Let's face it, they're letting it rip.

[ZednotZee]

Aren't they?

The vaccines aren't seemingly preventing transmission.

We are opening up on the 19th.

This is being done presumably as the public appetite for further lockdowns will be nil come October/November so best to get it over with now and have heard immunity come the autumn.

They won't say it but its becoming very clear that the immunocompromised need to continue to shield til the rest of us have contracted and got over the infection.

@TheKeatingFive

Very true. Because the average person hasn’t had the opportunity to mix with others, even things like D&V, flu will likely be more severe this winter because of the lack of exposure to otherwise normal viruses.

They already know this will be a huge problem. Basically flu strategy is fucked for next year as a direct result of lockdowns last winter (very low immunity, harder to guess the variants for vaccine purposes).

So it really is damned if you don't lockdown and damned if you do.

From a health pov, never mind the social, psychological, economic fallout.

Exactly!

Then it would have made sense to invest in better ventilation strategies and more handbasins in schools - not just for covid but for flu.

I’m CEV, vaccinated early on - both jabs. Still caught Covid, still very nasty. I do think they’re working the way they should, reducing very severe disease and hospitalisation, but I don’t think there was ever a claim that they would stop transmission. I’m going to carry on as I have been throughout the pandemic, doing everything I can to protect myself and my family, because I simply don’t trust the information we’re being fed. We have to try to get back to some kind of normal at some point, and I don’t think there will ever be a ‘right time’, so now is as good a time as any I suppose. It just feels odd, after all the rules and regulations that were in place, to be told basically that now it’s down to personal responsibility to keep safe.

It is always our responsibility though to keep ourselves "safe" bearing in mind that nothing is really safe. We are all adults. We cannot expect (nor want) the state to nanny us surely. We are all capable of weighing up the facts and acting accordingly.

@loulouljh. I agree, although I think most of us know people who have behaved, shall we say, less than responsibly, throughout the pandemic, with little regard for their own and others’ safety. No amount of rules and regulations appear to keep these people in check, so what’s the point of continuing lockdowns when most of us know what the responsible thing is and are prepared to do it. As I said in my post, it just feels odd to be suddenly told ‘it’s up to you now’. At the moment cases are rising at a faster rate than when we were all under strict prohibitions, vaccines don’t seem to be containing the actual spread, so what’s different ?

Because pam290358 the vulnerable are protected now I guess. We just have to move on.

I would be ok with their plan if they were doing three things:

1. Continuing to require face masks (and other hygiene measures) in essential service premises. By all means open the nightclubs and stadia for maskless people, especially if they are vaccinated. But people who can't be vaccinated need to be able to go to the grocery store, the post office or the job centre without risking their health.

2. Vaccinate all the 12-17 year olds immediately. The virus will continue to circulate in schools and colleges until they vaccinate them, and the more it circulates the more chance there is of a vaccine-resistant mutation. When that happens, people will start dying in great numbers again, and we will have to start the whole vaccination rollout over from the beginning. Just because we dragged our feet abotu vaccinating 12-17 year olds.

3. Allowing young people to choose a shorter interval between doses, so 18-29 year olds can get their second doses after three weeks instead of eight. It's not fair on them to make them second class citizens by opening things up to fully vaccinated people without allowing them to get their second doses.

Localocal

And we have an endless supply of vaccines...........

@musicalfrog you do realise that not every CEV person has the same medical issue??? You can't just put them all in the same boat. Maybe they aren't as vulnerable to flu and other illnesses as they are to covid. There are many different diseases which make people CEV. Also those other diseases weren't ripping through society like Covid is.

Which illnesses, specifically, makes you cev and particularly vulnerable to covid but not any of the other usual circulating illnesses?

@FourTeaFallOut

Which illnesses, specifically, makes you cev and particularly vulnerable to covid but not any of the other usual circulating illnesses?

Cancer. Someone with a history of a solid malignant tumour (but with no active disease and not undergoing active treatment) has around a 9.7% (off the top of my head, I'm not going to dig out the study to doublecheck the figures) chance of dying from Covid, and is also far more likely to have an inadequate response to vaccines. I've never heard of people in that position being told they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from the common cold, so I think it's safe to say that that is not the case.

But people who have cancer or who have had cancer are among the most vulnerable in the population to complications from flu.

I don't have statistics on it and if I am wrong I'm not too proud to change my point of view. But as I'm aware those who have had cancer are in the same boat as the rest of the cev in as much as they have a greater risk of infection and need to operate differently/ accept a greater level of risk when it is prevalent, sorry, when they are ripping through.

On one hand I think its too soon to drop all restrictions.

On the other hand I think when would it not be too soon.
There will never be a time when its 100% safe to lift restrictions.
I dont have the answer I dont think anyone does.
All I know is I dont want to live the rest of my life behind a mask.

@FourTeaFallOut

But people who have cancer or who have had cancer are among the most vulnerable in the population to complications from flu.

I don't have statistics on it and if I am wrong I'm not too proud to change my point of view. But as I'm aware those who have had cancer are in the same boat as the rest of the cev in as much as they have a greater risk of infection and need to operate differently/ accept a greater level of risk when it is prevalent, sorry, when they are ripping through.

But they aren't vulnerable to the flu to the extent that 1 in 10 of them die of the flu.

There was a point last winter when 1 in 30 people in London were infected with a highly contagious virus. Risking a 10% chance of dying for every 30th person you meet is scary stuff, and a completely different scale of risk to being more likely to suffer from complications from the flu.

That’s not true about people with a history of cancer, well solid malignancies anyway. It’s blood cancers that make you more vulnerable.

I’ve had breast cancer and I definitely don’t have a 10% chance of dying of Covid. I’m also no more susceptible to flu than the rest of the population.

"Prevention and treatment of pandemic influenza in cancer patients - Annals of Oncology" www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)39263-4/fulltext

Patients with cancer, whether receiving chemotherapy or not, are considered to be at a higher risk for influenza infection and its complications such as bacterial coinfection, with more protracted viral replication and shedding, higher progression to lower airway disease, more frequent need for mechanical ventilation and death compared with healthy persons [5.]. Prior retrospective series have shown that seasonal influenza among cancer patients is associated with a frequency of pneumonia of 21%–80% and a case fatality rate from 4% up to 33% [6., 7., 8.]. A large study regarding >64 000 hospitalized cancer patients between 1998 and 2001 showed that flu-related deaths occurred in about 9% of patients. People with lung carcinoma or hematological malignancies tended to have a more severe course and higher case fatality rate of 9% and 12%, respectively [9.].

That's cut from the article above...not trying to pass that off as my own

@notsofussy I think you’ve summed up how most feel to be honest. For me personally I’d have liked to see all the numbers level off a bit before everything changing. There’s some reassurance in knowing what level we actually can maintain in our current state, the pessimist in me would feel much better knowing that it wouldn’t necessarily require drastic measures to get back the point we’re at iyswim.

@Delatron

That’s not true about people with a history of cancer, well solid malignancies anyway. It’s blood cancers that make you more vulnerable.

I’ve had breast cancer and I definitely don’t have a 10% chance of dying of Covid. I’m also no more susceptible to flu than the rest of the population.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7259917/

Table 4. "The case-fatality rate in patients with haematological malignancies was 41% (nine of 22 patients) and that in solid tumours was 17% (31 of 183 patients; HR 3·28 [95% CI 1·56–6·91]"

@FourTeaFallOut

Patients with cancer, whether receiving chemotherapy or not, are considered to be at a higher risk for influenza infection and its complications such as bacterial coinfection, with more protracted viral replication and shedding, higher progression to lower airway disease, more frequent need for mechanical ventilation and death compared with healthy persons [5.]. Prior retrospective series have shown that seasonal influenza among cancer patients is associated with a frequency of pneumonia of 21%–80% and a case fatality rate from 4% up to 33% [6., 7., 8.]. A large study regarding >64 000 hospitalized cancer patients between 1998 and 2001 showed that flu-related deaths occurred in about 9% of patients. People with lung carcinoma or hematological malignancies tended to have a more severe course and higher case fatality rate of 9% and 12%, respectively [9.].

You need to take into account the likelihood of getting it too. I've had decades of non-social distancing and have never had the flu. I actually can't think of anyone I know who has had the flu.

Really? I've had it twice. Once following a flu jab and once prior to the jab. I'm a severe asthmatic and hospitalised both times.

As for the likelihood of getting the flu, then at the height of flu season then it is rife. Obviously not last year but it is regularly the reason why the NHS is on knees in January.

Just to make the point that there are varying degrees of flu too, you could be completely asymptomatic or just have a sniffle, it’s completely down to your immune system and it’s history of similar viruses.

It’s a myth that flu is guaranteed to knock you off your feet - the litmus test of getting up to get £20 from the garden is bs, it might be a good judge of when you need to be aware of keeping an eye out of worsening symptoms that need a HCP to review.

@AnAnxiousSeagull that’s with cancer currently not people who have had cancer in the past. And the article you linked shows that blood cancers are more at risk from Covid than solid tumours.