Coronavirus

[Tredman]

Loads of talk about a 2 week lockdown during October half term. Hancock waffling away on BBC saying nothing, but also not denying it.

 

[Paddingtonwolf]

I’m pretty sure it’s coming. It won’t be politically or economically palatable so there is an element of fingers in ears about its likely necessity.

 

[Newbridge Wolf]

Without wanting to sound like a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nutter, but with all the new recorded cases how many are resulting in serious illness and hospitalisation?

I understand that there is always a danger with how this will work itself out, and that we need to protect the weaker members of society, but there are many flus that are in circulation which cause mortality. I'm just wondering if this second wave proves less devastating, quite often the second wave is a milder reaction from what I've (admittedly limited) read, I know the Spanish flu is the big exception to that but with all these Bird flus and Swine flus they now exist and circulate within our communities.

I have a feeling, or maybe a hope, that this may well not be anywhere as devastating as the first wave, where I also believe there were many, many more infected than the limited testing identified.

 

[BillyDee]

Hospital cases and deaths are spiralling in France and Spain.
Here hospital admissions are doubling every 8 days. The first peak took out the most vulnerable, but this is still a killer, and there are concerns about long term issues even in those only mildly affected.

 

[pr0sl0]

Without wanting to sound like a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nutter, but with all the new recorded cases how many are resulting in serious illness and hospitalisation?

I understand that there is always a danger with how this will work itself out, and that we need to protect the weaker members of society, but there are many flus that are in circulation which cause mortality. I'm just wondering if this second wave proves less devastating, quite often the second wave is a milder reaction from what I've (admittedly limited) read, I know the Spanish flu is the big exception to that but with all these Bird flus and Swine flus they now exist and circulate within our communities.

I have a feeling, or maybe a hope, that this may well not be anywhere as devastating as the first wave, where I also believe there were many, many more infected than the limited testing identified.

Cases are going up because of more testing revealing them, but the key thing to look out for is % of tests that are positive - it's a better reflection of actual spread than raw case numbers.

And you can't really just hope and pray that it'll be better than before just because cases have been rising slowly since July without an accompanying rise in deaths/cases requiring hospitalisation. Think of it this way: We know that case numbers are rising predominantly in younger demographics, whereas the first "wave" was more evenly distributed (and the deaths were more common in people aged 50+). Whatever we're doing in terms of behavioural changes, so far, seems to be working in terms of balancing the spread against the need to give us all some degree of normality under stress (lockdown has its own health costs). BUT, at the same time, there hasn't been any appreciable mutation detected in the virus - it doesn't seem to have changed much over the year. This is an important thing to track, because it does give us a sense of understanding whether a virus like this is actually more or less dangerous. The Spanish Flu is a good example of the danger here, as you say, but it really is just a crapshoot - it could go up, it could go down, it could stay the same. You kind of have to assume the worst-case beforehand, because it would be too late to react and do anything if you're wrong by the time it's apparent.

If we take all that together, the balance of risks becomes clearer. Even with widespread changes in social behaviour - yes, it's not perfect by any means, but people are still generally more cautious than "normal", and many habits that are dangerous are much reduced like eg large-scale commuting, large cultural events, large gatherings, etc - we're still seeing cases start to rise, and the nature of exponential growth is that things kick off faster shockingly quickly, counter-untuitively so. We've just sent kids back to school, which is the largest mixing of different family and social bubbles since the lockdown, and university students are also heading back. If you already have the disease endemic in many communities, you're not just restarting the spread, you're giving it rocket fuel. And, crucially, at a certain point the "younger demographics" which have been sucking up most of the new cases will become saturated, and overspill. We don't know when or how that will happen, but it'll happen, same as hospitals becoming full kicked off a wave of deaths in care homes as people were discharged back into the community. Plus, of course, there's the lag between infections and deaths, so you really do have to be proactive when you see large case rises and nip it in the bud rather than waiting and seeing, as happened here in March, when it was clear for a few weeks that the UK was tracking Italy's case/death ratio almost exactly yet took measures in response later along the same trendline, and tens of thousands died as a result.

Interestingly enough, I got a letter this week saying I'd been randomly picked by the ONS to take part in the nationwide study they're doing to figure out exactly how widespread infections and immunity are. A health worker's going to drop around every few weeks and give me and my partner tests, but since it's projects like it that are the only way we'll know for sure how widespread infections were in the first wave, and in any incoming second, I'm pretty stoked to help out with it.

Whatever happens, the key thing is that lockdowns are really a policy failure whenever they happen. The whole point of what we've been doing is that it buys time to get the health infrastructure in place to suppress infections whenever they bubble up, so that even if you can never fully eliminate it you can at least get things back to as-near-as-normal ASAP. Having to go back into a second lockdown is just... Well, it's many things, and doesn't really do my rock-bottom opinion of this government any favours, but one thing it does lend credence to is the idea that we are still paying for early mistakes in, when a lockdown became clearly necessary, going for it as hard and comprehensively as possible. But I don't know, what do you guys all think? If someone came to me back in March and said "you're going to have to live in full quarantine, no leaving the house, not even for shopping, Wuhan-style, for 6-8 weeks, but afterwards it'll basically be back to normal", I'd take it in a shot.

 

[Newbridge Wolf]

I'm not doubting the seriousness of the disease and it is right that we should be taking precautions to kerb its spread, as most people I have vulnerable members of my family and it is something I take seriously.

I do feel that whilst certain facts can seem alarming, when you look a wide range of information, how we know it behaves, how we have learnt to treat it and how the systems are set up on a war footing if you like in preparation theres certainly some hope that any second wave will be less damaging than the first peak, although I'm not sure that would be any consolation to any family member who lost a loved one

 

[Tredman]

Positivity rate is going up - see colour of the line here:

 

[Newbridge Wolf]

Cases are going up because of more testing revealing them, but the key thing to look out for is % of tests that are positive - it's a better reflection of actual spread than raw case numbers.

And you can't really just hope and pray that it'll be better than before just because cases have been rising slowly since July without an accompanying rise in deaths/cases requiring hospitalisation. Think of it this way: We know that case numbers are rising predominantly in younger demographics, whereas the first "wave" was more evenly distributed (and the deaths were more common in people aged 50+). Whatever we're doing in terms of behavioural changes, so far, seems to be working in terms of balancing the spread against the need to give us all some degree of normality under stress (lockdown has its own health costs). BUT, at the same time, there hasn't been any appreciable mutation detected in the virus - it doesn't seem to have changed much over the year. This is an important thing to track, because it does give us a sense of understanding whether a virus like this is actually more or less dangerous. The Spanish Flu is a good example of the danger here, as you say, but it really is just a crapshoot - it could go up, it could go down, it could stay the same. You kind of have to assume the worst-case beforehand, because it would be too late to react and do anything if you're wrong by the time it's apparent.

If we take all that together, the balance of risks becomes clearer. Even with widespread changes in social behaviour - yes, it's not perfect by any means, but people are still generally more cautious than "normal", and many habits that are dangerous are much reduced like eg large-scale commuting, large cultural events, large gatherings, etc - we're still seeing cases start to rise, and the nature of exponential growth is that things kick off faster shockingly quickly, counter-untuitively so. We've just sent kids back to school, which is the largest mixing of different family and social bubbles since the lockdown, and university students are also heading back. If you already have the disease endemic in many communities, you're not just restarting the spread, you're giving it rocket fuel. And, crucially, at a certain point the "younger demographics" which have been sucking up most of the new cases will become saturated, and overspill. We don't know when or how that will happen, but it'll happen, same as hospitals becoming full kicked off a wave of deaths in care homes as people were discharged back into the community. Plus, of course, there's the lag between infections and deaths, so you really do have to be proactive when you see large case rises and nip it in the bud rather than waiting and seeing, as happened here in March, when it was clear for a few weeks that the UK was tracking Italy's case/death ratio almost exactly yet took measures in response later along the same trendline, and tens of thousands died as a result.

Interestingly enough, I got a letter this week saying I'd been randomly picked by the ONS to take part in the nationwide study they're doing to figure out exactly how widespread infections and immunity are. A health worker's going to drop around every few weeks and give me and my partner tests, but since it's projects like it that are the only way we'll know for sure how widespread infections were in the first wave, and in any incoming second, I'm pretty stoked to help out with it.

Whatever happens, the key thing is that lockdowns are really a policy failure whenever they happen. The whole point of what we've been doing is that it buys time to get the health infrastructure in place to suppress infections whenever they bubble up, so that even if you can never fully eliminate it you can at least get things back to as-near-as-normal ASAP. Having to go back into a second lockdown is just... Well, it's many things, and doesn't really do my rock-bottom opinion of this government any favours, but one thing it does lend credence to is the idea that we are still paying for early mistakes in, when a lockdown became clearly necessary, going for it as hard and comprehensively as possible. But I don't know, what do you guys all think? If someone came to me back in March and said "you're going to have to live in full quarantine, no leaving the house, not even for shopping, Wuhan-style, for 6-8 weeks, but afterwards it'll basically be back to normal", I'd take it in a shot.

I'd replied before reading your post - some interesting points. I don't trust the Wuhan model, something just doesn't ring true with that.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

Locking down for two weeks (and we won't even do it for about another month, as is being mooted) will do absolutely fuck all other than annoy people.

Either do it - I personally don't think we can afford to, on an economic or societal level - or don't.

 

[Tredman]

Actually think 2 weeks is exactly the right length if you want to stop transmission, assuming you are no longer infectious after 14 days. Do it properly and hard and it should work.

 

[BillyDee]

The "cases are going up because of more testing" line isn't accurate, there has been less testing in September than August.

 

[WolfmanOz]

2 weeks ! ! !

We’ve been in lockdown/curfew in Melbourne for 11 weeks with at least another 5 to go ! ! !

And I’m going fucking bat shit crazy being under house arrest.

 

[Newbridge Wolf]

2 weeks ! ! !

We’ve been in lockdown/curfew in Melbourne for 11 weeks with at least another 5 to go ! ! !

And I’m going fucking bat shit crazy being under house arrest.

Well we get plenty more days during a normal year when we can't go outside because the weather is foul - think about it as an evening up process!

Seriously I don't know how you guys are coping

 

[pr0sl0]

I'd replied before reading your post - some interesting points. I don't trust the Wuhan model, something just doesn't ring true with that.

Yeah, it's not something I like about myself that I now look at it and go "fair enough".

My feelings about a lot of what's happened over the last six months have taken a while to settle down, but what I have become very sure about is that the big failing of all of this - and this isn't just the UK, this has been the case in a lot of places - is that we're stuck in a kind of authoritarian vicious cycle. The problem won't go away because, fundamentally, we have a crisis of mutual respect and empathy. Not to go all papper about it, but the state does as the state is wont to do, and the options left for it now that it's endemic are ones that restrict us and keep up apart through cajoling and force, and I hate that. It goes against really fundemantal personal beliefs of mine, that the best solutions to the world's problems are ones which have the consent and involvement of as many people as possible, and which encourage us to look after each other.

It's annoying that cranks have jumped on Sweden as a kind of shining beacon on a hill alternative to lockdowns and restrictive laws, because they're not doing great either and there are definite problems with how they've handled things. But I do wish that we lived in a country, and a world, where this hadn't just been noticed and reacted to much earlier by a public health and government system which hadn't been hacked apart by cuts and deliberate sabotage, but which had also been met with a huge and deliberate campaign to give people the tools to understand and respond to what's happening without the need for a lockdown - like, if there had been widespread buy-in for mask-wearing back in March, as they had in Czechia, where people started making masks at home en masse and hanging them on trees and lampposts across the country so everyone could have them quickly and for free. Or, even better, like Japan, where a mix of relatively mild restrictions on certain large-scale events and a proactive public health service, combined with mass appreciation for how to keep your germs to yourself, has meant that the worst of the peak there (during a second wave in August) was "only" 2,000 new daily cases registered. That said, nobody's done this perfectly, and I think the thing I'm coming to accept is there really isn't any way to do this "perfectly". But I don't think that the kinds of conversations that are happening in the media, in politics, are actually productive when it comes to figuring out how close to perfect we might be able to get. You can see this increasing polarisation between the right-wing culture war "iM nOt WeArInG a MuZzLe" side and the "LOCKDOWN LOCKDOWN SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING NOW NOW NOW" precautionary principle side, and it's not really a back-and-forth that's likely to produce any kind of positive model for what the future should look like, accepting that this could and will happen again in some way, and how, therefore, society should be constructed as a response. There's a lot of incredibly interesting research that we can look to now on not just how the virus spreads but behavioural insights too, but trusting the kinds of people we have in power now to use that knowledge in a way that reconciles all the many opposing forces at play during a pandemic.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

We have Dildo Harding in charge. She has a proven track record of failure everywhere. We still have that corpulent cunt saying we've done a really good job and our systems are fine.

Whatever we do will be a poorly thought-through mess, you can guarantee that.

 

[Sniffer]

They've also got to balance their attempts at putting measures in place with the dissent of their backers and the loons that sit on the benches with them.

I think it was Tuesday's health statement with the questions that followed being..

1) From their opponents - what is going wrong with the testing system and when will it be fixed.
2) From their side - .....but the rule of 6, what can we do to change it and when will it end.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

Looks like we're going under restrictions. For FUCK'S sake.

 

[Parkins left foot]

Looks like we're going under restrictions. For FUCK'S sake.

From Tuesday apparrantly - no details were given on what though

Sorry for everyone else but glad that I live where I do at this point

 

[BGreenWolf]

What are the boundaries for Wolverhampton going into restrictions, then? Is it just the actual city itself, WV postcodes, or what?

 

[Sniffer]

What are the boundaries for Wolverhampton going into restrictions, then? Is it just the actual city itself, WV postcodes, or what?

If Leicester was anything to go by they'll announce all such details AFTER restrictions come into force. Why would people in the areas need to know in advance?