Generic Virus Thread

[villakram]

6 minutes ago, AVFCDAN said:

BBC helpfully running a story about the Swiss cheese model we should still be following with regards to Covid. It’s a perfect example of why I’m fed up of scientists and their scare mongering. Apparently the jab isn’t enough and we need to continue to apply other measure to keep our friends and family ‘safe’.

So it’s masks and social distancing for the rest of our days then? No thanks mate I’ll be making that decision myself, life won’t be worth living at 50% of what it was because of virus going round, something which we’ve been ok with in hundreds of other forms for centuries now.

It's getting ridiculous and bordering on the anti-germ type of thought and language that more extremist types use and have infamously used in the past.

If cars are allowed to have the ability to drive at greater than 70mph, beer, coke etc. can be sold, and our precious corporations can pollute ad nauseam, then why are covid lives so precious.

[AVFCDAN]

Just now, villakram said:

It's getting ridiculous and bordering on the anti-germ type of thought and language that more extremist types use and have infamously used in the past.

If cars are allowed to have the ability to drive at greater than 70mph, beer, coke etc. can be sold, and our precious corporations can pollute ad nauseam, then why are covid lives so precious.

The narrative for the last 12 months is basically that we are all dirty germ carriers first and human beings with social needs second. I can see it every time I go out for a run and there are people literally diving into the road out of the way of me because I might be at 5 feet from them instead of the 6 that has been drilled into them, such a shame.

[sidcow]

27 minutes ago, AVFCDAN said:

BBC helpfully running a story about the Swiss cheese model we should still be following with regards to Covid. It’s a perfect example of why I’m fed up of scientists and their scare mongering. Apparently the jab isn’t enough and we need to continue to apply other measure to keep our friends and family ‘safe’.

So it’s masks and social distancing for the rest of our days then? No thanks mate I’ll be making that decision myself, life won’t be worth living at 50% of what it was because of virus going round, something which we’ve been ok with in hundreds of other forms for centuries now.

I read that and didn't get it anyway.

After 75% immunity a virus is supposed to die out as it can't find new people to infect.    How can enough of it therefore get through if the vaccines are 80% + effective, especially when 5-10% of the population have already had it.

I can only think they are basing it on South African/Brazilian variations becoming established and being more resistant to the vaccines than they are currently suggesting.   If we get boosters in Autumn that theory then falls down unless it somehow becomes rampant in the summer months.

I was expecting more of a scientific explanation of how it spreads extensively even when people are vaccinated.

As long as we keep variants supressed by the time boosters for the new variants are out I think we should be broadly clear by winter.

Edited April 13, 2021 by sidcow

[sidcow]

That said above it seems there is an outbreak of the South African variant down saaf at the same time they have announced that Pfizer is less effective against it than they originally thought

[Demitri_C]

2 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

You're right Dem, our shortages of staff were our limiter, not our number of beds and given that we're not issuing pay rises, we've taken away the nurses bursary and we're making it much more difficult for nurses from Europe to work here, that's a situation that's unlikely to get any better any time soon.

Population of England - 55,98 million

Population of Spain - 46.94 million

Population of the UK - 66.65 million

How do mean when you say 'consider their population'?

 

 

 

When i goggled i typically did a dem and used frances population instead of Spain's oops. 

And the US population is over 320 million id say that is a disaster number of ICU beds.

The first part i wholeheartedly agree with you. You pay peanuts you wont get a high amount of applicants. Nurses were not paid well under the previous government  either.

In my opinion the nhs banding structure (agenda to change) is ridiculous. If it was up to me id scrap band 9 pay for anyone who isnt a clinician/treats patients and abolish 8a  8b and 8c. Have only a 8 as highlest level pay and make it lower than what it is today. Then use that money to pay nurses better so you get more people applying for these jobs

 

 

[Demitri_C]

2 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

I agree beds without staff is a waste of time which is why the Nightingale Hospitals were just a headline grabbing waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money as there was never the staff to be able to utilise them. 

With regards your second point beds per capita works in that the US has 34 ICU beds (with staff to man them otherwise it may as well just be a bed) per 100k inhabitants which is over 5 times the amount we do per hundred thousand people. If you consider that to be disastrous for them then what do you consider us being in a 5 times worse position to be?

It is because of the sheer size. I havent defended ours either.

I think the main issue for us is what @OutByEaster? said. First you get the staff in, once thats sorted you can have more ICU beds as you will have the staffing available to manage them.

[Demitri_C]

17 minutes ago, sidcow said:

That said above it seems there is an outbreak of the South African variant down saaf at the same time they have announced that Pfizer is less effective against it than they originally thought

Dont worry you will get it up naaf too at some point

 We love to share with our naaf neighbour's

[StefanAVFC]

Forgive me whilst I roll my eyes, paving the way for another Autumn/Winter locked, even when we're all vaccinated, again waved along and cheered by the terrified population.

Awful science, from the PM of all people.

[a m ole]

Is that his way of trying to take credit?

What the **** is going on, seriously. I feel trapped between two sides of insanity. First it was the anti-mask, it doesn’t exist, **** the possibility of healthcare collapse morons, and now it’s the existential fear, vaccines aren’t working, lockdown forever, say goodbye to society movement. The government doesn’t even seem to know which side of that fence it’s sitting on.

[a m ole]

I guess in a way he’s right though, if we put everyone in solitary confinement forever then there can be 0 proof that vaccines work.

[sidcow]

11 minutes ago, a m ole said:

Is that his way of trying to take credit?

What the **** is going on, seriously. I feel trapped between two sides of insanity. First it was the anti-mask, it doesn’t exist, **** the possibility of healthcare collapse morons, and now it’s the existential fear, vaccines aren’t working, lockdown forever, say goodbye to society movement. The government doesn’t even seem to know which side of that fence it’s sitting on.

I think he's just trying to calm the excitement of us all being let off the leash and on the lash, reminding people it's still important to stick to the rules and not rely on vaccines alone.

Alas, he's done it in his own way.

Edited April 13, 2021 by sidcow

[Genie]

If there’s 40,000 people in hospital and 1,800 dying a day then I think it’s fair something needs to be done.

It doesn’t have anything to do with being terrified. Absolutely nobody wants it. Not the public or the politicians.

Hopefully those days are well behind us.

If the numbers of infections, deaths and hospitalisations remain insignificant then we’ll carry on with our freedom.

 

[Genie]

Classic from Boris though.

“It’s very import that people realise the reduction is not down to the vaccination programme, but down to the lockdown, people maybe don’t appreciate that”

short pause

”the vaccination programme has helped”

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by Genie

[Mic09]

14 minutes ago, Genie said:

If the numbers of infections, deaths and hospitalisations remain insignificant then we’ll carry on with our freedom.

 

The problem I see is that "insignificant" is a very subjective number.

Now that politicians see they can move the goal posts of freedom as they see fit, we have set a very dangerous precedent of how a government can take individual rights without anyone seeming to care much.

[sharkyvilla]

To be honest I don't have an issue with what he said there, lockdown most likely has had the bigger effect.  It got cases right down last year too but this time by having the vaccination programme going on at the same time there has also been an increasingly positive effect week by week on top of it.  For example, if there had been no lockdown and just the vaccination programme there would still be a shitload of people dying.  Having the vaccination programme going so fast alongside the lockdown has been a big success and looks like making us being able to live our lives, at least domestically, in a normal manner sooner than nearly every other country.  Whether you give the government credit or not is debatable as the timing of the lockdown coinciding with the vaccines was largely due to the mess up over December rather than down to any forethought.

[Genie]

1 minute ago, Mic09 said:

The problem I see is that "insignificant" is a very subjective number.

Now that politicians see they can move the goal posts of freedom as they see fit, we have set a very dangerous precedent of how a government can take individual rights without anyone seeming to care much.

To a degree I agree. I’m coming at it from the angle of keeping the economy open. I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest to shut things unnecessarily. Pretty much all developed countries have acted similarly in this respect.

Sneaking power like the NHS app, Covid passports and laws around removing rights to protest are another matter though.

[markavfc40]

59 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

It is because of the sheer size. I havent defended ours either.

 

Dem as the US have 34 beds per 100k inhabitants if they had the same population as UK, 66 million, they would have, based on having 34 ICU beds per 100k, 22,440 ICU beds. Based on our figure of 6.6k per 100k we have 4340 ICU beds. They are way better off than us in terms of ICU beds per 100k people. A lot of countries are though in fairness and many of them much poorer than us.

 

Edited April 13, 2021 by markavfc40

[mjmooney]

46 minutes ago, a m ole said:

I guess in a way he’s right though, if we put everyone in solitary confinement forever then there can be 0 proof that vaccines work.

As I said a few pages back, in the pre-vaccine phase last year, pursuing herd immunity would have been suicidal. But once you've got the majority of adults vaccinated, it becomes the most pragmatic strategy. 

[a m ole]

23 minutes ago, Mic09 said:

The problem I see is that "insignificant" is a very subjective number.

Now that politicians see they can move the goal posts of freedom as they see fit, we have set a very dangerous precedent of how a government can take individual rights without anyone seeming to care much.

Yep, it’s been completely forgotten what used to be established as our benchmark for accepted risk, whether that’s the driving analogy, the flu analogy, alcohol and so on.

I’m sick of it not being talked about because we know vaccines work, these ones have passed trials that say they work and yet we’re still having lockdowns dangled in-front of us. Unless they flat out don’t work, we shouldn’t even be thinking of more lockdowns.

Edited April 13, 2021 by a m ole

[sidcow]

11 minutes ago, a m ole said:

Unless they flat out don’t work, we shouldn’t even be thinking of more lockdowns.

To be fair, if I had a penny for everytime I've heard a minister say that this winding down of lockdown has to be irreversible, I would have about 87p by now. 

I think it's pretty clear they don't want to go back into lockdown hence the abundance of caution and warnings.