Covid

[Danny]

Jan 21, 2022 12:09:43 GMT @tw said:

lens Masks are not perfect but let's agree to disagree to their effectiveness (and note we're specifically talking about the 'good' masks being used properly for certain settings). Where we do agree is that they will likely be used far less often and in far less settings in the future. Possibly we get to a situation where they are not mandatory, anywhere, any of the time - I hope[1] that becomes the case.

If masks at all, all they can do is reduce your risk on that occasion. If you are undergoing surgery, they can reduce the chance you get a bug while it is going. But if in such a case they reduced risk from 99% to 1%, that 1% still means on 1 in 100 occasions you will catch the bug.

If it was a one off exposure to covid then it might significantly cut cases. But when there is an endemic disease its the same as repeating your operation every single day, unti lthat 1/100 chance comes up and you finally catch it. 

All the measures combined have failed to reduce the chance of catching covid. The whole lot have therefore been useless and failed. Its ony in special situations they can help, such as trying to protect espeically vulnerable people. Fr the general population trying ti restrict spread has been counter productive and can nly have increased the number of vulnerable who end up catching it. And therefore increased the death toll.

Extending the duration of this epidemic to two (and a half) years hasnt been paid for just in terms of money and loss of liberty, but in lives too.

[Deleted]

Jan 22, 2022 10:39:49 GMT lululemonmustdobetter said:

Both of us now have to go into central London for work next week and it’s been a right royal pain trying to sort everything out. Any they wonder why people are pissed off with them, and as this responsibility primarily falls on women to sort out I can see this and other similar issues contributing to what appears to be a gender difference emerging in VI!

Wait till you find out the disaster the trains are now.

[Deleted]

My 95 year old father-in-law tested positive 3 days ago and has had no symptoms at all. His Care Home has had 5 residents and 2 staff positive this week - and none of them are ill.
It just shows how mild Omicron must be.

[pete]

Jan 27, 2022 20:55:02 GMT johntel said:

My 95 year old father-in-law tested positive 3 days ago and has had no symptoms at all. His Care Home has had 5 residents and 2 staff positive this week - and none of them are ill.
It just shows how mild Omicron must be.

Its still killing people.

[lens]

Pretty interesting item from the BBC IMO - www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-60161124

Maybe most interesting is looking at the graphs of cases versus age groups. Looks overwhelmingly like any growth in cases is in younger age groups, whilst very little in the elderly. (Which coincides with anecdotal reports from my wife talking about high levels amongs pupils at her school.) Hardly a surprise. The age groups least likely to be vaccinated, and schools always have been a breeding ground. (With masks not having made a lot of difference.)

And above may also help explain the next graph, about how far fewer cases are now resulting in death. Younger people have always been least likely to have a serious outcome, and with most cases now in the young (together with vaccinations and better treatments for the older and more vulnerable) it shouldn't be a surprise. Before even thinking about Omicron apparently being intrinsically milder.

To Pete - yes, it's still killing people, but so are many, many other things, in much greater number than Covid now. You also have to estimate how many Covid deaths (now) are "with" rather than "because of". If anything ("X") was present in 1 in 20 people (even if totally harmless), then with about 2,000 deaths every day, you'd expect about 100 to be of a person with "X", even if it was irrelevant. Yes, there obviously still are deaths because of Covid, but it should also be obvious that the death figures now are very inflated for the reason above. From the final paragraphs:

"Edinburgh University's Prof Devi Sridhar, accept it is time to change tactics.

It was reasonable to move away from restrictions, she said in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, as they were at risk of becoming more disruptive than the now "defanged" virus itself."

[Deleted]

Jan 29, 2022 0:46:02 GMT lens said:

"Edinburgh University's Prof Devi Sridhar, accept it is time to change tactics.

It was reasonable to move away from restrictions, she said in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, as they were at risk of becoming more disruptive than the now "defanged" virus itself."

Link for the article you mention in case others want to read it:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/19/science-covid-ineradicable-disease-prevention

[Danny]

Jan 29, 2022 0:46:02 GMT lens said:

Maybe most interesting is looking at the graphs of cases versus age groups. Looks overwhelmingly like any growth in cases is in younger age groups, whilst very little in the elderly.

Thats normal, there have always been fewer cases amongst the elderly, by a factor around x10 (ratio has varied a bit).

(Which coincides with anecdotal reports from my wife talking about high levels amongs pupils at her school.) Hardly a surprise. The age groups least likely to be vaccinated, and schools always have been a breeding ground. (With masks not having made a lot of difference.)

The age distrbution of cases doesnt seem to have been altered much by vaccination. Its difficult to tell how much the enormous concentration of resources in trying to isolate kids and test kids has reduced spread amongst them from the natural trend, so its difficult to try to isolate the effect of not vaccinating them, from effects due to changing isolation policy. There has been a big surge of covid amongst 0-9 this time round, which didn't happen last year. I recall reports from 2020 saying under tens were essentially immune to covid infection, and it would be very interesting to find out why this natural protection disappeared.

One possible reason is they had more acquired cross  immunity to corona viruses pre covid because they would have caught them regularly, whereas we have now prevented new youngsters catching these safe corona diseases for two years, so they have become more susceptible to covid. It was proven in 2020 and later research that infection by one corona virus generates immunity to different ones, so exposure to the safe ones in circulation pre 2020 did generate immunity to covid. Since then kids will have still generated immunity to corona viruses generally, but  now by catching covid rather than from catching other corona strains. Without really coming to  more harm than from the other corona viruses.

Zoe data suggest lockdown measures were much more successful at preventing spread of non covid diseases than covid, so they would have suppressed the acquisition of cross imunity to covid. Lockdown was an anti natural vaccination policy.

Kids caught 3 or 4 corona virus infections each year pre covid. This number fell with age, so adults only averaged one infection every 3-4 years.  That might reflect kids having more spread opportunities, but it might also reflect a growth of background immunity level with age, after multiple exposures. It looks like the vaccines only create a mediocre immunity to covid which is good enough to reduce severity, but not to reduce total number of infections.  All the vaccines seem to be essentially the same, and none has been updated for changes in the virus, which of course would happen with natural exposure. Repeat re-vaccination is therefore not likely to build on our immunity as well as does  repeat infection with different strains.

[Danny]

Jan 27, 2022 20:55:02 GMT johntel said:

My 95 year old father-in-law tested positive 3 days ago and has had no symptoms at all. His Care Home has had 5 residents and 2 staff positive this week - and none of them are ill.
It just shows how mild Omicron must be.

I imagine people there will have been vaccinated, and its quite possible they have also had covid. Whichever might be responsible, most people have stronger immunity now than two years ago...so it isnt surprising there are fewer bad outcomes.

I have yet to see any good analysis whether the vaccination/infection policy has worked, so there is no longer any point in special restrictions on care homes. It would be rather to the point to find this out.

[matt126]

It is possible that some cross immunity was lost due to lockdowns and Covid safe measures stopping the spread of other viruses. Maybe this current version of the virus though as adapted and spreads faster in young children. With regards vaccines it is clear boosters might help short term protection from the virus but do not have much impact on the spread. Going forward giving 4th doses would have little impact, just look at Israel number of cases after 4th booster. Most countries are using Pfizer and Moderna and are basically the same spike vax. You do wonder why vaccines were not updated previously before the 3rd doses were rolled out worldwide as a slightly different spike on vaccine would broaden immunity. Any 4th doses from Pfizer/Moderna would need to be updated to have much use. The Novavax vaccine is different technology so might be more useful in the short term.

[leftieliberal]

Ursodeoxycholate as a possible treatment for severe covid: theconversation.com/gut-bacteria-could-help-protect-against-covid-and-even-lead-to-a-new-drug-new-research-175173

What is unusual about this is that it was found as a result of studying why the death rate for covid varies so widely across the world, even in developed countries.

"So how is this Japanese study unique? For one thing, its authors say it is the abundance of a specific type of bacteria called Collinsella that coincides with protection from severe COVID. This is unusual because in people from the US and the UK, Collinsella is actually linked to eating a diet low in vegetables and to higher levels of inflammation.

"But the Japanese investigators also found something else. People better protected from severe COVID seemed to have high levels of a substance called ursodeoxycholate in their bodies as well. It’s what’s known as a secondary bile acid."

[Danny]

Jan 31, 2022 18:26:32 GMT matt126 said:

 You do wonder why vaccines were not updated previously before the 3rd doses were rolled out worldwide as a slightly different spike on vaccine would broaden immunity.

yes I did too. My conclusion is that the manufacturers could quite easily have updated their formula and it would have been nodded through testing as a minor change. That they have not done so suggests to me they think it would not make much difference to its effectiveness.

As to why, I suggest thats  to do with the theoretical basis behind the vaccines. They have all taken the same strategy to concentrate on the virus spike protein because they think its an essential part of the virus which cannot change much. Although spike proteins have changed, this assumption has remained true, so there isnt much to update. Antibodies arent produced simply to one long string of protein which is the whole spike, but to chunks of it, and even with the current mutations these chunks are still a fair fit.

There has been research highlighting the difference between the body's response to actual covid and vaccine, which shows the body produces a lower antibody response to spike proteins when faced with the real thing than the vaccines. I dont find that surprising, it was the design goal of the vaccines to create a huge response to spike. The problem though is that natural protection is distributed across all parts of the virus. With flu, whole virus vaccines give better durable protection against new strains, and this is very likely true for covid too. So the way to do better would be to abandon the design of the experimental vaccines used against covid, and go back to a more traditional whole virus vaccine. I assume this is harder to make, and comes with its own problems of exactly how you disable a virus but in the process dont destroy it so its unrecogniseable by the body.

The antibody testing usually done to assess immunity uses tests which are looking for immunity to spike. They naturally find a higher response against spike from vaccine than infection, and they claim on that basis vaccine is better. But it isnt. The tests are biased to find the expected outcome form vaccination and thats what they do. It doesnt say anything about which is really more protective.

So..the manufacturers picked a method for making a vaccine by targeting on a relatively simple but essential part of the virus. Because of the method, they cannot really make it more effective by updating that choice. We have a vaccine and a method of making it which can only deliver a relatively poor vaccine. There is no simple way to significantly improve it.

[lens]

Feb 2, 2022 15:56:01 GMT Danny said:

We have a vaccine and a method of making it which can only deliver a relatively poor vaccine.

"Relatively poor?" There's a glass half empty comment if ever I heard one! It may not be perfect, but compared to outcomes of cases in 2020, then not only does it make you much less likely to catch it in the first place, but has also meant it's far less likely to be severe if you do. (And we've got a case in our house at the moment - a few years ago we've have described it as "a mild cold".)

That's compared to several cases I know over a year ago where it was typically "like having really bad flu for 2 weeks", and one case that ended up in a coma for weeks with life changing effects.

I'd consider that "relatively very good" - and I'm not usually a glass half full type of person!

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

From the Telegraph

“Lockdowns prevented just 0.2 per cent of deaths in comparison with simply trusting people to do the right thing, a new study suggests.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, in the US, Lund University, in Sweden and the Centre for Political Studies, in Denmark, said the costs to society far outweighed the benefits and called for lockdown to be “rejected out of hand” as a future pandemic policy.

The team even found that some lockdown measures may have increased deaths by stopping access to outdoor space, “pushing people to meet at less safe places” while isolating infected people indoors, where they could pass the virus on to family members and housemates.”

…

“To calculate the benefits of lockdown, the researchers looked at 24 academic papers estimating their effectiveness as well as other interventions such as wearing masks, business and school closures, border closures and stay at home orders.”

[Danny]

Feb 2, 2022 23:37:58 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

From the Telegraph

“Lockdowns prevented just 0.2 per cent of deaths in comparison with simply trusting people to do the right thing, a new study suggests.

paper here sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

[neilj]

Some more details of the report on lockdowns here
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10466995/New-study-says-lockdowns-reduced-COVID-mortality-2-percent.html
Economists who carried out review said border closures had virtually zero effect on Covid mortality (-0.1%)
However, researchers found closing nonessential shops was most effective intervention, causing 10.6% fall

Worth noting this report by economists, rather than medically qualified people and is not been peer-reviewed

Also worth noting 'Critics have accused them of 'cherry-picking' studies to suit their narrative and have raised doubts about the biases of its authors, who have been vocal about lockdowns and vaccine mandates on social media.

Most scientists believe that, before the arrival of vaccines and antivirals, lockdowns had a significant effect on cutting transmission and therefore reducing the number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by Covid'

Seems more cherry picking from lockdown sceptics to get the result they want

[Danny]

Feb 3, 2022 7:02:07 GMT neilj said:

Most scientists believe that, before the arrival of vaccines and antivirals, lockdowns had a significant effect on cutting transmission and therefore reducing the number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by Covid'

Do they? Neil Ferguson and a couple of other government medical advsors were dismissed beause they broke regulations. Ferguson said he did so because having had covid, there wasnt any risk from what he did.

Where is the evidence 'most' scientists believe the restrictions worked? I imagine you would have put ferguson in this camp, whereas his honest view was that he wasnt. Do you mean staffers paid by government continue to state this view in public? I was talking to a senior nurse last week, who thought the whole set of restrictions had been pointless. Particularly masks as worn by the general public.

Feb 3, 2022 7:02:07 GMT neilj said:

Worth noting this report by economists, rather than medically qualified people and is not been peer-reviewed

Indeed it is. Many medics have staked their personal reputations on the effectiveness of restrictions. Hard to climb down after that even when you know you are wrong. Not to mention the massive amounts of money which have been made by medical supply companies because of the restrictions. How big a bribe would someone need before they decided to slope the truth a bit towards personal profit?

I dont suggest medics deliberately gave bad advice. The 2020 spring lockdown was justified based upon expected massive overload of medical  services by millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths. So the goal was to slow the outbreak and make it more manageable. Thats the right reason for lockdowns, even though this huge overload never in fact happened. But they didnt know that beforehand.  The slogan at the time was 'flattening the curve'.

The mail article also says this, "They said that while there was some evidence lockdowns reduce transmission, death rates tended to even out as time went on, with difference in population age, health and health care systems the defining factors of countries' death rates"

This is something I have also pointed out: while measures might temporarily reduce rates of infections and death, this simply slows the procss and doesnt prevent it. The same end point is eventually reached anyway.  Lockdown and voluntary separation did not reduce the total number of deaths even if they worked temporarily, and there is evidence they worked temporarily. People are muddling up whether something can reduce spread on a single occasion, with whether overall it reduces the total of cases.  The problem is that the fewer people catch it today, the more susceptible people there will still be tomorrow, and it never ends until they are all infected.

The most likely train of events is that SAGE misunderstood what happened in April 2020, when lockdown was intoduced and cases fell 90%.  This rate of fall never happened again, indeed at some points cases were rising through new imposed lockdowns. Sage believed this huge fall was caused by lockdown when it was really caused by the natural end of that wave. But they created a polic of supprssion of covid through use of lockdown and testing...which never worked. A terrible mistake costing the nation overall 1/2 to 1 trillion pounds.

Feb 3, 2022 7:02:07 GMT neilj said:

However, researchers found closing nonessential shops was most effective intervention, causing 10.6% fall

The mail article says they found most of this effect was from closing establishments selling alcohol for consumption there. So drunks were more likely to spread the disease. Somewhat misleading to describe this as 'non essential shops'.

[Deleted]

Feb 2, 2022 23:37:58 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Certainly now and in the future then the GBD[1] should IMO be applied as the Science of 'Vaccines+'[2] strategy, along with individual responsibility (behavioural adjustment) mitigates Covid and flattens the 'rolling hills' of what is now an endemic virus to 'flu-like' levels that NHS can cope with.

I wouldn't rule anything out for the future though. There might occasionally be circumstances where some limited lockdown measures are warranted (eg a nasty new variant where we should give the vaccine folks time to quickly develop a tweaked vaccine and consider some lockdown measures as a 'bridge' to get there). Lockdown should be a last resort, used in the minimum way for the minimum period when there is genuine high risk NHS will become overwhelmed and Science (vaccines+) just needs a small period of time to again come to the rescue. 

[1] My concern at the time GBD was announced was that we were, at that point in time (ie Oct'20), close to having 'vaccines+' do the 'heavy lifting' so a lockdown in Autumn-Winter'20-21 was justifiable given the circumstances at that time. Those circumstances have changed. 

gbdeclaration.org

[2] It's not just vaccines but also improved drugs and treatment protocols as medical 'Pharma' interventions (PI) that reduce the need for 'Non-Pharma Interventions' (NPI). There is also loads of 'spin-off' upside from the huge investment in vaccines in the last few years. Not my specialised subject but the investment is likely to produce vaccines for many other viruses and diseases and has attracted talent as well as money into 'Life Sciences' (in UK and rWorld). The legacy of the OxAZ model will hopefully be used in other sectors as well. 

[Danny]

Feb 3, 2022 8:58:59 GMT @tw said:

There might occasionally be circumstances where some limited lockdown measures are warranted (eg a nasty new variant where we should give the vaccine folks time to quickly develop a tweaked vaccine and consider some lockdown measures as a 'bridge' to get there). Lockdown should be a last resort, used in the minimum way for the minimum period when there is genuine high risk NHS will become overwhelmed and Science (vaccines+) just needs a small period of time to again come to the rescue. 

So you would agree there was no purpose for lockdown since maybe March 2020?

The NHS has capacity crises every winter because it is DESIGNED to have capacity crises every winter. It maintains a bed capacity based upon average demand, so it is guaranteed a shortage in winter when more people always get sick. To change that, you have to increase NHS bed capacity, which means adding all the other additional resources needed too. Otherwise you have to create a plan which does not involve halting society, which is vastly expensive and always less cost effective than simply not having a lockdown and budgeting more for health care to provide more beds permanently. In the past we never had lockdowns simply because they cost more and deliver less health gain than simply spending more on the NHS.

Lockdown did not give vaccine manufactures time to create their vaccines. It maybe extended each outbreak by a month or two, which just meant they still ended before a vaccine arrived but caused more economic harm. After spring 2021 there was not even this justification for further lockdowns, because all the high risk had by then been vaccinated. That was already as good as this vaccine gets.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

@tw

yes, ideally we should increasingly do those things that might render lockdowns less necessary, and less severe. If we do have lockdowns, we might do more to ameliorate the negative effects.

In the first instance though, we weren’t best placed to do a GBD-style “focused protection” approach, because we were rubbish at things like shielding the viulnerable, protecting care homes etc.

We were rubbish at lockdown too, making things worse by ejecting infected people from hospitals back into care homes etc. - we didn’t even know how well masks might work.

Either way, lockdown or no, we were screwing up. I’d like to think we are better now, but there are still gaping holes, like not doing nearly enough to improve people’s immune systems etc.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Feb 3, 2022 6:29:31 GMT Danny said:

Feb 2, 2022 23:37:58 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

From the Telegraph

“Lockdowns prevented just 0.2 per cent of deaths in comparison with simply trusting people to do the right thing, a new study suggests.

paper here sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

Thanks for the link Danny 👍

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Feb 3, 2022 7:05:17 GMT neilj said:

Seems more cherry picking from lockdown sceptics to get the result they want

Not too bothered about it being economists (especially after seeing how some of the epidemiologists go about things at times) - if it’s right it’s right no matter who does it, but would prefer it to be peer-reviewed and obviously one has to be wary of cherry-picking. I don’t really get the feeling we have really come close to doing the science on this properly - even just trying to figure out the efficacy of masks was rather behind the curve.

[lens]

Feb 3, 2022 7:05:17 GMT neilj said:

Also worth noting 'Critics have accused them of 'cherry-picking' studies to suit their narrative and have raised doubts about the biases of its authors, who have been vocal about lockdowns and vaccine mandates on social media.

My own feeling is that there's been a lot of cherry picking from many "experts" with widely differing, even opposing, views both for and against lockdown! I hate to say it, but when Boris said he was "following the science" he probably was intending to do just that - but the poor chap must have been driven mad by all the differing views he was getting as to what "the science" actually was. In particular, mathematical modelling at times seemed little better than guesswork. (OK, albeit a little more informed, but so often "worst case" scenarios were seized on, even though it was known the probabilities of such coming to pass were slight.) I got the impression that the modellers were far too keen to err on the side of pessimism on a basis that they would be in less trouble if the eventual scenario was better than the prediction than if worse.

Feb 3, 2022 7:05:17 GMT neilj said:

Most scientists believe that, before the arrival of vaccines and antivirals, lockdowns had a significant effect on cutting transmission and therefore reducing the number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by Covid'

Personally, I'm prepared to put a lot of weight behind "raw" figures (especially hospitalisations and deaths) with rough correlation to what measures were happening or not at the time. On that basis, top of my list are vaccinations, with lockdowns being effective as a means of rapidly limiting peaks. Other measures - masks, vaccine passports, surge testing, and the much hoped for (and expensive) app being far more limited in general. (Given how much it cost, and the promotion it received at first, funny how nobody ever mentions "the app" nowadays, isn't it?   )

I think it's wrong to talk about lockdowns as being "good or "bad" per se. At several times they held back a surge and prevented health services being overwhelmed, and delayed the pandemic (with consequent lives saved) until vaccines were available. But after a point they end up doing more harm than good, and it's amusing that I believe it's only China, North Korea and Turkmenistan which are still clinging rigidly to the idea of a "zero-Covid" end game and seemingly indefinite lockdowns. Lockdowns should be seen as a tool with varying degrees of strictness, and like any tool there are times when they are appropriate - and times when they are not.

On a personal level, then my daughter has just tested positive, though practically in her case a few years ago we would just have said she had a mild cold - end of story. It started with a runny nose, and for several days she did a lateral flow test, which was negative - it wasn't until several days later that an LFT finally gave a positive result. Pretty poor for something which is costing the taxpayer billions and generating tons of plastic to go to landfill, and far from the first time I've been told of such happening.

[Deleted]

Feb 3, 2022 21:05:42 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

@tw

yes, ideally we should increasingly do those things that might render lockdowns less necessary, and less severe. If we do have lockdowns, we might do more to ameliorate the negative effects.

In the first instance though, we weren’t best placed to do a GBD-style “focused protection” approach, because we were rubbish at things like shielding the viulnerable, protecting care homes etc.

We were rubbish at lockdown too, making things worse by ejecting infected people from hospitals back into care homes etc. - we didn’t even know how well masks might work.

Either way, lockdown or no, we were screwing up. I’d like to think we are better now, but there are still gaping holes, like not doing nearly enough to improve people’s immune systems etc.

I'm not going to disagree about the past. It certainly took a long time before we looked to how countries like HK, Singapore, etc 'split the herd' (ie all the 'cocooning' of Care Homes, etc I used to mention back in the day). Lots of others, notably WHO[1], 'dithered' on masks for a long time and there was a recent lengthy discussion on their role going forward in this thread. 

I also agree there are 'holes' in how we can cope going forward (ie we need more +'s on a 'vaccine+' strategy). I'd prefer to see the public inquiry sooner rather than later (eg Summer'22 ahead of Winter'22-3). It would naive to think it would be much more than a 'witch hunt' for the public+press (and possibly why some within CON might want Boris to survive a bit longer) BUT I hope the 'experts' that will offer advice in the future and those in govt who will make policy for the future can learn from mistakes of the past, adopt 'best practices' from rWorld[2], etc.

I think we are 'better' now (from a very low base!) but we're still a long, long, way from 'perfect' 

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

[1] edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-recommendation-trnd/index.html

[2] It's not my area of expertise and is increasingly dropping as an area of interest BUT given it was a Global pandemic then I'd hope that Global lessons can be learned. Every country is a bit different BUT some of the 'successful' approaches should become 'best practice' for others and I've no issue on copying good ideas!

[Danny]

Feb 3, 2022 23:25:37 GMT lens said:

I think it's wrong to talk about lockdowns as being "good or "bad" per se. At several times they held back a surge and prevented health services being overwhelmed, and delayed the pandemic (with consequent lives saved) until vaccines were available. But after a point they end up doing more harm than good,...

really cannot let that go. There is no evidence lockdowns have reduced the total number of cases or serious cases. The claim for them was that preventing medical services being overrun by cases meant is was possible to treat everyone ill, so fewer died, but again I dont see evidence services would have been significantly overrun without lockdowns. All the evidence is that comparing places where lockdowns did not happen to similar circumstances where they did...the final outcomes were much the same. Over the years I have posted many such comparisons as they arose. Covid mostly did its own thing regardless of how we tried to intervene, and there are good reasons to explain why.

1)The first reason is that it is impossible to lock down and effectively isolate a modern society where everyone depends on everyone else. Maybe half the work force had to carry on much as normal.

2)The second is that epidemics only end after enough people become immune. If you stop someone catching it today, they remain at risk until they.  All any sort of restriction can do is delay someone catching the disease, and they will catch it once those restrictions end.

What we saw was a combination of both these in operation. We couldnt suppress spread enough to reduce R below 1. It carried on more slowly perhaps but still only took maybe a month or at most two extra to go through the population. There was no benefit from this delay, generally hospitals were not overloaded and would have done better overall to have had their covid cases more concentrated into a shorter time. The exact opposite of what lockdown would achieve.

On a personal level, then my daughter has just tested positive, though practically in her case a few years ago we would just have said she had a mild cold - end of story. It started with a runny nose, and for several days she did a lateral flow test, which was negative - it wasn't until several days later that an LFT finally gave a positive result. Pretty poor for something which is costing the taxpayer billions and generating tons of plastic to go to landfill, and far from the first time I've been told of such happening.

I mentioned months ago they do not work very well. Many cases will have been missed. probably form the very start - testing was a failure all round and we would have done better simply telling people who felt ill to stay home until they felt better. Covid is just another corona virus which causes colds.

[lens]

Feb 4, 2022 14:03:55 GMT Danny said:

There is no evidence lockdowns have reduced the total number of cases or serious cases. The claim for them was that preventing medical services being overrun by cases meant is was possible to treat everyone ill, so fewer died, but again I dont see evidence services would have been significantly overrun without lockdowns.

Well, it was a pretty close run thing, wasn't it? "What if" can never be 100% sure, but I really think you should have a long conversation with a paramedic, and ask them about the work load during the first few months of the pandemic, and the first few months of 2021. Ask them what happened to response times because they were getting so many callouts to Covid patients with severe breathing difficulties. What's the evidence for no lockdown at such a time would have made no difference?

You may argue that some countries managed without lockdowns - which may be true, but is hardly like for like. Likely is that for a variety of reasons (geographic, population density, genetics, average population age etc etc) some countries were always more likely to have an easier time....... so no need for health service protecting lockdowns. Not everyone will need (say) heart surgery this year, but that's no argument for saying that it's not very necessary for some people!

[leftieliberal]

BBC2 documentary on the AZ vaccine on tomorrow at 9pm. Meanwhile here's the web page on it: www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-60259302

It's pretty scathing about EU leaders and their vaccine nationalism.

"I've been asking one central question: did politics and national interests get in the way of ambitions for the vaccine?

"Sir John Bell, Regius professor at Oxford University and a man at the heart of the team that got the Oxford vaccine out of the lab and into the arms of millions, is highly critical about decision-makers in the EU.

"They have damaged the reputation of the vaccine in a way that echoes around the rest of the world," he told us. "I think bad behaviour from scientists and from politicians has probably killed hundreds of thousands of people - and that they cannot be proud of."

Macron is no better than Johnson.

[matt126]

You would think after this pandemic there would be some sort of study into how effective preventative measures such as face masks are and which type of lockdown type measures are effective . It is difficult comparing country to country with different reporting and testing regimes however it does seem that measures like closing / restricting hospitality/ restricting capacity at outdoor sporting events are less effective when for example you look at the Netherlands cases recently which have been as high if not higher than countries with less restrictive measures. The issue with these sort of measures is that they probably encourage mixing elsewhere in less ventilated indoor space. Measures like we had in the UK recently under Plan B might work to a small extent

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Feb 4, 2022 8:13:19 GMT @tw said:

Feb 3, 2022 21:05:42 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

@tw

BUT I hope the 'experts' that will offer advice in the future and those in govt who will make policy for the future can learn from mistakes of the past, adopt 'best practices' from rWorld[2], etc.

I think we are 'better' now (from a very low base!) but we're still a long, long, way from 'perfect' 

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

I’m not sure how close they are to really modelling what was going on, and some of the mistakes were so obviously a problem - e.g. discharging infected patients into care homes - it does not fill one with the greatest degree of confidence. There is also quite the lack of consensus, and the fact as Leftieliberal pointed out, we HAD a Coronavirus pandemic plan as far back as New Labour but they never adopted it. It’s one of those things where you might hope for the best that they sort it all out but plan otherwise.

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/covid-plan-uk-government-sars-coronavirus-b1893726.html

“Britain’s ‘lost’ blueprint for fighting a coronavirus outbreak – written 16 years ago”

[Danny]

Jan 28, 2022 23:13:26 GMT pete said:

Jan 27, 2022 20:55:02 GMT johntel said:

My 95 year old father-in-law tested positive 3 days ago and has had no symptoms at all. His Care Home has had 5 residents and 2 staff positive this week - and none of them are ill.
It just shows how mild Omicron must be.

Its still killing people.

So are cars on the roads, both by collision and through air pollution. Yet we dont ban cars. And they kill young people, not those already old and sick.

[Danny]

Feb 6, 2022 23:15:40 GMT lens said:

Feb 4, 2022 14:03:55 GMT Danny said:

There is no evidence lockdowns have reduced the total number of cases or serious cases. The claim for them was that preventing medical services being overrun by cases meant is was possible to treat everyone ill, so fewer died, but again I dont see evidence services would have been significantly overrun without lockdowns.

Well, it was a pretty close run thing, wasn't it? "What if" can never be 100% sure, but I really think you should have a long conversation with a paramedic, and ask them about the work load during the first few months of the pandemic, and the first few months of 2021. Ask them what happened to response times because they were getting so many callouts to Covid patients with severe breathing difficulties. What's the evidence for no lockdown at such a time would have made no difference?

See paper above which analysed 20,000 covid papers for evidence of the effectiveness of lockdown. They ended up with only 30 odd papers based upon factual evidence they considered reliable, after eliminating all the comparisons based upon modelling (ie, guesswork) and official case numbers (which are wholly dependant upon the amount of testing being done at a particular time). So you are right, there is very little puplished evidence either way for effectiveness or not of restrictions. However the paper concluded mandatory restrictions were responsible for reducing deaths by only 0.2%, which is about 2 bilion pounds per life saved.

There was a paper published summer 2020 wich argued restrictions were hopelessly inefficient in terms of lives saved per pound spent, compared to normal funding on the NHS. So had all the money been saved and covid ignored, we could have saved more lives by spending it over many years in the ordinary way. Indeed, had we already been doing that, then the NHS would have had more capacity to deal with winter crises, which happeneevery year when it is overrun by one respiratory disease or another. Covid is not unique. The problem of an inadequately resourced NHS was very obvious over this recent Christmas when lockdown restrictions were again imposed. Yet the NHS had no problem because of too many covid cases. They stayed at a low percentage of bed occupancy. It only had problems because of general staff shortages from unfilled posts and staff illness (and most of that was probaby asymptomatic people testing positive). Most of the problems caused by covid would have been resolved simply by having a bigger NHS with a bigger ongoing budget on a par with other rich european nations. Dont forget the emergency Nightingale hospitals built for the first outbreak were never used. The risk from covid was always grossly over estimated and has never been realised anywhere under any circumstances.

At the moment official government case numbers are showing a steady fall from the January peak. whereas Zoe numbers showed a relatively smaller first peak, but are now showing a whole second peak of cases amongst older people, which government fgures have completely missed. The most likely reason for this is government before christmas hyped the use of testing and therefore more tests were done. so more cases were reported and a big peak shown. Now when a second peak is underway government isnt bothering with testing -indeed it still seems to have a shortage of test kits because it used so many- and so is not recording the second peak at all.

Interestingly hospital admissions for covid continue to fall despite real cases amongst older people rising. This strongly suggests official records of covid admissions are also dependent on the capacity to test. A nurse told me the local hospital simply ran out of covid tests to use on patients. We know the proportion of people being reported as covid cases despite really being in hospital for something else doubled during the first january peak. These numbers suggest the effect was far greater than this and prbably most hospital cases of covid this christmas were not really ill with covid. If people were really ill rather than just positive results, i am sure doctors could have diagnosed them in the ordinary way. We have created a crazy fantasy crisis through testing reporting people as ill despite them remaining healthy, who would have been counted as healthy in past epidemics.

A year ago we should have abandoned mandatory covid restrictions and just proceeded as normal this winter. Normal of course anticipates 20,000 people will die from winter respiratory diseases and every few years there will be a surge of cases. Covid has now been running for three seasons so its real annual death rate is only 1/3 the headline, and is of course falling.

Yesterday i had an interesting conversation with a nurse working at the local hospital, who was deeply sceptical of government claims about the epidemic because they did not correspond with his experience. I had another conversation with a senior nurse loally a couple of weeks ago. She also though the restrictions were nonsens and ineffective. Based upon her working experience, the general public wearing masks was ludicrous.

Admittedly Summer 2020 i had reports the local hospital in hastings had wards set aside for covid that spring which simply remained empty because the epidemic never happened. Which is all consistent with covid having happened in hastings over winter 2019-20, before anyone counted cases or even noticed any unusual  surge in deaths. Which is some of the best evidence how little difference lockdown made. its a real comparison of a town without restrictions compared to later on towns with restrictions. The nurse I spoke to confirmed he also believes he had covid winter 19/20. Many others have. Although we didnt know it at outset, significant covid has this unique symptom of loss of taste and smell.