To those saying just shield the elderly...

[Lifeaintalwaysempty]

And the youngest person to die in the last 24 hours, with NO underlying health conditions, was 26. It may be predominantly the elderly who are dying, but everyone else can get extremely sick. And when they fill up the hospitals, important treatments and surgeries get cancelled.
This will not go away if we just make the elderly shield and the rest of us go about our business. It is and will, affect all of us

You are opening a can of worms.

Quite apart from the young age of some patients, there are plenty of parents in their 60s who have teenagers. How do they shield? Should their children isolate too? Their spouses? Plenty of senior surgeons, doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, engineers, in their 60s. Should they all isolate too?

It's just not practical.

You may be opening a can of worms as pp said, but I tend to agree with you.

But I don't think many people are saying shield the elderly any more because we're now vaccinating the elderly. This is a good thing.

I actually think the more galling thing about this stat is the flipside: that three-quarters of hospital admissions are people over 55.

So after a year of lockdowns, tiers, firebreaks, prime ministerial broadcasts, economic suppression and everything else, this virus is still:

• disproportionately affecting (in health terms) the age group we're supposed to be acting to protect
• disproportionately impacting the system (the NHS) we've been asked to act in order to protect.

It's been a total failure of a policy, all ways round.

@NastyBlouse I was literally told yesterday morning that we should do this.
Yes good point on vaccination but my point is, it doesn’t just affect the elderly badly if 25% covid admissions are under 55. The rest of us are not immune.

There was a person with a child under one year old who ended up in intensive care- the Prime Minister. Should he have shielded and never gone out at all (well for this argument I am assuming he is fit for the office, which in my opinion not)?

Shielding or no shielding, lockdown or no lockdown, people are getting covid and dying. The difference with lockdown is that people get covid a few months later than they would have otherwise. Meanwhile, other people suffer and die - children get little or no education, jobs are lost and people lose their homes, struggle to eat, suffer with their mental health, etc etc etc.

A virus goes around. The total inability to accept that baffles me. You might want to 'stay safe' from it for the rest of your life but you just can't and making other people suffer for a belief that you can 'stay safe' is not acceptable in my book.

Do things to slow down the virus, yes. But don't pretend that you're going to somehow 'save' people from it. It's that belief that's driving people nuts IMO and making them completely miss the bigger picture - the extreme and unbelievable damage they're doing.

So you think everyone is going to get covid eventually? How ridiculous.

@Lifeaintalwaysempty

So you think everyone is going to get covid eventually? How ridiculous.

Well, yes and no. But the message was 'flatten the curve' not 'get rid of the curve'.

Personally I am working on the assumption that the vast majority of people will be exposed to covid at some point, yes. (Of course some will be vaccinated, some are naturally immune, some will be asymptomatic, and so on.)

Well obviously will be exposed due to vaccination but that doesn’t have a 1% fatality rate.

peak2021

There was a person with a child under one year old who ended up in intensive care- the Prime Minister. Should he have shielded and never gone out at all (well for this argument I am assuming he is fit for the office, which in my opinion not)?
The PM did not end up in intensive care when he had a child under one year old. The PM's child wasn't even born until 17 days after the PM was discharged from hospital.

@Lifeaintalwaysempty

So you think everyone is going to get covid eventually? How ridiculous.

No - people avoid illness even when there are massive outbreaks of hugely infectious diseases. Even in measles outbreaks among unvaccinated people, some people just don't get it and measles has can have a ridiculously high R number - 13 in some cases. In the Spanish flu epidemic it was common for some members of the family get the flu and others to be fine, with no social distancing and no vaccines.

Covid will be one of the many illnesses that does the rounds year after year. If the vaccine confers permanent immunity then it may be possible for a large proportion of people to avoid it their whole lives. But there is strong evidence that immunity fades, meaning that, like flu it'll be necessary to be vaccinated every year. In that case, it's impossible to be in a situation where you're guaranteed never to get it.

Even people who have been vaccinated have subsequently had covid. The vaccine is not 100% effective.

@TheDailyCarbunkle

Even people who have been vaccinated have subsequently had covid. The vaccine is not 100% effective.

true as the vaccine doesn't prevent you from catching the virus but from getting quite ill that you need a bed or ventilator

I don't think the premise of the elderly and vulnerable shielding is necessarily wrong. It seems bonkers that we should all be subjected to blanket restrictions (other than the CEV) when the virus clearly disproportionately impacts certain groups. There may be some limitations to whether all the vulnerable, old and elderly can effectively shield but that doesn't mean that at a population level we wouldn't see the levels of hospitalisations and deaths reducing if those that can shield did so.

If we could shield the majority of the over 60s and vulnerable then I wonder if the residual risk of the NHS being overwhelmed would reduce to a level where we could keep schools open etc. The fact that the idea is imperfect and there would be plenty of examples of people in this groups that couldn't shield doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile or wouldn't make a big enough difference to allow restrictions to lift slightly and enable benefits to the economy and society.

If there's a need to be vaccinated every year, then there'll inevitably be a period of time where people's protection is minimal - where the previous vaccination has worn off and the new one hasn't been administered yet. As with flu, there will be people all through the year who get ill, with cases spiking in the winter. The flu vaccination doesn't guarantee you'll never get flu and it's likely the covid vaccination with be the same (though that's not currently known for sure.)

My point was that the argument for shielding is that the rest of us will be fine if we get Covid. Evidently not if 25% hospital admissions are under 55s. That’s with the current restrictions. Open up society to those under 55s and that number will only increase, and the strain on the NHS and impact on other treatments and surgeries would continue.
We obviously have to continue to reduce the number of people with covid in society, until we have vaccinated sufficient portion of the population.
And if this is an annual bug then whenever numbers get high in society we will have to implement restrictions again to keep numbers under control albeit hopefully much less stringent.

Is there any data about what percentage of people are being admitted to hospitals purely due to Covid and those in hospital for another ailment that then test positive for Covid whilst there?

Those who test positive after being admitted for something else would not be included in the daily covid admissions figures that are available on the gov website and in the media.

@Lifeaintalwaysempty

My point was that the argument for shielding is that the rest of us will be fine if we get Covid. Evidently not if 25% hospital admissions are under 55s. That’s with the current restrictions. Open up society to those under 55s and that number will only increase, and the strain on the NHS and impact on other treatments and surgeries would continue. We obviously have to continue to reduce the number of people with covid in society, until we have vaccinated sufficient portion of the population. And if this is an annual bug then whenever numbers get high in society we will have to implement restrictions again to keep numbers under control albeit hopefully much less stringent.

The idea that we'll have to implement restrictions over and over and over forever is just plain lunacy. How long do you think a country can tolerate that sort of torture?

Covid is one illness of many illnesses that can kill you. Acting like it's the only thing in the world that matters solves absolutely nothing while creating masses of other problems. People really need to wake the fuck up.

@barbites

Is there any data about what percentage of people are being admitted to hospitals purely due to Covid and those in hospital for another ailment that then test positive for Covid whilst there?

This is what I want to know. They keep using the phrase died with covid rather than died from covid... it's ambiguous

@formerbabe yep, and within 28 days of a positive test...what's that about?!

[quote barbites]@formerbabe yep, and within 28 days of a positive test...what's that about?![/quote]
The parent of a friend died at the end of last year. He had a negative covid test but his death was put down as a covid death because he 'had signs of covid' (ie he had the pneumonia he got every single year due to the health issues that he'd had for many years). So it's not just people with a positive covid test, it's people without one too.

[quote barbites]@formerbabe yep, and within 28 days of a positive test...what's that about?![/quote]
Oh yes, that too. If you question this though apparently you're a crazy conspiracy theorist!

My point was that the argument for shielding is that the rest of us will be fine if we get Covid. Evidently not if 25% hospital admissions are under 55s. That’s with the current restrictions. Open up society to those under 55s and that number will only increase, and the strain on the NHS and impact on other treatments and surgeries would continue
But the whole reason we have restrictions is to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed. In a theoretical world where all the over 55s have been shielding then hospital admissions for covid would only be at 25% of current levels. Is this enough to threaten NHS capacity? If not, then there is an argument that actually restrictions could be loosened further to the point where the NHS being overwhelmed was a real possibility. This could potentially mean schools staying open, people seeing family, businesses being able to open etc, all very meaningful and valuable easements.

We aren't trying to eradicate covid and the fact that some younger people need medical assistance regarding covid doesn't mean that they are enough to overwhelm the NHS and therefore a reason to shutdown society.