COVID-19

I fear some people will not adjust back to normal life for years.

Some people take these tests religiously even if no even required to. I can understand teachers who have to test but there are people out there who do the same.

I would however guess that the vast vast majority of people don't test at all unless they actually suspect they have covid.

If they removed testing tomorrow for me nothing would change, however for a section of society they would be frightened to leave their homes.

In other news, 100,000 cases recorded on Australia yesterday. No wonder they want all the focus on Djokovic who to my knowledge tested negative and is still negative despite his vaccine status and is one of the most physically fit men in the world due to being one of the most successful athletes in the world.

 

Don't quite a lot of other countries charge for LFTs already? I seem to remeber Germany and France planning to stop them being free but nit sure if they ever went through with it.

 

we were planning on charging but dropped it.

from the number of people asking for tests I reckon a lot of people are now testing regularly

 

I think there's a massive age difference in attitude to testing. I'm 65, most of my friends are similar age or older. None of us is hiding behind the sofa, but we all usually do LFTs before meeting up. And all of our kids do them before meeting up with us because they don't want to risk giving Covid to us.

We all know that, because we're all triple jabbed, the chances of serious illness or death from Covid are pretty low. But once you get into your 60s most people have health issues of one sort or another that you live with. None of us knows whether we'll be one of the unlucky few for whom the vaccines don't work well and whether Covid would exacerbate those issues or worse. So that leads to more caution than younger people have, because they don't generally have those persistent health issues.
I think that level of caution will start to decrease once this current peak goes down and if it becomes incontrovertibly clear, as currently appears to be the case, that Omicron is much less dangerous than previous variants.
We clearly do have to get to the point where we simply need to live with Covid, as we do with other viruses. But because the mortality rate is so closely tied to age, it's going to take older people a bit longer to get to that point than everyone else.

 

The next, and hopefully final, stage in this process is for people who are higher risk and/or previously zero covid zealots to ween themselves off the testing and rely on the protection given by the vaccine.

To some degree it's what people who were already of lower risk have already done but its definitely harder for some other demographics.

Once that happens and people have confidence in the peersonal protection given by the vaccines then hopefully everything else will fall away.

Of course the old fall back scare stories of the next variant, long covid, etc, etc but hopefully people are getting desensitised to that kind of story by now.

 

Indy Sage and the covid grifters will not let this go without a fight.

It makes them feel needed. I doubt they will let their mini celebrity status fall away.

Christina Pagel is a mathematician yet seems to think she is the voice on covid response the way she is on Sky News.

I notice her latest piece on the TV was from Penrith Cumbria rather than North London, so the restrictions she wants placed upon us don't apply to her movements round the UK.

 

No doubt they won't let it go but hopefully their platform will get smaller. People like Pagel and Deepti Gurdasani have built a bit of "power" that they would never have got in any other circumstance so they won't let it slide.

However even The Guardian seem to have pivoted in the last couple of weeks to a more sensible long term endemic outlook (although in general they're not letting go of masks!) so the Indy SAGE outlook seems to be diminishing generally.

I don't know why the outlook that you should trust the protection your vaccine gives you has taken so long to filter through. It's probably that the messaging hasn't clearly changed since we were told that the vaccines would stop transmission so people still have this idea that it's a community solution.

 

It's the guff that was pushed out that the vaccine almost eliminated the getting covid which was removed by the Delta Variant and even more so by omicron that was Still pushed out.

It should have been made clear that you can still get and transmit Covid with the vaccine but you will be in a far better position to fight it off when you get it that should have been the main message through out.

That would have also not given the conspiracy theorists something to attack the vaccine with.

Messaging is key.

 

100% - I almost get that governments don't want to be seen to diminish the effectiveness of the vaccine in any way while they're also trying to push for people to have it but there's no excuse for the scientists to not give it to everyone straight about what the vaccines do - and don't - actually do.

The lack of clarity on this has not helped at all.

 

Regarding LFTs. Isn't the government guidance that if you are attending any sort of social gathering that you should take a LFT beforehand. Or was that just over Christmas and New Year?

 

18,000 people in hospital with covid and increasing daily

 

Northern Ireland and Wales don't confirm who is in hospital with Covid and who is in hospital for Covid.

Scotland on Friday released a small sample size showed that of the people in with Covid, only 60% were in hospital for Covid. Figures in England put this figure at 63%.

So of those 18,000 people in hospital with Covid, it would be fair to assume 11,000 are there because they require treatment, whilst the other 7,000 are there for other treatments who happen to test positive.

The number of people in ICU for Covid 19 on the 6th January in the UK was 868, on the 30th Dec it was 875, on the 23rd Dec it was 840, 16th Dec it was 875, 9th Dec it was 900, 2nd Dec it was 895, 16th Nov was 938, 1st Nov was 1,030, 16th Oct was 805, 1st Oct was 805, 16th Sept was 1,020 and going back 4 months 1st Sept was 1,030.

So the figures to ICU are if anything currently better than they have been overall in the last 4 months.

Data here Healthcare in the UK | Coronavirus in the UK (data.gov.uk)

 

Accepting all that they are still taking up 18,000 beds that could be used to treat others on the waiting list

 

I've just said that of the 18,000 a large number are people from the waiting list getting their treatments who just happen to test positive whilst they get their treatments.

 

Glad to see common sense prevailed and Djokovic can compete.

Hope we wins the damn thing after all this calamity.

 

I presume you are unaware of the latest developments where the Federal Government are still looking to throw him out of the country even though he won the court case.

 

So they should, He is taking the proverbial

 

Why? He followed the rules to enter the country. What's the point in setting criteria to enter the country including exemptions that you aren't going to honour.

Whether he should be vaccinated or not is a different matter. If he was granted a visa and he passed the criteria set, you can't just go changing that without fair warning.

It's all been a political setup, but now Australia government is the one who is coming out of it looking like a set of loons, not Djokovic.

 

That's very easy to say if you are not of an age where it's likely to kill you if you happen to be one of those for whom the vaccine doesn't work well, or at all. The fact is that most of the deaths are in people over 60 and the death rate, amongst those vaccinated as well as unvaccinated, goes up in lockstep with age.

Most vaccinated over-60s know that its unlikely that the virus will do them serious harm if they catch it. But they also know that if the vaccine doesn't work for them then they are much more likely to be up shit creek if they catch Covid than younger people are, because immune systems decline significantly post-60, even amongst very fit people. So most people I know, despite being thoroughly sick to the back teeth of having their normal lives curtailed and equally sick of constantly having to think about Covid, remain cautious, because no one knows if they are one of the unlucky ones until they catch it.

Some people are saying, 'it's no different from a cold now', but that's simply not true - nobody dies from a cold, even if they are old, but people are still dying from Omicron.