Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Good post. Have to take issue with this bit though.

Considering the current claims of vaccine effectiveness alongside out uptake rate AND all emerging evidence on the severity of Omicron, I would be thinking one would be 20 times less likely.

I expect for every confirmed case right now there are at least 20 unconfirmed considering testing limitations and all we know about the prevalence for No\Mild Omicron symptoms. Covid is everywhere. With 20k confirmed cases a day that's 200k real cases using an undetected factor of just ten. Add this to confirmed cases from the past, with are reasonable undetected factor, and it's becomes clear that our 5.2 mil have been well exposed to this. If you believe the stats around vaccine effectiveness, then consider the amount of 'breakthrough infections' we are seeing and then extrapolate the numbers out.

If it's everywhere why restrict?

The debate around the need for more restrictions will play out in the school reopening debate.

Strain on the health service or problems with schools reopening and staffing are actually down to the restrictions in place not because of the lack of them. Staff who are not 'sick' are being told to stay at home because they have either tested positive or are deemed close contacts.

With mild Omicron and extensive vaccination the pandemic is effectively over. The sooner we accept this the better. Time to remove all restrictions and treat the sick as they present as we would during a mild seasonal flu outbreak.

Now is the perfect time to remove restrictions while booster effectiveness is at it's maximum.

Not indefinitely, until the population has a high level of immunity from vaccines. Lockdowns were never a long term permanent plan, that was only the case in certain people's fascist conspiracy fantasys.

Have we any figures on the number in hospital with the flu at the moment or have we escaped it this year?

You can be anti-restrictions (I think we should have dropped them back in August, but I understand why they won't be dropped in the dead of Winter) without falsely claiming that restrictions don't work.

Claiming they don't work is generally so someone can absolve themselves of making hard decisions (i.e. who will die when we run out of health capacity) if restrictions don't work, then it doesn't make a difference anyway.

Most of the posters still claiming this were also making the same claims back in March/April 2020 and we can see by the death rates of countries that put restrictions in place early vs. those that waited till later, that they do work (then they try and steer the conversation over to demographics, again using hand waving and hoping people don't look at the actual numbers behind it).

I don't think that all restrictions will be dropped until Spring (March/April), I can see some of them being reduced in line with hospitalisation numbers, Winter is a bad time to make any changes which is why the original October/November schedule was complete pie in the sky (but I understand the rationale behind it even if I don't agree with it).

There is a Sweden thread, but Sweden is the standout bad performer of the Scandinavian countries and had an effective buffer around them protecting them (if you remember, 2020 was when the border counties in Ireland had the highest cases and death rates). Their rationale was to pursue herd immunity before vaccines were available and it didn't work that well (only the UK also briefly toyed with the idea before abandoning it).

Had we pursued the same, with the UK beside us, we'd have been facing into a Palermo scenario.

Denmark have an all digital and connected health system, they were also first out of the gates for vaccines ahead of the rest of Europe. We could have that as well, but there is a lot of union intransigence to digitising their workload in the health system (this allows you to target individuals faster, reduce close contacts, see where outbreaks are likely to occur and react to them before it happens, lots of good stuff that we can't do, you restrict smarter instead of blanket restrictions like we had).

You're toast.

I was in bits the other day after moderna booster.

Very very tired. Brand new now.

So if hospital numbers are including those who have either gone into hospital for something else and caught it, or those already in hospital for something else and have caught it, does that render that number meaningless now?

And makes ICU the only number that matters?