Second wave brigade

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Why are so many amendment on a second wave? If we keep to the rules there will be no second wave! It's an excuse to be lapse with the rules!

@IcedPurple the one in China was in a different area near the border of Russia/N Korea (who denies they have any cases) & led to the Chinese leader sending a message to say they would offer help -S Korea new outbreak was linked to either a large festival/disco/nightclub where someone who had the virus attended & spread it -

As to false tests you have to understand that people can have negative results in the early days before they become symptomatic- there was an incident of this recorded in this country recently of a young disabled woman.

The Oxford group have developed a vaccine for MERS and it’s currently in clinical trials in the Middle East with, as far as I’m aware, positive results (I’ll see if I can dig out the paper).

It’s obviously quite tricky to trial a vaccine when the virus you are trying to vaccinate against is not circulating in the community (how can you tell if it works?). SARs and MERS were both quite self limiting so I think that added to the delays there.

HIV as I understand it is essentially constantly mutating within the body and cannot be cleared by the body’s immune response which makes a vaccine very challenging. COVID is cleared very effectively by the body’s immune response in the vast majority of people so a vaccine is hopefully much more likely.

Nothing is certain but I think it’s probably more likely than not that a vaccine will be successfully developed.

How many people in the world have/have had coronavirus? A lot.
Remember at one point there was only one person in the whole world with this virus, and then it spread like this.
I don’t get how anyone can say a second wave isn’t inevitable.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200422132600.htm

@IcedPurple with that in mind why the decision to lockdown ? Is it because we don't currently have the medicine or technology to prevent the spread or we dont have enough of it ?

Lockdown was an emergency measure to cope with the outbreak of a novel virus.

The hope is that through a combination of treatments/vaccines and 'track and trace' tech we will be able to control the spread of the virus relatively soon. Those options wern't available at the time of the Black Death, or even the Spanish Flu.

the one in China was in a different area near the border of Russia/N Korea (who denies they have any cases) & led to the Chinese leader sending a message to say they would offer help -S Korea new outbreak was linked to either a large festival/disco/nightclub where someone who had the virus attended & spread it

Oh, I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I had thought that by 'reoccurances' you were referring to those who had supposedly tested positive for the virus twice.

If you mean there have been flare-ups of the virus since lockdown was relaxed in parts of the world, then yes of course there have. That was to be entirely expected and is pretty much inevitable. But they don't amount to a 'wave' any more than 70 people testing positive after schools reopening in France does. If overall numbers are sufficiently low and efficent track and trace measures are in place, it should be possible to contain such outbreaks.

Don't really understand your OP but if you are saying plenty on here are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a second wave and waiting to jump out and shout "we told you so" from behind their twitching net curtains I could not agree with you more.

Thank you, sunshine, interesting question about how to test a MERS vaccine.

I heard some of the UK researchers talking about COVID trial volunteers needing to be released out in the wild before the outbreak ends to be exposed (not that appears likely in the UK) without deliberately infecting people.

There’s so many people not sticking to the rules though!

People not sticking to ‘the rules’ will be factored in to all the governments modelling.
More people are sticking to the rules than they ever anticipated. That’s they they’ve had to encourage people back to work... a lot of those people were never supposed to stop going to work.

The hope is that through a combination of treatments/vaccines and 'track and trace' tech we will be able to control the spread of the virus relatively soon.

What treatments specifically ? Do you mean treatments for symptoms of the virus once someone is hospitalised or treatments to prevent admission to hospital ? A vaccine is many months/years away and track and trace technology is very much in its infancy in this country, currently being tested on a population of just over 141,000 on the Isle of Wight and involves voluntary participation.

I am honestly not having a go at you @IcedPurple, I would love this all to be over and back to normality, just trying to figure out how and when and safely

People not sticking to ‘the rules’ will be factored in to all the governments modelling. More people are sticking to the rules than they ever anticipated. That’s they they’ve had to encourage people back to work... a lot of those people were never supposed to stop going to work.

Yes, but how many of those not going to work have flouted other lockdown rules? Anyway, no surprise that people stopped going to work when the govt support (furlough) for some was so generous? Lockdown is all about protecting others whereas not going to work is all about protecting that person themselves.

What treatments specifically ? Do you mean treatments for symptoms of the virus once someone is hospitalised or treatments to prevent admission to hospital ? A vaccine is many months/years away and track and trace technology is very much in its infancy in this country, currently being tested on a population of just over 141,000 on the Isle of Wight and involves voluntary participation.

Scientists all over the world are currently working on a number of different drugs to lessen the severity of Covid symptoms. There is also some optimism that at least one out of the 100 or so vaccine programmes may prove succesful quite soon. I agree that there are several hurdles to be jumped regarding the 'track and trace' programme but it may prove to be an important tool in managing the pandemic.

I'm no expert so cannot tell how, when or even if any of these measures will work. My point was that we are in a vastly better position with regards to science and technology than we were at the time of the Spanish Flu and certainly the Black Death, and not sure how anyone can disagree with this.

As I said, people ‘flouting’ (hate that word) will be factored into government modelling. That was a separate point to the one about going to work.
The government factored in 50% non compliance. Way more people complied than they expected. And even with people ‘flouting’ the rules, hospital admissions and deaths are decreasing.

Not Tommy’s worried about the second wave as I am about the wave that will hit this winter along with seasonal flu.

My friend who works for the nhs says they are preparing now with how they will cope with the influx of a peak of Covid-19 and flu hitting together this winter.

I’m hoping by then they may have some sort of idea as to what medicines help to alleviate the recovery time so the nhs isn’t overwhelmed.

@Givenupno, it was explained on one of the early Science programmes 'can science beat the coronavirus?'. They started with why they couldn't develop a vaccine for HIV and that led to explaining why they can for Covid 19. They also explained that the will and investment wasn't put in to creating a vaccine for SARS because infection control was enough to stop it. There may be research work going on, but the major players backed away and moved on to other things.

the question is how you define a second wave. I'd say that is another large spike in cases. If you (slowly) relax restrictions, you will see a rise in the number of cases, but that shouldn't be a large rise (yet). If we now go back to our normal behaviour from say 2019, we will definitely see that large spike again soon.

Also, I personally expect a second wave over autumn/winter, because we will be closer together inside due to weather etc.. Probably also more isolation again, because we won't know whether sniffles/fever/coughs/... are due to SARS-Cov-2, other corona/cold virusses, or influenza. Hopefully, we will have more testing capacity, but who knows...

My point was that we are in a vastly better position with regards to science and technology than we were at the time of the Spanish Flu and certainly the Black Death, and not sure how anyone can disagree with this.

I agree that science and technology has moved forward a lot in the 100 years since The Spanish Flu

At what point does it be become a wave then?

Whhe you get exponential growth in infections again. We can avoid that IF we have low enough numbers after lockdown that test, , trace and isolate protocols can keep the infection rate under R1

Everyone keeps saying that lockdown was to save the NHS but it should have been to get the numbers of infections very low as a sort of reset so that when we came out of lockdown we could use testing and isolating along with some loose social distancing to keep things under control.So there would be some infections but they wouldn't tip over into exponential growth.

The problem is this requires resources and constant vigilance and flexibility. Companies and individuals need.to have zero tolerance for people breaking quarantine if they have to self isolate because of coming onto contact with a case. . This will never happen as many companies will just want People to come.into work and not self isolate. Of course we have to live with this and continue working etc but if we want to avoid a second wave ,companies need to accept that they shouldn't discipline people who have to stay home if they are ill or self isolating. People need to be encouraged to do the right thing and employers have to play their part in that if they want to avoid being shut down again. It may affect productivity but at least they will keep open.

still don't understand how people think we can "get the second wave out of the way before autumn" - as if you only get two waves and can pick when you have them.

It's very difficult to control an exponential process, it either trends towards zero or towards infinity. We can't afford to lock-down indefinitely in the hope of getting to zero.

The Imperial paper that triggered the switch to a lockdown strategy envisioned that we would lockdown temporarily when a certain threshold of NHS capacity was reached, and release the lockdown when we got down to another threshold. When the lockdown was released, the virus would take off again, and we'd get the next wave. There would not just be a second wave, but wave after wave until there was either a vaccine or a cure or herd immunity from nearly everyone left alive having had it. The process of lockdown and lockdown-release would be repeated multiple times with each wave when the trigger thresholds were met.

So in summary, we can somewhat control when we get the second (and subsequent) waves by timing the lifting and reimposing of restrictions.

No-one has talked about repeated lockdowns, I suppose politicians hope they can calibrate this first lifting of restrictions to just the right level so that we can have a stable level of new normal indefinitely. But that's difficult to achieve, I think.

Black death had around 18 waves over the space of about 10 years.

Surely this isnt seriously being cited as an expectation for COVID? In medieval England where people lived in crowded shacks and the medical advice was "wave some herbs around"?

No-one has talked about repeated lockdowns

Actually I do remember someone in government mentioning that as a strategy back in April, but I think it went out the window.