Hospital admissions and beds filled are undeniably going up. Just nowhere near quick enough to be a credible problem.
At the current rate of increase it'll take about a month to get to a total of 1,500 Covid patients in hospital, and that's assuming that the 15 million additional vaccinations that will happen over that period have zero additional effect either on preventing serious illness or dampening transmission, which is wholly implausible.
Barring a variant a whole lot more deadly than Delta, Covid-19 is effectively finished as an emergency. It's just that a lot of the scientists either can't see it, or don't want to.
Scientists and mathematicians are always very fond of their field of expertise, even if many people think that it is useless and boring. You can't blame them as it is their career.
I get the impression from my European colleagues that basically covid is over.
In fact, they think we are still riddled with it via the “Indian variant” and express pity, concern etc.
Are they not able to look at case rate figures?
They’re not reading the figures. They’re just responding to:
A - the opening up they see locally B - their own interaction with vaccines C - the scary stuff on the news about the U.K.
So uninformed nonsense then?
I never said it was informed.
I shared it because it’s interesting (and annoying) that they are basically “over covid” whereas in this country many still seem wedded to indefinite forms of lockdown.
I do feel we are squandering out vax success regarding opening up.
It's pretty clear that a significant section of the public is happy with the status quo of restrictions for other people
[clue: they don't go to nightclubs and the bowling clubs have reopened so all's good there]
I know that nothing like it can or will possibly happen, BUT... the most effective way to finish off the restrictions would be to tie the value of the state pension to the youth unemployment rate and the furlough bill. Those two indicators go up, the state pension goes down. Would concentrate minds wonderfully.
The most selfish generation in history, happily claiming their unfunded final salary pension schemes, sitting in their over-valused homes with planning permissions denied for new building. And they had 1 more gift for us!
I get the impression from my European colleagues that basically covid is over.
In fact, they think we are still riddled with it via the “Indian variant” and express pity, concern etc.
Are they not able to look at case rate figures?
They’re not reading the figures. They’re just responding to:
A - the opening up they see locally B - their own interaction with vaccines C - the scary stuff on the news about the U.K.
Perhaps they are better at handling risk than we are.
I agree.
I think - like in the US - they're happy with a certain base level of Covid as they reopen their economies. They're not aiming for zero, they're asking "can we reopen our economies, and have a level of infections and hospitalisations we can deal with?"
And they're coming up with the answer "yes".
This kind of assumes that what we are doing right now is not risky.
Our Corbynite economics IS risky. Its f8cking risky. Its f8cking suicidal. Especially when other countries are moving away from this approach and getting back to normal.
Think the markets won't react? possibly in a disorderly fashion? Johnson could be dead in the water if there's a run on the bond market or sterling.
If this goes on we cannot rule that out.
The ludicrous idea that there is any economic thought at all on the part of the Corbyn wing!
I remember last year on here being told that 'nobody' liked lockdown and restrictions. I think over the next month or so any remaining doubt will cease that there absolutely are people, some in positions of influence, who really don't want this to end.
Their views won't be expressed in that form, but we'll be a long way past the point of rational disagreement with ending lockdown before everyone will accept we can move on.
I think that some people consider there is a form of moral virtue in lockdowns.
I have definitely seen this.
Some of my mates were very judgy about my (entirely legal) business travel in November. It didn't seem to occur to them that some of us are can't always work from home.....
It’s annoying as hell when those needing to travel on business, or separated from family for more than a year, are pushed out of the conversation in favour of those who just want a week on a beach somewhere.
Entirely agree. And the constant narrative about holidays inevitably leads to the scenes we are seeing in Portugal with people desperate to return before the quarantine requirements kick in. Quite why they had to go away in the first place is beyond me (Cabinet ministers included).
I'm sceptical about many people claiming to need to travel on business though. If you just need to talk to people, do it by Zoom. If you are a specialist engineer who needs to tinker with some piece of kit and can't find the expertise locally, fair enough
I would never hold a serious conversation with someone on a computer/device.
Why not? It's really useful. Even before the pandemic it was something I would do regularly for work.
We’ve seen about five years of progress in 18 months, when it comes to conference calling.
Mostly management objections being thrown away by everyone being sent home last March.
I’ve met with new customers, lawyers and accountants over Teams and Webex this past year, and it’s all been fine.
Sales guys will complain, because they usually make the deal as much over the expensive dinners as the boardroom meeting. Adding new people to the business, or moving teams around is also more difficult, but not insurmountable.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch what happens in the next year or so. I expect that business travel will be well down (big bosses have already seen the cost of the quick trips from London to NY for dinner disappear, with little effect on sales numbers), and WFH will be a much more permanent state of affairs, in fact will be demanded by the workforce.
I’d be divesting commercial property in city centres, buying cheap hotels in cities, and buying nice hotels with conference rooms close to main arterial roads.
Hospital admissions and beds filled are undeniably going up. Just nowhere near quick enough to be a credible problem.
At the current rate of increase it'll take about a month to get to a total of 1,500 Covid patients in hospital, and that's assuming that the 15 million additional vaccinations that will happen over that period have zero additional effect either on preventing serious illness or dampening transmission, which is wholly implausible.
Barring a variant a whole lot more deadly than Delta, Covid-19 is effectively finished as an emergency. It's just that a lot of the scientists either can't see it, or don't want to.
Scientists and mathematicians are always very fond of their field of expertise, even if many people think that it is useless and boring. You can't blame them as it is their career.
Looking at the rise in hospital admissions in the most recent 7 days of data to 6 June (average 103) to three weeks earlier (75; the bottom of the curve), it's up about 37%.
Looking back ten days at how cases had gone, the 7-day average of cases in England as at the 28 of May was up 57% to where it had been three weeks earlier.
This implies that in just a few weeks, the ever-increasing vaccination rollout had further diminished the link between cases and hospitalisations. We should expect this to continue.
The cases rise accelerated after that (up another 57% in a week); I would expect admissions to climb maybe 50% in that week. Extrapolating wildly from the reported cases figure, I handwavily guesstimate cases to rise 33% the week after that. This to result in about a 28% rise in admissions. Average of about 200 per day in England as of the 21st of June.
Durations of time in hospital to also slowly decrease with increasing vaxxing, so the increase in number hospitalised to be slower.
I get the impression from my European colleagues that basically covid is over.
In fact, they think we are still riddled with it via the “Indian variant” and express pity, concern etc.
Are they not able to look at case rate figures?
They’re not reading the figures. They’re just responding to:
A - the opening up they see locally B - their own interaction with vaccines C - the scary stuff on the news about the U.K.
Perhaps they are better at handling risk than we are.
I agree.
I think - like in the US - they're happy with a certain base level of Covid as they reopen their economies. They're not aiming for zero, they're asking "can we reopen our economies, and have a level of infections and hospitalisations we can deal with?"
And they're coming up with the answer "yes".
Cases and hospitalizations are stilling dropping dramatically in the US. So it's easy to be upbeat there... especially when a lot of people were inclined to anyway.
There's also the point that any delay should not be prolonged past three or four weeks max - because if any exit wave gets pushed into winter, it will be far uglier than having it in late summer/autumn.
There's also the point that any delay should not be prolonged past three or four weeks max - because if any exit wave gets pushed into winter, it will be far uglier than having it in late summer/autumn.
I remember last year on here being told that 'nobody' liked lockdown and restrictions. I think over the next month or so any remaining doubt will cease that there absolutely are people, some in positions of influence, who really don't want this to end.
Their views won't be expressed in that form, but we'll be a long way past the point of rational disagreement with ending lockdown before everyone will accept we can move on.
I think that some people consider there is a form of moral virtue in lockdowns.
I have definitely seen this.
Some of my mates were very judgy about my (entirely legal) business travel in November. It didn't seem to occur to them that some of us are can't always work from home.....
It’s annoying as hell when those needing to travel on business, or separated from family for more than a year, are pushed out of the conversation in favour of those who just want a week on a beach somewhere.
Entirely agree. And the constant narrative about holidays inevitably leads to the scenes we are seeing in Portugal with people desperate to return before the quarantine requirements kick in. Quite why they had to go away in the first place is beyond me (Cabinet ministers included).
I'm sceptical about many people claiming to need to travel on business though. If you just need to talk to people, do it by Zoom. If you are a specialist engineer who needs to tinker with some piece of kit and can't find the expertise locally, fair enough
I would never hold a serious conversation with someone on a computer/device.
Why not? It's really useful. Even before the pandemic it was something I would do regularly for work.
And I don't think "I think can do my job better in person" is a sufficient argument - it doesn't make that travel essential.
I get the impression from my European colleagues that basically covid is over.
In fact, they think we are still riddled with it via the “Indian variant” and express pity, concern etc.
Are they not able to look at case rate figures?
They’re not reading the figures. They’re just responding to:
A - the opening up they see locally B - their own interaction with vaccines C - the scary stuff on the news about the U.K.
So uninformed nonsense then?
I never said it was informed.
I shared it because it’s interesting (and annoying) that they are basically “over covid” whereas in this country many still seem wedded to indefinite forms of lockdown.
I do feel we are squandering out vax success regarding opening up.
It's pretty clear that a significant section of the public is happy with the status quo of restrictions for other people
[clue: they don't go to nightclubs and the bowling clubs have reopened so all's good there]
I know that nothing like it can or will possibly happen, BUT... the most effective way to finish off the restrictions would be to tie the value of the state pension to the youth unemployment rate and the furlough bill. Those two indicators go up, the state pension goes down. Would concentrate minds wonderfully.
The most selfish generation in history, happily claiming their unfunded final salary pension schemes, sitting in their over-valused homes with planning permissions denied for new building. And they had 1 more gift for us!
Brexit?
I was in a Zoom meeting this morning, u3acommunities, something that's spun off from the University of the Third Age, and we were talking about the various systems available, as well as Zoom. A Polish lady present made a remark about getting a grant from Erasmus.
Potential headache for the Health Secretary if the new Alzheimer's treatment just approved in the US gets approved over here next year. The demand is huge, and it's rather expensive. But not very effective.
Good article on it here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval As the world knows, the FDA approved Biogen’s anti-amyloid antibody today, surely the first marketed drug whose Phase III trial was stopped for futility. I think this is one of the worst FDA decisions I have ever seen, because – like the advisory committee that reviewed the application, and like the FDA’s own statisticians – I don’t believe that Biogen really demonstrated efficacy. No problem apparently. The agency seems to have approved it based on its demonstrated ability to clear beta-amyloid, and is asking Biogen to run a confirmatory trial to show efficacy.
They will be absolutely overjoyed to do that, of course, because the whole time that’s going, they will be selling the first drug that (in theory) targets the etiology of Alzheimer’s. The backed-up demand is going to be gigantic, and Biogen is going to make enormous amounts of money. They have nine years, as it turns out, to get this trial done, and I feel safe in predicting that it’s going to take alllll niiiiine loooong sloooow years to get this done. Why shouldn’t it? The company certainly showed no interest whatsoever, not even a twitch, in running a confirmatory trial before this, so why should they hop to running one while the drug is selling? I continue to think that odds are quite good, and certainly unacceptably so for Biogen, that the drug will turn out in the end to have no real effect on Alzheimer’s patients at all....
I remember last year on here being told that 'nobody' liked lockdown and restrictions. I think over the next month or so any remaining doubt will cease that there absolutely are people, some in positions of influence, who really don't want this to end.
Their views won't be expressed in that form, but we'll be a long way past the point of rational disagreement with ending lockdown before everyone will accept we can move on.
I think that some people consider there is a form of moral virtue in lockdowns.
I have definitely seen this.
Some of my mates were very judgy about my (entirely legal) business travel in November. It didn't seem to occur to them that some of us are can't always work from home.....
It’s annoying as hell when those needing to travel on business, or separated from family for more than a year, are pushed out of the conversation in favour of those who just want a week on a beach somewhere.
Entirely agree. And the constant narrative about holidays inevitably leads to the scenes we are seeing in Portugal with people desperate to return before the quarantine requirements kick in. Quite why they had to go away in the first place is beyond me (Cabinet ministers included).
I'm sceptical about many people claiming to need to travel on business though. If you just need to talk to people, do it by Zoom. If you are a specialist engineer who needs to tinker with some piece of kit and can't find the expertise locally, fair enough
I would never hold a serious conversation with someone on a computer/device.
I get the impression from my European colleagues that basically covid is over.
In fact, they think we are still riddled with it via the “Indian variant” and express pity, concern etc.
Are they not able to look at case rate figures?
They’re not reading the figures. They’re just responding to:
A - the opening up they see locally B - their own interaction with vaccines C - the scary stuff on the news about the U.K.
Perhaps they are better at handling risk than we are.
I agree.
I think - like in the US - they're happy with a certain base level of Covid as they reopen their economies. They're not aiming for zero, they're asking "can we reopen our economies, and have a level of infections and hospitalisations we can deal with?"
And they're coming up with the answer "yes".
The history of the last winter might have a mental impact there. Most Western European countries did a moderately reasonable job of keeping Covid cases and deaths from getting out of hand over the winter. Grim numbers of lives lost, but manageable, without the huge peak that the UK experienced in January. At this point, I'm not blaming anyone for that peak, but just noting that it happened.
And whilst it might be that the situation in June isn't what it was in December, it would be inhuman for that experience not to have an impact and engender an excess of caution.
Agree on the mental impact of winter for some, but most of them had essentially one bimodal wave of cases in the winter/spring. Why the WE European lockdowns did not really succeed in most places is a really interesting question, when they did succeed in a small number of countries.
AFAICS most of them had bigger second waves than wave one, and a good number have never really got case levels back under control after that at all until now - and several are still running at 100-150 now.
Only perhaps Germany / Portugal never got their case rates on a 7-day basis (normally our numbers are 14 days) below our current peak spot in Bolton. Germany /Portugal had horrific peaks at Christmas - in Germany's case an awful peak relative to wave 1. Belgium too, but they did not take the lessons.
6,048 new cases....that's basically double same time last week....do I need to start going all Tweak?
Case numbers are pretty much irrelevant at this point - the more important stat is number in hospital, which is staying flat.
I wish people would stop saying that. Today's PHE data, as I said above, shows an undeniable increase and the direction of travel is *not* looking good.
Looking at @Andy_Cooke’s analysis about three posts up, there’s a small rise, but not anything that looks like overwhelming the healthcare system any time soon.
That was the reason for initially locking down, so I think the time has come to let people take their own level of risk
I agree but -
Just because the reason for lockdown was to stop the NHS collapsing it doesn't follow that ALL restrictions should end as soon as we know the NHS will not collapse.
Lockdown is substantially over already. All we're talking about now is the speed and timing of the final steps.
Comments
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/coronavirus-gove-june21-lockdown-rules_uk_60bf81afe4b003865d52fca1
Thinking isn't what lefty Labour is about.
Mostly management objections being thrown away by everyone being sent home last March.
I’ve met with new customers, lawyers and accountants over Teams and Webex this past year, and it’s all been fine.
Sales guys will complain, because they usually make the deal as much over the expensive dinners as the boardroom meeting. Adding new people to the business, or moving teams around is also more difficult, but not insurmountable.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch what happens in the next year or so. I expect that business travel will be well down (big bosses have already seen the cost of the quick trips from London to NY for dinner disappear, with little effect on sales numbers), and WFH will be a much more permanent state of affairs, in fact will be demanded by the workforce.
I’d be divesting commercial property in city centres, buying cheap hotels in cities, and buying nice hotels with conference rooms close to main arterial roads.
Looking back ten days at how cases had gone, the 7-day average of cases in England as at the 28 of May was up 57% to where it had been three weeks earlier.
This implies that in just a few weeks, the ever-increasing vaccination rollout had further diminished the link between cases and hospitalisations. We should expect this to continue.
The cases rise accelerated after that (up another 57% in a week); I would expect admissions to climb maybe 50% in that week.
Extrapolating wildly from the reported cases figure, I handwavily guesstimate cases to rise 33% the week after that. This to result in about a 28% rise in admissions. Average of about 200 per day in England as of the 21st of June.
Durations of time in hospital to also slowly decrease with increasing vaxxing, so the increase in number hospitalised to be slower.
(See James Ward's modelling)
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19358229.judges-refuse-appeal-attempt-former-diplomat-craig-murray-guilty-alex-salmond-trial-contempt/?ref=twtrec
A Polish lady present made a remark about getting a grant from Erasmus.
Grrrrr!
The demand is huge, and it's rather expensive. But not very effective.
Good article on it here:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/the-aducanumab-approval
As the world knows, the FDA approved Biogen’s anti-amyloid antibody today, surely the first marketed drug whose Phase III trial was stopped for futility. I think this is one of the worst FDA decisions I have ever seen, because – like the advisory committee that reviewed the application, and like the FDA’s own statisticians – I don’t believe that Biogen really demonstrated efficacy. No problem apparently. The agency seems to have approved it based on its demonstrated ability to clear beta-amyloid, and is asking Biogen to run a confirmatory trial to show efficacy.
They will be absolutely overjoyed to do that, of course, because the whole time that’s going, they will be selling the first drug that (in theory) targets the etiology of Alzheimer’s. The backed-up demand is going to be gigantic, and Biogen is going to make enormous amounts of money. They have nine years, as it turns out, to get this trial done, and I feel safe in predicting that it’s going to take alllll niiiiine loooong sloooow years to get this done. Why shouldn’t it? The company certainly showed no interest whatsoever, not even a twitch, in running a confirmatory trial before this, so why should they hop to running one while the drug is selling? I continue to think that odds are quite good, and certainly unacceptably so for Biogen, that the drug will turn out in the end to have no real effect on Alzheimer’s patients at all....
NEW THREEAD
No side effects from Second AZ dose except for the mildest of mild headaches.
AFAICS most of them had bigger second waves than wave one, and a good number have never really got case levels back under control after that at all until now - and several are still running at 100-150 now.
Only perhaps Germany / Portugal never got their case rates on a 7-day basis (normally our numbers are 14 days) below our current peak spot in Bolton. Germany /Portugal had horrific peaks at Christmas - in Germany's case an awful peak relative to wave 1. Belgium too, but they did not take the lessons.
He didn’t name names, nor come close to publishing identifying information.
Just because the reason for lockdown was to stop the NHS collapsing it doesn't follow that ALL restrictions should end as soon as we know the NHS will not collapse.
Lockdown is substantially over already. All we're talking about now is the speed and timing of the final steps.
What do actual experts think?