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C: “Vaccines should be considered the second line in covid management, because we don’t yet know how well they’ll work.”
Signs so far are very promising. I was reading yesterday that of the 75000 -odd patients involved in vaccine trials so far, not one has died of Covid. The effectiveness rate of vaccines is determined by how many people it prevents contracting the illness it targets at all, but it’s slightly misleading. Because if you get the virus and it does you almost no harm at all, that is a pretty good result too.
If nobody is dying of covid, and almost nobody is ending up in hospitals after being vaccinated, that’s a pretty good result. If it inoculates the vast majority, and renders Covid-19 no worse than a regular mild flu, it’s little short of miraculous.
… I meant “and renders Covid-19 no worse than a regular mild flu in the remainder” .
In the NYT story it illustrated the point by saying that of a typical 75000 people in the US, 150 would be dead and hundreds of others sent to hospital from C-19. Of the 75000 vaccinated, there have been zero dead and almost zero hospitalised.
The reCAPTCHA thing is getting more tedious.
An article in today’s irish Times Let’s end the stand-up tragedy of Ireland’s pandemic policy.
“But there has been far too little capacity to learn the big lesson – that the pattern of lockdown and release, lockdown and release, does not work. Hundreds of people have died unnecessarily to teach us that lesson.”
Hundreds in Ireland, tens of thousands elsewhere.
“To do this, we have to stop pretending that Ireland is different, that strategies that have worked in Australia or Taiwan or Finland couldn’t possibly work here because we’re more open and connected than those societies. We’re not.
Our stand-up tragedy show has been on stage for far too long. There’s now a working script for how to crush the virus while we wait for mass vaccination to take effect. The job of the Irish authorities is not to keep inventing one on the hoof. It’s to adapt it for a local audience.”
We do know what to do, we just refuse to do it.
Clark
“Vaccines should be considered the second line in covid management, because we don’t yet know how well they’ll work.”
The half hearted lockdown has reduced the number of cases slowly but they are still very high. My personal feeling is that if already about 10% of the population are infected it would be very difficult to contain the virus specially with the very poor test and trace system or non-system that is operating. All the relatives of my friend in NI do not know the possible source of their infections because of the poor surveillance. Sadly I think now vaccines are our only hope,
Already the Brazilian and Kent strains are showing high ability to escape the vaccines.
Why should we expect vaccines to work? Despite many attempts, no effective vaccines have ever been developed for any other coronaviruses, apart from some veterinary vaccines of very limited use.
We really should knock this thing on the head, because it’s knocking us on the head in large numbers and disrupting all our lives. We can’t carry on like this, and why should we? China hasn’t. Why faff around for another six months finding out whether a vaccine works or not when we could kill the damn thing in two?
glenn_uk, yes the vaccine might turn out to be fine, but it might not, and it still takes time to get it to everyone. We should get the social measures method right once, so that we have this weapon in our armoury, rather than relying on vaccinations which are slow to deploy and could fail in multiple ways.
While we’re waiting for the vaccine to be deployed we may as well do social restrictions right, rather than doing it wrong yet again.
Clark
In reality you will never get control of the virus now in any rampant capitalist society and with such a grossly incompetent government as we , the US and Brazil, some of the largest countries affected, have. Incompetence is marked by arrogance and ideological blanketing means that it cannot be done. Do you not see that it is impossible to keep people at home when they are hungry, they have to go to work to eat, yet Dido gets millions. There is no contact between Boris and reality, he or his Tories do not know how people live. To get compliance you have to provide proper supervised isolation facilities and money for food for everybody centrally. I know we have focussed on the harsher aspects of Chinese lockdown but they provided support for those quarantined. When will it dawn on everyone that we need to get rid of this government.These reports by the Guardian Get to the heart of the problem I outlined in my previous post. There is also another article about the failure rate of obtaining £500 payment if you need to self isolate .
SA, I agree.
Maybe what’s needed is a story of two regions. In one, people relied upon the existing government, while in the other people self-organised to do what was needed.
Not quite the same topic, though related; have you read The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle? It’s the book I quoted from elsewhere. I think you’d enjoy it.
Thanks for the tip Clark, I will look out for it, sadly at present I have a long ‘waiting list’ for books to read.
Re: the above couple of posts, no wonder there is a proliferation of CTs as some try to escape reality by pretending there is nothing to worry about, the said thing is that the government by its bumbling incompetence, including muddled messaging, has brought this on us.
Talking of off topic, this forum here seems to be completely off topic now and I am trying to continue my old one.There is no local COVID-19 community transmission. Face coverings are no longer necessary or advised as part of social distancing policies. The bars have reopened.
Edward:
– “There is no local COVID-19 community transmission.”
Do you have a link for that please? According to coronavirus.data.gov.uk, over 3000 people tested positive in the last seven days, despite much lower levels of testing. I had assumed it was still circulating in the population, but that immunity acquired from both vaccines and from previous infection had stopped the big waves and reduced the severity of most infections.
The number of tests appears to be about 36000 in the week, which means about 8% of those tested were positive.
Presumably people will not submit a test for analysis unless they have the symptoms, and I suspect many folk will do a test at home; then (if they test positive) will just take a few days off work and not socialise with other people outside of immediate family.
This would go undetected as far as the official gov.uk statistics are concerned; but Covid is unlikely to infect people out of thin air. Therefore to state there is no local transmission is very unhelpful. People must catch the virus from somewhere, and although the effects are much milder than they were 3 years ago that doesn’t mean we should all relax and pretend it is not still with us.
It would be interesting to know if the rate of infection suddenly becomes much higher in those people returning from the Glastonbury festival; but that would be an impossible statistic to monitor.
