New coronavirus in/from China

[Catweazle]

We will probably never know for sure.

When this is all over, there are those like me in the population that will ensure that those like you in the population will not get away with that excuse.

We will not forget. We will not forgive.

79% of the UK population support another lockdown if necessary. Surely you wouldn't attempt to overule the majority opinion ?

https://www.statista.com/chart/23851/su ... ckdown-uk/

[careful_eugene]

There is so much that that bbc post did not talk about.

The occupants of care homes are the oldest and frailest demographic. They may not develop as as strong an immune response even after being vaccinated. Having been kept under lockdown most tightly , they may now be belatedly coming into contact with the more infectious UK variant, as this spreads through the population from the most outgoing ( young and working age) to the most shielding. Having received one dose, staff may have relaxed their guard too soon, and inadvertently introduced the virus. The weather may have turned colder and triggered more deaths.

We will probably never know for sure.

I think some people have a reaction to the vaccination (my 87 year old mum was tired for a day after her first pfizer dose), and this may have pushed some of the more frail residents over the edge. As horrifying as this sounds, the alternative is a much greater chance of death from Covid for all of them. I don't believe there is a 100% correct way of doing this, just doing what is believed to be the best for the most based on knowledge at the time.

[PS_RalphW]

"surge testing" started in Manchester after 4 cases of a new mutation of the UK variant. No explanation of why this particular mutation, may be it is the same one thought to make SA variant resistant to the Oxford vaccine.

The SA variant can only be identified by genomic sequencing, and at present only 6% of positive samples are sequenced.

[Little John]

1) There have been a large number of "mutant" strains, otherwise known less hyperbolically as variants, from early on. This is NORMAL with a relatively highly mutative virus.

2) There is NO evidence of any strain being any more dangerous to the small number of vulnerable people who are susceptible to falling seriously ill than any other strain

3) The tendency of highly mutative viruses, all other things being equal, is for the less lethal variants to become the dominant ones in a population over time. The reason for this is fairly straightforwards. The more lethal variants tend to lay people up. People who are laid up, tend to move around less. People who move around less tend to pass on a virus less frequently. Conversely, the less lethal variants do not tend to lay people up. People who are not laid up tend to move around more. People who move around more tend to pass on a virus more frequently.

This is epidemiology 101 for fucks sake.

HOWEVER, on the small, but nevertheless still possible chance of a more lethal strain making a debut at some point, this was and remains the REASON WHY EVERYONE FOR WHOM THE FIRST STRAIN WAS NOT LETHAL SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO IT FORM THE VERY BEGINNING. Which is to say, at least 95% OF THE POPULATION. In being so this would have PROTECTED them with PARTIAL TO WHOLE IMMUNITY TO ANY SUBSEQUENT STRAIN. It would also, as it happens, have provided massive herd immunity to the small number of people in the vulnerable category.

HERD IMMUNITY. Remember that?

Finally, given all of the above, wanna make a wild guess as to what you need to do to provide the most conducive evolutionary conditions for encouraging the evolution and large scale spread of a more virulent and/or more deadly strain of any virus at the expense of a less lethal and/or less virulent strain.

Go on, give it a go....

MORONS.

[Catweazle]

1) There have been a large number of "mutant" strains, otherwise known less hyperbolically as variants, from early on. This is NORMAL with a relatively highly mutative virus.

2) There is NO evidence of any strain being any more dangerous to the small number of vulnerable people who are susceptible to falling seriously ill than any other strain

3) The tendency of highly mutative viruses, all other things being equal, is for the less lethal variants to become the dominant ones in a population over time. The reason for this is fairly straightforwards. The more lethal variants tend to lay people up. People who are laid up, tend to move around less. People who move around less tend to pass on a virus less frequently. Conversely, the less lethal variants do not tend to lay people up. People who are not laid up tend to move around more. People who move around more tend to pass on a virus more frequently.

This is epidemiology 101 for fucks sake.

HOWEVER, on the small, but nevertheless still possible chance of a more lethal strain making a debut at some point, this was and remains the REASON WHY EVERYONE FOR WHOM THE FIRST STRAIN WAS NOT LETHAL SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO IT FORM THE VERY BEGINNING. Which is to say, at least 95% OF THE POPULATION. In being so this would have PROTECTED them with PARTIAL TO WHOLE IMMUNITY TO ANY SUBSEQUENT STRAIN. It would also, as it happens, have provided massive herd immunity to the small number of people in the vulnerable category.

HERD IMMUNITY. Remember that?

Finally, given all of the above, wanna make a wild guess as to what you need to do to provide the most conducive environmental conditions for encouraging the large scale spread of a more virulent and/or more deadly strain of any virus at the expense of a less lethal and/or less virulent strain.

Go on, give it a go....

MORONS.

Interesting, but all wrong. Covid is a relatively slowly mutating virus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... witzerland.

But sequencing data suggest that coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses, probably because of a ‘proofreading’ enzyme that corrects potentially fatal copying mistakes. A typical SARS-CoV-2 virus accumulates only two single-letter mutations per month in its genome — a rate of change about half that of influenza and one-quarter that of HIV, says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Other genome data have emphasized this stability — more than 90,000 isolates have been sequenced and made public (see www.gisaid.org). Two SARS-CoV-2 viruses collected from anywhere in the world differ by an average of just 10 RNA letters out of 29,903, says Lucy Van Dorp, a computational geneticist at University College London, who is tracking the differences for signs that they confer an evolutionary advantage.

[clv101]

1) There have been a large number of "mutant" strains, otherwise known less hyperbolically as variants, from early on. This is NORMAL with a relatively highly mutative virus.

Yes, no one is suggesting otherwise. The vast majority of variants have no clinical significance. However some ARE significant and the chance of a significant variant emerging is directly proportional to the number of infected cases. It is no surprise at all that the UK, Brazil and SA have all produced significant variants. They are the price of our failure. They need not have occurred.

2) There is NO evidence of any strain being any more dangerous to the small number of vulnerable people who are susceptible to falling seriously ill than any other strain

Yes, but that's not the point. 50% more transmission is significantly more dangerous than 50% higher fatality rate. We've discussed this before. Much of the media coverage has failed to communicate this effectively, as they don't understand the exponential function.

3) The tendency of highly mutative viruses, all other things being equal, is for the less lethal variants to become the dominant ones in a population over time. The reason for this is fairly straightforwards. The more lethal variants tend to lay people up. People who are laid up, tend to move around less. People who move around less tend to pass on a virus less frequently. Conversely, the less lethal variants do not tend to lay people up. People who are not laid up tend to move around more. People who move around more tend to pass on a virus more frequently.

Sure, let's hope covid follows this pattern.

HOWEVER, on the small, but nevertheless still possible chance of a more lethal strain making a debut at some point, this was and remains the REASON WHY EVERYONE FOR WHOM THE FIRST STRAIN WAS NOT LETHAL SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO IT FORM THE VERY BEGINNING. Which is to say, at least 95% OF THE POPULATION. In being so this would have PROTECTED them with PARTIAL TO WHOLE IMMUNITY TO ANY SUBSEQUENT STRAIN. It would also, as it happens, have provided massive herd immunity to the small number of people in the vulnerable category.

HERD IMMUNITY. Remember that?

Now this isn't helpful. The UK absolutely couldn’t have coped with infecting 95% of the population over the last 12 months instead of maybe 20% we actually did. 5-fold infections would have led to more than 5 times the deaths, half a million+ and real risk of more serious systemic failures. Hospitals would have been in dramatically worse shape. ALSO there’s no guarantee that exposure to the original variant would confer much immunity to this later variant you talk about. The original variant doesn’t seem to offer much protection to the South African variant, hence the problems seen with the AZ vaccine. Achieving herd immunity through virus exposure would have been an absolute disaster.

Finally, given all of the above, wanna make a wild guess as to what you need to do to provide the most conducive evolutionary conditions for encouraging the evolution and large scale spread of a more virulent and/or more deadly strain of any virus at the expense of a less lethal and/or less virulent strain.

Go on, give it a go....

MORONS.

Yeah, utterly screw up our response as Johnson has though consistently acting late, and weakly. Failing to limit the rate of seeding into the country. Failing the test and trace infections, failing to isolate (and provide the support to enable isolation) cases, failing to quarantine new arrivals, facilitating spread though the daft eat out to help out, the list goes on.

[Little John]

1) massive shielding (if they wanted it) of the 0.5% to 2% or so of people who are at high to moderately high risk, as represented by the vast and overwhelming majority of people in hospital with Covid19

2) massive encouragement and facilitation of infection of anyone not at risk in the early days of Covid19 when it was known that the then existing predominantly at large variant was non lethal to the vast majority of people

Neither have happened.

As it is, the blood of an increased number of very elderly and/or very frail people are on Johnson's hands. Not merely as a consequence of piss poor shielding of them. But, also as a consequence of an as yet untold number of elderly and/or frail people dying of other morbidities that have not been properly treated over the course of the last 12 months. But, at least some of that blood is on the hands of people like you for for pushing indiscriminate, blanket lock-downs in the first place and for continuing to cheer them on in the face of overwhelming evidence of the damage they have done, not only medically, but in all kinds of other deeply damaging ways for society.

Additionally, in the unlikely but nevertheless possible event of a more deadly strain arising, the blood of a potentially much large number of people will not only be on Johnson's hands, they will also be 100% on the hands of hysterical, pant-shitting fools like you who have cheer-leaded this lock-down insanity on, however half-arsedly it has been implemented and, indeed, have pushed for lock-downs to be even less discriminatory and be even more extreme than have already been the case.

[Little John]

Dr. Sam Bailey

Covid-19: Behind the PCR Curtain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9Gccuv ... ture=share

[Little John]

....The UK absolutely couldn’t have coped with infecting 95% of the population over the last 12 months instead of maybe 20% we actually did. 5-fold infections would have led to more than 5 times the deaths, half a million+ and real risk of more serious systemic failures. Hospitals would have been in dramatically worse shape. ALSO there’s no guarantee that exposure to the original variant would confer much immunity to this later variant you talk about. The original variant doesn’t seem to offer much protection to the South African variant, hence the problems seen with the AZ vaccine. Achieving herd immunity through virus exposure would have been an absolute disaster.

More scientifically illiterate bollocks

1) gaining immunity to one strain will indeed not stop someone catching a different strain. But, that is irrelevant since that is not the point. The point is that is means someone is much less likely... you know.... to not die of it the second time they catch it. Which is why it is meaningless, hysterical bollocks to cite that recovery from the first strain does not stop you catching a second strain without simultaneously acknowledging that catching a second strain after recovering from a first strain is far less likely to cause serious illness.

2) The UK has not had a significantly higher total ICU bed occupancy during 2020 than it has previously had for at least 5 of the last twenty years.

3) Similarly, the UK has not had a significantly different death rate by all causes, including Covid19, for 2020, than it has had for at least 4 of the last twenty years.

4) the vast and overwhelming majority of people who have become sufficiently ill to require hospitalization with Covid19 have been the extremely elderly (average age of death of someone with Covid19 is 82.4 with the standard deviation from that average being, as I understand it, relatively tiny) or people with pre-existing and significant comorbidities.

5) In lieu of (1), (2), 3) and, especially, (4), the reason for what little rise in the deaths by all causes rate that has been observed is due to piss poor shielding of the relatively tiny portion of the population for whom this virus represents a mortal danger and NOT as a consequence of a lack of severity of lock-downs per se. In other words, if said vulnerable groups were properly shielded, then the extent to which the rest of the population was or was not locked down would be completely irreverent. However, there is arguably good reason to further assume that had the rest of the population - FOR WHOM COVID19 PRESENTS NO RISK OF SEROUS ILLNESS OR HOSPITALIZATION - been allowed to continue life as normal and contract Covid19 and unproblematically recover from it WHILE THE VULNERABLE GROUPS WERE BEING SIMULTANEOUSLY SHIELDED, this would have had the following mind-numbingly obvious benefits:

i) it would have afforded the vast majority of the population partial to whole immunity to any future strain. This would be especially advantageous if any future strain turned out to be otherwise more dangerous to anyone having never been exposed to any previous strain.

ii) it would have provided valuable herd immunity to the relatively tiny number of people in the vulnerable groups. Thus, allowing for their shielding to be relaxed much sooner than it might otherwise need to be

[Catweazle]

Here is a comprehensive article explaining how to analyse the mortality numbers:

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-how ... s-12185275

In this case, we're measuring mortality improvements, so anything in negative territory is bad. And the fall in mortality improvements during 2020, compared with the previous year, was the single biggest annual drop since 1929. In fact, if you were to put together a list of the worst years for annual changes in mortality improvements going all the way back to 1842, 2020 would be the third biggest annual fall in mortality improvements, after the Great Freeze of 1895 and the flu pandemic of 1929 (and somewhat worse than 1847, during which there was a severe cholera outbreak, and 1915, the midst of the Great War).

Crude mortality rates, which is what we're talking about here, have been falling for most of the 20th and 21st century as medical science has advanced and people have lived longer. So casting this number as telling us "it's only as bad as 2003" isn't quite right.

A far better yardstick (since we're trying to judge this year versus similar years) is to see how this crude mortality rate compares with the years before it. Are things getting better or worse, in other words? These are what the ONS calls excess death rates (a term you're doubtless already familiar with), and when you look at these population adjusted excess death rates, a very different picture presents itself.

In 2020 the number of excess deaths, as a proportion of the population, rose by 12.1% compared with the average of the previous five years. To put that in perspective, that's the biggest leap in any year since 1940. Bigger than during the 1951 flu epidemic. Bigger than during the Asian flu in the 1950s or the Hong Kong flu in the 1960s. In fact the only other years that come close - save for 1940 - are 1929, in which there was a global flu pandemic on top of an economic crash; 1918, year of the Spanish flu; and 1915, during the First World War.

It's worth underlining that these are not projections and these are not numbers dependent on diagnoses - they are cold hard numbers of those who have died of all causes. And they underline that even though this pandemic is still not over, it has already exerted an extraordinary cost in terms of lives lost.

However, excess deaths are not really the most comprehensive way of comparing these deaths, as while we've adjusted for the growing population size, we haven't adjusted for the fact that the population is ageing.

This really matters. Consider two imaginary countries: one where the majority of the population is over 80, the other where the majority is under 30. Now, you would always expect the country with an older population to see more people dying each year - even if the people there are comparatively healthier and have comparatively longer lives than those in the younger country.

So actuaries have devised a measure called age-standardised mortality. This is perhaps the gold standard of mortality measurements - so what happens when one examines 2020 in terms of standardised mortality?

Well, according to analysis carried out for Sky News by the Continuous Mortality Investigation of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the deterioration in mortality during 2020 was almost without parallel.

Grim reading about intensive care bed numbers, from January.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... -beds.html

Doctor warns Covid intensive care patients are 'competing for ventilators' in hard-hit London hospitals as NHS figures show critical wards are busier than this time last year despite 700 extra beds
NHS England data shows critical care demand was last week outstripping extra beds added for Covid crisis
In London, three quarters of ICU wards were 100% full or almost full last week as coronavirus cases surged
Nationwide, there were an average 743 extra ICU beds in December 2020 but 828 extra patients
Grim reports from capital city claim patients are being treated in ambulances and nurses in 'disaster mode'

NHS England data shows that, in the last week of December, there were 743 more intensive care beds available than in the same week of 2019 - 4,394 compared to 3,651.

But in the same week there were, on average, 828 more patients in critical care - 3,340 compared to 2,512 in the December 2019 - suggesting the strain of Covid-19 is bigger than hospitals had prepared for.

Medics say the sheer number of patients coming into some hospitals means they cannot always give seriously ill people the care they need.

Dr Pushpo Hossain, a 31-year-old junior doctor in London, told The Sun: 'Never before have so many patients required oxygen at the same time and many NHS hospitals are old buildings which have not been built to deliver oxygen on such a large scale.

'We do have the oxygen to supply to patients but what we don't have is the capacity to provide it to all of them at the same time. We are constantly reviewing all our patients to see who can come off oxygen, so we can reduce output.'

[Little John]

I realise facts don't hold much sway round here. But, on the basis that anyone passing who is not a moron may actually wish to know the facts, here are some.

[Little John]

[Little John]

[PS_RalphW]

Government has imposed 10 year maximum jail sentence for lying about travel to a quarantine imposed country. Parliament not given a vote as it is already law,

[adam2]

Yes, but as with other published "maximum jail terms" it mightbe more accurate to say "never exceeding 10 years, but typically a few weeks or months"