Please don’t say the l word, it brings out the zealot….
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
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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.
I keep seeing you reference your son & his training, what sport does he play?
Water polo. He has represented his country at youth and junior levels and is currently playing Div1 NCAA polo in California. He gets back home on Monday for the first time in 2 years and after 3 days of home quarantine he is attending his first traing camp after being named as part of the senior national squad. Paris is his goal so fingers crossed.
Fingers crossed here as well!
Oh give it a rest man. You all played the same school yard bullying trick last year, but then the word that brought out the candyman was Sweden, apparently now it’s “lockdown”.
Heaven forbid anyone has a different opinion on how to tackle this long term, I mean you do realise a hell of a lot of experts are also divided on it?
But hey, better this remains an echo chamber, bring out the Mourinho gif lads.
Just a personal anecdotal update here from SA - I know a shit ton of people who are covid positive now. Probably more than Wuhan, Beta and Delta waves combined. Lots are re-infection after double Pfizer as well (also some with double J&J). From what I’ve seen:
- families more likely to get it now I.e. one infection in the house leads to all infected
- everyone seems to start with a sore throat. No loss of taste or smell this time around.
- this thing is much much milder than past waves. Don’t know a single person who has had to go onto oxygen or hospital (last waves I knew quite a few who went into hospital including ICU)
- families more likely to get it now I.e. one infection in the house leads to all infected
- everyone seems to start with a sore throat. No loss of taste or smell this time around.
- this thing is much much milder than past waves. Don’t know a single person who has had to go onto oxygen or hospital (last waves I knew quite a few who went into hospital including ICU)
At this stage government has to be held accountable for the lack of planning for future spikes in cases. All for the sake of saving the NHS. If that was truly the case why haven’t they built purpose made hospitals for COVID patients? This would allow normal hospitals to continue with less chance of COVID spreading. And I’m not talking about temporary structures where millionaires can pocket yet more public money in rent. Even if COVID does go away we need more hospitals anyway. My local hospital has barely increased in capacity since I was born, yet the local population has probably quadrupled in that time.
Then you see private companies charging astronomical prices for PCR tests for travel, yet the NHS is providing these for free for daily use. The NHS could of had a much needed boost in revenue if they were able to charge for those travelling PCR. They are exactly the same tests and the facilities were already in place.
Every situation just feels like a money grab on public money whilst the average Joe won’t be able to claim furlough money next. We are being told to work from home but can still have a Christmas party. My work made the decision to cancel the Christmas party as it’s clear numbers are wildly spreading again but the government can’t afford to lockdown and cover people’s wages, so are essentially doing nothing other than providing boosters. The fact half of Europe is shut down already, it’s pretty obvious the UK will follow suit.
Then you see private companies charging astronomical prices for PCR tests for travel, yet the NHS is providing these for free for daily use. The NHS could of had a much needed boost in revenue if they were able to charge for those travelling PCR. They are exactly the same tests and the facilities were already in place.
Every situation just feels like a money grab on public money whilst the average Joe won’t be able to claim furlough money next. We are being told to work from home but can still have a Christmas party. My work made the decision to cancel the Christmas party as it’s clear numbers are wildly spreading again but the government can’t afford to lockdown and cover people’s wages, so are essentially doing nothing other than providing boosters. The fact half of Europe is shut down already, it’s pretty obvious the UK will follow suit.
I asked this too, and got the response that I have no clue how long a hospital takes to build, equip and staff. My argument is that 410 billion quid (the current estimated UK cost of restrictions so far) gets a lot done, in timespans faster than anything we ever could imagine under normal circumstances. 2 year specialist training for Covid-ICU, with a 5 year super pandemic wage package gets a lot of people interested in that education etc.
It's not the fact that we haven't done it yet, it's the fact that we haven't even started. The plans have all been short term, and rightly or wrong for the first months of the pandemic that was at least understandable. Since those first months it's been as though most strategies have been based off the vaccines being the one and only answer that would get us out of this, so plans only needed to remain short term till they "saved" us.
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I know this is very lame, totally irrational and “first world problems” but this virus is a nightmare for people like myself with a phobia of injections (dating back to a bad experience when I was about 6). I had my booster yesterday, the third one I've had but I was close to walking off waiting in the queue, it was quite traumatic for me. There must be a decent amount of people who just flat out refuse to have the vaccines for this reason. Can they not create a non-injection alternative?
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As well was not understanding how long it takes to build hospitals you were also told you don’t understand how long it would take to staff them. Which the bit in bold reinforces. It takes six years basic training for each doctor. Only then can they start to to learn the skills needed to work in ICU (at least 3 or 4 years to get a specialist qualification) This can’t be fast-tracked. If it could, it would have been. Because there’s a constant need for specialists, all over the world. Trying to train up specialists from other fields is a non-starter because one of the key elements of dealing with this pandemic is doing everything possible to avoid that outcome. Taking away resources from routine medical care to deal with covid patients.
Your idea is completely irrelevant to how we deal with SARS-COV-2. It might be relevant to how we prepare for the next pandemic but that’s not an easy decision. The last major pandemic like this was in 1918. Is it really a good idea to invest billions in an army of intensivists and hundreds of ICU beds that could be basically redundant for decades?
The UK is testing 3 x more than last year, the positivity rate is lower than this time last year. The data on hospitalisation and CFR is actually quite encouraging for the moment. Certainly compared to this time last year.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom#how-many-tests-are-performed-each-day
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-hospital?country=GBR
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom#how-many-tests-are-performed-each-day
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/current-covid-patients-hospital?country=GBR
As for the bolded, as opposed to 410bn (and counting) in the UK on nothing tangible? In my opinion, yes. Hell, use them afterwards and turn them into regular wards, and decommission/sell off some the old haggered hospitals/wards/departments to property developers when the time comes.
We're not talking regular construction money here, it'd be throwing the kitchen sink at it. And we're not saying build it in 15 days like the T20 Tower, I'm saying 2 years for specialist Covid wards or Covid hospitals with almost an unlimited amount of money.
The NHS did an online course to train up non-ICU nurses to work with intensive care Covid patients, New York had something similar. Nepal trained up 11,000. We're pretty much approaching 2 years now so I'm not talking about that kind of ridiculous fast tracking. Fair enough regarding taking away resources from other fields, whilst I'm not sure it's the "non-starter" you claim it is, as well, we're having to do that constantly as it is, but yeah that's obviously a real difficult one.
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For the UK at least, it cuts deeper than just the question of doctor or ICU team training - it's the years of cutting out every element of contingency catching up. We have fewer ICU beds per capita than the rest of Europe, fewer GPs now that we did ten years ago etc etc - despite an acknowledgment that with an ageing population we actually need more healthcare provision not less. It really has been death by a thousand cuts for the NHS.
One of the complaints now from the hospitals is that they've no one and nowhere to discharge patients to. For anyone who can't go home (on their own or with care from their family only) they haven't got care home beds or visiting carers to support them. Again - death by a thousand cuts - the amount being paid per person by local authorities for those who need support has gone down and costs have gone up. The virtual disappearance of council sheltered accommodation and care homes and their replacement with profit centres (where land value can be worth more than the business) has compounded it.
None of it helped of course by Brexit which really did put the top hat on it by making life miserable for families of EU citizens working here, and effectively stopped recruitment of people who previously would have welcomed a couple of years work in the UK. Our hostile environment has done a good job of being hostile to some of people who could have helped.
We really have had two years to sort out the basics. Sure, you don't get new hospitals that fast, but there's a lot that could have been done.
Worrying reports this morning of the AZ vaccine offering little or no resistance to the omicron variant.
That’s a heck of a lot of folk!
That’s a heck of a lot of folk!
There are pills and nasal sprays being worked on. But I don't think any are even close to approval at yet. Long-term the answer is probably yes. Short-term a no.
But performance is ok once boosted. In the UK, most people who've had AZ are already in the booster eligible group.
In any case the reports about AZ looking weak are focused on stopping infection. Just because it gets past the first line of defence doesn't mean the virus then gets a straight run at causing severe disease. It's still likely that AZ (or any of the others) has prepared your immune system to fight against it.
These are all chronic problems going on for years and years. One thing a pandemic is good at is exposing all the cracks in a health service that have been papered over (or made worse) by mismanagement from the very top down. I’m just not sure there’s the expertise or political will to fix so many long term problems in time to make a meaningful difference with this pandemic. It’s certainly has no bearing on our response to omicron.
This will make me sound insensitive and a bit of a prick but the monumental effort it’s taken/taking to get any form of vaccination as quick as they have is mental enough as it is.
Im sure pills/alternatives might be developed but It’s got to make sense to focus on one form of vaccination in the short term so you’ll likely just have to grin and bare it.
That's interesting. First summaries on cases amongst people who've had boosters are saying sore throat and fatigue as the clearest first symptoms, followed by a dry cough a few days later.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3981711
Big question now is how it behaves when it's the older groups who catch it. Plus, the other big unknown - what about those who've neither been vaxxed nor had prior infection? In the UK and SA there probably aren't many over 18s who haven't either had it before or been vaxxed. Not all countries are at the same point.
Long term IF this is a milder variant could the fact it spreads so fast be positive and potentially help if more deadly variants spread in future
You seem to think we could have spent the £410bn on new hospitals rather than nothing, when what we'd actually needed to have done is to spend the £410bn on having lockdowns while also spending however many billions on the hospitals and staff.
The staff part is much easier said than done, given how devastating the pandemic has been to the physical and mental health of the health workers themselves. The building of these facilities would also have taken the best part of a decade in normal times and likely much moreso given the shortage of labour in that sector following brexit, the shortage of and high cost of materials following brexit and the pandemic and the issues we've had recently with big construction firms like Carillion going bust. By the time the first of these facilities were opened and staffed, the likelihood would be that the pandemic would be long behind us.
We were promised 40 new hospitals which turned out to be a new car park for one and refurbished entrance doors on the other 39
Yeah, I know, I get it but there is a practical advantage in maximising the amount of vaccination take up, as well as the selfish reason of me being a big wuss. To be fair, they are the least painful ones I’ve had, I couldn’t even feel the one yesterday, but I know that if I somehow get a bad one where it hurts and gives me flashbacks to the bad experience, it will finish me off from getting any more.
Basically, yes but maybe not, and certainly not in a way that guarantees how much more/less deadly future variants might be.
The Spanish flu is still here, it still kills people, it kills fewer people than it did in its pandemic phase because we aren't immune naive, and the most vulnerable (mostly kids and the old) get vaccines/boosters.
That said, if it really is less deadly and less likely to leave people with ongoing illness then the fact it's so contagious is indeed good news. Unfortunately we don't know the answer to the less deadly, less ongoing illness questions and won't really know for sure for weeks.
There's a massive amount of luck involved right now. In countries where vaccine uptake is high, and past infection is covering most of the rest of the population - this might well be the wave that tips us from pandemic to endemic, and leave almost everyone with immune responses ready for future fights. The hope is that it does so without a massive number of new deaths and massive disruption to social harmony.
So far we know next to nothing about what it will do when it hits previously uninfected and unvaxxed people - there may be nothing mild about this variant at all.
I feel so invincible with my Pfizer. Bring it on, omicron.
One thing I worry about and is probably my lack of understanding is if this is vaccine/immune resistant of the alpha/delta targeted vaccines and immunity, what’s to say that it’s not going to work in the opposite direction?
So omicron immunity won’t protect from another alpha/delta lineage variation?
Unknown and unknowable? They will be able to do some retrospective tests soon - blood taken from Omicron cases tested to see if it neutralises Delta, alpha, beta viruses. There's a major complication though - it's going to be really hard in most countries to find someone who is unvaxxed and can be shown not to have had a past infection.
The other kind of study that we'll get results from soon (January maybe?) will be the first trials of Omicron targeted vaccines. They'll certainly test the blood for its ability to neutralise other variants. Again though, there's a complication - the chances of finding a clinical trial volunteer who has neither been previously vaccinated nor infected by then is probably closer to zero. Though they may be able to find people whose immunity has waned.
They may get some data from animal trials, but that will come with caveats as well.
Sure. I think I'm just profoundly frustrated by the idea that Tory politicians can still get away with talking about protecting the NHS while strangling it.
Mind you I'm even more frustrated that Labour have let them get away with it. They've had time to make the argument about resources in health and social care and for better sick pay and to put that centre stage. Instead they've continually let themselves get caught up in government rhetoric about stronger border controls and more stringent lockdowns.
I'm trying to determine what the chances are that I've had Covid. Things to consider:
- I live in a remote South African town - a holiday destination
- We've not been spared any wave
- My wife has been sick many times, but she has never tested positive
- I've been ill a couple of times since March 2020
- I've never been tested
Pfizer guy said you need 4 injections though.
Hardly invincible, although great from a marketing point of view
Just had my booster. Moderna on top of two AZ doses. Hopefully it's fine like the second jab, not horrendous like the first one.
For those in the UK, this was broadcast last night and definitely worth watching on catch up. Interesting insight on Pfizer and we'll probably begin to hear more of this in the coming months/years
Updated report on ICU admissions in the UK. This week's version contains the latest data on vaxxed/unvaxxed status of ICU admissions.
Summarising - get vaccinated. If you're eligible, get boosted. If you or someone you know is unvaxxed and can get vaccinated, particularly if they are pregnant, male or over 40 - encourage them to get vaccinated.
Leave those ICU beds free for the unlucky.
Summarising - get vaccinated. If you're eligible, get boosted. If you or someone you know is unvaxxed and can get vaccinated, particularly if they are pregnant, male or over 40 - encourage them to get vaccinated.
Leave those ICU beds free for the unlucky.
Thanks for the explanation it makes sense.
My relative is high up at Wythenshawe and as of Wednesday their entire covid ICU capacity was taken up by unvaccinated folk.
Do we know when boosters might be made available to under 40’s? I’m keen to get that in my arm ASAP.