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London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

bloomberg.com

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Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#161

Post by robbiep »

grey-area wrote: post #119
LatteLazy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Melbourne is A-Okay. They'd have been that way much earlier if it wasn't for one major super spreader event.

Aggressive contact tracing works when the disease is at low levels.

So Australia (Melbourne at the time) and the UK had basically the same case reports per day in July. One place crushed it, the other didn’t.

[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/drericlevi/status/132282229786701...

[1] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#162

Post by asdff »

edh649 wrote: post #134

For those (like me) who are looking for some more details of this new strain, I found 2 papers from the `COVID-19 Genomics Consortium UK (CoG-UK)` of great interest. It seems like the prime reasons for concern are increased frequency of mutations, increased proportion of cases, and possible change in immune response > Several aspects of this cluster are noteworthy for epidemiological and biological reasons and we rep…

Anecdotally I know a family where every member tested positive for COVID in the spring with severe symptoms at the time. They recovered, then over thanksgiving they started experiencing very mild symptoms (some none at all, others loss of taste and smell to more typical cold like symptoms), and all tested positive once again.

It might be that after you contracted COVID once, or a particular strain of COVID once, that you have a heightened immune response and less severe symptoms when you do catch the disease again. It is hard to say for sure what is going on from an isolated case, but this certainly doesn't bode well.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#163

Post by dboreham »

LatteLazy wrote: post #59

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…

Wow. Here in deepest Republican middle America mask wearing by _staff_ in supermarkets is universal. Customers around 90% if you count "nose-slingers" as non compliant. Pretty much nobody just swanning around with no mask these days. Costco has heavy mask enforcement -- they will hunt down and eject anyone with their nose out.

Where masks are not worn here is in smaller family owned businesses. Some have notices requiring masks on the door, some (many) do not, even though it's a state mandate.

Since this is the US, we have no public transport so I can't comment on that.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#164

Post by DanBC »

randomsearch wrote: post #132
codeulike wrote: post #111

A lot of you missing the context of what's been going on here in recent days - they've seen an unexpected spike in infections and it seems to correlate with a strain with an unusually high number of mutations. So they're not totally sure the new strain is responsible but it looks serious enough to get extra cautious. By tracking the growth of that strain then reckon it's 70% more easily spread. That could be statisti…

They’ve seen a spike in infections in a densely populated mega city in the busiest shopping weeks of the year, when (anecdotally) people are not taking precautions and social distancing. In what way is that unexpected?

The spike isn't just in London, but across the south east.

https://twitter.com/Davewwest/status/1339918672811462657?s=2...

https://twitter.com/avds/status/1340355825471287299?s=20

https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1340010730687492096...

This one shows high rates for Medway: https://twitter.com/RP131/status/1338158031067033601?s=20

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#165

Post by robbiep »

randomsearch wrote: post #128
LatteLazy wrote: post #59

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…

This is mostly hugely speculative. Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).

During Melbourne’s winter, Melbourne was reporting the same number of cases a day as the UK in summer.

[0] https://twitter.com/drdeannechiu/status/1322834922269073408?...

[1] https://twitter.com/drericlevi/status/1322822297867018240?s=...

yes I know I posted essentially the same information to two comments, I apologise for the spam

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#166

Post by elyobo »

lend000 wrote: post #112
pjc50 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia?

And islands. Australia may be a continent, but its low population density and lack of roads connecting it to more populous regions is certainly a contributing factor. All of the countries doing best are either authoritarian or effectively political islands (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China).

"Australia" has a low population density because most of it has close to no population; it's easy to be mislead by this if you're not aware of how the population is distributed within a huge area, but the areas where most people live do not have low population density. It's heavily urbanised (more so than the UK), with the vast majority of the population living in reasonably dense metropolitan areas.

It's the willingness and ability to take effective measures, not the geography, that matters.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#167

Post by dehrmann »

lefrenchy wrote: post #120
dehrmann wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> South Korea You might want to check the news on South Korea. They're hitting daily records right now. This isn't to say they're at US levels, but with their current measures, they don't have control of the virus.

It’s not even remotely comparable though. 1,000 cases a day and less than 1,000 total reported deaths. It puts Western nations to absolute shame.

That's not the point. My only point is their r0 has been above 1 since early November. They went from 100 news cases per day to 1000 in a month and a half. That isn't "succeed[ing] at containing this virus."

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#168

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mhh__ wrote: post #113
tobylane wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three days ago he said it would be inhumane to cancel Christmas. Today he said the data from the last 72 hours forced a change. Johnson is an oaf, but covid has kept him fairly serious. His waffling bumbling act was dropped.

I'm of two minds about this particular decision - Johnson is a crook and a fraud, but in this case I can't really blame him for making the decision (Our late decision to go into lockdown killed people, though).

I don't get why people have to personalise this. Johnson's decision is easy, go with the expertise or ignore it and make something up. Things for some reason seem now always to have to be presented as the policy of one political "team" as if a country can be run by relying entirely on a small group of politicians to come up with all the ideas.

We should be using statisticians, virologists, public health advisors, doctors, etc., to come up with suggestions. Maybe a few separate groups. Johnson's decision then is "shall I try and circumvent this expert advice or not".

Seems like politicians have no idea how to delegate, and press are so poor at reporting they can't somehow cope with presenting things that aren't personality competitions.

The best thing Johnson could do is sanction his advisors and make sure of the rule of law in their regard - he's used his father as a personal representative in governmental actions, but his father has been publicly and openly breaching the rules. Who could possibly honour "Johnson's" advice when he won't even hold his own personnel to that standard. It's beyond ridiculous and shows utter contempt for the British public IMO.

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#169

Post by singingfish »

lend000 wrote: post #112
pjc50 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia?

And islands. Australia may be a continent, but its low population density and lack of roads connecting it to more populous regions is certainly a contributing factor. All of the countries doing best are either authoritarian or effectively political islands (Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, China).

My understanding of the situation in new zealand is that at the beginning of the pandemic (back in march) they knew their health systems weren't up to the job - NZ's health system is kind of bad - so they took decisive action to ensure they could keep the pandemic under control. I think they're a bit better now but they still lack confidence in their health system.

Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).

Re: London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

#170

Post by elyobo »

randomsearch wrote: post #128
LatteLazy wrote: post #59

I live in London. The core issue here is that the government hasn't really taken any action. There are "rules" but they are full of loopholes and totally unenforced. 2 cases in particular stand out to me: Compliance with mask wearing on TFL is less than 50%. "Covid enforcement" officers walk around about one train in 50, and despite it being 8 months since this started, "I don't have one" is an acceptable answer to w…

This is mostly hugely speculative. Australia is in summer, so it would make more sense to compare it to the UK’s summer, if you insist on comparing two countries with very different population densities (a key factor in the spread of COVID-19).

Population densities are not wildly different between the two countries if you realise that most of Australia is effectively unpopulated and the vast majority live in a handful of metropolitan areas.
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