Vaccination alone is not the way out of this

[nonono1]

I’m watching a politician on Question Time tonight who has just said that vaccination is not the sole way out of this nightmare pandemic situation. I think she then went on to say something about the importance of the test and trace system being up to scratch in addition to the vaccines. But I wasn’t really listening at that point to be honest, as I was so surprised by what she’d said about the vaccines.

What I don’t understand is, how are vaccines not the sole way out of this? Surely when the vast majority of the population have been double jabbed, it will be over?!

@ElizabethTudor

^ obviously it’s not excellent - I’m being sarcastic. It’s clearly v shit. 😳

It really is.

‘Test and trace’ isn’t (just) the app, it’s the whole testing and contact tracing system.

@Puppysharness

Does anyone know how we are supposed to have a ‘robust test and trace’ system when nobody wants to use the app?

The app is a joke. Tells people to isolate due to a positive contact through a brick wall.. neighbour tested positive. I know a chap who got pinged all the time because his flat has a bus stop outside. He ended up deleting it. Ultimately, it means you end up isolating because your phone (not necessarily yourself) was close to another phone (again, not necessarily a person) for the time needed to trigger an alert. There is a reason why a lot of people with the app are told to disable it when they are at work.

Also, the app wont work on older smartphones. Not everyone can keep up with current tech.

I see what you're saying Olly
And it's definitely an airborne disease.

I just think too many people (not you) don't understand it's a vascular disease.

That's interesting Princess
We should look at what Senegal are doing.

@Tealightsandd

definitely

The issue here was it's just such a classic "spreader of misinformation" you see on SM tactic - swerve onto a new topic if a posters notices and tries to engage

Sorry Olly
I didn't mean to get involved.

@Tealightsandd

Sorry Olly I didn't mean to get involved.

ahh no not at all, this is a really interesting thread and i have no idea how it even got onto ivermectin

She’s right. Vaccinations will only help us out of this as long as it doesn’t mutate to evade said vaccines. If this happens we are back to square one fairly quickly. Be under no illusions, once everyone has been vaccinated we will still be at risk of outbreaks and variants.

We will need robust contact tracing, a continuation of social distancing and face masks particularly in busy high traffic areas.

We must increase investment into the NHS to cope with the additional demand of long covid and a continuous stream of moderate to severe cases. The NHS is our Achilles heel for lockdowns, this needs to be addressed.

We have to be efficient in responding and restricting travel to countries with excessive infection rates.

A support package for anyone who needs to self isolate should be easily accessible to all that guarantees your pay regardless of role.

Living with Covid is not a return to ‘life pre 2020 with booster jabs’, it’s about being proactive and minimising your personal risk of contracting and transmitting the virus.

If cases remain high the threat of long covid and further mutations becomes far greater even in a fully vaccinated population.

@nonono1

Until the majority is vaccinated (80-90%), other precautions might be needed. Masks, good test and trace, border control.

Well we’ve already vaccinated over 80% with a first dose, but obviously there’s a way to go with the second. But hopefully the end is in sight?

And there is your problem. This first generation vaccines need the 2 jabs to be 70-80 effective to stop transmission. At the moment the UK is just under the 50% for fully vaccinated people. Still a long way to go to prevent transmission in any meaningful way.

The new generation vaccines which will come next year will prevent 100% transmission. Until then, we can't rely on vaccines alone, but vaccination is the only way out of this pandemic

Once most protected it doesn't really matter if we dont hit vaccination target

flu vaccine uptake is only 60% - can be as low as 40% in kids. Not all year groups currently are offered it - mine are years 10/8 and have never been offered a flu jab yet we are not locking down for flu. If the 50-60% of at risk people have herd immunity then the rest - like flu- wont impact as much

Its been made clear cases don't matter - we are not trying to eradicate it. If there were 20-30 deaths a day moving forward, that still averages an annual flu amount of deaths

i mean if the 50% of those who have vaccine immunity make up almost 80% of those who are likely to suffer severe disease

We are probably above this already with groups 1-9 having had time to have had their second doses

@CindyRella18

I posted this in another thread earlier but Ivermectin likely could get us out of this mess. I was reading this docilebritain.com/2021/06/24/the-science-of-ivermectin-and-its-fight-against-covid-19/

It cites The American Journal of Therapeutics, medRxiv owned by Yale University and another.

Ivermectin has been added to the big Oxford university trial of home preventative drugs recently ( I can't remember what it's called) . I really think that will provide definitive proof one way or another as it is a big randomised trial

The big medical trials we have in this country have been really well designed and are very flexible. They have been a fantastic worldwide resource in this pandemic

This is it

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investigated-possible-treatment-covid-19-oxford-s-principle-trial

@Puppysharness in Melbourne they track people using their equivalent of oyster cards and loyalty card usage in shops. I'm not saying that is the route we should go down but there are things they can do
...

[quote Kingstonmumof1]@Puppysharness in Melbourne they track people using their equivalent of oyster cards and loyalty card usage in shops. I'm not saying that is the route we should go down but there are things they can do
...[/quote]
That’s interesting but people will still need to consent to be traced. Given the lack of trust people have in the system and those in charge, I doubt there would be very high uptake.

It depends on the people who are dying. Whether it's specific underlying conditions /extremely frail. Basically how well is the vax doing for the average elderly person. Also which vax they had.
Or did they have the vax in jan and it was worn off.

You can be one of the richest countries in the world with the earliest access to amazing vaccines but if your test trace and isolate system is shit the covid chaos continues.

Covid isn't moving in the direction of a seasonal disease that kills several thousand of the old and frail every winter and we're reasonably ok with that.

I don't think it's ever going to be that.

It's about to put our health system under some serious pressure in July.

It's become more transmissible a couple of times and developed ability to get round immunity a couple of times. The chances are it will do those things again, only better.

Countries that have battled high consequence infectious diseases before have learned and adapted and handled covid better than the U.K. (usually with a lot less resources)

We need to be like them.

And stop telling ourselves comforting lies about how it's about to become "like flu".

Maybe it will.

But who knows when?

Not this year, and probably not next.

How many years are we going to try to do this without the basics of infectious disease control? Test, trace and isolate.

Senegal:

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/22397842/senegal-covid-19-pandemic-playbook

@Watapalava

Once most protected it doesn't really matter if we dont hit vaccination target

flu vaccine uptake is only 60% - can be as low as 40% in kids. Not all year groups currently are offered it - mine are years 10/8 and have never been offered a flu jab yet we are not locking down for flu. If the 50-60% of at risk people have herd immunity then the rest - like flu- wont impact as much

Its been made clear cases don't matter - we are not trying to eradicate it. If there were 20-30 deaths a day moving forward, that still averages an annual flu amount of deaths

I disagree, the high number of cases translates to more people possibly suffering with long covid or complications as a result of having Covid despite vaccination, so it is wrong the assume cases simply don’t matter because they absolutely do.

You mention ‘protected’ but these vaccines are not 100% effective, thousands are still susceptible to Covid, they just don’t know until they catch it how protected they will be. When you factor in the potential risk of mutations and higher risk for vaccine failure for the CEV or elderly groups, high levels of virus in the population is Not good.

That’s why comparing the outlook to a Flu scenario is naive, because it fails to take into account how contagious Covid is regardless of vaccines and the potential problems for those whom the vaccines do not work. Flu is also seasonal so we are able to prepare accordingly knowing when roughly the virus starts spreading, so far Covid isn’t necessarily seasonal so the beginning of a wave is more difficult to predict because it’s all down to how the variants behave as and when they appear.

@Watapalava

Once most protected it doesn't really matter if we dont hit vaccination target

flu vaccine uptake is only 60% - can be as low as 40% in kids. Not all year groups currently are offered it - mine are years 10/8 and have never been offered a flu jab yet we are not locking down for flu. If the 50-60% of at risk people have herd immunity then the rest - like flu- wont impact as much

Its been made clear cases don't matter - we are not trying to eradicate it. If there were 20-30 deaths a day moving forward, that still averages an annual flu amount of deaths

the problem is 'flu behaves very differently to COVID though

and unfortunately the number of cases a day do matter - there's the high load of long term complications and long COVID even if initial illness is mild

@TheKeatingFive

Well it all depends on what you think the strategy should be.

Double jabs aren’t enough to achieve zero Covid and/or zero Covid deaths.

We probably knew that though.

Much like flu then, where we have a somewhat effective but not perfect vaccine, and some people catch it and die.

We have a covid vaccine, once everyone has been offered their first dose we should open up, keeping some precautions such as masks in crowded indoor spaces (like commuter trains).

And no I am not naive about flu, but originally we were going to open once the vulnerable had been vaccinated, then once the over 50s had been done, and now it's how long is a piece of string.

I don't really care whether night clubs can reopen or not, but getting increasingly fed up with the fact parkrun can't restart for another month in England (though it restarts in Northern Ireland tomorrow). Outdoor events need to be cut some slack at least.

One big reason that flu doesn’t infect as many people as covid is because most people have some resistance to circulating flu strains. Partly from vaccines, mostly from previous infection.

When we get a new flu strain where that level of resistance isn’t in place, it’s pandemic flu and it spreads much more rapidly, either causing horrendous damage (1918) or being less dangerous than we first feared (2009).

So saying ‘but covid isn’t like flu’ isn’t that helpful. Covid in early 2020 behaved like a particularly infectious new pandemic flu would. Covid in a population with a high degree of immunity will behave a lot more like seasonal flu - it’ll be around, it’ll cause some damage, but it won’t cause waves of mass deaths/healthcare system collapse/whole societies shutting down to contain it the way it has previously.

That’s what vaccines let us do. And that’s why it’s really important to roll them out fast as possible, and not undermine vaccine take-up with this “but vaccines won’t give us our lives back, sadly sadly I’m afraid people need to accept sadly” bollocks.

@CindyRella18

ivmmeta.com/

More in depth data. It worked for Mexico and India. Spain deployed vitamin D to assist. We really need open and transparent discussions.

What you mean is, we need to disregard all the studies that don't agree with me, and listen more carefully to people who actually know fuck all about medicine.