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Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#221

Post by Gibbon1 »

ketamine__ wrote: post #186
Gibbon1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic when the UK should have done nothing as Germany Invaded Poland and France. And then nothing as German troops landed. The real fact is people that argue and resist taking action against Covid because 'mah freedumbs' are seriously undermining democratic governments. Basically making authoritarian governments point for them.

Lots of politicians are refusing to get the vaccine. Something about waiting their turn. That seriously undermines democratic governments in a pandemic. I don't understand mocking freedoms. There are many people in nursing homes that want to see their families but can't. They are angry because the caretakers can see their families but they can't. Will you mock them too?

I'm not mocking freedoms are pointing out that if you want to keep them you need to act like you can be trusted with them.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#222

Post by jasonlaramburu »

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #220
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's as though the pro-lockdown side can't accept that sometimes tragedy happens and we're relatively powerless to stop it There are multiple countries (in both northern and southern hemisphere, islands and mainlands) that have eliminated community transmission of covid. It is wrong to say we are powerless to stop it. It is indisputable that if you and your family stay home, you will not get COVID. Likewise, common…

> You are trying to make the argument, absent data, that the economic and social/emotional impacts of 'stay at home' orders are worse than the economic and social/emotional impacts of uncontrolled viral infection and death. My argument has the proof of vast majority of countries that’ve failed to mitigate spread with high tradeoffs and costs to society. If Europe ostensibly can’t manage it - how is the US expected, g…

>My argument has the proof of vast majority of countries that’ve failed to mitigate spread with high tradeoffs and costs to society.

These are anecdotes. You fail to show that the costs of NPIs to society are greater than the cost of uncontrolled spread (ie doing nothing).

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#223

Post by jeofken »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #178
iridium_core wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the data directly: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons. New lockdowns also seem to be coordinated across the global right now, independent of local conditions. This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achieve some kind of strategic aim.

> Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons. Excess mortality is only just starting to creep back up. It's easy to see that UK excess deaths peaked in early April at a weekly rate nearly 4 times that of the highest pre-2020 peak (2018-01). Ideally, we'd avoid a repeat of that. > This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achi…

Do you have a source for the claim that hospitals are running out of beds?

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#224

Post by matz1 »

Silhouette wrote: post #217
matz1 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You posted link about ambulance delays. This is issue is not caused by covid, because it happened as well in the past where there was not covid. By implementing lockdown, now you have 2 issue : Ambulance delay and the damage from lockdown.

I'm not sure your conclusion logically follows from the evidence, but even if it did, you still haven't answered the big questions your position raises. If you think what they're doing at the moment is wrong, what specifically do you think they should be doing instead and why do you think your alternative strategy would have better outcomes?

Specifically: no lockdown.

Why it has better outcome?

From the data we know that for vast majority of people who get infected it will be either asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms and the serious case/death is skewed towards the elderly.

Lockdown cause harm. The virus cause harm.

More people suffer from lockdown than the virus.

At the minimum doing nothing different than the government already done in the past would lead better outcome than what we currently have.

If you want to do something, then there are many ways that are not lockdown, that can be done such as:

- increasing healthcare capacity/funding when needed

- accelerate development of better treatment

- accelerate vaccine development

- do not test everyone, so much wasted resource spent on this.

- media campaign to educate people about the actual risk of covid

- increase campaign on exercise, healthy diet, outdoor activities.

That's pretty much what I would do if I'm in power.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#225

Post by pw201 »

djsumdog wrote: post #144
JohnCohorn wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypocrisy of elected officials following measures doesn’t imply that the measures they’re imposing aren’t needed. I agree there have been elements of mass hysteria in this thing, but at the moment we have real and present reasons for hysteria to be appropriate. The number of cases we have at once is overwhelming hospital capacity in many regions and all signs point to it getting much worse over the next month.

> The number of cases Please research PCR and the amplification cycles. Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles and it's causing a lot of false positives. Cases should never be the number to use, fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated). The way PCR is being used is insane and a lot of the numbers are just plain misleadin…

> Right now most tests are using over 40 cycles

This is misleading. The number of cycles used is irrelevant. Reference: https://virologydownunder.com/the-false-positive-pcr-problem... (from someone who has actually used PCR in research, as neither you nor I have).

> and it's causing a lot of false positives.

We can get an upper bound on false positives from ONS surveys over the summer, by assuming all their positives were false (prevelance was low then). At https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... the ONS says "We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false. For example, in the most recent six-week period (31 July to 10 September), 159 of the 208,730 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.92%." (The false positive rate would then be 100% - 99.92% = 0.08 %). The ONS prevelance surveys are processed at a couple of the Lighthouse Labs which also do the Pillar 2 testing in the UK.

Can you explain why "false positives" go down among vaccinated patients?

> fatalities should (and even then many people get marked for COVID deaths because they test positive yet die of something unrelated)

Evidence for "many"? We have a couple of metrics for UK deaths from COVID: deaths within 28 days of a positive test, and root cause / contributing causes ("of" vs "with") on death certificates. These are imperfect in both directions (for example, some patients who die spend more than 28 days in hospital with COVID, meaning the 28 day metric undercounts them) but agree that the UK has seen around 70000 deaths of COVID.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#226

Post by pw201 »

iridium_core wrote: post #62
chacha2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hospitals are quickly filling up, young people need hospitals as much as anyone. What's your suggestion, allow elderly covid patients to die at home?

Overflow hospitals in the UK have never been used: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/covid-patients-england-ni... The UK Government is arresting people who film empty hospitals: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13619752/moment-anti-covid-loc... Meanwhile less than 400 people under age 50 have died with/of COVID in the UK. The fundamental driver of this pandemic is the ill-health of the population - driven by sugar (obe…

> The UK Government is arresting people who film empty hospitals:

The police arrested one person who walked, mask-less, though quiet public areas of a busy hospital (and was abusive when challenged by hospital workers). The vital need to spread conspiracy theories on Facebook isn't one of the "reasonable excuses" for leaving your house.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#227

Post by EForEndeavour »

jeofken wrote: post #223
EForEndeavour wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons. Excess mortality is only just starting to creep back up. It's easy to see that UK excess deaths peaked in early April at a weekly rate nearly 4 times that of the highest pre-2020 peak (2018-01). Ideally, we'd avoid a repeat of that. > This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achi…

Do you have a source for the claim that hospitals are running out of beds?

Plenty! Here's one specific news article from mid-December for the UK, with a link to the NHS data source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/17/nhs-hospitals-...

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#228

Post by Silhouette »

matz1 wrote: post #224
Silhouette wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure your conclusion logically follows from the evidence, but even if it did, you still haven't answered the big questions your position raises. If you think what they're doing at the moment is wrong, what specifically do you think they should be doing instead and why do you think your alternative strategy would have better outcomes?

Specifically: no lockdown. Why it has better outcome? From the data we know that for vast majority of people who get infected it will be either asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms and the serious case/death is skewed towards the elderly. Lockdown cause harm. The virus cause harm. More people suffer from lockdown than the virus. At the minimum doing nothing different than the government already done in the past wo…

So you're proposing a natural selection strategy that would, on the evidence so far, probably kill around 1 million people in this country alone and possibly cause long-term health consequences that we don't fully understand yet for millions more who get the virus but don't die of it?

And that's still making the implicit assumption that the greater number of people getting the virus and therefore greater number of opportunities for new mutations to develop don't make things any worse, for example by evolving a mutation that severely affects other demographics in the same way that the current known variations of the virus affect elderly or otherwise vulnerable groups and/or that can withstand the treatments and vaccines we have available so far.

And it's also making the obviously false assumption that the NHS has the resources to offer the best possible care to everyone who does get the virus in your scenario, and that care for others with serious conditions is not compromised causing further suffering and loss of life.

I don't think most people would agree that such a strategy is either ethical or likely to be more effective at controlling the virus than the lockdown measures, under the present circumstances.

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#229

Post by [deleted] »

matz1 wrote: post #224
Silhouette wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure your conclusion logically follows from the evidence, but even if it did, you still haven't answered the big questions your position raises. If you think what they're doing at the moment is wrong, what specifically do you think they should be doing instead and why do you think your alternative strategy would have better outcomes?

Specifically: no lockdown. Why it has better outcome? From the data we know that for vast majority of people who get infected it will be either asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms and the serious case/death is skewed towards the elderly. Lockdown cause harm. The virus cause harm. More people suffer from lockdown than the virus. At the minimum doing nothing different than the government already done in the past wo…

[deleted]

Re: Covid: New lockdown for England as cases surge

#230

Post by matz1 »

Silhouette wrote: post #228
matz1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically: no lockdown. Why it has better outcome? From the data we know that for vast majority of people who get infected it will be either asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms and the serious case/death is skewed towards the elderly. Lockdown cause harm. The virus cause harm. More people suffer from lockdown than the virus. At the minimum doing nothing different than the government already done in the past wo…

So you're proposing a natural selection strategy that would, on the evidence so far, probably kill around 1 million people in this country alone and possibly cause long-term health consequences that we don't fully understand yet for millions more who get the virus but don't die of it? And that's still making the implicit assumption that the greater number of people getting the virus and therefore greater number of op…

>So you're proposing a natural selection strategy that would

I didn't say that, I listed multiple measure that can be taken.

What I'm saying is, if for some reason the government refuse/unable to do those, at the minimum no lockdown is better.

>on the evidence so far, probably kill around 1 million people

1 million out of how many ? How many million people who going to suffer from lockdown?

>that we don't fully understand yet

Right, its not fully understood yet, so its not a justification to implement a measure that is harmful for million of people such as lockdown.

>or example by evolving a mutation that severely affects other demographics in the same way that the current known variations of the virus affect elderly or otherwise vulnerable groups and/or that can withstand the treatments and vaccines we have available so far

New mutation generally evolve into something that spread more easily but less deadly.

>And it's also making the obviously false assumption that the NHS has the resources to offer the best possible care to everyone

I never made assumption that the NHS has the resources to offer the best possible care to everyone.

>I don't think most people would agree that such a strategy is either ethical or likely to be more effective at controlling the virus than the lockdown measures, under the present circumstances.

I acknowledge that everybody has their own preference, if you like to live in the place with lockdown then to each their own. I'm just trying my best to everybody people I know. If I can choose I would much much prefer to live where the government handling this without lockdown. I ready to move to place with less lockdown, if the government in my place decided to increase the lockdown.

That being said I think each of us lives in their own preferable place is probably only thing that going to work for both of us.

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