Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Honest Saints Fan]

 

[Steven W]

Sturgeon also re-tweeting some stuff about this new variant.

I've not any problem with furthering restrictions, but it needs to go in tandem with accelerating the vaccination programme.

Quite fitting that on the day we begin the AZ vaccine scheme, SG will dishing out more restrictions on life.

[101]

They are going to re open the schools in England! This should serve as a good experiment for the rest of the UK to sit and watch what it does to infection levels, I'm going to bet on "rocket" how long until the first Scottish Tory says "Get Scottish kids back to school"

[Jan Vojáček]

7 minutes ago, Honest Saints Fan said:

 

Aside from extending the online learning period of the schools, I'm unsure what else they can do that will actually have an impact on figures in a serious way.

Sure they could cancel professional sport, shut takeaways or limit us back to 30 minutes outside a day. But I can't see any of those things having serious impact at all on the R number given the regulations we're already under.

We have a vaccine. If there are more restrictions to come then it needs to go hand-in-hand with a massive roll-out. We can't keep a lockdown until the end of April whilst faffing about vaccinating a small number of people every week.

They're only one example obviously, but my grandparents are 81; my Granny has cancer and my Papa has COPD and Bronchitis. They must be in one of the highest risk groups going and they're down at the health centre/hospital once or twice every single week - but as yet haven't heard a peep about their vaccine. 

[Honest Saints Fan]

Just now, Jan Vojáček said:

Aside from extending the online learning period of the schools, I'm unsure what else they can do that will actually have an impact on figures in a serious way.

Sure they could cancel professional sport, shut takeaways or limit us back to 30 minutes outside a day. But I can't see any of those things having serious impact at all on the R number given the regulations we're already under.

We have a vaccine. If there are more restrictions to come then it needs to go hand-in-hand with a massive roll-out. We can't keep a lockdown until the end of April whilst faffing about vaccinating a small number of people every week.

They're only one example obviously, but my grandparents are 81; my Granny has cancer and my Papa has COPD and Bronchitis. They must be in one of the highest risk groups going and they're down at the health centre/hospital once or twice every single week - but as yet haven't heard a peep about their vaccine. 

I think it's angling at schools won't be back on the 18th. 

I'm the same, two grandparents over 80 with many ailments including COPD, blood cancer, previous heart attacks and a stroke (how they are still alive is a testament to modern medicine) and they have heard nothing either.

[Jacksgranda]

14 hours ago, strichener said:

Yes but that doesn't mean that it takes 15mins per vaccination.  One person could probably vaccinate 120 people per hour with a staging area for the people to spend 15mins under observation.  Similar to what happens at blood donor sessions.

That's what used to happen at our surgery for the flu vaccination, the waiting room was used to monitor us, while we drank coffee and ate biscuits.

This year we were all horsed out the door immediately after receiving our jag - haven't heard of any casualties.

[peasy23]

It's the bit that the Westminster government has fucked up most all the way through this. Absolutely no checks or records kept on people landing in the country from known hot spots, never mind actual strict quarantine. Madness.

[Bairnardo]

1 minute ago, Steven W said:

Sturgeon also re-tweeting some stuff about this new variant.

I've not any problem with furthering restrictions, but it needs to go in tandem with accelerating the vaccination programme.

Quite fitting that on the day we begin the AZ vaccine scheme, SG will dishing out more restrictions on life.

Agree with this. No more woolly, open ended restrictions and appeals for the public to just wait a wee bit longer for the light at the end of the tunnel. If they want the whole of January with everyone in their houses in order to concentrate on nothing but vaccinations fine, but if they just want to lock us down because they don't really know what else to do. I don't see how anyone can argue that this vaccine program is adequate or "going fast enough". We are about to get caught with our pants down with AZ coing available. You just fucking know it.

[Michael W]

Johnson on Marr parroting the famous cliché that schools are safe yet again. 

I'll say it again - if the government policy is stay at home, which it is in Tier 4 areas, this is because the prevalence of the virus is rife and at a severely dangerous level. Schools are not safe and never have been, and they are just going to spread the virus further. Within the last week, 1 in every 200 people in England and NI has been diagnosed with the virus and it's nearing 1 in 400 in Scotland. They have long reckoned the actual numbers are likely two or three times as high: keeping schools open is Government-sanctioned infection of the population. 

I accept closing the schools is a monumental pain in the arse, but know what else is? 50k+ cases a day. We need to go back to March here - only kids whose presence at home stops nurses/doctors etc from going to work should be in school. They can be taught in a hub school via a rotation or even remotely if required. 

If schools are safe, so are restaurants and non-essential retail. Suddenly, your stay at home order starts to look silly. If you're issuing stay at home orders, schools should be shut. End of discussion. 

[doulikefish]

10 minutes ago, 101 said:

They are going to re open the schools in England! This should serve as a good experiment for the rest of the UK to sit and watch what it does to infection levels, I'm going to bet on "rocket" how long until the first Scottish Tory says "Get Scottish kids back to school"

Basically a tory

 

[Jan Vojáček]

13 minutes ago, Honest Saints Fan said:

I think it's angling at schools won't be back on the 18th. 

I'm the same, two grandparents over 80 with many ailments including COPD, blood cancer, previous heart attacks and a stroke (how they are still alive is a testament to modern medicine) and they have heard nothing either.

I think that would be sensible. As most people have seen all along - despite the constant claims that schools have no impact on the spread. 

Hopefully both sets of grandparents get some news on a vaccine pronto then. They're the ones I'm most worried about and we've taken no chances since March - including standing in the garden in the pouring rain last month for 25 minutes talking to them through a window. Once they've had their jabs I'll be feeling an awful lot more relaxed - but when I heard of the roll-out I really thought they'd at least have had a date for one by now.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

[renton]

6 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

Agree with this. No more woolly, open ended restrictions and appeals for the public to just wait a wee bit longer for the light at the end of the tunnel. If they want the whole of January with everyone in their houses in order to concentrate on nothing but vaccinations fine, but if they just want to lock us down because they don't really know what else to do. I don't see how anyone can argue that this vaccine program is adequate or "going fast enough". We are about to get caught with our pants down with AZ coing available. You just fucking know it.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-42-sars-cov-2-variant/

Non peer reviewed pre print from Ferguson and his crew at Imperial.

Under a half dozen different models the new strain is expected to have an additive effect on R by 0.4 to 0.7 (Well, 0.36 to 0.68)

The paper also looked at trying to figure out the R for both the old and new strains through the second English lockdown. It comes to the conclusion that the R for the old strain during that lockdown was 0.92 vs. 1.45 for the new strain, so 0.53 difference in additive effect of R.

Given the tier 4 restrictions up here managed to get R below 1 as well, it seems that the old strain could be controlled with schools remaining open.

The new strain cannot. Where the new strain is not dominant, it will become so as it outcompetes the old stuff. That means at the very least I'd expect Sturgeon to announce schools continuing in online earning until February.

If transmission is raised across all age groups equally as the paper here suggests: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/uk-novel-variant.html then there might be some scope to get the younger kids and primary schools back in person but you'd expect them to wait and collate a lot more data before going down that route.

The issue is that if the increase in R is closer to the upper end suggested by Ferguson, then closing schools might not necessarily be enough to control transmission by itself. So what then? Strict stay at home order? Curfew? 

If there is to be a return to a full March lockdown, then it has to go hand in hand with a schedule for vaccinations. Even if it means plowing f**k tonnes of money at AZ to guarantee supply. Otherwise it won't stick. I do think restrictions need to stay in place at least until they can get enough of the vulnerable groups vaccinated to bring down hospitalisations. Otherwise we run the risk of crashing the NHS at the point where it is trying to manage a massive vaccination program. The stories coming out of SE England are not exactly cheery.

[Bairnardo]

5 minutes ago, renton said:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-42-sars-cov-2-variant/

Non peer reviewed pre print from Ferguson and his crew at Imperial.

Under a half dozen different models the new strain is expected to have an additive effect on R by 0.4 to 0.7 (Well, 0.36 to 0.68)

The paper also looked at trying to figure out the R for both the old and new strains through the second English lockdown. It comes to the conclusion that the R for the old strain during that lockdown was 0.92 vs. 1.45 for the new strain, so 0.53 difference in additive effect of R.

Given the tier 4 restrictions up here managed to get R below 1 as well, it seems that the old strain could be controlled with schools remaining open.

The new strain cannot. Where the new strain is not dominant, it will become so as it outcompetes the old stuff. That means at the very least I'd expect Sturgeon to announce schools continuing in online earning until February.

If transmission is raised across all age groups equally as the paper here suggests: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/uk-novel-variant.html then there might be some scope to get the younger kids and primary schools back in person but you'd expect them to wait and collate a lot more data before going down that route.

The issue is that if the increase in R is closer to the upper end suggested by Ferguson, then closing schools might not necessarily be enough to control transmission by itself. So what then? Strict stay at home order? Curfew? 

If there is to be a return to a full March lockdown, then it has to go hand in hand with a schedule for vaccinations. Even if it means plowing f**k tonnes of money at AZ to guarantee supply. Otherwise it won't stick. I do think restrictions need to stay in place at least until they can get enough of the vulnerable groups vaccinated to bring down hospitalisations. Otherwise we run the risk of crashing the NHS at the point where it is trying to manage a massive vaccination program. The stories coming out of SE England are not exactly cheery.

You do get the impression that SE England has utterly fucked it, even accounting for new strain.

[renton]

2 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

You do get the impression that SE England has utterly fucked it, even accounting for new strain.

Aye, in one sense I don't think either of the pre print papers take compliance to restrictions into account. Obviously they assume that is constant throughout, even if its low.

You wonder though if compliance to the various measures dropped through the festive period in the run up to Christmas just based on the entirely subjective images on the news, and therefore some portion of the increased R is due to declining compliance vs. Increased transmission of the virus itself.

As always, the issue is in getting good quality data to inform the models that drive decision making.

[Bairnardo]

1 minute ago, renton said:

Aye, in one sense I don't think either of the pre print papers take compliance to restrictions into account. Obviously they assume that is constant throughout, even if its low.

You wonder though if compliance to the various measures dropped through the festive period in the run up to Christmas just based on the entirely subjective images on the news, and therefore some portion of the increased R is due to declining compliance vs. Increased transmission of the virus itself.

As always, the issue is in getting good quality data to inform the models that drive decision making.

The government must have fucked compliance to a fair degree by asserting that a five day window of patching rules we were previously told were crucial was safe. Compliance was always likely to drop when the vaccines came (In my opinion) which is why they should have known and been ready for, a race against time with the vaccines. The narrative around Christmas should be looked back on as way worse than anything around schools IMO. An absolutely ridiculous state of affairs with an as yet undetermined, but clearly high price.

[Sergeant Wilson]

47 minutes ago, 101 said:

They are going to re open the schools in England! This should serve as a good experiment for the rest of the UK to sit and watch what it does to infection levels, I'm going to bet on "rocket" how long until the first Scottish Tory says "Get Scottish kids back to school"

I was a just a bit annoyed by Spielman from Ofsted giving her tuppenceworth about schools staying open. I'm not sure she's any more an epidemiologist than me.

[dirty dingus]

1 hour ago, Paco said:

Seems the UK Government are yet again causing significant problems with their dithering.

The media and indeed the people of England are currently losing their mind about schools being open or closed on Monday. In most of the country, kids are due to show up in less than 24 hours time, and nobody knows whether they’ll be there or not. Unions are encouraging teachers not to show up. There have already been several u-turns in areas like London and government statements are immediately reversed later on in the same day. Into the bargain many headteachers spent the Christmas break planning mass testing regimes that were dropped onto them on the last day of term.

In Scotland, schools were announced as being closed for in-person learning until at least January 18th, on December 19th. This isn’t difficult politics - SAGE have said schools can’t stay open with R remaining below 1, as a result of the new variant. So the schools simply must be closed. Scotland has less than half the national average of new cases than England, and yet they seem determined to spread the virus even further down south.

They’re in a full crisis but don’t even seem to know it. The BMJ are claiming doctors in London are choosing who to give oxygen to due to a shortage. In some areas ICU’s are as full as 136%. Patients are being flown hundreds of miles to free beds. The media are banned from reporting at hospitals, and while this is all going on there have been several demos actually outside hospitals claiming Covid is a hoax. In response the government are all over social media trumpeting ‘new changes’ as a result of leaving the EU that have already been made by the EU.

A lot is made about how much material difference there is between the UK and Scottish Governments in all of this. There probably isn’t a massive amount in policy terms but it really isn’t difficult at all to see why the opinion polls land where they currently do.

Excellent summation of a Clusterfuck.

[Bairnardo]

11 minutes ago, Tynierose said:

See this really boils my piss.  Practices way back in March had to collate lists of most vulnerable patients for shielding information with this all sent to boards etc.

Why when knowing a vaccine was coming was an appointment system based on need not ready to be issued immediately.  Sloppy shoddy planning yet again whether it be by health boards or centrally by SG.    I've said it before only the sheer incompetence of Bojo and Co has made our lot look reasonable.

Tomorrow's announcements will include the plan of subliminal recordings of Leitch saying stay home coming through your TV 24/7 whilst on radio Devi will encourage you to believe your on a beach in Bermuda, positive mental attitude.

What tomorrow should announce is schools are shut  until end of January or until x amount of jags have been done.  This of course won't happen and some wishy washy half measure will be in place whilst some homage will be paid to the science about this new fast spreading strain. Alcohol sales will also be banned as people can't be trusted and the opportunity to exercise will be limited to switching the telly on and off.  Meanwhile Mp's of all parties will be free to wander about the country as they please and professional footballers from Ormiston can play against junior giants Armadale in a friendly.   Takeaways will also be shut apart from salad bars to counter lack of opportunities to exercise.  Police Scotland will also launch a dedicated grass line where those who are caught outside without good reason will be fined £200 quid and made to watch Godley videos non stop for a week, how's that for a deterrent.

In one final twist all hospitals will shut as will GP practices, apparently there is a lot of the virus about and those pesky staff who were ungrateful about their taxed windfall cannot be trusted either.  Supermarkets will remain open to allow pensioners to gossip while a mask adorns their chins.

We will reconvene in six months time and see how it goes. Good luck.

 

These people are deeply uncomfortable now that that focus is shifting. At the start of this, they were spinning how new this is and how no one has ever faced this before and we have no weapons against it, we just need to all muck in etc. Now every new restriction will correctly be met with "aye but why are we doing this when there's vaccines?" "How long will it take" etc. Perfectly legitimate questions and ones that are fully within their remit to answer and to improve upon. There are quite literally no more excuses now. Furlough cost how many billions? And even it only allows us to continue with open ended and largely ineffective, reactive measure. Wheres the similar throwing of resources and radical measures now? Even in this thread we have folk talking about how no one will show up for a vaccine in the middle of the night. The why bother trying attitude seems to come from the top down for me.

[Honest_Man#1]

14 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

The government must have fucked compliance to a fair degree by asserting that a five day window of patching rules we were previously told were crucial was safe. Compliance was always likely to drop when the vaccines came (In my opinion) which is why they should have known and been ready for, a race against time with the vaccines. The narrative around Christmas should be looked back on as way worse than anything around schools IMO. An absolutely ridiculous state of affairs with an as yet undetermined, but clearly high price.

I’m assuming you’ve now accepted schools should be shut?