Off Topic Covid 19 restrictions have done one

Its not mortality rates that lockdowns bring down , its the number of initial infections that they are designed to bring down which they did ultimately and so they worked .. that's all , just because we locked down it doesn't mean it will kill less % of people who become infected ..

 

Here you go... it was widely reported. Have a positive test... get knocked by a bus or stabbed - Covid death
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-deaths-idUKKCN2582CY

 

It's possible but it's very unlikely. True, it hasn't been around long enough to say for sure, but from what I've read it isn't much to worry about. Mutation sounds scarier than it actually is, it's a change in the genome and more often than not a mutation is detrimental to the virus. Viruses can't get rid of mutation like our cells can, so if the mutation doesn't stick, it doesn't tend to change much. According to a journal in Nature Microbiology, you'd need a lot of the virus' genes to mutate for it to become dangerous and that's not happening at much of a rate of knots. Furthermore, other RNA viruses like yellow fever, measles and mumps didn't mutate enough to become vaccine resistant, so it could be that it's more stable than something like common influenza.

But, only with time will we really know. The best resistance to the virus at the moment is non-exposure.

 

Local lockdown UK: Do city-wide curbs work? It's not clear.

Since Leicester, local lockdowns have multiplied. More than 15 million people - very roughly, a quarter of the UK population - have come under new curbs, in some form.

And it's become harder to see whether they are working or not.

In Leicester, cases fell when restrictions were introduced. When they were progressively eased in August and September, cases started to rise. But this rise coincided with more people travelling abroad. And with children going back to school.

In Greater Manchester, cases also rose over those months despite the area being in lockdown - albeit a looser version than Leicester's had been.

Unpicking these different factors is a big challenge.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54239538


The general concenus is that lockdowns should be used as a temporary holding policy to effectively suppress SARS-CoV-2 infections to low levels that allow rapid detection of localised outbreaks and rapid response through efficient and comprehensive find, test, trace, isolate, and support systems so life can return to near-normal without the need for generalised restrictions.

 

It doesn't say that in that article. It simply states that some were overstated in the early days of the pandemic to get a better grasp of how quickly the virus was spreading, it doesn't say how they overstated it. For some reason, England was doing that but Scotland was not, which I wasn't aware of. In any case, it only shaved off 5,000 deaths and it still leaves us as the worst European country affected.

The death figures are worded as "of those that tested positive, X amount have died." It wasn't a very good system, because it doesn't explicitly say how many died, which is why it was changed, but it's more accurate now than it was.

 

the first lockdown brought deaths down from 1000 a day to single figures within 3 months - most people obeyed the first lockdown - as soon as younger people realised it was very unlikely to affect them they didn't give a **** anymore which is why any subsequent lockdown wont have the same affect because they dont give a **** whether it kills old people with underlying conditions because they have had their life. were going to die anyway and getting granny's inheritance early is an added bonus

 

Sad , but true

 

Maybe I know a different type of youngster, but the ones I know have adhered to the rules better than a fair few of the older generation. The pictures of the queues and people in shops seems to support that.

 

More than 60% of new covid cases diagnosed at two hospitals in the Midlands in recent days (This is from June) were caught at least two weeks after the patient was admitted — suggesting there may be particular problems with the virus spreading on their wards.

Northamptonshire is also still grappling with larger numbers of covid cases in hospital, in contrast to most of England. Its NHS organisations have said they do not know the cause of its ongoing problems.

But the large share of cases diagnosed among patients who have been in hospital for at least 15 days – classed by NHS England as definitely “healthcare associated” – indicate that problems controlling the spread within the hospitals may be playing a significant part, rather than the outbreaks in the community.

There has been major national concern about in-hospital spread of the virus in recent weeks, with the government introducing new mandatory controls on Friday.

https://www.pslhub.org/blogs/entry/...rcent-of-new-covid-cases-caught-on-the-wards/ PUBLISHED 11 June

An article I read recently was discussing a figure of around 20% of cases nationally being acquired in hospital.

 

Supplying care homes with PPE and stopping sending them patients with the virus may have help reduce the death toll too.

 

5k less cases in the UK this Sunday compared to last Sunday.

Deaths are higher but due to 140 being missed off yesterday’s total due to an admin error that were then added onto today’s.

 

Cases per 100k has shrank in Hull for the first time since we went top of the table.

source: @UKCovid19Stats on Twitter.

 

If I read the highlighted sentence correctly, if a virus mutates it has a greater chance of remaining thus (a mutation of the virus), but the human immune system is capable of combating that mutation ( i.e. it doesn't stick !), because there needs to be several/many RNA mutations ? All is well ? Forgive me if I'm being dim here, but there seems to be a logic flaw here ? Why are flu mutations happening all the time and vaccine treatment is necessary annually, especially for older age patients ?

 

The headline CLEARLY say deaths for that month rose 42% to a total of 64,000.

 

Okay, I want to say straight off the bat that the website these links are posted on is ringing alarm bells straight away. In a very, very bad way. But, let's go through the first ten together.

1) Rabail Chaudhrya , George Dranitsarisb , Talha Mubashirc , Justyna Bartoszkoa , Sheila Riazia - conclusion ", full lockdowns (RR=2.47: 95%CI: 1.085.64) and reduced country vulnerability to biological threats (i.e. high scores on the global health security scale for risk environment) (RR=1.55; 95%CI: 1.132.12) were significantly associated with increased patient recovery rates" - so that actually argues the case FOR lockdown (though it does note that obesity, border closures and social measures do play a big part).

2) Jonas Dehning, Johannes Zierenberg, F. Paul Spitzner, Michael Wibral, Joao Pinheiro Neto, Michael Wilczek, Viola Priesemann - they mostly discuss how important it is to note the delay between discovery of infection and action taken. At no point do they denounce lockdowns or say they don't make a difference. In fact, they highlight the fact that only until Germany's 3rd level of lockdown did the virus dip below negative growth.

3) Matthias an der Heiden - it's in German (and if the owner of thefateemperor.com's German is anything like their web design, they didn't understand a word of it) but again, it doesn't say that lockdown's aren't necessary or that they have a negative impact on anything.

4) Simon Wood - Simon Wood is a statistician. He also writes for the spectator, which, in a curious twist, is where the DM get their data from. His methods show that the infection rate did start to decline before the lockdown was initiated, which we already knew looking at the ONS data from the time and was pointed out by many as a failing of the government to not act quicker. It doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work, it discusses the timing at which the lockdown should have taken place. The number of cases was beginning to decline in the days leading up to that, but he doesn't give any explanation into why that might be the case (I'm going to read it again to be sure) and we've seen data fluctuate on weekends; given the early timing and unknown quantities of measurement at the outset of the pandemic, it's safe to assume the data isn't wholly reliable no matter which side of the debate you fall upon.

5) Stefan Homburg - economist and Christof Kuhbandner - psychologist - this is a response to the Flaxman paper. The crux of the discussion is around the rise in infections and deaths just after the UK locked down. They argue that the +23 days number that the model is built on shows a flaw, yet the graph does actually average out for the period they mark out. By this point the virus was substantially weaker, so of course the impact was going to be less substantial than it would immediately after the first measures were put in place.

6) Isaac Ben Israel - I've got massive respect for him, he's a brilliant scientist. But this line in summation of his work was concerning: "simple statistics show the spread of the coronavirus declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it." We know that isn't true, it didn't in this country or in other countries across the world.

7) Paul Hunter - conclusion: Closure of educational facilities, banning mass gatherings and early closure of some but not necessarily all commercial businesses were all associated with reduction of the spread of infection. Closure of all business, no impact. So he seems to think somewhere between full lockdown and the three tier system is best. He did admit that his research did not allow for the nature of reality (a nice acknowledgement) and that the mandate of facemasks was too early in its existence to determine any major impact. So, again, not really a win for anti-lockdown people.

8) Thomas Meunier - oceanographer - concludes the same as Simon Wood, which is that the lockdowns didn't have any impact on the slowing of covid related deaths or illnesses. But, he cannot account for reasons WHY the virus slowed down just before the lockdown came into effect (it doesn't seem like any of these people can) and confidently claims that the lockdowns have zero impact when compared to pre lockdown measures such as washing hands and social distancing. So, he thinks it's a waste of time. Okay, there's one.

9) Marco Colombo, Joseph Mellor, Helen Calhoun, Gabriela Gomes, Paul McKeigue - introduces heterogeneity of susceptibility instead of homogenous susceptibility. This is interesting, though it's worth pointing out that their model shows a much higher R rating than the Flaxman model does, which is obviously a very important factor. It also mentions the claim that "three million deaths were avoided", which as we've already discussed, was a claim taken out of context and is meaningless.

10) Ken Rice, Ben Wynne, Victoria Martin, Graeme J Ackland - acknowledges in the first line that the lockdowns were highly effective, argues that school closures were a source of the virus spreading. An interesting take for sure, but without further research into the subject I'm not convinced on that.


A few things.

1) A lot of these aren't written by scientists, certainly not epidemiologists or virologists.

2) Some of them contradict each other which, if you're trying to make a single argument, isn't very helpful.

3) The owner of that website is one Ivor Cummins who is, to be polite, absolutely ****ing crackers. He claimed, among other things, that "it’s not clear yet whether COVID-19 was weaponized in one of the world’s numerous, and secretive, chemical and biological warfare laboratories and then was accidentally or deliberately released, or whether its toxic potency was accelerated by “normal” genetic mutations as it passed from bats and pangolins through humans.” He has been debunked and denounced several times, quite brutally in some cases. Not suppressed or blocked or whatever, debunked.

I knew the alarm bells were ringing for a reason.

 

I agree,

my response was to this post which insinuated that 60000 died of flu in the January basing it off the same article

 

(Ben help me).

Basically, a mutation is a changed gene. Blue eyes, ginger hair, whatever. In nature, if a mutation is beneficial (or at least non-harmful) to the organism then the trait remains. Mutations are very common in nature and are a key component of evolution. A viral mutation usually leads to something detrimental to the virus because viruses use RNA and not DNA, so they haven't got as much to work with. For the virus to get stronger, you'd have to have a successful mutation many times, which mathematically isn't impossible but would be uncommon for a virus like Covid.

Influenza is prone to successful mutation so vaccines have limited value before they are needed again. You have H and N in influenza, the antigens which your body responds to when you get the flu. Flu survives because those antigens change. Covid, on the other hand, doesn't seem to display the same changes (though, as you rightly stated, that could change).

If you're given the vaccine for the current strain of Covid, it's very, very likely that the mutations in the virus aren't significant enough that the vaccine wouldn't have any impact, or even less impact.

The bugger is, though, that if you catch both at the same time, your body has to fight two infections at once and for a lot of people, that's lethal.

 

Not attempting to question the articles you have been reading ST. Just puzzled that the logic seems to flow against "Darwinian Theory" - as I understand it. Genetic mutation is likely to favour a revised gene, including RNA modifications, that give a species an advantage in its survival endeavour. If in a virus, such a modification may be a pathogen or have other negative impacts on a host (humans in this case), the host would need to adjust accordingly. i.e. modify its immune system's bag of tricks. This can be accomplished by the use of vaccines ( naturally created or synthesized by human scientific research & development).

We don't know enough about the current Covid "bug". Hence the need for more scientific experimentation and captured data analysis.

What you do say is 'follow the "tried and tested" rules' for minimising the impact that we know work (to varying degrees) - to minimise/avoid transmission. Definitely true. Problem seems to be, a fair proportion (different countries and/or cultures) see this "golden rule" differently.

 

I see what you're saying, perhaps I should have been clearer. The mutation could be something very minimal in the virus, enough to make a change but not enough to prevent vaccines from actively working on it. It's going to be a while before we discover whether that's the case, but that's how I understand it at present. The virus has a low mutation rate, according to samples taken, but again it will need a wider base of research to better understand the situation and it could be that more varied mutations are already producing stronger strains.

 

My point exactly. Hence me quizzing your statement I highlighted in post # 1003. These bastard life forms are sneaky and will mutate to survive until we get a vaccine that covers most eventualities readily. Bit like the annual "flu" vaccine flavours we have & continue to develop.