Covid-19 pandemic

[ursus arctos]

Has she been vaccinated? That is helping some sufferers

https://twitter.com/markberman/status/1371843914471239690

[San Bernardhinault]

I have a facebook acquaintance in NYC who got covid fairly early on and claims to have had some reduction in the fatiguey dragging symptoms since being vaccinated. It's hard to know if this is real or psychsomatic or what, but it's another piece of anecdata to add to the pile.

[Balderdasha]

Has she been vaccinated? That is helping some sufferers

https://twitter.com/markberman/status/1371843914471239690

No, she hasn't been vaccinated yet. And won't be for a while as is under 40 with no underlying symptoms.

[Nocturnal Submission]

More evidence to suggest that this is a seriously odd virus.

[San Bernardhinault]

Today's data from Massachusetts reinforces that the increase over the last week and a half is not probably not noise and is probably real. It's not substantial yet, and hopefully vaccination efforts can reverse it. But it feels like a real thing - probably not unrelated to the fact that the public seem to have become a bit demob happy, and I will admit that this group of public also includes me.

[Jimski]

Cases round here have almost flattened but still going down slightly. Currently around 35 per 100,000. I'm reading that as quite a positive sign as they are now lumping in all school tests with the rest. The total tests each day last week were in excess of 1.5m whereas the previous week it was less than a million per day. Kind of expecting things to kick up a bit this week as the effects of schools returning starts to register.

Sorry, a bit late to this, but surely they aren't lumping in Lateral Flow test results with the PCR ones? That would be odd, as they are two different sorts of test entirely. (Also given every secondary school child is being Lateral Flow tested at the moment that would increase the number of people tested each week by around 5 or 6 million, which certainly isn't in the figures.)

[Capybara]

Sorry, a bit late to this, but surely they aren't lumping in Lateral Flow test results with the PCR ones? That would be odd, as they are two different sorts of test entirely. (Also given every secondary school child is being Lateral Flow tested at the moment that would increase the number of people tested each week by around 5 or 6 million, which certainly isn't in the figures.)

Unfortunately I don't remember where I read this but the government website states that lateral flow tests are included while also showing that daily (weekday) tests rose to around 1.5m per day on 8 March (the day the schools went back) from 950,000 the previous week, which is an increase of over 3m on the week.

edit: it won't let me post the link to the relevant page. You need to select the 'All testing data' link under the graph on the right hand side.

[Patrick Thistle]

https://twitter.com/bbchealth/status/1373219999033229320?s=19

[Jimski]

Unfortunately I don't remember where I read this but the government website states that lateral flow tests are included while also showing that daily (weekday) tests rose to around 1.5m per day on 8 March (the day the schools went back) from 950,000 the previous week, which is an increase of over 3m on the week.

edit: it won't let me post the link to the relevant page. You need to select the 'All testing data' link under the graph on the right hand side.

Ah, ok - thanks for that. Still seems odd to mix those results. And also still low on numbers if it's all secondary students.

[Satchmo Distel]

Best wishes to Imran. Might have been an arrogant sod but one hell of a cricketer who put Botham in his place.

[Capybara]

Ah, ok - thanks for that. Still seems odd to mix those results. And also still low on numbers if it's all secondary students.

Previously one of my jobs was to supply regular figures to senior management where I worked. I lost count of the number of times that they asked me to change the basis of how they were worked out, usually temporarily, and I had to explain that that would change the integrity of years worth of figures if I did that. I'm still not sure they ever understood.

To be fair, one problem with the reporting of new COVID cases has always been that the number of tests is variable. The ONS survey is much more dependable but reflects the position at least a week ago.

[San Bernardhinault]

Another rise in the state. Two consecutive days over 2,000 new cases after 3 weeks without a single day over 2,000.

Nobody is saying as much because it would be an admission of bad policymaking, but I don't think the increase in numbers is unrelated to a number of stories about schools shutting down because of outbreak clusters in schools.

[Patrick Thistle]

More questions than answers in this article (which is probably how it should be when trying to analyse these things) but I found it interesting

https://twitter.com/bbchealth/status/1373419133891715075?s=19

[Patrick Thistle]

And then there's this...

https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1373305328851386372?s=19

[Lang Spoon]

Oh for a disease that just ravaged through ignorant smug cunts.

[Gangster Octopus]

You're wasting your time. The evil gene protects scum. Why do you think that Johnson, Trump and Bolsinaro are still alive after catching the disease.

[Sporting]

Miami:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/miami-...e-of-emergency

"Johnson, a student at Manhattan College in New York, said he and his friends have been in town for three days and are leaving Sunday. “It’s crazy out here,” Johnson said. “It's lit. It's chaotic.”

He said despite the huge police presence, he hadn't seen cops harassing too many spring breakers. “They are not bothering anybody really,” he said.

Johnson was equally unconcerned about catching COVID-19. “We’re good. We’re young,” he said, adding that he hasn’t gotten the vaccine and doesn’t plan on it.

“We don't trust that bullshit,” Johnson said."

[Satchmo Distel]

The police measures are counterproductive if the students are just going to cram into hotel rooms and party there. The only effective option would be to close the hotels. There will definitely be massive spikes in campus cases in the next fortnight but maybe the plan was always to have an online phase at the back end of term?

[ursus arctos]

I believe that the goal was to try to protect the staff of bars and clubs, as well as the cops and others who had been called upon to disperse the the crowds. Protecting their staff was the explicit rationale of the South Beach hotels that have closed.

[Seven Saxon Kings]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-56475807

Bloody hell, social distal distancing for years according to someone high up in PHE. This is profoundly depressing, it's been hard enough living like this for one year.

[ad hoc]

Spike in cases among those just injected (presumably people feeling safe before they have actually developed immunity)
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n783

[steviecowden]

Spike in cases among those just injected (presumably people feeling safe before they have actually developed immunity)
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n783

how depressingly predictable
my own work is absolutely decimated with covid just now,about 20% of staff positive and rising.im one of the few who should be ok for the time being as i had it last month so should still have an immunity

[Janik]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-56475807

Bloody hell, social distal distancing for years according to someone high up in PHE. This is profoundly depressing, it's been hard enough living like this for one year.

It's not a new message, though. Chris Whitty said something similar a month ago which prompted the #sackchriswhitty hashtag. It all comes back to people in the scientific community believing the vaccines cannot eradicate a highly infectious respiratory transmitted virus, particularly one with the transmission profile of this thing. That we have reasonably effective vaccines at all is already a massive win, given we have never had one of this type of virus previously - but at the effectiveness they are at they are a hold that allows a partial return to normal activity, not an end that means this is a thing of the past. In that sense they are a chemical lockdown, and lockdowns are something that varies in their effectiveness with how tough the rules are and how well they are followed (the analogy here being how well vaccines are delivered, how well matched to new variants, and how many people get slack about getting booster shots).
All of that is why I still believe that further flare ups will happen necessitating localised lockdowns to regain control, and the only end point can be mutation to where this becomes another of the legion of diseases we call 'common colds' - a group that includes some other coronaviruses that may have been just as devastating when they first jumped into humanity.

[Janik]

One thing that hopefully will happen that really should have been done so years ago anyway is a change to the workplace culture of 'struggling in' when you have an infectious disease. If companies that didn't go down that root end up being obviously financially worse off (say 20% of the workforce out because an infection went around the workplace...), basically forcing them against their will to do so, that would be a minor positive to come from this for me.

[Moonlight Shadow]

One thing that hopefully will happen that really should have been done so years ago anyway is a change to the workplace culture of 'struggling in' when you have an infectious disease. If companies that didn't go down that root end up being obviously financially worse off (say 20% of the workforce out because an infection went around the workplace...), basically forcing them against their will to do so, that would be a minor positive to come from this for me.

I suspect for those companies that have enabled wfh and have been ok with it (rather than rush back at the earliest opportunity), there is going to be a shift to 'if you are feeling under the weather, work from home' and likely a big drop in sick days...