Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Phil71]

Hope Pat Rice in Short Shorts is ok.

He was going through a rough time when he last posted.

Last I saw his brother had recovered hadn't he?

Yes I think so - but they were both still rough I think.

[Yorkyblue]

Trina and her husband were bed bound with it before and during xmas. Both okay now. They only left the house all year for work pretty much.

[Ach]

Glad to hear boss lady is ok

[LMAO]

Bruh really made the Bmore mayor code-switch in the middle of a press conference:

Wear a mask. Brush your mouth and it's not that hard. You wear underwear, pants, a shirt, shoes, and a jacket without a problem. Social distance, too. Vaccines are here. It'll be a few more months. Jeez.

[Rockape]

In today’s Telegraph:

After almost a year of watching the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of Covid-19, the speed of progress now is hard to take in. Just a few months ago, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, was telling colleagues he didn’t believe a vaccine would come in time. Now we have several of them, highly effective, already delivered to millions worldwide. The logistics, the safety: it’s all going as well as can be expected – in Britain, especially. The big question is what happens next.

Israel will be the first to give the world an answer. Benjamin Netanyahu, up for re-election in March, is now campaigning as the vaccine king, after cutting a deal with Pfizer to make his country the “model state” of the Covid inoculation. He’s offering up vast amounts of anonymised health data, to help Pfizer learn more, and supplies have come rolling in.

Israel, a country the size of Wales, will soon be vaccinating as many people a day as Italy, France and Germany put together. Already three-quarters of its over-60s (those most likely to die from the virus) have been protected. The rest will be covered within days, not weeks.

Israel won’t see a collapsing R-number or plummeting infections: not for a while, at least. The main vaccine effect should be a break in the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths. Protecting a small number of people should mean big results, given that the oldest 20 per cent account for 90 per cent of virus fatalities. If all goes as planned, then Israel will have downgraded Covid from a fatal virus to a bug which is nasty, but no longer the killer we have come to know.

The vaccine dividend should be discernible in Israeli hospitals very soon. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute reckon that the proportion of over-60s in critical care will have roughly halved within two weeks. By Easter, it thinks, most Covid deaths will be eliminated in Israel. It will be the first major country in the world to achieve this.

And, all going well, Britain should be the second. Our vaccination programme is still steaming ahead. The Prime Minister’s first deadline – 13 million vaccinations by the middle of next month – remains in sight. Just over half of Britain’s Covid-19 deaths are among the over-80s, almost all of whom should have been offered a vaccine within a fortnight. Add another two weeks for the vaccine’s protection to set in, and the number dying from Covid-19 should be half what it would otherwise have been by the end of next month.

This is the projection by the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group, which has had a strikingly good track record since it was set up to monitor the pandemic. If Nadhim Zahawi’s vaccination programme goes roughly to plan, it says, hospital admissions will be half what they’d otherwise be by mid-March. Intensive care admissions will be down by only a third: a lower number because those admitted tend to be younger. But overall, the Covid-19 burden on the health service will look very different very soon.

While plenty can still go wrong, ministers remain pretty confident – and more than they let on. Some in government think the official target will be easily surpassed – although they’ve been told never to confess as much in public. Kate Bingham, who masterminded the vaccine procurement programme, almost let the cat out of the bag recently by saying the schedule will be “met – and possibly exceeded”.

If she’s right, and if Covid deaths fall by 80 per cent by mid-March, can lockdown restrictions still be justified? Politically, it’s a difficult question and battle lines are already being sketched out. Jonathan Ashworth, the Shadow Health Secretary, has said that we won’t be able to go back to normal “while the virus will still be circulating” – which it’s likely to keep doing throughout the summer. Even with hospital numbers down, he says, Covid-19 can still be a debilitating disease with lasting side effects.

At this point, what would Matt Hancock say? Once everyone likely to die from the virus has been vaccinated, would he be prepared to lift restrictions and be accused of letting the virus rip amongst the young? I asked him recently and he hinted that he was ready for the fight. “There are many illnesses in the world,” he said. “We have to live our lives.”

These words sound odd coming from a minister who usually argues for tighter lockdown. Only last weekend he was privately arguing it was time to stop people exercising (ie, walking) with a friend. But there’s not necessarily a contradiction. In Israel, it’s argued that tighter lockdowns mean earlier relaxation – because the virus, if it gets out control, slows vaccination. The country’s Covid tsar, Nachman Ash, has said he’s ready to unlock even if virus levels are still high. “Our strategy is to inoculate the people who are at the highest risk,” he said, “so we can open the economy even if the number of infected has still not gone down.”

Sceptics grumble that Israel’s example may not be so instructive because it’s unique: a tiny, highly organised country with the world’s best digitised health records. It doesn’t need to slow things down by asking vaccinated people to wait 15 minutes to see if they suffer an anaphylactic shock: they know who’s at risk because their technology tells them. But the basic theory Israel is testing is that Covid’s power to kill can be stopped quite quickly. That, if proven, will be a universal lesson.

Many Tories are getting nervous and want the Prime Minister to commit to relaxing as soon as the top-risk group are vaccinated. But he has an obvious retort: that it’s still a theory. Even Israel is waiting to see what the hospital numbers show, whether the theory pans out. All depends on how the relationship between infection numbers, hospital numbers and deaths really does change. Britain will find out soon, but not for a few weeks.

This week, Netanyahu told his Cabinet that it’s precisely because they’re so close to the finish line that they need to keep discipline now. “This is how we will save lives,” he said. “This is how we will be first in the world to emerge from the coronavirus.” It would be quite a boast for Boris Johnson if Britain were to be the second.

[VCC]

Trina and her husband were bed bound with it before and during xmas. Both okay now. They only left the house all year for work pretty much.

Pleased to hear that they are ok
They are Good peeps!!

[Jedi]

Media panic bullsh1te, more people die of the flu..............https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... s-covid-19

Stop comparing it to the flu. Coronavirus has just started, but deathrate is much higher. Millions will die, most likely.

Omg stop!

Millions!! we're in the low thousands and that's even in the worst hit pandemic areas which weren't prepared for it as they got hit first.

It is not going to be millions, its not the bubonic plague ffs.

I'll quote this once the worldwide death count passes 1 mil as i fully expect it to.

Just in US 61 million people had the swine flu. Thankfully the deathrate was low. Coronavirus deathrate could be anywhere between 1% and 3.5%.

If it's 1% and it spreads as well as swine flu did, that's already 600K+ dead, just in the US.

This was back in March 2020.

Even with all the lockdowns, which nobody expected at this point, we're at 2 million worldwide deaths and 400k in the US.

[jayramfootball]

Media panic bullsh1te, more people die of the flu..............https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... s-covid-19

Stop comparing it to the flu. Coronavirus has just started, but deathrate is much higher. Millions will die, most likely.

Omg stop!

Millions!! we're in the low thousands and that's even in the worst hit pandemic areas which weren't prepared for it as they got hit first.

It is not going to be millions, its not the bubonic plague ffs.

I'll quote this once the worldwide death count passes 1 mil as i fully expect it to.

Just in US 61 million people had the swine flu. Thankfully the deathrate was low. Coronavirus deathrate could be anywhere between 1% and 3.5%.

If it's 1% and it spreads as well as swine flu did, that's already 600K+ dead, just in the US.

This was back in March 2020.

Even with all the lockdowns, which nobody expected at this point, we're at 2 million worldwide deaths and 400k in the US.

At this stage the bigger question is whether we even need to lockdown or take much if any precaution - and whether any future lockdowns are required.
Nothing has stopped the spread.
Would deaths have been higher if we had not gone through all the destructive measures of the last 12 months?
Hard to say, but given the initial estimates, it's hard not to think we'd have been better off just letting it spread and building up resistance.
It's spread like wildfire anyway.
Maybe all that was needed is some strategy for 70+ year olds.

[Royal Gooner]

Media panic bullsh1te, more people die of the flu..............https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... s-covid-19

Stop comparing it to the flu. Coronavirus has just started, but deathrate is much higher. Millions will die, most likely.

Omg stop!

Millions!! we're in the low thousands and that's even in the worst hit pandemic areas which weren't prepared for it as they got hit first.

It is not going to be millions, its not the bubonic plague ffs.

I'll quote this once the worldwide death count passes 1 mil as i fully expect it to.

Just in US 61 million people had the swine flu. Thankfully the deathrate was low. Coronavirus deathrate could be anywhere between 1% and 3.5%.

If it's 1% and it spreads as well as swine flu did, that's already 600K+ dead, just in the US.

This was back in March 2020.

Even with all the lockdowns, which nobody expected at this point, we're at 2 million worldwide deaths and 400k in the US.

At this stage the bigger question is whether we even need to lockdown or take much if any precaution - and whether any future lockdowns are required.
Nothing has stopped the spread.
Would deaths have been higher if we had not gone through all the destructive measures of the last 12 months?
Hard to say, but given the initial estimates, it's hard not to think we'd have been better off just letting it spread and building up resistance.
It's spread like wildfire anyway.
Maybe all that was needed is some strategy for 70+ year olds.

Simple, anyone medically vulnerable should be given the option to shield and the support they'd need if they choose to do so and let the rest of us get on with our lives. I did read a report that Boris could face a leadership challenge unless he ends the lockdowns soon (I'm hoping this is true that the Tory MPs do have some backbone)

[Dejan]

Media panic bullsh1te, more people die of the flu..............https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2 ... s-covid-19

Stop comparing it to the flu. Coronavirus has just started, but deathrate is much higher. Millions will die, most likely.

Omg stop!

Millions!! we're in the low thousands and that's even in the worst hit pandemic areas which weren't prepared for it as they got hit first.

It is not going to be millions, its not the bubonic plague ffs.

I'll quote this once the worldwide death count passes 1 mil as i fully expect it to.

Just in US 61 million people had the swine flu. Thankfully the deathrate was low. Coronavirus deathrate could be anywhere between 1% and 3.5%.

If it's 1% and it spreads as well as swine flu did, that's already 600K+ dead, just in the US.

This was back in March 2020.

Even with all the lockdowns, which nobody expected at this point, we're at 2 million worldwide deaths and 400k in the US.

Dont even bother man. Its pointless having this debate with non believers.

Btw in the statistics the 2m deaths only counts for 5k deaths in china I believe.
So IMO between 3 and 4m deaths is way more of an accurate guess if you ask me

[Dejan]

13 people died after the Pfizer vaccine in Norway (after 30k vaccinations)

What do you guys make of all this?

[Ach]

Won't stop me taking it when it's my turn

[Phil71]

13 people died after the Pfizer vaccine in Norway (after 30k vaccinations)

What do you guys make of all this?

If they are getting vaccinated now it means they're in the at risk group.

They probably would have died anyway.

[Nuggets]

According to the media, the only people dying is because they have the Coronavirus so nobody is dying of nothing else then yea right.

[Nuggets]

13 people died after the Pfizer vaccine in Norway (after 30k vaccinations)

What do you guys make of all this?

If they are getting vaccinated now it means they're in the at risk group.

They probably would have died anyway.

But but but that doesn't sell papers and spread panic.