As the Guardian noted last night:
No 10 is drawing up plans to phase out England's remaining pandemic restrictions from as early as March as a beleaguered Boris Johnson signals to his backbenchers that he is prepared to let the UK live with the virus.
The message, designed solely for consumption by the Tory backbenchers, is that we will now have to live with Covid.
This is an act of the upmost irresponsibility. As the Covide data from yesterday shows, there 84,429 positive cases yesterday. In the last week, there have been 700,366 positive cases, down 501,197 on the previous week. There were 85 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. In the last week 1,845 deaths have been reported, an increase of 515 on the previous week. As of the latest data 19,345 COVID patients are in hospital, or about one in six of all people in hospital.
So, it would seem as though omicron has peaked, which is not to say that Covid is over. It is just that this variant has peaked. There will very likely be another along soon.
And despite all the claims that this version is mild deaths are still rising, even as hospital admissions are falling and ICU cases have been level. That's because it so happens that this version does not hit the lungs as badly as previous versions did. But as the Guardian notes, this version kills in different ways:
It's far more likely that Covid exacerbates another condition or causes a different illness to rise to the forefront: complications from diabetes, renal failure, strokes, heart inflammation or failure, asthma, emphysema, pulmonary embolisms.
Cases of diabetes in children are rising. And have you noticed how many people with apparently unknown heart conditions are dying? This may well be Covid. No other respiratory diseases creates that list of issues, but Covid is doing so. And that is also a reason why deaths are increasing whilst hospitals are not as overwhelmed as expected (and they are still overwhelmed). People are dying at home instead. That is the explanation for that.
But to appease the mad members of the Tory party restrictions are to be removed and public health concern about Covid is to be scaled back when it is apparent that the incidence of long Covid is rising and other causes of fatality, right across age ranges, are rising as a result.
And it is not as if it has gone away. As one teacher told me at the weekend, she started the week with 26 in her class. At the end of the week she had 12 and one in hospital with dangerously low blood pressure. And this is primary school.
Covid is not going away.
Omicron is not mild.
There will be other variants, inevitably.
An yet the government is washing its hands of all measures when this is an issue requiring attention for the long term, like all diseases that have yet to become endemic, and even those that have.
You literally cannot make irresponsibility on this level up. And all to save one man and his job.
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Even now in my household, my partner and I do not agree about Covid.
The drip-drip of alternative facts – even those divulged in the interests of fair accessible debate (should we be ‘debating’ Covid?) has won the battle.
I think that my partner has had enough – she is worried about mental health issues, isolation etc. I think that many do think like her – they’re sort of at the end of their tether and I think that the Tories – who know us as we are (whereas progressives tell us quite rightly how we could be) are banking on this.
Let’s unpick this though a bit more:
I have little patience with people who do not get vaccinated; my partner does not have that problem.
When you think about it though, the problem is not that people don’t get vaccinated.
The problem is an underfunded, under pressure NHS as people have a right to decide who sticks needles with fluids in them.
The Guardian for example should be reporting on that rather than on people be unvaccinated which is a choice in many ways they have a right to?
In the end, this is what a penny pinching, austerity society reduces us to isn’t it? Pointing the finger at each other rather than the incompetent idiots who are in charge.
A lot of people are just, to be polite fed up of it all now, they are certainly not COVID deniers, they, like me are fed up of seeing some scientists getting into Twitter spats instead of putting their heads together to work out long term solutions.
I am also concerned that air pollution is getting pushed to the back along with mental health and full sick pay.
I think you will find Independent SAGE has focussed a great deal in the long term
They are being ignored
Hence the spats
Links?
To what?
To where ISage have discussed sick pay reform, NHS reform, future air pollution issues from reduced public transport usage etc…
You can read the minutes as well as I can and what they say on issues (not including sick pay reform, which i am not sure they have addressed) as well as I can
Disappointing that they haven’t discussed sick pay reform with mitigations for abuse (which unfortunately happens bot pre and during COVID)
Also how the NHS can be proactive rather than reactive.
Easy to read explanations with verifiable facts are needed.
They are not economists
Perhaps there is a link between “falling cases” and the fact that confirmatory PCR tests are no longer required? I suspect large numbers of positive LFT results go unreported, making the figures unreliable
All the genuinely independent epidemiologists, virologists, public health and primary health care academics are confirming what you are saying. The short term and longer term effects of getting infected are only partially understood, but they are serious and they are multi-system.
The BBC are not even asking questions, but are colluding with the ‘its nearly all over’ false messaging the government is promoting – ‘its mild’, ‘the number of cases doesnt matter’, ‘its endemic (meaning mild)’, ‘the next variants will inevitably be milder’, ‘hospitals are coping’,’children don’t get ill’, ‘Boris’s gamble has paid off’, ‘we have done better than other countries’.
But the one-party state is making it clear to the experts nearer to or inside government or dependent on government good will for their managerial positions, that they musnt challenge the ‘its nearly all over’ message.
You then get Prof Hiscox saying ‘it will be a sniffle’, and Dr Gropelli ‘I am very optimistic’. Even if they warn that endemic disease can still tkill hundreds of thousands every year – the BBC corresponden James Gallagher helpfully adds that the immunity created by millions being infected means that the thousands dying might be a price worth paying. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59970281.
We have the worst death toll in Western Europe, and orders of magnitude more deaths than successful countries like Taiwan, S Korea, Japan, China, NZ.
The pandemic response has been run as a political campaign from day one – with politicians micro-managing from their daily podium. But now, with the PM’s own position being in hoc to his ultras in parliament who are against any protections against the virus – the political nature of the pandemic response has reached its reductio ad absurdum. People have to die to save the Prime Minister .
Thank you
Andrew
Very little if anything at all to disagree with in your post.
I have steered clear of the ‘multitude of multiplicities’ by concentrating on avoiding big crowds, wearing a good face mask and getting vaccinated. And I’m pleased that the Serb got sent home too.
My partner ‘s views have changed as she listens to R4 a lot.
The issue that haunts me though is the next variant: what will it be like and how did it get to develop and circulate (because of stupidity and expediency now – that’s why).
This idea that we can evolve around the virus is just la-la land thinking.
A vaccinated, fit 70 year old died of COVID last Friday…. just one of about 100 that day. This one happened to be the mother of a friend of mine; she is inconsolable.
THIS IS NOT A GAME.
(PS forgive the “Anon” – it would be rude if the family concerned could be identified by my post…. )
No one wants to get this…
Meanwhile, Dominic Raab has apparently been claiming on Sky that he wasn’t invited to a “party” (his word for the ‘event’), that wasn’t actually, ehm, a party. Understand? No, neither do I.
What really baffles me is that if he wants to make clear that he did not recieve an invitation to the “party”, but it wasn’t a ‘party’; if there wasn’t a party there wouldn’t be an invitation to anyone, would there? Because it didn’t exist. So why is he making clear he didn’t receive an invitation, when there was no party? Notice, I do not need inverted commas for the word invitation; because there must have been invitations, since Raab does not claim there were no invitations. Invitations to what? Invitations to work? Or should that be “work”?
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’. ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’.” (Lewis Carroll)
Yes, we are now offically living in ‘Wonderland’.
True
Just noticed my fumbling fingers erred: that should of course be “receive”! Notice how simple it is to acknowledge an error….. unless you have a somewhat exaggerated idea of how big a dog you are, or just how unimportant you really are to the most vital values in life, save to people who seem to have compromised their values beyond repair.
🙂
Schrodinger’s parties
The increasing covid cases and hospitalisation of children is a concern as is the under-reporting of same.
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1483385953393729541?s=20
I read the headline as
Corbyn is an ongoing threat to the well being of millions
Had to read it again of course but slower.
Sky News has interviewed the PM. Johnson says nobody informed him the party he attended was a “party”. What he is saying is he can’t recognise a party when he is standing in it; we know that because he failed to close the ‘event’ (sic, or is that sick?), the moment he walked into the garden and saw 40+ people gathered, spread with tables and booze, in the middle of total lockdown. That should tell you all you need to know about Johnson. If we have a PM who can’t even work that our for himself by observation, he is not fit to be PM; whatever way you attempt to interpret the incoherent guff he is now presenting, with increasingly insulting frequency to the British electorate, and especially those who have suffered personal, unimaginable grief through their own selfless commitment to the lockdown. This is not the “misjudgement” Jonson claims, we are far beyond that level of modest failure.
Furthermore, the PM appeals again to the Sue Grey report: another red herring. Sue Grey will report to him. This is farce. The sue Grey report will be decided by the PM’s own Party, and nowhere else. What we should ask of Sue Grey, is what is she doing to interrogate those Downing Street staff (political or Civil Service) who know what went on, but are no longer there, and have laft the service: like Dominic Cummings, various Press Officers and a host of pople, some now in the media (what a grotesque circular, politically in-bred cohort of propagandists we have in this rum collection). Will such an interview happen, or does Sue Grey have any power to do so if the request is declined by any of them? Just what sort of “investigation” is this? Instead of repeating her name endlessly, does anyone in the Conservative Party actually care if the this is a genuine “investigation” in the widest sense of the term ‘investigation’, or not? Is the Sue Grey smokescreen just more Humpty-Dumpty, playing with words?
See my tweet on this – my timeline is on the right of the blog
The media talks constantly of Sue Gray interviewing people connected with the various parties. All very well, but some at least (and one in particular) are known habitual liars. Johnson tells us that he was only at one party/non-party/work event for 25 minutes which he stumbled into accidentally. We only have his word, for what that’s worth, for that, but there must be hours of CCTV footage from the numerous security cameras in and around No. 10. Is it too much to hope that Sue Gray will examine the footage and establish facts that are incontrovertible?