SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
Wait, why are you both quoting something from April?
I only saw it when Wibble posted, hadn't realised it was so long ago!! Doh.
Pretty much all of the above is what was happening in Ireland in the pubs I've visited before they closed them again. The only difference is that yes you've to book in advance but it doesn't have to be electronic and we don't have marshalls as far as I'm aware.
It's baffling, at the beginning they decided the pubs would be the last places to open but we didn't have a huge amount of evidence of anything at that stage.
The govt won't budge on it now but haven't really provided any evidence to back up the idea that pubs/restaurants are responsible for the spread of covid.
The only evidence I've seen is that American study of 314 people where they found those infected were twice as likely to have visited a bar/restaurant. It's a very small sample size and we don't know anything about the measures implemented in these places. They did say that those infected were less likely to have reported others wearing masks and social distancing.
Even in the summary it says that bars/restaurants might be important risk factors.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6936a5.htm
In Ireland we aren't actually gathering information about where the disease came from. I get that the contact tracers are more concerned with finding out who you could have given it to and there are limited budgets/time constraints but it seems a wasted opportunity.
Nah, we have basically the same measures here.
I mentioned this about two weeks ago, in that educational settings is the biggest elephant in the room at the minute.
The workplace increases is less down to covid secure measures, but more about children at school passing it onto parents, and then transmission coming into the workplace environment. There's been no real fluctuation in their incidents until the kids have gone back to school.
The problem with the pubs & restaurants angle is that it's an easy target for public critics, as the sheer aspect of social enjoyment in those places at a time where there is great frustration around restriction of movement, is enough to highlight it as a problem. It's probably one of the more controlled environments that you could perhaps visit currently.
That is good. Is the UK similar because some of the posting on here made is sound like a free for all?
the pubs I’ve been to have been fine and you’re not even allowed to go to the bar to order drinks it’s table service only with mandatory track and trace details when you arrive. The issue will be with the pubs and bars that don’t really give a shit
Yep, it's pretty much the same as what you're describing.
In Ireland our pubs aren’t even open. Most of them anyway. Restaurants were allowed open so any pub that could serve a “substantial meal” was allowed reopen. They had to comply with strict regulations as described by @Wibble above, plus nobody was allowed to stay more than two hours. There’s been some piss-taking about what constitutes a meal and lots of anecdotes about people finding ways to outstay their allocated slot but generally they’ve done their best to be fully compliant. With hundreds of pubs up and down the country shuttered since March.
It’s starting to feel very harsh the way they remain such a focus of the restrictions when transmission is so rife in other workplaces and schools and people are still hosting piss ups in their homes.
And don’t get me fecking started on communion parties...
It’s starting to feel very harsh the way they remain such a focus of the restrictions when transmission is so rife in other workplaces and schools and people are still hosting piss ups in their homes.
And don’t get me fecking started on communion parties...
Depends on the pub if they're adhered to. I know that in Oldham the reports to police of pub flouting the rules were pretty high.
"Starting to"? It's always been a load of bollox. Especially having Dublin in level 3 yet somehow all the pubs are closed, but the rest of the country is fine. It's already been proven that pubs being open has had pretty much no impact on cases either.
Seeing as pubs still haven’t opened, I would say that is pretty difficult to prove!
I agree. Although, whilst other Governments have evidently done a better job, (as much as it pains me to say it, being very firmly left on centre) I'm not sure anyone has really done all that much better. Certainly, post-lockdowns, nobody has really got this cracked and we're all awaiting a vaccine to get back to any semblance of normality.
The contact tracing issue is a big one and if people don't co-operate then how can we expect it to succeed?
My opinion, as a society, we were largely willing to co-operate at the start in the face of an unprecedented threat, with warnings that half a million could die and stadiums being turned into hospitals with death on an industrial scale. The reality is, that (for whatever reason, and clearly locking down had a major impact) that never came to pass and I believe most (and especially the young) have no fear of the virus anymore since statistically they think they're very unlikely to suffer. The fear factor is gone, there is no force of will and without that you're into having to enforce with neither the resources, nor the mandate to do it. I suspect that is now the same the world over.
Pubs are seen in Belgium as one of the major infection hubs. Weird how it's different from country to country.
This might very well be true (and for the record, I don't think hospitality should be forced to close either) but what's the solution? The economy needs to function and kids need to be educated. Without both we cause far reaching damage well in excess of anything the virus will do.
I seem to be slowly coming to the view that without a vaccine, there appears little that can be done to prevent infection other than a further lockdown which is itself a disaster.
*pubs that serve food
I think the UK seems to have done a really bad job even by comparison with most other nations, most of who haven't been very good at all. A good leader like they have in NZ takes hearts and minds with them. BoJo just bumbles through, doesn't even rebuke his main adviser for flouting the law and then expects everyone else to guess what he means and comply if they guess right. It doesn't breed cooperation.
I don’t know if anyone knows exactly how big a role they play. As the CMO keeps saying household transmission is the main driver but the virus has to get into the household somehow. Our contact tracing system is completely overwhelmed and not able to work out where each case first got infected. There’s so many unknowns right now. We’re in a really tough spot.
I don't know what to believe anymore really and I'm just going along with the ride at this stage. Some corners say we're totally overreacting with our far more restrictive measures than most European countries, some say we're not reacting enough, others say the economy will be ruined, that we don't have the money for it, that we'll lose more lives indirectly than directly, who fecking knows really? You do have to wonder how the only island state in the EU (and a sparsely populated one at that) has made such a complete balls of things that they want to go and lockdown again, OR, are we being completely ridiculous even thinking about locking down for a second time? Again, feck knows, but it's all a bit shite.
But now NPHET are on about basically cancelling Christmas and god help them and the government if they do anything like that!
This is skewed by huge outbreaks at universities? And places like food factories?
The thing is, every country in Europe is in the shit right now. To me it just seems like this is an unsolvable problem in a region where open boarders and freedom of travel are prioritised so highly, yet countries are all taking different approaches to viral suppression.
We might be an island but we both know there’s a land border on this island and its the border counties that are getting hammered by the virus most of all.
I only saw it when Wibble posted, hadn't realised it was so long ago!! Doh.
just to answer your questions - Mooloolaba and no, they have no right to do what they want I'M the boss.
Awesome. The Sunshine Coast is a great place to live. And now covid free.
One of the few places I could see myself living other than Sydney and Perth/WA. Plus it isn't too bad for work (in my field) so it would be vaguely possible to live there before retirement.
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I lived in Mooloolaba for 6 months! I was working in Nambour General Hospital, just up the road. Nice place. Decent beaches.
Page 18 should explain the data further for you, it isn't skewed by universities. Most of the cases are coming from primary and secondary school settings (10 times greater than universities).
Food factories have cases, but not enough to skew the figures. Looking at the data, the workplace increases looks to correlate with schools going back.
But not a patch on the Costa Del Toowoomba?
Does anybody know of any studies that have estimated the number of people who have been infected in the UK (ie. not just tested positive)?
Very difficult to determine this unless you have mass antibody testing.
This combines all of the different studies done to try to answer that question - https://fullfact.org/health/19m-coronavirus-manchester/
I well remember the speech talking about sacrificing the pub for schools, and I think my reaction to it (like everyone else's) was 'well that's shit, but if that has to happen it has to happen'.
My issue is that now the data is in, it's clear it's not a 1 for 1 trade off, and I would argue it's questionable whether it is even possible at all to have schools open and pretend like we are still attempting to control the virus. Maybe it is possible, at the expense of literally everything else (including most workplaces where it is impossible to WFH), but that seems like something that at the very least needs to be publicly debated, and if it's not possible, which strongly seems to be what the data is indicating, then we need to see the modelling and we need to know what the projected death tolls are going to be as a result of it spreading rapidly again. If we, as a society, decide having schools open is worth that price then so be it.
As the government has absolutely no appetite to do either of those things, it really pisses me off that you get this faux moralising (which a lot of people in this thread have fallen for) that the spread of coronavirus is somehow a failure of personal responsibility. As if if we'd all agreed to not have one extra pint, or if 2% more of the population wore masks more effectively, we'd still be on top of it. It's the exact same bollocks as global warming: it's going to make feck all difference if you put your Muller Fruit Corner in the correct bin when the government are approving new coal mines, greenlighting fracking, and working hand in hand with BP, so it's galling to see idiots like Robert Jenrick arguing things like 'it is commonsensical (fecking sic) that the longer you stay in pubs and restaurants, the more likely you are to come into contact with other individuals' as proof that local lockdowns aren't working and need to be more strict. Of course that's a factor, but why is that the debate when the stats suggest it is a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of cases without ministers ever being questioned about whether local lockdowns might not be working because kids are still going to school in those areas, or that both Manchester universities have imported thousands of cases because the government refused to bail out the university sector and gave universities a very simply choice between becoming covid incubators or going bankrupt.
No one is going to argue that hospitality can happen with zero cases. Lockdown extremists will logically argue that we should not have them open at all. My position is simply that if you don't have schools open the evidence of the summer seemed to suggest you can have some degree of normality, and if you DO have schools open it's irrelevant whether those places are open or shut because you're not going to be able to keep a lid on case numbers anyway.
It's a difficult debate, for sure, I'm just frustrated that we're being cheerled back into fairly major restrictions on all of our lives, especially for those of us who don't live lives that conform to the expectations that you live with/have a close nuclear family unit, without much evidence to suggest it's going to have any effect whatsoever.
Felt like moving from hell to paradise.
Surely the other way to look at that is when community transmission was low and workplaces were less full, the covid secure measures weren't all that important, and when community transmission was high and they were really needed, it became clear that these covid secure measures were full of holes? The premise is that these measures "substantially reduce" the risk of transmission, so even if parents are bringing it back in, it shouldn't spread much. The figures don't seem to support that.
Agreed!
Whilst i absolutely agree that all restrictions need to be evidenced base. Where we don't have a body of evidence we really need to stop ignoring common sense and pretending it'll be fine.
This whole crisis has felt like a long journey of the science catching up to reality. It was obvious masks would help, that stadiums were an issue and that schools and workplaces would be hotspots for transmission. The list is endless.
Hospitality might be of little threat when cases are low but given that the growth in numbers is exponential then any area of transmission becomes a major cause of concern at higher levels. It's certainly not as simple as just looking at the main contributors.
The government's initial threat levels made a lot of sense but they've cocked up the communications and not been very honest about it.
Very fair comment
This is pretty pointless statistic. There are a lot more primary schools than unis and the clusters are smaller. Absolute numbers would be a lot better stat than number of clusters.
Edit: checked it and there are 21.000 primary schools and 142 unis in UK. So 150 times as many.
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I went to a talk way back in March at the very start of all this. I remember an epidemiologist saying that in a pandemic you can’t always wait for strong scientific evidence before taking action. Think masks are a prime example of this. Not that I’m saying that science shouldn’t be central to policy, just that sometimes decisions need to be made without perfect evidence and need to able to change when we get better evidence.
Good point. Same proviso applies when comparisons of schools vs pubs/restaurants etc. In terms of numbers of people visiting each of those sites every day the pubs/restaurants will be a tiny % of the number of children in school.
Also, year groups and whole schools are being isolated at the first sign of a case. Schools are being controlled much more strictly than most other settings at the moment, because that's fairly easy to do. Trying to trace cases back to a particular pub or restaurant is much more difficult, particularly with the shortcomings of track and trace, so it's almost inevitable that they will have fewer confirmed clusters.
As the Irish WHO bloke said (can’t remember his name) “Perfect is the enemy of good”
A fraction of the visitors also means a fraction of the risk though.
Of course, I cannot just begin to pretend like I think it makes sense to invest the entirety of our energy and effort on what is shown to be a tiny area of transmission whilst ignoring areas that the data shows are massive problems.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the balance between hospitality and schools was the other way round given the respective focus each is getting, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence in PHE's data to suggest that it's becoming a bigger issue as case loads increase elsewhere. That might change, and I'd be happy to change my opinion with the data as it emerges, but it just does not feel like we're targeting measures at the right things to get back on top of it.