Off Topic Covid 19 restrictions have done one

Yes, the NHS beds crisis does sound familiar
Read this news report: ‘Many A&E units have been severely overcrowded in recent days, with patients lying in corridors and ambulances queuing outside.

‘Hospitals have already been forced to cancel tens of thousands of operations and NHS chiefs fear things will only get worse… On Tuesday, hospitals were ordered to cancel up to 55,000 non-urgent operations and put patients in mixed-sex wards to create more room.’


Sound familiar? But actually it’s three years old, from the Daily Mail of January 6, 2018, under the headline ‘Now the NHS tells us: Don’t get ill.’

If you look back into the archives of any newspaper or TV news station, you will discover that the NHS has a ‘winter crisis’ thanks to overloaded intensive care wards, year after year.

But nobody ever thought before that this could be solved by strangling the country and forbidding grandparents to hug their grandchildren.

 

well said

 

The difference this winter is that there's a pandemic of a relatively unknown virus which spreads relatively rapidly via human close contact with only recently developed vaccines. The pressure on the NHS is therefore commensurately much higher, and therefore it's more critical to have more stringent processes/procedures to help mitigate transmission. In other words, the danger dial has been turned up much higher than in previous winters.

 

100% correct.
Hull Royal was jam packed last winter with norovirus...FACT.(my cousins a nurse in it)

 

Infection rate dropping.
Position dropping.
Look at how green it’s become.

 

Might have been on Twitter, or here (?) but I read one vet saying they should be doing the jabs because he can do one every minute even when the patient is biting him!

 

The Daily Mail !!!

 

who would have guessed that getting people to keep their distance and wash their hands would lead to a reduction in highly infectious diseases, eh?

 

How soon will we see the benefits of the vaccine rollout?
The Spectator | John Roberts

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-soon-will-we-see-the-benefits-of-the-vaccine-roll-out

How soon might we see the vaccine effect? With the programme in full swing, and over 2.5 million people with their first jab, the hope is that the prioritisation of the most vulnerable groups means that we will soon see a meaningful reduction in the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths. But how soon? For some time now, my colleagues at the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group have been looking at various figures.

We are familiar with modelling showing how Covid-19 deaths may rise if the rise of the virus were to continue unchecked. But what follows is modelling for a different scenario: how the Covid-19 figures would fall if things go broadly to plan.
As with all models, all depends on the assumptions. The following are used:-
The vaccine is 70 per cent effective at preventing infection (as per the view of the four countries’ Chief Medical Officers).
But that the vaccine is 100 per cent effective in preventing illness serious enough to prevent hospitalisation and death (there was only one serious illness reported across both the Pfizer and Oxford AstraZeneca trials).
For take-up, it’s likely that the most vulnerable groups will be very keen to be protected, and similarly for those working in health and care settings. The full take-up assumed will obviously include an element of overstatement, but still indicates the potential benefit that we could see.
That protection kicks in 14 days after the vaccine.
It takes 3 days for a case to show up, 10 days for hospitalisation and 17 days from infection to death. With another two or three days to then show up in the figures.
The official target – to vaccinate 14 million by mid-February – is hit.
So by mid-Feb, the first four priority groups (accounting for 90 per cent of deaths) are covered. With protection kicking in by early March.
Given the above, how would the Covid statistics change by March?
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Covid-19 cases: a 15 per cent reduction by early March. The first four priority groups (who together make up a fifth of the population) are due to be vaccinated by mid-February: allowing for 70 per cent vaccine effectiveness, this could mean a reduction of around 15 per cent of Covid cases by early March. But more important are the implications for hospital capacity, particularly intensive care demand.
Hospital admissions: a 60 per cent reduction by mid-March. With the burden of disease much greater on the older population, the benefits of the vaccination strategy become apparent in terms of hospital admissions, with an 60 per cent reduction envisaged by mid-March.
Intensive care: only a third reduction. However, the impact on intensive care units is noticeably less, because the oldest and most vulnerable are less likely to be admitted to ICU (based on clinical assessment of the benefit of the treatment). So here we only expect a reduction of around one third, which is likely to leave these units very stretched.
Covid-19 deaths: down by 88 per cent. The good news is that we expect vaccinations of these first four groups to reduce deaths by up to 88 per cent (slightly fewer in hospitals). This should all have fed through by late March, a full year from the first wave peak, although reporting in ONS data will take a little longer to emerge.

Hopefully there will be an additional benefit, with those vaccinated being less likely to transmit the virus, reducing the rate of spread. With only 20 per cent vaccinated in this first phase, and no conclusive evidence yet of reduced transmission, we’ve not modelled any benefit from such an effect.

So deaths should be much lower from April onwards. But this is, of course, just one part of Covid. We must not forget that those yet to be vaccinated will remain at risk of serious illness in the short term, as well as the unknown long-term consequences of infection. Our modelling only looks at the over-70s (Groups 1-4), as that is the government’s immediate focus. But continued vaccine rollout, at pace, is needed to get the country back to as close to normal as is possible at the earliest opportunity. With recent progress encouraging, there's a possibility that the first milestone will not only be met but exceeded. We all must hope for tha

 

Thank you for posting that. It’s only a matter of time before the same happens to that one, but I’ve lost count of the number of similar graphs I’ve seen posted on social media as ‘proof’ that the COVID rates just consist of falsely re-badging all normal deaths, without understanding or acknowledging your main point that actually rates of other infectious diseases that are passed on through poor hand or respiratory hygiene will drop when hand washing and appropriate PPE is more widely adopted.

 

Yes Daily Mail, supposedly yesterday mouth piece of the Tories, criticising the way things were handled under them. Something the Grauniad and Mirror don't do when Labour are in.

 

Too much to read and take in there, can you just tell me what date it will be?

 

I've seen similar graphs for influenza A and B but for the life of me I couldn’t find them last night. Basically, all the normal bugs that flare up in winter are hardly being seen at all at the moment.

The reason COVID is still spreading despite preventative measures is because it is a brand new virus. Enough of the population have been previously exposed to norovirus and flu/vaccinated against flu that distancing and hand washing are enough to dramatically limit their spread.

 

42nd of Novembuary

 

I believe that Covid spreads more easily than those other viruses too, but I could be wrong.
Either way the measures people are taking for it (due to the fact that it is certainly more life threatening than the others across the population) is bound to cause a decrease in those ones.
I suspect the reason they are saying there will be some things still in place next Winter is because those measures will reduce NHS winter pressures if the vaccine has minimised Covid so they’d like some to stay.
I think it was on last leg on Friday some woman was going back over previous trends (after 1918 flu etc) to predict what might happen after this and her view was mask wearing would still remain by people who had colds etc, just because it’s polite to not gob your illness over everyone else.
She also predicted huge amounts of shagging as soon as people can touch each other based on the massive increase in syphilis after 1918.

(she might not have used exactly those words)

So something to look forward to for some people anyway

 

Going by the number of people who have decided the pleas to stay at home don't apply to them and have travelled miles to wander about on the seafront today the panic is over, and everything is hunky dory.

 

People in England are being vaccinated four times faster than new cases of the virus are being detected, NHS England's chief executive has said.

Sir Simon Stevens told the BBC that 140 people a minute were now being given the jab, usually the first dose of two.

Sir Simon told the Andrew Marr Show some hospitals would open for vaccinations 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a trial basis in the next 10

Half of all over-80s have now been vaccinated, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said. "Each jab brings us one step closer to normal," he said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55694967