The excuse they will use is that Omni makes vaccines less effective - hence the booster programme.So it's been confirmed that Omicron is less severe than Delta. So why is there still these silly face mask restrictions? Remember a few weeks ago when Javid said "If Omicron is found to be no more dangerous than Delta, then these restrictions can be removed immediately" and "We won't keep these restrictions for a moment longer than necessary"?
This news article from 29th November....
Face masks will not be in place 'a day longer if Omicron is no more dangerous than Delta'
Conservative MPs are expected to vote against measures to tackle the new Covid straininews.co.uk
Short important snippet from that article.
So why have these restrictions not been removed yet?! Did Javid forget what he said?
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Omicron variant and the measures implemented in response to it
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Exactly what i have been wondering. Why have the media not pulled him up on this?
BRX
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This twitter thread has the facts about the proportion of patients in hospital "with covid" rather than "for covid".
It's not two thirds. It's more like a quarter, a minority.
But patients who are brought in for other reasons, but are found to have covid, still present an additional burden for hospitals to deal with, because of the implications for transmission within hospital. Those patients would be easier for the hospital to deal with, if they didn't have covid, so they are still relevant to the "will the NHS be overwhelmed" question.
It's not two thirds. It's more like a quarter, a minority.
But patients who are brought in for other reasons, but are found to have covid, still present an additional burden for hospitals to deal with, because of the implications for transmission within hospital. Those patients would be easier for the hospital to deal with, if they didn't have covid, so they are still relevant to the "will the NHS be overwhelmed" question.
Didn't the face covering SI (Statutory Instrument) have an expiry date of 21st December on it? Was that date reviewed as promised? If the date was changed (to a later date), was it debated and voted on in Parliament?
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BRX
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Because it's not been confirmed that it is "no more dangerous than Delta". It has not been confirmed that it has "no more infectivity tha Delta". The opposite has been confirmed.
DustyBin
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From the DM so apologies but probably just as accurate as Twitter!
UK News | Breaking news & latest updates | Daily Mail Online
All the latest breaking UK news with in-depth comment and analysis, pictures and videos from MailOnline and the Daily Mail.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
It causes less severe illness but is more transmissible; that’s now widely accepted isn’t it?
This is a good example of why I like reading your posts on this subject so much. Brilliant, and very true.
In what way could it be "more dangerous"? You must be referring to the danger to the health service rather than the relative risk to individuals?
Don't forget to add a quote, including the bits where he admits "Numbers still well below last Christmas" and "These figures undercount the total number or "with Covid" incidentals"
Everyone is going to get exposed to this; we need to stop acting as if that isn't true.
It doesn't; that's a complete misconception of how vaccines work. The podcast I linked to a few posts ago covers this.
A vaccinated person is perhaps better off catching Omicron than Delta; an asymptomatic or mild infection is likely, along with a big boost to your immunity (including immunity to more than just spike and immunity in areas traditional vaccines can't reach)
In order to transition to endemic equilibrium, we require mass exposure to the full virus.
Everyone is going to be exposed to Sars-CoV-2; the sooner that happens, the sooner we end the epidemic.
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BRX
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Yes, because that's what the restrictions are all about, and always have been.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
They are talking about the proportion of new admissions in recent days, and this fact is acknowledged in the twitter thread that I linked to. It remains the case that the majority of patients in hospital with covid are there "for" covid, and it remains the case that the number of patients in hospital "for covid" in London is currently increasing quite rapidly. We have to wait and see when that increase stalls in the way the "cases" numbers appear to have.From the DM so apologies but probably just as accurate as Twitter!
UK News | Breaking news & latest updates | Daily Mail Online
All the latest breaking UK news with in-depth comment and analysis, pictures and videos from MailOnline and the Daily Mail.www.dailymail.co.uk
I am fairly hopeful that the increased rate of hospitalisations will indeed stall fairly soon, but we don't know yet.
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It got quietly extended to 26•JNR•22 when they extended the range of premises where face coverings have to be worn.
I have no idea what if any debate or vote Parliament has had on the matter; you would need to check Hansard.
VauxhallandI
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There are a lot of things we don’t know yet but most of us are able to deal with that in a rational way.
I think some people are going to be left behind after this and need some serious counselling, unfortunately more victims of how we have conducted our response rather than the threat itself.
BRX
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I don't think you can say that a more cautious response is less rational than a less cautious response - or vice versa.
Because it's all about judgement of risk vs benefit, with a lot of unknowns, there's no definitively "rational" response.
Especially when there's a small chance of something going very wrong in a big way.
And the fact is that the UK govt is not reacting in an especially cautious way. It is not placing any restrictions at all on what people do over christmas, a time when generations are going to mix, at a point where we actually don't know what the impact of Omicron is going to be in the older portion of the population.
In case anyone thinks I'm some kind of lockdown fanaticist, I'll be with my parents, in their 70s and 80s, this weekend, in the part of the UK with the highest Omicron rates so far. I've made my own risk assessment, and I've made my own mitigations. I'm well aware that I haven't cut the risk to zero, and I'm OK with that. I won't suggest that we all go and sit in a crowded pub on boxing day though, because my feeling is that the risk/benefit is not worth it. Those are my decisions, I would not have made them if I didn't feel they were "rational" but there will be other people who will have made less, or more, cautious decisions than me and in neither case would I necessarily consider them irrational.
BRX
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I'm not "calling for" anything as such. I am glad I am not the person who has to make the call.
I do think it might have been sensible to put a hold on large events, and maybe restrict pub hours, about a week or two ago. In other words, if that decision had been made, I wouldn't have objected to it.
We may find out in a couple of weeks time, either that something like that would have been entirely unnecessary, or might have been a very good idea. I don't pretend to have any special powers of prediction. My contributions on this thread are prompted by reading what I see as a very unbalanced discussion.
By the way, we should also bear in mind that the "scaremongering" or whatever some might like to call it, about potential worst case scenarios, will have impacted people's behaviour in the past couple of weeks, and that will have affected the course of the epidemic. If the entirety of the discussion nationwide were just people saying "it'll be fine, stop panicking" or "everyone's going to get it, there's nothing we can do" then behaviour would be different and I think we'd be seeing more widespread infection rate rises than we are, just now.
VauxhallandI
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As soon as I see cutting the hours of pubs I lose any faith in the individuals capability of making any sensible suggestion
So you are not calling for any such restrictions and you are not saying we should have them but merely wouldn't object if they were imposed.
But you don't deny that Omicron is now known to be less virulent than Delta?
Firstly people having the ability to choose their behaviour is a good reason not to impose restrictions on them.
Secondly I don't think encouraging people to panic has been helpful and people are now realising that they were mislead over claims Omicron was a more virulent form of the virus than Delta, as the cat is now well and truly out of the bag that the opposite is the case.
While the short term effects may be seen to have been beneficial in your opinion, in the longer term this harms the case for restrictions and undermines the appetite of the general public for restrictions.
The pro-restriction brigade do not think about the longer term or the bigger picture and the vast majority of the general public are now immune to their scaremongering.
Indeed. A completely pointless and counterproductive measure, and a clear sign of desperation.
This is what they want. You will have no right to leave home in future unless the NHS permits it, which they won't if they have a staff shortage brcause they cannot manage staff sickness properly and force healthy staff to isolate based on their own bureaucratic rules.
It really is a monumental producer interest trumping everything, like something out of the Soviet Union; where the state owned supermarkets and you were expected to be grateful if they had anything in stock and queue for ages (in the latter case just like the NHS).
www.dailymail.co.uk
It really is a monumental producer interest trumping everything, like something out of the Soviet Union; where the state owned supermarkets and you were expected to be grateful if they had anything in stock and queue for ages (in the latter case just like the NHS).
NY could be axed even if hospitalisations low, health chief warns
Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, said the 'impact on society' of Omicron will be crucial despite mounting evidence that it is generally milder than the Delta strain.
Fair enough, but why not trust in others to also make their own risk assessment?! The above paragraph smacks somewhat of you carrying on as normal and yet seeming happy for restrictions to be applied to other people.
I think that attitude has underpinned much of the support for restrictions we have seen throughout the pandemic; people are happy to see others being restricted, but are less keen on measures that affect them personally.
A rational response would be not acting unless it is clear that the benefits outweigh the harms. We can argue about the exact weightings that should be applied, but it seems like we've not even tried.
Instead, we've been recklessly throwing around whatever restrictions our scientists think of, many of which were not recommended, or specifically recommended against in our pandemic plans.
BRX
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No. I am not "carrying on as normal". Like I said, I've applied various mitigations as part of my decision. For example I have minimised social contact for the past week or so, which means I have not gone and had drinks with friends or other things I'd normally do. I've avoided public transport. I've taken tests for the past few days and have been prepared to cancel if one comes up positive.
And if some kind of national restrictions had come in, ones I felt reasonable from a public health point of view, that applied to everyone, I would have respected them, and not considered myself a special case.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
Sorry, but this is absolute nonsense, unless by the "pro-restriction brigade" you mean a very small number of people with extreme views.
This kind of caricaturisation of a position is very unhelpful, and the fact that it seems to be accepted in the discussion on this thread is one of the things that makes me think many of the participants simply aren't reading widely enough.
The idea that most people who think that some level of restrictions are beneficial in certain scenarios, do not think about the bigger picture or the longer term - do you seriously believe this?
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
There can be no clarity until some time after the point at which acting would produce the benefits.
So, no, it's not just about weightings. It's about making a call based on incomplete information. It's a very difficult decision to make, and comes along with the well known paradox that if you get it right, it might never become apparent that you did, because the thing that would otherwise have happened, didn't.
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The real risk at this point is the increased infectivity of key workers leading to staff shortges due to isolation - this is particularly an issue for the NHS which may have reduced capacity as a result which may knock on to NHS being "unable to cope" in other wards unrelted to Covid. Obviously not actually because of Covid hospitaltions/deaths but other secondary effects that need to be managed yet should be less severe overall that last Winter.
The reduction in isolation to 7-days is actully poorly thought through - doing lateral flow tests after days 6&7 when you've already been confirmed PCR positive is (according to a senior doctor family friend) very likely to return a positive result (on the LFT) due to the presence of antibodies - and is normally the case for up to 90 days. So would be unlikely to actually reduce it & might actually extend the time off.
The reduction in isolation to 7-days is actully poorly thought through - doing lateral flow tests after days 6&7 when you've already been confirmed PCR positive is (according to a senior doctor family friend) very likely to return a positive result (on the LFT) due to the presence of antibodies - and is normally the case for up to 90 days. So would be unlikely to actually reduce it & might actually extend the time off.
The question is whether that justifies putting the whole country under house arrest. There are many who would say that this an extreme and grossly disproportionate form of action.
Indeed before March 2020 it would have been uncontroversial to say such action would be extreme and grossly disproportionate. The first lockdown was because otherwise half a million would die (if you believed Ferguson, which the government did, despite his past record).
Already the ratchet has shifted so far that its proponents now think it is acceptable to ruin peoples livlihoods and mental health because of the risk of hospital staff shortages.
No I would say it isn't - but at the same time if we're not going to have signficiant measures to reduce infections (which may well be the right action), we will need to accept that at the current rate, there will be a reduction (perhaps only short-term) in quality/quantity/availability of certain services in many sectors due to the staff shortages. As an example, this thread details some of the impact of staff shortges on train cancellations.
The choice is simple, unless you believe that the benefits outweigh the costs, don't do anything. Anything else is gambling with peoples lives and livelihoods.
We can cope with uncertainties, but not even trying to perform that calculation is inexcusable.
What really needs to happen is a movement away from mass testing, which is very much an imperfect science in terms of false positives long after infection (for an illness which is mild for the vast majority of those who contract it). We have high immunity levels throughout the population due to highly effective vaccines and prior infections so there really is no rational reason to persist with mass testing and isolation “on suspicion” pending a test result.
But that argument could be used to justify any knee jerk reaction. The problem is Covid restrictions which are so easily imposed come with an enormous cost, but nobody seems interested in properly quantifying that. So, in the grand scheme of things, we don’t actually know whether the restrictions of the last two years have any net benefit, or have simply been a monumental act of national self harm.
brad465
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Maybe when we first locked down this logic can be applied, but we then had plenty of time to analyse the situation thereafter before considering further lockdowns. This is also evident in how there are those who supported the first lockdown as we were dealing with an unknown threat, but by the autumn we knew more and more critical analysis of costs and benefits should have been applied, and still needs applying in future.
One of the problems with NHS staff shortages due to isolation is caused by NHS staff shortages in general. Recent estimates I've seen put that at around 40,000 staff nationally. Now while we are not suddenly going to fill them, we certainly need to do so in future with increased training and recruitment, plus better pay and conditions. Were there no physical staff shortages generally, sickness shortages would be much less of an issue in the NHS right now, even if there were still going to be some shortages.
Bantamzen
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Don't LFTs detect the proteins from the virus & not antibodies?
How many of those people are sick, and how many are simply "having to isolate"?
Oh yes there is certainly a general shortage in staff due to chronic underfunding over the past 10 years. The NHS is a huge employer for the country of course, so anything that is likely to cause the country as a whole to be off sick (even if not seriously ill), will be a perfect storm.
I don't see how this is controversial or indeed debatable; it's what response is practical to a rise in absences and what impacts the country is happy to accept. And that will vary wildly dependent on your circumstnces.
Bantamzen
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Here's where I get nonplussed. We are telling everyone who tests positive, symptoms or not, to isolate. Surely we need only be asking people with symptoms to isolate, because those without symptoms can just wear masks right?
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