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The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

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Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#411
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's quite this simple; look at the overall case by specimen and age demographics graphs on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=natio... (England only, because the data for rUK isn't available). Note the peak is around a week _prior_ the end of the school term in England (23 July), and this is true across basically all age groups.

Most of England's private schools broke up one week prior to the state schools.

Only 6% of the population attend private school.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#412

I don't see why we should care about number of cases in countries with freely available vaccines. Disease (as reflected by hospital admissions) and death are what we care about. And those numbers are continuing to trend in the right direction. The US media is just addicted to fear at this point. With a more boring/traditional president in the office and the covid panic waning, there is a news vacuum. And the media is…

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…

I don't think "from The Lancet" has the same weight as it used to.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#413
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…

You can deduce the number of required infections by taking an IFR and the given total deaths of 613000.

IFR: 0.15 = 613000 * 1 / 0.0015 = 408 million infections (124% population)

IFR: 0.3 = 613000 * 1 / 0.003 = 204 million infections (62% population)

IFR: 0.6 = 613000 * 1 / 0.006 = 102 million infections (31% population)

So in case of the lower IFR would implicate there must be many reinfections. And those reinfections are still deadly. It would imply immunity isn't long-lasting. So best to keep routinely boosting your immunity through vaccines. This would probably be the least favorable scenario.

In the case of the higher IFR would implicate there's still some herd immunity to go. It also implicates infections are more deadly. So better boost herd immunity by getting the vaccine. This would actually be the more favorable scenario if we're going to be able to beat Covid.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#414

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.

In the UK we're not vaccinating under 18s in volume - not yet anyway. I really don't want my kids to take part in the Great Adolescent Long Covid Experiment.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#415
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…

> Starting 2 weeks from now, you won't even have to self-isolate if you test positive for COVID-19. This is a loaded question, but since covid is and will be endemic, when do we get on with our lives and start facing the mountains of other public health issues? It seems like our vaccination effort was extremely successful and had an amazing effect and there isn’t likely to be any radical new intervention for years to…

At some point we will "get on with our lives" but that doesn't mean that we will be able to ignore COVID-19. As with any highly infectious and dangerous disease there will still be a public health response to outbreaks. The hope is that with a high proportion of people vaccinated we won't see many outbreaks.

For example, in Australia we have a 92-94% vaccination rate against measles (differs slightly by state) with the disease considered eliminated in 2014 [0]. Even still, in 2019 there was a small outbreak in Western Australia that lead to a big contact tracing effort and some forced isolation/quarantine of close contacts [1].

[0] https://www.health.gov.au/health-topics/immunisation/childho...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-25/inside-the-operation-...

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#416

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…

I don't think "from The Lancet" has the same weight as it used to.

The Lancet actually played a major role in promoting anti-vaccine sentiment.

They were the ones who initially published Andrew Wakefield's now-discredited research [1] linking the MMR vaccine to autism. This research and the media attention it garnered massively undermined public trust in vaccines in both the UK and US.

It took them over a decade to officially retract the article.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#417
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wou…

Rather than increasing efficiency, I'd be concerned about loss of function in the error checker. This would spike the mutational rate (and the mutational load).

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#418
post #379
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's something actually happening here. because those people dont want to take the vaccines?

If somebody who refused to get vaccinated gets sick, you can say it's their fault. But some people can't get vaccinated, and for others who did get vaccinated the vaccine will have no effect - these will still be at risk until (if ever) herd immunity is reached...

Sure I can. They get what they fucking deserve.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#419
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By this standard, anyone can make up any speculation of something that might happen to children someday, and we'll use that speculation to demand fearful responses, indefinitely. You are also speculating, but simply about different things. You're speculating about harm from the vaccine, or about infection that don't happen. One way to avoid going down that speculation rabbithole is to defer to experts whose job it…

> You are also speculating, but simply about different things. You're speculating about harm from the vaccine, No, I've provided evidence of that. It's not speculation: young boys are seeing disproportionate levels of vaccine-induced myocarditis > One way to avoid going down that speculation rabbithole is to defer to experts whose job it is to weigh the pros and cons and crunch the numbers Indeed, that's all I've don…

Here you say listen to both arguments, which seems right. Above your tone was ‘don’t vax kids because the UK and half of Europe say not to’ which does make one wonder, ‘what about the other half?’

The UK is often on the wrong side of health vs. quackery, in recent decades originating then spreading more ‘expert’ FUD to set back global disease eradication than perhaps any other first world country. That doesn’t mean the UK is mistaken now, but it does indeed suggest a more careful and less credulous deconstruction of “the UK’s” balance of belief.

Re: The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delta's R numbers are not uniform, but certainly are not 0. Some easy-to-grab stats from Canada's worst covid province which is dealing with a Delta wave: Alberta provincewide: 1.48 (1.38-1.59) Edmonton Zone: 1.37 (1.15-1.61) Calgary Zone: 1.50 (1.37-1.64) Rest of Alberta: 1.48 (1.26-1.73) https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx (Fyi, Alberta is Canada's version of West Virginia. It is the national heart of…

I don’t know any specifics about this, so this as an attempt at asking questions of what to possibly expect from those numbers. Alberta seems to be 63% vaccinated, which seems to put them well above average for the US? And it looks like those numbers are currently computed for the day before the latest surge in cases took off? Edit: later learned the parent is talking about R0 and you are talking about Rt, so those n…

Oh. Whenever i see "R number" i think Rt. Thats what the news and government spokespeople use.
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