Corona Virus main thread

[Capt. Pants 4,300]

9 minutes ago, ricardo said:

Anti lockdown riots in Amsterdam overnight.

The Scots and Welsh will be revolting.

[The Real Buh 3,486]

38 minutes ago, ricardo said:

Anti lockdown riots in Amsterdam overnight.

Some countries have lost their biscuit over this virus they really have. 
 

We need to live with this. Hide away forever and what is the point in life.

[Wings of a Sparrow 1,449]

43 minutes ago, Capt. Pants said:

The Scots and Welsh will be revolting.

Too late 😁

[How I Wrote Elastic Man 1,198]

Australia now leading the world at rapid tests 

[ricardo 7,416]

National

157,758 - 42       Deaths, England only

rate of increase of  50%           1.5 million tests

Still much incomplete data

 

Local

Norwich   West rate             1557.5              Local   R  estimated 1 - 1.2

N&N in Hospital

	28-12-2021                                  21 27-12-2021 27 26-12-2021 24 25-12-2021 25 24-12-2021 25
	Vax     (not including Wales) 1st Dose           12,121                90.1% done                               Norwich numbers   78.4%        Booster rate 49.9%      2nd Dose          15,893              82.5% done                                                               72.2% Booster    106,665    total          34,205,472                59.5%           In Hospital   29-12-2021                                            11,918 28-12-2021 10,883 27-12-2021 9,724 26-12-2021 8,717 25-12-2021 8,309 24-12-2021 8,502

[ricardo 7,416]

Positivity rates

[ricardo 7,416]

Genome sequencing

[The Real Buh 3,486]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59865108
 

goddam, hate being right all the time

Vaccines for all every four to six months not needed, says expert
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who helped develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, says the most at risk should be identified and prioritised instead.

[ricardo 7,416]

National

218,724 - 48       includes 4 days data N. Ireland, 2 days data Wales plus deaths don't include Scotland

rate of increase of  50.9%           1.7 million tests

Some catch up data today.

 

Local

Norwich   West rate             1531.5              Local   R  estimated 1 - 1.2

N&N in Hospital

	28-12-2021                                  21 27-12-2021 27 26-12-2021 24 25-12-2021 25 24-12-2021 25
	Vax     1st Dose           19,158                90.1% done                               Norwich numbers   78.5%        Booster rate 50.4%      2nd Dose          29,295              82.6% done                                                                    72.3% Booster    141,825    total          34,363,986                59.8%           In Hospital   31-12-2021                             14,126 30-12-2021 13,123 29-12-2021 11,949 28-12-2021 10,911 27-12-2021 9,752

Edited January 4, 2022 by ricardo

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Redruth now running out of LFTs. People ahead of me in Boots saying they didn't know they had to get a code. Or maybe they had phoned their Boss this morning and said they had it.

Edited January 4, 2022 by keelansgrandad

[ricardo 7,416]

Greece 50k. That's 325k UK pop equivalent.

 

[KernowCanary 214]

5 News loving this. Live on-camera reports from outside hospitals while they scaremonger.

Should be ashamed of themselves.

Edited January 4, 2022 by KernowCanary

[Well b back 3,285]

4 hours ago, The Real Buh said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59865108
 

goddam, hate being right all the time

Vaccines for all every four to six months not needed, says expert
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who helped develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, says the most at risk should be identified and prioritised instead.

But the other day you were objecting to this. It is Andrew Pollard speaking and what he is talking about is vaccinating the world and that younger people should not have multiple vaccines. This was what I explained to you and you called me a cupcake, are you now saying you agree with a cupcake, Andrew Pollard is saying exactly what he said a year ago when we were offered jab 2.

Welcome to the get the world vaccinated club.

[Well b back 3,285]

31 minutes ago, KernowCanary said:

5 News loving this. Live on-camera reports from outside hospitals while they scaremonger.

Should be ashamed of themselves.

I was by the wards today briefly, very busy are you saying they aren’t ? Those busy wards are seeing cancer treatment and the like delayed. There are also huge amounts of staff off ( hence why people are getting borrowed ). The critical incidents are equally about staff numbers as they are COVID cases.

[KernowCanary 214]

Wolf Alice postponed their tour…… this won’t be the first time gigs will be rescheduled around the place or cancelled. It feels like going two years back and the better half and I were so looking forward to it.

I appreciate they want to look after us, but it’s no joy booking a ticket to anything these days and looking forward to it while counting the days down. Now it’s just baited breath and constant praying the thing will actually happen and that’s no fun.

We need to live alongside this, not constantly cower.

[KernowCanary 214]

1 minute ago, Well b back said:

I was by the wards today briefly, very busy are you saying they aren’t ? Those busy wards are seeing cancer treatment and the like delayed. There are also huge amounts of staff off ( hence why people are getting borrowed ). The critical incidents are equally about staff numbers as they are COVID cases.

I’m past getting pissed off with the MSM now. It’s alright for them with their cushy secure jobs while everyone else worries.

[Well b back 3,285]

51 minutes ago, ricardo said:

Greece 50k. That's 325k UK pop equivalent.

 

The quicker it spreads the better your position, unless your health service gets overwhelmed. The main people concerned should be the unvaccinated and those that haven’t been boosted, who have subsequently lost a lot of immunity ( that won’t be every unboosted person ).

[Well b back 3,285]

4 hours ago, The Real Buh said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59865108
 

goddam, hate being right all the time

Vaccines for all every four to six months not needed, says expert
Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who helped develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, says the most at risk should be identified and prioritised instead.

He said the vaccine rollout had gone "extremely well" in the UK but other parts of the world were falling behind.

[Capt. Pants 4,300]

1 hour ago, ricardo said:

National

218,724 - 48       includes 4 days data N. Ireland, 2 days data Wales plus deaths don't include Scotland

rate of increase of  50.9%           1.7 million tests

Some catch up data today.

 

Local

Norwich   West rate             1531.5              Local   R  estimated 1 - 1.2

N&N in Hospital

	28-12-2021                                  21 27-12-2021 27 26-12-2021 24 25-12-2021 25 24-12-2021 25
	Vax     1st Dose           19,158                90.1% done                               Norwich numbers   78.5%        Booster rate 50.4%      2nd Dose          29,295              82.6% done                                                                    72.3% Booster    141,825    total          34,363,986                59.8%           In Hospital   31-12-2021                             14,126 30-12-2021 13,123 29-12-2021 11,949 28-12-2021 10,911 27-12-2021 9,752

According to local news there are 90 people in the N&N with Covid, so those numbers look well wrong.

A close family member said last Thursday there was a 16 hour wait to see a doctor in A&E and 12hr wait to unload the ambulances. The situation improved a bit over the weekend but still horrendously busy. 600 staff off sick or with stress.

[ricardo 7,416]

31 minutes ago, Capt. Pants said:

According to local news there are 90 people in the N&N with Covid, so those numbers look well wrong.

A close family member said last Thursday there was a 16 hour wait to see a doctor in A&E and 12hr wait to unload the ambulances. The situation improved a bit over the weekend but still horrendously busy. 600 staff off sick or with stress.

The government dashboard has not been updated since 28th Dec.

[Herman 9,842]

4 minutes ago, ricardo said:

The government dashboard has not been updated since 28th Dec.

Probably all got covid.

[Well b back 3,285]

23 minutes ago, Capt. Pants said:

According to local news there are 90 people in the N&N with Covid, so those numbers look well wrong.

A close family member said last Thursday there was a 16 hour wait to see a doctor in A&E and 12hr wait to unload the ambulances. The situation improved a bit over the weekend but still horrendously busy. 600 staff off sick or with stress.

It is a bit worrying with staffing that PCR tests seem ( I have no data to confirm this just people I know and hear about ) to take around 5 days. We now have to test each day, but on-site before we start shifts.

[Aggy 766]

1 hour ago, Capt. Pants said:

According to local news there are 90 people in the N&N with Covid, so those numbers look well wrong.

A close family member said last Thursday there was a 16 hour wait to see a doctor in A&E and 12hr wait to unload the ambulances. The situation improved a bit over the weekend but still horrendously busy. 600 staff off sick or with stress.

Two articles from the Guardian:

Twenty people died while waiting too long for ambulances in the east of England after the ambulance service there failed to seek outside help during the busy period over Christmas, a Labour MP has said, citing a whistleblower.

Clive Lewis, the MP for Norwich South, used a point of order in the Commons to highlight what he said was an “exceptionally serious issue” with the East of England ambulance service, highlighted by the whistleblower.

The ambulance service became critically overstretched from 19 December, and senior managers wanted to move into what is called Reap 4, the fourth stage of the resource escalation action plan, which involves seeking outside help, Lewis told MPs.

Because neighbouring ambulance services were also overstretched, the assistance would most likely have come from the armed forces, he said.

Lewis said no decision was taken until 31 December, when a different plan was implemented. Over the period, 20 patients died in incidents when ambulances arrived late, the whistleblower has claimed.

The latest NHS figures show that up to 100,000 patients this winter have had to wait in the back of ambulances for at least 30 minutes because of A&E overcrowding.

In all 104,987 patients brought to hospitals in England have been stuck inside an ambulance, or in parts of hospitals including corridors, for upwards of half an hour.

They have faced long waits because A&E staff, struggling to cope with a surge in demand for care, have been too busy to accept them at the time they arrive. Of the patients affected, almost a quarter – 24,624 – have endured a delay of at least an hour.

 

 

 

2:

 

Hospitals’ inability to keep up with the demand for care on Tuesday night prompted NHS England to tell them to take unprecedented measures to try and stabilise the service. 

 

They included cancelling outpatient appointments and day case surgery, extending an existing ban on non-urgent surgery until the end of the month and deploying consultants in A&E units to assess if patients really are a medical emergency.

Amid growing evidence of chaos as the NHS’s winter crisis bites, hospitals are being forced to create makeshift wards for patients, growing numbers are declaring a black alert – an official admission that they cannot cope – and patients are waiting as long as 12 hours for A&E care.

“We are seeing conditions that people have not experienced in their working lives,” said Dr Taj Hassan, an A&E consultant in Leeds and president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), which represents A&E doctors.

“The position is as bad as I’ve ever known,” said Dr Nick Scriven, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, whose members look after emergency admitted patients not needing surgery. “I’m 34 years in and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Tracy Bullock, the chief executive of Mid Cheshire hospitals NHS foundation trust. 

Dr Richard Fawcett, a senior doctor in emergency medicine at the Royal Stoke hospital in Staffordshire, tweeted on Tuesday: “As an A&E consultant at University of North Midlands NHS Trust I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the third world conditions of the department due to overcrowding.” 

Scriven told the Guardian how he worked from 8am to 7pm on Monday but was then called back in to his hospital in Halifax, Yorkshire, at midnight because the hospital was full and he worked on treating patients until 4am. 

His hospital was experiencing major difficulties despite having opened extra beds in preparation for the expected surge in demand at this time of year, he said. 

Scriven said that during his long shift the hospital had run out of beds that could be safely staffed and that patients were being “bedded down” in the A&E. 

Patient safety could be at risk across the NHS because there were too few nurses to staff all the beds that needed to be opened, warned Scriven. “Big issues are currently nurse staffing levels, with extra beds being opened around hospitals to cope with winter surge and not enough nurses to go round.” That, allied to similar shortages of doctors and therapists and diagnostic facilities being “swamped”, were creating “a vicious circle of increased need causing longer delays in [the] whole system”, he added.

Officials estimated that extending the ban on non-essential operations could lead to 55,000 procedures being deferred.

The NHS’s new “recommendations” to hospitals, from the national emergency pressures panel chaired by overall NHS medical director Prof Sir Bruce Keogh, sparked suggestions that NHS chiefs are acutely worried.

They were accompanied by an admission by NHS England that its intensive planning for this winter, designed to avoid a repeat of shambolic scenes in hospitals last January that led the British Red Cross to call the situation a “humanitarian crisis”, appears to have had only a limited impact. 

Keogh thanked NHS staff who worked hard over a difficult Christmas. “The NHS needs to take further action to increase capacity and minimise disruptive last minute cancellations. That is why we are making these further recommendations,” he added. 

Southend hospital in Essex declared an “internal critical incident” on Tuesday because it could not cope with what Dr Neil Rothnie, its medical director, said was “the high number of acutely unwell patients arriving at our emergency department requiring admission to hospital”.

In an email to staff Rothnie said that by Monday night they had “no medical or surgical beds” available and that “ambulances [were] queuing for considerable periods of time throughout the night”. In addition, many patients had to wait “for considerable time” in the hospital’s A&E unit before they could be admitted to a bed on a specialist medical ward. 

 

On Monday it treated just 63.5% of its 277 A&E patients within four hours, far fewer than the 95% stipulated by ministers and guaranteed in the NHS constitution. Other hospitals are treating and admitting, transferring or discharging as few as 40% of those arriving at A&E, as a result of “exit block” – the rest of the hospital being too full – Hassan said. 

Nottingham University hospitals NHS trust is also among those which have declared a black alert – the highest form of alert in the NHS. It did so on Tuesday because, director of operations Miriam Duffy told staff in an email, “the last few weeks have been difficult. We … have opened a winter respiratory ward due to significant pressures within respiratory and emergency flow, [but also] run out of bed capacity in medicine”, she said. 

In other hospitals: 

 A children’s day surgery ward at St Helier hospital in Sutton, Surrey, has been closed to under-18s. Instead adults – fewer than 10, the hospital says – are now being treated there because the trust has run out of beds to put them in.

The Royal Albert Edward Infirmary in Wigan in Lancashire has warned that patients turning up at its A&E “can expect long waits up to 12 hours while the most serious cases are prioritised”.

 Prof Chris Moulton, the RCEM’s vice-president, warned that “massive queues in corridors” were now common.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells trust, Kent
On Tuesday, the trust was forced to call a black alert – known as an opel 4 incident. According to NHS guidelines, this happens when “decisive action must be taken … to recover capacity and ensure patient safety” in the face of “rising system pressure”. It comes after Maidstone hospital A&E department endured the busiest Christmas Day on record. 
 

 

Darent Valley hospital, Kent
The hospital, which is also operating on opel 4, informed patients on Tuesday morning that its emergency department was “extremely busy” and that patients should seek an alternative option where possible. 

Epsom and St Helier hospitals, Surrey 
Another trust on black alert, local people have been urged not to attend A&E unless its a genuine emergency. Chief operating officer, Dan Bradbury, said: “We are seeing and admitting high numbers of sick people and our hospitals are very busy indeed.” The trust confirmed that as a result they have had to call for extra staff and some care admissions had been rescheduled.

Claire Jackson-Prior, 44 from south London, said her daughter, 13, was sent home, after turning up at St Helier hospital for an appointment at the paediatric day surgery unit. The space was instead being used for adult inpatients. “We know it’s not the staff’s fault but it worries me that they are so stretched,” she said.

Southend University hospital, Essex
The hospital has declared an internal critical incident due to the high number of acutely unwell patients arriving at A&E. On 2 January, it said in an email to staff that the previous day there had been no medical or surgical beds and ambulances were queuing for “considerable periods of time throughout the night.” Yvonne Blücher, managing director at Southend University NHS foundation trust, said: “In common with hospitals across the country we are experiencing very high demand on our services.” 

Medway NHS trust, Kent
On Tuesday, staff tweeted to tell patients that the emergency department was experiencing high numbers of attendances and that there were longer waits than usual. It said: “Please consider whether the emergency department is the most appropriate place for your care.” The director of finance, Tracey Cotterill, said: “That’s certainly the busiest new year’s day I have ever had! Thank you to all staff working today.”

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Djokovic given a pass for Australian Open. He will not say whether he has been vaccinated. Why? To both sentences.

[Virtual reality 748]

7 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

Djokovic given a pass for Australian Open. He will not say whether he has been vaccinated. Why? To both sentences.

He’s been given it on the grounds that he has a medical exemption 

 

Edited January 4, 2022 by Virtual reality

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

7 minutes ago, Virtual reality said:

He’s been given it on the grounds that he has a medical exemption 

 

So why won't he say whether he has had any jab? The statement doesn't say much at all in reality.

[Virtual reality 748]

3 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

So why won't he say whether he has had any jab? The statement doesn't say much at all in reality.

He hasn’t had the jab. The medical exemption will be the reason why he hasn’t had it. I Don’t know what the medical reason is for him to get the exemption but in fairness his medical records are not mine or anyone else’s business. 

[Virtual reality 748]

13 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

So why won't he say whether he has had any jab? The statement doesn't say much at all in reality.

Just found this after delving into it a bit more 

 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

1 minute ago, Virtual reality said:

Just found this after delving into it a bit more 

 

That is his right of course but its hardly revealing your medical records to say I have a medical exemption which means I cannot have the vaccine. Neither would it be revealing medical records to say I am fully vaccinated.

Just as I don't understand why some teams do not say which players have covid. Its hardly a crime or a sin to contract it.

[The Real Buh 3,486]

Djokovic trolling the vaccine religious zealots.

he doesn’t have to reveal his vaccination status, nobody does. Just because you told all your mates on bebo about it or whatever doesn’t mean everyone else has to. It’s a private matter. Get over yourselves.