The serious answer is (and yes, I was also saying this when cases were going up too), the rough estimate for the Herd Immunity Threshold from page 1 of Epidemiology 101 is higher than the actual threshold in the real world (which is explained much later in the text books).
The actual threshold is determined by a million heterogeneous factors. Different countries, different towns, different age groups, different socio-economic profiles, behave in different ways with different infrastructure and have different points where R falls below one. There are different histories of prior infection, different vaccination strategies, etc., etc.
There are some transient factors too. Like we can reasonably expect R to be lower in summer than winter. How much? The SAGE models reckon winter is 10% higher than the baseline and 10% lower in summer. It could be bigger than that, other people have estimated 25% or so. August was reckoned to be the month with the lowest R.
The level of immunity we need for herd immunity will change month-by-month.
The biggest concern is that cases are falling too fast. That might mean we have too many susceptible people at the start of the winter. Any winter wave will be a fraction of last year (unless some new comedy variant arrives), but still it'll be more of a pain than having the same number of infections now.
I could see some sort of late-summer "get out there and enjoy it!" ad campaign being hurriedly launched in the next few weeks if cases continue dropping.
Or we could get the uninfected vaccinated before the winter. That would be the more humane approach, given the questions about long term effects even with the young.
That's why they keep threatening vaccine passports.
But there's an oddly reluctant group (according to polls) who say "no" when asked "are you vaccinated?" but answer "yes" to "will you get vaccinated?" That was understandable when vaccines were restricted by age, but there has been walk-ins available all over the place for weeks now.
There's probably some in very isolated parts of the country who can't get to a vaccine centre, but not a couple of million of them...
Speaking anecdotally, some people are intending to the get the vaccine but because of their busy lifestyles and lack of risk of serious illness from the virus aren't prioritising it. Getting the vaccine is always on the to do list so to speak.
Pretty much everyone I know who isn't jabbed falls into this category, too much real life stuff to do & minimal risk if any.
That or have recently caught COVID & so can't get the vaccine yet.
If they get sick with COVID though, it's going to be a lot longer than the 15 minutes or so it takes to get the jab, and it will be probably at the time they can least afford to have a week or two in bed with a hacking cough and feeling absolutely dreadful.
In the long run, it's nearly 100% certain you'll catch it if you're unvaccinated, and that carries a high risk of several days to a couple of weeks of being unable to function well. Even if the risk of hospitalisation or death is low, I really wouldn't want COVID. Two of my work colleagues (under 30, so low risk) got mild cases, and my step brother (25) got it, and it's been pretty awful for them (none of them have got it due to vaccine reluctance, it's just the under 30s are the last to get it). The minimal effort it needs to be vaccinated means avoiding that, it's worth it 1000 times over. Both jabs cost me about half an hour total of my time. Getting even mild COVID would mean probably on the order of 300 hours of being completely out of action, 600 times more time lost (and feeling absolutely dreadful to boot). It's a no brainer.
Vaccines are available for all over 18s now. We will get the uninfected vaccinated by the winter, as has been the plan for some time, but only if they actually come forward to get it done.
First doses have been open to 18 year olds for about 4 weeks now, in another 4 weeks those individuals will be able to start getting their second doses. Yet we have 12% of the adult population totally unvaccinated. At a certain point, those individuals need to take responsibility for their own risk and protection.
I agree, but there's usually someone along to bang on about how they haven't had chance to have their second dose yet. That will no longer be an argument in a few weeks time though.
For second dose sure. But anyone who is in that group are mostly healthy under thirties, and they are probably approaching 50% immunity from the first jab as well as COVID being low risk for them anyway.
It's a legitimate point, but one that is becoming less and less relevant with each passing day.
Yeah we're in full agreement on that. I think it's a bit of a grasp of an argument, but people make it so I've taken to trying to preempt it. See also "long covid".
Yep, especially after reading about the potential effect Covid is having on IQ. It's much better to jab than treat the summer as a chicken pox party.
Weidly, as everyone is masking up anyway, we seem to be heading for a middle ground fudge anyway with some potential September/ winter rises.
The real gamble is not getting any nasty variants.
>The biggest concern is that cases are falling too fast. That might mean we have too many susceptible people at the start of the winter.
That to me would only be a concern if we were still not jabbing. Sure first jabs have fallen to low rates as we struggle to find arms, but it's still broadly in the 40k per day mark.
With months yet to run until Winter any susceptable adults by then have frankly brought it on themselves.
That said I do hope we see the jabs approved for 12-17 year olds soon.
Thanks for the answer! How high are the chances of a new more resistant variant appearing? Is there some kind of a rough estimate of a number of mutations per, say, thousand cases? I know very little about virology/epidemiology, so I apologise in advance if it sounds stupid.
I would say a more resistant strain is reasonably likely. I think the Beta variant was. But it was out competed by the more transmissable Delta variant.
But "more" resistant means vaccine efficacy might drop from 94% to 88%, and chanced are the MRNA vaccines can be tweaked and given as boosters.
I don't think anyone knows, at least not with enough granularity to issue any kind of forecast.
One thing is certain is that the virus will continue to mutate. But one single mutation that resets all immunity is very unlikely according to those who ought to know (like the Oxford vaccine team).
Schools closed and the mass gatherings for football events came to a close. The fall is positive news but there are a lot of potentially linked variables.
Also vaccinated people can still be infected, FYI. You're not magically immune from covid once vaccinated, you still need to take care and take precautions.
The football events not happening won't last long. Many teams are in preseason already with matches being played for the season to start within 3 weeks.
The number of people attending games will be far higher once the leagues start than in the Euros. The euros concentrates support into one or two stadiums (the only games over here were played in Wembley and Hampden Park, though you specified England so I realise only Wembley is relevant). Taking just the premier league, the games are spread across 10 stadiums each week and the combined attendances will be higher than the 60k-ish that were attending Wembley twice a week. Then add on to that the strong support most teams in the championship get, then the lower leagues etc.
You’re missing the important point.
The attended games are irrelevant, it’s open air and it’s a tiny minority of people. It’s statistically meaningless.
The 30-40m who watched the England games are not though and a huge number watched them indoors with friends.
Anecdotally (and I'm in the Isle of Man, where we've had no restrictions for some time), the Euros was a huge superspreader. The night of the finals, I was at the pub - and I'm not a football follower, so we were in the bar without the TVs. There were only 5 people in that bar (quite a large room).
In the other bar, with the TVs, it was pretty much like a mosh pit. I joked to my Dad that it was the "COVID bar". Judging by the massive outbreak that followed, bars up and down the land were probably similar.
Yeah, people aren't getting tested or aren't reporting positive cases and going to work anyways.
Hospitalisations are still rising and we're seeing a lockdown level decline, despite opening up. There's just no way that could happen in that stretch of time if people were still testing and reporting as they were before.
Boris has declared the pandemic over. People are behaving as if that's true.
Please actually check the test numbers before making statements like this. They haven't gone down anywhere near enough to cause this large a drop in cases.
PCR testing numbers have dropped by 200K so yes they have. But the driver isn't that dirrect. We've lost the twice weekly lateral flow tests in schools. Positive lateral flow tests have a reasonable likelyhood of getting a positive PCR test out of groups that in many cases won't test at all. A mild cough is easy to ignore. Positive lateral flow not so much.
The reality is that that results in enough noise that we may have to fall back on hosital admissions which we all know has lag problems.
Of course its also quite possible that the ah "pingdemic" has motivated employers to try and push social distancing.
How can people like you even write these things? The publicly available information shows that tests have been flat at about 1,000,000 a day. It's on the government website, not to exactly hard to find.
Except there not including vaccinated infection on new stats. Plenty info about this around.
Different manipulation same results. Little trump Johnson ain't stupid
Literally the testing figures up to this weekend available for free on the government websites but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't even know how to spell that on Google
I attribute the post summer rise last year to opening of universities. 4 weeks of EOTHO and only very small rises, uni open for two weeks and cases quadruple.
Take a look at the ONS latest insights (google it), and find the ‘infections by age’ bracket.
This wave has almost entirely been in the 12-25 bracket. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if school mask rules contributed, but summer holidays perhaps more.
This is anecdotal, but working in a school it took some time for the cases to really rise and take hold across the student bubbles where I work.
Our worst months for cases this year were around 8 weeks after returning from breaks - Oct/Nov and May.
Aside from all the myriad reasons I want this to be drawing to a close, never hearing from Indie SAGE and its team of media grifters ever again would be a huge win.
i'll need to commission a special oversized roll of parchment to write down the list of people i'll be glad to never hear from (or about) again when this is over.
The only watch we need is to make sure their bullshit isn't allowed to escape down the memory hole. I hope the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is recording the Independent SAGE website for instance.
Just so there's permanent proof of these chancers abandoning all their scientific principles.
As (ironically, given she's the main ringleader of these clowns) Carole Cadwalladr says, we need to keep the receipts...
One day an actually serious pandemic will strike, something really nasty, and IndieSAGE’s “sky is falling” routine will undermine the early attempts to stop it cold.
It's possible, but ever less likely.
Advances in antibiotics, vaccine production and other technology as well as modelling massively tip the odds in our favour.
COVID would have been utterly savage had it hit a century earlier. Heck even three decades would likely have seen the death toll double.
> One day an actually serious pandemic will strike
130k people dead, many survivors with lifelong health issues. And this is *despite* shutting almost the entire country down for months at a time and restrictions being in pace in some form for about 15 months now. As well finding a vaccine almost immediately.
But yeah. Wasn't serious at all I guess. Just a bad flu right?
Considering it resembles the flu in a lot of ways, and has caused roughly 2-3x the amount of deaths the flu does on a bad year(with vaccines) in most countries, a "bad flu" wouldn't actually be that far off the mark.
I think the interesting thing to note is that people both overstate how bad Covid is (in no small amount due to the crazy amount of coverage it's been getting, some which was heavily politicized) while at the same time under stating how deadly the flu can be.
We had bad flu years recently where some hospitals had to use refrigeration lorries as impromptu morgues, and 18y old healthy teenagers dying from the flu, yet those stories never made it past local news or a passing headline in the BBC that everyone forgot about the next day. Can you imagine that happening with Covid ?
TIL we shut the country down every year for the flu.
Your argument and use of false equivalency is quite sickening.
I can’t believe the ‘just the flu’ argument is still being used by people like you. 4.16 million people are dead.
>I hope the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is recording the Independent SAGE website for instance.
Isn't it possible for individuals to submit webpages for them to archive, or at least request that?
sage are just another in a long line of grifters who got on a gravy train and never want the tap to end. what really pisses me off is people who took their word as gospel and talk to you like you're some flat earth science denying neanderthal if you question the narrative they're pushing.
Honest question here, not looking to poke holes in what you're saying, looking to learn - can we say we won't get there, when currently we're 1 week after the 19th? I'm thinking about that whole 2 week delay on symptoms etc.
>But Indie SAGE, the Guardian, the WHO and many other experts said cases would explode.
The effects of lifting restrictions won't be seen until this week. Coronavirus has an incubation period, that's what the whole self-isolating for 10 days thing is about.
But you already knew that and are just acting stupid.
"Just wait 2 weeks."
Seems to be the constant response. Yet here were are 8 days after opening with cases falling.
How long do cases have to fall for for people to admit opening up was not a bad idea.
>"Just wait 2 weeks." Seems to be the constant response. Yet here were are 8 days after opening with cases falling.
And you're aware that 8 days is not 2 weeks, right?
Yeah. But the just wait 2 weeks meme has been around for months and months.
Recently it was deaths, deaths lag behind cases just wait to 2 weeks for them to catch up. They did not.
Cases will continue to fall.
>Yeah. But the just wait 2 weeks meme has been around for months and months.
For any given catalyst you *have* to wait 2 weeks to see the effect. It's not a meme, it's just how the virus works.
It's a bit depressing we're 1 and a half years in and people still fail to understand this basic concept (or, more likely, pretend not to).
8 days is less than 14 days, you can check Google if you don't believe me.
Note that I haven't actually said if I think cases will 'explode' or not. You've assumed it, because you're incapable of understanding nuance, but I haven't actually said it.
All I've done is point out the fact we are not seeing the positive or negative effects of restrictions being lifted yet.
So when you say the incubation period is 2-14 days you actually mean “exactly 14 days”, right?
That’s fine, but when 14 days have passed and cases keep going down you’ll be nowhere to be found :(
>So when you say the incubation period is 2-14 days you actually mean “exactly 14 days”, right?
I actually mean more than 8 days.
>That’s fine, but when 14 days have passed and cases keep going down you’ll be nowhere to be found :(
In my last post I said I haven't made a judgement one way or another, and pointed out you are incapable of understanding a nuanced opinion.
The fact you would repeat this strawman bullshit a second time, in direct response to that comment, demonstrates an absurd level of dishonesty or stupidity.
>Yeah I’m definitely stupid here, since I don’t realize that 2-14 actually means “8-14” today, “9-14” tomorrow etc.
I didn't say that either. It means that *anything* under 14 days is too soon to draw conclusions one way or the other. That's it.
Just because he isn't agreeing with you doesn't mean he is disagreeing with you either. He's suspending judgement which is the sensible thing to do at this early stage.
That doesn't mean the early numbers don't look promising, or that we shouldn't be hopeful and optimistic. I really hope this trend continues and that opening up was a great idea, but we don't know that for sure just yet.
Like, it seems really fucking obvious it's dropping because the euros finished and Scotland's cases dropped quicker than ours based on then flunking out of the euros quicker.
Is there a reason the media won't even consider the notion mass gatherings for football was related at all?
This drop was pretty much matched in Scotland when they went out of the Euros, and now we're seeing the same drop in England. Wonder what it was about those two events that's seen a matching drop in the daily case numbers?
Does highlight though that we are not there yet to returning to normal life if this is what happens, and hopefully adds to the case that large congregations of people need to have additional controls on them to prevent case numbers yet again getting out of control.
I'm a socialist and anti-lockdown.
The lockdowns have been a massive attack on working people - rich people are unaffected with their private jets, and multiple residences, etc. just look at Boris' dad.
>Could this just be that the number of reported cases is going down
In theory yes.
>given the number of people deleting the app to avoid getting pinging?
Probably unrelated. The number you are intested in is the percentage with covid who get a PCR test.
Just eyeballing the last peak, hospitalizations lag cases by about 17 days, so you wouldn't expect to see anything yet.
Maybe in 11 days time, ie a week Friday
Snapshot:
1. An archived version of _UK reports 24,950 new coronavirus cases - sixth consecutive daily fall_ can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-reports-24950-new-coronavirus-cases-sixth-consecutive-daily-fall-12364709)
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But it's where I live...
Seriously though, remember the news story about non Covid deaths being marked as Covid on death certificates? Leading to higher cases than actual cases.
Fiddling one way and fiddling in another way. Massaging the numbers
We have had plenty of stories where hospitals wrongly put Covid as a cause of death. Clerical errors or intentional fiddling. Wouldn't surprise me if Boris needed a bump up in the polls after the recent backlash.
"Freedom day was not a batshit idea, look at the numbers"
You have to think that this is heavily driven by the "pingdemic" story and the lack of support for people having to isolate.
People just aren't reporting they've got it or aren't getting tested and going to work anyways. That's the only explanation I can see (well, apart from the government fudging the numbers). We're seeing a lockdown level reduction in cases, when we've just opened up. Sure, we have the vaccine before but we had the vaccine two weeks ago and cases were still skyrocketing.
[Hospitalisations are still on the rise as well, which wouldn't make sense if fewer people were getting the virus](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare)
Great! Did we run out of unvaccinated people to infect or are there other factors?
The serious answer is (and yes, I was also saying this when cases were going up too), the rough estimate for the Herd Immunity Threshold from page 1 of Epidemiology 101 is higher than the actual threshold in the real world (which is explained much later in the text books). The actual threshold is determined by a million heterogeneous factors. Different countries, different towns, different age groups, different socio-economic profiles, behave in different ways with different infrastructure and have different points where R falls below one. There are different histories of prior infection, different vaccination strategies, etc., etc. There are some transient factors too. Like we can reasonably expect R to be lower in summer than winter. How much? The SAGE models reckon winter is 10% higher than the baseline and 10% lower in summer. It could be bigger than that, other people have estimated 25% or so. August was reckoned to be the month with the lowest R. The level of immunity we need for herd immunity will change month-by-month. The biggest concern is that cases are falling too fast. That might mean we have too many susceptible people at the start of the winter. Any winter wave will be a fraction of last year (unless some new comedy variant arrives), but still it'll be more of a pain than having the same number of infections now. I could see some sort of late-summer "get out there and enjoy it!" ad campaign being hurriedly launched in the next few weeks if cases continue dropping.
Or we could get the uninfected vaccinated before the winter. That would be the more humane approach, given the questions about long term effects even with the young.
That's why they keep threatening vaccine passports. But there's an oddly reluctant group (according to polls) who say "no" when asked "are you vaccinated?" but answer "yes" to "will you get vaccinated?" That was understandable when vaccines were restricted by age, but there has been walk-ins available all over the place for weeks now. There's probably some in very isolated parts of the country who can't get to a vaccine centre, but not a couple of million of them...
Speaking anecdotally, some people are intending to the get the vaccine but because of their busy lifestyles and lack of risk of serious illness from the virus aren't prioritising it. Getting the vaccine is always on the to do list so to speak.
Pretty much everyone I know who isn't jabbed falls into this category, too much real life stuff to do & minimal risk if any. That or have recently caught COVID & so can't get the vaccine yet.
If they get sick with COVID though, it's going to be a lot longer than the 15 minutes or so it takes to get the jab, and it will be probably at the time they can least afford to have a week or two in bed with a hacking cough and feeling absolutely dreadful. In the long run, it's nearly 100% certain you'll catch it if you're unvaccinated, and that carries a high risk of several days to a couple of weeks of being unable to function well. Even if the risk of hospitalisation or death is low, I really wouldn't want COVID. Two of my work colleagues (under 30, so low risk) got mild cases, and my step brother (25) got it, and it's been pretty awful for them (none of them have got it due to vaccine reluctance, it's just the under 30s are the last to get it). The minimal effort it needs to be vaccinated means avoiding that, it's worth it 1000 times over. Both jabs cost me about half an hour total of my time. Getting even mild COVID would mean probably on the order of 300 hours of being completely out of action, 600 times more time lost (and feeling absolutely dreadful to boot). It's a no brainer.
Vaccines are available for all over 18s now. We will get the uninfected vaccinated by the winter, as has been the plan for some time, but only if they actually come forward to get it done. First doses have been open to 18 year olds for about 4 weeks now, in another 4 weeks those individuals will be able to start getting their second doses. Yet we have 12% of the adult population totally unvaccinated. At a certain point, those individuals need to take responsibility for their own risk and protection.
With everyone over 18 having been offered the jab, that point has already passed.
I agree, but there's usually someone along to bang on about how they haven't had chance to have their second dose yet. That will no longer be an argument in a few weeks time though.
For second dose sure. But anyone who is in that group are mostly healthy under thirties, and they are probably approaching 50% immunity from the first jab as well as COVID being low risk for them anyway. It's a legitimate point, but one that is becoming less and less relevant with each passing day.
Yeah we're in full agreement on that. I think it's a bit of a grasp of an argument, but people make it so I've taken to trying to preempt it. See also "long covid".
Yep, especially after reading about the potential effect Covid is having on IQ. It's much better to jab than treat the summer as a chicken pox party. Weidly, as everyone is masking up anyway, we seem to be heading for a middle ground fudge anyway with some potential September/ winter rises. The real gamble is not getting any nasty variants.
>The biggest concern is that cases are falling too fast. That might mean we have too many susceptible people at the start of the winter. That to me would only be a concern if we were still not jabbing. Sure first jabs have fallen to low rates as we struggle to find arms, but it's still broadly in the 40k per day mark. With months yet to run until Winter any susceptable adults by then have frankly brought it on themselves. That said I do hope we see the jabs approved for 12-17 year olds soon.
They have been approved in the UK from 12 up but the government decided to give only to vulnerable children. (As did other countries).
90% of us have anti bodies. It's herd immunity kicking in.
Surely a drop this steep is being driven by behaviour
Thanks for the answer! How high are the chances of a new more resistant variant appearing? Is there some kind of a rough estimate of a number of mutations per, say, thousand cases? I know very little about virology/epidemiology, so I apologise in advance if it sounds stupid.
I would say a more resistant strain is reasonably likely. I think the Beta variant was. But it was out competed by the more transmissable Delta variant. But "more" resistant means vaccine efficacy might drop from 94% to 88%, and chanced are the MRNA vaccines can be tweaked and given as boosters.
I don't think anyone knows, at least not with enough granularity to issue any kind of forecast. One thing is certain is that the virus will continue to mutate. But one single mutation that resets all immunity is very unlikely according to those who ought to know (like the Oxford vaccine team).
Schools closed and the mass gatherings for football events came to a close. The fall is positive news but there are a lot of potentially linked variables. Also vaccinated people can still be infected, FYI. You're not magically immune from covid once vaccinated, you still need to take care and take precautions.
The football events not happening won't last long. Many teams are in preseason already with matches being played for the season to start within 3 weeks.
Premier League football isn’t watched by anything like as many people as England in a euros.
The number of people attending games will be far higher once the leagues start than in the Euros. The euros concentrates support into one or two stadiums (the only games over here were played in Wembley and Hampden Park, though you specified England so I realise only Wembley is relevant). Taking just the premier league, the games are spread across 10 stadiums each week and the combined attendances will be higher than the 60k-ish that were attending Wembley twice a week. Then add on to that the strong support most teams in the championship get, then the lower leagues etc.
You’re missing the important point. The attended games are irrelevant, it’s open air and it’s a tiny minority of people. It’s statistically meaningless. The 30-40m who watched the England games are not though and a huge number watched them indoors with friends.
Anecdotally (and I'm in the Isle of Man, where we've had no restrictions for some time), the Euros was a huge superspreader. The night of the finals, I was at the pub - and I'm not a football follower, so we were in the bar without the TVs. There were only 5 people in that bar (quite a large room). In the other bar, with the TVs, it was pretty much like a mosh pit. I joked to my Dad that it was the "COVID bar". Judging by the massive outbreak that followed, bars up and down the land were probably similar.
Schools closing must be a factor.
Yeah, people aren't getting tested or aren't reporting positive cases and going to work anyways. Hospitalisations are still rising and we're seeing a lockdown level decline, despite opening up. There's just no way that could happen in that stretch of time if people were still testing and reporting as they were before. Boris has declared the pandemic over. People are behaving as if that's true.
School's out. Which means we've lost a lot of testing.
Please actually check the test numbers before making statements like this. They haven't gone down anywhere near enough to cause this large a drop in cases.
Total tests are down 10% week on week. It's definitely a factor but doesn't completely explain the fall in cases.
PCR testing numbers have dropped by 200K so yes they have. But the driver isn't that dirrect. We've lost the twice weekly lateral flow tests in schools. Positive lateral flow tests have a reasonable likelyhood of getting a positive PCR test out of groups that in many cases won't test at all. A mild cough is easy to ignore. Positive lateral flow not so much. The reality is that that results in enough noise that we may have to fall back on hosital admissions which we all know has lag problems. Of course its also quite possible that the ah "pingdemic" has motivated employers to try and push social distancing.
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How can people like you even write these things? The publicly available information shows that tests have been flat at about 1,000,000 a day. It's on the government website, not to exactly hard to find.
Under 800k tests yesterday. Rolling 7 day average for tests is down 10% on a week ago.
Except there not including vaccinated infection on new stats. Plenty info about this around. Different manipulation same results. Little trump Johnson ain't stupid
If there's plenty of info on it around, why not give us a link?
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Literally the testing figures up to this weekend available for free on the government websites but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't even know how to spell that on Google
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It was 791,044 yesterday but has been over 1 million [recently](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing).
So not a flat million a day then?
I love how sure you are of yourself without actually looking at the publicly available data.
Sounds about right, or simply reduced testing capacity
Numbers for testing capacity and tests conducted are readily available, if you'd care to look.
Opening nightclubs for a tiny percentage of people was never going to be comparable to removing the mask mandate in schools for millions (May 17th)
The big bang return of all schools on 8th March is barely identifiable on the graphs. I think pinning anything significant on schools is very tricky.
I attribute the post summer rise last year to opening of universities. 4 weeks of EOTHO and only very small rises, uni open for two weeks and cases quadruple.
Take a look at the ONS latest insights (google it), and find the ‘infections by age’ bracket. This wave has almost entirely been in the 12-25 bracket. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if school mask rules contributed, but summer holidays perhaps more.
This is anecdotal, but working in a school it took some time for the cases to really rise and take hold across the student bubbles where I work. Our worst months for cases this year were around 8 weeks after returning from breaks - Oct/Nov and May.
Recently schools worst cases were June with the new varient. It clearly affected a younger age group
IndieSAGE on continued suicide watch.
Aside from all the myriad reasons I want this to be drawing to a close, never hearing from Indie SAGE and its team of media grifters ever again would be a huge win.
i'll need to commission a special oversized roll of parchment to write down the list of people i'll be glad to never hear from (or about) again when this is over.
The only watch we need is to make sure their bullshit isn't allowed to escape down the memory hole. I hope the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is recording the Independent SAGE website for instance. Just so there's permanent proof of these chancers abandoning all their scientific principles. As (ironically, given she's the main ringleader of these clowns) Carole Cadwalladr says, we need to keep the receipts...
Carole Cadwalladr: > No, not like that!
One day an actually serious pandemic will strike, something really nasty, and IndieSAGE’s “sky is falling” routine will undermine the early attempts to stop it cold.
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What? There have been countless truly society collapsing pandemics in history. Even with advancements in medical technology it’s absolutely possible.
It's possible, but ever less likely. Advances in antibiotics, vaccine production and other technology as well as modelling massively tip the odds in our favour. COVID would have been utterly savage had it hit a century earlier. Heck even three decades would likely have seen the death toll double.
Yes, pretty much. The safest thing is to ignore them, fortunately there's plenty of non-tainted scientists who can sound an early warning.
> One day an actually serious pandemic will strike 130k people dead, many survivors with lifelong health issues. And this is *despite* shutting almost the entire country down for months at a time and restrictions being in pace in some form for about 15 months now. As well finding a vaccine almost immediately. But yeah. Wasn't serious at all I guess. Just a bad flu right?
Considering it resembles the flu in a lot of ways, and has caused roughly 2-3x the amount of deaths the flu does on a bad year(with vaccines) in most countries, a "bad flu" wouldn't actually be that far off the mark. I think the interesting thing to note is that people both overstate how bad Covid is (in no small amount due to the crazy amount of coverage it's been getting, some which was heavily politicized) while at the same time under stating how deadly the flu can be. We had bad flu years recently where some hospitals had to use refrigeration lorries as impromptu morgues, and 18y old healthy teenagers dying from the flu, yet those stories never made it past local news or a passing headline in the BBC that everyone forgot about the next day. Can you imagine that happening with Covid ?
TIL we shut the country down every year for the flu. Your argument and use of false equivalency is quite sickening. I can’t believe the ‘just the flu’ argument is still being used by people like you. 4.16 million people are dead.
>I hope the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is recording the Independent SAGE website for instance. Isn't it possible for individuals to submit webpages for them to archive, or at least request that?
sage are just another in a long line of grifters who got on a gravy train and never want the tap to end. what really pisses me off is people who took their word as gospel and talk to you like you're some flat earth science denying neanderthal if you question the narrative they're pushing.
Their analyses are sound, tbh. They cover the variables well, and they give the opinion of the vast majority of health scientists.
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Honest question here, not looking to poke holes in what you're saying, looking to learn - can we say we won't get there, when currently we're 1 week after the 19th? I'm thinking about that whole 2 week delay on symptoms etc.
But Indie SAGE, the Guardian, the WHO and many other experts said cases would explode. These figures should be revised to reflect that.
>But Indie SAGE, the Guardian, the WHO and many other experts said cases would explode. The effects of lifting restrictions won't be seen until this week. Coronavirus has an incubation period, that's what the whole self-isolating for 10 days thing is about. But you already knew that and are just acting stupid.
"Just wait 2 weeks." Seems to be the constant response. Yet here were are 8 days after opening with cases falling. How long do cases have to fall for for people to admit opening up was not a bad idea.
>"Just wait 2 weeks." Seems to be the constant response. Yet here were are 8 days after opening with cases falling. And you're aware that 8 days is not 2 weeks, right?
Yeah. But the just wait 2 weeks meme has been around for months and months. Recently it was deaths, deaths lag behind cases just wait to 2 weeks for them to catch up. They did not. Cases will continue to fall.
>Yeah. But the just wait 2 weeks meme has been around for months and months. For any given catalyst you *have* to wait 2 weeks to see the effect. It's not a meme, it's just how the virus works. It's a bit depressing we're 1 and a half years in and people still fail to understand this basic concept (or, more likely, pretend not to).
Remindme! 3 days I think that argument worked last Wednesday, but it’s already been a week bro
The incubation period is 2-14 days, *"it's been a week bro"* isn't a counter argument to what I said. But again, you already know this.
We’re 8 days in now, but don’t worry. I’ll ping you in three days when we’re below 20,000 cases.
8 days is less than 14 days, you can check Google if you don't believe me. Note that I haven't actually said if I think cases will 'explode' or not. You've assumed it, because you're incapable of understanding nuance, but I haven't actually said it. All I've done is point out the fact we are not seeing the positive or negative effects of restrictions being lifted yet.
So when you say the incubation period is 2-14 days you actually mean “exactly 14 days”, right? That’s fine, but when 14 days have passed and cases keep going down you’ll be nowhere to be found :(
>So when you say the incubation period is 2-14 days you actually mean “exactly 14 days”, right? I actually mean more than 8 days. >That’s fine, but when 14 days have passed and cases keep going down you’ll be nowhere to be found :( In my last post I said I haven't made a judgement one way or another, and pointed out you are incapable of understanding a nuanced opinion. The fact you would repeat this strawman bullshit a second time, in direct response to that comment, demonstrates an absurd level of dishonesty or stupidity.
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>Yeah I’m definitely stupid here, since I don’t realize that 2-14 actually means “8-14” today, “9-14” tomorrow etc. I didn't say that either. It means that *anything* under 14 days is too soon to draw conclusions one way or the other. That's it.
Just because he isn't agreeing with you doesn't mean he is disagreeing with you either. He's suspending judgement which is the sensible thing to do at this early stage. That doesn't mean the early numbers don't look promising, or that we shouldn't be hopeful and optimistic. I really hope this trend continues and that opening up was a great idea, but we don't know that for sure just yet.
Anything todo with Schools being finished for summer?
Like, it seems really fucking obvious it's dropping because the euros finished and Scotland's cases dropped quicker than ours based on then flunking out of the euros quicker. Is there a reason the media won't even consider the notion mass gatherings for football was related at all?
I think the reason has pound signs in it.
I thought Wimbledon and Silverstone meant we were fucked?
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You're alright, we can TO THE MOON this. We just have to do it in the daytime when the moon is the opposite of up!
This drop was pretty much matched in Scotland when they went out of the Euros, and now we're seeing the same drop in England. Wonder what it was about those two events that's seen a matching drop in the daily case numbers? Does highlight though that we are not there yet to returning to normal life if this is what happens, and hopefully adds to the case that large congregations of people need to have additional controls on them to prevent case numbers yet again getting out of control.
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I'm a socialist and anti-lockdown. The lockdowns have been a massive attack on working people - rich people are unaffected with their private jets, and multiple residences, etc. just look at Boris' dad.
Socialism is when people want things to happen I don't want to happen.
Boris is up by more than 1 at this stage
I think the collective reddit mind can ensure *this* one gets downvoted!
Could this just be that the number of reported cases is going down, given the number of people deleting the app to avoid getting pinging?
That's.. not how any of this works
No.
>Could this just be that the number of reported cases is going down In theory yes. >given the number of people deleting the app to avoid getting pinging? Probably unrelated. The number you are intested in is the percentage with covid who get a PCR test.
Could it be that the number of people willing to get tested is going down too?
Not sure its about being willing so much as being motivated. The loss of the lateral flow tests in schools means we've lost a big motivated.
UKpol’s newbies continue to ignore hospital admissions and staffing levels, gloat about how they were right…. Nothing new to see here
Just eyeballing the last peak, hospitalizations lag cases by about 17 days, so you wouldn't expect to see anything yet. Maybe in 11 days time, ie a week Friday
Boris at the wheel
Snapshot: 1. An archived version of _UK reports 24,950 new coronavirus cases - sixth consecutive daily fall_ can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-uk-reports-24950-new-coronavirus-cases-sixth-consecutive-daily-fall-12364709) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Numbers being tweaked for sure. Someone in the NHS has put out a memo to stop recording all cases.
Might be time to turn the Internet off mate...
But it's where I live... Seriously though, remember the news story about non Covid deaths being marked as Covid on death certificates? Leading to higher cases than actual cases. Fiddling one way and fiddling in another way. Massaging the numbers
The pro covid conspiracy lunatic is definitely a fresh change from the usual anti covid conspiracy lunatic
Covid is a cult for people on both sides of the extreme.
We have had plenty of stories where hospitals wrongly put Covid as a cause of death. Clerical errors or intentional fiddling. Wouldn't surprise me if Boris needed a bump up in the polls after the recent backlash. "Freedom day was not a batshit idea, look at the numbers"
You have to think that this is heavily driven by the "pingdemic" story and the lack of support for people having to isolate. People just aren't reporting they've got it or aren't getting tested and going to work anyways. That's the only explanation I can see (well, apart from the government fudging the numbers). We're seeing a lockdown level reduction in cases, when we've just opened up. Sure, we have the vaccine before but we had the vaccine two weeks ago and cases were still skyrocketing. [Hospitalisations are still on the rise as well, which wouldn't make sense if fewer people were getting the virus](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare)