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Post by lens on Nov 25, 2022 0:25:18 GMT
A very cursory glance at the plot for England show two very significant accelerations, in April/May 2020 and then Dec-Feb 2021. Obviously (like doh!) these mirror the early waves of the pandemic, and these are the waves before we achieved high levels of vaccination. yes of course, but my whole point was that whereas at the start there were big spikes of deaths with then gaps in between of few deaths, now we have a steady daily average. What we achieved was to spread the same number of deaths evenly over every day. Whoopy-do! No - not true. The AVERAGE over the first year was higher than subsequently. Your graph shows that quite clearly - see comment below. There are some major problems about the definition of a covid death, but it seems to have been consistent. I dont realy see what is worng about plotting this cumulatively instead of per week. This explicitly allows someone to examine the gradient of the plot, which was exactly my purpose. The gradient is the average rate at which people are dying, and my exact point is that it hasnt changed much. Danny, it HAS changed substantially! Take a point on the UK graph corresponding to April 2021. Then draw a line from the origin to that point. The gradient of that line represents the AVERAGE death rate over this period, yes? Now compare it with a line drawn from April 2021 to the present - a much lower gradient, and hence a much lower average death rate over this period, yes? We're left with two distinct parts to your graph. The first year up to April 2021, and the period after. The first period has big swings, and a higher gradient (average death rate). It's almost as if some event happened in the UK around April 2021 to fundamentally change matters........ Oh, when did the vaccination programme start? And combine that with two other factors and the point is even more marked. Firstly that from mid 2021 restrictions were greatly eased, which would be anticipated to lead to a higher average - not lower. Second that because of the way "a Covid death" is measured, there will always be a positive gradient, even if a Covid infection never did more than give a sore toe for 10 days!! If a million people got Covid every week, then statistically a number of them will die by law of averages, not because their "sore toe" killed them! It's the whole point about dying because of Covid, or with Covid. If the change was - as you are implying - fundamentally down to immunity built from previous infection, rather than vaccination, I'd expect the graph to change far more gradually over time. Especially a graph of case rate over time. It doesn't do that. It's a graph of two halves, and the distinction correlates pretty well around the time vaccination was introduced. Regarding your own experiences, then again it's a case of not judging the battlefield from a single shell hole. I've not (AFAIK) had it, even though my wife and daughter did, but experiences of people I know have been very variable. In one case life threatening, and leading to life changing effects, but more generally in the first year what I've heard was "like the worst flu I've ever had, but went on for two weeks". But post vaccination the reports have (typically) been "like a cold" or "like flu, and lasted several days". (And that includes people who hadn't had it before, so only vaccine immunity.) I've now had enough reports, from enough people, to conclude that like the graph it's been a pandemic of two halves - pre and post vaccination. (And to alec, thank you for the information re the ideas behind a nasal vaccine. Interesting, and I can only say I shall wait and see. (And hope!) Unfortunately, I fear the distrust in China will mean any future policy - even it works as hoped for - is unlikely to mean a substantial uptake.) if as they say most people tesing positive have no symptoms, presumably most people with no symptoms never get tested and arent being counted. They would need to be doing maybe 200 million tests a day to be certain how many cases they really have. Similarly, we needed to be doing more like ten million tests a day to determine numbers here, and we maxed out at about 1 million. Danny, this is fundamentally a polling site, so do I really need to point out that the current ONS 1 million figure doesn't need to be determined by ten million tests a day? It's the same as any other polling. Choose a representative sample, poll (or test), and modify to reflect the total population. That said, it's for the UK figure, and who knows how the Chinese figure is arrived at? If you're saying that 31,000 is an underestimate I'm not going to disagree - but done properly you don't need 200 million tests to get a good approximation to the case rate in China as a whole. (And I emphasise "done properly".) |
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Post by lens on Nov 25, 2022 0:46:09 GMT
I had a disease with all the right symptoms for covid in about November 2019, in hastings. It was traceable to someone coming from Wuhan, and i was one removed from the original source. About 400 others were in the same workplace, so whatever it was, it got a good start. Someone who was an elderly relative of an older worker was hospitalised with pneumonia and the actual bug could not be identified. Two probables hospitalised I know of, one who died. At the time I thought this was just flu, and ......... Either I had covid in 2019, or i had something exactly like it. If i did have some other disease imported from Wuhan which was not covid, i am puzzled how it took off locally but then fizzled out without infecting london and then the rest of the country. It would have exactly coincided with the actual covid epidemic. Could have been very tricky facing two different viruses at once. Danny, I really don't want to get involved with your whole Hastings argument, but there is a fundamental sticking point in half your argument. The question is which half..... If we accept (due to an acknowledged contact from Wuhan) that you did indeed have it, as did others in Hastings, then EITHER the oubreak would have been big enough to give the subsequent immunity you speak of, but would almost certainly have been picked up on, *OR* would have fizzled out before being picked up on - but would then not have been widespread enough to give the Hastings wide immunity you also refer to? You can't have your cake and eat it. A small outbreak could conceivably have come early direct from Wuhan, fizzled out, and hence got missed amongst the noise. OR it could have become widespread enough to confer a lot of subsequent local population immunity - but would then almost certainly have rung alarm bells. But I can't believe big enough to give the immunity you suggest whilst remaining below the radar. |
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Post by alec on Nov 25, 2022 7:33:40 GMT
Danny - "I am puzzled why you think 'cumulative data [is] bound to show a pattern closer to a straight line'. Why do you say 'bound to'. You seem to be saying you EXPECT this to come out as a straight line, which means you agree the death rate has not changed!" Ah! There speaks a man who knows nothing about statistics!
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Danny
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Nov 25, 2022 9:08:31 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 25, 2022 9:08:31 GMT
No - not true. The AVERAGE over the first year was higher than subsequently. Your graph shows that quite clearly - see comment below. Yes, somewhere above I mention that. However if I saw that data as the result of a lab experiment, I would say its reasonable to use one single straight line approximation to the entire data set. Looking at the graph you can regard it as a change from step behaviour to a much steadier constant rise. If you do, then you need to define the change point later, so not April but maybe August. The countries shown were just whatever examples I was comparing at the time I took the snapshot, but they show a similar change happening in different countries at different times, all reasonable for the vaccine change hypothesis. Measuring the two sections separately, i get an initial death rate of 200/16months and a later death rate of 80/12 months. So about half post vaccination campaign. Vaccination only managed to halve the death rate, is that a substantial change? Or actually, a bit of a failure for vaccines? And that is allowing no contribution to the reduction from people immune by infection. However many people already had covid did not need or significantly benefit from a vaccination. A minimum of maybe ten million people must have had covid by Aug 21, but possibly many more. Understanding these stats is further complicated by most cases occurring amongst young people, but most deaths amongst old people, so we need to separate out the number of infections young and old which might then leave a person immune, but most of them being amongst the young who were never at risk. So I really dont know how many at risk people had already been infected so were already safe, but this will cut further the percentage made safe by vaccination. And then there is the problem whether older people are fundamentally more at risk because they are old, or whether they might experience patches of risk while sick with something else, or move into a risk category because they develop some other disease. It might be most 90 year olds are fundamentally safe from covid, but if they develop extra risk factors only then become high covid risk. So someone could switch from low risk to high risk quite quickly despite only aging a year. Medics made changes to how they treated covid including two big steps. One was the discovery placing people early on ventilators as had been done caused more to die. The other was treatment using steroids to limit immune response. I forget how much these contributed, but wasnt it claimed about 1/3 of deaths were prevented? neither of these changes was available in the first outbreak, so we could reasonably have expected to reduce deaths then by 1/3 if they had been as they are now. That also makes quite a change to the early recorded death rate! I'm not sure when these changes came into effect, so relevant during late 2020? It started after two major waves of covid. One first half of 2020, one last quarter 2020 into first quarter 21. There is clear evidence how immunity to the first strain suppressed further cases until a new strain came along, and then a new outbreak began (despite lockdowns). Thus my reasoning the first section of the graph has to include the plateau april-aug of minimal covid because of then existing immunity to the kent strain. Whether protectin was by infection or vaccination, cases didnt get going again until the next significant variant came along. Did we have an Indian strain, cant remember. Somewhen we switched naming scheme. Or, the post infection immunity to the kent strain was protecting the population as had post infection immunity to the initial strain in 2020, the earlier example being definitely before the arrival of any vaccine. Nothing could have happened because society already had herd immunity to kent strain, until the next breakthrough strain arrived. The early wave deaths come in steps, fast onset then flat as it ends. thats the natural outcome. A slow rise is a damped effect caused by interventions slowing spread but not preventing it.
Bear in mind again that the vaccination campaign started with the old people at risk of death. However covid is spread and sustained by infections amongst young people who however do not die. But once the young are immune, then spread stops and the old dont get sick either. Some countries actually adopted a policy of vaccinating the young first for this very reason, to stop spread. I think that was wrong, but the rationale was out there.
Also that the vaccination campaign has had three shots now, going into a fourth. Every time the body has an infection or vaccination it boosts its circulating antibody giving temporary high protection for a few months before it wears off. This is different to the idea of a vaccine giving long term protection for years. Giving repeat shots will have the effect of delaying infections rather than ultimately preventing them, creating exactly the sort of constant slow epidemic we are seeing.
I'm not disagreeing that vaccination caused a change in the danger from covid. What I am disagreeing is that the change was as big as claimed. And secondly, that lockdown was ineffectual snd really didnt save anyone, because the disease spread naturally despite lockdowns and created population immunity to those strains anyway. The extent to which vaccines give better or worse protection is unclear, but either way does not prevent new cases and therefore new spread through the community so that the disease can reach the subset of largely old people who are at risk of death. The extent to which either past infection or vaccination can protect the old is again unclear. Its accepted that vaccines generally work least well for old people, and thats all part of the fundamental problem tta vaccines can only work at all if your immune sytem is in good operating condition. They dont attack the virus themselves. No surprise then that the people most likely to die are those with dodgy immune systems, and for them vaccines are least effective. Absolutely. But that cuts both ways, you are agreeing the total number of deaths attributed to covid has been exaggerated. Are there more or less false claimed deaths now than at outset? Zoe seem to have quietly shelved the estimated prevalence they made for covid spring 2020. However what they published then suggested prevalence similar to now. So millions of cases per week for months. The impression I get is that there are far fewer really severe covid cases now, but the background was probably many more community cases then than now even if we did not know they were happening, because there was no testing plus a belief covid could not yet have entered the UK. I have reports from a London school, which had the worst ever figures for pupil absences in the term before schools were closed march 2020. And the kids still attending were all hacking away. Covid had a huge prevalence at the time of that peak in deaths, sufficient to make S. England immune to that strain. Whereas when schools reopened in the autumn there was some resurgence of the original strain mostly amongst younger people in Northern England, where the spring wave got started later and didnt create as much immunity before lockdown, especially amongst the kids. The evidence suggest we attained functional immunity to initial strain in S England through infection, before lockdown took effect. I expect infection creates a stronger protection against that particular strain than does vaccination, but maybe a weaker protection against a mutated strain, the way this operates is different because of the chosen makeup of the vaccine. I argue we became immune to first strain, and then kent. That lockdown didnt really prevent these strains ending essentially as they would have done naturally, with the same total of deaths, so lockdown was a vast expense but futile. Or at least, to the extent interventions saved lives, it was by protecting the old during an outbreak, which we very clearly did not do well initially (sending infected people into care homes...), plus the plain fact extending the duration of an outbreak by slowing spread simply meant the virus was circulating for longer, making it harder for high risk to effectively isolate themselves. We have that problem now because covid is endemic and constantly at high infection rates. And vaccine has probably created this situation of widespread constant infection, rather than sudden huge bursts of infection. yes, but a single shell hole is enough to prove a battle is going on, they dont just happen by themselves. If i had covid, then the whole offical history of how covid began in the Uk and got out of control is wrong. A whole town having it wthout noticing proves it was far less virulent than claimed. But you never heard from people who had covid before it existed because they wrote it off as something else, and never heard from anyone who was infected but fought it off so effectively they didnt even notice, whether from scratch or after infection or after vaccination. Descriptions of its effects have always been biased towards those who are visibly sick. Almost all pubished data on covid cases is based upon recorded and test verified cases, which are a tiny fraction of real numbers of cases. So yes, we can do a statistical study of how many cases there are and have been, but all government action and claims of efficacy has based upon recorded cases. Recorded cases around April 2020 were near zero. Real cases by then were minimum a few million, max tens of million in the UK. |
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Post by alec on Nov 25, 2022 9:53:24 GMT
Danny - "If i had covid, then the whole offical history of how covid began in the Uk and got out of control is wrong. A whole town having it wthout noticing proves it was far less virulent than claimed." But that's the trouble. You didn't have covid, and neither did the rest of the town. You just imagine these things were so. In science, imagining something isn't the same as evidence.
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Post by lens on Nov 25, 2022 15:37:48 GMT
Danny - "If i had covid, then the whole offical history of how covid began in the Uk and got out of control is wrong. A whole town having it wthout noticing proves it was far less virulent than claimed." But that's the trouble. You didn't have covid, and neither did the rest of the town. You just imagine these things were so. In science, imagining something isn't the same as evidence. Alec, even giving Danny the benefit of the intial doubt - let's say it's **plausible** he may have himself had Covid in late 2019 - it's the rest of the argument that falls down. (**Conceivably** he may work in the textile industry, and hence had a Wuhan contact via that.) But let's go along with that. He further claims that Hastings had an outbreak at such time, which gave some immunity to the area when it struck elsewhere later. Well - just possible? But what would it mean? I believe the area is roughly 100,000 people. Is it reasonable to assume the later immunity would need about half to have been infected first time round? So 50,000 infections. In the early days, I believe ball park figures expected a death rate around 1%, with serious illness about 5-10% in the population at large? (Mostly worse the older you were.) So to get the immunity danny suggests, that would have led to around an extra 500 deaths, and 2,500-5,000 serious illnesses in a couple of months around Christmas. Is it really credible such numbers would go unnoticed by health authorities in the area? Even if you accept that stats of death etc were out by as much as a factor of ten (due to large numbers being infected but not showing symptoms) - which I doubt - then we've still got an extra 50 deaths 250+ serious illnesses, which MUST get picked up on? Or is the suggestion that Hastings residents are biologically different to the rest of the UK, such that the mortality rate from Covid is vastly lower than elsewhere in the country.........? Hmmmm. Danny - choosing April is not a random choice. It's where the nature of your graph (roughly) starts to change. I've no doubt choosing August suits your argument better, but there''s no reason to look at the graph and see it as a change point. You also quote that even if the graph does suit the "vaccines did make a difference" argument, it's not much numerically. What you are forgetting is that soon after the vaccination programme, restrictions were greatly relaxed. Which in itself would expect an INCREASE in rates - whereas we saw a big decrease. I'd argue the vaccine effect didn't just mean a fall in cases and deaths, it did it despite a big loosening of restrictions from spring 2021 onwards. And likewise the "with or because of" argument. In the early days most "Covid deaths" were because of it. Later, an increasing number became "with it" deaths, and even the "because of" deaths became increasingly amongst the unvaccinated anyway. Put all such together and it indicates much better efficacy of vaccines than you imply. |
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Danny
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Nov 25, 2022 18:42:34 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 25, 2022 18:42:34 GMT
If we accept (due to an acknowledged contact from Wuhan) that you did indeed have it, as did others in Hastings, then EITHER the oubreak would have been big enough to give the subsequent immunity you speak of, but would almost certainly have been picked up on, *OR* would have fizzled out before being picked up on - but would then not have been widespread enough to give the Hastings wide immunity you also refer to? You can't have your cake and eat it. Yes, I can. The flaw in your logic is in assuming covid is such a highly deadly disease. Thats an assumption which has not been proved. Never anywhere in the world has covid caused the scale of death initially assumed. If we simply ignored it, it may be no more people would have died than did across the UK, and its also possible the final total could have been less. If one accepts covid was here (I do because the symptoms were right, they were similar to when I later definitely got covid but very mildy despite no vaccinations, Hastings was immune when the general epidemic spread across the UK in April, traceable link to wuhan), and that it didnt kill enough people to cause alarm, then this PROVES it was always a self limiting disease with much more modest risk than was assumed. That is not altogether at odds with what SAGE reported, but their recommendations were always based upon the WORST CREDIBlE CASE.ie, given the evidence then available to them, as bad as it could possibly be. They did not at that time have evidence of any places where it had run its course naturally, so they could assess the final outcome based on facts rather than guesses. The evidence about its virulence was largely based upon hospitalised patients, which gave the impression out of just a few people who had caught it so far, many were very ill. That was simply wrong, because most cases have never been formally documented and this under reporting was at its worst at the outset. Mild covid just looks like a cold or flu unless you have been warned about the existence of covid and specific symptoms. It didnt officially exist until early 2020, and actual distinctive symptoms like loss of taste didnt get reported till maybe may/June or later. if you look at stats on deaths, every year something like 10,000 people die from non specific pneumonia, ie no specific cause identified. Some of them might even be corona viruses, we dont have testing for many uncommon diseases, and the epidemic has pushed a leap forward in the use of such specific tests which was not the case before. I know of two people who at that time had dangerously severe pneumonia who were hospitalised but no specific causal agent could be identified. If it was covid, well no surprise they couldnt identify it, but it also means they did the normal tests such as they are and eliminated stuff like flu. A wave of such deaths amongst old people in winter is perfectly normal, Maybe this one was a bit bigger than usual (or maybe not), but the local urban area is only about 100,000 people, and it would seem this just wasnt enough people to create enough deaths to cause alarm. Some here have argued the flu service is always looking out for epidemics starting up, but in fact it deliberately eliminates from consideration anything proven not to be flu, which would have been tested for. One wave of covid in the Uk typically caused a death rate of about 0.1%. In an area of 100,000 people thats ballpark 100. Presumably spread over several months as the outbreak started from scratch. i can tell you I spoke to someone who works for a local charity running care homes, who said that winter there was a wave of deaths, and he now believes these were covid. Unfortunately, that isnt terribly unusual if a dises of this sort gets into a home for the old and sick, they are very susceptible. Which brings me to another point. If you recall, the first news of covid from Italy concerned deaths in some sort of care centre or hospital for the elderly. Lots of their residents died, and it started a panic. Thats actually similar to the first reports from Wuhan, where what they reported was about 100 people in hospital with a new disease, very ill. I dont know how old the chinese were, but you will know the age profile of who get severely ill, its old people, so very good chance the chinese hospital has a whole load of old people too. There is a pattern that covid was first only identified once local hospitals had enough cases, and in particular after they had been made aware there was a new disease on the loose. There is an important extra fact which later became known about the Milan and Turin outbreak in Italy (ie the locality where the old people's outbreak was identified). Later in 2020 stored sewer water samples were tested for covid, and it was found to have been present in the cities dating back into 2019. But it never came to attention there, instead only being noticed months later when an institution full of highly susceptible older people became infected. The pattern is that covid could be around in the general community for months with very few people becoming seriously ill. Only once it reched a cluster of susceptible old did anyone notice something odd. In the UK, a massive number of the deaths in the first outbreak were in care homes (was it originally reported as about 1/3?), and then probably second most common was hospitals, which probably included a lot of people catching it in those hospitals. Looking into this I found a stat which said the average duration of stay in a care home was about 1 year. They are mostly for people very ill, who dont go back home after but die. So 1/3 of those dying in the first wave had at outset had an average life expectancy of only 6 months, because they were so ill already. (I mean, !!!). average age at death from covid, 82 or was it 83. Anyway, it was one year older than average age of death for the entire population. There is massive evidence covid only kills already unhealthy people.
I guess you dont want the even longer version of this, but there is lots of circumstantial evidence making the case that the danger of covid was grossly over estimated. There was some epidemiological evidence which argued that although cases fell when lockdown was initiated in April 2020, that was because we had already reached the peak of the outbreak, and it would therefore have started falling had nothing been done.
Some of things done will have made matters worse. I mentioned before covid is mostly transmitted by and between young people, Our society naturally isolated the old and especially the unhealthy old. So they are automatically protected because they have limited social contact. However one thing they may well still have to do is go shopping. You will remember that when warnings about an impenidn lockdown were made, shops became absolutely rammed with people trying to buy stuff. The contrasts to a month later when people were ordered to stay 2m apart was almost unbelievable. Anyway, the consequence of that measure was to force people together in supermarkets far closer than they normally would get, we were tripping over each other trying to get round the shops! It is inevitable that infected people using those shops will have come into contact with older at risk people and infected them. Its quite possible the April peak was in part a self fulfilling prophecy because declaring a forthcoing lockdown boosted spread to vulnerable groups, and therefore boosted the number of serious cases...which were the only ones being counted.
Finally, back to immunity. Most people are safe from covid. Have always been safe from covid. In 2019 if you had covid you would assume it was flu and you would also assume there was no point troubling a doctor, just go to bed for a few days. None of those cases would ever come to medical attention. Spread amongst the young is fastest and most frequent and only later propagates to the older, or maybe never does. Most of the people back in Milan could have been infected before cases reached that hospital and it became a national crisis. Hastings and Bexhill (run into each other as one urban area) is a modest size so its 100 expected deaths isnt enough to trigger an alarm, and maybe never even got that bad. Its possible the youngsters got it, became immune and so it ceased transmitting through the community before it ever got to most of the oldsters. This is what I mean about rapid infection potentialy being an advantage, because once you eliminate the transmitters of the disease it has to die out whether or not the old have yet had it. I think the way to optimise outcome would have been to encourage the young to just catch it, while shielding the old until it was safe. Which would have been fairly quick. Obviously we hit a snag when we found covid can readily mutate, but again it isnt obvious to me that this mightn't be less likely to happen if the epidemic is over quickly, than if we take steps to slow its spread and therefore keep it going giving it a longer timeframe to try out new mutations on those already immune to the original. Perhaps it works better in terms of ending an outbreak safely if you all catch it fast.
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Danny
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Nov 25, 2022 19:14:21 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 25, 2022 19:14:21 GMT
(**Conceivably** he may work in the textile industry, and hence had a Wuhan contact via that.) I dont want to explain exactly how this came about, because I dont imagine they want to be known as the source of covid in the UK, if thats what happened. See above. The point is we have no idea how many people were really infected with covid. All we know about is people who got ill, and also got a test whose positive results were reported to government and counted. I base the death rate at 0.1% because this is pretty typical for any european country with an outbreak of one strain of covid. Thats about how many end up dead from the entire population. It never gets worse than that, and in some countries like Japan it never got worse than 0.01%. I assume thats because something in those countries automatically protected the people, and since all the countries with especially good outcomes are in the same part of the world...I assume the main factor is pre existing immunity (which we in Europe and the US had too, it was measured and reported), but which was greater in that part of the world than in Europe. i suggest it is no coincidence China was both the orign point of covid and has had about the world's lowest death rate from covid. You might have expected the opposite...unless covid or closely related viruses have been about in china for decades or centuries but based as an animal disease never quite making the leap to succeed in humans. Exposure to over corona viruses DOES create immunity to covid too (to a degree), and in the Uk youngsters tyically get 3-4 such viruses a year. frequency of infection the exact reverse of the covid death stats, so the younger you are the more corona infections and fewest covid deaths, the older the fewest corona or covid infections but the most deaths. Coincidence? Name a country which has actually experienced that death rate? If you look at the FT interactive covid stats page, the worst outcome in the world is listed as Peru at 0.65% of the population over the entire course of the epidemic. Not just one strain. Their performance per wave seems to have been about 0.3% for the first two waves but thereafter much less. No idea if they had a vaccination program-maybe not. ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=1&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2020-04-01&values=deathsThen we must disagree. I argue that flat plateaus in deaths are a feature of natural epidemics, they represnt the time during which there cannot be any more infections or deaths because the population is immune and therefore benefitting from that immunity. That particular strain is over. a new segment only begins when a new strain arrives and starts to infect, and then either we would have had a news urge in deaths or the slow rise. You cannot count the plateau as part of the vaccine effects since it was due to natural immunity. Only if those rectrictions actually worked. In May or so 2020 restrictions failed to prevent ongoing covid in hospitals, while it fell to a plateau in the community and refused to go lower. Restrictions were held for months longer trying to eradicate it, but it simply didnt work. Local restrictions always failed when applied to local areas. In hastings (and other towns) covid cases from kent strain ROSE during the lockdown about November 2020. That lockdown exactly coincided with the start of infection in the town, but simply didnt stop it. And then in december as restrictions were temporarily eased...cases FELL in Hastings. If you looked at that data in isolation the actual conclusion would be lockdown increased spread, but in reality I think it just made little diffrence and the outbreak came and went fairly naturally espite the lockdown or absence thereof. when schools.universities returned autumn term 2020 they caused a wave of cases in northern England but not southern. the inference was southern had become immune because of its higher cases in the spring. However to this point, before any action was taken this rise began earlier and faster in some places than others, but it also had time to peak and start falling befor any restrictions happened. And then when comparing to other palces later which had their outbreaks during restriction, the evolution of those outbreaks wasnt obviously altered by the interventions. I mentioned all this on UKPR1 at the time. Thats possible, I agree that early on there seem to have been a lot more dramatic serious cases. However I already mentioned that changes in medical procedures cut deaths by 1/3 (or maybe more, I dont think I have seen a cumulative figure estimating the total reduction by different treatment regimes), and must have cut severity of cases similarly so there would be far fewer of the most severe. However the stats about what were risk factors for covid were generated from the earliest wave and dont seem to have changed. There remains a problem that if someone only dies from covid if they have covid coupled with factors x or y, which is the true killer? If the covid aspect is treated more effectively, then it seems likely the other aspect will tend to predominate more in people's minds. I'm not convinced the real proportion of falsely claimed covid deaths has changed in the sense of what factors contributed to the eventual death, just the interpretation. |
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Nov 26, 2022 20:02:37 GMT
Post by alec on Nov 26, 2022 20:02:37 GMT
Informative thread looking at covid mutations and asking what could happen next and how -
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Post by alec on Nov 27, 2022 8:39:22 GMT
This is a good blog about the current state of covid variants. I don't pretend to understand it in great depth, but it gives some insight into the complexity and novelty of how covid is constantly changing. The authors note that we still have Delta variants cropping up regularly, in low numbers, and the authors express concern at the risk of something unpleasant emerging from these Delta reservoirs. virological.org/t/sars-cov-2-evolution-post-omicron/911#post_1Meanwhile, the Zoe app is suggesting cases are now probably rising once again. The Zoe data hasn't always been accurate, but over the last year or so it seems to have bedded down to give a reasonable approximation of case numbers, or at least trends. What is notable is that while the recent peak was short of the big peak some modellers had predicted, the trough appears to have bottomed out at a much higher level than the previous two troughs. English NHS bed occupancy data is also suggesting cases are bottoming out or leveling. With around 5% of acute beds still occupied with covid patients, the occupancy numbers have stalled in the latest data. The distinction between 'with or off' has always been something of a red herring, as it is well established that having covid makes existing illness harder to treat with worse outcomes, so any hospital patient with a positive test is an additional burden on the NHS. There was much play recently of the 13,000 beds blocked by healthy patients unable to be discharged, it's only four weeks or so since we had 10,000 beds blocked with covid patients, but that inexplicably didn't get anything like the same level of attention. 'Collective denialism' would be my explanation. So, not clear exactly where we are heading, but an increase from a pretty high low point now seems likely, and the NHS pressures heading into Christmas don't look great. Meanwhile, unconstrained infection is undoubtedly leading to a far faster rate of evolution of the virus than we had initially expected, with a number of very substantial risks carried by some of the possible evolutionary twists. As ever, avoiding infection by masking when appropriate, working on air quality, ensuring proper isolation and keeping up with vaccines will help the individual as well as wider society. I remain optimistic, even though still a lone voice in the wind. |
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Danny
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Nov 27, 2022 17:45:00 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 27, 2022 17:45:00 GMT
Meanwhile, unconstrained infection is undoubtedly leading to a far faster rate of evolution of the virus than we had initially expected, with a number of very substantial risks carried by some of the possible evolutionary twists. Is that the sort of hyperbolic language people tend to use, saying 'is undoubtedly leading to', when in fact there is plenty of doubt, but they wish to suppress oposed views by trying to make their holders appear stupid? There is plenty of doubt. We seem to have created a situation by use of vaccines that covid is now in constant circulation, whereas its natural evolution would be a rapid rise but then equally quick fall. We have chosen to keep it in circulation while there are also plenty of immune people about, which is the ideal situation for a nnew stain to arise. I'd be grateful if you could point out some medical papers which support what you claim? Its important to get these facts correct, you know. |
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Covid
Nov 27, 2022 18:12:56 GMT
Post by alec on Nov 27, 2022 18:12:56 GMT
Danny - "Is that the sort of hyperbolic language people tend to use.." No.
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Covid
Nov 28, 2022 0:14:58 GMT
Post by lens on Nov 28, 2022 0:14:58 GMT
The point is we have no idea how many people were really infected with covid. All we know about is people who got ill, and also got a test whose positive results were reported to government and counted. I base the death rate at 0.1% because this is pretty typical for any european country with an outbreak of one strain of covid. Thats about how many end up dead from the entire population. Danny - it's a question of whether you see glasses half full or half empty. And I think as time went on they did get a pretty good idea of numbers infected (at all) and what percentage of cases eventually led to a death. (Through randomly testing a pproportion of the population, whether showing symptoms or not.) I seem to remember from the early months, that a good ball park figure was about 10% pa of a population getting (symptomatically) infected, and a death rate within such of about 1% - so 0.1% of the population in all. With such biased heavily towards the elderly, obese, and already ill. But for Hastings (and 100,000 people) that would predict 100 extra deaths in a period of a couple of months, and a lot of extra serious illness - both of those being with common symptoms. It beggars belief that wouldn't have been picked up on epidemiological grounds. Very roughly, about 1% of a population die each year. I'd therefore expect around 1,000 deaths within your 100,000 every year from all causes - just under about 100 per month. Add in to that an extra 100 over a couple of months (all with similar symptoms) and are you seriously trying to make out it wouldn't have been noticed!? And that's using your 0.1% figure, and just deaths, ignoring the many more becoming seriously ill with Covid. I've sympathy with a general argument that far too many people seemed to equate Covid with something like the Black Death - it wasn't, it certainly isn't now, and for far too many people the fear and hysteria may have caused more harm than the disease. I've sympathy with a view that much of the money spent and measures taken were disproportionate. But equally it's wrong to be too dismissive. A very salient graph is weekly death rates, plotted along with a line of the 5 year average. The striking feature about such is that for two periods (March/April 2020 and early 2021) the number of deaths DOUBLED for a period of a couple of months! And if (as you say) Hastings did get Covid in late 2019 - extensively enough to confer widespraed immunity a few months later - why did Hastings not show stats such as the rest of the country in March. Why didn't Hastings see a doubling of it's normal death rate before Christmas 2019? |
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Danny
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Nov 28, 2022 20:41:42 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 28, 2022 20:41:42 GMT
The point is we have no idea how many people were really infected with covid. All we know about is people who got ill, and also got a test whose positive results were reported to government and counted. I base the death rate at 0.1% because this is pretty typical for any european country with an outbreak of one strain of covid. Thats about how many end up dead from the entire population. Danny - it's a question of whether you see glasses half full or half empty. And I think as time went on they did get a pretty good idea of numbers infected (at all) and what percentage of cases eventually led to a death. (Through randomly testing a pproportion of the population, whether showing symptoms or not.) I seem to remember from the early months, that a good ball park figure was about 10% pa of a population getting (symptomatically) infected, and a death rate within such of about 1% - so 0.1% of the population in all. With such biased heavily towards the elderly, obese, and already ill. There is no known test that a person received a sufficient incoming dose of covid but fought it off immediately. This wouldnt necessarily trigger a strong antibody response, that only happens if an infection starts to establish. Antibodies responsible for this wouldnt necessarily be detectable because I think all the tests we do are very specific, and anyway if someone comes back with an antibody test result less than the standardised '1', they are declared not to be immune or previosly infected. Which is a bit of a nonsense, but nonetheless what the medical establishment seems to do. Similarly, vaccination makes it much harder to detect if an infection was fought off- we have policies of deliberately not vaccinating animals against various nasty disease so they will develop symptoms or antibodies we can detect...then when we find one we kill them and any who might have come in contact to stop spread. No questions asked, because you cannot tell if some might have been infected. There is no way to tell how many had trivial infections of covid they fought off, but it is critically important whether, say, 50% of the population was never infected, or that same 50% was infected but had no detectable symptoms. Its (part of) the difference between covid being a deadly disease and a trivial one, and that is exactly what we have not proven. I can say the proven rate of infection is considered well above 10% pa, because doctors accepted basically the whole nation has now had covid at least by this year, maybe last year. But that is a minimum. We essentially achieved herd immunity to two strains before vaccines arrived, currently we are getting a million detectable new cases a week (so who knows about the undetectable ones).
In any epidemic the disease dies out before reaching 100% of the population, at the point herd immunity is acquired. This would seem to apply to each strain of covid, but not to the entire disease because it mutates fairly frequently. So one strain comes along and then dies out because it can no longer infect enough new people. Then the question is, at what percentage of an unaware population would covid die out? Most detected cases are amongst the young, with kids at times x20 as frequently infected as the old. Whereas hardly any kids die, but the old do. We could maybe infect 90%+ of the whole population and no one would die, just so long as it was the right 90%. Probably 99%. So, the way to prevent anyone dying from covid is to infect a larger percentage of the population than is necessary to achieve herd immunity, but to make sure only safe people get infected. So how to do that? Why just get people to carry on socialising as usual, but tell the old and sick to isolate themselves till its over, in maybe a couple of months. Does that not sound to you more like simply letting people behave normally, and less like what we did?
I have not seen any proper analysis taking into account spread rates in an unaware society, I'd imagine they show even greater disparity of cases than the measurements in an aware epidemic. The modelling of spread I have seen does not take into account differential spread at different ages or between different ages, its all pretty basic. Thats what our response was based upon. Bad, rudimentary models.
Potentially, if we just allow covid to spread naturaly, then the outbreak will be over amongst the young before it reaches a significant number of old people. Who goes to visit granny if they have flu? Even if they reckon they are well enough to work, they will still avoid granny. So.. its entirely possible that a natural outbreak could rapidly infect the young and run out of new victims to continue its spread. Before reaching most of the old who might die. Hence at least one of my arguments why intervention may have made matters worse. Hastings could have had a rather better outcome than the nation achieved under lockdown interventions, because it did nothing. I find that rather disturbing, dont you? If you are telling me 100 people dying from covid was bound to have been detected, I reply, then is that evidence the outbreak took place, but its outcome was much better than when we intervened with lockdowns?
First off, you are assuming thats 100 EXTRA deaths. I cant remember now whether it was much as 50% of deaths initially were coming from care homes, or just a third. But anyway, I also cited that average stay in a care home is 1 year. All the residents would be exected to die in a year on average. So that's 1/3 of all covid deaths were going to die within one year anyway, and actually at any one time the average life expectancy can only be 6 months, because on average they are halfway through. So these arent extra deaths at all. Just deaths from a slightly different cause. Similarly with the average age of death from covid actually higher than the average age at death, no one (on average) was far from death when they died from covid. Figures like that guarantee much of the covid death toll has to be compensated by lower deaths from other causes. And then we have the question of who would notice this, and what would they do about it? It could only be noticed statistically, not by individual doctors, because individuals would not see enough cases to become concerned. And then, we do not actually know that the outbreak was not noticed. But the action to be taken on a national scale from such a small outbreak would be...nothing. You might recall con disbanded the disease outbreak early identification group set up by labour, as pointless. As to general widespread illness.. no one would notice that either! Sure people would call in sick with flu. So what? Some people might visit their doctor (not easy to do, the receptionist would turn you away for flu), who would tell them to go to bed and take paracetamol. If he notified the flu warning service and they did a test, they would have found it wasnt flu and they didnt recognise it as a dangerous diasese so would have taken no further action. 100 cases even if all could be confirmed as the same just isnt enough to cause concern. No one is looking that closely. It would just have been averaged into a figure of unexplained seasonal deaths averaged over a large region like the entire county or SE. Thats how the flu people do it. They would not have reacted until a much bigger population got infected, like the whole of London...and guess what, then they did!
Timing all works out for a Hastings infection spreading to infect London, and explains why the government experts thought they had influx of covid from abroad under control...only to find it was everywhere.
Did you notice however that these were partially compensated by deaths FALLING below average after outbreaks of covid end? And this is complicated because of extra people dying, because they are not being treated for other diseases, because we chose to suspend medical services. In other words, because of the intervenion choices we made, people died. What stats did it not show? It didnt have much in the way of covid cases or deaths March/april or up to the arrival of kent strain, when it did. I have no idea what the death rate in Hastings was or from what causes people died before covid, because as far as I know that information is not published in such local detail. Its only available now because of interest in covid and specifically only about deaths from covid. I was quite interested myself to see what was typical. |
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Post by lens on Nov 29, 2022 0:36:51 GMT
Timing all works out for a Hastings infection spreading to infect London, and explains why the government experts thought they had influx of covid from abroad under control...only to find it was everywhere. Did you notice however that these were partially compensated by deaths FALLING below average after outbreaks of covid end? And this is complicated because of extra people dying, because they are not being treated for other diseases, because we chose to suspend medical services. In other words, because of the intervenion choices we made, people died. What stats did it not show? It didnt have much in the way of covid cases or deaths March/april or up to the arrival of kent strain, when it did. I have no idea what the death rate in Hastings was or from what causes people died before covid, because as far as I know that information is not published in such local detail. Its only available now because of interest in covid and specifically only about deaths from covid. I was quite interested myself to see what was typical. Danny - you are not remotely answering the crucial question of why your alleged Hastings outbreak went unnoticed in the absence of any measures or vaccinations - when everywhere else which had such an outbreak saw roughly a doubling of the death rate for at least a month or so, to say nothing of a huge surge in hospitalisations. When Covid arrived anywhere, it may not have registered immediately (eg the Alpine ski resorts) - but after a few weeks the increase in deaths/illnesses could hardly be missed. It's conceivable Hastings may have had a minor outbreak when you say - but if it had been so extensive as to give immunity widely for March/April, it's inconceivable the results wouldn't have been glaringly evident at the time once it fully took hold. It's not a case of "information being published in local detail" - a doubling of the death rate in an area of 100,000 people, even for a few weeks would **NOT** have gone unnoticed!! The only way that would have been possible is if somehow all the residents of Hastings statistically had a totally different response to everybody else in the country, which is vanishingly unlikely!! Occams Razor suggests the most likely explanation by far is that such a widespread outbreak in late 2019 never happened, even if there may have been a few cases. |
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Danny
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Nov 29, 2022 8:14:49 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 29, 2022 8:14:49 GMT
Interesting paper measuring years of life lost (YLL) from covid set against other leading mortality indicators in the US across the first two years of the pandemic - www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-2226It's from the US, so with a slightly different dynamic due to different vaccines uptake, but it calculates an average YLL per covid death in year 1 of the pandemic at 18.8 years, rising to 25.5 years in year 2, as deaths shifted to younger age cohorts. It would be fascinating to see the same analysis from the UK, but this does provide solid evidence that dismisses the early statements from a number of ignorant sources to the effect that covid was only serious for people 'who were going to die soon anyway'. Really? Did you read it? I quote: "The YLL associated with most of the leading causes of U.S. death were stable across intervals (Table). Three of the four causes of death that exhibited larger than 10% changes in deaths across the study intervals had concordant changes in YLL. Specifically, YLL due to unintentional injuries increased by 10.5%, comparable to the 11.0% increase in unintentional injury deaths. Large and similar decreases in YLL and deaths were observed for influenza and pneumonia (YLL, −14.6%; deaths, −16.0%) and Alzheimer disease (YLL, −12.6; deaths, −14.2%). In contrast, despite 20.8% fewer COVID-19 deaths during March to December 2021 than during March to December 2020, YLL due to COVID-19 increased by 7.4% as the age distribution of decedents shifted downward (that is, to relatively younger persons); the median (interquartile range) age of COVID-19–involved deaths decreased from 78 years (68 to 87 years) to 69 years (59 to 80 years). Accordingly, YLL per COVID-19 death increased by 35.7% (Figure); YLL per death did not change by more than 2.2% for any other cause." So between the first and second periods of the study loss of life years due to accidental deaths and injuries rose by 10%. Losses due to covid rose 7.5%. But on the other hand life years lost to Altzheimers decreased by 13%, to influenza fell 15%. So what it says is that in the second wave of the epidemic, there was more loss of life to covid but compensating this even more gain of life from those not dying from Altzheimers or flu. The rise in accidental injuries also seems to be concerning, suggesting disruption of people's lives caused more of this. But these changes seem wholly consistent to me that covid deaths simply replaced people who would otherwise have died from Altzheimers, influenza or pneumonia. Dying from influenza or pneumonia seems much the same as covid to me. Dying from covid might be preferable to years of Altzheimers! There is another major flaw in the study. in the UK we know that a massive proportion of the first wave deaths (bit smaller second wave) came from care homes whose residents would indeed normally be very likely to die from Altzheimers or flu. if they died from covid first, it makes perfect sense that these already very sick people affected the statistics changing their cause of death. Unfortunately, the study assumes that anyone dying at a certain age had an average life expectancy. That is simply not true. Anyone in a care home has a far shorter life expectancy than an average person of the same age, being in the care home is already a marker of expected death within a year of entering it. The study fails to check the real life expectancy of those whi died in a particular year. Its highly likely the healthy ones responsible for boosting the average life expectancy never did die from covid either. The ones who died were those dragging down the average life expectancy who would have died soon anyway. The study doesnt show that at all. One might wonder how it got published, but this flaw has been present in previous work about life years lost to covid. I wonder why no one corrects such publications? Why people keep advancing them?
The study assumes the people who died from covid had an average life expectancy, whereas even the evidence in the study itself suggests covid deaths simply substituted other immedate causes of death.
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Danny
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Nov 29, 2022 9:02:51 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 29, 2022 9:02:51 GMT
Danny - you are not remotely answering the crucial question of why your alleged Hastings outbreak went unnoticed in the absence of any measures or vaccinations - when everywhere else which had such an outbreak saw roughly a doubling of the death rate for at least a month or so, to say nothing of a huge surge in hospitalisations. When Covid arrived anywhere, it may not have registered immediately (eg the Alpine ski resorts) - but after a few weeks the increase in deaths/illnesses could hardly be missed. Covid was in Milan or Turin for MONTHS before Italy became aware it had covid, and then only discovered because the infection spread to an old person's care home/hospital. In all probability China had covid for months before it recognised it, maybe years, maybe decades as the virus tried to break out to humans. The ski resort had no indication it was spreading covid to the rest of Europe, before the rest of Europe noticed where new cases were coming from. I seem to recall a study there found very high local antibody levels, indicating many locals had had covid long before and as a high percentage, and yet local medical services didnt notice. No one is going to notice people young and fit enough to be avid skiers having a bit of flu. Given that antibody falls pretty quickly, I did wonder whether such high levels didnt just indicate cases, but regular repeat exposure. Somewhere with regular new susceptible arrivals catching it straight away and passing it on again before they left, but keeping the locals antibody levels topped up. Didnt happen in the ski resort. They only found out after people going home got tested for covid at borders and were found positive. Young healthy people do not get very sick from covid, its just a bit of flu, and they mostly pass it to other young fit people. So that the vectors for the disease are eliminated and it ceases to spread to anyone. Except in a ski resort there were always new arrivals. The rate of infection of the high risk is low compared to general total of cases, and their rate of infecting each other in the same age group is also way lower. Basically, the group at significant risk are mostly pensioners, who dont work so dont get infected at work, and dont socialise much. And the sicker they are, so the higher their risk of severe covid, then the more they self isolate naturally not because of covid but just because they are sick. Covid deaths or serious cases take off once hospitals and care homes become infected. Before that there isnt much to see. This is kinda important- most people will have had covid before serious cases and deaths arise. I am not aware of any source of evidence I can examine to prove or disprove that. There are no published stats about local causes of death week by week or day by day. So I dont know what the normal pattern is. I do know inside a hospital it is very hard to pin any one doctor down as responsible for any patient. When relatives have been in hospital its a new doctor each day who looks up the notes to find what is going on. No one would really notice who has died or why. I can say doubling of the death rate in winter compared to summer is very normal, thats a statistical fact you can check. I imagine deaths coming in waves from some illness is very normal too. I have no doubt that when a disease like this gets into a care home it will be expected to be followed by a wave of residents dying. See post above replying to Alec about average life expectancy, what is really happening here is covid or flu or something unidentified which just gets listed as pneumonia are very common causes of death amongst already old and sick people. And this is exactly what a hospital would have seen. Its not a wave of 20 year olds dying, its the ones you expect to see die in winter from respiratory disease, in waves, dying exactly as you expect. Nothing remarkable. Had all these people turned blue and died screaming, then even one case might have caused alarm. But they just died in a normal way how similar people die every year with simlar symptoms. Maybe a few more than usual, but as a localised effect, thats just bad luck. These things definitely do come in waves. Absolutely not. You think 100 extra deaths is so many it would be noticed. I think a surge of winter respiratory deaths is perfectly normal, every year, so the only odd thing would have been maybe a few more than normal. This could well have been exactly what happened, there is no evidence it didnt. Doctors might have sat in the tea room and talked about there being some bug about, but then what? I have heard hospital staff say they had a busy winter, but not really talked to anyone I could quizz. After the doctors think this, what would happen? Why nothing. They would be aware it wasnt happening anywhere else, just bad luck locally. Covid is absolutely not unusual as a disease except in scale, but in scale it isnt really much above normal. 100,000 people in Hastings wasnt enough to trigger alarm. Even ten million in London did not trigger alarm until mass testing began and found there were already huge numbers of cases which had not been noticed. Do you not remembe how the original plan to deal with covid had several stages, but then we moved from first to last in about a week when authorities got testing going and found there was far more about than they believed possible? Thats really exactly what you say you cannot believe happened, that it was everywhere but no one noticed until they started testing. There are differences between Hastings and London of scale. It isnt just the difference of total population, but also the density of living. Few people use public transport, whereas Londoners use sardine trains and buses. That means hastings is largely missing out on one method of cross spread between strangers. Housing is closer together, there are many more might clubs, restauarants, scope for communal socialising. There is evidence severity of a case of covid is related to initial dose of infections. More crowded conditions, larger proportion of severe cases. Probably the threshold for establishing herd immunity would be lower. But the one big difference between covid in Hastings winter 19/20, and covid nationally in March, was that no one in hastings did anything special. This raises the question whether the interventions made the whole epidemic worse! Things like sending infected people back to care homes-disaster for the death rate. Creating mass crowding in supermarkest mixing infected youngsters with sick grannies at close quarters which would never have hapened otherwise. Preventing some of the ways infections would have spread fast between youngsters, so that the whole epidemic lasted longer increasing the chances people would end up visiting granny while sick. I see no evidence this interpretation is wrong. I mean, evidence. Key facts which prove or disprove arent available except anecdotally talking to people and asking them about winter 19/20 which i tried to do in 2020. The neighbour whose school seems to have had covid. Outbreak at the local theatre. Comments from the lady whose daughter works for the mortuary. Individuals who had loss of taste and smeall that winter with flu. |
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Post by lens on Nov 29, 2022 17:46:35 GMT
It's conceivable Hastings may have had a minor outbreak when you say - but if it had been so extensive as to give immunity widely for March/April, it's inconceivable the results wouldn't have been glaringly evident at the time once it fully took hold. Didnt happen in the ski resort. They only found out after people going home got tested for covid at borders and were found positive. Young healthy people do not get very sick from covid, its just a bit of flu, and they mostly pass it to other young fit people. So that the vectors for the disease are eliminated and it ceases to spread to anyone. Except in a ski resort there were always new arrivals. But as you yourself say "Young healthy people do not get very sick from covid"! And by definition people going to the Alps largely fit in that category. (Though some friends of ours in their 60's, but generally fit, came back from the Alps at that time and were pretty ill - not enough to go to hospital, but I'd like to see you tell them it was "just a bit of flu"!) But - the population profile of Hastings is surely very different to Alpine ski resorts in February!! Or are you trying to tell me that Hastings is overwhelmingly comprised of "young healthy people"!!? It may very well be true that Covid in the Alpine resorts took a while to be recognised on the scale it was (and I believe returning skiers was a prime vector of the spread to the UK, and why it got a foothold as quickly as it did) - but Hastings isn't a resort full of skiers. Higher age profile, and it's share of people not in good fitness. It's not a case of "information being published in local detail" - a doubling of the death rate in an area of 100,000 people, even for a few weeks would **NOT** have gone unnoticed!! There are no published stats about local causes of death week by week or day by day. So I dont know what the normal pattern is. I do know inside a hospital it is very hard to pin any one doctor down as responsible for any patient. When relatives have been in hospital its a new doctor each day who looks up the notes to find what is going on. No one would really notice who has died or why. Danny, any single doctor may not be able to pin down any single death, but believe me such stats are considered at a higher level, precisely to pick up any epidemic as soon as possible. Not just deaths, but overall admission patterns as well. There is obviously a lag between an epidemic starting and identification, but in the case of a town like Hastings and Covid, then from other similar towns it's likely to be "a few weeks". To say "noone would really notice" a doubling of the death rate and similar large numbers of very ill people arriving to occupy beds is simply ridiculous. Just look back to AIDS, when the overall numbers were much smaller and timescales much longer. It was relatively small changes to patterns of illness and eventually deaths that rang the alarm bells. It's basic epidemiology. The only way that would have been possible is if somehow all the residents of Hastings statistically had a totally different response to everybody else in the country, which is vanishingly unlikely!! Absolutely not. You think 100 extra deaths is so many it would be noticed. I think a surge of winter respiratory deaths is perfectly normal, every year, so the only odd thing would have been maybe a few more than normal. Oh really!! A doubling of the expected death rate is hardly "a few more than normal"! And do you not realise that the "normal" death rate takes account of seasonal factors? Epidemiologists don't expect the same number of weekly deaths throughout the year, before even thinking about finer detail of cause. The only way in which an epidemic big enough to leave a big immune response behind could have gone unnoticed is as said above - if the inhabitants were statistically very different to the norm in the rest of the country. Which may have largely been the case in the ski resorts. But please don't tell me that nearly everyone in the Hastings area is "young, fit, and healthy......"? This really does read as you having a theory you would like to be true, and trying to fit facts to suit. Exactly the opposite of a true scientific method. |
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Nov 29, 2022 18:00:50 GMT
Post by alec on Nov 29, 2022 18:00:50 GMT
lens - "This really does read as you having a theory you would like to be true, and trying to fit facts to suit. Exactly the opposite of a true scientific method." Quite. For Danny, it isn't science - it's a religious belief. Nothing will shake him from the Hastings theory, despite the provably false hypothesis. He has no interest in truth, and can't change his mind when the evidence changes.
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Nov 30, 2022 8:00:27 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 30, 2022 8:00:27 GMT
(Though some friends of ours in their 60's, but generally fit, came back from the Alps at that time and were pretty ill - not enough to go to hospital, but I'd like to see you tell them it was "just a bit of flu"!) Sounds about right for covid. So did they get tallied amongst those officially having covid? Or did they just go to bed till they got better and it was never formally reported? Were they tested and told it was covid, or did they just assume it was flu as I did, because thats what it looked like? If they were tested and told it was covid, what would they ahve assumed if they had caught it 4 months earlier before the world had even heard of covid? Did they like me assume it was flu, and then six months later start thinking, hang on, that must have been covid back then? Depends what you mean. I'd think towns all over have a mix of young and old. The difference is the people coming to that ski town. What I see is the locals at the ski resort got covid much like Hastings and nothing very dramatic happened. It was not identified because of sick people in the town, only retrospectively did they test and find very high antibody prevalence. However there would have been this constant flow of visitors each catching it from the reservoir in the town, and indeed each staying long enough to start contributing to pass it on and keep it going. One endless party of people socialising and spreading. The actual lowest recorded cases in the UK in April 2020 was at and around Torridge in Devon. Which interestingly has its own tourist industry with Uk surfing along that coast, which runs on late in the year. I even saw one of those TV programs where they follow youngsters going on a wild holiday to get laid, which was about a group going there for the surfing. I have seen the cars parked alongside the coast road on a cold wintry day, with people changing into wetsuits. I assume they too had covid end of 2020. Cant be sure how it got there, but I noticed a devon university has research links to wuhan. Students trying the surfing, sounds exactly right to start it off. I am absolutely not assuming Hastings got covid uniquely early, we know covid was departing china maybe as early as mid 2019. I suspect once the chinese realised it was there around christmas they stopped travel, so what happened was the early leavers from wuhan infected other spots around the world, and then these spread it more locally. While I think London caught it from hastings, you think London caught it from the ski resort. But either way, it was indirectly from somewhere in europe infected very early and well before it was acknowledged to exist. We agree this was the pattern of indirect infection from early points of introduction. In covid terms young approximately equates to anyone below retirement. You just gave an example yourself at the top end of this range, pretty sick but not sick enough to go to hospital. Something dealt with at home with no special intervention. And thats why covid was never noticed, because it just looks like flu and we dont use medical services to deal with it. The only odd thing about the resort was it had extra younger and fit people unlikely to need medical care. Otherwise it was just another town which had covid but didnt notice from people living there getting ill. It is in itself a documented example of a town proven to have had covid (because it was passing it to visitors) but where the locals didnt realise they were supposedly seriously ill. Not sure your point, but its kinda proving mine that early infections just werent noticed even if quite a lot of people had it. Aids was easy to detect because it had a unique set of symptoms, though these took a long time to develop. Covid does have a unique signature loss of taste and smell, but it took six months to realise that! I am absolutely certain no one would notice a doubling of the death rate compared to summer, because thats exactly what happens every year. And whats more it will happen in waves as bugs go round. So no, thats not odd at all, unless it was maybe 40 year olds suddenly dying. But it wasnt, it was exactly the right 80 year olds. All the symptoms including deaths fit the normal annual pattern. Had this happened in the summer then likely someone would have realised something was wrong, but it didnt. Old people dying from unidentified pneumonias in winter is normal.
As to examining wider statistics, the problem is then that hastings gets aggregated into a much larger region. We do not take action over local outbreaks of anything. Even during covid you might have noticed lockdowns did not get declared until total of cases nationally reached a sufficient number. There was no organisation set to rush into action and quarantine an infected town, and no system to identify outbreaks of anything on a small scale of 100 people. You confidently claim someone had the job of identifying oddities amongst deaths, but there just isnt. 100 deaths from respiratory disease amongst old people in winter is neither here nor there by itself. As i said before, death statistics are not published in fine detail by date and cause and location. No one could look at the data which didnt exist. The last labour government set up a small unit to look out for oncoming epidemics, and con immediately abolished it again on taking office to save money. But if we had known there was a surplus of deaths in Hastings from unidentified pneumonia, what would have been done differently? Exactly nothing? What could have been done? All this was over before anyone thought it was even possible covid could have arrived in the Uk, because it started before the Chinese even admitted covid existed. And if this wasn't covid, then what was it? Why didnt we get a national epidemic of the hastings virus as well as the covid virus?
Maybe you are right, and someone was monitoring deaths real time, what could they have done except note a bit of a surge and wait to see if it got bigger? Answer would have been, no it faded out. All the time it was actually spreading into London, but the pattern of spread would have been from leisure and work travellers into London, where it would have dispersed the disease amongst youngsters again. No serious cases to detect. If there had been a wave of deaths in hastings, this would have ended by itself before a wave of deaths in London began...because of the lag between infection and deaths.
No one is examining numbers in such detail in real time. I doubt they are even available collected until months after the event. No. As i said, all the stats confirm that roughly people under retirement age are safe and over are not. Formally the government seems to put the cutoff nowadays at 50 in terms of recommending vaccination, but vaccines are cheap and they are erring on the side of caution. Average age of covid death was 83. The people spreading covid and catching it fast are the young, the younger the more so. Experts were correct that schools spread it fast, and then infect their parents, their parents infect friends and work colleagues. It steps up a generation to parents parents, if you consder a kid aged 15, parents aged 35 and grandparents aged 55, then they are all still in the safe bracket. Anyone retired is out of the workplace loop of meeting people and has slowed their social calendar too. People do not visit great grandma if they have a cold. The whole pattern of this disease is it affects safe people first and most frequently, thereby building up herd immunity fast before deaths start happening. That pattern must be true of pretty much any community. By the time you realise it has arrived because hospital cases start piling up, its already well on the way to ending naturally. Not as was supposed, just starting. When you start getting deaths, its almost over. This was born out during the epidemc because time after time the officials announced a new wave was on its way and cases were showing exponential growth...but literally as they made these announcements case rates were already starting to slow! |
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Danny
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Nov 30, 2022 8:17:21 GMT
Post by Danny on Nov 30, 2022 8:17:21 GMT
Nothing will shake him from the Hastings theory, despite the provably false hypothesis. He has no interest in truth, and can't change his mind when the evidence changes. Anyone can look through the posts here and notice you have not provided evidence to support your claims. From time to time you post papers about covid, and I point out their fundamental failings. You fail to respond, just find another paper with the same flaws. The two major ones which keep recurring are studies based upon hospital patients, which of course are the ones with the most severe illness and are not typical of the population as a whole. The other big flaw is a failure to allow for pre existing illness in those very sick with covid. For example you recent paper which argued people dying from covid would have had a population average life expectancy had they not caught covid. Thats just not true, because it is well established people are much more susceptible to covid if they have certain know tabulated risk factors beforehand. These are all things which cut your life expectancy anyway. Your last paper was really a classic, because it identified a rise in covid deaths correlated with a drop in Altzheimer and flu deaths! |
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Post by alec on Nov 30, 2022 9:47:41 GMT
Danny - "Anyone can look through the posts here and notice you have not provided evidence to support your claims." That's a complete lie I'm afraid. You really should know better. Scientific papers are real evidence. You need to understand that. "From time to time you post papers about covid, and I point out their fundamental failings." No you haven't. You've demonstrated an embarrassing inability to understand science, that's all. You think you've shown flaws, but you haven't. "You fail to respond.." As explained, I'll provide the evidence, but I'm not going to get into a line by line discussion with a troll. If you can't understand science, that's your problem. "The two major ones which keep recurring are studies based upon hospital patients, which of course are the ones with the most severe illness and are not typical of the population as a whole. The other big flaw is a failure to allow for pre existing illness in those very sick with covid." Again, just a pack of lies. The majority of studies I have cited have been in non-hospitalized patients, and yes, most of them have corrected for age, sex, demographic and pre existing health conditions. Again, you simply don't understand what you are reading I'm afraid. " For example you recent paper which argued people dying from covid would have had a population average life expectancy had they not caught covid. Thats just not true, because it is well established people are much more susceptible to covid if they have certain know tabulated risk factors beforehand. These are all things which cut your life expectancy anyway. Your last paper was really a classic, because it identified a rise in covid deaths correlated with a drop in Altzheimer and flu deaths!" Again, this just shows the depths of your misunderstanding. If you really think that you know better, why don't you write a paper and submit it. You can explain all your theories, provide all the rebuttals you like, explain why all the other findings are wrong, and then see how that goes. You'll be up against real scientists though, so saying things like "I believe" won't cut it - you'll need the data, but most importantly, you'll actually need to understand what that data is saying. That's the bit you have always struggled with. Also worth mentioning the fall in overall life expectancy due to covid. To help you, as a general guide, where you say 'that's the big flaw in this paper" is nearly always an example of you not understanding what the paper is saying, and an indication that you need to go away and do a bit more homework first.
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Danny
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Dec 1, 2022 8:54:19 GMT
Post by Danny on Dec 1, 2022 8:54:19 GMT
Apropos of what counts as significant death, Spiegelhalter just reported the NHS has had 100 a day excess deaths for the last six months...but only now is this becoming of national concern. Thats 18,000 extra people who definitely didnt die from covid but more than would have been expected from other causes.
The deaths do not seem to be evenly distributed. Some hospitals have more than others. Has any local hospital come to general attention because of a wave of deaths?
That would be 36,000 a year, or had it been going on for three years like covid, 108,000 by now. In other words approaching the numbers who died from covid, but who are now dying because the ability of the NHS to treat them is failing.
So if instead of closing down the world economy and in the UK spending something like £1 trillion public and private n covid interventions, we had spent that money slowly over years to expand the capacity of the NHS....why its likely we would have saved many more lives.
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Danny
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Dec 1, 2022 9:23:01 GMT
Post by Danny on Dec 1, 2022 9:23:01 GMT
"The two major ones which keep recurring are studies based upon hospital patients, which of course are the ones with the most severe illness and are not typical of the population as a whole. The other big flaw is a failure to allow for pre existing illness in those very sick with covid." Again, just a pack of lies. The majority of studies I have cited have been in non-hospitalized patients, and yes, most of them have corrected for age, sex, demographic and pre existing health conditions. Again, you simply don't understand what you are reading I'm afraid. Again you keep missing the point, though I recall explaining it to you before. I said 'hospital' patients, ie those with a hospital record. You said 'hospitalized' patients, ie those admitted to hospitals. Many people are treated by hospitals but are never admitted. In this context hospitals ran many clinics for covid patients where they probably were at great pains to keep them away from the buildings. I am talking about people who have a medical record of having covid. All these studiea are only about such people and ignore people with no medical record of having covid (for example, Ive had covid at least twice and on one occasion even tested positive. According to any official records about me, I have never had covid). If you do not include in studies all the people who had covid but were fine, or all the people exposed to a dose of covid which would have seen someone high risk laid up in hospital, then you cannot claim the results of the study are representative of the effect of covid on the population. You need a random trial following people through the epidemic, and we never got one. I wrote a long post above where you claimed the ONS study was representative, whereas I noted 90% of people asked to take part refused. Thats a terribly biased sample group once again, probably biased towards those who are already concerned about their health. Are you disputing that someone with altzheimers has a lower life expectancy than the average person their age? Are you disputing someone living in a geriatric care home has a life expectancy lower than the average for their age? The paper suggested covid deaths were actually early altzheimer deaths or early flu deaths. That instead of dying within a year from those diseases, they died a year early from covid. And yet the authors claimed those deaths were a loss of life years assuming they had average life expectancy. They obviously did not, and it is a major flaw in the paper. The insurance industry has for centuries tabulated life expectancy for people in different situation. I dont recall who now, but someone became famous when they first studied how you can look at a person's current situation and make a personalised forecast of their life expectancy. The NHS has done it for decades, making estimates of qualys, quality life years, which it calculates for all its treatments to help decided which they should fund. So treat the broken leg of 20 years old, and you gain 60 years life expectancy. Treat a 82 year old in a care home for covid and you save 6 months of life expectancy. But if that person was one of those already with Altzheiners, then maybe the number of qualys you save is exactly 0 because they dont have 'quality' life at all. And that fundamentally is why in the first wave the NHS simply sent people with covid back to their care homes or refused to take them to hospital. because it made choices who to treat based upon estimates of the good which would be done by saving them. Now that was a mistake, but not because it assessed those people as like to die soon anyway, but because it turned out really they were the huge bulk of those at risk. |
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Dec 5, 2022 21:52:59 GMT
Post by leftieliberal on Dec 5, 2022 21:52:59 GMT
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Danny
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Dec 11, 2022 8:08:38 GMT
Post by Danny on Dec 11, 2022 8:08:38 GMT
I also tried to be careful in the previous post to talk about "typical", "average" and so such. Personal experience has ranged from one friend (very fit and healthy, and not that old) nearly dying, and suffering life changing effects, to....... not a lot - no worse than a cold. That said, the **typical** case I've heard about was "like really, really bad flu" during the first year, and "more like a cold" post vaccination. Accept that, and I just cannot accept Danny's comments of being so dismissive of the effects of vaccines. It's borne out by basic and simple figures. The first two waves led to a doubling of the daily death rate for periods of about a month each time. We haven't seen anything remotely like that in subsequent waves, in spite of comparable case rates - and that must be largely down to vaccines. Ok, lets be clear here, I am not opposed to vaccines. They work, but only up to a point. If they had been available and given to everyone in 2019 then the epidemic would have been milder but it could NOT have been avoided. There was much talking up about how all we had to do was hold out until the vaccines arrived, and then everyone would be safe. But vaccines are here now and people are still dying from covid at an official rate still about 1/4 its peak. See for yourself here ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=kor&areas=grc&areas=nzl&areas=e92000001&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=1&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2020-03-27&values=deathsAnd thats before you consider that improvements in medical care for covid cases is claimed to have cut the death rate by 1/2 or 1/3. Presumably the most susceptible would have caught it first, causing easy victims to be removed from the population and then the expectation would be fewer deaths as the epidemic progressed. Put those two together and there isnt much room for benefit from vaccines. Useful, but not brilliant. Much more useful if possibly the biggest part of the epidemic hadnt already happened by the time they arrived. There are various reasons why vaccines dont work. The obvious one is that all a vaccine does is trigger your immune system. Gets it prepared. But firstly this virus changes quite a bit so is perfectly capable of switching to a new form which can evade the vaccine. We have demonstrated vaccines or past infections are unable to prevent new infections, and therefore they cannot create herd immunity against covid (ie safe people still catch it and spread it to the unsafe). Either process seems to create herd immunity to a particular strain of covid, so there is still hope covid will run out of permutations to use and then will die down. That will happen, first because its ability to change is limited because it still has to function as a virus, and second based upon experience that this has happened many times in the past and initially serious corona viruses have simply downgraded to colds. Although they remain with us, and its likely they gave us a degree of immunity to covid as a plus for keeping them around. The other big reason vaccines havnt worked is because it has always been the old dying. Average age of covid death initially 83. By that age many people have failing bodies and failing immune systems anyway. The young fight it off without needing a vaccine. The old do not have the effective immune system to do this, and so even if primed by a vaccine it still fails. The principle of vaccination is to get your body up to full fighting effectiveness before the virus arrives, but if that still isnt enough....then it still isnt enough. There was certainly a fear of health service collapse. Only it didnt happen, here or anywhere. Yes health services were run off their feet, but they never failed. it was even discovered that patients did better without intensive ventilator intervention (you may recall the panic hunt for ventilators, which then got quietly cancelled). We did discover the NHS had inadequate capacity to supply oxygen for these patients, but again the epidemic never stretched actually quite beyond capacity. The fact it never did do this is decent evidence it never could have done this. The first year included two full waves of covid, with little evidence the interventions actually prevented spread through the general population. Slowed it down a bit maybe, but that in itself didnt help. So by the end of that year millions of people had immunity after infection to the same degree as by vaccination. If you recall, South Africa never bothered vaccinating the younger 2/3 of its population because there really wasnt much point. Either because by then they had already had covid, or because they were unlikely to be severely affected. If you look at my user picture, it shows the official deaths evolution in England. We had one spring peak, then a secondary peak as schools resumed which was northern england only. Southern was already immune. But then along came kent strain in the south generating the second large peak. After vaccination deaths from covid have never gone away and covid has become a constant infection of a million cases a week. With cyclic peaks doubling the case numbers.
In the south of England school age people already achieved herd immunity before schools closed, so the first wave never resumed in the south. Closing schools which was before general lockdown was too late in the south to prevent most kids having had covid already. But in the north it wasnt, so once schools reopened it came back. There was then a mini wave which arguably was the completion of the first. Then along came kent spreading north. The interventions have complicated an analysis of how many deaths were really first wave and how many second, because the north ended up partially with two strains in quick succession.
I still dont understand these stats about most deaths now being amongst the unvaccinated. I also havnt seen any recent stats to verify that is still true? The vaccination rate amongst high risk groups was huge into the high 90%s, with the only low percentages being amongst younger people. While the average age at death has fallen a bit, its still in pensioner territory. So where are all these unvaccinated people coming from, because the death rate is still 1/4 of what it was at outset?
Just checked from the FT page. In the first year there were about 200 deaths per 100,000 of the population, and in the last two years after the vaccination campaign 100 deaths per 100,000. So the death rate fell to 1/4 in the second phase. There have been in total about 3000 deaths per million of the population over three years or 0.3%. About 0.1% for each of the first two waves, and another 0.1% in the ongoing constantly circulating covid after vaccinations. Vaccination has changed this from a disease coming in spikes to one which is constant all year round. The total of deaths is about 13% of the annual death rate over all three years, or for the last two years about 6%. I have no clear information how many official covid deaths are primarily due to covid. Government stats either as within 28 days of a test or covid listed on death certificate are much the same. You sure you didnt? Did you scrupulously isolate from each other each time? if you didnt then its surely highly likely you were exposed but no infection could establish such that you noticed? You were immune.
Or as I argue, didnt have early cases establishing unnoticed within the country before any alarm was called, as we did in the UK. Noting that the existence of the infected alpine town is itself evidence that early cases did establish outside china completely unnoticed before they were supposed to exist.
Japan didnt lock down or do anything much except warn people, and had a death rate of 0.01% compared to the Uk 0.1%. i guess the reason they never locked down was because deaths and serious cases simply never got high enough. They did eventually impose restrictions but only because the olympics was coming. Nothing serious happened then either, but by then restrictions were in place so who can say if it never would have. What evidence do you have that NZ would not have had an evolution of the disease much like Japan instead of Europe? In Europe or the US restictions simply failed to stop spread or deaths, whereas in the pacific rim countries, or those closer to china, they achieved better outcomes sometimes without trying. The geography suggests that region of the world has had more past exposure to corona viruses and therefore started with more immunity. I'm actually not disagreeing this was due to vaccination- I'm just arguing they got vaccinated by natural corona virus infections before the covid outbreak began. (all countries did to a degree. That much is proven)
It will be intersting to see what happens now in China, where they have the official lowest death rate in the world. Odd given covid began there. |
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Post by alec on Dec 11, 2022 13:21:27 GMT
Danny - "Either process seems to create herd immunity to a particular strain of covid, so there is still hope covid will run out of permutations to use and then will die down. That will happen, first because its ability to change is limited because it still has to function as a virus, and second based upon experience that this has happened many times in the past and initially serious corona viruses have simply downgraded to colds. Although they remain with us, and its likely they gave us a degree of immunity to covid as a plus for keeping them around." It would really help if you could actually cite some sources for where you get your assumptions from, because they're all wrong. 1) A particular feature of coronaviruses is the fact that immunity wanes. This sets it apart from 'flu and many other respiratory viruses. It isn't just about genetic drift towards new variants. The same variant can infect you a second time, as per a paper I showed you that found someone re-infected with the same variant after 26 days. Generally, but not always, second infections tend to be less severe in the acute phase, although there is very strong evidence that risks from long covid are elevated for subsequent infections. Again, all supported previously with the papers. 2) The covid virus has an almost limitless capacity to evolve. Again, as per papers I've posted, researchers have found 9000+ potential sites for mutation on the virus, and have identified those most likely to mutate. A lot of research has been done on this, and the virus is evolving much faster than originally anticipated. 3) I don't know where you get the assumption that it's bound to get milder as it evolves. That's just Daily Mail lazy shite. It's a myth. Viruses can get milder, get more severe, or stay the same. As it happens, covid has got significantly more severe since it first emerged in humans, with Omicron being slightly less severe than Delta but still significantly more severe than the original. Severity also depends on many other factors, so, for example, hospitalisation rates for under 5s with Omicron are far higher than Delta, because Omicron affects the upper respiratory tract more than the lungs, and infants are particularly vulnerable to this. I've mentioned before, with references, there is some evidence that smallpox was pretty harmless for several centuries before randomly mutating into a killer, and the current strain of avian flu has been widely circulating since 1996. This year, something happened to make it the most deadly strain of bird flu seen to date. It's time to dump the cod science idea that viruses always get milder. It isn't true. The reduction in severe outcomes is due primarily to vaccination. As a general point, please do show us your evidence. I show you an abundance of factual evidence, which you routinely misrepresent and fail to understand, but that's up to you. If you like demonstrating your ignorance in a public forum that's your call. But it would be very good to actually see the data upon which you base your opinions, as you seem very reticent to reveal these.
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Danny
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Dec 12, 2022 9:14:13 GMT
Post by Danny on Dec 12, 2022 9:14:13 GMT
You said we would get herd immunity, but now you've realised infections continue to run at high levels constantly that's a problem for you, so you have to invent completely spurious implications. I think I was always sceptical but hopeful about herd immunity. Because fundamentally Covid is much the same as other colds or flu to which we have never been able to create absolute herd immunity or a workable vaccine able to prevent spread. If you looked at my old posts, they would show me sceptical about the ability of a vaccine to do this, which has proved correct. Others pushing the government line argued vaccines would create herd immunity. It hasnt. What I do say is we created herd immunity to individual strains of covid, and you may recall that at outset official advice was that the virus wouldnt be able to mutate much. Thus immunity to the first strain would be durable even if it came back in a few years. I dont think the official experts expected covid to stay prevalent, or to come back in a new strain as we saw with Kent. Or at least, hoped it wouldnt and gave advice on the basis it wouldnt. I dont know how effective that herd immunity continues to be longer term, but we arent seeing repeat infections with the original strain, so I guess it is still holding up. The fact Hastings or Torridge didnt get reinfections in April 2020 proves they had herd immunity, so it did work at least strain by strain.
Constant high infections isnt a problem for me. The question is, is it something new which we have caused by the way we treated this illness, which has to mean the vaccine campaign because thats what has been different. Or was it always the case that an epidemic as it fades goes through a phase of mass endemic infections which however dodn't get noticed because most cases are very mild, and therefore before the invention of mass testing, undetectable?
Imprinting will only happen after repeated intense exposure to the same stimulus. Which is what happens with repeat vaccination programs but does not happen from natural infection. People get sick after vaccinations because they just got a huge dose of the trigger, in fact as big a dose as the doctors dared give them before the side effects became unacceptable. We have learnt to reduce the dose to younger people, because their stronger response has indeed proved dangerous in some cases. In nature, once our immune response gets strong enough to prevent an infection, then we dont get an infection and dont get a big trigger to increase that response. But when you shoot someone full of vaccine, its a huge body invasion every time. It just couldnt happen naturally, and we have never done this before on a mass scale like this. Especially since the new generation experimental vaccines are deliberately designed to concentrate on limited areas of the virus and for the most part have not been changed. Everything has been deliberately made far more intenses than in nature. That is what is different. If imprinting was ever going to happen, it would be upon the vaccine. Which then constrains everyone who has been vaccinated to be partially but not fully immune to new covid strains as they come along.
So its possible we have created this situation of permanent high level of covid infections, which is the exact reverse of herd immunity. It means anyone who for some other medical reason becomes susceptible, can be sure there will be covid circulating for them to catch.
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Danny
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Dec 12, 2022 10:01:20 GMT
Post by Danny on Dec 12, 2022 10:01:20 GMT
1) A particular feature of coronaviruses is the fact that immunity wanes. This sets it apart from 'flu and many other respiratory viruses. It really isnt. People get reinfected with other cold and flu viruses too. Expert estimated three corona virus infections per year pre covid for kids. But there are only two or three recognised strains. Normally this has been thought of as happening during the winter season. But actually we dont know what happened in the past during the summers. Before the invention of mass testing, if someone didnt have any symptoms of infection, just how would you know they had one? Bit of a sniffle in the summer, must be an allergy? Or was it flu? Change of tack there. I'd agree with what you say, except that you infer serious repeat infections are frequent, whereas the reality if you look at the Uk population right now, is they are pretty rare. They only achieve alarming numbers if you look at studies which ignore the general mass of the population which does not report being ill. Well duh, if you ignore everyone who isnt ill despite being infected with covid repeatedly, then the proportion getting symptoms starts to look scary. That in a nutshell has been the whole history of covid. if you dont count everyone who never got significantly ill despite being exposed and just look at the few really ill...then its scary. But that was always the big mistake. There might be a huge number of sites where changes can occur, but that doesnt mean all combinations will work together, or will make the virus fitter to survive. You can make a case that this explains why infections get milder as they go along, because the agent can no longer use some of its strongest tricks to which we have generated immunity and has to rely upon combinations which can get around immunity, but don't cause much illness (and hence spread). The consensus in designing vaccines was if you concentrate on the spike region, that will always work because it is very hard to change. Doesnt matter what happens elsewhere, that part is a bottleneck always targetable. Well, hasnt worked out quite like that but the simple existence of thousands or millions of variants doesnt prevent there being bottlenecks where change cannot occur. You are right, its seems likely it will be impossible to eradicate covid using vaccines or infection, simply to tone it down so we can live with it. throughout human history, this has happened every time a new epidemic emerges. Maybe covid is different, but it would be unique if so. Theoretically they can, but in real world situations under evolutionary pressure, they dont. There is an obvious reason why, because if an organism becomes too deadly it kills its hosts before they can spread it. No host, no organism. Organisms optimise to continue spreading and evade host immunity, but also they adapt to a level of inconvenience of their host where they can spread. if you isolate yourself, you wont spread the virus, So a more succesful virus is one which doesnt make you ill enough to take to your bed. There is evolutionary pressure which constrains them to be mild. Thats really hard to tell, because severity isnt an absolute we can measure. A strain which would kill everyone in a naive population might have little effect and therefore spread readily in a heavily imune one. So is that strain severe or mild? Its the same as when western explores invaded america, and the locals died in swathes from the diseases the westerners took with them. Was that severe illness because it killed indigenous americans, or mild illness because it didnt make westerners sick? Whose to say that further back before that it was a killer again and became mild? There certainly is a pattern that where a disease falls out of constant circulation in a population but continues to evolve apart from it, then when it comes back to the first population it can be very dangerous. Because it has evolved for a different situation, it then accidentally is pitched too severe. Thats why diseases switching from animals can be so dangerous, because when they switch they arent adapted to be mild in humans but have to evolve to be so. Or as I just said, it can happen where human populations are separated fom each other. The lesson is, constant repeat infections keeps you safe. No. Obviously no. vaccines have existed for only a tiny part of human history, yet we continue to exist with few severe diseases. if pathogens evolved to become severe we would be all long extinct. The pattern is they always evolve to be mild but virulent enough to continue living amongst their host population. I dont misrepresent it. I point out flaws in it. When I do that, you never respond. Its entirely open to you to argue your case, why eg people dying from covid would have had a population averge life expectancy. Whereas I argue that because peple are much more likely to get severely ill with covid if they are already ill with something else, which was proven in 2020 by numerous researchers, then it must follow they always had below average life expectancy. You have posted several papers which repeat this flaw, I have pointed it out numerous times, but never have you attempted to argue why I am wrong. Think for yourself for a change instead of believeing that because a recognised expert has said something, it must be true. If we took that line we would never have stopped living in caves. |
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Post by bardin1 on Dec 13, 2022 19:31:14 GMT
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