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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#111

Post by gpt5 »

felipellrocha wrote: post #102
arbuge wrote: post #90

Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…

> Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. We don't know how much, though. There are cases in which vaccine performs better than a natural infection, there are cases in which the vaccine performs worse than natural infection. Without time for a study, it's impossible to know where we lie with Covid.

It's not impossible to estimate for COVID. Re-infections in COVID are exceedingly rare.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#112

Post by majormajor »

timr wrote: post #81
anyonecancode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Children are at exceptionally low risk from Covid. Let's hope the die keep rolling up to that result with each succeeding variant!

This is a perfect illustration of the point. In the face of ample documented evidence of the actual risk, your response is to speculate wildly about future events that are completely inconsistent with what we know.

The "give up and let it be endemic forever" defeatism attitude appears very statistically foolish.

It's likely, yes, but why on earth would we want to just accept that?

The flu, for instance, bounces around in severity and kills tens of thousands per year in the US. Few of those are kids, so what? If we're happy to let the virus continue to transmit in any populations, it'll change in various ways. One year a variant may pop up that'll be more harmful to those kids. At some other point a variant may pop up that'll be more elusive against adult immunity, etc. Over years, how many lives does that add up to? Why wouldn't we aggressively try to vaccinate as many people as possible before those things happen?

Success wouldn't be guaranteed even if people weren't opposed to it for various spurious reasons but it would be nice if we believed we could accomplish hard things...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#113

Post by dtech »

newsyyswen wrote: post #53
runawaybottle wrote: post #50

Do we have conclusive numbers on how long these vaccines last? I’m reading that Pfizer lasts about 6 months? There’s no way there won’t be a surge again next summer if that’s the case.

There are no conclusive numbers on how long they last, because there has not been a significant drop-off in efficacy yet. There is some evidence that booster shots after 6 months can provide better even better protection than the second shot after 3-4 weeks, but it's not clear whether they will be necessary yet, especially when so much of the world is still desperate to get the first two shots in peoples' arms.

There has been shown a little bit of drop-off, but that is in the range of 95% to 80-90%, so still strong. Hard to say because the mutation in circulation have changed.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#114

Post by karol »

sprkwd wrote: post #104
zarzavat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choose your own adventure, coronavirus edition. You have coronavirus symptoms. During the middle of a surge in cases, the government has announced that all coronavirus restrictions have ended and everybody can go back to normal. The vast majority of older and vulnerable people have been fully vaccinated. Do you: A: get a test and risk having to isolate B: not get a test and live your life like normal as the governmen…

Anecdotally, everybody I know has deleted the app from their phone so they can’t get pinged and live their life reasonably normally.

Anecdotally, I never installed it for the same reason.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#115

Post by gpt5 »

mattlondon wrote: post #100
Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #2

Important and underexamined question. What happened in the UK?

IMO it was most likely the Euros football/soccer championship leading to a lot of mixing in crowded spaces among younger men who maybe didn't yet have the vaccine or we're from backrounds that are the sort that typically ignore this sort of thing.

Would you also blame the Euro football for the rising Delta cases everywhere in the western world?

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#116

Post by jkhdigital »

raphlinus wrote: post #105
jkhdigital wrote: post #88

> thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed…

That is a dramatic misrepresentation of that preprint. The number of deaths is small enough that it is hard to draw inferences from it, and that was not the endpoint of the study. Rather, the key finding is a vaccine effectiveness of 97% against severe disease. A preprint that did address deaths[1] found a vaccine effectiveness of 98.7% against death. This is not consistent with your claim of "no evidence." [1]: http…

That preprint is not an RCT. The study I cited is an RCT. And the RCT shows no effect on deaths.

And yes, it does show a dramatic effect on infections and serious illness. This is great, and we should shout it from the rooftops! But a journalist writing that vaccines are the reason Covid mortality will drop 90% is projecting, not reporting facts.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#117

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

jkhdigital wrote: post #88

> thanks to widespread vaccination of the elderly, however fast this disease spreads it will ultimately inflict a much, much smaller death toll than earlier waves, because vaccination has probably eliminated 90 percent or more of the country’s total COVID-19 mortality risk. This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis: A double-blind randomized trial for an mRNA vaccine with 44k participants showed…

> This claim does not appear to be grounded in any factual basis

No factual basis in that paper but you seem to be saying "no factual basis at all" which is flat-out wrong, indeed basing such a claim on one paper is disingenuous: Absence of evidence in 1 chosen paper is not evidence of absence in general.

You only have to compare the linkage between cases and deaths in UK waves 1 and 2, with the much lower level of deaths for comparable numbers of cases in wave 3, to see the "much, much smaller death toll" staring you in the face.

Your chosen paper is also largely irrelevant before we even get there; it's about mRNA vaccines, whereas the UK's program has leaned heavily on AZ, which is not.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#118

Post by nyokodo »

neither_color wrote: post #64
0xTJ wrote: post #20

This gives me hope for Canada, where I am, won't face too many issues even as we slowly start to tick up from the bottom since major reopening happened, allowing indoor dining etc. In the last week, we've passed the UK in number of fully vaccinated people, but that's going to be slowing down as we start running of people who got their first dose during the big surge in shots here. Unfortunately, at 64% of the total p…

Since when is Texas a pejorative? By itself it would be a world top-15 economy, and its pandemic performance was not an outlier or exceptional. If anything it, along with Florida, demonstrated that extremely strict lockdowns don't correlate to better outcomes. Nothing like Alberta.

> Since when is Texas a pejorative?

Alberta is Canada's biggest oil producing region similar to Texas. I do not think it was meant as a pejorative.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#119

Post by zwily »

basch wrote: post #101
arbuge wrote: post #90

Most news articles I see focus solely on the number of vaccinated people when estimating how far away countries are from herd immunity, which seems odd to me. Left out in the discussion seem to be the unvaccinated but already infected. As far as I know, prior infection confers at least some degree of immunity. It may also be the case that those inclined to be skeptical of vaccines were also the ones who exposed thems…

Not as sensationally reported is that, fatality rate (the proportion of people who die of those who tested positive) appears to be falling slightly, and is at its lowest in 2+ months. https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/map

This would most likely be due to the vaccines, no?

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#120

Post by mattlondon »

bostik wrote: post #58
tsywke44 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also lots of previously vaccinated people were exposed, but didn’t get infected. Doesn’t mean their immune system did nothing though. I’d wager a lot of UK population basically got an ”organic 3rd vaccine dose”. My prediction is they have probably the highest immunity rates in the world atm

> a lot of UK population basically got an ”organic 3rd vaccine dose”. Isn't that how the vaccination regime is supposed to work, actually? With two jabs in, contracting Covid still comes with something like 4%..20% hit rate.[ß] However, with two jabs the risk of hospitalisation is mercifully low, and roughly half of the cases are asymptomatic. So instead of vaccinated people overloading the NHS, when they do get unlu…

As far as I know, long covid is directly related to how sick you get. you hear all these stories of people being bed bound for a week or more, high fever, struggling to breathe, etc etc.

I'd think it sounds quite a lot like those people were really rather ill. I don't think people should expect to go back to running marathons or whatever a week after fighting to survive

It's the same for flu and other major viral infections. It can take a while to get back to full health - I don't think covid is anything new here? Just the usual "you almost died"?

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