It is extremely difficult to make any sense of almost any of the discussion on Covid right now. That is not because it is impossible to make sense of Covid. That would not seem to be hard. What is impossible to understand is the attitude that so many, from the prime minister, to many of his party, to much of the press corp, seem to have towards it.
We are very clearly in a third wave of Covid now, as I predicted we would be. It was not very hard to do so: a simple look at the evidence was all that was required.
As a result of that third wave cases are rising rapidly. We have no idea what the true impact of vaccines on this wave might be. What seems certain is that the AZ vaccine is not of great use in managing it. What is absolutely certain is that the UK's failure to properly double vaccinate people in short time scales has left more people vulnerable to it than is necessary.
The result of this combination of facts is really not very hard to predict. There are going to be a great many really quite sick people in this country. They will be more infectious than any previous Covid sufferers have been. Despite vaccines this wave is going to spread very quickly as a result. Many people will require hospitalisation. If oxygen, or the ability to deliver it, runs out then some of them are going to die, completely unnecessarily. And the capacity of the NHS will be threatened again. That's what working this out means.
And yet it seems that all the press can ask Johnson is why he might think it necessary to delay a very minor change to Covid regulation, which is the stage four unlocking that seems to be almost inconsequential in the grand scheme of this whole unlocking plan. It's as if large weddings and pop festivals and ordering at the bar in pubs are the most important issues in everyone's lives, when that very clearly is not true. These things do not represent ‘freedom' despite the representation that they might in the press.
What matters much more than those things are people's well-being. That is, preventing people getting ill, stopping them dying, and also making sure that despite the fact that we are to have another quite literally deadly wave of this disease there appear to be no plans at present to help businesses and individuals who might be impacted all over again. These are the things that matter. And they are being ignored.
What should we be discussing now? Let me suggest three things.
The first is how we can really plan to eliminate Covid. That would require a plan to fully vaccinate the UK, and then spread that benefit as far as possible around the world. It would require continuing restrictions now until the benefit of that palm is delivered. And it would require considerable travel bans until the world shares the benefit. Instead what is happening is the Great Barrington Declaration plan, which is to unblock and let the virus rip until the point when the NHS is overwhelmed, again, with many deaths arising is what his actually being delivered by this government.
Second, it would require a co-ordinated plan for recovery, knowing that far from having a boom, as some rather foolish economists predict, many businesses are now tottering on the edge of failure, which situation will only get worse as this crisis continues. What is required is a plan to save the best, and rebuild work for others.
Third, would be a plan for the recovery of society. That's a plan for inclusiveness, for education, for climate change, for beating the problems arising from inequality, for building social care, and more. But there is no hint of any of this.
We are a very long way from being over Covid as yet. Freedom from it is not represented by being able to go to the bar to get a drink, spreading germs on the way. Freedom from it will be when we see the better society that we could build in a post-Covid world. That would be the type of transformation that was dreamed about in 1918 and that was delivered in 1945. Instead our aspiration is to apparently get drunk in a crowd. It's chilling thought that our ambition is now so limited.
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Superb, succinct analysis, Richard.
You describe accurately the extraordinary level of collective stupidity displayed, choreographed, by media and politicians, economists and even some collaborators from the scientific community. You will note that the focus is increasingly on the evil Macron or whatever warcry of the day serves the jingoism of the ideologues controlling government and the other organs of power. Very depressing and so reminiscent of the politics of the inter-war period. Populist slogans, not policy.
You suggest that the plan should be to totally eliminate Covid, and till then have severe global lockdowns.
I can only think that you don’t know what you are talking about or are crazy if this is your plan.
Diseases can’t be totally eliminated. Covid won’t be. But they don’t need to be for the human race to lead normal lives.
You seem to be enjoying lockdowns and the power and authority they give government just a bit too much.
Actually, we have eliminated a disease
And effective,y contained others, which is what I am discussing here
The foolish person here is you
“The first is how we can really plan to eliminate Covid.”
Nope, you weren’t talking about containment, you clearly said we should be looking to eliminate it.
If we plan to eliminate it we might contain it
You have, very clearly, never managed anything
We’ve managed to totally eliminate one disease in the whole of human history.
So the chances of eliminating Covid are basically zero. The best we can hope for is managing it.
Considering that no vaccine is 100% effective this will always be the case.
At which point the question is this:
When do you plan to open up the world again and let people live normal lives? How many cases per head of population?
Once Covid is managed, do you then lock the country down for every transmissible disease outbreak? There are plenty out there which are far more deadly than Covid in terms of mortality.
Or do you just plan plan (and clearly enjoy) the fortelling of impending catastrophe and want lockdown forever?
See others
Containment is not a strategy that’s viable
The discussion has already been offered here today
How many more people are you prepared to see die or fall ill, Bernard, if infections are allowed to grow without constraint until everyone is exposed to the latest variant, or a new one that emerges because we let this virus infect millions of people?
As things stand, nearly 30 million people in the UK have had two doses, and they might be 60% protected, perhaps 80, 90% if we are lucky, which leaves 3, 6, perhaps 12 million of these – the most vulnerable people – some to good but not perfect protection.
Worse, another 12 million people have one dose and might have 30, 40% protection, so they are better off than the remaining 20 million people who’ve had no vaccinations at all.
Yes, we can hope that most people will be ok, but how many thousands of them might need hospital treatment, and how many at the same time ? The latest daily hospitalisation numbers about week ago had already almost doubled from the 100 or so per day baseline a few weeks before.
Could we cope with 40,000 COVID patients again? How about 50,000 or 100,000 (which is just 1% of 5 million or 10 million)? And then how many might have long term and avoidable health problems?
How long should we wait before we recognise that we already have a growing problem with the R number being above one, and take action to stop this disease spreading exponentially?
And that is before we get on to people coming to the UK with new variants from elsewhere. Unlike for example places like Australia and New Zealand, where they stamp on it, hard.
“The typical approach of high income nations (such as those in North America and Europe) has been a “suppression strategy,” sometimes after initial use of a “mitigation strategy”. The goal of suppression is to flatten the epidemic curve further than with mitigation, but still without expecting to end community transmission. These approaches are largely consistent with plans designed to mitigate or suppress pandemic influenza. By contrast, China’s success in containing the pandemic has shown that SARS-CoV-2 can be eliminated even after widespread community transmission. Several other Asian jurisdictions also achieved some success in containing the pandemic at an early stage, notably Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
Confronted with the rapidly spreading covid-19 pandemic in January 2020, New Zealand initially rolled out its existing national influenza pandemic plan as the basis for its response. Australia did likewise. Fortunately, both countries had a brief period to refine their approaches before the first reported covid-19 case arrived on 25 January in Australia and 26 February in New Zealand. This timing gave them an opportunity to learn from the effects of the pandemic on countries in the northern hemisphere and consider the different response strategies.
The New Zealand government chose an explicit elimination approach. Australia also has elimination of community transmission as the stated goal, but has generally described its strategy as “aggressive suppression.” A related strategy that also aims to achieve zero community transmission is the exclusion approach that has been successfully used by some Pacific Island countries and territories.
The goal of elimination is a major departure from pandemic influenza mitigation. With a mitigation goal, the response is typically to increase stringency as the pandemic progresses and for more disruptive interventions, such as school closures, to be held in reserve to flatten the peak. By contrast, the goal of elimination rapidly escalates the stringency of control measures to extinguish chains of transmission.
Choosing a strategy is not necessarily a fixed path, and countries might change their approach. Sweden, for example, initially seemed to pursue a version of mitigation with the intent of achieving herd immunity and then seemed to switch to a suppression strategy.”
“Provisional definition of covid-19 elimination:
A definition for elimination of covid-19 could include the following three components:
Absence of newly diagnosed SARS-CoV-2 virus infections from community transmission– within a defined jurisdiction or region, for a specified period (such as 28 days since the last known case in the community was placed into isolation)
Presence of a high performing surveillance system–with appropriate targeting and geographic and demographic coverage, operating continuously, with sufficient volumes of testing to provide reasonable certainty of detecting outbreaks in a set period (for example, testing a specified minimum number of people per 1000 population per day or a specified minimum number of tests per day)
Acceptance of suitable exemptions–such as cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection among incoming travellers detected at the border and held in supervised isolation or quarantine facilities until safe to release into the community and potentially cases of community transmission that are epidemiologically and genomically linked to staff or a traveller in an isolation or quarantine facility.”
The above analysis is taken direct from the BMJ website (Covid-19 elimination analysis), here: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4907
I offer it here because I believe debate should be framed within a context of well sourced information; remembering that even science does not determine certainties, but is itself determined by what is unknown, or contingent. I recommend that readers here go to the BMJ website and read the analysis for themselves, and then follow other usable sources to explore the issues further on an informed basis.
Thanks
Even the most insensible members at the Club desperate to have ‘atmosphere’ and ‘parties’ – involving singing loudly and dancing in congas and screaming ingurrland – have absorbed the subliminal messaging of the government and mass media over the last month along with it’s mad scientist leader Cummings.
The Road Map is a failure. The promises were fake.
Vaccines are not 100% let alone mostly effective.
–
They may even get a serious set back if it is confirmed, as it seems rumoured that the unfortunate under 30 year old Erickson was vaccinated.
Yet the idiot members are not railing against the PM, Health, Transport, Education and Trade Ministers – or their technocrats appointed without ever standing for election – the delivery of the Facist state writ large.
Even the more ‘leftists’ are desperate to stick to the fairy tale of FREEDOM DAY – not wanting to cancel yet another holiday booking, wedding, party and god forbid – the pubs during the tourney. Saying that the government WONT take the risk of pissing the WHOLE country off!!
The callousness of opinions range from ‘I’m all right and vaxxed’; Most people have been vaxxed; There aren’t that many dying; and we shouldn’t lockdown until reaching 100 deaths a day!;
It is analogous to whole country having been infantilised and screaming ‘are we there yet, I’m bored and want to go home’.
Absolutely pathetic , I have had to restrain myself from calling them callous complicit mass murderers.
Disease elimination is not disease eradication.
“The concepts of disease elimination and eradication mostly relate to immunisation programme outcomes. Disease eradication is the global reduction of infection to zero cases, whereas disease elimination is the absence of sustained endemic community transmission in a country or other geographical region.”
This quottion is from Heywood and MacIntyre, ‘Elimination of COVID-19: what would it look like and is it possible?’; ‘The Lancet’, 6th August, 2020 here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30633-2/fulltext
It is really important that we understand the terms we use, in the context of the disciplinary professions that use them with specific meanings. I submit these references because I believe they are important.
Again, thanks
What we can say for sure is that neither is currently a UK goal
https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article24287112.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/0_boris.jpg
Surely this picture of Johnson demonstrates exactly why the U.K. is in the mess it is in. All of the other other G7 leaders looked business like and gave off an aura of competence and not buffoonery.
Can’t agree with this part:
“What is absolutely certain is that the UK’s failure to properly double vaccinate people in short time scales has left more people vulnerable to it than is necessary.”
The UK is comfortably ahead of all EU nations and the US in the % fully vaccinated.
That’s despite the 2nd dose delay, which may or may not have been the best course but at least has solid logic behind it. It’s hard to see the UK vaccine rollout as anything but a success story.
You clearly have not looked at the data
We are now way down the list
We did well
Not any more we do not
Way down the list? Have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Fully vaccinated as of the 11th June (the most recent date when all are updated):
UK = 43% (5th behind Israel, Bahrain, Mongolia and Chile)
US = 42%
Germany = 25%
Italy = 23%
France = 21%
(EU = 24%)
That doesn’t look “way down the list” to me.
Who pays you trolls?
Why don’t you realise one dose is not vaccinated?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
Maybe you should look at the data again before you get things wrong.
We are still ahead of all of Europe and still at the top of the list.
One does is not vaccinated
It’s a jab
But no useful protection at all
I referred to people vaccinated
The Our World in Data page has a section headed: “What share of the population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19?”, which they clearly explain as: “The following chart shows the share of the total population that has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. This represents the share that have received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol. If a person receives the first dose of a 2-dose vaccine, this metric stays the same. If they receive the second dose, the metric goes up by 1.”
Those are the numbers correctly quoted by other commenters. The data is very clearly presented.
Reference to https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations is somewhat ambiguous as it gives access to 16 different graphs on the same page.
When you open the page, it shows a graph of the percentage of “people who received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine” for a number of countries over time. Canada at 65% has just overtaken Israel at 63%, with the UK third at about 61%. We know that one dose is helpful but not enough to defeat the delta variant.
But you can change the graph to show “people fully vaccinated” instead of “people vaccinated”.
That graph is labelled “Share of the total population that have received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol.” Israel leads on 59% (which is still not enough for “herd immunity” incidentally, if the R number is above about 2.5). After Bahrain, Mongolia and Chile, the UK is indeed apparently fifth at 44%, close to the US and Hungary.
The government numbers at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ say nearly 57% of adult have two doses, and another 22% one dose. That leaves 21% of adults unvaccinated.
It may be easier to talk in terms of numbers of people than percentages. I think that all implies a UK population of about 66 million people, about 52 million adults and 14 million under 18, of whom about 30 million have had two doses (that includes about 6 million people who received their second dose in the last three weeks so not fully protected yet) and 12 million have had one. Another 24 million people (10 million adults and 14 million children) have had neither.
If the R rate for the delta variant is about 6, we would need to get two vaccinations out to about 84% of people (about 55 million people doubly vaccinated) to make sure the virus declines if it infects the remaining one person in six. We are only about half way there.
Thanks
I’ve been listening to this classic Waterboys track that I find resonates with me quite a lot as Johnson and his posh thugs kill their way to everlasting power:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwpz8snYCw8
OK – some of us are suckers. But not all of us.
Said from the perspective of a financially comfortable older person who has lived their life.
Do you not remember what it was like to be younger and wanting to get out and meet people/find a job and HAVE A LIFE!
Why do you only care for older people and not anyone below the age of 25?
Typical millionaire baby boomer moron
Wow. AT 63 I have lived my life.
And wow, I don’t care about my children.
And I do n’t care about jobs.
How wrong can a troll be?
I watched yesterday’s COVID briefing and suddenly realised the significance of something Chris Whitty said (It is after 17 minutes of the BBC iPlayer version). He said that he expected case numbers to be higher when restrictions were lifted in July.
I had still believed that the purpose of Lockdown and restrictions was to stop the spread of the virus, to reduce the R number below 1, so that eventually the virus would die out before it reached the people that it would kill. I was baffled why our leaders were still talking about removing restrictions, when numbers were rising and it was clear that current restrictions were failing.
The implication is that we have quietly moved back to a strategy of herd immunity. The virus is to remain endemic, but vaccination may allow deaths and hospitalisations to be kept to an acceptable level.
I don’t think this is a good strategy at any level. In particular, it ignores Long COVID.
But as with Brexit, we have lost, and are expected to get over it.
They expect at least 40,000 deaths
I should say ‘sadly’ they expect 40,000 deaths because they always say sadly about deaths they could have prevented
It is pretty stark. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/993361/S1290_LSHTM_Roadmap_Step_4.pdf
“Under most scenarios, this summer wave would be smaller than the January 2021 wave, in terms of hospitalisations and deaths, but comparable to the April or October 2020 waves.” “Taking further measures to reduce the summer wave, such as delaying Step 4 until all adults have had both vaccine doses, instigating a circuit-breaker lockdown or moving back to Step 2 measures is likely to largely negate the impact of the summer wave” “These projections are subject to considerable uncertainty”
Even in their most optimistic scenario (low immune escape, 50% increased transmissibility, page 25) they are suggesting peak hospital admission of 10,000 to 20,000, with at least 24,000 and perhaps 50,000 deaths from the current strategy. Going back to step 2 might mean “only” 12,000 deaths.
I would happily go back to stage 2 to save those deaths