Just seen someone on my facebook feed say that they're no longer wearing a mask to go shopping, if Boris' dad can do it without any consequences then why should she!
Cummings effect mkII inbound?
Eton has a lot to answer for:
This was a neighbourhood that is mostly made up of a school, Eton College, located in the town of Windsor some distance away to the south-east. In the week ending September 16, this neighbourhood had one of the largest rises in cases reported in the south of England, but there were also similar rises in the north.
They tested all students.
The map below shows just how unusual the Eton cluster was when it emerged.
No other school on that map tested all students.
A potentially more significant possibility is suggested by this graph if we look to its right-hand side. This pattern implies that areas with the highest levels of previous mortality do not show marked resurgences of cases this time around. Specifically, in neighbourhoods where between half and three-quarters of all the earlier deaths were thought to have involved or been directly caused by COVID-19, the numbers of people recently testing positive for the disease falls dramatically.
Care homes hit overly hard in the first peak explain this without falling into conjecture about community immunity.
The map below shows just how unusual the Eton cluster was when it emerged.
At least one secondary within that map had a 4 person outbreak, and at least 2 I know of have had 2 people test positive
Just seen someone on my facebook feed say that they’re no longer wearing a mask to go shopping, if Boris’ dad can do it without any consequences then why should she!
I'm not surprised, It's not that Boris' Dad is seen any any sort of Guru, but people are looking for an excuse.
We really are living in an age of stupid. I've just been for my Flu Jab, Pharmacist ushering me into a 2x2 room for the job with a mask around his chin, I mentioned he's "forgotten to put it up" and I got the impression he hadn't forgotten.
At home I've got a Odd Job Man fitting some doors, he comes in, Asks my Wife and Her Colleague how their patients feel about them wearing masks coming into their homes. (they're Community Nurses, in Uniform) Relived? Then he goes on about how Covid is a Hoax to control us and how he's got an exemption for masks because of a chest complaint... (self cert) then stops after half a door because it's throwing up too much dust and he needs to go and get a mask... Don't get me wrong, dust can be deadly, but he clearly believes dust exist because he can see it, 42k deaths wasn't' enough to prove the existence of a Virus to him. I'm not sure he should be allow to use powertools.
Morbidity is also to be managed. Management is about unknowns as well as knowns. The economic consequence in 10 years of an epidemic of coronary disease might be a thing.
A real problem is that so many people were infected at the peak when no testing was available, I know of several who were quite ill but never went to hospital, all bar 1 seem to have recovered fully, with none of them in the system its impossible for them to be followed up & the vast majority of people who got it werent tetsed or went into hospital
as the alternative SAGE team noted, ACE2 receptors most highly concentrated in ovary & testes, who know what long term effects on fertility for example may be
admissions up again today, comnpared to the last few days, certainly not rising rapidly but people reading a lot into a few days & saying cases are going down
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/healthcare
Sorry to get political but along with Johnson Sr getting caught Corbyn got busted having dinner for 9
Labour want corbyn fined, but tories don’t
Corbyn should 100% be find and Johnson's dad. We cant call for Cummings to resign when he didn't technically break the rules and let JC get away with it. Im pro JC but you can 100% guarantee a normal person will get fined for this.
Hospital admissions will keep going up for a few weeks even if cases started declining now, and they havent, its just the rate of increase that may have slowed
Corbyn should 100% be find
I agree, however what is the evidence, I've not looked and did The Mirror ( was it them) get a date on the newspaper Johnson bought?
Sorry to get political but along with Johnson Sr getting caught Corbyn got busted having dinner for 9
He'll just have been listening to his brother and David Icke telling him the whole thing is a hoax by the lizard people 😉
however what is the evidence
The evidence is firm. Both have apologised though.
We cant call for Cummings to resign when he didn’t technically break the rules and let JC get away with it.
We can. He didn't apologise, the rules didn't apply to him, apparently. And he did break them. Resigning from a role where you are involved in setting the rules that you yourself are breaking is a reasonable thing to ask for, without calling for others to be fined where they have slipped and apologised. Cummings could have apologised... instead he basically made out that he was smart enough to get around the rules (he didn't get around them, he just ignored them) and challenged the rest of us to be smarter and explain away any of our own discretions with "doing the right thing for our families"... which we are.
Still waiting for you to provide evidence for
We no longer have a highly susceptible population.
What percentage of the population have been exposed now?
The ONS bulletin for 8th September says 6.2% tested positive for antibodies, so at least that many.
But my wife almost certainly had it back in March - yet she recently tested negative (she had a pinprick blood test sent through the post, I think by the ONS). And I have a friend who *definitely* had it back in March (really ill, all the symptoms, still a bit broken), and she also recently tested negative (antibody test). Those negative tests are not a surprise - we know that antibodies disappear after a while, but that means that the actual number who have been exposed is a lot higher than just 6.2%.
Someone smarter than me could probably figure it out, but I suspect it's a big old number.
And going back to my youngest son. OK, so this is also wildly anecdotal. But he definitely had it back in Feb/March. Recently his flat mate tested positive, and my son developed symptoms. His test came back negative - he's just got "normal" fresher's flu. So that's one less person who can pass Covid19 around, and also shows that despite all these restrictions, we are still going around catching viruses.
with johnson & corbyn, government have opportunity to make an example of wronogdoers, they can both afford it seems a no brainer
Is anyone else getting frustrated by seemingly intelligent people in work / social groups starting to subscribe to conspiracy theories about testing (false positives) / mortality / prevalence etc?
I did get sucked into one at the start of what's become the second wave.
A very articulate guy on Twitter (retweeted by that Prof Sikora guy, I've grown doubtful of him) made a point along the lines of:
"With a FPR of 0.8% if we tested 1000 people at random, 8 would come back as positive, with only 1 in 1000 of the UK population having Covid, that means you'd get 9 positive results, 8 being false and 1 being real. Given the sudden panic for testing, it might explain why we're getting so many more cases, but no hospital admissions"
This isn't really a conspiracy theories as such, but a real case of being careful of confusing opinion with fact.
Firstly, no one really knows what the FPR is. Also, no one really knows how many people have Covid, but it's closer (now at least) to 1 in 200, not 1 in 1000 and even though there was a rush to test, people have been told to only test when they have symptoms. Some will ignore that through worry, but it's no where near 1000 random people on the street.
This statement and various other versions of it have been circulating around ever since and I'm sure it was enough to persuade people that this second wave wasn't real. Now, weeks later, admissions are rising and deaths are rising.
We can. He didn’t apologise, the rules didn’t apply to him, apparently. And he did break them. Resigning from a role where you are involved in setting the rules that you yourself are breaking is a reasonable thing to ask for, without calling for others to be fined where they have slipped and apologised.
Im not defending Cummigns all im saying is it can't be one rule for them and one for us - which seems the case. Cummings should have resigned / been sacked and JC and Bojos dad should be fined. Its about a level playing field when normal people break the rules we get fined they should too. its really simple. I
but you can 100% guarantee a normal person will get fined for this.
Very few people have been fined for breaching the rules throughout this, the police took a softly softly approach that probably seemed wise at the time but with hindsight may not have helped in the longer term.
government have opportunity to make an example of wronogdoers, they can both afford it seems a no brainer
I agree with the sentiment but it's not the government who investigate or enforce the rules.
Those negative tests are not a surprise – we know that antibodies disappear after a while, but that means that the actual number who have been exposed is a lot higher than just 6.2%.
If we are considering who might carry the virus in future, wouldn't it be wise to include anyone who has no antibodies... unless/until we have evidence that those who have had the virus and then had the antibodies disappear are still protected from catching and passing on the virus despite the lack of antibodies?
Someone smarter than me could probably figure it out
Surprising they havent then isnt it
So that’s one less person who can pass Covid19 around
Didnt we do this pages, ago. Just because you keep posting it, it wont make it correct.
But my wife almost certainly had it back in March – yet she recently tested negative (she had a pinprick blood test sent through the post, I think by the ONS). And I have a friend who *definitely* had it back in March (really ill, all the symptoms, still a bit broken), and she also recently tested negative (antibody test). Those negative tests are not a surprise – we know that antibodies disappear after a while, but that means that the actual number who have been exposed is a lot higher than just 6.2%.
Its quite likely , but he ONS do allow for this
theres also the question of whether having lost your antibodies, have they also lost immunity to it?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v1
And going back to my youngest son. OK, so this is also wildly anecdotal. But he definitely had it back in Feb/March. Recently his flat mate tested positive, and my son developed symptoms. His test came back negative – he’s just got “normal” fresher’s flu. So that’s one less person who can pass Covid19 around, and also shows that despite all these restrictions, we are still going around catching viruses.
there was regular flu going around last winter as well, so theres no way we can say 'definitely' had covid & flu varies in severity & timescale year to year, tho it peaked earlier than normal in 2019/20
you also cant definitively say he's immune, reinfection has been observed, and it may be that his flatmate simply doesnt spread it in the same way >80% of all cases are spread by superspreaders, the majority of people that catch it are not superspreaders
I find it very interesting and eye opening reading people's personal experiences of CV19. I feel very distant from it. I don't know anyone who has been ill, don't even know anyone who has been tested positive (only know one person who has taken a test). Our large urban schools (kids 6&9) have had no cases. It all seems to very far away.
My partner lost her job as the printing company had no work to do all summer so we've felt those effects but thankfully we've been spared, so far, any ill health to ourselves or anyone we know.
It's miserable all this.
I find it very interesting and eye opening reading people’s personal experiences of CV19. I feel very distant from it. I don’t know anyone who has been ill, don’t even know anyone who has been tested positive (only know one person who has taken a test). Our large urban schools (kids 6&9) have had no cases. It all seems to very far away.
My partner lost her job as the printing company had no work to do all summer so we’ve felt those effects but thankfully we’ve been spared, so far, any ill health to ourselves or anyone we know.
It’s miserable all this.
very true, my immediate family have all been fine, my brother was quite ill, one of my colleagues was very ill, other than that it seems remote
I work with a lot of young medics who were called back from research to work on COVID ITU wards have a very different experience of it all
I find it mad when people say they don't know anyone who has been affected by Covid. I don't know if its just because I live in London (higher cases and all that) but I know about 10+ people who have had it all are close / semi close friends.
On the subject of tests and antibodies my partner had it at the start of lock down (got it from me) all the symptoms apart from loss of taste of smell. Works for the NHS and had the antibody test a few months ago result not antibodies and never had covid. The general feeling seems to be the bigger the gap between infection and test the less reliable they are.
"We no longer have a highly susceptible population."
OK, that gets trotted out quite a lot but the only thing that's meaningfully changed in the population since the first wave, is that we let it kill a whole lot of vulnerable people, and that can't happen this time to the same extent because they're already dead.
But actually, that makes no significant difference to the prospects of the second wave because those vulnerable members of the population would be protected anyway. There should be absolutely no possibility now of infected people being sent back to care homes, for instance, and visitors are already heavily screened.
kimbers
Full MemberThose negative tests are not a surprise – we know that antibodies disappear after a while, but that means that the actual number who have been exposed is a lot higher than just 6.2%.
True. But if antibody levels are too low to detect in people that have had it, that's not encouraging for them retaining immunity either. "How many people have had it" only matters for viral spread if those people who've had it can't get it again, or are dead. Otherwise, it's just disaster trivia.
I don’t know anyone who has been ill
My wife's friend is now a widow. As I have said, it is not impossible that immunity is more widespread than seropositivity would have us believe. A firm prediction for herd immunity is that we can lift contact restrictions (and I count mask-wearing in that), and expect infection rates to remain low. How's that going so far? I'm concerned.
There should be absolutely no possibility now of infected people being sent back to care homes, for instance,
I'm absolutely positive that exact scenario has been proposed. Quite recently, no? If not, and you have someone in hospital and fit for discharge, where would they go? (Not saying they should be discharged into a care home, but that an alternative would need to be arranged).
But actually, that makes no significant difference to the prospects of the second wave because those vulnerable members of the population would be protected anyway. There should be absolutely no possibility now of infected people being sent back to care homes, for instance, and visitors are already heavily screened.
Looked into this carefully earlier this year and the fact was that more than 50% of the vulnerable population was under 50 years old.
With shielding ended, these people are back in the workforce. Some will have homeworking options, some will have good employers with enhanced workplace risk assessments, and some will have a mask and hand gel.
The next wave of critically extremely vulnerable admissions will be spread through far greater age range.
I find it mad when people say they don’t know anyone who has been affected by Covid. I don’t know if its just because I live in London (higher cases and all that) but I know about 10+ people who have had it all are close / semi close friends.
You've answered your own confusion.
I’m absolutely positive that exact scenario has been proposed.
Some contracts seemed to prepare for that, just in case, but I’m pretty sure there have been “commitments” (yeah, I know) that it won’t be “forced” on care homes…
Im not defending Cummigns all im saying is it can’t be one rule for them and one for us – which seems the case. Cummings should have resigned / been sacked and JC and Bojos dad should be fined. Its about a level playing field when normal people break the rules we get fined they should too. its really simple.
I said at the time that spending all that political capital on saving Cummings would come back to haunt them in the event of a second wave.
I thought it was a very poor show indeed; extremely bad faith indeed from Cummings and BJ. The worst sort of leadership. As has been said above, Cummings didn't just refuse to admit fault he had to show how clever he was by erecting a legal fiction to excuse his behaviour. The guy is pathological. It's all about him defying journalists who he believes are out to get him. Discharging the proper duties of a man in public office doesn't seem to be a consideration.
As for what's going on now, I'm confused about the ends of all the measures. The first time around, the end of stopping the NHS from being overwhelmed seemed clear. Now, what are we doing though? What's the end game here?
This SNP MP FFS how stupid are these ****s?
While that is obviously ridiculous behaviour, people were being advised to use public transport to access tests at far off test centres pretty recently (which is equally ridiculous obviously but was being suggested by the authorities apparently)
I suspect that this will encourage a lot of people to avoid getting a test if at all possible.
kelvin
Full MemberThose negative tests are not a surprise – we know that antibodies disappear after a while, but that means that the actual number who have been exposed is a lot higher than just 6.2%.
If we are considering who might carry the virus in future, wouldn’t it be wise to include anyone who has no antibodies… unless/until we have evidence that those who have had the virus and then had the antibodies disappear are still protected from catching and passing on the virus despite the lack of antibodies?
"Wise" ? There's a crazy high cost to that wisdom - so it's completely fair to demand some pretty convincing evidence that this coronavirus interacts with our immune system completely differently to every other coronavirus that has preceded it.
There’s a crazy high cost to that wisdom – so it’s completely fair to demand some pretty convincing evidence that this coronavirus interacts with our immune system completely differently to every other coronavirus that has preceded it.
Loss of antibodies has been shown to allow reinfection in other coronaviruses in animals & humans
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074761320303125
Similar to studies of animal coronaviruses, antibody titers in volunteers had waned substantially 1 year after initial infection and many could be reinfected and shed virus, though these secondary infections did not cause clinical symptoms
Funnily enough, just spoken to my mum, who had just spoken to a friend who had been on the cruise ship that left Argentina in the beginning of March and eventually ended up in Florida after a bit of a traumatic virus ridden trip round South and Central America.
Despite not feeling ill at all, she has just tested positive for the Covid antibody, though her husband tested negative.
RichPenny
Full MemberI’m absolutely positive that exact scenario has been proposed. Quite recently, no? If not, and you have someone in hospital and fit for discharge, where would they go?
You're not fit for discharge if you're infectious with coronavirus, obviously.
Why didn't Sturgeon not sack her?
She's done very well thus far in behaving like a state leader yet this is strange. Apparently SNP hierarchy knew yesterday, she knew as of early pm today.
Bizarre
It's not possible to sack someone as an mp.The SNP have done all they can do by withdrawing the whip.
I see Trump just tested positive for Covid. A few good swigs of bleach should sort him out!
it’s completely fair to demand some pretty convincing evidence that this coronavirus interacts with our immune system completely differently to every other coronavirus that has preceded it.
Do you think it would be at all possible for you to try and educate yourself a little bit before you spout such moronic rubbish that is completely incorrect?
Trump testing positive might be a turning point for America.
anagallis_arvensis
Do you think it would be at all possible for you to try and educate yourself a little bit before you spout such moronic rubbish that is completely incorrect?
We've had millions of cases, for almost a year now. Some people retain antibodies, some don't.
But if reinfection with serious illness was really a thing - as you seem to suggest - then we would know about it by now. It would be all over the news. There are instead a handful of reports of people being tested positive a second time who were unaware that they were even infected.
Once you've been infected, your immune system does what it's always done.
And if it didn't then we would *Really* be in trouble. How do you think a vaccine works?
P.S.
I'm trying to avoid calling people names and suggesting that they're lazy and stupid because it makes it impossible to discuss this. Let's not go down that road because then this thread becomes just another echo chamber.
How do you think a vaccine works?
Heard of a "booster"?
Once you’ve been infected, your immune system does what it’s always done.
Why do I keep getting colds a flu throughout my lfe then?
I’m trying to avoid calling people names and suggesting that they’re lazy and stupid because it makes it impossible to discuss this.
You should listen to your advice here.
