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The Covid race: vaccination vs lockdown easing. It’s not over yet – politicalbetting.com
The Covid race: vaccination vs lockdown easing. It’s not over yet – politicalbetting.com
You might think that things are finally going well in the UK in the fight against Covid-19. And, after a pretty awful 2020, so they are. Close to 25m vaccine doses have already been administered – more, proportionally than almost any other country on Earth; weekly case numbers are down by more than 90% from the peak, the weekly death toll is down by more than 85%, hospital admissions by almost as much and the number of patients in hospital by almost 80%.
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People will wrongly think they have immunity before they do. People will get very confused and angry when the jab doesn't work for them. But unless the schools lead to a major spike, the plan looks sensible and has generally got our buy-in.
No-one has offered a better one that survives contact with the enemy.
Bernard Manning’s best line in that interview with Mark Lamar was “Poor old Jim Bowen - he’ll never live to be as old as he looks”
Only ease off restrictions as long as case rates don't rise. I think case rates are low enough now to ease off the restrictions, but you want to do it slowly.
Hospitalisations are still too high. They need to fall further. In particular the ICU requirement needs to fall.
France is an interesting case study. They didn't fully lockdown in the new year - schools were kept open throughout. Case rates are medium overall but with a number of hotspots. But it is putting pressure on hospitals, in particular ICU. France has a policy of distributing patients across the country rather than stressing hospitals in hotspots, on the basis that properly resourced ICU saves lives. Thread on this, in French:
https://twitter.com/eorphelin/status/1368886505062735874
The difference between first and second dose protection is very marginal - the key benefit of the second dose is extending protection not enhancing it. 3 weeks after the first dose gives excellent protection against hospitalisation and death.
The impact of the disease on under 40s (probably under 50s), sad as it is, does not justify lockdown.
We should be easing restrictions, especially those outside, faster than the timetable. Maybe only a few weeks faster but those weeks do matter economically and psychologically.
However, political decision makers know that they'll be instantly and loudly blamed for deaths, so they prefer to be risk averse. It's understandable.
I accept that most would only have had round one, which would give 65-70% coverage and not 95%+ so you'd expect some very unlucky ones, unfortunately.
So I expect a new hump, but one that's hopefully shorter and flatter and that dissipates by July due to the effects of vaccines not lockdown.
Rates are dropping here, but still above much of the country.
https://twitter.com/CovidLeics/status/1370425267412418560?s=19
NWLeics, Charnwood, Blaby are all fairly typical Middle England. Only Charnwood has a significant ethnic mix.
That gives us a 22% reduction in R that we didn't have at the start of the year. I'm fairly optimistic that this will be enough to keep case numbers from returning to five figures, and to ensure that hospital admissions don't rise again, even with some modest reopening.
The vaccine rollout, and vaccine wars, came just in time for him.
Thought experiment: What if the US vaccine rollout had happened just before their election, rather than just after? Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Let's hope it is not.
Sources have told Telegraph that supplies could be double the rate in coming weeks. Could hit 1m a day vaccinations.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-preprint-assessing-the-effectiveness-of-the-first-dose-of-pfizer-biontech-and-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccines-in-prevention-of-hospitalisations-in-elderly-and-frail-adults/
My big gripe is that with each week we will likely get closer to the answer, but we are only allowed to actually use that data to inform decisions once every five weeks, and then only on a particular subset of restrictions.
So whereas before the infection rate was 4.2% (I know at one stage before Christmas the ONS said it was 0.2% but that appears to have been a typing error) I’m not hearing of many positives among children at all despite these millions of tests.
This may of course be because they are as useless as a chocolate kettle, but let’s be optimistic here and assume it’s because there isn’t much to find.
In which case, it seems unlikely there will be a major school driven spike for at least 2-3 weeks, by which time we have the Easter holidays (April 1st or earlier) and another two weeks’ respite.
So if my experience is typical there is reason to hope schools will not cause problems this side of May, by which time vaccines should be sufficiently advanced to do the heavy lifting on protection.
Each time round they have been too slow to impose restrictions, and too slow to relax them.
The thing which really enrages me at the moment is that I'm locked down now, incase by unlocking too quickly, cases run away and they have to lockdown again. This is quite probably the most stupid policy of all time - imposing something which is probably unnecessary, so as to avoid possibly having to do it in the future.
*they aren't. The various approaches of different US states are proving pretty conclusively that you might as well not bother and just let a de-facto lockdown occur instead. Same results in terms of case numbers, vastly increased freedom for those not really at risk.
And it didn't even require that - all Trump needed to do to win was to get his voters to actually vote by say not discouraging early and mail in voting.
That’s the error they made over schools, where a barrage of leaks from the DfE meant it had to be announced they were all reopening on the 8th March even though this was (a) not true and (b) a significant gamble given the enormous problems involved and the major risks of confining millions of people in poorly ventilated rooms for long stretches.
As it turns out it’s one I’m now hopeful we’ll get away with, but it could easily have gone very wrong if large numbers of cases had been found.
Not a tip. Still strongly suspect Mercedes will rack up more titles this season.
See you later.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It was impossible for a start, but if he had led his people in the campaign to restrict its damage he would have been lauded as the saviour of the country. He would have won a landslide last November.
Day after vaccine - 21 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection
Then the next morning - 20 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection
Would cost virtually nothing to do but have an impact on behaviour, if a little annoying.
“As much as one-third of the UK population may already have gained some level of immunity by contracting and recovering from Covid-19, said Prof Ferguson. And this pool of protection is being quickly expanded by vaccination to take the population towards herd immunity status.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-uk-neil-ferguson-lockdown-b1801354.html
Of that 30% (let’s call it 25% conservatively) it is not unreasonable to suppose a great proportion are those of working age, who have had to be out and about, and thus exposed to the virus. There will be an overlap of course but the sheer transmissibility of the Kent variant will have meant more and more people will have got the virus. So it’s quite possible 50% of the population have some degree of immunity already.
Now, variants do offer some escape from immune reaction, but Rupert Beale, who is the Group Leader of the Cambridge Cell Biology of Infection Lab says -
“Vaccinated or previously infected people may get infected again, but because they have some measure of immunity their infections will be mild, much as with the four seasonal coronaviruses we have lived with for decades.”
Quite rightly, herd immunity through prior infection is something no government should aim for, and that our government was clinging to it last March for as long as it was gives it no credit, but we are where we are. In that context the pace of unlocking does seem to be about right.
Finally below is an Tweet from Shane Crotty, an immunologist at La Jolla Institute of Immunology, who estimates the level of protection given by prior infection to a few of the current variants -
https://twitter.com/profshanecrotty/status/1367559032282607618
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyWtVZE8GB4
In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke reflects on key moments in the 2020 race with the authors of the new book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won The Presidency.” Written by Jonathan Allen, senior political analyst with NBC News, and Amie Parnes, senior correspondent for The Hill, the book is the first big reported account of the 2020 campaign in its entirety.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-bad-is-liverpool/
He refused to believe he was facing an epochal public health emergency that would destroy his "beautiful" economy so he consistently acted as if it were much less serious than it was.
I almost totally lost it in the latest one; I couldn't work or sleep at times, and my relationships really suffered. All I wanted to do was drink to escape it. Or play totally absorbing games and drink. And even that didn't work at times.
Did other people have it far worse than me? Of course - much much worse, with personal tragedy and real trauma on top. But this has never happened to me before and it was terrifying.
And if it's happening to me it must be happening to millions of others too, and the long-term effects of that we still don't know and possible won't for years (if not decades) so it's time to take a few calculated risks if we now know we've got the measure of this virus, because we don't know we've got the measure of the aftermath.
That vaccination is having an effect is evident from comparing the case and hospital rate trends for the UK and US with those of Europe.
Yet spikes are still possible (from a very low base case rates on the island rose last week) and it's too early to judge what effect sending pupils back to school may have had.
Vaccination is proceeding efficiently and steadily, but with the wave of second doses about to hit, capacity needs to ramp up asap. The March ramping up has been forecast almost as often as a LibDem late surge, but it is now mid month and so far there is no sign of it; indeed first dose vaccination numbers are trending downward and have been for some weeks.
That is 3 weeks after the 15m most vulnerable have had their first jab. About right for the next step
Is this a feeling anyone has had ?
Where we are right now suggests to me that those advising the government have called this pretty spot on. We will see the acceleration now but given the lag between vaccination and actual protection the window for changing the timetable looks pretty much shut.
That doesn’t seem very balanced
So it doesn't look exactly like just another outbreak. Yesterday's Western Morning News said second jabs were due this weekend.
God morning, everyone.
Lockdown is a tremendous strain on civil liberties that should only be a last resort. If by the end of March the most vulnerable have had two doses and the over 50s one then three weeks later it's inexcusable to still be saying that mainstream indoor businesses like bars and restaurants need to be closed.
Steady as she goes to Easter maybe but a real rethink is needed at or by Easter. On current timelines indoor hospitality is going to remain shut until nearly the end of May. That simply can not be justified. We are not at the last resort anymore.
Nightclubs in June I'd keep until three weeks after 18 year olds have had the first dose, but summer 2020 style regulations with restaurants and pubs open indoors should be brought forward after Easter.
Going forward, I think it likely that the "no sooner than dates" will be stuck to, but they can get away with pushing the steps back if they really feel they need to, provided that sufficient notice is given and that it's not by more than a couple of weeks each time. The success of the vaccine project has bought the Government some extra political capital, but only a finite amount of it.
Don't forget he got more votes than any previous POTUS candidate in history excluding Biden 2020. That doesn't show a lack of turnout, simply he was behind Biden as the polls showed.
A couple of things from my mum's care home: before the vaccines they had an outbreak with five residents testing positive (and some care staff). Not one had any symptoms. This is seems odd when compared to Mark's example.
Secondly, mum's home, and I assume others in the area (Mark's example from Sidmouth is just down the road), had Pfiser. I've often wondered how reliable the chilling of the vaccine is, especially as they are visiting the care homes in mobile units. Is it possible that the Sidmouth vaccine was compromised leading to a faulty batch?
The one exception is hospital and care staff, but that was moreso to prevent deaths and hospitalisation amongst those they work with than for themselves.
It's subtley different to the strategy in place in the country which is broadly moving at the same speed as us, the USA.
Our longer vaccination gap is definitely better in the round though I think.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Is there a source for this claim. I thought the whole issue with the 12 week issue (for Pfizer) was we just don’t know.
So whilst I’m happy for the government to be cautious and wish they had been more cautious in the autumn, I think David is worrying too much.
The government could have stressed that people are only fully protected 2 weeks after the second Pfizer (strong evidence from Israel), and that there was significant, albeit diminished risk until then. The problem is that such a campaign is complex and to an extent discordant with a single dose strategy.
https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1370011662275723267
At this point it's worth reminding ourselves of two other things. Firstly, that the vaccine does provide significant protection for all the vulnerable cohorts - if it didn't then, given how very easy it is for Covid to get into care homes, we'd be getting horror reports of this kind very frequently from all over the country, and the Covid mortality rate in the very elderly would not be dropping like a stone as it is. And secondly, that even a very thorough vaccine drive is still not going to eliminate Covid, and a certain number of people are still going to die from it. The entire aim of this process is to get Covid deaths down to a level that society as a whole can accept, not to wipe them out.
- An uptick in 0-14, from the school testing
- 65 upwards falling faster
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-56372847
That being the case we're almost at the finishing line. It's now mid-March, the first big loosening is due in mid-April and the second in mid-May, after which things should start to feel a lot more normal.
You are right in that this lockdown feels the worst. Online socialising has lost its lustre and I just want to be out and about doing normal things. That pub table has been booked for a month's time...
Dilemma: I could book a vaccination for tomorrow through the website, but it would be in the mass centre which is quite a long way from me. No car. Would either need to risk a taxi both ways, or risk taking my mobility scooter and it running out of juice on the way home (it would be at the extreme limit of its range). Alternative is to try to book through my GP (who should have already offered me a slot but didn't) at their local centre which is just up the road from me. But they are closed so I have to wait until Monday even to find out if they have slots.
Any suggestions? Part of me just wants to get this done but I'll kick myself if I either pick up COVID in a taxi or get stranded halfway home.
--AS
That they have, officially, a fairly low case count still doesn't take away the disruption that it causes and it did cause disruption to China's economy, an economy that requires an obscene level of growth each year..
They may well offer you 10 options.
Then balance distance and promptness.
--AS
Legally allowed to socialise, so OK for a few cans in the local green space for an end of week decompress with a mate.
And from the 8th, we've been allowed to run labs, so we've had 20 kids in a day this last week. And, like the report of primary schools, you can see how happy they are to be back in the laboratory.
Little things, but they add up.
It would incentivise uptake among sceptic groups by offering a quid pro quo, and it is happening anyway. HMG should get ahead of the game and have a controlled reopening rather than an uncontrolled one. Not to mention electoral credit with the locals imminent!
What I am also saying is I am now hopeful that their dishonesty, incompetence and panic isn’t going to lead to multiple deaths and possible further lockdowns.
But that isn’t the same as saying they were right to do what they did. It was a gamble that has a higher chance than it did a week ago of coming off.
Also - ask your GP, Your circumstances sound like those where a home vaccination would be a good idea.
I doubt I'll be getting on the train to go wandering around Cambridge, still less to visit relatives, until I've had shot one plus the obligatory three weeks, but then again I'm nearly 45 so I'm hoping I'll get my appointment the right side of Easter and will therefore be good to go by the end of next month anyway.