If the vaccines do not work and lockdown isn't working

[RosieLemonade]

What happens now?
Will this actually be my child's life? Nothing but walks outside the house? I feel emotional but is this truly it now?

Also, lots of things didn’t make sense about locking down. Get everyone to stay at home as much as possible, but let people continue to fly into the UK, unchecked, so they can wonder straight from Heathrow onto a bus or train. What was the logic in that?
The pay a contractor, millions , to make a track and trace app that never really worked effectively. Another example of a big company profiting off of tax payers money!
Then, a year later almost, Boris gets tighter on air travel? Too little too late!
And why not have 24 hour vaccines? We could let every medical facility in then country, GP surgeries and pharmacies working day and night to get people through!
Boris has just blundered his way through this pandemic with incompetent ministers like Gavin Williams for example.
But I agree with another poster, when the true economic pain is felt through this lockdown, Boris will be long gone into the sunset....
Why in early 2020, didn’t we shut down our borders and support the airlines and travel companies financially, it could have potentially saved a lockdown and the need to furlough everyone else!

**I think you're being really dramatic and a bit scaremongering. Not sure if this is intentional or anxiety.

In terms of the economic situation, jobs are going. Many gone bust and some will just downsize , when they realise they need less staff.
Over the next five years ,it’s perfectly reasonable to assume a few million jobs will go once the true cost has filtered through to businesses.
A logistics company in my town has announced its closing in the summer, this is a big employer in my town. It’s distributes food and drink to restaurants and bars and hotels around the south of the UK.

@Plussizejumpsuit is speaking the reality truly scaremongering?

@Hearwego to be fair by the time any calls to close the borders came it was already too late, Covid was already here.

Let’s not forget China we’re very tight lipped about the severity of the virus and the extent of which it had spread. In hindsight we should have blocked every single flight from coming in to the country but that didn’t happen because it seemed utterly premature and over reactionary at the point when it actually needed to happen to make a difference.

The economic fall out was on the cards with the borders closed or us welcoming every Tom Dick and Harry in for 50% off food in the summer. Our destiny was plotted as soon as covid became a thing, Pandora’s box opened and here we are.

The outcome would have been the same with or without BoJo&Co or Jezza. It doesn’t take Mystic Meg to say the economic fallout will only get much worse either.

*The vaccines do seem to offer some protection but these lockdowns can't go on for much longer.

If it turns out they can' t fight the mutation I am afraid it will be time to get on with it and like the Spanish Flu, hope it will burn itself out. I don't think this country will stand lockdowns for very much longer no matter what.

I live in London and did my usual hour of exercise today and frankly I was truly surprised by how many people were out and about, some very obviously spending time with groups/people other than one household and mixing. This lockdown is not going to hold and certainly not once we get to the Spring and the weather improves. Ministers have 2 months at most to improve after that they will have lost people's good will and compliance*

The way things are going, and gone up to now, something else may come along to get people back indoors once more. I agree with you though, nice spring days, and people will disobey. Unless they become frightened by something once more.

@Toomuchtrouble4me

Heard immunity won’t work as you can get reinfected with this buggering virus.

You can get infected twice, but it’s pretty uncommon. Most people who have it, and those who are vaccinated, will not get any symptoms that would worry anyone, although it’s not yet clear how likely they are to pass it on.

Therefore the damage that the virus can do even if it is still circulating will eventually be very low, once enough people have been vaccinated/infected. That’s not quite the same thing as herd immunity, but it’s good enough to enable us to stop having lockdowns and social distancing.

We don’t know yet how long protection lasts. Variants will come which will make existing vaccines less effective (not totally ineffective). So the vaccines will be adjusted, and revaccination campaigns will be needed from time to time.

But it won’t be this bad for ever. Eventually we will reach a level of cases which allow the NHS to get back to treating everything else, a d the deaths will be at a level that society is prepared to tolerate. Businesses will open up again and the economy will recover.

It’s all well and good protecting the NHS but we need people to work, to pay tax so it can be funded.
The hospitality industry employs millions and pays billions to the economy. We need them back and open to pay for nurses and police officers.
I think people will tolerate this up until summer for example. But long term I really can’t see how a lockdown will be sustainable, economically. We will have more people not paying tax than people actually paying tax....

Be helpful if the government used the vaccines as set out in the manufacturer’s recommendations and not making up their own. (Some counties have reported higher incidence after one dose?!)
Also tests conducted in Israel do not directly reflect the reality of normal living conditions. There is also insufficient evidence to suggest they are or are not working at the moment, because the government have changed the timeframes I guess we will never know exactly how effective they are... unless they manage to capture data on deaths after first dose, second dose and timeframes etc.
I also have seen zero reports on issues of people dying or suffering adverse effects, Norway have lost 29 people to the Pfizer vaccine, we had two medical staff with adverse reactions and silence since.

Also deaths recorded are within 28 days of a positive test. So if you go into hospital for heart failure, stay alive for 7 days and test positive for COVID-19, then pass away.
Your recorded as a Covid death.
All these people going back to normal ‘in March because we can’t do it anymore’ are beyond me, I really cannot understand why you would jeopardise life to have a meet up, let alone the pressure that’s putting on the nhs with beds being taken by people getting bored of staying in. Ridiculous.

@Tiredwiththeshits

Also deaths recorded are within 28 days of a positive test. So if you go into hospital for heart failure, stay alive for 7 days and test positive for COVID-19, then pass away. Your recorded as a Covid death. All these people going back to normal ‘in March because we can’t do it anymore’ are beyond me, I really cannot understand why you would jeopardise life to have a meet up, let alone the pressure that’s putting on the nhs with beds being taken by people getting bored of staying in. Ridiculous.

This is how deaths are measured:

Pandemic death tolls have traditionally been assessed on how many excess deaths there were over and above the average of the previous 5 years.

We have 95,094. So far.

Deaths within 60 days of a positive covid test total 104,761

Yesterday a man finally went home from hospital 306 days after his positive test.

Some countries have fewer deaths overall than the five year average. We did too. every week of 2020 until March.

The ONS will issue its final report on 2020 deaths in July 2021.

I expect the covid death toll to be revised upwards.

U.K. deaths.

Given their timing, the grey area above the hard black line and shaded area in the first peak are very likely to be covid deaths in patients who were never tested.

I think this graphic shows quite clearly that the enormous death toll in this country is not a feature of how covid deaths are reported within 28 days of a positive test.

Covid deaths are significantly under reported, rather than over reported if anything.

But they may not work unless the second dose is given after 3 weeks not 6/8 weeks!

Really, ffs behave yourself

Thank you both for the graphs, I agree I’m not saying we are under reported more to the point that it is inaccurate.

@PuzzledObserver I have a theory on the reinfected numbers and I’m not sure if it’s been discussed before...

What if people are being reinfected when the didn’t realise they’d had it in the first place perhaps in the first wave or through the late spring summer. As many people say the symptoms can be very mild or you don’t have any at all. What if people are now starting to get a slightly worse infection a second time round which they believe is only their first?

But they do and it is.

The real problem here is 'we' (IE in scientific community) thought SARS-COV-2 would behave itself like most coronaviruses do: yes of course mutate, but ever so gradually & predictably. Unfortunately, this one's behaving like a bugger: 6 mutations in one jump including 2x on the spike protein & dropping 2x amino acids - is not good. We now have at least 3 variants that show the potential to evade neutralising antibodies - we still have T-cells & mB to - hopefully - still provide some efficacy from extant vaccines. What is worrying is this mutation velocity: math modelling ID'd mutations that gave Covid greatest RNA advantage & they're exactly the ones that have occurred - only prob is the predicted timeline est horizon was 3+ years min....Covid's made this leap in a few months. Real worry is that it could mutate faster that we can realistically amend & admin vaccines....then we're back to mitigation only!

@WitchWanderer.
Part the reason I have been telling people in rl for months, that I think the virus is here to stay. Well, for 3 years, and even then, not disappearing. That the world has to adapt to it. NHS has to act accordingly, expecting from Sept to Mar/April to deal with it in somewhat significant numbers.

As to lockdowns, I dont know. I dont think the mental health of this country collectively, can cope with much more. Nor the finances.

We have to hope that if you get covid naturally, your T cells do a better job of tending off newer variants than the vaccine does. I don’t think we know the answer to this yet.

Of course it’s not just think roaring 20s it was the relief after the 1923 somethings Great Depression.. there is always change and this will change back to normal (whatever that is) in time.

Melcombe Regis 1348.

@WitchWanderer

The real problem here is 'we' (IE in scientific community) thought SARS-COV-2 would behave itself like most coronaviruses do: yes of course mutate, but ever so gradually & predictably. Unfortunately, this one's behaving like a bugger: 6 mutations in one jump including 2x on the spike protein & dropping 2x amino acids - is not good. We now have at least 3 variants that show the potential to evade neutralising antibodies - we still have T-cells & mB to - hopefully - still provide some efficacy from extant vaccines. What is worrying is this mutation velocity: math modelling ID'd mutations that gave Covid greatest RNA advantage & they're exactly the ones that have occurred - only prob is the predicted timeline est horizon was 3+ years min....Covid's made this leap in a few months. Real worry is that it could mutate faster that we can realistically amend & admin vaccines....then we're back to mitigation only!

It is concerning

[quote lightand]@WitchWanderer.
Part the reason I have been telling people in rl for months, that I think the virus is here to stay. Well, for 3 years, and even then, not disappearing. That the world has to adapt to it. NHS has to act accordingly, expecting from Sept to Mar/April to deal with it in somewhat significant numbers.

As to lockdowns, I dont know. I dont think the mental health of this country collectively, can cope with much more. Nor the finances.[/quote]
Me either. It’d be very hard to do this again, I don’t think I could

[quote Thewiseoneincognito]@PuzzledObserver I have a theory on the reinfected numbers and I’m not sure if it’s been discussed before...

What if people are being reinfected when the didn’t realise they’d had it in the first place perhaps in the first wave or through the late spring summer. As many people say the symptoms can be very mild or you don’t have any at all. What if people are now starting to get a slightly worse infection a second time round which they believe is only their first?[/quote]
Only more data will answer the question of whether that is happening.

I prefer to look at results from the SIREN study looking at reinfections among NHS staff with a proven first infection. The low number of reinfections which did occur were either mild or asymptomatic. There were over 1,000 infected in the first wave, and some tens in the second.

Again, that study does not definitely prove that “worse second time round” infections can’t occur. It does suggest that are vanishingly rare.

All this, of course, is up for reassessment as time passes and more data emerges. New variants may change the odds. But, for now, we are vaccinating people at a after rate than new infections, and that means that things will get better.

Real worry is that it could mutate faster that we can realistically amend & admin vaccines....then we're back to mitigation only!

Quite, which is why the numbers of transmissions need to be reduced and quickly.

The major worry longer term is that the vaccines might drive down symptomatic disease caused by the known variants (good!) but still permit high transmission, thus accelerating mutations, some of which will escape the vaccine. However, contrary to some claims, the effectiveness of the vaccines in reducing infections and transmissions is not yet known. We’ll have to wait to see the real world data over the next few months.

It seems that some scientists (and posters on here) want an elimination strategy to be pursued. Can anyone explain how this can possibly work when - 30, 50, 80 per cent or whatever the figure is- of cases are asymptomatic? It's pretty clear that lockdowns only work while they are being imposed (otherwise why are we into the third) and how can test and trace realistically have a hope when there are so many asymptomatic cases?