Government urging caution…

[Moonme]

Anyone else feel like we are back to early March 2020. They are opening night clubs but then telling us to be cautious and not be reckless?! How do we square that circle? What is reckless behaviour? Coffee in doors? Going to a bar? Sitting in a cinema?
Finding it increasingly hard to know what we should be doing.
Government once again have totally lost control of the public health messaging.

@MarshaBradyo

I thought Israel did see a rise and re-introduced masks?

Do they have herd immunity or just slowed rise, as you can still pass virus, even though is reduced

If people who are double vaccinated are in hospital : deaths they’d happen

Israel were doing fine til delta turned up. The combination of increased transmissibility and reduced vaccine efficacy has resulted in insufficient population immunity to prevent cases rising.

Hi @MarshaBradyo

Sorry - that comment wasn't aimed at you! More a sense of some casting caution to the wind and saying sod it if people get poorly or long term sick. Being one of those myself it is a view I find quite hard to stomach.

If you look at where we were a year ago with severe cases and the things our medical staff can do now - the work on vaccines and treatment has had a huge impact on outcome of cases. That's what I meant by if you slow rates of transmission down it allows science to play catch up with new strategies and knowledge. Keeping time on our side is good. Obviously we have to weigh up harms of various kinds - mental health, education and so on.

In terms of unlocking - keeping masks and social distancing would be a good start. I don't know the data on mass events but presumably scientists have an idea of what kind of behaviours or venues are fuelling the rise in numbers. Government messaging was very off (Boris is correcting course slightly on that this week I see).

Also - better thoughts and plan on controlling transmission in school settings come Sept. I know bubbles cause a lot of disruption but to do away with them and replace them with - what? asking parents to test? but not requiring them to?

Just feels like a good ol' recipe for disaster to me.

I don't want to get too polarised - I like a good discussion and I will listen to other people and what they have to say. That's why I love Mumsnet - plenty of ideas. Sometimes that does make you more informed or even change your mind. Always a good thing!

I've had it. I manage care homes. I've got as many staff off isolating As I had in January. As then there are no possible contingencies for this and it will only get worse. I'm done.

So sorry to hear that @theworldsbiggestcrocodile.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

And Israel didn’t have the exit wave that Boris Johnson et al say is inevitable

Exit waves are not a thing. It’s just not controlling the infection rate any more. If you have herd immunity, you don’t get an ‘exit wave’.

Precisely.

Anyone else feel like we are back to early March 2020

No, and I wish people would stop saying this. It's utterly ridiculous and now is nothing like then.

It’s like that in that it is uncharted territory.

Anyone else feel like we are back to early March 2020

I do, yeah.

The government giving every impression that it's inevitable that thousands of British people will now to hospital and/or die.

The NHS sounding the alarm and being ignored.

Scientists sounding the alarm and being ignored.

The world looking on aghast at a government not even trying to protect its own people.

And all the while the numbers are rising...

Some of us can see what's happening pretty clearly.

And some of us think things are going to be back to normal soon when it burns itself out and becomes like flu.

A sprinkling of utter weapons who think behaving completely normally is the way to go. Kind of "ignore it and it'll go away." Because that famously works with pandemics.

Definite March 2020 vibes.

Even the Warwick modelling seems to be sounding the alarm.

I missed the press briefing yesterday so really only going on headlines and social media. Hadn’t quite realised the model was predicting a 3rd wave over the summer and a 4th over the winter in some scenarios. If that was mentioned in the briefing it doesn’t seem to have come across elsewhere.

This isn’t an ‘exit wave’ they are talking about now, it’s the next in a series of waves over the next 2 years if we keep following the policy we’re following now. And that’s among some of the best case scenarios.

@RafaIsTheKingOfClay

Even the Warwick modelling seems to be sounding the alarm.

I missed the press briefing yesterday so really only going on headlines and social media. Hadn’t quite realised the model was predicting a 3rd wave over the summer and a 4th over the winter in some scenarios. If that was mentioned in the briefing it doesn’t seem to have come across elsewhere.

This isn’t an ‘exit wave’ they are talking about now, it’s the next in a series of waves over the next 2 years if we keep following the policy we’re following now. And that’s among some of the best case scenarios.

Isn’t the Warwick modelling usually out?

The last I saw this, it’s June but shows a discrepancy

Have they updated something?

Yeah, it's just wave number 3 or 4 depending on how you count them.

Lots more waves to come.

@PrincessNutNuts

Yeah, it's just wave number 3 or 4 depending on how you count them.

Lots more waves to come.

We have had the pleasure of seeing Boris in the sea with the waves. He seemed to like waves in the sea, do we think he also likes these covid waves?

Anyone else feel like we are back to early March 2020

Do you mean aside from the millions who have been vaccinated?

There's always loads of made up stats on threads like these, can anyone link the 'fact' that 7% of children who get covid will suffer from long covid? Anyone?

@Noterook I was referencing the Government actions, response and communication strategy.
See @PrincessNutNuts response above for all the reasons why

@Noterook

There's always loads of made up stats on threads like these, can anyone link the 'fact' that 7% of children who get covid will suffer from long covid? Anyone?

I think the zoe app was reporting 1.9% long covid in young people and 4.5% in the middle aged.

Still a substantial number though if all children are expected to get naturally infected at some point rather than vaccinated.

@Noterook

There's always loads of made up stats on threads like these, can anyone link the 'fact' that 7% of children who get covid will suffer from long covid? Anyone?

I think it depends on how you define long covid, and also the figures have varied between different studies.

From this MIT Technology review:www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/13/1028419/heres-what-we-know-about-kids-and-long-covid/

How common is long covid in kids?
That’s the problem—we just don’t know. “There's just a dearth of good, peer-reviewed published medical literature on this topic,” says Alicia Johnston, an infectious disease specialist and head of the new post-covid clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital. And the handful of studies that do exist report wildly different rates.

For example, researchers in Italy surveyed caregivers of 109 kids who had been infected and found that 42% of the children had at least one symptom two months after their diagnosis. Four months out, the number dropped to 27%.

But data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics suggest that just 10-13% of kids who test positive for covid have symptoms more for than five weeks. And 7-8% have symptoms beyond 12 weeks. That matches an Australian study, which examined 151 young children with covid and found that 8% still reported symptoms three to six months after infection. All of the kids have since recovered.

One non-peer reviewed study tracked symptoms among more than 1,700 school-age children in the UK who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Of those, 4.4% had symptoms that lasted more than a month. And only 1.8% had symptoms that persisted longer than two months.

Another preprint paper from Switzerland compared long covid symptoms in two groups of kids between the ages of 6 and 16: those who had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and those who didn’t (and presumably had not been infected). The percentage of covid-positive children reporting at least one symptom ranged from 9% at four weeks to 4% at twelve weeks. But surprisingly, the researchers found similar rates of symptoms among those who tested negative for antibodies.

@Noterook

There's always loads of made up stats on threads like these, can anyone link the 'fact' that 7% of children who get covid will suffer from long covid? Anyone?

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1april2021

You might have to dig about in the data table to find it and don’t confuse prevalence with the % of children who had covid and have ongoing symptoms.

For the poster who said 7% was an unfounded statistic for children with Long Covid -

Let's start with stats for Long Covid worldwide (As PP said, researchers use different metrics but a common one seems to be either 1 or 2 or more symptoms, lasting 3+ months after infection).

Studies have shown Long Covid rates at around 10% (of global population who have been infected by Covid). Research on UK population backs up this figure.

Skip to 40.51 to hear professor Danny Altman, an Immunologist at Imperial, talking about Long Covid.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000xsv7

A previous contributor to the programme said there are now 1 million cases in the UK.

Research on the Long Covid Kids Web page for articles specifically on children and rates. As one researcher points out, data on children is harder to gather. Stats I have seen in various research articles seem to vary from 4% in younger children ( 2 to 11 year olds) and higher for children in the upper age group (12 to 16) with rates of between 7 and 9% at 12 weeks after infection.

That's a conservative figure - I have seen 12 to 14% quoted by ONS. See link below -

Here's a nice graph based on around 9000 UK respondents which shows a graph by age (page 2)

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/962830/s1079-ons-update-on-long-covid-prevalence-estimate.pdf

Here are just two of a of a number of articles -

'Another study by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that 10% of children between 2 and 11 years and 12 and 16 years, respectively, had persistent symptoms at five weeks. At 12 weeks, 7-8% still had symptoms.'

www.news-medical.net/news/20210624/Long-COVID-has-low-prevalence-in-school-age-children-UK-study-suggests.aspx

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

I work in the academic field - with all due respect I am not pulling stats out of my rear end!

A big research grant has just been awarded (1.4 million) to Great Ormond Street to research this in children.

Stats on children do vary somewhat, so if we take the middle ground and go with a conservative figure of 7% - given the numbers of cases, it will still impact a substantial number of families. More girls than boys it seems from a couple of studies.

So girls of 11 to 16 seem somewhat more at risk of developing LC according to studies so far. I'm not wildly surprised at this - a lot more women get CFS than men. It is suggested (not yet proven) that this is to do with differences in immune responses.

The NHS lead on LC (Dr David Strain of Exeter University) said in his Horizon appearance that even if you get mild Covid - rest for longer than you think you need to. Rushing back to work (or school I would say) before full recovery (he said rest for 2, 3 or even 4 weeks) could leave you more at risk of Long Covid. This was based on his observations of potential causes.

www.gov.uk/government/news/185-million-to-tackle-long-covid-through-research

Yes - it is still poorly understood in both adults and children - but there is no doubt it is occurring and numbers likely to go up based on general infections going up.

@herecomesthsun it is heartening to read that all the children in the Australian study recovered.

There are cases where it goes on (some adults and children have had it for a year + now) BUT if it follows anything like the pattern of CFS which shows some similarities (impaired mitochondrial function possible cause for both as Dr Stainer says) then there is cause for hope.

CFS in children and young people does seem to have substantially better recovery rates than both adult males and women of childbearing age with slow onset CFS.

A little silver lining.