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Coronavirus

Coronavirus - The Poll

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Apologies, I should have been more transparent with my source. This is via postcode search on Government coronavirus data website. I understand this breaks it down to a much more localised area and BigT may have been looking more broadly.

I am in a city centre so quite densely populated. Cases were 4 (per 100.000 to 7 days) and below the national average when we went into tier 3, it's crept up to 24 and above average since then. 5 miles down the road at my Mum's, I think there were 2 or 3 when she also went in tier 3, it remains well below the national average now, in fact lower than my girlfriend's parent's in Cheshire who remain in tier 2.

Personally, I have little confidence the tier system works. Weren't tier 3 areas also promised mass testing? We were informed we're going into tier 3 on Thursday and heard nothing. A number of my friends are in Manchester and in tier 3 and haven't heard a thing. Why is everything so slow?
 
GaryH said:
And if it was the opposition in power it would be the same situation. That’s government and politics.
Let’s just be thankful it’s not Corbyn leading the country!!
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Thats a huge assumption to make, with absolutely no evidence to back it up. In fact all major opposition parties have been bang on the money regarding the actions that should be taken even without access to the government data, how do we know this? Because Johnson has had to u-turn and do what the opposition said at every turn. Just 2 weeks too late on average.

No government could have prevented any impact from this pandemic as it’s a natural disaster, but the conservatives have been more interested in getting money to their mates (with huge PPE contracts) than proactively acting against the spread of the virus.

I wasn’t a major Corbyn fan as I sit more centre left in my politics, but he would have handled this better than the clown we have in power now. And you really need to get over him, he’s yesterday’s news.
 
One of the interesting things about the new strain is it is potentially spreading better in children. That's not to say children get ill from it, but perhaps they are playing a bigger part in its transmission than in previous strains. Also when Boris spoke at the press conference yesterday he said he wanted to keep schools open "if we possibly can", which seems like a change of tone.

The data is untested at the moment but if it becomes proven, I wonder if we'll see a reintroduction of remote or staggered learning, at least in areas where the infection rate is high (perhaps in tier 4 areas)?
 
Alsty said:
One of the interesting things about the new strain is it is potentially spreading better in children. That's not to say children get ill from it, but perhaps they are playing a bigger part in its transmission than in previous strains. Also when Boris spoke at the press conference yesterday he said he wanted to keep schools open "if we possibly can", which seems like a change of tone.

The data is untested at the moment but if it becomes proven, I wonder if we'll see a reintroduction of remote or staggered learning, at least in areas where the infection rate is high (perhaps in tier 4 areas)?
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Yeah I saw that, theory is that children have fewer ACE receptors than adults so the fact this version of the virus is more efficient at binding to the ACE receptors gives it an advantage in children.

There are some very quiet rumblings that this mutated version of the virus may actually be a little less severe but I suspect the issue is the illness doesn’t really become severe until the 2nd week of infection and it’s mostly spreading amongst the young so we don’t really have enough data to know the severity yet.

Scientist do however seem confident it is still vulnerable to the vaccines currently in circulation.
 
Dave said:
Scientist do however seem confident it is still vulnerable to the vaccines currently in circulation.
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This is very promising, in my personal view.

On the topic of vaccines, I’ve also heard that the government is pondering the prospect of vaccinating secondary school students very soon for this precise reason, as well as that the new variant possibly makes children more susceptible.
 
Matt N said:
This is very promising, in my personal view.

On the topic of vaccines, I’ve also heard that the government is pondering the prospect of vaccinating secondary school students very soon for this precise reason, as well as that the new variant possibly makes children more susceptible.
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Its a little more complicated than the government deciding to vaccinate children. The medicines safety approval is completely different for children as you can’t easily do research on healthy children for consent reasons.
 
Danza91 said:
Weren't tier 3 areas also promised mass testing?
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Yup “mass” lateral flow testing came in for tier 3 areas, but way too late as cases were already dropping. For example, my town launched it on the 14th December which was way too late to have any sort of effect. The slots filled up quickly and this batch of testing finishes tomorrow anyway.

I have no idea just how many tests were actually done either, as the government dashboard doesn’t seem to tally with the multiple slots per day that were available. If we do treat the dashboard data as accurate, then just 22 lateral flow tests have been conducted since 14th December. Not really a definition of mass testing in a town of 106,000... And if that data isn’t accurate and more tests have been conducted, we are causing issues in tracking the virus if statistics are not updated at regular intervals.

If things were in place earlier, who knows we may have actually got out of tier 3.
 
Dave said:
There are some very quiet rumblings that this mutated version of the virus may actually be a little less severe but I suspect the issue is the illness doesn’t really become severe until the 2nd week of infection and it’s mostly spreading amongst the young so we don’t really have enough data to know the severity yet.

Scientist do however seem confident it is still vulnerable to the vaccines currently in circulation.
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There are also rumblings that this strain has been around for some time but is just now becoming dominant, that kind of makes sense as Spain and France both had fast outbreaks a couple of months ago but their scientists didn’t spot it, It would be the irony of all ironies if that turns out to be true given how quickly they announced travel bans.
Apparently Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
No wonder the UK was one of the first to find it,
 
BigT said:
There are also rumblings that this strain has been around for some time but is just now becoming dominant, that kind of makes sense as Spain and France both had fast outbreaks a couple of months ago but their scientists didn’t spot it, It would be the irony of all ironies if that turns out to be true given how quickly they announced travel bans.
Apparently Public Health Wales sequenced about 4,000 genomes in the past week, more than the whole of France since the beginning of the pandemic.
No wonder the UK was one of the first to find it,
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Its not a rumbling, scientists are pretty sure this variant has been around since September.

If you want some border wars this variant also has the mutation seen in Denmark when we closed our borders to them (including accompanied freight), it’s likely most countries are too late with their border closures but are you really going to get grumpy over them doing something you would have praised our government for doing if the shoe was on the other foot?

The irony is this virus proves borders are potentially just a construct of pointlessness , because the bag of RNA and protein doesn’t give a flying....
 
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rob666 said:
Isle of Man residents would disagree however.
If you get your borders up quickly, and enforce the rules, they work.
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Its easier if you have a small island, in general by the time you notice a new virus/ strain of virus in a population of millions the thing has already packed its bags and wandered off to a new area to infect.
 
In theory it would of been possible to do a New Zealand and lift the drawbridge as we are lucky to be an island nation however due to greedy corporations that have tentacles in every level of government (whatever colour it is at the time) that was impossible.
Even now we have supermarkets claiming they are running out of broccoli and cauliflower when in actual fact farmers in Lincolnshire have fields full of the stuff but it’s cheaper to import it from France.
 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-55410065

Coronavirus spreads to Antarctic research station

The news means that Covid cases have now been recorded on all seven continents. Oh No! I hope the Penguins are COVID proof :(

On the brighter note 2.4M vaccines have been administered so far and many million to come. Sure baby steps getting back out of Lockdowns but light at the end of tunnel for next year :D

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This is the problem of letting non-experts speak on technical subjects. The Pfizer vaccine has regulatory approval only when it's administered as two doses. It is not possible to do what he suggests.

The FDA report (Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine PDF, 1.1MB, page 32) suggests there is insufficient data to show that a single dose is effective after 21 days:

The efficacy observed after Dose 1 and before Dose 2, from a post-hoc analysis, cannot support a conclusion on the efficacy of a single dose of the vaccine, because the time of observation is limited by the fact that most of the participants received a second dose after three weeks. The trial did not have a single-dose arm to make an adequate comparison.

Presumably it is the same data the MHRA and EMA have used to grant their approvals. They won't give approval for something that's not supported by the data. There would need to be a trial of only a single dose before they could make a decision to approve it.
 
I imagine the MHRA will be worried that if a single dose isn’t as effective as 94% it dents confidence in vaccination scrutiny and overall uptake of vaccines.

To my knowledge they are not holding back on doses anyway, they are administering everything we have and hoping that the next delivery isn’t delayed for the 2nd dose.
 
It's weird that there's this sudden concentration on new and different strains. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but surely pre-September we weren't dealing with just one strain from the very start of the pandemic until then? Yet now every announcement seems to be accompanied with "we have a new strain..."
 
There's significantly more than three strains as the virus mutates all the time. I think @Rojo is referring to the two specific strains mentioned by Hancock plus "all the other strains" roughly bundled together.

The two new strains that are causing concern are the one seen in the South East of England (variant B.1.1.7) and the newly discovered one in South Africa which is also more transmissible. It looks like they evolved separately but have similar mutations.

Other strains have not been mentioned because I guess they have similar transmission and severity characteristics to each other. However these two have a higher transmissibility rate which is what makes them newsworthy.
 
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