When will it all end?

josip

AdamD wrote: »

Things are seriously bleak when people are wishing for curfews.

I don't think anyone is wishing for curfews in addition to what we have.
Many would like curfews instead of some of our restrictions.

Andrewf20

Andrewf20 wrote: »

Lets hope the warmer weather that is coming will help drive the downward trend.

This is what terrifies me. This plateauing means if numbers stay this high, we will never be out of this hell hole level 5!

Tazz T

Andrewf20 wrote: »

Lets hope the warmer weather that is coming will help drive the downward trend.

Some concern there alright. I note that Greece are seeing what looks like a new wave appearing in their graph despite being completely locked down for about three months. However, they did open non-essential retail about three weeks ago so that might explain it. Hopefully its just a blip.

markodaly

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Straight answers, if you want to fire questions back at me that's fine, but answer these first. What's your view on the question of social distancing essentially forcing an entire generation into indefinite, government-mandated celibacy and how long that paradigm is acceptable to continue? And what's your view on what, if not mass vaccination as was previously stated, is the goalpost at which point this government-mandated celibacy can be revoked?

Am I supposed to take that question seriously?

josip

Deleted User wrote: »

This is what terrifies me. This plateauing means if numbers stay this high, we will never be out of this hell hole level 5!

Vaccines will reduce case numbers. Hospitals and care homes are the source of most cases and getting them done should see a significant drop in cases.
We may already have seen part of that.

Another significant drop will be harder to achieve, because no other sector is responsible for quite so many cases.
Maybe when 18-30 year olds get done since they would be more socially active (and rightly so) than the older cohort.

Which does mean that if 'they' want to keep us in Level 5 forever they probably could according to their criteria.
I think that by April, the elected part of 'they' will realise that there is no longer the same support for Level 5 lockdown and we'll start to see changes.

Tazz T

josip wrote: »

Vaccines will reduce case numbers. Hospitals and care homes are the source of most cases and getting them done should see a significant drop in cases.
We may already have seen part of that.

Another significant drop will be harder to achieve, because no other sector is responsible for quite so many cases. Maybe when 18-30 year olds get done since they would be more socially active (and rightly so) than the older cohort.

Which does mean that if 'they' want to keep us in Level 5 forever they probably could according to their criteria.
I think that by April, the elected part of 'they' will realise that there is no longer the same support for Level 5 lockdown and we'll start to see changes.

I suspect, certainly by May, restriction guidelines will be driven more by financial criteria than public perspective, or even infection criteria.

Here's an article from the economist on the slightly beyond near-term situation re the virus, vaccines and Covid.


Covid-19 may become endemic. Governments need to start thinking about how to cope

Even miracles have their limits. Vaccines against the coronavirus have arrived sooner and worked better than many people dared hope. Without them, the pandemic threatened to take more than 150m lives. And yet, while the world rolls up a sleeve, it has become clear that expecting vaccines to see off covid-19 is mistaken. Instead the disease will circulate for years, and seems likely to become endemic. When covid-19 first struck, governments were caught by surprise. Now they need to think ahead.

To call vaccination a miracle is no exaggeration. A little more than a year after the virus was first recognised, medics have already administered 148m doses. In Israel, the world’s champion inoculator, hospital admissions among those aged below 60, who have not received a jab, are higher than ever. By contrast, among the largely inoculated over-60s they are already nearly 40% below their mid-January peak and they will fall further. Although vaccines fail to prevent all mild and asymptomatic cases of covid-19, they mostly seem to spare patients from death and the severest infections that require hospital admission, which is what really matters. Early evidence suggests that some vaccines stop the virus spreading, too. This would greatly slow the pandemic and thus make it easier to alleviate lockdowns without causing a surge of cases that overwhelms intensive-care units. Those findings, and many more, will harden up over the next few months as more data emerge.

However, despite all this good news, the coronavirus is not finished with humanity yet. Covid-19 will continue to circulate widely. There is a growing realisation that the virus is likely to find a permanent home in humans, as “The Jab”, our new podcast, which launches on February 15th, will explore. That has profound implications for how governments need to respond.

One reason the coronavirus will persist is that making and distributing enough vaccine to protect the world’s 7.8bn people is a Herculean task. Even Britain, which is vaccinating the population at a faster rate than any other big country, will not finish with the over-50s until May. To add to the burden, the potency of a jab may fade, making boosters necessary. Outside the rich world, 85% of countries have yet to start their vaccination programmes. Until the billions of people who live in them have felt the prick of a needle, which may not be before 2023, they will remain fuel for the virus.

Another reason for covid-19’s persistence is that, even as vaccines are making sars-cov-2 less infectious and protecting people against death, new viral variants are undoing some of their good work. For one thing, successful variants are more infectious—anything from 25-40% in the case of b.1.1.7 which was first found in Britain. Infection is governed by the dizzying mathematics of exponential growth, so cases and deaths accumulate rapidly even if the variant is no more deadly. To get a given level of viral suppression, more onerous social distancing is needed.

In addition, new variants may withstand current vaccines. The ones found in Brazil and South Africa may also be defeating the immunity acquired from a previous covid-19 infection. The hope is that such cases will be milder, because the immune system has been primed by the first encounter with the disease. Even if that is true, the virus will continue to circulate, finding unprotected people and—because that is what viruses do—evolving new strains, some of which will be better at evading the defences that societies have mounted against them.

And the third reason sars-cov-2 will persist is that lots of people will choose to remain a target by refusing vaccination. A total of 10m Britons are vulnerable to the disease, because of their age or underlying conditions. Modelling suggests that if just 10% of them declined to be vaccinated and if social distancing were abandoned while the virus was still liable to circulate at high levels, then a tremendous spike in infections and deaths would result.

In reality, the share of the overall population that remains unvaccinated is likely to be much higher than in that thought-experiment (see article). Vaccines are not yet licensed for children. Minority communities in many countries, which are most vulnerable to infection, tend to have less trust in the government and the medical establishment. Even among some care workers, as many as half refuse vaccination, despite having seen the ravages of covid-19 at first hand. With the new variants, about 80% of the overall population needs to be immune for an infected person, on average, to pass on the disease to less than one contact, the threshold at which the epidemic subsides. That will be a tall order.

For all these reasons, governments need to start planning for covid-19 as an endemic disease. Today they treat it as an emergency that will pass. To see how those ways of thinking differ, consider New Zealand, which has sought to be covid-free by bolting its doors against the world. In this way it has kept registered deaths down to just 25, but such a draconian policy makes no sense as a permanent defence: New Zealand is not North Korea. As vulnerable Kiwis are vaccinated, their country will come under growing pressure to open its borders—and hence to start to tolerate endemic covid-19 infections and deaths.

Across the world governments will have to work out when and how to switch from emergency measures to policies that are economically and socially sustainable indefinitely. The transition will be politically hard in places that have invested a lot in being covid-free. Nowhere more so than China, where vaccination is slow. The Communist Party has defined every case of covid-19 as unacceptable and wide circulation of the disease as a sign of the decadence of Western democracies.

The new coronormal
The adjustment to living with covid-19 begins with medical science. Work has already started on tweaking vaccines to confer protection against variants. That should go along with more surveillance of mutations that are spreading and accelerated regulatory approval for booster shots. Meanwhile treatments will be required to save more of those who contract the disease from death or serious illness. The best outcome would be for a combination of acquired immunity, regular booster jabs of tweaked vaccines and a menu of therapies to ensure that covid-19 need rarely be life-threatening. But that outcome is not guaranteed.

To the extent that medicine alone cannot prevent lethal outbreaks of covid-19, the burden will also fall on behaviour, just as it has in most of the pandemic. But rather than national lockdowns and months-long school closures, which come at a huge price, the responsibility should fall more heavily on individuals. Habits like mask-wearing may become part of everyday life. Vaccine passports and restrictions in crowded spaces could become mandatory. Vulnerable people will have to maintain great vigilance. Those who refuse vaccination can expect health-education and encouragement, but limited protection. As our special report on the travel industry makes clear, people’s desire to live their lives will ultimately be hard to resist, even in autocracies like China that may be reluctant to leave zero-tolerance behind.

The persistence of acute infections and chronic, debilitating “long covid” means that the next stage of the pandemic sounds grim. But even if covid-19 has not been completely put to rest, the situation is immeasurably better than what might have been. The credit for that goes to medical science.

CalamariFritti

plodder wrote: »

I'd certainly take a 9pm curfew over the 5km restriction we have. I think it would be easier to police as well.

The problem with either of those measures is that they dont actually have any effect on the spread of the virus. They are merely 'shock measures' to drive home the 'seriousness of the situation'. They are 'educational' measures. There's been a few of those. Masks comes to mind.

Sadly people have the attention span of a house fly these days so they dont see the woods from the trees and will applaude whatever nonsense is being peddled next week.

plodder

CalamariFritti wrote: »

The problem with either of those measures is that they dont actually have any effect on the spread of the virus. They are merely 'shock measures' to drive home the 'seriousness of the situation'. They are 'educational' measures. There's been a few of those. Masks comes to mind.

Sadly people have the attention span of a house fly these days so they dont see the woods from the trees and will applaude whatever nonsense is being peddled next week.

Well, I'm not getting into a "lockdown doesn't work" debate. For me, it's obvious that it does, but I want the most effective lockdown at the least personal cost, and stopping people from walking on a beach or in a park, 10km away, just because there is a fear they will call into their friends/relations houses is not optimal imo.

Ginger n Lemon

Schools re opening in Scotland on Monday.

Bloody Scotland like.

hynesie08

Ginger n Lemon wrote: »

Schools re opening in Scotland on Monday.

Bloody Scotland like.

God, I can't believe that all schools are opening fully and unrestricted in Scotland on Monday....

Spends 8 seconds on Google......

Oh they're not.

markodaly

For those who think we can just vaccinate a few and open up as normal.

Doctor Jimbob

markodaly wrote: »

For those who think we can just vaccinate a few and open up as normal.

I agree we can't open up as normal without many people vaccinated.

What I don't understand is why all indications from Government at the moment are that this summer will be more restricted than last summer, when we had no vaccines at all.

josip

markodaly wrote: »

For those who think we can just vaccinate a few and open up as normal.

I think she's wrong at the 2:33.
With all of the vulnerable vaccinated, a new wave of infections won't result in "tens of thousands of deaths".
Lots of cases yes, but not deaths.
And it was at that point I started to suspect that she may have arrived at her conclusions before conducting her analysis.

Silentcorner

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

I agree we can't open up as normal without many people vaccinated.

What I don't understand is why all indications from Government at the moment are that this summer will be more restricted than last summer, when we had no vaccines at all.

Our restrictions last summer were over the top...

This year between the vaccinated and people with a degree of immunity we should be looking at much more relaxed restrictions.

What we are doing is deranged.

doublejobbing 2

In seven days we will be well into the final week of February. A time back in January when NPHET predicted that we could be hitting 200 to 400 cases a day.

With where we are now I find it hard to believe we will get close to this

Baffles me how week on week we can do drops from 8000 to 5000 to 3000 to 1000 and not keep dropping by 50 to 100% every week like up until that point.

josip

josip wrote: »

I think she's wrong at the 2:33.
With all of the vulnerable vaccinated, a new wave of infections won't result in "tens of thousands of deaths".
Lots of cases yes, but not deaths.
And it was at that point I started to suspect that she may have arrived at her conclusions before conducting her analysis.

Agreed. She intimated that there COULD be deaths, so her assertions are caveated. It’s positive to see some more good news but I think once we see the drop off in hospitalisation and death there should be no reason to keep us as hemmed in as we are. We don’t see stats on the flu each year or any other infection with a survival rate like covid.

hatrickpatrick

markodaly wrote: »

Am I supposed to take that question seriously?

I wouldn't have bothered typing it if you weren't. Two metre social distancing means that single people haven't been able to be physically intimate with anybody since March of 2020, and will not be able to until two metre social distancing is abolished. That's assuming they don't just say "f*ck it" and break the rules, obviously. Dating has been off the table, social occasions at which people tend to meet potential mates have been off the table, physical intimacy of any kind has been off the table unless a person already lives with a partner or shares a bubble with them, which means that single people have been forced to live lives of complete touch starvation for almost a year - and we're being told that this will still be the case nine months from now.

Do you see this as an acceptable long term situation? How long term would you see it as acceptable for?

Doctor Jimbob

Silentcorner wrote: »

Our restrictions last summer were over the top...

This year between the vaccinated and people with a degree of immunity we should be looking at much more relaxed restrictions.

What we are doing is deranged.

I agree. I'm hoping the cautious language from government is just a response to the reaction to a large number of cases in January after Christmas reopening.

I'm in favour of some level of caution and restrictions personally, but there's no need to have the same level of restrictions as last summer if we have a large number of the most vulnerable vaccinated.

gozunda

Samsonsmasher wrote: »

Nphet will end up like the Cairo Gang if they aren't careful LOL

When the UK open up ahead of us there is going to be war.

If we have a long hot summer with people cooped up the government can kiss their political careers goodbye

The absolute amount of hairy speculation that Ireland is the worstest ever here really takes the biscuit.

The British government has already indicated that people there most likely will not be heading off anywhere this year.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2021/02/11/uk-travel-brits-told-maybe-no-international-trips-for-rest-of-2021/

It remains it is in the UKs interest that a level of parity remains between the UK and Ireland or we simply end up with eejits from both jurisdiction taking the piss by trying to dodge restrictions.

But yes things will open up. But not because of those suggesting there will be insurrection or whatever because they can't get the annual dose of sun n' sangria ..

Le Bruise

markodaly wrote: »

For those who think we can just vaccinate a few and open up as normal.

I don't know if there's anyone who thinks we can open up as normal after vaccinating a 'few' people? Sure we can relax some restrictions after the vulnerable are sorted...but normality can only resume after a critical mass has been vaccinated (barring disaster).

El_Duderino 09

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

If they hit it, then why would we need to continue observing social distancing? That's literally all I'm asking. Mass vaccination should mean that it's safe to mingle with groups of people again. If it doesn't, if mass vaccination isn't good enough to allow people to do this, then what is?

That's all I've been asking in these posts. Literally that's all. I'm asking what possible logic there is in saying that once we have a high enough vaccination rate to achieve critical mass / herd immunity, we still have to stay away from crowds? Either the vaccine works, or it doesn't. And again, if the vaccine isn't a good enough solution to re-enable us to engage with large groups of people, then what is? What will be that line in the sand, if not mass vaccination?

IF they hit it they MIGHT not need social distancing. IF they hit the target then they will have to see what happens and act accordingly.

It seems you’ve made up up your own set of criteria and now you’re expecting reality to conform to your criteria.

Who told you that’s if we reach the September target, then we don’t need social distancing? Or did anyone tell you and if not, why do you think it?

Bigfatmichael

Le Bruise wrote: »

I don't know if there's anyone who thinks we can open up as normal after vaccinating a 'few' people? Sure we can relax some restrictions after the vulnerable are sorted...but normality can only resume after a critical mass has been vaccinated (barring disaster).

Who's going to pay for it

hatrickpatrick

El_Duderino 09 wrote: »

IF they hit it they MIGHT not need social distancing. IF they hit the target then they will have to see what happens and act accordingly.

If they hit it, why might we still need social distancing? That implies that the vaccine doesn't work.

It seems you’ve made up up your own set of criteria and now you’re expecting reality to conform to your criteria.

Incorrect, but I'm not arsed re-hashing the quote war so I'll let this one go for the time being.

Who told you that’s if we reach the September target, then we don’t need social distancing? Or did anyone tell you and if not, why do you think it?

See above. Not re-hashing this. But if we still need social distancing with critical mass vaccination, then I ask for the bajillionth time, two simple questions:

One: What's the point of the vaccine if we still have to be worried about further COVID waves even once we reach critical mass?

Two: If the vaccine isn't good enough to let us out of this hellish social distancing era, then what would be good enough?

Le Bruise

Bigfatmichael wrote: »

Who's going to pay for it

We will eventually. Just to be clear, I want normality ASAP!

Micky 32

Deleted User wrote: »

Agreed. She intimated that there COULD be deaths, so her assertions are caveated. It’s positive to see some more good news but I think once we see the drop off in hospitalisation and death there should be no reason to keep us as hemmed in as we are. We don’t see stats on the flu each year or any other infection with a survival rate like covid.

Dr Glynn has even hinted at the prospect of allowing people who are vaccinated to re-engage with society.

Micky 32

Le Bruise wrote: »

I don't know if there's anyone who thinks we can open up as normal after vaccinating a 'few' people? Sure we can relax some restrictions after the vulnerable are sorted...but normality can only resume after a critical mass has been vaccinated (barring disaster).

Yeah it’s the usual exaggerated posts to try and make some sort of point.

El_Duderino 09

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

If they hit it, why might we still need social distancing? That implies that the vaccine doesn't work.



Incorrect, but I'm not arsed re-hashing the quote war so I'll let this one go for the time being.



See above. Not re-hashing this. But if we still need social distancing with critical mass vaccination, then I ask for the bajillionth time, two simple questions:

One: What's the point of the vaccine if we still have to be worried about further COVID waves even once we reach critical mass?

Two: If the vaccine isn't good enough to let us out of this hellish social distancing era, then what would be good enough?

Ah no. If you can’t say who told you that hitting the September target would mean an end to restrictions, then the whole thing is just a question about the vaccine efficacy. And it a a good question and it should be answered by someone who knows a lot about the the vaccine.

Did someone tell you that hitting the September target would result in the end of distancing or not? That’s the question that underpins your point. So, did someone tell you that was the case or not?

Tazz T

Deleted User wrote: »

Agreed. She intimated that there COULD be deaths, so her assertions are caveated. It’s positive to see some more good news but I think once we see the drop off in hospitalisation and death there should be no reason to keep us as hemmed in as we are. We don’t see stats on the flu each year or any other infection with a survival rate like covid.

Yeah. She's looking at worst case scenario as a result of opening early and unknown variants. A best case scenario is like, most pandemics in the past, that the virus has already run its course and will be mostly eradicated apart from blips in the early months as restrictions ease and in winter (as her graph shows). By September, deaths will be negligible with vaccinations causing less severe symptoms in those unlucky to still get it after being vaxxed.

hatrickpatrick

El_Duderino 09 wrote: »

Ah no. If you can’t say who told you that hitting the September target would mean an end to restrictions, then the whole thing is just a question about the vaccine efficacy.

I've answered that question repeatedly and you've ignored the answer in every post in which I've posted it, that's why I'm not doing so again.

And it a a good question and it should be answered by someone who knows a lot about the the vaccine.

Did someone tell you that hitting the September target would result in the end of distancing or not? That’s the question that underpins your point. So, did someone tell you that was the case or not?

As I've repeatedly said, yes. Leo Varadkar did, when he stated that mass vaccination would correlate with the return of mass gatherings and that it was only a matter of when we achieved mass vaccination.

Again I ask you, what in your view is the end game? You seem to be fully on board with this "mass vaccination doesn't mean we can stop socially distancing" and I'm saying fair enough, BUT we need an answer to this question. Current social distancing rules, if people follow them to the letter, categorically rule out the forming of relationships by anyone who is currently single. It is totally and completely insane to suggest that this is a long term solution and not a stopgap.