Remaining Effects of Covid

[Eyersey468]

I agree the messaging around Covid was absolutely appalling.

 

[Peter Sarf]

Can be as lost for words as you like the fact is it is less likely to be fatal to majority of population than flu.


Why? The severity of this virus was seriously overstated, I know some people died from it but they do from lots of things, we don't panic about most of them especially when there's a highly likely probability you'll recover from it.

All I know is three people I know of died from Covid, two of them I knew (and I would not say they were unhealthy). A fourth has long Covid and I have to cope with it. I myself got the worst Virus attack I have ever had by a long way. I cannot think of anyone I know of who has died of Flu (there must be some over the last 63 years).

EDIT - also a person at my workplace spent a long time in hospital with Covid but has recovered reasonably well. So the hospitals were useful for him - the other three died in hospital having contracted Covid.

I am not saying there were no victims of lockdown btw. But there was certainly an urgent need to protect the NHS in 2020 into 2021.

It is a bit surreal thinking about what we all went through tbh. Plus it is over two years ago ! - longer than the ordeal itself.

 

[Richard Scott]

All I know is three people I know of died from Covid, two of them I knew (and I would not say they were unhealthy). A fourth has long Covid and I have to cope with it. I myself got the worst Virus attack I have ever had by a long way. I cannot think of anyone I know of who has died of Flu (there must be some over the last 63 years).

EDIT - also a person at my workplace spent a long time in hospital with Covid but has recovered reasonably well. So the hospitals were useful for him - the other three died in hospital having contracted Covid.

I am not saying there were no victims of lockdown btw. But there was certainly an urgent need to protect the NHS in 2020 into 2021.

It is a bit surreal thinking about what we all went through tbh. Plus it is over two years ago ! - longer than the ordeal itself.

As sad as it is knowing people who've died from it doesn't dictate it's more lethal.
I know more people who've died in road crashes that with the virus but doesn't lead me to try and persuade people that it's more dangerous and we should all have locked down to prevent people driving and keep us all safe.

 

[joncombe]

Personally i was very disappointed in the scientists at the enquiry. They seemed to insist that lockdown was the only solution and the only question was when, for how long and how harsh. There seems to be absolutely no interest in looking what other countries did and what could be learned from that. Sweden and Iceland had no lockdown but lower death rate than most of Europe. Yet still the scientists completely ignore this evidence and continue down the line of lockdown being the only solution. Predicted correctly here but I am still saddened that it seems to be all about gathering evidence to support what was done, not looking at alternative approaches and finding out why countries that didn't lock down did not in fact see a higher death rate. A scientist that ignores data that doesn't support their theory is not a good scientist in my view.

 

[Richard Scott]

Personally i was very disappointed in the scientists at the enquiry. They seemed to insist that lockdown was the only solution and the only question was when, for how long and how harsh. There seems to be absolutely no interest in looking what other countries did and what could be learned from that. Sweden and Iceland had no lockdown but lower death rate than most of Europe. Yet still the scientists completely ignore this evidence and continue down the line of lockdown being the only solution. Predicted correctly here but I am still saddened that it seems to be all about gathering evidence to support what was done, not looking at alternative approaches and finding out why countries that didn't lock down did not in fact see a higher death rate. A scientist that ignores data that doesn't support their theory is not a good scientist in my view.

Exactly this but seems self interest in scientific community and a fear of admitting being wrong means enquiry is likely to be a total farce that ends up costing a lot of money. A bit like the whole virus scenario but problemis some people feel that if they were honest they'd be seen as uncaring as people died. Appears heart ruling head in too many cases.
Seems we never learn.

 

[Bantamzen]

Fair enough we clearly going to have to agree to disagree. As far as I can see the only "evidence" that Covid was circulating in a "significant proportion" of the population before February/March 2020 is that there is evidence of some infections being present in the UK in late 2019. But clearly you disagree anyway and feel that lots of people already had had covid by February/March 2020 and that the fact that deaths increased suddenly then is unrelated to any increase in cases which may or may not have occured. Don't seem particularly persuasive to me but that's fine you do you

There was no evidence because there was little or no testing. A lack of testing based proof does not prove a lack of the virus. If it was here in late 2019 then it was spreading, maybe it did mutate in those early months, we will never truly know. But what is clear from the data is the sharp rise in excess deaths pretty much coincided with the decision to start restrictions, including sending elderly people away from direct NHS care as well as putting up a lot of other barriers to people needing their immediate care.

We can agree to disagree but there is no getting away from this basic and key data point. From my perspective I can't shake the feeling that a lot of deaths were as a result of these decisions by policy makers and NHS / DoH leaders. This is where the real blame lies in my opinion, and sadly this seems to be one being skirted around.

 

[Yew]

But there's no spike in deaths above the 5-year average until March 2020, indeed it was below average in January/February 2020? For it to be killing significant numbers of people, which is what you'd expect if it was circulating in a "significant proportion" of the population, you would surely expect to see deaths rising above the average earlier than it did in reality? Unless the suggestion is that there were two forms of Covid. An earlier version that infected loads of people in the end of 2019 through February 2020 and was fairly benign and then a mutated version that was more lethal from February 2020 onwards?

Circulating in significant but low levels would likely displace deaths from flu etc that we usually see in winter.

 

[DustyBin]

In which case why did cases continue rise until early April?

Did they though?

The number of new infections per day is a key quantity for effective epidemic management. It can be estimated relatively directly by testing of random population samples. Without such direct epidemiological measurement, other approaches are required to infer whether the number of new cases is likely to be increasing or decreasing: for example, estimating the pathogen-effective reproduction number, R, using data gathered from the clinical response to the disease. For coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19/SARS-Cov-2), such R estimation is heavily dependent on modelling assumptions, because the available clinical case data are opportunistic observational data subject to severe temporal confounding. Given this difficulty, it is useful to retrospectively reconstruct the time course of infections from the least compromised available data, using minimal prior assumptions. A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on first-wave Covid-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that fatal infections were in decline before full UK lockdown (24 March 2020), and that fatal infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. gives the same result under relaxation of its prior assumptions on R, suggesting an enhanced role for non-pharmaceutical interventions short of full lockdown in the UK context. Similar patterns appear to have occurred in the subsequent two lockdowns.

Inferring UK COVID-19 fatal infection trajectories from daily mortality data: Were infections already in decline before the UK lockdowns? - PubMed

The number of new infections per day is a key quantity for effective epidemic management. It can be estimated relatively directly by testing of random population samples. Without such direct epidemiological measurement, other approaches are required to infer whether the number of new cases is...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Peter Sarf]

Personally i was very disappointed in the scientists at the enquiry. They seemed to insist that lockdown was the only solution and the only question was when, for how long and how harsh. There seems to be absolutely no interest in looking what other countries did and what could be learned from that. Sweden and Iceland had no lockdown but lower death rate than most of Europe. Yet still the scientists completely ignore this evidence and continue down the line of lockdown being the only solution. Predicted correctly here but I am still saddened that it seems to be all about gathering evidence to support what was done, not looking at alternative approaches and finding out why countries that didn't lock down did not in fact see a higher death rate. A scientist that ignores data that doesn't support their theory is not a good scientist in my view.

This raises an interesting point. Both Sweden and Iceland are not known for having large populations that are crammed in cheek by jowl. So a lockdown has less to achieve for those countries. I can be very sure that their standard of life is better than ours - perhaps we should be asking why can we not each have that amount of space. That could be the inconvenient truth - there are too many people in Britain.....

So is Covid and how we dealt with it the problem - or is how we live the problem ?.

There was no evidence because there was little or no testing. A lack of testing based proof does not prove a lack of the virus. If it was here in late 2019 then it was spreading, maybe it did mutate in those early months, we will never truly know. But what is clear from the data is the sharp rise in excess deaths pretty much coincided with the decision to start restrictions, including sending elderly people away from direct NHS care as well as putting up a lot of other barriers to people needing their immediate care.

We can agree to disagree but there is no getting away from this basic and key data point. From my perspective I can't shake the feeling that a lot of deaths were as a result of these decisions by policy makers and NHS / DoH leaders. This is where the real blame lies in my opinion, and sadly this seems to be one being skirted around.

Well there is a conundrum here. So the death rate rose as restrictions were increased.

Now we can ask - did the death rate rise because the restrictions started or did the restrictions start because the death rate was rising.

My common sense tells me we were never going to start restrictions until it was painfully obvious we needed to. So it follows that the death rate had to rise enough to trigger a lockdown. But a lockdown does not instantly stop deaths. is takes weeks (maybe months) for the case rate to come down. So anyone looking for instant actions and instant results is being naive. Human nature dictates we are likely to do too little and then have to do too much. There was very obviously a desire to avoid doing much about covid until it was painfully obvious that we were not in control. Not doing anything was not working.

 

[Bantamzen]

Well there is a conundrum here. So the death rate rose as restrictions were increased.

Now we can ask - did the death rate rise because the restrictions started or did the restrictions start because the death rate was rising.

My common sense tells me we were never going to start restrictions until it was painfully obvious we needed to. So it follows that the death rate had to rise enough to trigger a lockdown. But a lockdown does not instantly stop deaths. is takes weeks (maybe months) for the case rate to come down. So anyone looking for instant actions and instant results is being naive. Human nature dictates we are likely to do too little and then have to do too much. There was very obviously a desire to avoid doing much about covid until it was painfully obvious that we were not in control. Not doing anything was not working.

There was plenty of discussion at the time as to the dangers of tipping elderly & poorly people from NHS care back into care homes, and I'm sure I've seem somewhere (I'll try to dig it out) some analysis from ONS that suggested that this led to over 20K+ deaths through the first wave, which would account for almost half of those additional covid-related excess deaths. So it is certainly very possible to attribute a considerable proportion of the increases directly to the decisions following lockdown, and this is before any analysis is done on the effect of locking down the spectrum of NHS care to the wider population.

As for being "in control", I'm not entirely sure what this means. If it is controlling viral spread, well despite the lockdown & associated restrictions there were still a lot of people working & travelling, so the virus had plenty of opportunity to spread further during that period, including back to a lot of the population staying at home, and if as I suspect spread was already proportionately high its really difficult to see what was hoped to be achieved. Perhaps if we had more extensive data from the beginning of 2020 we'd be better able to analyse this, but that data does not exist.

If it was to have control over the effect on the NHS, I honestly believe that would have been better achieved by reaching out to those people registered with the NHS who had pre-conditions that would make them more at risk. Giving them early opportunity to understand some additional measures to help them try to avoid infection, or at least deal with infection if it happened would have been much more effective, and way less costly. I did argue this at the time, but for most lockdown was the solution, well at least until it wasn't.

 

[DustyBin]

This raises an interesting point. Both Sweden and Iceland are not known for having large populations that are crammed in cheek by jowl. So a lockdown has less to achieve for those countries. I can be very sure that their standard of life is better than ours - perhaps we should be asking why can we not each have that amount of space. That could be the inconvenient truth - there are too many people in Britain.....

So is Covid and how we dealt with it the problem - or is how we live the problem ?.

This was discussed back in the day, and is a widely held misconception. Sweden's population density in actually inhabited areas is comparable with that of the UK. (There will of course be other factors to consider, but population density is probably the most significant).

Well there is a conundrum here. So the death rate rose as restrictions were increased.

Now we can ask - did the death rate rise because the restrictions started or did the restrictions start because the death rate was rising.

My common sense tells me we were never going to start restrictions until it was painfully obvious we needed to. So it follows that the death rate had to rise enough to trigger a lockdown. But a lockdown does not instantly stop deaths. is takes weeks (maybe months) for the case rate to come down. So anyone looking for instant actions and instant results is being naive. Human nature dictates we are likely to do too little and then have to do too much. There was very obviously a desire to avoid doing much about covid until it was painfully obvious that we were not in control. Not doing anything was not working.

The problem here is that your "common sense" is leading you to unsubstantiated conclusions.

Further to my previous post, here's a graph from the original study:



Original paper here:

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~swood34/biometrics-peak-timing.pdf

We know that deaths follow infections, and the hospital death data points towards the infection rate having peaked in mid-March, a week or so before the first lockdown was implemented.

 

[Bikeman78]

I suspect the only way to eradicate it would have been to force people to self-isolate for 6 months rather than 14 days. I also suspect that asking large sections of the populace to voluntarily put themselves under house arrest for 6 months (and I mean literally not leaving the house once during that time - I know some people did, but not many) with no way of enforcing it wouldn't have been very successful.

How would that work though? Many people still have to attend work rather than work from home. Off the top of my head, anyone involved with power supplies, emergency services or food production and distribution would have to go to work. A total lockdown would be impossible.

 

[Richard Scott]

How would that work though? Many people still have to attend work rather than work from home. Of the top of my head, anyone involved with power supplies, emergency services or food production and distribution would have to go to work. A total lockdown would be impossible.

In reality a total lockdown would also have been unnecessary, the damage done would massively outweigh any advantages.

 

[Grecian 1998]

How would that work though? Many people still have to attend work rather than work from home. Off the top of my head, anyone involved with power supplies, emergency services or food production and distribution would have to go to work. A total lockdown would be impossible.

Indeed - I was trying to make the point that even the type of stringent quarantine rules applied to scientists in Antarctica - people who are used to following the rules as breaches could have lethal consequences if you're based in the coldest place on earth - didn't consistently keep Covid out. If it couldn't succeed there, it couldn't realistically succeed anywhere. The zero Covid strategy which some scientists here and across Europe advocated could never have worked outside of small isolated islands which could cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

 

[Richard Scott]

The zero Covid strategy which some scientists here and across Europe advocated could never have worked outside of small isolated islands which could cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

Probably need to add the word 'forever' to that sentence because as soon as they open up again it will find its way in?

 

[Tester]

Probably need to add the word 'forever' to that sentence because as soon as they open up again it will find its way in?

And devastate them due to immunological naivety.

 

[renegademaster]

Almost nowhere but China avoided lockdowns with a "propper test and trace" , and China avoided national lockdowns by locking down entire cities over a couple of cases with compliance levels wed probably never get here

 

[Bantamzen]

Almost nowhere but China avoided lockdowns with a "propper test and trace" , and China avoided national lockdowns by locking down entire cities over a couple of cases with compliance levels wed probably never get here

Are you suggesting we should have had China levels of lockdowns?

 

[renegademaster]

Are you suggesting we should have had China levels of lockdowns?

No I was more pointing out the naivety of people in this thread who act like T&T was competent what happened would have been substantially different

 

[Bantamzen]

No I was more pointing out the naivety of people in this thread who act like T&T was competent what happened would have been substantially different

Ah I see, my apologies.

 

[island]

Got Covid? Here’s the good news

Patients who get Covid-19 this Christmas are three times less likely to end up in hospital with the virus than they would have been last winter, data suggests. Each infection is also ten times less

www.thetimes.co.uk

Whilst millions have been infected this month, one is now 10 times less likely to be hospitalized after catching COVID-19 than in 2021 and 3 times less likely than in 2022.

As @yorkie and others predicted quite some time ago it is quite clear that it has just become another endemic coronavirus.

Even the NHS is now saying staff who have tested positive may come in if they feel well enough.

 

[Blindtraveler]

This definitely belongs in the category of things that we predicted would be the case if you simply gave it long enough.

Feeling ever so slightly smug

 

[Richard Scott]

This definitely belongs in the category of things that we predicted would be the case if you simply gave it long enough.

Feeling ever so slightly smug

Feeling smug but annoyed at the same time. All the time and money thrown at this, which a number of us said was unnecessary at the time. We were told we were wrong, granny killers etc but actually were right and there are still people who won't admit that and say we should have locked down sooner etc.

 

[DustyBin]

Feeling smug but annoyed at the same time. All the time and money thrown at this, which a number of us said was unnecessary at the time. We were told we were wrong, granny killers etc but actually were right and there are still people who won't admit that and say we should have locked down sooner etc.

There was only ever going to be one outcome, and it truly baffles me how anyone could have thought differently. The zero-covidiots are up there with the flat earth brigade when it comes to pseudoscience....

(Or maybe they just wanted to end capitalism, who knows!).

 

[geoffk]

A petition with this title* is on the Government website and, since October, it's attracted only 112 signatures. It seems that there's not much support for such a move. What does everyone think? Some lawyers are calling for an amnesty on unpaid fines.

*Reduce Covid fines to the amount paid by those at the Downing Street parties ​

In spring 2021, MPs on the joint committee for human rights recommended a review of Covid fines issued in England. It was an unfair policy, the MPs concluded, that often criminalised poor people over the better off. But the criminal justice system has apparently ploughed on regardless, pursuing action against vulnerable people in the belief that it’s possible to punish our way out of the pandemic.

Almost 125,000 fines ranging from £200 to £10,000 were handed out since the legislation was passed, for anything from failure to wear a face mask to exercising too far from home, and around £17 million in fines is still owed. The majority of fines were issued to young people, with students and ethnic minorities particularly affected. Lawyers say that many fines are disproportionate and should be rescinded, especially as the officials and politicians who attended the Downing Street parties only received fines of £50 or £100! The petition isn't calling for an amnesty, just fair treatment for all.

 

[dangie]

‘Lawyers are calling for….’, ‘Lawyers say….’

All that extra business…….

 

[alex17595]

Imagine if this backfires and they just end up raising everyones fines.

 

[Crossover]

Imagine if this backfires and they just end up raising everyones fines.

Best start with all the MP’s then and lead by example…

 

[nw1]

There was only ever going to be one outcome, and it truly baffles me how anyone could have thought differently. The zero-covidiots are up there with the flat earth brigade when it comes to pseudoscience....

(Or maybe they just wanted to end capitalism, who knows!).

I'm not sure lockdown was anti-capitalist though. Large multinational companies weathered it much better than small companies and individuals.

 

[DustyBin]

I'm not sure lockdown was anti-capitalist though. Large multinational companies weathered it much better than small companies and individuals.

That is actually a good point; Michie and co. must be very proud!