UK Reaches Highest COVID-19 Deaths Since March As New AY.4.2 Delta Sub-Variant Spreads (independent.co.uk) 403
AleRunner writes: The United Kingdom's COVID-19 death rate has reached its highest rate since just after the peak of the last lockdown in March. This has been happening as the new AY.4.2 variant of the Delta strain of the SARS-COV-2 virus has begun to dominate in the UK. Coming into winter, the increase in coronavirus infection in the UK is already causing a collapse in health care with patients dying just after long waits for care or even whilst waiting. Although there's some similarity to 2020, and a worry that AY.4.2 might avoid immunity, the UK chancellor has decided to commit to a vaccines mainly strategy whilst other countries seem to be unconcerned with the CDC already declaring that no measures are planned to limit AY.4.2 spread.
Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sure a flight is departing for my country right now. But we get boosters, yay!
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have learned that when the government constantly lies, breaks its own rules, blunders along making easily foreseeable mistake after mistake, considers options like "let the bodies pile high" (direct quote from our Prime Minister), and gaslighting ("we did everything we could"), a lot of people just won't tolerate any more restrictions. Not even mask wearing.
Herd immunity is the policy, was always the policy, which means millions of unnecessary infections. They were hoping that vaccines would make it more viable, i.e. fewer people dying or overwhelming hospitals, but the vaccines are not that effective with the new variants. There is also Long COVID, which doesn't seem to have factored into their decision making at all, and which will become a major long term public health issue.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Informative)
I see two things wrong here:
> As with any policy, you have to carefully consider pros and cons.
I have no confidence it was carefully considered at all. It was decided far, far too early on - before anyone really knew anything about the virus. If it was carefully considered, then let's see the outputs from that effort - surely there must be meeting notes, or even the science to share about it. Such materials would go a long way to gaining a lot of support for a contentious approach, so we can only guess why it's not been released.
Secondly, herd immunity might be a valid way forward or maybe it's not. It's one hell of a gamble to take when you don't yet know all the side effects of the virus, or indeed how you might tackle the ones you do know about (long covid really has no proper care plan, much less "cure"). Pushing your national health care to it's brink on a long-term basis also isn't wise, unless you have ulterior motives (eg. show it to be "failing" offer privatisation, or US drug company "help" as the solution).
Knowingly allowing your electorate to get infected by a virus you don't fully understand is either brilliant or bone-headed. I personally haven't seen much else from the government I'd describe as "brilliant", but I'll leave it to the reader to decide which of the two it is.
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But we are seeing the shortcomings of them...they don't last, they may not work with variants.
Why are we not seeing publicly the PUSH for treatments for the disease....things you can take when you get it?
I know we saw one pill that is coming out, but what are there not 4-5 different treatments for covid like there were 4-5 different vaccines in high speed development?
I don't think we can vaccine our way out of this, we need at t
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have epidemic of loneliness, overdoses, suicides, homelessness
Yeah, we had all that before the pandemic in many countries. And now we still have it. And it's still not because of the pandemic, it's because of the lack of assistance with basic human needs, and a system which seems set up to permit the already-wealthy to profit from that lack.
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How about closing the borders? Seemed to work well for other countries, and it's hard to imagine that it would have done any more economic damage than the lockdowns and COVID running wild did. The UK took the biggest economic hit in the developed world.
The government was advised to start the first lockdown earlier than it did. Even a week earlier would have saved a lot of lives AND shortened the lockdown period significantly.
Similarly, not trying to "save" Christmas and locking down earlier would have saved
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
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I would if they let me in
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Feel free to move to Australia if you like your lockdowns.
If only. For a couple of lockdowns here and there they have largely enjoyed a perfectly normal life for the past year. Even the record of Victoria being the state with the longest lockdown in the world neglected to say that much of that "lockdown" was limited to very specific and select suburbs.
I'd give anything for my country to follow Australia's sensible approach.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
While the sickness itself and the vaccinations were easy to predict (even before we actually had vaccines), the Long COVID is something relatively new and couldn't be predicted early in the pandemics.
The big issue is that the trust people had in "The Government" was squandered by bad-faith actions, by "You'll all obey the rules, the rules are for peasants but we'll ignore them when we want to", by "we were wrong but won't really admit it" and so on and so forth.
Not really a UK specific problem, though. Some countries did it better (Portugal by not involving politicians in vaccination efforts AT ALL, Germany by vaccinating their Iron Lady in the normal course of things and not queue-jumping, France by imposing the rules and staying the course with hundreds of thousands in the streets). Italy ate their bitter pill and smiled and did better (incredibly much better, to be fair).
Romania defeated the Pandemics in June, and didn't care to carry on vaccinating. Its politicians broke mask wearing rules again and again, didn't care about people uncertain about vaccination, didn't care about people refusing vaccination.
We (and others) reap what we sow, and will unfortunately reap the effects for a loong time.
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I agree. Let's close the borders to the people from the plague island. All bad covid variants in the EU have been brought from the UK.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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By "second wave" do you mean the one in November 2020 [ourworldindata.org] where EU saw a spike in cases exceeding those in the UK, just before the UK saw a big spike? By this metric, I think we should conclude the variants spread in the other direction?
And if we're assuming that we can correlate deaths with the origin locations of new variants, then surely we must be casting suspicious eyes towards places like Romania and Italy? [ourworldindata.org]
I'm being facetious, of course. These are both poor ways to determine where a variant came from. To
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
But looking at the numbers the UK seems to do fine enough. At least for now the mortality rates are still fairly flat and low if compared to the infection rates. The comparison with the numbers from March are at least a bit disingenuous in this light, because mortality and infection correlated much stronger back then.
I don't know what the future will bring, but right now it certainly does look like that whatever they did lead to some improvement.
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Nope.
Like a month ago our cases (not the UK) were still very low after the summer but, if you looked carefully at the numbers, it was clear they were growing at the same rate as before the last peak. Did anyone do anything? Of course not, we're now like halfway up to the previous peak and they're just starting to move their asses to come up with some policies.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
but can we at least get an agreement that if someone not vaccinated does get sick, that they agree to stay home and die quietly and not burden the healthcare system?
Fixed it for you. In the U.S., ~98% of all persons in the hospital for covid are unvaccinated. Mississippi now has over 10,000 deaths from covid, the largest percentage of dead relative to population. Florida and Texas both have surpassed New York in covid deaths despite New York bearing the brunt a year ago.
Also, in relation to the UK, this is what some people [imgur.com] are like in regards to vaccinations. Is it any wonder the pandemic never ends.
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Sorry, I meant unvaccinated - too early to be discussing such an important subject without coffee in my veins.
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Sorry, but that number is way off. The actual number of COVID hospital patients that are unvaccinated are 86%. Not 98%.
https://www.healthsystemtracke... [healthsystemtracker.org]
That 98% percent is talking about "preventable" COVID hospitalizations of the unvaccinated, if they had been vaccinated. The vaccinated hospitalizations are, of course, not preventable. As the vaccine did not prevent their hospitalization.
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Fixed it for you. In the U.S., ~98% of all persons in the hospital for covid are unvaccinated.
I wish people would stop posting useless statistics. First as a factual matter 98% is incorrect. 98% implies a 48x difference in hospitalizations between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations when reality it is much closer to 10x.
More importantly the usefulness of this figure depends entirely on the relative proportion of the population with acquired immunity at the time the figure is calculated.
If everyone were vaccinated 100% of the persons in the hospital for covid would be vaccinated. Should I use
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As soon as one of those lardos can actually force such a greaseball down my throat by breathing vaguely in my direction, you even have a point.
Until then, the only person he endangers is himself. Which is allright by me.
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Until then, the only person he endangers is himself. Which is allright by me.
Until he's seated next to you on the airlines.
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Don't the foreign scum-bags realise what a privilege it is to come here to be insulted, exploited and reviled? How to they hope to build their own empire to match ours?
Fuck, I guess we're going to have to bring in Indians next. Or fucking septics -
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Obesity isn't contagious.
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I'm not so sure. Social contagion is a reasonably well understood phenomena, and socially contagious things are indeed contagious between people.
And we're not even sure if it's not partly biologically contagious as well. There are at least some studies that seem to suggest that obesity is a multivariate problem and at least one of the significant variants is what you have in your gut microbiome. And those are in fact biologically contagious, going through things like mother's vagina (for natural and properl
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From an economic perspective, it would be more profitable for the pharma companies to have more sick people, as they increase the demand in medication. A mass produced vaccine like the diverse anti-SARS-CoV2-vaccines does only make so much revenue, as the price per dose is low ($20 per shot for Comirnaty from Pfizer). Ivermectin for instance costs about $15 per dose, but differently than a vaccine, it does not help, and people will apply several doses in vain. After the t
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Lol. This old trope.
There are a lot of pharma companies, and more and more keep popping up like rats. They're competitive as hell, and also heavily regulated to make sure there isn't any collusion of the kind you suggest. If one discovers a cure for something they will absolutely market it because it's worth a lot of money. If that cure scuttles someone else's mere treatment, so much the better. And if they don't, someone else will; "someone else" could be a pack of grad students feeling entrepreneurial.
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India was the start of delta variant. The number of deaths reported in March-April time when covid was at peak is most definitely 10% or less of the actuals. I am not blaming the government either - unlike developed countries India doesn't have the infrastructure to control people at that granular level.
As of today 2 new cases of this new variant have been detected in the state of Karnataka. It still remains to be seen how bad it will get though. May be not, because almost everyone already got covid during
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not sure if you are deliberately trolling but this is akin to stating that people still die in car accidents so it is obvious that seatbelts do not work.
The current Covid vaccines we have are some of the most effective ever produced in terms of reducing the risk of infection, severe disease and death, should you be exposed to this particular pathogen. They do not make you invulnerable; nothing does. If you have lots of comorbidities and/or risk factors you are helped by vaccines but the individual risk level still remains substantial.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
As of data from three days ago, 68% of the UK is vaccinated. If they are still having an outbreak now, then it is obvious that the vaccines do not work.
68% still leaves plenty of people to spread a virus as contagious as Delta. This new one must be even easier to spread if it's increasing in prevalence. No surprise it's still spreading. Especially when restrictions are lifted and people let their guard down thinking they are immune.
Even the summary mentioned it might be more resistant to this new strain.
Let me guess. Your plan for when two viruses are spreading simultaneously. If you can't protect against both perfectly you wouldn't try to protect against just one would you?
(If you can't protect against AY.4.2 then you may as well let Delta classic get you.)
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Sure, fully vaccinated people can die - but deaths from COVID in people who are fully vaccinated are much, much lower than it is in a similarly risky unvaccinated group. (And I would add the risk of death from the vaccine itself is extremely low, perhaps indistinguishable from
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
with people like you "thinking by yourself" is analogous to "swimming across the ocean by yourself" when you clearly don't even know how to swim
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just looked it up. As of data from three days ago, 68% of the UK is vaccinated. If they are still having an outbreak now, then it is obvious that the vaccines do not work.
The local news in this part of the US has plenty of reports of fully vaccinated people dying.
You clearly do not understand how vaccines work. The following is true of all vaccines, not just the COVID-19 vaccines:
* Receiving a vaccine does not guarantee you are protected. Not everyone generates an immune response to a particular vaccine.
* Assuming the vaccine "took" in you, it does not guarantee you won't become infected. Although infection is far less likely, it can still happen.
* If you are infected, infection is less likely to result in disease, but some people will still get sick.
* If you are infected, you may still shed virus, although probably much less.
Vaccines are not an invincibility shield. A vaccine can be 95% effective at preventing infection and 98% effective at preventing death, but if you vaccinate 10s of millions of people and then expose them to the pathogen targeted by the vaccine, you'll still get 1000s of anecdotes of vaccinated people dying.
The purpose of a vaccine is not primarily to protect the individual, although it does have that effect most of the time. The purpose of a vaccine is to protect a population. The more of the population is vaccinated, the more it drags down the r value of the pathogen targeted by the vaccine. The best case scenario is to get enough of the population vaccinated to drag the r value down below 1.0 so the pathogen burns itself out.
For COVID-19 I've heard estimates of high 70s to low 90s for percentages necessary to achieve herd immunity. Note that the r value for a pathogen is not static: it is influenced by other factors such as population density, hygiene practices, quarantine policy, social distancing, use of PPE, etc. Since many countries seem to be doing a pretty crap job of implementing measures that might bring the r value down, expect the herd immunity target to be closer to the 90% end of the range. Since 68% is much smaller than 90%, it's hardly a surprise that there are still major outbreaks.
You as an individual get still get infected if you are vaccinated (however unlikely). You as an individual might get sick if you are vaccinated (although probably much less sick). You as an individual might even die if you are vaccinated (however unlikely). This doesn't mean the vaccine doesn't work. It just means that you still have to be somewhat cautious while a pandemic is raging even if you are vaccinated. I'm sorry if this doesn't align with your expectations and that wearing a mask makes you mad, but if you want this thing to end the best thing you can do is get in line with everybody else and get a vaccine.
And wear a god damn mask in the grocery store. it's really not that bad.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Informative)
The vaccines are clearly working. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/2... [cnbc.com]
It's an epidemic of the unvaccinated.
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Thanks for the detailed response.
To add to it: vaccines do work. Evidence from two Canadian provinces [canada.ca] with high vaccinations (Ontario, the most populous) along with Quebec, vs. Saskatchewan where uptake is lower. Scroll down to the map, then mouse over the province to see its epidemiological curve.
Compare the last wave in Ontario/Quebec (Sept/Oct) to the last wave in Saskatchewan.
Night and day difference, and the only crucial factor is vaccination ...
Over the past several weeks, Saskatchewan was sending ICU
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Or that most of the people clogging the healthcare are from that 32% that aren't vaccinated.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
a) Functionally you can get close enough as we have with a number of other diseases that have effectively been wiped off the map. (I'm not going to say 100% eradicated, but in terms of their existence affecting daily life outside of getting a vaccine for it, they might as well not exist.)
b) it is, but mind you I listen to the majority of doctors and scientists, and not nitwits on the internet
c) it isn't, but mind you I listen to the majority of doctors and scientists, and not nitwits on the internet
d) locksdowns are effective and important steps to take when numbers become greater than our capacity to handle them in our healthcare systems where the fatality numbers would skyrocket from people dying who might otherwise survive having received care
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think you can make generalized arguments about herd immunity -- specifics matter. Herd immunity is relatively easy to achieve with something like measles, even though the vaccination threshold you need for something that infections is extremely high.
COVID -- even the Delta variant -- is nowhere near as infectious as measles, but the challenge is immunity to coronaviruses does not appear to last very long. Also with SARS-COV-2, it's ability to evade the innate immune system means that immunity isn't a binary thing like it is in the mathematical models; you can get infected enough to shed virus while still being immune enough to not get symptoms.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
B: The COVID shot isn't a vaccine.
Pfizer's "COMIRNATY" (aka "BNT162b2"), Moderna's "SpikeVax" (aka "mRNA-1273") and Johnson and Johnson's "Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine" are all vaccines. This appears to be a persistent piece of information that is repeatedly spread here.
C: If you can be infected even after inoculation, the inoculation is shit.
Strictly speaking, *no* vaccine actually prevents infections; vaccines prime your body to attack an infection before it goes very far. This is true whether you acquire immunity through vaccination or through surviving infection. All the major vaccines are effective at preventing symptomatic infections and are *highly* effective at preventing severe disease, which even if they did nothing to prevent the spread of infection would still be a big deal.
The planet needs to start planning for living with COVID, the same way we do for the flu and the common cold.
This is true as far as it goes, but COVID is not flu; the differences matter. So far as we know COVID is showing no signs of becoming seasonal; also COVID has a potent ability to spread through asymptomatic carriers. Protecting people who are immunocompromised or with underlying conditions is going to be a big challenge. While most of us will be able to put our masks in a drawer and forget them, there is no end in sight to masking for vulnerable people and their families.
The thing that will be the same is that there will be massive annual inoculation programs in our future, although for different reasons. Flu immunity doesn't last year to year because flu is biologically diverse; this year's flu is different enough that immunity to last year's flu doesn't help you. We'll need COVID boosters annually because COVID immunity doesn't appear to last very long. This is particularly true for immunity gained from infection, which can begin to wane in as little as 90 days from recovery.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say that those who do believe that Western Medicine is evil should stick to their alternative medicine and see how it plays out for them.
For the wealthier European countries this might not be much of an issue, because their capacities are larger. But when I look at my home country Romania where Western Medicine scare is rampant, they do run into capacity issues. The rate at which things develop looks quite bad https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
It also doesn't look like people are realizing that maybe some precaution is advisable. Instead I've now often heard from Romanian acquaintances that they don't want to go to the hospital at all. Because they believe that if you go there, they'll euthanize you and say it's COVID.
And the shit that I hear about even the Communists not being as bad... I witnessed that first hand. The sate institutions didn't ask if you wanted to get vaccinated, they didn't tell you what was in the shot or what research had been done on proving it to be safe. They just lined everyone up and administered the shot, using the same needle they used on 15 other people before you.
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I dare say it's safe to say that we should not put anti-vaxxers into intensive care beds. It clearly isn't what they'd want, after all, it would only put more money into the coffers of the industrial medicine complex.
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I don't know about not putting them into beds, but we should certainly put them into beds last. If someone comes in with a bleeding head wound, give them care before the unvaccinated covid darwinists.
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No, we have to respect their wishes. I have been told time and time again that they don't want to participate in this whole bullshit where we hand our money hand over fist to the medical industries, and we should not try to force them to participate in this.
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I have been told time and time again that they don't want to participate in this whole bullshit where we hand our money hand over fist to the medical industries, and we should not try to force them to participate in this.
They often change their minds, though, begging for the vaccination when it's too late. But at that point they've clearly come to accept the benefits of modern medicine.
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It's when all the alternative medicine fails when many still seek out conventional medicine and end up in intensive care units that just can't turn a blind eye to them because of the oath they took.
A reversal of the usual chain of events where when conventional medicine doesn't seem to help any more, desperate people seek out homeopathy or faith healing.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
Every "fact" you posted is a lie.
Re:Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
The term MSM has to be retired. Fox is now the number one cable news channel. They are the mainsteam. https://www.forbes.com/sites/m... [forbes.com]
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Where is the "+1 - Fucking Frightening" mod when you need it?
Re: Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
"Our studies demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-based vaccination of humans induces a persistent germinal centre B cell response, which enables the generation of robust humoral immunity."
This was not difficult to find.
Re: Quarantine the country dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a citation for T cells:
https://www.pennmedicine.org/n... [pennmedicine.org]
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That was the plan. The government chickened out a bit when they realized that 150,000 deaths, weighted towards the demographic that votes for them, might be bad. Turns out it's okay though, their standard tactic of blaming other people seems to have worked and many key voters are of the opinion that it was idiots not following the ever-changing rules, not the government, to blame.
Hmm, someone doesn't really have a clue (Score:5, Informative)
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"Couple of things: ... We have Prime Minister, not a Chancellor (well, we do have a Chancellor but he's of the Exchequer, so not responsible for formulating non-financial policies)."
That doesn't hinder Rishi to give his opinion and thoughts about the health measures to anybody asking him.
Re:Hmm, someone doesn't really have a clue (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't hinder Rishi to give his opinion and thoughts about the health measures to anybody asking him.
Not to mention that when the health secretary (Javid) wanted to introduce mask wearing for all members of the government the Chancellor (of the Exchequer), Rishi Sunak was the one who stood up publicly and made it 100% clear that wasn't going to happen. It's 100% clear that Johnson is Rishi's bitch.
Re:Hmm, someone doesn't really have a clue (Score:4, Informative)
As a UK resident I agree with the OP. The UK does a significant proportion of the entire Worlds genomic sequencing and somewhere between 1/2 and 1m tests a *day* for a population of ~67m, with the obvious corollaries that we will a) likely see variants first as we are actually looking for them, even though they are widespread globally by then and b) get a high number of cases. If you do not look, you will not find.
I, too, would not be the first to leap to the defence of our Govt. but the statistics do not seem that alarming when you look at the context. All there to see at https://coronavirus.data.gov.u... [data.gov.uk]
Re:Hmm, someone doesn't really have a clue (Score:5, Funny)
You have a Queen. Why is she not doing anything? Chop off some heads and make order.
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Couple of things: 1. Our health service is no where near to collapse. 2. We have Prime Minister, not a Chancellor (well, we do have a Chancellor but he's of the Exchequer, so not responsible for formulating non-financial policies). 3. Cases in the UK are high, agreed, but have been falling for the past few days, and the bulk of the cases are amongst school-age children who are the least likely to suffer significant illness. 4. Whoever wrote this summary obviously has no clue what's actually going on the UK. I am no fan of our government, nor of their handling of the pandemic, but the alarmism and general lack of understanding here is staggering.
I'll start with #4 and say, you must be new here.
The big things are case to hospitalisation and case to death ratios. Both are down due to the high vaccine takeup (over 90% of adults are fully vaccinated in the UK). I'm no fan of Johnson and the Tories, but they've managed to get that right. Compared to other times when the case rate was this high (late Jan 2020) the death rate is a fraction of what it was when most of the UK was unvaccinated.
Vaccinated hospitalizations make up for about 1/3 of the to
Happy belated Freedom Day! (Score:2, Funny)
For everybody!
263 deaths on Tuesday (Score:3)
It comes amid ministers deciding to wait until after the half-term break to decide if they will enforce so-called plan B Covid restrictions, despite the UK reporting 263 deaths on Tuesday – the highest figure since 3 March.
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This is roughly the same as the number of people who died on Tuesday from smoking. From the NHS's own website:
"Every year around 78,000 people in the UK die from smoking" [www.nhs.uk].
That's 213 people per day.
You have to keep perspective here. On Tuesday, 263 people died of a horrible virus that has crippled the country. On the same day, a similar number of people suffered a totally avoidable death but nobody mentions it and we certainly don't let it lock down the economy.
Re:263 deaths on Tuesday (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because locking down the economy wouldn't reduce the number of smoking deaths.
Comparison with previous waves (Score:4, Informative)
According to JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data & Google, the UK is currently experiencing 140 deaths per day from Covid (7 day average). At the peak of the second UK wave in late January, the UK was experiencing 1250 deaths per day (7 day average). In mid April 2020, at the peak of the first UK wave, the UK had 900 deaths per day. The number of people hospitalized (concurrently in the hospital) with Covid is currently approximately 7000. In January, it was up to 38,000 and in April 2020, 21,000 were hospitalized. It appears that the vaccines have been able to significantly reduced the number of deaths.
The UK has an unremarkable COVID-19 death rate ! (Score:4, Informative)
The UK is at about % 0.21
The EU is at about % 0.20
The US is at about % 0.22
The UK has an unremarkable COVID-19 death rate ! does not make for a very interesting headline.
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A chance of 2 in 1000 to die is unremarkable? I mean, ok, I'm kinda spoiled by our top notch first world healthcare, but personally, I'd consider a .2% chance to croak from a disease as nontrivial.
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It unremarkable compared to the rest of the world.
"UK Reaches Highest COVID-19 Deaths Since March . . . " - is thus a sensationalist headline. It singles out the UK yet the UK death rate is running on par with the rest of the (civilised) world.
Re:The UK has an unremarkable COVID-19 death rate (Score:4, Informative)
The overall number of deaths since 2019 is not particularly interesting. What's interesting/concerning is that the UK currently has a death rate per day vastly higher than other Western European countries. (Presumably, the reason for this is that they started vaccinating earlier, thus their immunity has had more time to wear off. And unlike Israel which was in the same situation until they gave boosters to everyone, UK has only provided boosters to a small minority of the population.)
Re:The UK has an unremarkable COVID-19 death rate (Score:4, Informative)
It singles out the UK yet the UK death rate is running on par with the rest of the (civilised) world.
That's the death rate from COVID infections, and additionally it's across the past 2 years.
It ignores that the UK (completely unlike the rest of the world) has a significantly higher percentage of COVID cases currently. In terms of the past 6 months the UK has one of the highest deaths per person statistics in the world.
Stop abusing statistics. No one gives a shit about last year's stats.
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Globally 0.75% of the population die every year on average, that's 7.5 in 1000.
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That number is probably for the infected people.
There might be undetected asymptomatic cases out there, which would lower that 2 in a thousand chance.
In any way, the survival rate for Intensive Care patients in Romania is now under 40%... 1800 or so in Intensive Care Units as we speak, and 300-500 deaths a day... 15,000 new cases a day for the last (I think) couple of weeks... About 1% of the population is in isolation at home or in quarantine at home (we don't actually have a trustworthy number of the tota
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Easily agreed that it's nontrivial. In fact, it's pretty bad.
But it has to be compared against harm being caused by mitigation measures, not against perfect utopia where no one dies of disease. Just the developmental detriment to children and young adults alone has been devastating, and almost no one wants to talk about that one. People forced to die alone and isolated because there's a fear they'll infect someone who has almost no chance to even get infected, and almost no chance of getting killed by the d
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But it has to be compared against harm being caused by mitigation measures, not against perfect utopia where no one dies of disease.
Agreed. It's difficult to have a sane discussion on the costs of mitigation efforts when we have people going "OMG wearing a mask and getting a vaccine is equivalent to genocide!" The ultimate question is -- how do we cut out the extremism and go back to sane discussion?
But mitigation measures taken are worse.
Which mitigation efforts do you find onerous at this point? Where I live in the US, kids are back in school, after-school activities have resumed, restaurants are open.
About the only mitigation left is that we still wear masks indoors bec
Re:The UK has an unremarkable COVID-19 death rate (Score:5, Insightful)
I do volunteer work with kids in sports, and impact there is extremely visible. Many team sports groups lost up to 3/4 of their participants. I've seen a few of those they managed to get back, and I am frankly haunted by what some of those kids became. Active, outgoing, engaged kids became reclusive, withdrawn, and easy to anger uncontrollably.
These are not the problems that go away because "you let them go back". Those are the things that are lost and need effort and time to be recovered, if they even can be recovered. I'm not a psychology professional, but I've done this for two decades now so I'm quite experienced, and the only time I've seen that sort of change in the past was a kid that had a death of a parent during formative period. And even then, it was more manageable because there was usually effort to keep the kid engaged in sport of his choice, to give him a place to be free of that tragedy at least for a few hour a week. Here, it's like we let those kids dam up that tragedy or social isolation for a year. Alone with nothing but social media to alleviate it.
And that's just those that came back. A lot more didn't. And there's a lot of material evidence what happened to them. Things like rate of youths damaging public property have exploded. Youth psychology and psychiatry queues have become ridiculous, with half a year to year long wait periods. I've heard several stories of someone getting their payment guarantee from our state health insurer and then finding out that there are no free psychologists with open patient slots for half a year or longer just in the last month and just in my social circles.
As one teacher I've known for a long time put it a few weeks ago, "we sacrificed the children to save the elderly, and we'll be paying the price for this choice for decades". My suspicion is that you won't see this be quite as bad in US, because there it's acceptable to just medicate those problems away, effectively stunting mental development, but mitigating the problems from... well, actually going through mental development. But it's not acceptable to just effectively forcibly level people's emotional states through medication and pretend the problem isn't there for most of the world. Which means we'll be seeing effects earlier, though likely results of these effects will be less damaging.
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So, interesting numbers you choose there. Not to mention the fact that your EU number is wrong (actual number: 0.17)
Let's try some more reasonable comparisons.
Taiwan: 0.0035 %
Ghana: 0.0035 %
South Korea: 0.0054 %
Norway: 0.0163 %
Finland: 0.0207 %
Vietnam: 0.0222 %
Canada: 0.0758 %
Germany: 0.1735 %
France: 0.1753 %
EU Average: 0.1772 %
UK: 0.205 %
US: 0.221 %
And of course, also worth mentioning:
Romania: 0.237 %
Brazil: 0.283 %
Maybe the motto should be "UK, we're not doing quite as badly as Brazil"?
(source: https://ou [ourworldindata.org]
Re:scaremongering (Score:4)
So was testing (and by a greater amount), so doesn't mean a great deal. Perhaps tests were down because less people had symptomatic illness to request a test, but that still doesn't tell you much. Also, it's not the first time there has been a reduction in cases for a few days before continuing to climb higher than it was before (this has happened twice in the last 6 weeks already).
https://coronavirus.data.gov.u... [data.gov.uk]
Re:scaremongering (Score:4, Informative)
So was testing (and by a greater amount), so doesn't mean a great deal. Perhaps tests were down because less people had symptomatic illness to request a test, but that still doesn't tell you much.
Actually the tests are down because it's the school holiday. Normally almost all children do several lateral flow tests a week (which aren't counted into the tests) and then, if they get a positive LTF they isolate and follow up with a PCR test. That slows down the spread in schools considerably nd pushes up the number of positive PCR tests. Hopefully the school holiday means less spread in schools but I'm afraid it actually means more mixing as people travel.
The best place to see a realistic estimate of the case numbers without manipulation and testing effects [joinzoe.com] is from the ZOE project's UK data [joinzoe.com] which shows a continual ramp up in cases right now. Over last summer when the government case data was all over the place as schools came in and out, younger (asymptomatic) people got infected and so on, ZOE gave a much better estimate.
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If we are now referencing Twitter posts as sources, truly all hope for humanity is lost.
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But but but one asshole in India claims he cured 500 people!
Great. Does he have any research data?
No he just says so on twitter and he's a doctor!
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Blairite? Really?
Ahhh. Hi, Captain Yesterday.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Re:Margarine vs. butter (Score:5, Insightful)
Natural antibodies train the body's T and B cells to adapt to and attack variants of a virus it's already beaten (as it did in 99+% of cases)
Getting vaccinated provides far better protection [cdc.gov] than not being vaccinated, and this includes reinfection.
The study of hundreds of Kentucky residents with previous infections through June 2021 found that those who were unvaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated. The findings suggest that among people who have had COVID-19 previously, getting fully vaccinated provides additional protection against reinfection.
Additionally, a second publication from MMWR shows vaccines prevented COVID-19 related hospitalizations among the highest risk age groups. As cases, hospitalizations, and deaths rise, the data in today’s MMWR reinforce that COVID-19 vaccines are the best way to prevent COVID-19.
Further, natural immunity is less beneficial in the long run since it fades faster than being vaccinated [nebraskamed.com].
The data is clear: Natural immunity is not better. The COVID-19 vaccines create more effective and longer-lasting immunity than natural immunity from infection.
More than a third of COVID-19 infections result in zero protective antibodies
Natural immunity fades faster than vaccine immunity
Natural immunity alone is less than half as effective than natural immunity plus vaccination
Substituting the vaccines for a healthy immune system (which I recognize not everyone has) is like substituting margarine for butter. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but...
You're not "substituting" anything. If you've never been infected with a virus your body has no template to work with. It has to figure out what to do and that takes time, time which the virus uses to do its thing. Whereas, getting vaccinated provides a ready made template for the body to use if it happens to get infected. No time wasted, it already has the layout.
This would be the difference between being told to go into a house and find something in a particular room without knowing anything about the house, or being given a complete floor plan layout to study ahead of time. Which do you think will be a faster way to find the object in question?
Re:Margarine vs. butter (Score:4, Informative)
Further, natural immunity is less beneficial in the long run since it fades faster than being vaccinated [nebraskamed.com].
This is not the case. Breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infections in 620,000 U.S. Veterans, February 1, 2021 to August 13, 2021 [medrxiv.org]
As you can see, large study showing substantial declines in just 6 months. Meanwhile there are studies showing people that got SARS-CoV-1 still have immunity almost 20 years later.
Re:Margarine vs. butter (Score:5, Insightful)
As you can see, large study showing substantial declines in just 6 months. Meanwhile there are studies showing people that got SARS-CoV-1 still have immunity almost 20 years later.
We didn't have a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 people without strong immunity died ...
Did you even read the abstract?
The main reason was because Delta was becoming more predominant. Not because the vaccines were wearing off.
In our analysis, the oldest age group (65 years) had a similar pattern of breakthrough infections over time compared to the younger age group, despite becoming fully vaccinated 3-4 months earlier, on average.
Implying length of time since vaccinations wasn't the man determinate, but the prevalence of Delta was.
Although follow-up of the Pfizer-BioNTech trial demonstrated sustained vaccine protection against infection (91%) (3), our results suggest vaccines are less effective in preventing infections with the more recent Delta variant.
Your linked study doesn't mention natural immunity at all. It's certainly not comparing it to vaccine induced immunity as you are implying.
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Fact: Recovering from covid gives you greatly better immunity than a vaccine.
(a) It's not clear that's a fact, at all. And there's good reason to expect that it could go either way, depending on what proteins from the virus your body decided to target vs what proteins the vaccine creates, and depending on what levels of the relevant proteins were in your system to generate an immune response. The majority of studies have found better immune response in the vaccinated than the recovered, but the largest study to date has found the other direction, so it's ambiguous.
(b) In order to
Re:Margarine vs. butter (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me explain my post using shorter words: Scientists found that vaccine in not as good after 6 months. We also know that people that were infected with other virus are still good 20 years later. This tells us that natural immunity does not go bad as quickly as vaccinated.
Let me explain to you again.
The study you linked doesn't say what you are claiming it says.
It says that 6 months later, when Delta was the main strain, that vaccines weren't as effective. Because they aren't as effective against Delta. That's just common knowledge by now.
There wasn't even a 'natural immunity' group in the study for you to compare to.
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Meanwhile there are studies showing people that got SARS-CoV-1 still have immunity almost 20 years later.
And your reference to a completely different virus is relevant why? Is it because you don't understand virology even in the slightest?
Pointing to breakthrough cases does not change the fact that natural immunity is *not* better that afforded by immunization. To say nothing of the fact that repeat infections of COVID-19 are usually far worse than the first infection which is precisely why countries are giving people recently infected with COVID-19 booster shots.
But I'm sure you know better despite all eviden
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What sort of sad sack of bullshit puts something in quotes and edits it without indicating they did so? Quonset, that's who.
The actual quote is
In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus.
So no, getting the vaccine does NOT provide better protection than being infected normally. Getting the vaccine possibly provides additional protection after having been infected normally, but the study in no way indicates that being infected after getting the vaccine confers the same additional protection. Moreover, the study does not control for length of time sin
Healthy immune system (Score:2)
How does that work against HIV?
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Re: Margarine vs. butter (Score:2, Interesting)
Classic vaccines do and generally provide broad protection against variants.
The current COVID vaccines hypertarget specific strains, so it is quick to create in comparison with other vaccines (you only need 1 sample) but ineffective against variants unless you get continuous booster shots for variants as they pop up.
Hence why even though weâ(TM)ve reached herd immunity for the first strains, Delta and subsequent strains will continue.
People thought COVID would not mutate as quickly as flu and HIV. But
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Actually, the COVID vaccine is effective against variants. The effectiveness is diminished but still significant.
The flu vaccine OTOH has to be given annually since it isn't significantly effective against other strains.
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Do you happen to have a source that doesn't just let any random bozo publish trash?
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He's not wrong, though. More cases are to be expected to hit us during the colder months.
But instead of going "meh, it's Winter, what can you do?" we should probably start checking whether our ICUs can handle the expected additional cases.
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You do know that COVID infection rates are strongly tied to temperature and humidity right?
Re: Winter is coming... (Score:2)
Many are other kinds of coronaviruses.
I repeat: sars cov 2 is the only virus known to man that can fry your brain without having to infect you, and it has the only vaccine known to man that does not need to be administered to saute your brain with shallots and garlic.