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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#361

Post by avs733 »

nostromo wrote: post #300
brianmcc wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long Covid. It's not just death and hospitalisations. From The Lancet: "Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden." https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ec…

Vaccinated people don’t get “long covid” in appreciable numbers.

There is no data to support this claim.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#362

Post by avs733 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #245
dmje wrote: post #223

UK citizen here. I just don't think this "collapse" is the case. My gut feel is that everyone has stopped doing lateral flow tests and reporting those tests: noone wants to be isolating now the summer holidays have started, and many people are now ignoring track and trace because they're scared of the possible "pingdemic". I know many people who have stopped scanning in to venues. I reckon many suspect they may have…

It really makes me wonder why the authorities don’t do proper randomized surveys? It is obvious that the testing numbers will go up and down as the population goes scared and then goes don’t care.

Several municipalities in the US did do randomized sero surveys earlier in the pandemic.

I can’t provide a citation but largely these were abandoned because they were influence by a couple factors

* participation was obviously still voluntary and largely mirrored the same trends you describe

* the data was not short term actionable and took up testing infrastructure at the time

* it was dangerous - I.e., public health workers were threatened, assaulted, and in at least one case shot at.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#363

Post by rtpg »

spookthesunset wrote: post #124
neves wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work. Dozens of countries and well organized societies responded well to the pandemic.

> There's a lot of evidence about what worked what didn't work If that was true why can I take the population adjusted graphs for any interesting statistic, overlay several countries or states, and see the shape of them all is basically the same? I would assert that for any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile the effect on such charts should be absolutely noticeable to any layman on the…

That's just not true? there have of course been outbreaks in many countries so the graphs _look similar_, but usually at totally different scales.

Did you forget about the half-million dead in the richest country in the world? That didn't not happen, and is extremely different from other places.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#364

Post by XorNot »

nicoburns wrote: post #194
samizdat311 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are very good points. I'd add that herd immunity isn't a clearly defined threshold, either. It's the point at which the effective R in a population is much below 1 you get, exponential decay might take a few months or even a few years to get down to elimination. The current dip in the UK is trending toward the former. But it's further complicated by the fact that levels of immunity in the population will contin…

> eradication for the UK looks very close to impossible given the near-total-abandonment of public health measures recently. I don't support the recent abandonment of restrictions, but could that policy, followed up by stricter restrictions in a few months time actually be helpful for eradication? Eradication is likely a hopeless prospect in the UK anyway, because there is no political will for closing the borders. B…

The ship has sailed on eradication. We're ALL going to get Delta at some point now, it's just a question under what circumstances (and whether the antivaxxers will have sufficient numbers to denial of service the healthcare system as they die).

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#365

Post by XorNot »

stadium wrote: post #346
bhickey wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll echo that this is a reasonable assessment. In evolutionary hill climbing, the fitter a protein the fewer paths there are to climb higher [0]. Art Poon has some interesting work that effectively maps viral phenotype space by looking at compensatory mutations [1]. He induces deleterious mutations in page phage, grows them until they recover fitness and then assesses if they regained fitness by reversion or compens…

> What frightens me are polymerase mutations. What are these in layman's terms?

Mutations in the genetic replication machinery of the virus. All the world's worst and most untreatable diseases tend to have very fast, but very low quality polymerases.

This means they replicate quickly, and generate mutagenic variants quickly. HIV and Ebola have this in common.

Delta is already selecting for viral load over vaccine escape - if it keeps getting faster then it could become more dangerous, but it would also increase the rate it can explore it's genetic "phase space".

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#366

Post by dragonwriter »

XorNot wrote: post #364
nicoburns wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eradication for the UK looks very close to impossible given the near-total-abandonment of public health measures recently. I don't support the recent abandonment of restrictions, but could that policy, followed up by stricter restrictions in a few months time actually be helpful for eradication? Eradication is likely a hopeless prospect in the UK anyway, because there is no political will for closing the borders. B…

The ship has sailed on eradication. We're ALL going to get Delta at some point now, it's just a question under what circumstances (and whether the antivaxxers will have sufficient numbers to denial of service the healthcare system as they die).

> We're ALL going to get Delta at some point now,

That's by no means certain; even ignoring the possibility of effective countermeasures, a more transmissible variant could displace it (if we’re lucky, it could also be one producing less severe disease, the way it was when Epsilon variant for a while displaced most others in California, before Delta, which is more transmissible than Epsilon, took hold.)

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#368

Post by amirhirsch »

kkvcdyh wrote: post #351
nostrademons wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The herd immunity threshold changed with Delta, which I've heard has an R0 of 8-10 (compare 3.5-4.5 for the UK Alpha variant, and about 2.5 for the original strain). Instead of 60% vaccination, you'd need 90%, and will likely overshoot that. It wouldn't surprise me if the UK's cases are now dropping because they reached that threshold, but I doubt the US is there now. Probably Delta will blow through literally all th…

Where did you "hear" it has an R0 of 8-10? It's not time to be imprecise. If you're referencing the CDC's case study from Provincetown, I think it's important to point out that the R value cited is the R value during Bear Week, not on average.

When people present R0 as a property of the pathogen, you can take it as hot panicky air.

From wiki: "R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population."

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#369

Post by manwe150 »

timr wrote: post #294
manwe150 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there is a lot of hysterical speculation, around everything from the initial high death rates to the supposed benefits of HCQ. And slowly we have need to attempt to re-evaluate the data, when it is possible. I really wonder how we could get that data more accurately in the future, without all of the inherent privacy implications and dangers from collecting it. The article also mentions that most of those myoc…

> Since I see you post to COVID questions often, what would you consider to be "more risky?" It is clear teens are on the low end of personal risk from COVID, but they also put others at increased risk of complications, such as their parents, in addition to their own mild risks. This depends so heavily on personal circumstance that all I can say is "consult with your doctor". There are kids for whom the tradeoff is o…

Yes, PCP involvement is wise. Reading deep into that link, I notice it says their advice (for 1 dose) is predicated specifically on the drop in infectivity rates in June, implying that that the more virulent delta strain that began circulating shortly after publication meant we should vaccine all eligible teens with 2 doses now. I think that is too strong perhaps, but I am not too certain what we know about it. Even most of the counter-example countries have changed their position (Germany today, Israel before the article, their link Netherlands for seems to have actually said teens should be vaccinated as soon as doses were available). Do you agree with that assessment of the link?

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#370

Post by kcplate »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #307
newacct583 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The great lie still [...] is that Covid is going to go away courtesy of vaccinations. The authorities have pitched that to the public from the early days of the vaccines That is (1) outrageously hyperbolized and (2) completely wrong. Delta wasn't known to have this level of transmissibility until the last three weeks . People, experts, doctors, "authorities", whatever, you want to label them 100% believed sincerely…

The relevant experts - virologists, epidemiologists, etc. - neither believed nor claimed that we were on a path to the elimination of the outbreak. They've consistently stated that the virus will be around for at least years, probably decades, possibly forever.

Yeah, but a politician can’t say that…so the experts close to the politicians tend to follow the political narrative instead. The ugly result is a lack of trust in the experts, the science, and the politicians when there are setbacks to that political narrative.
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