According to the Guardian:
Boris Johnson has told business leaders that efficient delivery of the coronavirus vaccine is Britain's best economic recovery tool as he promised a sustainable fightback from the worst recession in 300 years.
The only problem with this is that, like so much the government has said on Covid 19, this may not be true.
The reality is that Independent SAGE, who are the body I trust the most on this issue, say that vaccination is not the way out of this crisis. Certainly it will help, but the logic of vaccination is that we achieve so called herd immunity. But as they suggest, developing that scale of tolerance carries all sorts of risk with it, and the real goal of policy should be suppression of the virus, which is something that we have not tried, but which others have.
So far the UK policy has led to the highest death rate in the world in the last seven days, and a dire economic impact by international standards. As Independent SAGE does, again, argue, Covid management and economic management are in this case related variables.
That is most especially true when new research shows that single doses of vaccine, as opposed to double dose vaccination, may not be effective in the over 80s, whilst other new research, out today, shows existing vaccines may have limited impact on new virus variants.
I am not saying Johnson is wrong: it is just possible his policy may work. But it will be against the odds. Despite this he was, apparently, in full boosterism mode, it being reported that:
The prime minister said it was important for the government and businesses to work together to rebuild the virus-stricken economy, and that he would support job creation, upgrade Britain's infrastructure, and launch a “green industrial revolution” to help the country “build back better” from the pandemic.
It would be almost amusing to note that he has adopted Corbynistic terminology rather than use the term Green New Deal. But without beating Covid 19 all this is just talk, and right now we have not achieved that goal, or shown that we know how to do so. Nor does it even look like we are necessarily on the right path to doing so. We have a long way to go as yet, in other words.
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Pretty sure that ‘vaccine’ in third paragraph ought be virus…?
Re Johnson and his promises… personally I’ve heard all that before from him and his (imho) vile cadre, so I shan’t be holding my breath (other than hoping your forecast of his date of departure from office is sooner rather than later – and that his replacement is at least half way competant)
Corrected, thanks
Suppresion of the ‘vaccine’ ??!
Sorry
Not proof reading well this morning
Virus, of course
Corrected
Thanks
I am sure that you meant “suppression of the virus” rather than “vaccine”.
However, no matter what, there will be no hope of a recovery under the current government.
I am quite sure that the vital need for a Green New Deal, which is a long-term project – although I know that it has the very helpful potential for some early returns – will conflict with the inherent short-termism of much of British business.
And when we add into the mix the fact that Johnson’s backers are totally absorbed with just engineering of the financial kind, it’s plain that all the political, economic and business vices that left this country wide open to the ravages of a catastrophic event will work hard to reassert themselves.
As a consequence, just watch the ramping up, by the right, of irrelevant culture wars to distract the susceptible from the disaster that surrounds them.
Typo corrected now…
Hello Richard.
Are the government going to spend new money to ‘build back better’ or shall they be supporting businesses some other way, whilst at the same time enacting austerity?
It sounds like waffle from the PM.
What does ”suppression” mean? No football. No cinemas. No Pubs. No Restaurants. No holidays. No house guests. Sealed international borders?
It won’t be possible to hold back the clamour to get back to something like normal as soon as the effect of the vaccines take hold. Covid will still be with us but its effect will be much reduced and hopefully no greater than we would normally expect from seasonal flu.
The argument will be that we don’t shut down the economy for flu so why should we for Covid?
How do you know the effects will be much reduced?
It already seems the vaccine is four times less effective against new variants
This might continue
The vaccine is not the whole answer
What people might clamour for is not wise
Brexit proves that
@Richard, You say ” the vaccine is four times less effective against new variants”
I can’t find any evidence to support this assertion. It is a danger, but also a problem to be tackled if it happens. The point of the lockdowns was to protect as many people as possible until the vaccines we have now become widely available. When the Spanish flu hit in the 20s there was no similar prospect. The only option was to let nature take its course. The end result was around 250,000 dead.
If the vaccines don’t work, if we are stymied by vaccine resistant variants to the extent you claim, we could have a death toll of double that. We can’t hide away forever. We’ll have to do the same as previous generations did.
I will have to look for it again
It was a well sourced tweet – I only use such things. But annoyingly I can’t find it again right now. I will search.
Today the message is Israel is finding that the first dose of vaccine is vastly less effective than double dose vaccination, and so delay does not work very well.
That’s the next problem we will face.
In other words we do not gave to accept deaths. We could do things right.
Is this it?
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1351233027410718720
That is certainly the report I saw
This is just one person, Dr Eric Ding, who seems to be engaging in the process of thinking aloud via Twitter. He says he is ‘scratching his head’ I cannot see the point in doing that on a public forum at least until he has come to a clearer conclusion.
I, too, am uneasy about the timing of a second vaccine dose. I would prefer my first dose to be tomorrow and my second three weeks later. I don’t know enough to advise anyone on how the limited supplies of vaccine should be administered for optimal effect. Until those supplies are sufficient for everyone, people will die, whatever we do.
Tim
Look at the Israeli findings. See Sky news this morning if you have not done so
And this is not a Covid site….
I use Twitter in the main for that
Richard
The strap line is the nicest way you could put it to be honest.
Today the UK had the highest number of coronavirus deaths reported during the pandemic (over 1600) since, er, last Wednesday (over 1550 on the 13th), which beat the previous peak on, er, the previous Friday (over 1300 on the 8th). The peak day in spring 2020 was 1200 on 21 April, although the 7 day average peaked at 942 on 10 April. It is not at all clear that the 7 day average of deaths has peaked this time.
The number of new cases detected has fallen since we locked down on 4 January, from over 60,000 to about 40,000 a day, but there is a long way to go, and some of those new cases people will turn into hospital admissions in a few weeks, and potentially deaths a few weeks after that.
It is about time the government outlined what conditions they would need to be satisfied in order to propose any relaxation of the lockdown conditions (which are in any event looser than they were in March, with many more exceptions). We did it in December when cases were still far too high and they shot up again. The tiers patently did not work to keep infection under control. We must not unlock until daily cases are significantly below the 15,000 we had in November. Last spring, schools opened partially from 1 June, but the lockdown continued until July. Three months from January would take us into April, well past the budget on 3 March and the decennial census (!) on 21 March.
Recovery? Not until next year at the earliest. If at all, given Brexit impacts. What is the government going to do to stop fishing concerns going out of business as early as next week?
Your third para is key. There is no plan. And that is the key issue
As for fish, the bailout will be offered after the businesses have all failed
@ Andrew,
You say “We must not unlock until daily cases are significantly below the 15,000 we had in November.”
I would go along with that. At present they are falling at a rate of 10,000 per week. So that could mean we would be below your target figure by about the first week in February. That’s probably being too optimistic but we can expect that we should be in much better shape by the end of February and be under your threshold. The difference between this year and last is we now are vaccinating millions of people and that is going to help enormously.
This isn’t a political point. The Government is in the fortunate position that the tremendous efforts of those scientists around the world are likely to bail them out of their incompetence. I’m always struck by how well they come across when interviewed on TV. They actually answer the questions put to them to the best of their ability!
Did you listen to Christina Pagel on Channel 4 News tonight
Her answer would be ‘why are you content with that, the NHS is still imploding?’
This is not over for a long time yet
Tim, I said “significantly below”. We are not going to reach 10,000 in three weeks or zero in four weeks, but if you are asking me for a concrete proposal (just like I was saying we need one from the government) then I’d suggest we need to get down to low single thousands of new cases per day, with R below 1, like last July, to keep spread under control. We also need to be confident that hospital admissions are within reasonable bounds – there is going to be a long tail of people currently in hospital and those who are admitted in the month or so after they are infected, particularly from age cohorts who are not currently being vaccinated, which probably takes us into March or April – and by that time the rate of daily deaths should be down significantly too, perhaps to ten or below, again like last July. I’ll repeat what I have said elsewhere: we have had over 400 COVID deaths per day (3000 per week) since last November, significantly more in recent weeks. We plateaued in the summer at about 40,000 deaths and it is now over 90,000, and sadly there will be tens of thousands more deaths on the way down from the peak. And many more who have not died but will have significant long term health impacts. We have become inured to this ongoing daily massacre.
I agree with all that
But I suspect we will find July much too early, because real people in the NHS will need a great deal of time to recover before more risk can be taken.
“This is not over for a long time yet”
“….. the NHS is still imploding”
I agree with all that but I’m not sure I know what you mean by “In other words we do not have to accept deaths. We could do things right”
Stocks of vaccine are finite, and the prospect of getting more are are poor. In any case other countries should be next in the queue before we go up for extras. There may yet turn out to be problems with these vaccines which will only show up in real world use. No-one wants to accept deaths, so what are you proposing to stop, rather than just minimise, them?
Read Devi Sridhar
I fear the government may give in to the pressure to start easing lockdown restrictions from mid-February, which is far too early. They locked down too late three times, so I have no confidence that they will not repeat the mistake of unlocking too early. We are not even sure that the people who have had their first vaccine shots will be properly protected by then.
If I had to pick a date now, I’d guess April or May, and that is for starting to ease restrictions. I’m not convinced that we will be able to remove all of the restrictions this year. We are nowhere near returning to normality. It really depends on how infection, hospital admission, and death numbers go, how much of the vaccines are available and how quickly they can be administered (to be fair, that seems to be going well), and currently unknown contingencies such as how effective the vaccines actually are, delivery of second shots, mutations, etc.
The NHS is not going to recover for several years, if it ever properly recovers. There are huge backlogs, people are exhausted, and we have miles to go. If the pressure keeps piling on, something will give way eventually.
@ Richard,
We should be sceptical of anyone who claims to know all the answers when there probably isn’t a good one. A quick check on Devi Sridhar’s tweets reveals she is telling us that it is a false economy versus health debate, and that the virus is killing the economy and not the restrictions.
This sounds far too simplistic and binary to be true. She is offering us a false choice. It has to be both. Say we had done nothing at all and we had allowed the virus to rip. We would have possibly had a death rate of 0.5% of the population or over 300,000 by now. However, my neighbour who runs a shop would not be at his wit’s end wondering how he’s going to survive financially. He can probably afford to lose 0.5% of his customers but he can’t afford to lose them all.
I’m not saying that we should allow 300,000 people to die. It is hard to know what to do. In the summer I was arguing that we should adopt the German approach of much better testing, tracing and isolation. At the time they did look like they had found a much better solution. Since then they have not done much better than us with daily death totals of over a thousand too. If they cannot make that system work, probably we have no chance.
You may think I am being naive, but I am pinning all my hopes onto the vaccine policy working. If it is right then we should start to see big improvements in the next few weeks. The alternative does not bear thinking about!
Tim
Interesting. Devi Sridhar is probably the wisest and most able commentator on this issue.
I think your time here is up. You quite clearly do not comprehend the issues if you dismiss her so flippantly
Richard
1,820 COVID deaths today. The most since yesterday. Condolences to all those affected. Sadly this is only going to get worse for a week or two until the people who were testing positive at the beginning of this month reach the crisis point. And then at least a month perhaps two or more of elevated deaths before we come off the second wave. Particularly if the single dose vaccines are not as effective as hoped. How can we even think of reducing restrictions while the situation is so parlous?
I am as baffled as you Andrew
And shocked
I remember being ridiculed in the first wave when I said deaths could reach this level
Now they have
Dear Richard,
I was stunned by your assertion that the vaccine may not be effective in the over 80s, what is the evidence for that ? I thought I had been following quite well and my info is that the JVCI advice is correct. Thanks
That is a report from the Gupta Lab in Cambridge https://twitter.com/guptar_lab/status/1350131626240598019?s=21