How low is low enough

[RosieLemonade]

For things to open up a bit more? I wouldn't even be able to guess a ball park figure. 10,000 or 5,000 or 1,000? Less than that?

@faerin

The whole reason for lockdown in the first place is due to the NHS being overwhelmed, not numbers of cases. The second the NHS can cope with the number of people in hospitals, we should lift lockdown.

Absolutely! However it seems the agenda has been changed?

🤓

@faerin

The whole reason for lockdown in the first place is due to the NHS being overwhelmed, not numbers of cases. The second the NHS can cope with the number of people in hospitals, we should lift lockdown.

That's what we did at the end of November. It didn't work out brilliantly. I'd rather we didn't enter lockdown 4 before Easter, if I'm honest with you. It would be quite nice if number 3 was the last one.

Winter is always worse for respiratory illnesses. I don’t think we’ll need another lockdown in spring.

Over the summer, the number of cases was consistently below 1,000 virtually every day for almost six weeks. However, now we are rolling out the vaccines, as others have said those most vulnerable are protected from severe illness.

You might think we could therefore tolerate higher numbers. But that negates the risk of new variants. Every time the virus replicates, there is the chance of a mutation which may lead to a significant difference in how it behaves. Therefore we still need to keep the number of cases low, even if hospitalisations and deaths become very low. That's how we will keep the lid on new mutations arising.

That's not the same as saying lockdown will last for ever - it won't.

The whole reason for lockdown in the first place is due to the NHS being overwhelmed, not numbers of cases. The second the NHS can cope with the number of people in hospitals, we should lift lockdown

I think there needs to be a sort of buffer zone or more capacity rather than lifting lockdown straight away. Otherwise the nhs will just be swamped again in 2 weeks.

I HATE tiers. We lived in a low one. People piling in from everywhere else just pushed the numbers up. When we were moved into a higher tier, DH had to discipline someone at work for travelling to a lower tier to get drunk.

The idiot put it all over social media and staff were really pissed off and wouldn’t come to work until he was sent home.

Everyone should be equal.

@TheNinjaWife yes the 'agenda' has changed due to the new variants and we now need to be concerned about high case numbers. I remember it was all about 'breaking the link between high case numbers equalling hospitalisation' but now even the government seem concerned about cases.

Tiers are a bit rubbish. I have only ever been in T2 and T4 and you can't do hardly anything in T2 anyway.

But if the new variants aren’t actually causing an increase in hospitalisations then why worry about them? This is where having too much information almost seems like a bad thing. If we weren’t doing genomic analysis would we even know there were so many different strains and would we be worrying about them? If they weren’t making more people seriously ill then no, we wouldn’t.

Should be percentage of cases against number of hospitalisations.

Hopefully the vaccine will reduce the number of people requiring hospital treatment so should start to fall sharply once enough of the vulnerable people are done.

I don’t believe tiers are a good idea though. We were tier 2 surrounded by tier 4 before Christmas so we had a massive influx of people having Christmas nights out, Christmas shopping.

@bumbleymummy

But if the new variants aren’t actually causing an increase in hospitalisations then why worry about them? This is where having too much information almost seems like a bad thing. If we weren’t doing genomic analysis would we even know there were so many different strains and would we be worrying about them? If they weren’t making more people seriously ill then no, we wouldn’t.

Plus variants can also mean that the risk of serious cases declines. It's not desirable for a virus to evolve to be too efficient at making people seriously ill as they don't spread it. The more people feeling mildly ill and functional as we do with a cold, the better for the virus. Other comparable pandemics fizzled out because of favourable mutstions/ varients. It's not automatically a bad thing for mutations to occur.

@BogRollBOGOF Yep. But people just seem to love focusing on the negative possibilities 🙄

What level were we at when we started to come out of lock down first time? Bearing in mind there's concerns over the variants, I'm thinking it's going to be a similar level to that or lower.

Spanish flu died out because it became so deadly that people died before they could pass it on.

Not all virus mutate to less aggressive strains.

I think hospital admissions should be deciding factor