Generic Virus Thread

[penguin]

14 minutes ago, trekka said:

Quite a rise in hospitalisations in London . 

 

 

 

[LondonLax]

7 minutes ago, penguin said:

 

Could London have more young people though?

[desensitized43]

13 minutes ago, Swerbs said:

Was there even any need for Boris to turn up today?

He wasn’t going to pass up a chance to turn up and say “vaccines” over and over to boost his approval rating with the retards.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

Well clearly you have then

Can you show me a post saying that?

[blandy]

2 hours ago, mrchnry said:

this time the reaction seems over the top without the data to back it up. 

Here's some data as to why they're doing what they're doing.

Before the graphs, some context. When the pandemic started there was no vaccine and no known effective treatment, so consequently strong measures like lockdown were taken. Deaths were high and hospitalisations also high.

Then there came the vaccine and the Beta and Delta variants - more harmful & transmissible. Delta effectively took over, but vaccines were effective, together with summer to reduce the scale of hospitalisations and deaths, even with opening back up and a big rise in cases.

Now we've got the Omicron variant, which is massively more transmissible, spreading like a very spready thing indeed (say runny peanut butter), but it seems to be less severe for most people, and the vaccine, with boosters does a decent job of further mitigating the impact and effects.

The graphs are as titled, with the last one for hospitalisations since the start of it.

What they show is a recent rapid surge in cases caught by testing. The data says there will be something like 3 times as many actual cases as captured (lots of people don't get tested, and test results take a while to come through, anyway, from PCR tests). Numbers of positives are doubling every couple of days on recent trends. That's a ****ton of positives coming up over the next period.

But that's just positive tests, not people in hospital or deaths, right? so why worry?

Well hospital takes a week or two from positive test result to show up in the figures, but we can see that hospitalisations are on the rise, too - almost 6000 people a week as of today, reflecting the increase in cases seen in November.

If Omicron is about a third as severe in illness as Delta, then let's call that 2000 omicron cases as week going to hospital, as of today. But doubling every two days, leads. to that very quickly becoming 4000, 8000, 16000, 32,000 64,000 - which is more than the worst of it in January. The NHS could not cope with 128,000 a week needing hospital from Covid. The NHS is a bit/lot broken already, as are the people working for it.

So they're decided to bring in a few relatively minor restrictions in anticipation of slowing down a very rapid spread of the thing while they attempt to get people to get the boosters to protect themselves from the nasty fungus.

We could say, well, let's wait to see how it goes before we ask people to put a mask on, or show they're been jabbed or recovered from the fungus, we could cross our fingers and just hope it's all OK, because we're fed up.

But that's not really a good strategy for dealing with a reality, from a scientific or medical point of view.

As I write this, I'm listening to this

Quote

We'll never learn, we don't deserve nice things

And we'll scream self-righteously "We did our best",

but what does that really mean? I'm walkin' around, walking' around

With my head down, my head down

Which seems aposite.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, Chindie said:

The blame game is literally pointless.

Blame is, responsibility isn't. I mean suppose for example it was an accidental leak of a man made fungus from the Wuhan lab. China would no doubt put in place all kinds of new measures, while keeping that secret from the RotW.

But if they (hypothetically) came clean and said "yep, our error/procedural failure - this is exactly what we were doing, this is what went wrong, this is how we've changed our procedures..." then the RotW could adopt the lessons learnt, perhaps add some further ideas to protect us all, everywhere from a recurrence.

It's interesting that the USA and Russia, for example can happily work closely together on all kinds of science and space programmes and whatnot, even while the politicians are dicking about. There's no reason, other than cultural suspicions why Chinese scientists and Western scientists couldn't do the same, for everyone's benefit.

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

we cannot ultimately do anything much to get 'control' of what they do in laboratories.

We can (and do) get control of how they do it, who does it, where they do it...

I mean Porton Down is where the UK does its dangerous stuff research. But it's not just some randoms in a room playing with vats of Ebola virus, before knocking off and going to the pub in their work clothes, is it?

I don't mean to be sarcastic, but there's immense levels of safety management go into Nuclear and Chemical and Biological research and investigation and so on. If those measures are found to be lacking or failing, then they sure as heck need making more stringent and more effective.

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, blandy said:

We can (and do) get control of how they do it, who does it, where they do it...

I mean Porton Down is where the UK does its dangerous stuff research. But it's not just some randoms in a room playing with vats of Ebola virus, before knocking off and going to the pub in their work clothes, is it?

I don't mean to be sarcastic, but there's immense levels of safety management go into Nuclear and Chemical and Biological research and investigation and so on. If those measures are found to be lacking or failing, then they sure as heck need making more stringent and more effective.

The 'they' in my post refers to China, and what happens in Chinese laboratories. 'We' (as in, the west) cannot control what happens in Chinese laboratories.

(Of course, we can share best practice, talk to colleagues and have collaborations etc etc. But some scientific work is top secret, and will inevitably remain so; if they wanted to keep doing gain-of-function research while telling the world they had stopped, they absolutely could - and so could we).

[Mic09]

I don't think it's a conspiracy to entertain the idea the virus might be man made. 

https://www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/57932699.amp?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16395904476950&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From %1%24s

Quote

Coronavirus: Was US money used to fund risky research in China?

But no way are we ever to find this out - no way either US or China will admit to making any mistakes like that.

[blandy]

Just now, HanoiVillan said:

The 'they' in my post refers to China, and what happens in Chinese laboratories. 'We' (as in, the west) cannot control what happens in Chinese laboratories.

Ah, OK, misunderstood. Sorry.

Even then, while we can't control, we can influence, perhaps, over time. One way we could influence is greater 2 way honesty - at the moment (probably understandably and rightly) there's little of no trust. One way for trust to be gained or improved is the removal of (some) instinctive protective secrecy. China wouldn't admit to failings because (as @Chindie said) they'd be "blamed". And we don't trust them because we think they're not honest. SO if we can put out the message "we don't want to blame or punish you" and they can put out the message "look, here's the real truth" (about an issue) then the situation will improve.

[Mic09]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The 'they' in my post refers to China, and what happens in Chinese laboratories. 'We' (as in, the west) cannot control what happens in Chinese laboratories.

We can fund those laboratories (we - the west). Which it appears like we are doing.

[danceoftheshamen]

Such a difficult situation this Covid thing,

I personally do not believe a word uttered by politicians and scientists appear to be divided on it all... it's just that the one half of the scientists opinions appear to be being deleted / hidden from view!!! So i'm really not sure who to believe in it all. It appears 100 Tory MP's have similar concerns.

I have had the 1st two Astro Zenica jabs after which i then caught Covid and recovered. Of course i will never know really whether the reason i caught it was because my immune system had been compromised due to having the jab or whether i would have gotten worse if i hadn't had the jab. This appears to be the conundrum and it is dividing people around the World. 

 

Edited December 15, 2021 by danceoftheshamen

[HanoiVillan]

Just now, blandy said:

Ah, OK, misunderstood. Sorry.

Even then, while we can't control, we can influence, perhaps, over time. One way we could influence is greater 2 way honesty - at the moment (probably understandably and rightly) there's little of no trust. One way for trust to be gained or improved is the removal of (some) instinctive protective secrecy. China wouldn't admit to failings because (as @Chindie said) they'd be "blamed". And we don't trust them because we think they're not honest. SO if we can put out the message "we don't want to blame or punish you" and they can put out the message "look, here's the real truth" (about an issue) then the situation will improve.

Yes, I think that's right in theory, but sadly the question got caught in a partisan fury in America at the start of the pandemic with Republicans (but not Trump, at least initially, interestingly enough) insisting it *definitely* was man-made and Democrats and most media outlets insisting it *definitely* wasn't. All were wrong to do so, of course, but now no-one can back down (which is of course the real reason people are arguing about it) and there could be no credible message to suggest blame wouldn't be assigned, because everyone can see that Republican politicians are just itching to blame them for exactly that.

[mjmooney]

Still trying to get my head around the weird thinking of the "that's enough vaccinations, I'm not having anymore" mob (like Mrs Ruge). 

"I've got a headache"

"Take some paracetamol" 

"Hell no! I took some paracetamol for a headache last month! It worked, but I'm not doing it again, I'd rather have a headache".  

[Jareth]

Burnley game is off cos Covid - could be multiple games off soon. Wot a palava

[mjmooney]

3 minutes ago, danceoftheshamen said:

Of course i will never know really whether the reason i caught it was because my immune system had been compromised due to having the jab

Say what??? 

[Rugeley Villa]

1 hour ago, Craigyh74 said:

Spanish rules apply to the Canaries as they are governed by them. I should be on a beach in Gran Canaria right now, but seeing as my lad has only had 1 jab we've had to cancel. I've made sure to let him know it's all his fault and he's spoilt xmas  

Yeah I thought it was because Tenerife play in the Spanish league . Nah, you’re better off here. Too many foreigners over there spreading this virus 

[a-k]

12 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

I don't think it's a conspiracy to entertain the idea the virus might be man made. 

https://www-bbc-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/57932699.amp?amp_js_v=a6&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16395904476950&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From %1%24s

But no way are we ever to find this out - no way either US or China will admit to making any mistakes like that.

[danceoftheshamen]

1 minute ago, mjmooney said:

Say what??? 

I say this as a representation as to the stuff i hear at work to demonstrate just how much angst is out there and it really is a divided opinion out there.... Not as a representation of my own views BTW

[penguin]

36 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

Could London have more young people though?

Possibly? Although the metrics are looking at people over 12 years old and it would certainly from a "common sense" perspective (in my eyes anyway) explain the surge of hospitalisations in the region.

Quote

A third of Londoners have not received any Covid vaccine, it has been reported as the most-infectious variant omicron became the dominant strain in the capital.

The number of people who are unvaccinated is three times as high in London as in the country as a whole, according to analysis of government figures by The Times.

 

The 14 areas in the UK with the lowest vaccination rates among people aged over 12 are boroughs in the capital.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-vaccine-unvaccinated-omicron-london-b1976746.html