Coronavirus outbreak

[tom73]

Hospitals are starting to ration Covid treatment drugs at the moment, not sure how many hospital cases it would take to fill our hospitals again......

Less than many people think I'd love to know how the health service from primary care though to hospitals.
Would work in this "golden" let covid get on with it world. Clearly they don't have a clue how it all works.
If hospitals kept going some how primary care which is main part of health care would for sure collapse.

 

[brodiej]

Those charts are nothing more than scaremongering nonsense drawn up by number crunching geeks. The actual, real-world reality simply doesn't bear out any of this fantasy.
Despite the official positive test numbers being way higher than those back in March/April, hospitalisations and deaths are only a small fraction of those six months ago.

No they aren’t

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[tom73]

These are total beds available in local ICU's.
BRI has increased to 16 beds,
Calderdale has 6 beds,
Huddersfield has 8.

Doesn't seem as though it'd take much to fill them.

That's plenty in the covid left to it "golden age". Remember all the old locked down , care homes locked down, group homes locked downed, All at "risk" groups locked down. They only get really sick remember everyone else just has a bad cold so won't need them. Anyway they won't be use as most staff will be off on sick with the bad cold. So either way they'd not be in use so won't fill up and problem solved.

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

This is what's known as denial. When facts are simply too difficult to confront.

The virus has already killed nigh on 60,000 with no evidence of herd immunity. Yet you simply can't face the reality that unsuppressed, many more will die.

I'm not denying anything. The virus is real, to some people it is deadly, and globally it has in reality already taken out several million people, way more than any official figures - and will continue to take out many more millions before its over and done with.
Attempting to generally suppress the virus will not save any lives overall. Deaths will still occur, but over an extended period and additionally from other medical conditions left untreated because all the focus is currently on the virus.
There is no magical "get out of jail free card" with coronavirus. There's no vaccine, even if there was one it might not be that effective either, and you also have the logistical problem of actually getting a good proportion of the population vaccinated. A substantial minority won't accept the vaccine, so what do you do then? Unless you allow people to become infected rather than try to suppress it, the coronavirus is going to circulate for years at some level and it could well mutate significantly over that time, which will cause another big problem. It needs to progress swiftly, and burn itself out as soon as possible.

 

[Milzy]

Please explain what would drive down R if we don't take action?

We need to keep the R held Steady for herd immunity, without over running hospitals. Or play cat and mouse with it for 10 years or more.

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

We need to keep the R held Steady for herd immunity, without over running hospitals. Or play cat and mouse with it for 10 years or more.

Exactly. Every infection case now is one less person you need to try to get vaccinated at a later date. Given the logistics and the size of populations, it makes more sense to try to target vaccination at the high risk end of the spectrum and let everyone else gain immunity from having been infected. Even delivering the winter Flu vaccine to a limited group of people in the UK proves quite a challenge every year. Does anyone seriously believe it's possible to deliver several times as many coronavirus vaccinations on top?

 

[vickster]

Exactly. Every infection case now is one less person you need to try to get vaccinated at a later date.

How so? Do you have actual scientific validated data to show infection confers (long term) immunity? (Not sure you can as the virus has only been in existence for a year if that).
Or could this be an unsubstantiated assumption on your part (which you regularly trot out)?

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

No-one knows how long immunity will be effective for, but that applies to both viruses and vaccines alike. The difference is no vaccine immunity is currently available, whereas infection immunity is. It's not a perfect world, and we don't have the luxury of that choice if we want to eradicate the virus quickly. It's infection or nothing.

 

[marinyork]

Exactly. Every infection case now is one less person you need to try to get vaccinated at a later date. Given the logistics and the size of populations, it makes more sense to try to target vaccination at the high risk end of the spectrum and let everyone else gain immunity from having been infected. Even delivering the winter Flu vaccine to a limited group of people in the UK proves quite a challenge every year. Does anyone seriously believe it's possible to deliver several times as many coronavirus vaccinations on top?

I think it'd take about a year and a half to get it to the a very high percentage of the people over 11.

The government's strategy is what you are saying. Then wait and see. If it spectacularly didn't work having vaccinated 30 million people and there was a 3rd 4th and 5th smaller wave or other very long health like long covid doing even more damage than known now they might vaccinate another 25 million if very safe.

Kate Bingham did say words to this effect that if the vaccine was 95% effective and safe they might do then rest later. It's likely very unrealistic numbers.

 

[tom73]

We need to keep the R held Steady for herd immunity, without over running hospitals. Or play cat and mouse with it for 10 years or more.

How do you that then ? with no interventions other than lock anyone at risk away?
As testing would have totally broken down by long before you'd have chance to work it out.
As R is not a daily figure anything you do takes week's to filter though.
It takes around 10 days before any case get's to hospital admission and days or week or so before they get critical.
How do you plan capacity if you can't possibly know what case numbers are likely to be ?
With no interventions primary care would have fell over long before that point anyway. So we'd have no health service to get over ran in the first place.

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

How do you plan capacity if you can't possibly know what case numbers are likely to be ?.

We've got the numbers of hospitalisations from early on in the outbreak, and various people have been trying to make educated guesses as to what the true number of daily infections really were at that time. The multiple between true and tested positive infections is going to be much smaller now with widespread testing than it was six months ago. The potential for future cases is constantly declining anyway, due to previous infections. If, say, 25% of the population has already had the virus then the worst case scenario is only 75% of what it was at the beginning of the epidemic and that potential number is falling by whatever the real daily infection rate is.

 

[classic33]

Exactly. Every infection case now is one less person you need to try to get vaccinated at a later date. Given the logistics and the size of populations, it makes more sense to try to target vaccination at the high risk end of the spectrum and let everyone else gain immunity from having been infected. Even delivering the winter Flu vaccine to a limited group of people in the UK proves quite a challenge every year. Does anyone seriously believe it's possible to deliver several times as many coronavirus vaccinations on top?

Question!
I realise it's only what I've seen, but the same person has tested positive twice. Isolation for the second time.

Their job required a negative result before returning.

How can they be positive again, if herd immunity/catching it once means you can't catch it a second time?

 

[RoadRider400]

No they aren’t

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How about posting data this plotted using a linear Y axis. The use of a logarithmic axis is fabulously misleading. Though I suspect thats the idea.

 

[MarkF]

Hospitals are starting to ration Covid treatment drugs at the moment, not sure how many hospital cases it would take to fill our hospitals again......

Well the Guardian will probably tell you the NHS will be overwhelmed by teatime. In reality the worst hit area, the North, has a Covid occupancy of 3-4%, this in hopitals that have been preparing for months and currently have huge vacant/dormant/prepared capacity. A panic stricken NHS coped at the virus peak, with huge amounts of staff covid-absent, why shouldn't it cope this winter? We are in another hysterical fear mongering mood, just like spring, it gets to me and I have to get comfort from the scientits who called it right since March. Are we to make the same mistakes again?

We can no more stop the spread of the virus in the vulnerable areas, care homes and hospitals, than we can flu. I've seen so many infection control measures put in place in good faith and for solid reasons, but still it spreads and that's where the deaths will be this winter, care homes and hospitals, next year too and the year after.....lockdown?

I see the government is (hopefully) not going to lockdown again, good, because they don't work, they know they are going to have to live/work with it, it's now the start of a long and protracted career protecting reversal. If you were to be presented with country graphs from all around the world, showing infections, hospitalistaions and deaths for 2020, then asked to mark where lockdown was introduced, you'd be stumped. There is nothing to go on, no event, no indicator, you'd be guessing as much as a blind man pinning a tail on a donkey.

WHO:- "We really do appeal to all world leaders:stop using lockdown as your primary control method"

The government is happy with a ridiculously flawed testing system. It can then manipulate and produce the figures and headlines however it likes, how else can you expain the 1000's of perfectly healthy Northern uni/college kids being used to produce policy? These asymptomatic or false postive kids are at the start of term and have practically no consequence for the rest of society.

I see that the government failed to produce any scientific evidence for it's recent measures by the Friday deadline, how could it? Into court, 15th October, now that will be interesting, they cannot lie & bluff there.

As ever, I am not a virus denier, conspiracy theorist nor re-set believer, it is an almighty cock up though.

 

[SpokeyDokey]

No they aren’t

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Current NHS bed occupation level in England is around 3000 cases (Gov' dashboard) which does broadly equate to the occupation level up to around March 23/24.

This rapidly rose to around 11000 by April 1 and peaked at around 17000 by April 12 followed by what looks like an accelerating decline thereafter to a low of 4-500 by late August.

Will be pertinent to see if this wave follows the same trend or not.