Corona Virus main thread

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

23 hours ago, Indy said:

I went to see the 80’s show two weeks ago in Cromer, stayed the night, was really careful, wore a mask, cleansed my hands yet Monday evening had sniffles and tested positive……it appears this variant is really easy to catch and spread, from what I’ve read you can test negative for up to two days after catching it!

Now two days clear, but really didn’t know I had it, the sniffles went in a couple days and nothing else in symptoms!

Well its good news there are no after effects. Its now a real annoyance more than anything else.

[Aggy 755]

On 30/03/2022 at 13:20, It's Character Forming said:

If there's an enquiry into Covid and how it's been dealt with, I really hope it looks at the modelling and projections, especially towards the end they seem consistently to have been way over in what they've been projecting.

The other thing I’d like to see more focus on in any post-pandemic ‘review’ is the wider indirect effects.

An article on the bbc today saying young children’s development is worrying as a result of lockdowns and restrictions.

More info on things like that needed so we can properly make fully informed decisions if similar measures ever contemplated in the future. 

 

 

[Herman 9,765]

2 hours ago, Aggy said:

The other thing I’d like to see more focus on in any post-pandemic ‘review’ is the wider indirect effects.

An article on the bbc today saying young children’s development is worrying as a result of lockdowns and restrictions.

More info on things like that needed so we can properly make fully informed decisions if similar measures ever contemplated in the future. 

 

 

There were some interesting debates on this subject on LBC today. A range of problems from speech, behavioral, social etc have been detected widely.

[Rock The Boat 1,332]

Some update on the possible origins of covid in Vanity Fair:

In June 18, 2021, an evolutionary biologist named Jesse D. Bloom sent the draft of an unpublished scientific paper he’d written to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States. A bespectacled, boyish-looking 43-year-old often clad in short-sleeved checkered shirts, Bloom specializes in the study of how viruses evolve. “He is the most ethical scientist I know,” said Sergei Pond, a fellow evolutionary biologist. “He wants to dig deep and discover the truth.”

The paper Bloom had written—known as a preprint, because it had yet to be peer-reviewed or published—contained sensitive revelations about the National Institutes of Health, the federal agency that oversees biomedical research. In the interests of transparency, he wanted Fauci, who helms an NIH subagency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to see it ahead of time. Under ordinary circumstances, the preprint might have sparked a respectful exchange of views. But this was no ordinary preprint, and no ordinary moment.

More than a year into the pandemic, the genesis of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was still a mystery. Most scientists believed that it had made the leap from bats to humans naturally, via an intermediary species, most likely at a market in Wuhan, China, where live wild animals were slaughtered and sold. But a growing contingent were asking if it could have originated inside a nearby laboratory that is known to have conducted risky coronavirus research funded in part by the United States. As speculation, sober and otherwise, swirled, the NIH was being bombarded by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits. Fauci himself needed a security detail, owing to death threats from conspiracy theorists who believed he was covering up some dark secret.

Bloom’s paper was the product of detective work he’d undertaken after noticing that a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences mentioned in a published paper from China had somehow vanished without a trace. The sequences, which map the nucleotides that give a virus its unique genetic identity, are key to tracking when the virus emerged and how it might have evolved. In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan. Now, he was hoping Fauci and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins, could help him identify other deleted sequences that might shed light on the mystery.

Bloom had submitted the paper to a preprint server, a public repository of scientific papers awaiting peer review, on the same day that he’d sent a copy to Fauci and Collins. It now existed in a kind of twilight zone: not published, and not yet public, but almost certain to appear online soon.

Collins immediately organized a Zoom meeting for Sunday, June 20. He invited two outside scientists, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen and virologist Robert Garry, and allowed Bloom to do the same. Bloom chose Pond and Rasmus Nielsen, a genetic biologist. That it was shaping up like an old-fashioned duel with seconds in attendance did not cross Bloom’s mind at the time. But six months after that meeting, he remained so troubled by what transpired that he wrote a detailed account, which Vanity Fair obtained.

After Bloom described his research, the Zoom meeting became “extremely contentious,” he wrote. Andersen leapt in, saying he found the preprint “deeply troubling.” If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed. And there was nothing unusual about the early genomic sequences in Wuhan.

Instantly, Nielsen and Andersen were “yelling at each other,” Bloom wrote, with Nielsen insisting that the early Wuhan sequences were “extremely puzzling and unusual.”

Andersen—who’d had some of his emails with Fauci from early in the pandemic publicly released through FOIA requests—leveled a third objection. Andersen, Bloom wrote, “needed security outside his house, and my pre-print would fuel conspiratorial notions that China was hiding data and thereby lead to more criticism of scientists such as himself.”

Fauci then weighed in, objecting to the preprint’s description of Chinese scientists “surreptitiously” deleting the sequences. The word was loaded, said Fauci, and the reason they’d asked for the deletions was unknown.

That’s when Andersen made a suggestion that surprised Bloom. He said he was a screener at the preprint server, which gave him access to papers that weren’t yet public. He then offered to either entirely delete the preprint or revise it “in a way that would leave no record that this had been done.” Bloom refused, saying that he doubted either option was appropriate, “given the contentious nature of the meeting.”

At that point, both Fauci and Collins distanced themselves from Andersen’s offer, with Fauci saying, as Bloom recalled it, “Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print.” They seemed to know that Andersen had gone too far.

Both Andersen and Garry denied that anyone in the meeting suggested deleting or revising the paper. Andersen said Bloom’s account was “false.” Garry dismissed it as “nonsense.” Sergei Pond, however, confirmed Bloom’s account as accurate, after having it read aloud to him. “I don’t remember the exact phrasing—I didn’t take any notes—but from what you described, that sounds accurate. I definitely felt bad for poor Jesse.” He added that the “charged-up” atmosphere struck him as “inappropriate for a scientific meeting.” A spokesperson for Fauci declined to comment.

The wagon-circling on that Zoom call reflected a siege mentality at the NIH whose cause was much larger than Bloom and the missing sequences. It couldn’t be made to disappear with creative editing or deletion. And it all began with a once-obscure science nonprofit in Manhattan that had become the conduit for federal grant money to a Wuhan research laboratory.

In 2014, Fauci’s agency had issued a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to predicting and helping to prevent the next pandemic by identifying viruses that could leap from wildlife to humans. The grant, titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, proposed to screen wild and captive bats in China, analyze sequences in the laboratory to gauge the risk of bat viruses infecting humans, and build predictive models to examine future risk. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was a key collaborator to whom EcoHealth Alliance gave almost $600,000 in sub-awards. But the work there had been controversial enough that the NIH suspended the grant in July 2020.

As it happened, EcoHealth Alliance failed to predict the COVID-19 pandemic—even though it erupted into public view at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a short drive from the WIV itself. In the ensuing months, every move of EcoHealth Alliance, and its voluble president Peter Daszak, came under scrutiny by a small army of scientific sleuths and assorted journalists. What, they wanted to know, had really gone on at the WIV? Why had Daszak been so cagey about the work his organization had been funding there? And were Fauci and other officials trying to direct attention away from research that the U.S. had been, at least indirectly, financing?

The dispute over COVID-19’s origins has become increasingly acrimonious, with warring camps of scientists trading personal insults on Twitter feeds. Natural-origin proponents argue that the virus, like so many before it, emerged from the well-known phenomenon of natural spillover, jumping from a bat host to an intermediate species before going on to infect humans. Those suspecting a lab-related incident point to an array of possible scenarios, from inadvertent exposure of a scientist during field research to the accidental release of a natural or manipulated strain during laboratory work. The lack of concrete evidence supporting either theory has only increased the rancor. “Everyone is looking for a smoking gun that would render any reasonable doubt impossible,” says Amir Attaran, a biologist and lawyer at the University of Ottawa. Without cooperation from the Chinese government, that may be impossible.

In 2018, Daszak had appeared on Chinese state-run TV and said, “The work we do with Chinese collaborators is published jointly in international journals and the sequence data is uploaded onto the internet free for everyone to read, very open, very transparent, and very collaborative.” He added, “Science is naturally transparent and open…. You do something, you discover something, you want to tell the world about it. That’s the nature of scientists.”

But as COVID-19 rampaged across the globe, the Chinese government’s commitment to transparency turned out to be limited. It has refused to share raw data from early patient cases, or participate in any further international efforts to investigate the virus’s origin. And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.

As for transparency-minded scientists in the U.S., Daszak early on set about covertly organizing a letter in the Lancet medical journal that sought to present the lab-leak hypothesis as a groundless and destructive conspiracy theory. And Fauci and a small group of scientists, including Andersen and Garry, worked to enshrine the natural-origin theory during confidential discussions in early February 2020, even though several of them privately expressed that they felt a lab-related incident was likelier. Just days before those discussions began, Vanity Fair has learned, Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had urged Fauci privately to vigorously investigate both the lab and natural hypotheses. He was then excluded from the ensuing discussions—learning only later that they’d even occurred. “Their goal was to have a single narrative,” Redfield told Vanity Fair.

Why top scientists linked arms to tamp down public speculation about a lab leak—even when their emails, revealed via FOIA requests and congressional review, suggest they held similar concerns—remains unclear. Was it simply because their views shifted in favor of a natural origin? Could it have been to protect science from the ravings of conspiracy theorists? Or to protect against a revelation that could prove fatal to certain risky research that they deem indispensable? Or to protect vast streams of grant money from political interference or government regulation?

Perhaps more than anyone, Peter Daszak—a Western scientist immersed in Chinese coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—was uniquely positioned to help the world crack open the origin mystery, not least by sharing what he knew. But last year, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who oversees the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission, dismissed Daszak from the helm of a task force investigating the virus’s genesis, after he flatly refused to share progress reports from his contested research grant. (In written responses to detailed questions, Daszak said he was “simply following NIH guidance” when he declined Sachs’s request, because the agency was withholding the reports in question “until they had adjudicated a FOIA request.” The reports are now publicly available, he said.)

 

[KernowCanary 214]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61106918#comments
 

About 4.4 million people had the virus in their body in the week up to 9 April, down from nearly 4.9 million the week before.

WHY!?, just why do the BBC always try and sound clever only to sound like idiots with their choice of words in reporting!?. “IN THEIR BODY!?”, talk about trying to sound over dramatic!. What’s wrong with “4.4 million were infected with the virus”?. Look at the typical photo at the top of a person’s mouth coughing while wearing a mask!. Just how many images to “GETTY IMAGES”  have in their inventory!?, it’s the only source Auntie Beeb uses!.

They’ve been absolute scum like the rest of the MSM during this nightmare, affecting mental health and that of vulnerable people as well. Laura Foster is the only BBC juno I like, always presented really helpful videos describing things and not once did she like the rest of them go out there to scaremonger. Shame she’s not on the national news anymore.

Edited April 14, 2022 by KernowCanary

[Well b back 3,207]

42 minutes ago, KernowCanary said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61106918#comments
 

About 4.4 million people had the virus in their body in the week up to 9 April, down from nearly 4.9 million the week before.

WHY!?, just why do the BBC always try and sound clever only to sound like idiots with their choice of words in reporting!?. “IN THEIR BODY!?”, talk about trying to sound over dramatic!. What’s wrong with “4.4 million were infected with the virus”?. Look at the typical photo at the top of a person’s mouth coughing while wearing a mask!. Just how many images to “GETTY IMAGES”  have in their inventory!?, it’s the only source Auntie Beeb uses!.

They’ve been absolute scum like the rest of the MSM during this nightmare, affecting mental health and that of vulnerable people as well. Laura Foster is the only BBC juno I like, always presented really helpful videos describing things and not once did she like the rest of them go out there to scaremonger. Shame she’s not on the national news anymore.

They were the ONS figures not sure how that is sensational reporting. They have been reported every Thursday for the last 18 months. Surely if they were doing that they would scare you with the U.K. death figures 658 yesterday, 393 per day seven day average, a normal flu season every week and a bad flu season every month.

Because of COVID if you are rushed to hospital over the weekend you will likely have a 12 hour wait and a 30 hour wait for a bed if you are kept in. Or maybe it’s because we are all partying in the staff room.

And before you say I am for lockdowns etc I should point out I am happily ‘ living with COVID ‘ even though I come face to face with positive cases every day of the week.
 

Edited April 14, 2022 by Well b back

[Aggy 755]

19 hours ago, Well b back said:

 

Because of COVID if you are rushed to hospital over the weekend you will likely have a 12 hour wait and a 30 hour wait for a bed if you are kept in.

Are you suggesting that without covid there wouldn’t be any waiting times?

[Well b back 3,207]

4 hours ago, Aggy said:

Are you suggesting that without covid there wouldn’t be any waiting times?

Indeed there would be, but I am told never anything like this before. Do you think NHS workers are faking being off with COVID or isolating ? If I remember the stats you put up recently correctly April normally has lots of bed space. Do you think we should mix COVID positives on the wards with other patients ?. 
I am not really sure what point you are making ? Are you trying to say the hospitals are not at breaking point or are you saying in April you would always have been waiting 12 hours to be seen and 36 hours for a bed. If the latter it shows how this government has lied about how the NHS has coped in previous years.

[Aggy 755]

12 minutes ago, Well b back said:

Indeed there would be, but I am told never anything like this before. Do you think NHS workers are faking being off with COVID or isolating ? If I remember the stats you put up recently correctly April normally has lots of bed space. Do you think we should mix COVID positives on the wards with other patients ?. 
I am not really sure what point you are making ? Are you trying to say the hospitals are not at breaking point or are you saying in April you would always have been waiting 12 hours to be seen and 36 hours for a bed. If the latter it shows how this government has lied about how the NHS has coped in previous years.

I don’t think anyone has said nhs workers are faking anything. That appears to be some very random chip you have on your shoulder as you have said it twice to two different posters, neither of whom have said anything about nhs workers. 

The specific point I was making was that your statement that covid is causing 13 hour waits is incorrect and misleading. Covid is one of many things which is causing 13 hour waiting times. 

The wider point I was making was  that hospitals have been at breaking point for decades. 

The focus on covid is, if anything, counterproductive. If we got rid of covid magically overnight the nhs would still be in a mess. It would be far more useful if the people who keep banging on about covid actually now woke up and banged on about the absolute state the nhs has been in for years and why that is. In reality, covid is now just another thing putting a burden on the nhs - an nhs which was at breaking point even before covid was around. 

Edited April 15, 2022 by Aggy

[KernowCanary 214]

Boris: “YOU MUST STAY AT HOME!!”

Voiceover: “This announcement was brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Pfizer!”

[Creative Midfielder 1,996]

On 15/04/2022 at 23:02, Aggy said:

The focus on covid is, if anything, counterproductive. If we got rid of covid magically overnight the nhs would still be in a mess. It would be far more useful if the people who keep banging on about covid actually now woke up and banged on about the absolute state the nhs has been in for years and why that is. In reality, covid is now just another thing putting a burden on the nhs - an nhs which was at breaking point even before covid was around. 

Many of us have been banging on for years about the damage that successive Tory governments have inflicted on the NHS but it hasn't done a bit of good because the Tories (both governments and many of their voters) basically don't give a s**t and/or are deluded enough to believe that the private sector can do it better, even in the face of mountains of evidence which says precisely the opposite.

The idea that a focus on Covid is counter-productive is, IMO, quite ridiculous. It seems to me that it is a necessary counter balance to the Governments absolutely risible 'plan' to live with Covid which actually consists of nothing whatsoever beyond trying to pretend that we have indeed magically got rid of it altogether.

But whatever your stance/attitude on Covid is, the fact remains that Covid is still placing a massive additional burden on an NHS wich as you rightly point out was already at breaking point pre-Covid. The focus is necessary because our malign Government refuses to recognise either the additional burden or the fact that the NHS was already at breaking point, so it naturally follows that they are doing b****r all about it, apart from raising our taxes to pay for the £30b+ they wasted on a private sector Test, Track and Trace system which never at any point actually worked.

 

[Aggy 755]

33 minutes ago, Creative Midfielder said:

Many of us have been banging on for years about the damage that successive Tory governments have inflicted on the NHS but it hasn't done a bit of good because the Tories (both governments and many of their voters) basically don't give a s**t and/or are deluded enough to believe that the private sector can do it better, even in the face of mountains of evidence which says precisely the opposite.

The idea that a focus on Covid is counter-productive is, IMO, quite ridiculous. It seems to me that it is a necessary counter balance to the Governments absolutely risible 'plan' to live with Covid which actually consists of nothing whatsoever beyond trying to pretend that we have indeed magically got rid of it altogether.

But whatever your stance/attitude on Covid is, the fact remains that Covid is still placing a massive additional burden on an NHS wich as you rightly point out was already at breaking point pre-Covid. The focus is necessary because our malign Government refuses to recognise either the additional burden or the fact that the NHS was already at breaking point, so it naturally follows that they are doing b****r all about it, apart from raising our taxes to pay for the £30b+ they wasted on a private sector Test, Track and Trace system which never at any point actually worked.

 

The focus on covid will only ever revolve around face masks, restrictions and lockdowns. How else do you stop it? 

We aren’t ever going to “get rid” of it. We need to learn to live with it and you need to get past the idea that “living with it” means, or even ought to mean, having some form of permanent restrictions. 

The biggest burden on the nhs and the wider health and social care sectors, both recently and in the future, is our ever ageing population.

Claims such as “covid is causing 13 hour waits in a and e” suggest if we all wear masks and sanitise our hands everything will be fine. It won’t.  Maybe if we all live in permanent lockdown we’ll all be great. Except people still get old.

And guess what - more old people living longer means we need more hospitals, doctors, nurses, and care homes. If covid had never happened, we’d still need more of all those things. We’ll need even more in five or ten years time.

The answer isn’t prevention of covid or worrying about reducing numbers of people in hospital with covid. It’s partly prevention of a lot of things such as obesity, smoking, alcohol, even mental health.

But more than anything, it’s getting more money into more hospitals, more social care settings and more staff.

 

Face masks and standing 6 metres away don’t magically create any of those things. Claims like “covid is causing long waiting lists” masks and detracts from the much more serious reasons we have long waiting lists. 

The government has pledged a lot of money will go into building new hospitals. How is that progressing? Better, I would suggest, that your energy is put into ensuring they follow through with that than worrying about people washing their hands while humming happy birthday and students having fun.

[Creative Midfielder 1,996]

18 hours ago, Aggy said:

The focus on covid will only ever revolve around face masks, restrictions and lockdowns. How else do you stop it? 

Completely disagree, now we have reasonably effective vaccines those measures largely fall into the 'emergency' category although when the infection is still present in huge numbers across the country and having a major impact on the economy (as well as still killing quite a lot of people) it seems pretty clear that face masks should be used much more than they actually are.

Other ways of reducing the impact of Covid would obviously be to continue free Covid testing and provide support for the low paid to self - isolate for 5-7 days. Encouraging people, where possible, to continue to work from home would also be another very obvious measure before even considering restrictive measures.

We aren’t ever going to “get rid” of it. We need to learn to live with it and you need to get past the idea that “living with it” means, or even ought to mean, having some form of permanent restrictions. 

We may eventually 'get rid' of it though clearly not any time soon so we do need to find a way to live with it but we've clearly 'learnt' very little so far because we making a pretty poor job of it at the minute. As I pointed out in my previous post, the Government's 'plan to live with Covid' is a completely empty vessel - the plan is to pretend that it has disappeared. In fact their actual plan is to pretend it never happened because they're doing **** all about tackling long Covid.

The biggest burden on the nhs and the wider health and social care sectors, both recently and in the future, is our ever ageing population.

That is a big and growing problem but it is one that has been known about for many years and has been highlighted many times over the past decade in debates over NHS (and social care) funding, yet this Government and its Tory predecessors have completely ignored it, so blaming a 'focus on Covid' now as the reason it is not being addresses is completely misguided. It isn't being addressed now, just as it wasn't addressed pre-Covid, because the Government has no interest or intention of addressing it, i.e. they don't want to spend the money.

Nor does it alter the fact that Covid is still adding a huge extra load onto the NHS in addition to these pre-existing problems and the Government is doing nothing to reduce the load (whether ageing population, backlog created by Covid or ongoing) and almost nothing to provide additional resources to the NHS or the care sector.

Claims such as “covid is causing 13 hour waits in a and e” suggest if we all wear masks and sanitise our hands everything will be fine. It won’t.  Maybe if we all live in permanent lockdown we’ll all be great. Except people still get old.

And guess what - more old people living longer means we need more hospitals, doctors, nurses, and care homes. If covid had never happened, we’d still need more of all those things. We’ll need even more in five or ten years time.

The answer isn’t prevention of covid or worrying about reducing numbers of people in hospital with covid. It’s partly prevention of a lot of things such as obesity, smoking, alcohol, even mental health.

But more than anything, it’s getting more money into more hospitals, more social care settings and more staff.

 

Face masks and standing 6 metres away don’t magically create any of those things. Claims like “covid is causing long waiting lists” masks and detracts from the much more serious reasons we have long waiting lists. 

The government has pledged a lot of money will go into building new hospitals. How is that progressing? Better, I would suggest, that your energy is put into ensuring they follow through with that than worrying about people washing their hands while humming happy birthday and students having fun.

I would suggest that is a statement of total naivety if not downright delusion.

Pledges from this government are worth absolutely nothing - this is a Government that has consistently lied about its policies and actions, repeatedly over-promised and almost always under-delivered or not delivered at all on its pledges.

This government (and its predecessors) promised 7 years ago to recruit 50,000 more doctors & nurses, or was it 50,000 of each - I don't quite remember but certainly the NHS was 100,000 short of medical staff at the time. That promise has been repeated pretty much every year since and I can tell you exactly where we are with that - we have fewer nurses and fewer hospital doctors now that when that promise was first made. We also have GPs giving up in droves so their number is also steadily dropping at a time when they should also be picking up an increased workload caused by our ageing population and the millions suffering with long Covid.

As for the money for new hospitals, most of that is also money that has already been 'promised' several times but somehow hasn't actually ever been spent and if you cast you mind back to when the liar actually announced this program to build 43 'new hospitals' it pretty quickly emerged that very few of these projects were new hospitals - most of the 43 were just extensions to or refurbs of parts of existing hospitals.

Social care is in an even worse state than the NHS and is getting even less help from Government so thing there are truly dire and this in turn will place further burdens on the NHS.

Basically our health and social care system is completely broken and it has been broken entirely due to 12 years of mismanagement by successive Tory governments although to be fair IMO the vast majority of the damage has occured in the last seven years.

In 2015 the early damage to the NHS could have easily been repaired and the care system also helped. Now I don't think its possible for the Government to fix the NHS and the care system even if they wanted to and were motivated to - and clearly they aren't on either score.

 

[Aggy 755]

21 hours ago, Creative Midfielder said:

 

I don’t think you’ve read my post correctly. I think you probably agree with most of what I’ve said.

The point is we haven’t “got rid” of flu, so we won’t “get rid” of covid either. The only way of “living with” covid is exactly the same way that we have been “living with” flu for decades. Likewise, the best way of living with the ageing population and all the other issues is the same way too - treating people with all health problems while ensuring we have capacity for emergency treatment as well.

The problem is that we don’t have enough hospital capacity, staff etc to do all of that. That isn’t just because of covid. It’s because of a large number of things - the vast vast majority of which have been around long before covid, and covid is just one small part of it.

Anyone who thinks face masks and restrictions are the answer is dealing in short term measures only, and is sleep walking into a far worse crisis in the not so distant future.

The last 7 or 8 posts on this thread have been arguing about the factually incorrect statement that covid is causing 13 hour waits. As I’ve been saying - it’s distracting. You don’t seem to know how well (or badly) the government’s new hospital programme is (or is not) progressing, but you do seem to know a lot about face masks. 

As the last point in my previous post suggests (and I think you’ve misread it) - you would be far better off worrying about making sure the government follows through with its wider healthcare promises than worrying about face masks for covid.

That’s the only solution - wider investment in the healthcare sector. If the government don’t follow through with those promises, we’ll be in a much worse crisis fairly soon, and face masks and restrictions are going to be a tiny drop in the ocean. If they do follow through with those promises, then that will be significantly more helpful than face masks. 
 

In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that “you have to wait 13 hours to get treatment - what an absolute disgrace” is far more effective and hard hitting than a factually incorrect statement that covid is causing 13 hour waits when it isn’t. 

Edited April 20, 2022 by Aggy

[Creative Midfielder 1,996]

21 hours ago, Aggy said:

In a nutshell, what I’m saying is that “you have to wait 13 hours to get treatment - what an absolute disgrace” is far more effective and hard hitting than a factually incorrect statement that covid is causing 13 hour waits when it isn’t. 

Well I haven't said that at any point so I think it is perhaps you not reading my posts correctly rather than vice-versa.

I have essentially been responding to your point from several posts ago that 'The focus on covid is, if anything, counterproductive' which I believe is totally misguided. Whilst we've agreed several times that the NHS is severely under-resourced and has been for years prior to Covid, you cannot escape the fact that the huge burden of treating long Covid added to the ongoing treatment of a very large number of currently people currently hospitalised with Covid is making an already very bad situation far worse.

What is perhaps more to the point is that the burden of treating current Covid patients is largely unnecessary and exists only because of the Government's ineffective and at times downright reckless response to the pandemic - which is also the reason IMO why there remains such a strong focus on Covid.

I'm afraid I don't think the comparison with 'living with flu' works at all frankly. We do need to find a way to live with Covid specifically, not pretend its a nasty form of flu, and its pretty obvious that at the moment that the UK hasn't found a way, or not a remotely satisfactory one anyway.

Since it has been clear from the very start of this pandemic that the UK Government is too arrogant and too foolish to learn anything from abroad then I don't imagine things will change any time soon and until then both Covid and the scandalous under-resourcing of the NHS pre-Covid will remain major issues, although of course there is very stiff competition for attention from plenty of other serious issues that the Government is making a mess of at the moment.

[It's Character Forming 1,161]

This is a chart by the Economist showing excess deaths per 100,000 people and for me it shows how relatively small the variations are between how areas have done in dealing with Covid, although there are clearly some extremes e.g. Russia has done appallingly (almost like they need something to distract peoples' attention from this ?) and at the other extreme New Zealand has done amazingly well,  perhaps there are huge natural advantages to dealing with a pandemic when you're an isolated island group in the Pacific Ocean, who'd have guessed ?

Estimated cumulative excess deaths per 100,000 people during COVID-19, Apr 15, 2022 (ourworldindata.org)

Behind these numbers it's interesting that the range of estimates for China have a variation of about 2m excess deaths from best to worst, I know which way I'd guess is the real outcome.  Also, for some areas (e.g. S Africa compared to the rest of Africa) I suspect the variations are more down to the quality of the data than real differences.

[Aggy 755]

On 21/04/2022 at 11:20, Creative Midfielder said:

 

What are your thoughts on the info from a couple of weeks ago about how badly lockdowns and restrictions was affecting young children’s development?

And what is it our government should be learning from these foreign countries you seem to think we need to learn from?

Ps the point about counter productivity was in response to the quote that “covid was causing 13 hour waits”. Simple fact is that’s an incorrect statement to try and sensationalise covid. People roll their eyes and don’t pay attention because they see people making things up to push some covid agenda. They’d pay more attention if they were just told (without the made up sensationalisation of covid) that they might not great treated for 13 hours when they urgently need it. So yes, the focus on covid is counterproductive when the large majority of the population are now back to living a normal life.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Aggy

[A Load of Squit 5,164]

 

 

 

Neil Stone

@DrNeilStone

Thousands of infectious diseases doctors who have spent 2 years battling Covid.

First major conference in person since Covid.

Every single person wearing a mask.

Every Single One

Think about that.

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

On 24/04/2022 at 09:57, A Load of Squit said:

 

 

 

Neil Stone

@DrNeilStone

Thousands of infectious diseases doctors who have spent 2 years battling Covid.

First major conference in person since Covid.

Every single person wearing a mask.

Every Single One

Think about that.

I doubt anyone would expect anything different. Listening to two virologists at the weekend, the affirmed that the virus still lies deep in the system of many who have had it. Probably to little or no bother but nonetheless I expect virologists to follow the guidelines (unlike politicians).

[ron obvious 1,502]

On 21/04/2022 at 14:26, It's Character Forming said:

This is a chart by the Economist showing excess deaths per 100,000 people and for me it shows how relatively small the variations are between how areas have done in dealing with Covid, although there are clearly some extremes e.g. Russia has done appallingly (almost like they need something to distract peoples' attention from this ?) and at the other extreme New Zealand has done amazingly well,  perhaps there are huge natural advantages to dealing with a pandemic when you're an isolated island group in the Pacific Ocean, who'd have guessed ?

Estimated cumulative excess deaths per 100,000 people during COVID-19, Apr 15, 2022 (ourworldindata.org)

Behind these numbers it's interesting that the range of estimates for China have a variation of about 2m excess deaths from best to worst, I know which way I'd guess is the real outcome.  Also, for some areas (e.g. S Africa compared to the rest of Africa) I suspect the variations are more down to the quality of the data than real differences.

 

[ricardo 7,395]

I went in for jab No 5 this morning.

In and out in 5 mins.

[Indy 3,300]

7 minutes ago, ricardo said:

I went in for jab No 5 this morning.

In and out in 5 mins.

Brilliant, it’s so good that numbers are so low and those who have caught covid recently had absolutely no symptoms! Time coming to live with it as another bug like flu, yearly jabs! Stay safe Ricardo…..

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

34 minutes ago, ricardo said:

I went in for jab No 5 this morning.

In and out in 5 mins.

Mrs KG has had her fourth and we have discussed it and think she will decline a fifth. The vaccine did wonders for Covid but is it really wise to keep pumping it into our bloodstream when it was rightfully accelerated through without the chance of long lasting side effects.

But since neither of us have had Covid when every single one of our close family has had it, many friends and associates neither, then we will take the chance that we have some sort of antibodies.

But I can see that it is sensible for you to have it.

[Van wink 2,994]

An uptick in Covid hospital admissions in England may herald a new wave of cases caused by omicron sub variants, according to experts.

According to data published on Thursday, hospitalisations have bottomed out and started to slowly climb again, with a 11 per cent jump nationally compared to last week. 

Although figures remain relatively low – with 577 people admitted on Thursday, compared to over 2,000 a day in early January – experts say we should not be “complacent regarding the direction of travel”, and warn any increase is likely to put more pressure on an NHS already under strain. 

Meanwhile the Office for National Statistics said on Friday that Covid infections across the UK have risen for the first time in two months, with almost 990,000 people estimated to have had the virus in the last seven days – up from 953,900 last week. 

John Roberts, an actuary tracking Covid, told the Telegraph that the uptick in hospitalisations is linked to two omicron sub variants known as BA.4 and BA.5, which are now “in the ascendancy” having taken over from BA.2 – which caused a wave of infections in April and March.

Both variants emerged in South Africa and have proved able to evade immunity from vaccination or earlier infections. Last month the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control predicted a wave driven by the variants could cause a “significant overall increase” in cases across the continent “in the coming weeks and months”.

[KernowCanary 214]

Oh God, this horrible thread is back. It makes more comebacks than John Travolta.

[Yellow Fever 3,785]

1 hour ago, Van wink said:

 

Both variants emerged in South Africa and have proved able to evade immunity from vaccination or earlier infections. Last month the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control predicted a wave driven by the variants could cause a “significant overall increase” in cases across the continent “in the coming weeks and months”.

 

Yes - No complacency please if any of these sub variants start to look serious infections.

It was actually very noticeable that in the US a lot of people are still wearing masks.

[KernowCanary 214]

“The Pandemic” they called it as if it was the only ever one in living history.

At least the ones before it didn’t spawn annoying catchphrases, compound words, virtue signalling exercises and annoying commercials playing sombre music while coming out with repeated slogans.

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Mrs KG is finally booked to go to NZ to visit her Mum in September.

I hope Jacinda isn't going to panic with the new variants and shut it down again. She has been waiting long enough to go.

[Van wink 2,994]

Certainly seeing things moving in the wrong direction, probably over the last 10 days or so. 

[Capt. Pants 4,234]

Numerous superspreader events over the Jubillee celebrations likely the cause. 

Glastonbury next weekend. We learn to live with it.