American Airlines is about to become the world's best airline, you can just tell.
American Airlines Plans To Give All Frontline Employees New Apple iPhones and iPads
merican’s ever-excellent Chief Information Officer (and former AAdvantage head) Maya Leibman announced to employees today that the airline will be replacing current mobile devices for all frontline employees as well as line maintenance workers with new Apple mobile devices.
The test of these devices started today with agents at Washington National airport (the airport seems to be where a lot of new processes get tested). Maintenance is already getting new iPads, a priority because they previously carried multiple devices to deal with different aircraft. Pilots and flight attendants will take longer to see the upgrades.
Additionally, we don't know what the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from vaccine refusers. It's the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss because the answer is that people who have said no to taking the vaccine are going to have a very high risk of hospitalisation and death post-unlockdown. There's no way around that and we can't stay locked down forever to protect vaccine refusers.
It would be interesting to know that but one suspects a slight nervousness around that as it will, if the targeting of the "get vaccinated" campaigns are any guide, indicate a degree of race-based differentiation.
Details of the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from actual vaccine refusers is not possible, I guess, because it goes to motive for not having the jab.
However, we should know the proportion of new hospitalisations which are not vaccinated (for whatever reason), only had one jab, etc. This information exists somewhere surely?
For age groups 50plus, not be be vaccinated (almost certainly twice) is, I feel, a deliberate decision.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
There is going to be an interesting and difficult discussion in Australia and New Zealand around this point.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
All that assumes that 'safety' is or was ever driving government policy in the way you present. I don't think it is now.
The government is becoming more concerned about the alarming rise in cases of conservative voters in the south of England who are not voting conservative. The knock-on effect could be an increase in Tory MP disposalisations and an eventual overwhelming of the national conservative service.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
Yes. I recall right at the start of the pandemic, the Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch saying "in the end, everyone will catch this"
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
BREAKING: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school cheerleader cut from her squad for using the middle finger and the word "f**k" on Snapchat.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
Yes. I recall right at the start of the pandemic, the Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch saying "in the end, everyone will catch this"
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
I'll be glad to have been vaccinated before catching it, though, rather than deciding to go ahead and catch it sooner rather than later.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
Yes. I recall right at the start of the pandemic, the Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch saying "in the end, everyone will catch this"
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
A doctor relative of mine said the same thing.
Given that, the best things we can do are: get vaccinated, get fit and give up smoking. All this social distancing, quarantining and isolation isn't the answer unless you're very vulenerable.
Oliver Johnson @BristOliver · 48m *Big* headline reported case day - 12,765 in England. Hasn't all filtered in this graph which is by specimen date values, because I cut off the last couple of days for lag, but the next value is already over 11 thousand so you might want to adjust your cope accordingly.
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
No, case growth hadn't plateaued then and I don't think anyone said that. What was happening (and still is to some degree) was case growth rate was slowing down from about 75% WoW to about 40% WoW, it dropped to about 30% but has crept up to 36%, however Wednesday data tends to exaggerate the growth rate a bit because it backfills Monday which backfills Saturday and Sunday.
Hospitalisations take around 11-15 days to go from case positive to being admitted, if we look at the case rate for that period we're actually seeing about 6.5k cases per day so already an elevated level but we're not really seeing feed into hospitalisations.
Think of it like a funnel, we've got lots of people entering it but at each stage many more people are leaving it before reaching the next stage of severity than were in the previous wave. This is because of vaccines. In an alternate timeline where delta exists but vaccines don't I think we would be seeing cases at 10x this current number and hospitalisations at 20-30x with a March 2020 lockdown being implemented immediately.
Cases up quite a bit (we seem to get a step change once a week at the moment, rather odd) but hospital beds occupied went down 4% (50) which looks to be a correction of the data issue when it appeared to spike over the weekend.
Er the UK figure was 1508 on Monday, up from 1378. Or do you have more recent figures than the gov.uk Coronavirus summary?
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
Yes. I recall right at the start of the pandemic, the Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch saying "in the end, everyone will catch this"
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
A doctor relative of mine said the same thing.
Given that, the best things we can do are: get vaccinated, get fit and give up smoking. All this social distancing, quarantining and isolation isn't the answer unless you're very vulenerable.
One of the best things to come out of the first lockdown was people improvising with home-based group exercise online. The government could have spent a relatively small amount of money on promoting a national fitness campaign last summer. Things like Parkrun should have been expanded instead of cancelled.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
And if it doesn't, the politics of vaccination will get ugly.
As an aside... 16k cases today... % change going back up... numbers in hospital are rising too, but admissions don't seem to be going up much... I guess will be about a week before this big increase in cases feeds through.
Case growth in England has ticked up from 33% to 36% if these bigger case numbers were going to feed into hospitalisations then we would already be seeing it happen as two weeks ago cases were already around 6.5k.
The reason is this heatmap:
Groups that are susceptible to hospitalisation aren't getting infected very much at all because the vaccine are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infection.
At the same point in the previous wave for the Beta variant the same heatmap looked like this:
Which led to rolling average of 450 hospitalisations per day vs about 185 at the moment.
Additionally, we don't know what the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from vaccine refusers. It's the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss because the answer is that people who have said no to taking the vaccine are going to have a very high risk of hospitalisation and death post-unlockdown. There's no way around that and we can't stay locked down forever to protect vaccine refusers.
The noteworthy thing is how prevalent it is in 15-19 year olds most whom of course are not eligible for the vaccine and it seems increasingly likely they're not going to be.
If they're not getting vaccinated then they need to get their immunity naturally and that's what's happening. But the virus is running into a wall of immunity for everyone else.
It will burn itself out before too long. There's too much immunity in the herd for it not to do otherwise.
Cases up quite a bit (we seem to get a step change once a week at the moment, rather odd) but hospital beds occupied went down 4% (50) which looks to be a correction of the data issue when it appeared to spike over the weekend.
Er the UK figure was 1508 on Monday, up from 1378. Or do you have more recent figures than the gov.uk Coronavirus summary?
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
Yes. I recall right at the start of the pandemic, the Harvard epidemiologist Mark Lipsitch saying "in the end, everyone will catch this"
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
A doctor relative of mine said the same thing.
Given that, the best things we can do are: get vaccinated, get fit and give up smoking. All this social distancing, quarantining and isolation isn't the answer unless you're very vulenerable.
One of the best things to come out of the first lockdown was people improvising with home-based group exercise online. The government could have spent a relatively small amount of money on promoting a national fitness campaign last summer. Things like Parkrun should have been expanded instead of cancelled.
And - a personal bete noire of mine - they shouldn't have closed outdoor gyms. Whoever decided that was a moron.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
And if it doesn't, the politics of vaccination will get ugly.
Well, the assumption in the US is that Covid is over. So, if it doesn't run riot (and bear in mind that Rs in most of these places are much lower because they simply have lower population density), then I think America will shrug its shoulders and feel superior to the rest of the world.
The danger is that Delta is so much more contagious that Rs will be pretty high even in places which previously avoided meaningful Covid issues.
As an aside... 16k cases today... % change going back up... numbers in hospital are rising too, but admissions don't seem to be going up much... I guess will be about a week before this big increase in cases feeds through.
Case growth in England has ticked up from 33% to 36% if these bigger case numbers were going to feed into hospitalisations then we would already be seeing it happen as two weeks ago cases were already around 6.5k.
The reason is this heatmap:
Groups that are susceptible to hospitalisation aren't getting infected very much at all because the vaccine are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infection.
At the same point in the previous wave for the Beta variant the same heatmap looked like this:
Which led to rolling average of 450 hospitalisations per day vs about 185 at the moment.
Additionally, we don't know what the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from vaccine refusers. It's the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss because the answer is that people who have said no to taking the vaccine are going to have a very high risk of hospitalisation and death post-unlockdown. There's no way around that and we can't stay locked down forever to protect vaccine refusers.
The noteworthy thing is how prevalent it is in 15-19 year olds most whom of course are not eligible for the vaccine and it seems increasingly likely they're not going to be.
If they're not getting vaccinated then they need to get their immunity naturally and that's what's happening. But the virus is running into a wall of immunity for everyone else.
It will burn itself out before too long. There's too much immunity in the herd for it not to do otherwise.
Though the highest rate by far is in the 20-24 age band
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
It's because rural and small town America is much more naturally socially distanced than Camden.
US school holidays have also already started, and kids won't return until late August - which is a lucky break for the US.
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
Cases-hospitalisations is indeed about 7 days, but rather than thinking that cases had plateaued, we thought the rate of increase had reduced and stabilised (ie still growing exponentially, but slower than before).
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
As an aside... 16k cases today... % change going back up... numbers in hospital are rising too, but admissions don't seem to be going up much... I guess will be about a week before this big increase in cases feeds through.
Number in hospital fell today.
Sorry yes - the England number fell, the UK total for a few days ago rose.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
And if it doesn't, the politics of vaccination will get ugly.
Well, the assumption in the US is that Covid is over. So, if it doesn't run riot (and bear in mind that Rs in most of these places are much lower because they simply have lower population density), then I think America will shrug its shoulders and feel superior to the rest of the world.
The danger is that Delta is so much more contagious that Rs will be pretty high even in places which previously avoided meaningful Covid issues.
Precisely.
Population density has probably affected R and thus death rates etc more than any NPI or lockdown has. The map of cases per capita and deaths per capita mirrors in almost any nation almost perfectly the maps of population density.
If you live in rural Tennessee or Alberta then your risk from this is completely different to if you live in London or New York or Houston.
I do know that as well as universities a lot of schools are very affected by it atm. Perhaps that is driving numbers. Friends of mine have had their children sent home, are isolating, the lot. I think some schools have closed but don't have details.
One of the secondary schools in Durham is closed as 300 pupils and 8 teachers need to isolate.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
I don't think it was ever likely to completely die out in the US, simply because of such high rates of vaccine scepticism.
As a complete aside, look at those Icelanders! They've got to 82.6% of people with one dose, and more than 50% double vaccinated.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
As an aside... 16k cases today... % change going back up... numbers in hospital are rising too, but admissions don't seem to be going up much... I guess will be about a week before this big increase in cases feeds through.
Case growth in England has ticked up from 33% to 36% if these bigger case numbers were going to feed into hospitalisations then we would already be seeing it happen as two weeks ago cases were already around 6.5k.
The reason is this heatmap:
Groups that are susceptible to hospitalisation aren't getting infected very much at all because the vaccine are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infection.
At the same point in the previous wave for the Beta variant the same heatmap looked like this:
Which led to rolling average of 450 hospitalisations per day vs about 185 at the moment.
Additionally, we don't know what the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from vaccine refusers. It's the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss because the answer is that people who have said no to taking the vaccine are going to have a very high risk of hospitalisation and death post-unlockdown. There's no way around that and we can't stay locked down forever to protect vaccine refusers.
The noteworthy thing is how prevalent it is in 15-19 year olds most whom of course are not eligible for the vaccine and it seems increasingly likely they're not going to be.
If they're not getting vaccinated then they need to get their immunity naturally and that's what's happening. But the virus is running into a wall of immunity for everyone else.
It will burn itself out before too long. There's too much immunity in the herd for it not to do otherwise.
I do know that as well as universities a lot of schools are very affected by it atm. Perhaps that is driving numbers. Friends of mine have had their children sent home, are isolating, the lot. I think some schools have closed but don't have details.
One of the secondary schools in Durham is closed as 300 pupils and 8 teachers need to isolate.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
Year 11 have finished in Durham? Year 11 are sitting mocks in Northumberland.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
It's because rural and small town America is much more naturally socially distanced than Camden.
US school holidays have also already started, and kids won't return until late August - which is a lucky break for the US.
That's when these places could get creamed.
But look at the black and hispanic vax rates in the big US cities. Not good. That's a first world India waiting to kick off
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
It's because rural and small town America is much more naturally socially distanced than Camden.
US school holidays have also already started, and kids won't return until late August - which is a lucky break for the US.
That's when these places could get creamed.
America's geography did not many sages predicting firestorms, floods and plagues in Florida, Texas and other republican US states when they junked lock down last year or early this year.
It turned out their heating/thermostat assumptions about lockdown were simply utterly wrong, just as our assumptions about vaccination could be wrong.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
Man the case rate in Scotland just seems to have exploded. Wonder what's going on.
I don't know but we all know the solution involves Scottish independence, am I right?
Sturgeon spent last year keeping Scotland under greater and longer restrictions than England, resulting in Scotland having about 30% fewer cases per 100,000 of population than England. This resulted in Scotland having less herd immunity. Now this means that the virus finds it easier to spread in Scotland, so there are more cases there.
That sounds logical but we have also had the start of the break up of schools with a huge number of social activities related to that. It may well be that these young people are not getting particularly ill but are spreading the virus around far more households where middle aged, more vulnerable people are either not vaccinated at all or at best have recently had 1 jab.
No 10 condemns ‘appalling’ video of antivax protester accusing Jonathan Van-Tam of ‘genocide’
The antivaxxer previously filmed himself targeting Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, as he walked through a street in Oxford earlier this month
Downing Street has condemned the “appalling” verbal abuse of England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van-Tamm, by an antivax protester.
A video circulated widely online showed Geza Tarjanyi filming himself targeting Mr Van-Tam as he walked into the Ministry of Defence building in Westminster on Wednesday.
The protester accused Professor Van-Tam of being a “traitor”, and told him he would end up in prison for “genocide”.
“Why continue lying to the British people? [They] are going to get justice for what you’ve done to this country. All of you liars are going to prison, I guarantee it,” Mr Tarjanyi can be heard saying in the video.
He also asked the Deputy Chief Medical Officer “what was really in that needle that you put into Matt Hancock,” after Professor Van-Tam gave the Health Secretary his first Covid jab in April.
The antivax protester then followed Professor Van-Tam into the reception of the Ministry of Defence, where he continued to heckle him.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
There is going to be an interesting and difficult discussion in Australia and New Zealand around this point.
Yes, I have been thinking that possibly in the long run it might be a bad thing for Aus/NZ that they did so well in keeping the virus in check. The alternative narrative here was get the vaccine or Bozo might let a couple of hundred thousand more people take an "essential travel" journey to India and you might get some horrible variant when they all get back here.
The message is simple: Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the incompetence of HM Government.
I do know that as well as universities a lot of schools are very affected by it atm. Perhaps that is driving numbers. Friends of mine have had their children sent home, are isolating, the lot. I think some schools have closed but don't have details.
One of the secondary schools in Durham is closed as 300 pupils and 8 teachers need to isolate.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
Year 11 have finished in Durham? Year 11 are sitting mocks in Northumberland.
I don't know about the school that has closed but I know all the local schools have finished their Year 11 assessments as have some in Ipswich.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
Yes inner city African Americans refusing the vaccine is much, much more concerning than deep south hicksville rednecks refusing it.
Delta will sweep through the cities. Small isolated towns not as much.
It's a terrible combination of unlockdown, vax hesitancy, and poor healthcare, in the big US inner cities
But maybe American exceptionalism will save them - there is no uptick yet (tho the CDC says Delta is now 20% of cases)
Its worth noting that when people like contrarian say that the US or states have lifted lockdown, that the US has genuine local governments in a way we're not used to. Many cities are still locked down, even when the rest of the state isn't, which can make sense since the cities are at more risk.
Plus evidence seems to be that vaccination take up rates are higher in the cities too.
So hopefully that will mean that the higher take-up there will cancel out the risk. If those most protected are those most at risk, that's a good thing.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
There is going to be an interesting and difficult discussion in Australia and New Zealand around this point.
Yes, I have been thinking that possibly in the long run it might be a bad thing for Aus/NZ that they did so well in keeping the virus in check. The alternative narrative here was get the vaccine or Bozo might let a couple of hundred thousand more people take an "essential travel" journey to India and you might get some horrible variant when they all get back here.
The message is simple: Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the incompetence of HM Government.
On the other hand -
"Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the *competence* of your Government."
I do know that as well as universities a lot of schools are very affected by it atm. Perhaps that is driving numbers. Friends of mine have had their children sent home, are isolating, the lot. I think some schools have closed but don't have details.
One of the secondary schools in Durham is closed as 300 pupils and 8 teachers need to isolate.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
Year 11 have finished in Durham? Year 11 are sitting mocks in Northumberland.
I don't know about the school that has closed but I know all the local schools have finished their Year 11 assessments as have some in Ipswich.
Many apologies. Shamefully, I don't know what year my youngest is... Year 12 are doing mocks.
A year and a half into this wretched pandemic, and Argentina has just posted its worst ever day for deaths: 791 (the equivalent in the UK would be 1,400), and it is still rising
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
I do know that as well as universities a lot of schools are very affected by it atm. Perhaps that is driving numbers. Friends of mine have had their children sent home, are isolating, the lot. I think some schools have closed but don't have details.
One of the secondary schools in Durham is closed as 300 pupils and 8 teachers need to isolate.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
Year 11 have finished in Durham? Year 11 are sitting mocks in Northumberland.
I don't know about the school that has closed but I know all the local schools have finished their Year 11 assessments as have some in Ipswich.
Many apologies. Shamefully, I don't know what year my youngest is... Year 12 are doing mocks.
It looks from the street names like they've covered a few square yards of one of the Batley wards and extrapolated the whole of the constituency from that.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
As an aside... 16k cases today... % change going back up... numbers in hospital are rising too, but admissions don't seem to be going up much... I guess will be about a week before this big increase in cases feeds through.
Case growth in England has ticked up from 33% to 36% if these bigger case numbers were going to feed into hospitalisations then we would already be seeing it happen as two weeks ago cases were already around 6.5k.
The reason is this heatmap:
Groups that are susceptible to hospitalisation aren't getting infected very much at all because the vaccine are highly effective at preventing symptomatic infection.
At the same point in the previous wave for the Beta variant the same heatmap looked like this:
Which led to rolling average of 450 hospitalisations per day vs about 185 at the moment.
Additionally, we don't know what the proportion of hospitalisations is coming from vaccine refusers. It's the elephant in the room that no politician wants to discuss because the answer is that people who have said no to taking the vaccine are going to have a very high risk of hospitalisation and death post-unlockdown. There's no way around that and we can't stay locked down forever to protect vaccine refusers.
The noteworthy thing is how prevalent it is in 15-19 year olds most whom of course are not eligible for the vaccine and it seems increasingly likely they're not going to be.
If they're not getting vaccinated then they need to get their immunity naturally and that's what's happening. But the virus is running into a wall of immunity for everyone else.
It will burn itself out before too long. There's too much immunity in the herd for it not to do otherwise.
So cases will have started falling by August, when the vaccination programme will be nearly complete? The government and all the doctors and scientists certainly hope so. If not, some difficult decisions will be looming.
No 10 condemns ‘appalling’ video of antivax protester accusing Jonathan Van-Tam of ‘genocide’
The antivaxxer previously filmed himself targeting Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, as he walked through a street in Oxford earlier this month
Downing Street has condemned the “appalling” verbal abuse of England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van-Tamm, by an antivax protester.
A video circulated widely online showed Geza Tarjanyi filming himself targeting Mr Van-Tam as he walked into the Ministry of Defence building in Westminster on Wednesday.
The protester accused Professor Van-Tam of being a “traitor”, and told him he would end up in prison for “genocide”.
“Why continue lying to the British people? [They] are going to get justice for what you’ve done to this country. All of you liars are going to prison, I guarantee it,” Mr Tarjanyi can be heard saying in the video.
He also asked the Deputy Chief Medical Officer “what was really in that needle that you put into Matt Hancock,” after Professor Van-Tam gave the Health Secretary his first Covid jab in April.
The antivax protester then followed Professor Van-Tam into the reception of the Ministry of Defence, where he continued to heckle him.
He is a rare talent within this government of lightweights
His appointment was derided by some here. Maybe he just got lucky?
Other than his unfortunate association with Jeffrey Archer, he has an impressive business background and also a degree in chemical engineering. He also comes across well on TV. He comes across as competent and talented, which means he probably will not rise too far while Boris Johnson is in charge.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
And in English this means?
Snap, crackle and pop! (5th to 7th time derivatives) edit: fourth to sixth actually. Jerk or jolt is the third time derivative. The delta function is an idealised pulse.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
It's because rural and small town America is much more naturally socially distanced than Camden.
US school holidays have also already started, and kids won't return until late August - which is a lucky break for the US.
That's when these places could get creamed.
America's geography did not many sages predicting firestorms, floods and plagues in Florida, Texas and other republican US states when they junked lock down last year or early this year.
It turned out their heating/thermostat assumptions about lockdown were simply utterly wrong, just as our assumptions about vaccination could be wrong.
When you say "assumptions about vaccination(s) could be wrong", what exactly are you saying?
That they don't work, or their protection will turn out to be temporary?
It's a slightly odd turn of phrase.
And we now have some pretty long datasets on vaccinations. The original Pfizer-BioNTech cohort is still being studied and data released, and there doesn't seem to be any let up in protection there. So, it'd be surprising if there was a big let up in vaccines generally.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
If it does keep unfolding like this, the antivaxxers are going to have an unpleasant time.
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
There is going to be an interesting and difficult discussion in Australia and New Zealand around this point.
Yes, I have been thinking that possibly in the long run it might be a bad thing for Aus/NZ that they did so well in keeping the virus in check. The alternative narrative here was get the vaccine or Bozo might let a couple of hundred thousand more people take an "essential travel" journey to India and you might get some horrible variant when they all get back here.
The message is simple: Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the incompetence of HM Government.
On the other hand -
"Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the *competence* of your Government."
See South Korea, NZ, Australia etc etc
I suspect S Korea could be OK. They've never cut themselves off from the outside world like the other two, and still seem to have kept numbers under some sort of control. Whether that can stay the case with Delta is an interesting question.
The jolt upwards in cases (especially in Scotland and the North East of England) is disappointing. On the flip side, the ratio of hospitalisations and number of people in hospital continues to reduce. If even 4% of cases ended up hospitalised, we'd be past 300 admissions per day in England alone by now, while the rolling 7-day average actually tweaked down to 183 today. The number hospitalised would be north of 2,000 in England now; today, it dropped very slightly to 1,255.
I don't mean to downplay the potential problems that could arise still with rapid growth. After all, even a 25-year-old man with no medical issues still has a 1%-2% chance of hospitalisation if unvaccinated - but every day there are fewer unvaccinated 25-year olds, and the same goes for all remaining 18-29 adults.
It's possible we're seeing what happens when an ever-increasing chunk of the younger population have 1 dose, which doesn't reduce symptomatic infection by a huge amount - but does reduce the risk of hospitalisation by a hefty 80% or so. And we know that even breakthrough infections are considerably less serious in the vaccinated than they would have been if left unvaccinated.
Hopefully the ratio between hospitalisations and cases will continue to drop still further, and we'll end up with cases numbers becoming less and less relevant.
Yes, I think the link between cases and hospitalisations is now broken and we have got strong evidence for that. What's also very encouraging is that under 40s are all getting Pfizer and Moderna which is a very fast acting vaccine, within 10 days efficacy with a single dose reaches a very good level while it takes 28 days with AZ to get a comparable level of efficacy. We're also still doing around 1.5m first doses per week at the moment and we've only got about 5m left to do in total before all of the supply can be switched to second doses.
It's weakened -> it's obviously not broken. It looks to be around 3% of cases => hospitalization, so I would imagine we would break 400 hospitalizations by end of month.
BBC reporting that sweeping new restrictions are being introduced across Sydney as a fast growing new outbreak develops with no entry to Sydney and residents largely banned from leaving the city
The Health minister describes it as a very real and present danger
It is apparently a Delta covid variant
It does make you wonder if this new Delta variant of concern, just discovered, is a real threat to vaccines
I can't see how Australia is ever going to escape from this situation.
The same way as everyone else?
But later.
Spoke to a mate of mine in Brisbane. He is furious. Joked that it will be 2023 before he gets his jab.
Meanwhile they are in a prison which was supposed to keep them safe. But hasn't. Absolutely fucking miserable.
I'd rather be us.
My 86 yo Dad is hoping to get his jab in NZ soon.
My family are quite happy as life has proceeded v largely as normal for the past 18 months, save the ability to travel overseas.
I hear you.
There are many reasons why for me that would be far from normal, being trapped in the country forbidden to leave or enter. But I can see that for many people as long as they could go to the pub or shops or have people over everything would seem fine.
For certain PB-ers, where no one is allowed to arrive or leave especially on holiday I imagine it would be like living in some kind of wet dream.
Not for me tho'.
The counterfactial is the experience of this country in the past 18 months.
No serious person would prefer our situation, and had I know what was ahead of us in March 2020 I would have quit my job and taken my family to NZ.
It’s like night and day.
The zero covid hell of no day to day restrictions.
Im glad we avoided the nightmare of open venues, unfettered restraunts and full sports stadiums.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
Note: Need to recalibrate the range for colours.. 500 was the max...
Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day?
Lumme
Everyone unvaxxed in Scotland is going to catch this.
Yes, but also everywhere else looks like - Falkirk, Angus, Fife, South Lanarkshire, etc, scan down the chart looking for rapid recent increases and they're all in Scotland (and Wakefield).
The ONS antibody survey had scotland on only 79.1% with antibodies.
*DELTA VARIANT SEEN IN 20% OF RECENT US COVID CASES: CDC CHIEF*
Jill Biden was in Tennessee yesterday pointing out only 3 in 10 of the state's population are vaccinated.
America may be a lab for vaccination in the same way as it was a lab for lockdown.
It's probably even worse than that: in the big urban areas of the American South (Birmingham, Atlanta, etc.) vaccination rates are reasonably high.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
How could Delta not run riot? That's what it DOES. C'est son metier
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Small towns are very socially distanced naturally.
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
America also has other viral advantages - warmer and sunnier in the south, everyone drives and no one takes the bus/train....
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
And in English this means?
∫ dx f(x) δ(x) = f(0)
Ha! That's the definition of a delta function, but "jerk"?
I don't remember anyone calling the derivative of acceleration that.
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
Cases-hospitalisations is indeed about 7 days, but rather than thinking that cases had plateaued, we thought the rate of increase had reduced and stabilised (ie still growing exponentially, but slower than before).
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
To follow on from this:
This is a bit of a rough visualisation of the issue.
The translucent bars are the cases in England against a given day. The darker bars are the hospitalisations in England seven days later. As we can see, as cases climbed, hospitalisations climbed much slower. And the levelling out in the most recent week comes off the highest level of cases yet.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
And in English this means?
∫ dx f(x) δ(x) = f(0)
Ha! That's the definition of a delta function, but "jerk"?
I don't remember anyone calling the derivative of acceleration that.
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
Cases-hospitalisations is indeed about 7 days, but rather than thinking that cases had plateaued, we thought the rate of increase had reduced and stabilised (ie still growing exponentially, but slower than before).
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
To follow on from this:
This is a bit of a rough visualisation of the issue.
The translucent bars are the cases in England against a given day. The darker bars are the hospitalisations in England seven days later. As we can see, as cases climbed, hospitalisations climbed much slower. And the levelling out in the most recent week comes off the highest level of cases yet.
Talking about "the jolt upwards" (Andy_Cooke) and that "Glasgow and Edinburgh basically doubled in a single day" (Leon) we should note that a jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity. per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
And in English this means?
∫ dx f(x) δ(x) = f(0)
Ha! That's the definition of a delta function, but "jerk"?
I don't remember anyone calling the derivative of acceleration that.
Ooh, I do, now I come to think about it.
Perhaps it was just Physicists. That or my memory is shot. Probably the latter...
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
Cases-hospitalisations is indeed about 7 days, but rather than thinking that cases had plateaued, we thought the rate of increase had reduced and stabilised (ie still growing exponentially, but slower than before).
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
To follow on from this:
This is a bit of a rough visualisation of the issue.
The translucent bars are the cases in England against a given day. The darker bars are the hospitalisations in England seven days later. As we can see, as cases climbed, hospitalisations climbed much slower. And the levelling out in the most recent week comes off the highest level of cases yet.
Maybe I'm misreading this -> but how have you got hospitalizations for the future? E.g. bar for 19 June -> hospitalizations for 26 June?
Bloody hell, I agree with Steve Baker. I need to to re-evaluate my life.
But can anyone explain why we gave up the Champions League final by not agreeing to similar demands from UEFA but have agreed to these demands for the Euros?
Sure. We didn’t have Delta at the time we gave up the CL. Now it’s 99%. If the UEFA guys want to risk catching it…
And sure, this may well change (and quickly), but would I prefer to be in the position of France or Germany right now in terms of infection rates and % vaccinated, or the position UK is in... I'd go for the former.
Colombia es el tercer país del mundo con más muertes reportadas por COVID-19. Y está detrás de Brasil, que tiene 214 millones de habitantes, e India, con cerca de 1.400 millones. A TODAS LUCES ESTAMOS ENFRENTANDO UNA CATÁSTROFE DE PROPORCIONES HISTÓRICAS"
I believe an exemption has applied to "elite sports" through much of the coronavirus period. For example, French and Irish owners, trainers, jockeys and stable staff were able to be at Royal Ascot last week.
The same exemption will apply to this coming weekend's Irish Derby but if you are a prospective buyer at the Tattersalls Ireland bloodstock sale, you can bid from your hotel room but you can't come on to the actual sale site.
It's the anomalies as always that undermine the main message.
A year and a half into this wretched pandemic, and Argentina has just posted its worst ever day for deaths: 791 (the equivalent in the UK would be 1,400), and it is still rising
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
Is it any different to the 1957 and 1968 flu epidemics?
A year and a half into this wretched pandemic, and Argentina has just posted its worst ever day for deaths: 791 (the equivalent in the UK would be 1,400), and it is still rising
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
Is it any different to the 1957 and 1968 flu epidemics?
Worrying though it is right now, I wonder if it may in the long term be a good thing that younger unvaxxed people are now catching and developing antibodies to the Delta variant. 1. It's the summer, and all the evidence suggests it's better to have a long fairly gentle simmer of cases in summer than a huge surge in winter, and 2. Delta already has some vaccine escape properties, and future variants will almost certainly evolve to escape immunity further, so having a pool of say 10% of the population who have been exposed to a more recent variant alongside the large proportion with enough immunity from vaccination to avoid serious illness and death might help us when the inevitable next big one (perhaps Delta+) comes along.
This surge is also an effective vax efficacy experiment. It is showing us in real time what the impact of each vaccine is on infection, hospitalisation and death. It means that when things finally do settle down, which they inevitably will, we will have more confidence than we would otherwise in what might happen next time there is a new variant or an uptick.
Latin America (ex-Chile) does look like a disaster zone though. Not so much a gentle simmer as a protracted rolling boil. Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Mexico show what might have been our fate had we gone for herd immunity via infection. I want to know why that region has done so badly for so long. I know there are high levels of obesity across the continent but it can't just be that.
A year and a half into this wretched pandemic, and Argentina has just posted its worst ever day for deaths: 791 (the equivalent in the UK would be 1,400), and it is still rising
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
Is it any different to the 1957 and 1968 flu epidemics?
A year and a half into this wretched pandemic, and Argentina has just posted its worst ever day for deaths: 791 (the equivalent in the UK would be 1,400), and it is still rising
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
Of most interest is that the admissions for England have plateaued or started falling across the entire age range.
Having said that, isn't the standard timeline Infection - Positive test takes about 7 days Infection - Hospitalisation takes about 14 days?
We thought tests had plateaued about a week ago...
Cases-hospitalisations is indeed about 7 days, but rather than thinking that cases had plateaued, we thought the rate of increase had reduced and stabilised (ie still growing exponentially, but slower than before).
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
Ta. What I'm thinking is the school half term in the first week of June would genuinely but temporarily slow growth in measured cases in the second week and hospitalisations about now.
Worrying though it is right now, I wonder if it may in the long term be a good thing that younger unvaxxed people are now catching and developing antibodies to the Delta variant. 1. It's the summer, and all the evidence suggests it's better to have a long fairly gentle simmer of cases in summer than a huge surge in winter, and 2. Delta already has some vaccine escape properties, and future variants will almost certainly evolve to escape immunity further, so having a pool of say 10% of the population who have been exposed to a more recent variant alongside the large proportion with enough immunity from vaccination to avoid serious illness and death might help us when the inevitable next big one (perhaps Delta+) comes along.
This surge is also an effective vax efficacy experiment. It is showing us in real time what the impact of each vaccine is on infection, hospitalisation and death. It means that when things finally do settle down, which they inevitably will, we will have more confidence than we would otherwise in what might happen next time there is a new variant or an uptick.
Latin America (ex-Chile) does look like a disaster zone though. Not so much a gentle simmer as a protracted rolling boil. Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Mexico show what might have been our fate had we gone for herd immunity via infection. I want to know why that region has done so badly for so long. I know there are high levels of obesity across the continent but it can't just be that.
I think the countries there are just rich enough to be able to count Covid deaths, and have them be more noticeable in a way that they wouldn't be in a poorer country that still had higher mortality generally from other causes, but not rich enough to act effectively to control the disease.
Worrying though it is right now, I wonder if it may in the long term be a good thing that younger unvaxxed people are now catching and developing antibodies to the Delta variant. 1. It's the summer, and all the evidence suggests it's better to have a long fairly gentle simmer of cases in summer than a huge surge in winter, and 2. Delta already has some vaccine escape properties, and future variants will almost certainly evolve to escape immunity further, so having a pool of say 10% of the population who have been exposed to a more recent variant alongside the large proportion with enough immunity from vaccination to avoid serious illness and death might help us when the inevitable next big one (perhaps Delta+) comes along.
This surge is also an effective vax efficacy experiment. It is showing us in real time what the impact of each vaccine is on infection, hospitalisation and death. It means that when things finally do settle down, which they inevitably will, we will have more confidence than we would otherwise in what might happen next time there is a new variant or an uptick.
Latin America (ex-Chile) does look like a disaster zone though. Not so much a gentle simmer as a protracted rolling boil. Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Mexico show what might have been our fate had we gone for herd immunity via infection. I want to know why that region has done so badly for so long. I know there are high levels of obesity across the continent but it can't just be that.
Off the top of my head, much, much higher densities than us (shanty towns etc).
I also wouldn't fancy being halfway up the Andes with a breathing condition.
Comments
American Airlines Plans To Give All Frontline Employees New Apple iPhones and iPads
merican’s ever-excellent Chief Information Officer (and former AAdvantage head) Maya Leibman announced to employees today that the airline will be replacing current mobile devices for all frontline employees as well as line maintenance workers with new Apple mobile devices.
The test of these devices started today with agents at Washington National airport (the airport seems to be where a lot of new processes get tested). Maintenance is already getting new iPads, a priority because they previously carried multiple devices to deal with different aircraft. Pilots and flight attendants will take longer to see the upgrades.
https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-plans-to-give-all-frontline-employees-new-apple-iphones-and-ipads/
"How would you like to get your antibodies? Vaccine or virus?"
It's looking like everyone's going to end up seeing the virus sooner or later. Only choice is whether to leave ones' system fully naive to a novel virus (ask the Native Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries how good an idea that is), or to have it prepared and ready.
The government is becoming more concerned about the alarming rise in cases of conservative voters in the south of England who are not voting conservative. The knock-on effect could be an increase in Tory MP disposalisations and an eventual overwhelming of the national conservative service.
Looks prescient. The same way everyone gets a cold and/or the flu in the end
The reason this is interesting, is that it is in the face of a sustained increase in cases over
the course of a month+
BREAKING: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school cheerleader cut from her squad for using the middle finger and the word "f**k" on Snapchat.
The case is a victory for off-campus free speech and has roots in student Vietnam War protests. Only Justice Thomas dissented.
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1407716872410353676
And Thomas continues to be a miserable old fnck.
But if you go to small towns and cities, then vaccination rates collapse. Just 23% of residents of Lafayette County AK, 18% of Hempstead County, and 14% of Winston County Alabama. In Winston County, not even a third of the over 65s are vaccinated.
If Delta runs riot in some of these places, it'll be ugly.
Given that, the best things we can do are: get vaccinated, get fit and give up smoking. All this social distancing, quarantining and isolation isn't the answer unless you're very vulenerable.
@BristOliver
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48m
*Big* headline reported case day - 12,765 in England. Hasn't all filtered in this graph which is by specimen date values, because I cut off the last couple of days for lag, but the next value is already over 11 thousand so you might want to adjust your cope accordingly.
Hospitalisations take around 11-15 days to go from case positive to being admitted, if we look at the case rate for that period we're actually seeing about 6.5k cases per day so already an elevated level but we're not really seeing feed into hospitalisations.
Think of it like a funnel, we've got lots of people entering it but at each stage many more people are leaving it before reaching the next stage of severity than were in the previous wave. This is because of vaccines. In an alternate timeline where delta exists but vaccines don't I think we would be seeing cases at 10x this current number and hospitalisations at 20-30x with a March 2020 lockdown being implemented immediately.
Total beds occupied in England dropped from 1,301 yesterday (the 22nd) to 1,255 today (the 23rd).
If they're not getting vaccinated then they need to get their immunity naturally and that's what's happening. But the virus is running into a wall of immunity for everyone else.
It will burn itself out before too long. There's too much immunity in the herd for it not to do otherwise.
Week-over-week, beds occupied in England rose 19%, which is the smallest increase in a week.
These fucking bugs have a remorseless logic
Vaccinating the cities will protect the towns, because the key pools of infection are the cities which can then spread to the towns as people go from a town to a city or vice-versa, but once it dies off in the cities which it will before too long, where are the towns going to get infected from?
The danger is that Delta is so much more contagious that Rs will be pretty high even in places which previously avoided meaningful Covid issues.
US school holidays have also already started, and kids won't return until late August - which is a lucky break for the US.
That's when these places could get creamed.
Snazzy multicoloured graph (I coloured each week differently so as to make weekly artefacts easier to spot at a glance) of reported cases in England since the low point:
The weekly drumbeat is down to people choosing not to go for tests on weekends, or being sent from work, so the dashed black line shows the rolling 7-day average. Hospitalisations tend to follow the 7-day average rather than being perfectly lagged from the specific cases on the day, as if you leave it later or go earlier, the time between infection and case specimen date will vary.
Population density has probably affected R and thus death rates etc more than any NPI or lockdown has. The map of cases per capita and deaths per capita mirrors in almost any nation almost perfectly the maps of population density.
If you live in rural Tennessee or Alberta then your risk from this is completely different to if you live in London or New York or Houston.
Those 300 pupils are I think half the current school now Year 11 have finished.
jump-discontinuity in acceleration can be modeled using a Dirac delta function in jerk, scaled to the height of the jump. Integrating jerk over time across the Dirac delta yields the jump-discontinuity.
per Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
As a complete aside, look at those Icelanders! They've got to 82.6% of people with one dose, and more than 50% double vaccinated.
.. but they have a poor healthcare system, they are very obese (and this has been gravely worsened by lockdowns), there are lots of vulnerable people who won't get vaxxed: addicts, homeless
I think it could get very messy in cities like LA, Frisco, Chicago, Miami
"The disparities are also reflected in vaccination rates. As of last week, 43% of Black and 52% of Latino residents of L.A. County had received at least one dose of vaccine, compared to 64% of white, 61% of Native American and 74% of Asian American residents."
The black vax rate in Chicago is levelling out at about 40%
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/covid19-vaccine/home/vaccination-data-at-a-glance.html
Year 11 are sitting mocks in Northumberland.
The Delta Bug is vicious
It turned out their heating/thermostat assumptions about lockdown were simply utterly wrong, just as our assumptions about vaccination could be wrong.
Delta will sweep through the cities. Small isolated towns not as much.
The antivaxxer previously filmed himself targeting Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, as he walked through a street in Oxford earlier this month
Downing Street has condemned the “appalling” verbal abuse of England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jonathan Van-Tamm, by an antivax protester.
A video circulated widely online showed Geza Tarjanyi filming himself targeting Mr Van-Tam as he walked into the Ministry of Defence building in Westminster on Wednesday.
The protester accused Professor Van-Tam of being a “traitor”, and told him he would end up in prison for “genocide”.
“Why continue lying to the British people? [They] are going to get justice for what you’ve done to this country. All of you liars are going to prison, I guarantee it,” Mr Tarjanyi can be heard saying in the video.
He also asked the Deputy Chief Medical Officer “what was really in that needle that you put into Matt Hancock,” after Professor Van-Tam gave the Health Secretary his first Covid jab in April.
The antivax protester then followed Professor Van-Tam into the reception of the Ministry of Defence, where he continued to heckle him.
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/no-10-condemns-appalling-video-of-antivax-protester-accusing-jonathan-van-tam-of-genocide-1067437
The message is simple: Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the incompetence of HM Government.
But maybe American exceptionalism will save them - there is no uptick yet (tho the CDC says Delta is now 20% of cases)
Sorry @tlg86
Plus evidence seems to be that vaccination take up rates are higher in the cities too.
So hopefully that will mean that the higher take-up there will cancel out the risk. If those most protected are those most at risk, that's a good thing.
"Get your yourself vaccinated to protect yourself from the *competence* of your Government."
See South Korea, NZ, Australia etc etc
Shamefully, I don't know what year my youngest is...
Year 12 are doing mocks.
What a colossal human tragedy this is. Sometimes you have to step back and gawp. We are still in the firestorm, entire nations have been quarantined for a year, with no obvious exit. Millions have died. And are dying
Because of a tiny microbe probably leaked in a stupid, pointless lab in China, which was trying to make viruses nastier
It's like the First World War, springing from a tragic and obscure assassination
(5th to 7th time derivatives)
edit: fourth to sixth actually. Jerk or jolt is the third time derivative. The delta function is an idealised pulse.
That they don't work, or their protection will turn out to be temporary?
It's a slightly odd turn of phrase.
And we now have some pretty long datasets on vaccinations. The original Pfizer-BioNTech cohort is still being studied and data released, and there doesn't seem to be any let up in protection there. So, it'd be surprising if there was a big let up in vaccines generally.
They've never cut themselves off from the outside world like the other two, and still seem to have kept numbers under some sort of control. Whether that can stay the case with Delta is an interesting question.
Vaccine progress not great, but not terrible.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2021/06/119_310943.html
Im glad we avoided the nightmare of open venues, unfettered restraunts and full sports stadiums.
It just takes one kid coming home from visiting friends in Atlanta to spread it round his entire class, and then the entire school.
Which would normally be fine... but if granny is living at home and isn't vaccinated, it could get pretty ugly.
I don't remember anyone calling the derivative of acceleration that.
This is a bit of a rough visualisation of the issue.
The translucent bars are the cases in England against a given day.
The darker bars are the hospitalisations in England seven days later.
As we can see, as cases climbed, hospitalisations climbed much slower. And the levelling out in the most recent week comes off the highest level of cases yet.
That was a spectacular own goal.
Up there with Pickford's effort in the 2018 Merseyside derby.
https://twitter.com/Worville/status/1407738367475957767
E.g. bar for 19 June -> hospitalizations for 26 June?
And sure, this may well change (and quickly), but would I prefer to be in the position of France or Germany right now in terms of infection rates and % vaccinated, or the position UK is in... I'd go for the former.
https://twitter.com/jonworth/status/1407737502102863875?s=20
100,000 dead and still peaking. Bodies left in the streets. Like Ecuador a year ago
https://twitter.com/mikeariza/status/1407731959070183426?s=20
Colombia es el tercer país del mundo con más muertes reportadas por COVID-19. Y está detrás de Brasil, que tiene 214 millones de habitantes, e India, con cerca de 1.400 millones. A TODAS LUCES ESTAMOS ENFRENTANDO UNA CATÁSTROFE DE PROPORCIONES HISTÓRICAS"
I believe an exemption has applied to "elite sports" through much of the coronavirus period. For example, French and Irish owners, trainers, jockeys and stable staff were able to be at Royal Ascot last week.
The same exemption will apply to this coming weekend's Irish Derby but if you are a prospective buyer at the Tattersalls Ireland bloodstock sale, you can bid from your hotel room but you can't come on to the actual sale site.
It's the anomalies as always that undermine the main message.
This surge is also an effective vax efficacy experiment. It is showing us in real time what the impact of each vaccine is on infection, hospitalisation and death. It means that when things finally do settle down, which they inevitably will, we will have more confidence than we would otherwise in what might happen next time there is a new variant or an uptick.
Latin America (ex-Chile) does look like a disaster zone though. Not so much a gentle simmer as a protracted rolling boil. Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Mexico show what might have been our fate had we gone for herd immunity via infection. I want to know why that region has done so badly for so long. I know there are high levels of obesity across the continent but it can't just be that.
I also wouldn't fancy being halfway up the Andes with a breathing condition.