Viewing 40 posts - 29,961 through 30,000 (of 39,835 total)
  • The Coronavirus Discussion Thread.
  • Klunk
    Free Member

    Data from Public Health England confirms there have been 42 deaths so far in England with the Delta variant. Of this number, 23 were unvaccinated, seven were more than 21 days after their first dose of vaccine, and 12 were more than 14 days after their second dose.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    Agree with you joepud, and I fully expect the government to do some release on the “freedom day” the papers have got over excited about, but not remove all measures. There are many intermediate steps we can take this year, rather than going all or nothing at the end of this month. To make this a bit more personal… increasing the number who can attend weddings, rather than having no limit at all or sticking with the current limit, for example. More graduation of release, rather than off or on. More generally… perhaps INCREASING mask use as we remove other restrictions, rather than doing away with masks… that’s something I’d like to see considered.

    joepud
    Free Member

    More generally… perhaps INCREASING mask use as we remove other restrictions, rather than doing away with masks… that’s something I’d like to see considered.

    I think mask use a really interesting one. I personally can’t see me getting on the tube or going into tesco without one any time soon. I feel like it should just be a given that people have to continue to wear a mask. This idea of “freedom day” and suddenly the covid risk ends is really dumb… but that seems to the the wider thinking in this country. What is it Drakeford said a little while ago just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

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    Kryton57
    Full Member

    A slight aside with the TDLR being “Could I have had Covid”?

    For my bike training I have a surprising inability for short hard efforts – power at VO2max or Z5 efforts. It’s dropped my ability for a 20 minute effort.

    Now, in Feb 2020 I was ill with a “Flu and Gastro” virus according to the docs, and I always wondered if I’d had Covid, after I’d spent the whole of January 2020 surfing the Tube.

    No other issue, could this be a minor Covid issue for me?

    MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    This idea of “freedom day” and suddenly the covid risk ends is really dumb… but that seems to the the wider thinking in this country. What is it Drakeford said a little while ago just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

    Absolutely agree – some things maybe can should be relaxed, but not everything, otherwise how do you know what behaviour might be causing spikes?

    Not sure how we’ve ended up with a press and public who can only see “all or nothing” – on any issue.

    Pieface
    Full Member

    Given the current scenario a reversal of lifting of restrictions would seem sensible, we’ve got an increasing incidence of a variant we’re not very sure of, which is probably going to grow exponentially with a delayed reaction on hospital admissions and deaths, all within a month of lifting the need to wear masks in secondary schools and other freedoms.

    Kryton57
    Full Member

    Pieface +1

    MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    Did you mean a halting of the lifting of restrictions, rather than a reversal of the lifting, which sounds like reimposing some?

    Many secondary schools round here kept the face mask requirement, and they all encourage the wearing of them. Still intrigued how one had 170 positive tests straight away though, must have genuinely been licking each other

    airvent
    Free Member

    What’s the need to extend the lockdown when the NHS is currently a million miles from being overwhelmed? We’re at just 7 covid related deaths a day in England, I’m not sure how that justifies continued emergency restrictions unless anyone would care to explain.

    Pieface
    Full Member

    I think that going ahead with lifting restrictions on the 21st of June is insanity.

    Given what’s been happening in the last couple of weeks, exercising a bit of Plan > Do > Review I would like to see some restrictions being re-imposed. Don’t ask me which ones though!

    The Roadmap was all based on the assumption of the virus behaving in a known way and vaccination working in an asusmed way. Unfortunately a combination of a significant lifting of restrictions, the Delta variant and our cack-handed border controls means that the roadmap needs reviewing, and we should possibly consider a detour or U-turn with an overnight stay in the Holiday Inn.

    Seeing the majority behaviour of people when on holiday last week you’d think Covid had gone away.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    What’s the need to extend the lockdown when the NHS is currently a million miles from being overwhelmed?

    You skipped the previous page, yeah?

    SKY: COVID-19: Record high hospital waiting list in England as 5.1 million need treatment

    BBC: Hospital waiting list tops 5m in England

    Guardian: Number of people on England’s NHS waiting list tops 5m for first time

    There’s a huge backlog to work through. Adding another wave of Covid to that needs to be avoided. We also need to actively do something to help and retain burnt out staff.

    airvent
    Free Member

    There’s a huge backlog to work through. Adding another wave of Covid to that needs to be avoided. We also need to actively do something to help and retain burnt out staff.

    Yes there is, some of which has been a perpetual problem for decades from a lack of investment, shite staff morale and compounded by staff leaving in flocks, and the rest are from GPs refusing to see anyone for the last 14 months leading to health issues not being nipped in the bud and scaring the public into not going to hospital for critical care because they were told the NHS has better things to be focusing on.

    The first is nothing to do with covid and society shouldn’t be paying for it with lockdowns, and the second is just irresponsible behaviour from politicians, the media and the NHS.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    Yes, but that is ignoring just how bad things currently are. Saying there were waiting lists that could/should have been reduced before the pandemic is true, but things are now many times worse… and will get worse still if the NHS has to deal with another wave, even if that wave involves far fewer deaths than the previous ones.

    P-Jay
    Free Member

    What’s the need to extend the lockdown when the NHS is currently a million miles from being overwhelmed? We’re at just 7 covid related deaths a day in England, I’m not sure how that justifies continued emergency restrictions unless anyone would care to explain.

    The problem is ‘Delta’, like how Kent/Alpha turned everything on it’s head last Autumn, Delta, which thankfully no more deadly (it seems anyway) is more contagious again.

    The University if Warwick completed a study, it was very ‘worst case’ but it said that if they drop all restrictions on the 21st of June, 3-4 weeks later they could see 20k Hospital admissions a day, that’s an unimaginable disaster for the NHS. 4 times higher than the peak in January.

    It’s always the ‘lag’ that catches the Government out, up to now they’ve not been able to accept unpalatable projections until they happen. So yeah, 7 deaths a day isn’t a lot for Covid, but by the time people start dying in large numbers, it’s all ready too late and we’re at the start of another big wave that will take us until at least the autumn to get down again.

    Boris doesn’t like playing the strict parent, he knows many people, with good reason, will blame him for Delta reaching the UK so if he had to say June 21st is off because of that, he’ll look bad, knowing him, he’ll fluff it, he’s announce some loosening of restrictions on the 21st, and leave the rest up to us, which will be mostly ignored until it’s a big problem again.

    I know the public are very quickly running out of tolerance for restrictions, so the time when we have to let nature take it’s course is coming, but you need more than 42% of the population fully vaccinated, or a lot of the remaining 58% are going to get sick.

    My personal opinion is that, as much as I’m fed up of it, Wales keeping Social Distancing in place, probably until the end of the year at least, is the way to go. With another big push, we could have everyone over-12 in the UK vaccinated and we stand a chance of putting it behind us.

    airvent
    Free Member

    Yes, but that is ignoring how bad things currently are. Saying there were waiting lists that could/should have been reduced before the pandemic is true, but things are now many times worse… and will get worse still if the NHS has to deal with another wave, even if that wave involves far fewer deaths that the previous ones.

    Trust me it’s not because of covid. It’s because of decades of poor investment and neglect of the NHS in an attempt to wean us off it and eventually dissolve it into a private entity. The less appealing they can make the NHS to the electorate the more likely they are to go along with privatising it.

    I reiterate, we should not be paying for decades of mistakes and neglect with restrictions on our private life. The government has had over a year to prepare and fund the NHS for the eventual backlog but has chosen not to, by carrying on with Brexit and driving a large chunk of the staff out of the country, and spending funding that should have provided new hospital space and staff on giving contracts to their mates and on perpetual quantitative easing to make the economy look as if it has been fixed.

    I’m not willingly going along with it anymore – paying for the government’s ineptitude with my freedom.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    Trust me it’s not because of covid.

    > sigh <

    Whatever mate.

    airvent
    Free Member

    Strong counter point

    kelvin
    Full Member

    The NHS was underfunded, and was ill prepared for the pandemic. The pandemic has resulted in a huge backlog of care, and people being turned away for services they desperately need. A further wave of Covid19 hospitalisations, even if the results are more favourable this time around (average stay much shorter and more patients surviving) is going to result in a further burden on the NHS and the staff that work in it, and even more people facing delays for even longer, or denied treatment, and that is something we absolutely should be acting to avoid in the coming weeks.

    Del
    Full Member

    So the way to deal with the government’s under-funding and failure to further invest in the NHS is to crash it?

    It’s bold, I’ll give you that. 🙃

    Larry_Lamb
    Free Member

    and that is something we absolutely should be acting to avoid in the coming weeks.

    Best we lock back down now then because it’s the only way.

    piemonster
    Full Member

    I can’t see any rational reason why large numbers of Covid hospitalisations won’t have further exacerbated delays in treatment within the NHS.  And further large numbers won’t do the same again.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    Best we lock back down now then because it’s the only way.

    There’s a world of options between “lock down” and “no restrictions”, but that point has been made so many times already.

    Our 19 yr old just got the nod for her first jab, and now booked for next week. Things are flying along! We’re getting to a really good place in the UK. And now hopefully we’ll be doing more to help other countries (as the USA are finally preparing to do).

    P-Jay
    Free Member

    Trust me it’s not because of covid. It’s because of decades of poor investment and neglect of the NHS in an attempt to wean us off it and eventually dissolve it into a private entity. The less appealing they can make the NHS to the electorate the more likely they are to go along with privatising it.

    I reiterate, we should not be paying for decades of mistakes and neglect with restrictions on our private life. The government has had over a year to prepare and fund the NHS for the eventual backlog but has chosen not to, by carrying on with Brexit and driving a large chunk of the staff out of the country, and spending funding that should have provided new hospital space and staff on giving contracts to their mates and on perpetual quantitative easing to make the economy look as if it has been fixed.

    I’m not willingly going along with it anymore – paying for the government’s ineptitude with my freedom.

    My opinion, based on the experiences of my Wife, an NHS Nurse.

    Obvious 10 years of austerity has taken it’s toll, whether or not that’s the Tory’s plan for privatisation or just general ‘give to the rich and steal from the poor’ Tory dogma, who can say?

    But that’s maybe 5% of the reason for the waiting lists, it’s 95% Covid related. In late March, early April 2020 the NHS went onto a war footing, if anything it was downplayed in the media, but it was as dramatic as anything She, or any of her colleges with decades of experience had ever seen.

    In her teams case, within days of Boris’ first speech the Maintenance team had ripped out her office (modern hospitals are quite modular) and turned it into a ward. I know from our experience in work, the people we support who work on the Admin side of the Children’s Charity who run a specialist Children Ward had the same 2 days notice that they need to move, because your office is not going to exist on day 3.

    She was redeployed, not to Covid work, but to support other teams who’d had their staff taken for Covid work, this was repeated all over the Hospital and Trust. Her usual patients, just lost her, because they went from a team of 8, to 2, and then 1, who only saw the more urgent of cases. Their waiting time of around 3 weeks didn’t change, but the criteria for getting on it changed massively. A lot of suffering happened because of it.

    For a few weeks they were crazy busy and then as the first wave started to ease, they were quiet, really quiet. The largest hospital in Cardiff had the lowest level of occupancy in it’s history last summer. For those working on the Covid wards it was incredibly hard work, but sheer chance I had to visit one last May, only as far as the door, but the activity level was obvious (frankly it felt very strange being there), but the rest of the hospital was eerily quiet, waiting for a worst, worst case that thankfully never came. I know there was a sense of pride and relief when they ‘opened’ the field hospitals last year, but honestly, in hindsight, if we ever had to really use them, the death toll would have made what happened last year seem like a decent result.

    She only got back to her normal team / job in March, they spent most of Feb trying to get up and running, even now, they’re working, but the admin is a nightmare because they still don’t have an office and their admin staff are still WFH. Their work load is crazy, but they’re seeing patients again, so they’re getting through them. Because a lot of their work is with end-of-life patients and the very elderly their waiting list is now about 6 weeks, rather than months and months.

    As above, this is the case for different departments and hospitals all over the trust, I know I was meant to have surgery late last year, I had it early this year instead and that was only because the NHS paid for me to have it privately (not my choice).

    I don’t want to offer the Government an excuse, but it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it, you can’t train new Nurses and Doctors in months, it takes years. You can blame them for things like cutting the Nurse Training Bursary years ago, but no one had heard about Covid then.

    MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    It’s always the ‘lag’ that catches the Government out, up to now they’ve not been able to accept unpalatable projections until they happen

    That’s the basis for my preference for caution now. The government has consistently failed to act in time when tough decisions needed to be made, and I don’t trust them to fail again.

    While I’m well aware of the mental health issues linked to lockdiwns and businesses closing, as I understand it there is no data supporting the theory that lockdowns have increased the suicide rate. Lockdowns aren’t killing people. The virus has killed 150,000+ people looking at the corrected figures from death certificates.

    I know which I think is the one to be wary of.

    sobriety
    Free Member

    I’m not willingly going along with it anymore – paying for the government’s ineptitude with my freedom.

    But paying for it with yours or someone else’s life is ok.

    Hyperbole I know, but not far from the truth, and we don’t need to keep up the restrictions much longer in order to put us as a nation in a properly good place, rather than risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

    reluctantjumper
    Full Member

    For those working on the Covid wards it was incredibly hard work, but sheer chance I had to visit one last May, only as far as the door, but the activity level was obvious (frankly it felt very strange being there), but the rest of the hospital was eerily quiet, waiting for a worst, worst case that thankfully never came.

    I can echo that, had to visit the Heath with my dad around that time and it was a surreal experience. His appointment was in an empty part of the hospital that’s normally busy but you could see across to the Covid section and that was flat-out but organised. I didn’t get to go in but speaking to the staff I did interact with they said it was incredibly tough. Dad came back out of his appointment very humbled at the fact he was still getting treatment at the time, mostly on time compared to normal timescales too.

    I don’t want to offer the Government an excuse, but it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at it, you can’t train new Nurses and Doctors in months, it takes years.

    Absolutely. The damage was done over the last decade of under-investment and will take that long, or even longer, to rectify. The issue now is that an awful lot of the current staff are at, or even way beyond, breaking point so will leave as soon as they can and will need to be replaced. If the next wave happens at even 50% of the worst-case scenario it could easily bring the whole lot toppling down.

    Whatever decision Johnson makes in the next few days will set the scene for this winter. Unfortunately the way it will play out is so reliant on a number of variable factors that we will only really know the result in real-time. Add in the delays in the results manifesting themselves and we run the real risk of the slightest mistake leading to far-reaching consequences that we will have little chance to supress.

    Larry_Lamb
    Free Member

    There’s a world of options between “lock down” and “no restrictions”, but that point has been made so many times already.

    Sorry you’re right, lets lock back down to – Essential shops, schools, nail salons and garden centres.

    It seemed to hold the tide of infections increasing.

    theotherjonv
    Full Member

    We could already see this coming two, even three weeks ago, I even called it and I’m far from a genius. Now we’re two days from the big announcement which i think will be to pause reopening, but in leaving it late creating extra chaos to those that have continued to prepare to open. Food and drink orders, staffing, etc., can’t easily be cancelled at the last moment.

    All. Too. Predictable.

    As for ‘decades of underinvestment so do nothing now’

    My house has caught fire, I know I should have installed a sprinkler system, so I won’t call the fire brigade? It’s even more important we protect the NHS and save lives now BECAUSE we DIDN’T invest when we should have.

    Klunk
    Free Member

    All. Too. Predictable.

    Well it is Boris the Coward we’re talking about here.

    MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    we don’t need to keep up the restrictions much longer in order to put us as a nation in a properly good place, rather than risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

    Can’t say this often enough. We are 2-4 weeks away from being in an excellent position. All the experts and data point to this. Do we really want to risk throwing it away now?

    Edukator
    Free Member

    On this side of the channel the rate of vaccination has slowed this week, plenty of vaccination slots available on my phone app, I could get a Pfizer slot tomorrow if I were 18. It’s now the number of candidates that’s the limiting factor rather than the vaccines available – we’re looking like the US a few weeks back. Whoever predicted this, you were right. I look forward to governement promotion campaign starting in a few days time.

    On the bright side anyone wanting to go on holiday from mid July will have had the chance to get two doses and a QR code.

    Having had the second dose I’ve now got an EU recognised QR code on my phone (and a paper copy) which means the EU frontiers are open to me without a test. But would they let me into Blighty?

    jimw
    Free Member

    the rest are from GPs refusing to see anyone for the last 14 months

    Airvent, I am afraid that this is an exaggeration from my experience. Yes, we have all found it less satisfactory than before and undoubtedly hasn’t worked for every one everywhere.
    However, all of the practices in my area have been having face to face consultations throughout the pandemic, determined by clinical need after telephone triage. This has meant fewer face to face than previously so most consultations have been via video or telephone.
    No way could this be considered refusing to see anyone.

    dissonance
    Full Member

    Do we really want to risk throwing it away now?

    Yeah sod it why not? After all it worked so well the last times.
    I am hoping the Christmas climb down might indicate the path this time but that said that time was late enough plenty of people went sod it and went and spread it around when they got home anyway.
    I will admit to being rather irritated by it all. I am willing to make sacrifices but there seems to be a consistent pattern of squandering all of the sacrifices in order to allow a few to be selfish idiots.

    neiloxford
    Free Member

    Rumour is a 4 week delay.

    https://www.ft.com/content/fa7c25be-d3df-4edd-b86f-b86780b28f95

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15241170/boris-johnson-june-lockdown-delay/

    The explaination of the delay is important to manage expectations

    My hope – we need to finish vaccination rollout which will take 4 more weeks and then we will open up

    My fear – we need 4 more weeks to get more data and will update you again in mid July.

    My worst fear – we need to lockdown again if cases continue to rise

    mudmuncher
    Full Member

    Rumour is a 4 week delay

    I doubt the June 21st easing will make much difference, the big step was last month allowing indoor mixing in households/pubs/restaurants etc. We’d have probably got away with it if our incompetent overlords had closed the borders with India a month earlier. We’d still have ended up with the Indian variant being dominant eventually, but the importation of thousands of cases has brought that date forward such that the level of vaccination at the moment is insufficient to prevent significant exponential growth in cases and the inevitable increase in deaths and admissions.

    kelvin
    Full Member

    And indoor mixing, without masks, in secondary schools and sixth forms. The schools here are still trying to keep mask use going, but without a national message (from government and in the media) to support mask use, it is getting more and more difficult. My son is complaining of missing whole lessons where pupils are arguing with the teacher, ripping off masks, and making a point of not wearing them. His school is wasting hundreds of disposable masks a day giving one (and in some cases many) to pupils who refuse to bring their own mask in.

    Anyway, that the government delayed the India travel ban, let the delta variant spread in schools, and messed up the mask wearing in schools message while hiding data that should have helped inform the national decision on that… well, that’s the latest what the f combo for me.

    mudmuncher
    Full Member

    And indoor mixing, without masks, in secondary schools and sixth forms.

    I didn’t realise they were scrapping masks indoors, it just mentions nightclubs and large events on the government website.

    MoreCashThanDash
    Full Member

    Masks in school stopped being compulsory at the last easing.

    Think it very much depends on the school/pupils as to how well that’s going.

    21st June was meant to be the dropping of all restrictions. Full stop. MrsMC and I have always thought that target was unlikely to be met.

    scotroutes
    Full Member

    We’re expecting Level 0 around that time in Scotland. That doesn’t mean a total lifting of all restrictions.

    https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-protection-levels/pages/protection-level-0/

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