ago.
The challenges were proving safety of an entirely new form of vaccine (check, done), and ramping up the ability to produce mRNA vaccine at scale (still a work in progress, but definitely heading in the right direction).
"yet"
https://twitter.com/simonharley/status/1352245062764290048
When will we learn to stop under-estimating this disease?
I wonder what the official figures will show once they're compiled?
Sadly I see we are back to ridiculous hysteria.
FFS get a grip.
Bye!
That news has really perked me up because it shows the government has a long term plan to beat this, we aren't just going to rely on pharma companies/the market to do the work for us, we're fully incentivising them to do the work and supply the UK first with their mutation busting vaccines.
We will prevail.
That is my considered view.
But you're right there could be some twists in the tale
Cheer up mate, you'll be able to find somewhere cheaper than £15k for a week in the Cotswolds.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-africas-covid-lockdown-may-have-created-herd-immunity-12116494
Don't get me wrong, I am immensely grateful to all concerned that we have been vaccinated so quickly but I do have a growing feeling that those of us that are over 70 and had AZ drew the short straw. I sincerely hope that those countries that are not approving AZ for the over 65s are not proved to have been correct.
There is zero evidence that AZ does not work with the elderly (against normal variants). There is just a certain lack of evidence that it DOES work. But the chances are high that it will work, even for the old, and is therefore definitely worth having
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2021/feb/06/behind-the-numbers-efficacy-of-oxford-vaccine?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
1) At this point, with a viable route out of this crisis visible and available in the next 6 weeks or so, we shouldn't be taking any risks. Currently we have too strict a national lockdown, and far too weak an international lockdown, given that the major threat isn't another wave now with the most vulnerable all nearly jabbed, but vaccine resistance from abroad.
2) I'd happily close the borders for a year for every extra month where I can just go round to any friend's house, play with their kids, drink a beer with them, hug my mum, play in a band with my mates, sing at church. If the media, politicians, celbs etc want to go abroad fine. They just don't get to come back till this is over globally (can't see we'd miss any of them anyway).
"Starmer ally" is used rather than "Labour frontbencher" because they have no other means to attack Starmer.
The chances of either in our lifetimes have neither increased nor decreased.
Edit. Of course they decrease with every day it doesn't happen.
It's still difficult. There's lots of uncertainty. But it's getting better.
Let's see it through.
But we also need to be ready to start opening them once we get a serious portion of the population vaccinated. Because vaccination is not just about making CV19 a little less unpleasant, it's about making it harder to spread. And all the evidence in the last week - from Pfizer and from AZN - is that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the disease, irrespective of the variant.
Once we have 70-80% of the population vaccinated (and yes, we'll need to do top-ups with vaccines that cover new variants), then it's really going to be really hard for CV19 to spread. Plus, of course, the fewer people (globally) that have severe CV19, the fewer mutations there will be.
I find the lack of accuracy of aphorisms most vexing.
Or is it a proverb?
The UK's vaccination lead falls off a bit and the Frenchies get to laugh and point at us.
Not good, but not that bad.
Except for the bit about the Frenchies, obviously.
Don't have nightmares, everyone.
More than £11,000 in Covid fines have been handed out to 14 adults after they attended a one-year-old's birthday party.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-55963093
Also, after the Neolithic Revolution, when we first domesticated animals, human lives grew shorter because of all the new diseases we caught from the sheep and pigs etc. Humans themselves became physically scrawnier
I believe modern Greeks are still slightly shorter, on average, than their Hunter gatherer forefathers.
The best vaccine is what you have on hand. Better to give people some protection now.
But you know what. Let's imagine that AZ turns out to be completely ineffective*. Well, then we'll end up revaccinating everyone in three months with Pfizer or Moderna or CureVac.
In that scenario, we'll have had to endure a few more months of restrictions than we would have liked.
That is - literally - the worst case scenario.
* Which it won't be.
However the most recent poll put Unionists split 3 ways to total 41%. And a SF First Minister.
He waits to criticise government policies without offering alternatives. It's called hindsight! 😊
When we discovered Pfizer and Moderna were 95% effective, that was DDay.
The South African variant, that's the Battle of the Bulge.
But it doesn't stop the fact that world CV19 vaccine capacity is increasing at a monstrous pace, and that we can easily tweak mRNA vaccines to deal with CV19 mutations.
We will overwhelm this virus, and sooner rather than later.
(Guys: watch Israel. They are seven weeks away from having vaccinated everyone in the country at least once. See how they're doing in April. If CV19 has essentially disappeared from the country, then we'll know freedom is just a few pricks away.)
In terms or vaccines we really have got all avenues covered. We also have Novavax which has 60% efficacy against the SA variant, and 60m doses of that arriving from April.
There's no scenario where we're not done with this shit by the end of May. A round of booster shots for the over 50s in October with our fancy new AZ mutation busting vaccine will cover off all possibilities.
Who knows what the Covid 19 death toll would have been in the Middle Ages.
There's way too much doom and gloom on here.
It would probably require the DUP to regain votes lost to TUV to ensure Foster stays First Minister and leader of the largest party at Stormont and the UUP to win votes from the Alliance to ensure a Unionist majority overall
In at least one important respect the WHO is right: this disease isn't beaten anywhere until it's beaten everywhere. It needs to be crushed into submission all over the world. Even if it can't be eradicated, which may be unrealistic, then it needs to be given as little chance as possible to mutate, which will maximise our ability to suppress it going forward with a combination of regular inoculation and improved treatments.
We risk throwing everything away if we do manage to crush it in Britain and get the bulk of the population jabbed, only to let it back in a new and more dangerous form from some other part of the world where Covid remains rampant.
We should raise our defences and keep them up until it makes sense to lower them. It is better by far to chuck the affected segments of the economy on the bonfire than the whole thing and our society along with it. Nothing is more important than getting rid of lockdown, whether cyclical or continuous.
I think that the solution to unlocking borders will be for counties to lock down their borders hard until they have things under control via vaccination - and then to only open up travel to countries in similar positions. So once the EU gets it's act together, maybe in 9 months time we could look at reopening the EU-UK borders. Maybe the same with the US.
Obviously booster vaccines will have their place, but I don't think we can afford to be as complacent as to assume we'll be able to keep pace with variants whilst having the borders open to anywhere where the disease is out of control.