Generic Virus Thread

[Awol]

1 hour ago, sidcow said:

Today's and tomorrow's figures will make for interesting reading then. 

If they are back down to 200-300k again that will be a shame. 

I would be a little disappointed if some are reporting weeks worth because the figures are specifically labeled as those receiving jabs in the last 24 hours. 

Less than 10,000 jabbed in Scotland yesterday. SNP efforts are devoted entirely to pandemic PR (every UK media outlet seem to think it’s great here!! ) and propagandising about a wildcat (illegal) referendum before Christmas. 

The absolute best thing the Westminster government can do for the Union is get England  vaccinated at industrial speed, showing up the SNP as the jokers they are. 

 

[sidcow]

So they've jabbed 319,038 in the last 24 hours.

Whilst a lot down from yesterdays figure a) I guess it mainly represents Sunday which I would imagine would be quiter anyway and b) it would still have been the third biggest number of last week.  Last Monday they declared 184,249 so it's massively up on that.

Lowest number of new cases and deaths  than for a long long time as well.  I don't pay much attention to Monday figures, tomorrow if more important when they play catch up, but it's still way down on both figures from last Monday.

Basically it's  continuing downward picture on cases and deaths and upward picture on jabs.

[darrenm]

It's all looking very promising

Cases falling rapidly

Vaccinations down from yesterday but it looks like the same reporting anomaly as every other metric so the average is better to look at

And now deaths look to be falling faster than the spring which means the vaccine is having an effect. The 7 day average by Wednesday or Thursday should tell us more.

[HanoiVillan]

On 22/01/2021 at 21:49, HanoiVillan said:

Lockdowns, social distancing and border closures are 'failure' policies, last-ditch interventions when nothing else works. They have more in common with curfews, martial law and declaring war than they do to standard policy interventions, and like curfews and wars they should last for as short a time as possible. However, what I see in the media is more and more people finding reasons to prolong them into the increasingly distant futures

Sorry to quote myself, but one of my concerns on the above is of lockdowns remaining or becoming preferential/first choice response for outbreaks.

An example here is Western Australia, which has entered a 5-day lockdown because of *one* (1) case of community transmission. When I comment about Australia, people - not even mostly Australians - sometimes seem to think I'm suggesting they've 'done a bad job' handling the pandemic, so to be clear that's not what I'm saying, but this looks like a very large over-reaction. *One* case of viral transmission is the paradigmatic example for when test and trace is useful. Public health authorities can publish where that one person has been, and people in those places, or with relatives in those places, can get tested. Obviously this is much harder to do with 20,000+ cases per day! If Australian states choose instead to enter lockdowns whenever they find single examples of transmission, they are either committing to keeping closed borders or to entering periodic lockdowns for a very long time to come, because vaccination alone is not going to prevent single cases emerging for a long time.

I'm really very concerned that 'entering lockdown' is going to come to be seen as a first choice response rather than something you only do when all of the better, less disruptive measures have failed and you have literally no other choice.

[blandy]

38 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Sorry to quote myself, but one of my concerns on the above is of lockdowns remaining or becoming preferential/first choice response for outbreaks.

An example here is Western Australia, which has entered a 5-day lockdown because of *one* (1) case of community transmission. When I comment about Australia, people - not even mostly Australians - sometimes seem to think I'm suggesting they've 'done a bad job' handling the pandemic, so to be clear that's not what I'm saying, but this looks like a very large over-reaction. *One* case of viral transmission is the paradigmatic example for when test and trace is useful. Public health authorities can publish where that one person has been, and people in those places, or with relatives in those places, can get tested. Obviously this is much harder to do with 20,000+ cases per day! If Australian states choose instead to enter lockdowns whenever they find single examples of transmission, they are either committing to keeping closed borders or to entering periodic lockdowns for a very long time to come, because vaccination alone is not going to prevent single cases emerging for a long time.

I'm really very concerned that 'entering lockdown' is going to come to be seen as a first choice response rather than something you only do when all of the better, less disruptive measures have failed and you have literally no other choice.

The flip side of that is that you find one person who has it. What needs to happen then to contain any spread is to identify who they've been in contact with and get to them, test, treat etc. To stop the as yet unknown contacts spreading it, lock down - people stay still and seperate. Then you find the possible people who might have caught it before they spread it. A fast lockdown, catch the sick, look after them. Open up. It's to me exactly how you should deal with it at source and before it spreads. The lockdown will be very brief and do no harm as long as they catch the contagious. Don't lockdown and it spread and you have a proper outbreak.

[ml1dch]

3 hours ago, sidcow said:

If they are back down to 200-300k again that will be a shame. 

Without wanting to be all contrarian about it, those are still hugely impressive numbers.

If they don't hit the self-selected 'x' number of vaccines by 'y' date then c'est la vie.

The important thing is that it's working, and in the grand scheme of things the vaccination programmes isn't going to be judged as a success or failure based on whether we're doing 250,000 per day or 400,000 per day. Both those numbers represent success.

[LondonLax]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

Sorry to quote myself, but one of my concerns on the above is of lockdowns remaining or becoming preferential/first choice response for outbreaks.

An example here is Western Australia, which has entered a 5-day lockdown because of *one* (1) case of community transmission. When I comment about Australia, people - not even mostly Australians - sometimes seem to think I'm suggesting they've 'done a bad job' handling the pandemic, so to be clear that's not what I'm saying, but this looks like a very large over-reaction. *One* case of viral transmission is the paradigmatic example for when test and trace is useful. Public health authorities can publish where that one person has been, and people in those places, or with relatives in those places, can get tested. Obviously this is much harder to do with 20,000+ cases per day! If Australian states choose instead to enter lockdowns whenever they find single examples of transmission, they are either committing to keeping closed borders or to entering periodic lockdowns for a very long time to come, because vaccination alone is not going to prevent single cases emerging for a long time.

I'm really very concerned that 'entering lockdown' is going to come to be seen as a first choice response rather than something you only do when all of the better, less disruptive measures have failed and you have literally no other choice.

West Australia hasn’t had a lockdown for almost a year now and no community transmission in that time either. The call for a lockdown will likely be just be a short period to get the track and trace up and running again which has probably been mothballed for the last 6 months

That’s essentially what happened in Queensland recently as well. It’s much easier to track contacts if they have all spent the last few days in their homes instead of mixing further. 

Australia will not be opening its borders to outsiders again until its population has been vaccinated. The Federal government has indicated it won’t be opening the national borders until 2022 at the earliest. 

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

The flip side of that is that you find one person who has it. What needs to happen then to contain any spread is to identify who they've been in contact with and get to them, test, treat etc. To stop the as yet unknown contacts spreading it, lock down - people stay still and seperate. Then you find the possible people who might have caught it before they spread it. A fast lockdown, catch the sick, look after them. Open up. It's to me exactly how you should deal with it at source and before it spreads. The lockdown will be very brief and do no harm as long as they catch the contagious. Don't lockdown and it spread and you have a proper outbreak.

I'm sorry, but that's not going to work in the medium term. Right now, people are being understanding and putting their lives on hold, but at some point people are going to need to attend events and congregate in groups of people. We are going to need to have conferences, weddings, funerals, family gatherings etc etc, and people are not going to have an endless tolerance for them to be cancelled at the last minute all the time because of single cases of community transmission. Eventually consent will be lost for these measures, and the more abrupt and intrusive they are the faster consent will be lost.

Incidentally, *within* Australia, New South Wales has repeatedly successfully handled small outbreaks like this without going on lockdown, so there's a local, workable model for how to do it.

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm sorry, but that's not going to work in the medium term. Right now, people are being understanding and putting their lives on hold, but at some point people are going to need to attend events and congregate in groups of people. We are going to need to have conferences, weddings, funerals, family gatherings etc etc, and people are not going to have an endless tolerance for them to be cancelled at the last minute all the time because of single cases of community transmission. Eventually consent will be lost for these measures, and the more abrupt and intrusive they are the faster consent will be lost.

Incidentally, *within* Australia, New South Wales has repeatedly successfully handled small outbreaks like this without going on lockdown, so there's a local, workable model for how to do it.

I've been following what's been going on in Aus pretty closely.

I think your point mixes up the lockdown fatigue in the UK, with what's the case in Aus. Here - sure, the fungus is out and about and widespread. In WA, that's not been the case. They've had hardly any cases, and of the ones they have, many were from a ship and contained there. So the weddings, funerals stuff isn't nearly the same as what's happened here. People will still be hacked off of course, but it's not comparable.

For small scale outbreaks, it's necessary to stop them before they spread. Local lockdowns can and should do that. They will be short and sharp. They (in WA) identified specific hotspots of where the case had spent time and then they wanted and asked for people who had been at that hotel, that cafe, that bar at that time to come forward and get checked, fingers crossed it works out for them, it's a fantastic place, with fantastic people. Victoria and NSW have had much bigger outbreaks (though still tiny compared to the UK). And so they've had to handle it differently.

[HanoiVillan]

3 minutes ago, blandy said:

For small scale outbreaks, it's necessary to stop them before they spread. Local lockdowns can and should do that. They will be short and sharp. They (in WA) identified specific hotspots of where the case had spent time and then they wanted and asked for people who had been at that hotel, that cafe, that bar at that time to come forward and get checked, fingers crossed it works out for them, it's a fantastic place, with fantastic people. Victoria and NSW have had much bigger outbreaks (though still tiny compared to the UK). And so they've had to handle it differently.

That's not a lockdown, that's test trace and isolate. That's what should happen, I completely agree.

What should not happen is telling everybody in the state they need to stay home (which caused entirely predictable panic buying in supermarkets, I see).

6 minutes ago, blandy said:

I think your point mixes up the lockdown fatigue in the UK, with what's the case in Aus. Here - sure, the fungus is out and about and widespread. In WA, that's not been the case. They've had hardly any cases, and of the ones they have, many were from a ship and contained there. So the weddings, funerals stuff isn't nearly the same as what's happened here. People will still be hacked off of course, but it's not comparable.

Absolutely, people have been able to socialise all year in Australia. Very nice!

Unfortunately though, the virus is not going to suddenly disappear from the surface of the planet, and indeed this case has occurred despite the national borders being almost entirely closed. So if you lockdown for single cases, you commit to locking down, at random short notice, for the indefinite future. I am very bearish on people's medium-term tolerance for that. There does seem to be a thing where 'being incredibly hawkish on covid' has become a kind of cultural marker in Australia and New Zealand, so maybe their tolerance will last longer, but it isn't going to be infinite. 

A reminder that lockdowns are almost entirely an invention of the last 12 months. The WHO did not recommend them *in any circumstances* prior to that, and that's for the best. They are mark of complete failure, not a first response.

 

[blandy]

Agree to disagree, I guess.

Their lockdown is a 5 day one (though it may get extended). The aim is to stop it spreading, while they do the TTI on people. Catch it by the most strenuous efforts available, before it's too late. If you can snuff it out before it becomes rampant, then you win. A short sharp lockdown is definitely a tool that helps. Use it.

Co-incidentally I was just reading this

Quote

It is a year and a day since, apparently, panic ripped through Whitehall. The UK’s first confirmed case of Covid-19 occurred on 31 January 2020. 

If there was panic in 10 Downing Street, mercifully it did not interrupt the installation of a light projection screen to count down the final hours of the country’s membership of the European Union.

According to reports in Politico, the Covid news struck the heart of government like something of an earthquake. Which, for those of us who spend our time observing its exterior as opposed to interior workings, comes as something of a surprise.

Jamie Njoku-Goodwin, who was then special adviser to health secretary Matt Hancock, has said that he received a phone call at 12.41am. He missed the call and sent a WhatsApp to the person who had sent it. He then did his job, and told his boss the news, in the middle of the night, who would then do his job and tell his boss – the prime minister – the same news.

Mr Njoku-Goodwin marked the anniversary by telling Politico: “I remember leaving home and walking through London Bridge station with all these people walking around me and just thinking: “None of them know what’s about to hit them.”

Whether he personally knew the scale of quite what was about to hit seems unlikely. But it’s clear that someone two phone calls away from Boris Johnson was at least aware that it was, you know, a big deal.

More on link, but what wouldn't we have given for a 5 days lock down, travel ban and good TTI system then? - I'm not sure that WA has all of that, but they're trying, and so they should.

[TrentVilla]

2 hours ago, sidcow said:

So they've jabbed 319,038 in the last 24 hours.

Whilst a lot down from yesterdays figure a) I guess it mainly represents Sunday which I would imagine would be quiter anyway and b) it would still have been the third biggest number of last week.  Last Monday they declared 184,249 so it's massively up on that.

Lowest number of new cases and deaths  than for a long long time as well.  I don't pay much attention to Monday figures, tomorrow if more important when they play catch up, but it's still way down on both figures from last Monday.

Basically it's  continuing downward picture on cases and deaths and upward picture on jabs.

I think we have to just accept that the numbers will be subject to all kinds of fluctuations and that progress isn’t linear. So much so in fact that I no longer think daily vaccination figures are particularly helpful, its like checking your weight every day. A weekly figure would be far more meaningful as a measure.

[blandy]

1 minute ago, TrentVilla said:

I no longer think daily vaccination figures are particularly helpful, its like checking your weight every day. A weekly figure would be far more meaningful as a measure.

I'm never quite sure, but I think on the website I look at they show 7 day rolling figures, which is a good comparison, and probably more informative than weekly figures at the end of the week - more real time, kind of thing.

[blandy]

Yeah it is "Seven–day rolling rate of new cases by specimen date..." You can search by post code for your rate of interest.

A map is here

 

[LondonLax]

45 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm sorry, but that's not going to work in the medium term. Right now, people are being understanding and putting their lives on hold, but at some point people are going to need to attend events and congregate in groups of people. We are going to need to have conferences, weddings, funerals, family gatherings etc etc, and people are not going to have an endless tolerance for them to be cancelled at the last minute all the time because of single cases of community transmission. Eventually consent will be lost for these measures, and the more abrupt and intrusive they are the faster consent will be lost.

Incidentally, *within* Australia, New South Wales has repeatedly successfully handled small outbreaks like this without going on lockdown, so there's a local, workable model for how to do it.

NSW did lockdown a significant part of Sydney during the outbreak over Christmas while they got the track and trace running.

The thing with track and trace is that the numbers you have to trace very quickly go exponential if people are moving around freely and you quickly lose all control of it. One person goes to a Supermarket and that’s 50 people you have to contact within 24h max. Every one of those people have family at home so that’s another 50-100 people. If any of those caught a train or a bus suddenly you are talking about thousands you need to contact within a day or so. It quickly becomes unworkable. You need a period of time where everyone stays still while the tracers get to work letting people know to isolate. 

[sidcow]

1 hour ago, ml1dch said:

Without wanting to be all contrarian about it, those are still hugely impressive numbers.

If they don't hit the self-selected 'x' number of vaccines by 'y' date then c'est la vie.

The important thing is that it's working, and in the grand scheme of things the vaccination programmes isn't going to be judged as a success or failure based on whether we're doing 250,000 per day or 400,000 per day. Both those numbers represent success.

Yeah, that's why I said it would be a shame, not a disaster. They need to be getting more than 200k to 300k a day to meet the target and I am cheering them on to make it. 

[HanoiVillan]

19 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

NSW did lockdown a significant part of Sydney during the outbreak over Christmas while they got the track and trace running.

The thing with track and trace is that the numbers you have to trace very quickly go exponential if people are moving around freely and you quickly lose all control of it. One person goes to a Supermarket and that’s 50 people you have to contact within 24h max. Every one of those people have family at home so that’s another 50-100 people. If any of those caught a train or a bus suddenly you are talking about thousands you need to contact within a day or so. It quickly becomes unworkable. You need a period of time where everyone stays still while the tracers get to work letting people know to isolate. 

Plenty of other countries are managing it; they haven't been doing these lockdowns in Taiwan, for instance. It isn't impossible.

[sidcow]

Results from Israel seem to suggest the Pvizer vaccine is absolutely storming it. 

Fingers crossed AZ is going to perform just as well (relative to it's trial results). 

Hopefully in the coming weeks we should get our own evidence of what the impact is. 

Edited February 1, 2021 by sidcow

[LondonLax]

24 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Plenty of other countries are managing it; they haven't been doing these lockdowns in Taiwan, for instance. It isn't impossible.

Taiwan has just had a local lockdown of some 5000 people in Taoyaun apparently. Presumably they need buy time to get contact tracing under control again. 

[HanoiVillan]

15 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

Taiwan has just had a local lockdown of some 5000 people in Taoyaun apparently. Presumably they need buy time to get contact tracing under control again. 

Fair enough, I hadn't seen that one, but looking at it even there it's smaller than the WA one, and in many ways it demonstrates that you can control things without state/countrywide lockdown (they've simply told everyone who attended a particular hospital and their families to isolate, so it's much more targeted).