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I think the reality will be a date in the middle, Sturgeon not wanting to underestimate, and Doris just being Doris.
I wouldn't be hastily booking any early summer holidays. The difference between March & April 20 to now is there are lots more people at work in "Covid safe" offices & construction etc. This seems to be the judging by how busy the roads are in my way in to work compared to lockdown 1
My hospital currently has 25 more Covid + inpatients than at the peak in April last year. Add that to less staff due to illness & isolating and those seconded to administering the vaccine and the near future looks grim.
Those people at work will hopefully be wearing masks all day this time round given the more infectious strain? Only that will make a normal summer more likely
my wife (secondary school teacher - North Kent) reckons there will be very few kids back in school before Easter.
I think the Government will lift the 'lockdown' at some point in March, with most of the country going straight into Tier 4.
I think the Tier system will be in place until May/June at the earliest and as Whitty mentioned earlier some restrictions will be needed over next winter.
I think you've got to be pretty bold to be booking a summer holiday abroad right now...
The lockdown should last a very long time.
How long the government keep it going is a different thing.
We are vaccinating the elderly and venerable - they are not the ones likely to spread it.
So it will keep spreading, the population are already lax in taking precautions. A lot also see the vaccine as being the end in sight, so will relax even further.
Hmmm I reckon you're all being pretty optimistic. We live on a very densely populated island with crap weather and an aged population. I stuck my details in one of the "when will you be vaccinated" calculators. Bear in mind I am almost 54. Current estimate is December 21-Jan 22. If I put in that I am mildly asthmatic it suggests I may be done by Oct 21. So I reckon we can expect to see a genearal improvement to the current situation in the summer of 2022.
. I stuck my details in one of the “when will you be vaccinated” calculators. Bear in mind I am almost 54. Current estimate is December 21-Jan 22.
At 51 and no health problems I was forecast June-July 2021?
That’s your first dose, second is a fair bit later.
e.g.
Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your first dose of vaccine between 21/07/2021 and 04/10/2021.
You should then get your second dose by between 13/10/2021 and 27/12/2021.
Given a vaccination rate of 1,000,000 a week and an uptake of 70.6%, you should expect to receive your first dose of vaccine between 18/05/2021 and 06/06/2021.
You should then get your second dose by between 10/08/2021 and 29/08/2021.
Aged 62 and no underlying health issues. Nicola Sturgeon today said that everyone over 50 would be vaccinated by May.
Me too, I think it was the Omni calculator but that was at least a week, maybe too ago.
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We are vaccinating the elderly and venerable – they are not the ones likely to spread it.
Curious - are they vaccinating dementia patients in care homes? What's the criteria?
If it keeps mutating, as viruses are prone to do, will we be starting all over again by the time we’ve finished vaccinating everyone?
Like painting the Forth Rail Bridge (until they bought decent paint).
@montgomery my nan is 91 with advanced dementia in a care home. She's booked in this week at some point for a vaccination. I find it fairly bizarre tbh.....imho she's got a fairly low quality of life (unaware/unable to comprehend that just before Xmas she became a great grandma) I guess that the only real value of her getting the vaccine is that it eases the Covid pressure on the NHS?
NS is away with the faeries if she thinks that. My gran in fife is 93 and hasn't heard anything yet - so imagine how long it it will be before she gets both jabs? Parents in their 60s (also Fife) haven't heard anything. My sister is a nurse and has done all the COVID vax training (Fife again - a pattern!) and is currently sitting at home twiddling her thumbs*
*sending me vids of the kids doing robot dances.
Ah to add, my nan is in England not Scotland. Is the vaccine not broadly a UK wide roll out then? It seems to vary from town to town from what I can see mind!
That's one of my fears here. Right at the beginning I remember it being described as slippery - i.e. prone to mutating.
On a positive note I think from the limited amount I've read that the RNA type vaccine is more easily adaptable so maybe able to be changed faster to respond to mutations.
There's also the wider societal problems that go with huge swathes of the population in social isolation and financial distress for extended periods of time.
I think from the main Covid thread that there's a suggestion that long term planning for living in a Covid world is also going on in the background.
The huge challenge with this lockdown is also lockdown fatigue from parts of the population (look at some of the posts on here or any local Facebook group). A lot of people are clearly pissed off with being essentially imprisoned in their own homes and it's painfully obvious round here that compliance with the main stuff (household mixing etc.) is definitely less than it was in lockdown 1. There's only so many times you can tell the population that it'll be alright in a couple of months before they stop believing it and stop seeing any point in complying.
My wife (a nurse) says it’s here to stay, so learning to live with it is the only option. The flu jab is different each year depending on the prevelant strain(s) each year, so I guess the COVID-19 jab can be too.
this seems like a duplicate thread to me. @TiRed will fact check I hope?
Sturgeon hinted at May today.
Oh ffs. I have lots of things to do i cannot do in lockdown by may. I am going to have the mother of all tantrums!
In Scotland at least the priority is first all the vaccinators get the jab. Then all care home residents and staff. It may seem daft to give it to someone at the end of their life with a poor quality of life but think a bit more and they could become a source of infection for others in the homes who may not be in that situation.
Despite being 60 myself and working in healthcare and my parents being 80+ and vulnerable I am happy with this order for priorities.
JCVI advises the order of priority for the coronavirus vaccination is:
residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
all those 80 years of age and over and frontline health and social care workers
all those 75 years of age and over
all those 70 years of age and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
all those 65 years of age and over
all individuals aged 16 years to 64 years with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious disease and mortality
all those 60 years of age and over
all those 55 years of age and over
all those 50 years of age and over
They just can’t say the vaccine stops transmission because the trial wasn’t there to find that out.
You're right, of course but the AZ/Oxford study outcome was positive nasopharyngeal swab PCR and the result was bewtween 62-90% better than the control group.
Since this is primarily an airborne transmission route, big reductions in detectable virus in the upper respiratory tract SEEM like good news in terms of transmissibility
[my trust - biggish English teaching hosp - is hoping to have all willing staff done for 1st dose within the next 2 weeks or so, maybe half that]
On mutations, don't be fooled by 'flu - that's a segmented virus genome and has bigger tendency to mutate (or really just reassemble differently). All viruses mutate and evolve as a result but not "usually" all that fast for coronaviruses. The trouble with this one is it's effectively a new virus in a new host so it is probably not that well-suited to its "task" yet and I think you could argue that this might drive quicker evolution before it calms down a bit.
@scaredypants thanks for your explanatory comments on the mutation point (I can't keep up with the volumes/full detail on the main thread having not really followed it from early enough in all this but do dip in and out of the recent bits when I have the energy) 🙂
The vaccine will stop those dying now from dying. It won’t relieve pressure on ICUs until we reach those in the next group down and then some. Hospital pressures will reduce once we get to the over 50s. That’s assuming that cross reactivity is sustained and new strains are not resistant.
Three months looks prudent for control of force of infection. It won’t be half-term.
We are vaccinating the elderly and venerable – they are not the ones likely to spread it.
So it will keep spreading, the population are already lax in taking precautions
My thinking, too...
Easy for the retired to sit at home and live of their pensions. Not so easy for those with jobs, mortgages, families to sit around. Not everyone has the luxury of having a few grand in savings/a buy to let to live off or being able to work from home.
Germany's lockdown has already been extended until the end of Jan. In sure it won't be long until that's revised.
The elderly and vulnerable are far more likely to die - and in the case of care homes act as potential points for spread.
RE: Very elderly people with dementia and vaccines.
This a very tricky subject to discuss. Early in the Pandemic I guess we'll all remember that the Government wasn't counting Care Home deaths in the official figures. The reason was probably simply because they wanted to keep the numbers as low as possible on paper of course, but there was some justification.
When the press talk about Care Home etc, they paint a picture of Old People sat in chairs having a sing-along in sheltered accom, but really, that's not the reality of it. This one of those things where I seem to be at odds with most people, I don't aim to offend, but Care Homes are often places where we put our loved ones to insolate from as many things as possible that may cause them to die of 'natural causes' to save ourselves to pain of mourning.
That said, there simply isn't time to write a procedure and make it law that says "If quality of live is below a given standard, then the vaccine won't be given". The problem being a lot of people can't accept that their loved one is dying, and if they're 'Denied' a vaccine (in Daily Mail speak) they might even try to sue.
It won't make much of a difference to the NHS, people in Care Homes rarely go to Hospital, they certainly won't see an ITU. They will have in-house Nurses to care for them.
I don't suppose there's any point in discussing the why's and how's of their vaccinations. I don't our local District Nurse teams are doing care homes this week, they might even be done by now.
If it keeps mutating, as viruses are prone to do, will we be starting all over again by the time we’ve finished vaccinating everyone?
Like painting the Forth Rail Bridge (until they bought decent paint).
I think we need it to mutate (evolve is probably a better word).
If I was going to bet on it, I guess over the nest couple of years as we're exposed to it more (either directly or because we had a vaccine) our immune systems will develop to fight it better) and the virus will evolve to be a better virus, I.E. one that doesn't kill it's host.
They won't have to start all over again, but they will need to modify the vaccines, at least in the short-term, as they do with the flu vaccine every year.
No one really knows what winter 21/22 will be like, I saw one of the gutter rags today saying we'll all need to go into lockdown again next winter, we might, or it might be a case that the vaccine will work so well we'll effectively eradicate it (seems unlikely) or we'll need continually have vaccines every 12 weeks for years, or we'll need one autumn, or just some people will need it every autumn like the flu vaccine or it'll just become another 'cold'.
but Care Homes are often places where we put our loved ones to insolate from as many things as possible that may cause them to die of ‘natural causes’ to save ourselves to pain of mourning.
A little simplistic as the homes cover a vast spectrum of people from those with degenerative brain diseases to those with severe physical impairment who require a team to maintain them. Some of these people are old some are teenagers. We're vaccinating them all as it would be inhuman to kill the younger element who have lots to offer. These tend to be the group in between the extremes that require supported living and possibly medical care while holding down a functioning place in society.
We are vaccinating the elderly and venerable
So apart from Bede who is on the list?
An interesting perspective P-Jay it sounds like you see elderly care homes more like palliative care homes, where we send the old to die quietly out of the way, just not in name...
That aside I think the fundamental problem I've noticed in the UK over the last year is a collective inability to deal with "bad news", and a generally "short-termist" attitude
We have a government who got in power by overselling and glossing over potential negatives. And a wider public who have become accustomed to that sort of public discourse and become focussed on the "how am I affected" element of every announcement, rather than considering the bigger picture.
A New year lockdown was entirely predictable back at the start of November, probably earlier. LD2 was relatively short and less restrictive than LD1, and was clearly planned to try and get the masses back out shopping and meeting up so BoJo could be our best mate and "save Christmas"...
Vaccination hasn't been proven to stop recipients from spreading CV19, so I really think the responsible thing to do would be keep restrictions in place until a majority of the population have been vaccinated, all this talk about 30m doses by mid-feb isn't actually very helpful, artificial deadlines and arbitrary numbers are intended solely to reassure, but really I reckon something more like 50-60m people vaccinated should be the point where resumption of "normality" can begin to be considered*...
(*Unqualified speculation of course)...
I appreciate these are especially difficult circumstances in which to govern/administer a country, but I don't believe the decision makers in power are at all capable, and have now repeatedly failed to learn any lessons or heed expert advice. A large proportion of the deaths and serious CV19 infections since early December were entirely avoidable...
So apart from Bede who is on the list?
👏
COVID-19 vaccine ingredients
The 2 approved COVID-19 vaccines do not contain any animal products or egg.
From the NHS website, made me chucckle.
restricted contact between people reduces the spread of this virus irrespective of the time of year.
there is no evidence previous infection with this virus confers immunity.
when the NHS really comes under pressure the ICUs will be filling up with those best placed to deal with the physical trauma that treatment puts the body under. the rest will be made comfortable as best they can be.
roughly 20% of the UK population (~66million) are 65 years old or over.
FWIW prior to this pandemic the life expectancy of a 65 year old male was 85, and female 87, with a 1 in 4 chance of making it to 92 and 94 respectively. sauce there are just under 300,000 over 65s resident in care homes in england and wales. or at least there were in 2011
Curious – are they vaccinating dementia patients in care homes? What’s the criteria?
Yes they are. I believe that's been part of the delay in getting vaccines rolled out in care homes. Certainly with the pfizer jag you want to do all the people at a location at once because of the transport issues, but they've had to go through the hoops of getting consent from people who aren't on site.
The government is not the organisation best placed to sort out this type of a problem. They are set up to make sure they are voted back in. So they are unlikely to do anything that comes across as harsh, mean and wont want to hear voters complaining that their freedom, rights, way of life has become difficult.
We need an emergency government who don't give a fig about being voted for. Take decisive action for the benefit of the whole population and make decisions we cant or don't want to.
Politicians rise to power for reasons that really don't help right now.