Will this level of cases now just be acceptable?

[Tuba437]

Just having a think to myself. We're now at around 30k cases a day in general. The 7 day average daily deaths is about 89 (this was for around 45-50k cases a day). We can assume that I a month or so deaths will be at around 60 a day.

Over a year that works out at about 21k worth of deaths. Will this just be the acceptable number. We know the vaccine doesn't stop the spread so I highly doubt were ever just going to get down to sub 5k cases a day again.

21k is considered a very mild flu death rate for the year. We have a new virus around now so more deaths a year are going to be a thing whether we like it or not.

I also think red list countries should only be for countries with worrying variants. If I don't have to isolate if my wife tests positive (just daily testing) then why on earth would I have to spend 1500 on a government hotel to quarantine as I've been to a country with a lower covid rate than us?

Sorry about the rant.

You also say more evidence is needed on long covid, but then surely more evidence is required for a very new drug? The vaccine (I'm talking about children here). You cannot have it both ways.

I'm very respectful to the intelligent people on here who have been writing reports and collating data etc. Unfortunately I just speak of what I see and hear. My main priority is to protect all the children from any more harm.

@Peteycat

My reasons for disliking masks are none of your business. In fact, to be quite honest I have massive valid reasons but I'm not going to discuss that with strangers. They are no good psychologicaly for children for a start.

Visually impaired people struggle with reading people's faces in them. Visually impaired people struggle with two meters distance, they can't see you.

Deaf people cannot read your lips.

People with dementia or learning disabilities may be scared.

Even dogs are terrified. I have experience of this should you wish me to elaborate.

Was talking to a lady the other day who experienced an armed robbery attack at work. Masks give her flashbacks.

Yes you may ask me to wear a mask, to which my answer will be a strong no.

People put them in their pockets after wearing deeming them filthy and useless.

People can't breath properly in them.

There's more but it's been a long day.

@Peteycat

It's a thread on discussion of COVID policies, I don't think you can really state "it's none of your business" if someone asks why you disagree with one

The filthy argument I see a lot but it doesn't really impact in the way you think it does. Wearing a unwashed mask isn't great in the same way sleeping on a unwashed pillow isn't, but it will still reduce the amount of viral particles you expel if you happened to be infectious.

I agree regarding children and think would be better for them not to be used in schools, but I don't really see how these arguments hold up in other scenarios where they'd make a big difference, like public transport and crowded shops?

The "people can't breathe properly" argument is also pretty irrelevant given that if this is true for someone, then they simply shouldn't wear one. For the average person, it does not impact on your ability to breathe.

Even dogs are terrified. I have experience of this should you wish me to elaborate.
Please do! I have a silly spaniel who is scared of glasses, hats, bikes, rucksacks, people with an unusual gait but masks seem to be fine.

@Peteycat

You also say more evidence is needed on long covid, but then surely more evidence is required for a very new drug? The vaccine (I'm talking about children here). You cannot have it both ways.

I'm very respectful to the intelligent people on here who have been writing reports and collating data etc. Unfortunately I just speak of what I see and hear. My main priority is to protect all the children from any more harm.

Gah this has be said to death but - data is being gathered on the long term effects of both vaccines and infection. It is not possible to have data for a longer time period than that has elapsed.

Continuing certain suppression policies that have little impact on the individual is advised because we do not know enough about prevalence of LC or long term effects of infection - this is not "having it both ways".

Given what we do know, it has been concluded that the benefits of vaccination outweighs potential risks, hence why the majority of countries are offering the vaccine to children.

Well I was helping at a dog show a few weeks ago outdoors. Charity event. There was a judge, she had a mask on. Dogs were going berserk. I mean bananas. She took it off, they all performed fine afterwards.

My personal reasons are no ones business. The reasons I state are for others. Its not up to others to police and question what I put on my face. I'm simply explaining why they are wrong on the whole.

Given what we know.... Yes exactly my point.

The problem is that hidden disabilities are just that. Imposing mandatory masks open lots of people up to abuse from strangers again. I'm not saying you would do this, but many are aggressive and shouty at others not wearing masks. I've seen it so many times it's totally wrong.

Well, I'd like my Dc's education actually to happen - and not be disrupted by illness of staff and pupils.

Use of masks by pupils & teachers who aren't actually presenting or asking/answering questions (or in the process of lipreading) might be a way of doing that.

The balance of actual scientific evidence seems to be in favour of mask wearing.

@Peteycat

Given what we know.... Yes exactly my point.

What else is there?

You are asking for evidence that doesn't exist. Given that we don't have evidence for the long term effects of COVID, but evidence from other viral infections show adverse effects, and that there isn't a plausible mechanism by which vaccine would cause effects that only emerge in long term, it was decided that the benefits of vaccination outweighs the risks in the current context.

@Peteycat

The problem is that hidden disabilities are just that. Imposing mandatory masks open lots of people up to abuse from strangers again. I'm not saying you would do this, but many are aggressive and shouty at others not wearing masks. I've seen it so many times it's totally wrong.

Masks were always recommended with the proviso of exemptions.

I never saw aggression of that sort (mind you we haven't been out much)

@Peteycat

You say your "main priority is to protect all the children from any more harm" but you seem to be advocating for both not offering vaccination and dropping all measures that would help supress coronavirus transmission (in schools and the community) thus putting children at high exposure risk.

What about the fact that the delta variant has moved the goal posts? The head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said herd immunity is now “not a possibility” given how transmissible the Covid-19 variant is.

In a recent study which randomly tests up to 150,000 people in England for Covid-19, scientists found that the Delta strain was dominant and had reduced the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines to 49 per cent. (That is the overall effectiveness for all vaccines used in the UK.)

In the US the number of children becoming infected is increasing, with experts concerned as schools prepare to welcome students back to class. Over 400 children had died of Covid-19 in the US since the pandemic began. And right now there are almost 2000 kids in the hospital, many of them in ICU, some of them under the age of 4.

Outbreaks have also occurred at schools that have already reopened where there is resistance to wearing masks.

What happens when schools go back and there is a rise is serious illness and death with children? I'm not being facetious for a response, but rather I just don't know at this point.

Sorry I’m late to catch up, battery ran out.

@Peteycat I’m sorry you’ve had a difficult experience as someone who is exempt from mask wearing. However, I’m not sorry that your bad experience does not trump the evidence that they can work when used well.

The policy solution to this is to educate people on how to use masks properly, and on tolerance to the circumstances of others that might mean they feel differently. Not to ban them as a public health measure altogether because a minority don’t like them.

I’m not budging on this, masks are widely accepted in other cultures (as they are in various professions) with no detrimental social effects on children, and certainly not on dogs (I think you lost us all on that one). As for other groups eg visually impaired or deaf, why is it not ok for someone to remove mask accordingly? I have family members with the impairments you mention (see another post of mine on caring) and they have absolutely NO problem with asking someone to remove their mask. So please, stop using groups of whom you are not a part to boost your own argument and afford them the respect with which a everyone should be considered in these discussions… never about us without us. The majority of the people who fall into these categories also have other risk factors for covid (age being the common risk factor), and on balance, prefer mask wearing over increasing the chances that they are exposed to them. There are other, younger groups of course, but public health is quite simply, rightly or wrongly, a study of numbers, and someone has to be in the minority.

The question is, does the detriment to the minority sufficiently outweigh the benefit to the majority (without modest interventions such as exemptions and behavioural chances) for the intervention to be considered ineffective?

The answer here is quite clearly, no.

The head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said herd immunity is now “not a possibility” given how transmissible the Covid-19 variant is

Quite agree. I think also worth noting that herd immunity was never possible given that we now clearly know that people can be reinfected (vaccinated or otherwise).

Again, rates of reinfection are something we need to learn much more about.

In response to previous question about how long we need to keep learning… my response is:

a) we will know so much more after this winter re length of vaccine protection, infections in children, effect of removing mitigations, rates of long Covid, rates of reinfection etc

b) we talk about the delta variant as if it’s the last variant………..

I’m not budging on this, masks are widely accepted in other cultures (as they are in various professions) with no detrimental social effects on children

There really aren't other cultures where it's 'widely accepted' masks are worn by all adults indoors in public. There are some places in Asia where masks are worn outdoors as an anti-pollution measure, or by people who have coughs and colds in places where they don't want to pass on germs. That's not the same.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't keep wearing masks for a while. But as someone who does struggle with them (but isn't exempt and wouldn't claim to be) and yet is legally obliged to keep wearing them anyway, I would quite like to know:

• whether we can't do a bit more research into how well they work and, eg, how effective a cloth mask is against a properly fitted FFP2, especially in the context of delta?
• if we can maybe agree on some criteria for not having to wear them any more, that's a bit more specific than 'when we know more about covid'?

@TheReluctantPhoenix just to answer:

You have to have hospital admissions under control before you even consider anything else. Without that, society falls apart. And with infectious disease, that implies a population r number below (or equal to) one

No. We have moved on. This was the case before we knew anything else about Covid, and because we had no other indicators by which to measure its impact. Now the focus should be on mitigating the dangers of Covid, which if done correctly, will then mitigate pressure on clinical resources. I repeat my earlier comment - Covid is a public health crisis, not a staffing crisis. The objective is to stop people getting so severely ill that they need hospital treatment in the first place, not to make sure there enough hospital beds for everyone who gets severely ill.

Obviously the r number is applied to a baseline number of cases (around 200k per week right now). If you feel the impact of long COVID is serious, you may choose to lockdown for longer to lower this baseline

It doesn’t work like this. R is a population average which gives you a broad indication of how fast the disease is spreading, NOT what the outcomes are going to be. Rates of long Covid, deaths etc vary significantly among different social groups, ages etc. So whilst the R number is a leading indicator of hospitalisation, complications and deaths (ie it tells you what to expect), it is not an absolute predictor / causal indicator of outcomes. You cannot infer the r number between social groups because that’s simply not how the virus spreads at population level. r cannot tell you whether the virus is spreading among at risk groups or otherwise, that has to be inferred from other information we have, specifically case rates among population groups (which are not equivalent to r).

Clearly, also, as a society, we have to decide how many deaths are tolerable (they are currently not a major issue). But, given our hospital staffing issues, managing hospitals and managing impact are pretty much equivalent

No. This is my point. At the beginning we had no other choice or information. Now we do, so we manage impact first, hospitals will follow. There is no other illness in existence for which we manage hospital resources as a priority over patient outcomes (although I’m not a medical doctor, so happy to be corrected by someone who is in this case).

If we had 10x the hospitals, we might decide that hospitals were no longer the limiting factor but absolute deaths and or long term implications of long COVID were.

I could not disagree more. Deaths and long term implications of COVID are the only thing that matter. That’s why we sought to manage hospital admissions in the first place.

@GoldenOmber

There really aren't other cultures where it's 'widely accepted' masks are worn by all adults indoors in public. There are some places in Asia where masks are worn outdoors as an anti-pollution measure, or by people who have coughs and colds in places where they don't want to pass on germs. That's not the same

I’m sorry to keep disagreeing. But unless you have direct cultural experience of having lived in countries where it IS the norm, please don’t make assumptions and generalisations that you know nothing about. If you have lives in these cultures as I have, then please do say.

It is absolutely the norm for everyone, including children, to wear masks when there is a health reason to do so. This includes schools, offices, public transport, shops and anywhere else you’d care to mention. Given that we are in a pandemic, there is a health related reason, which is why everyone in these cultures is quite happily wearing one without complaint.

There is no other illness in existence for which we manage hospital resources as a priority over patient outcomes

There aren’t that many illnesses which we manage by using such severe societal restrictions, either. That management has its own cost. And it’s very unclear what the benefit of continuing with those would be if the virus will be endemic.

If people are going to get exposed to it anyway, then what’s the advantage of putting various restrictions in place to make that happen three years into the future rather than now? Giving people time to get vaccinated is a clear advantage; avoiding the health system collapsing is a clear advantage; “there might be long-term side-effects we don’t know about and we might find out how to treat those in a few years” is rather vague to be worth the definite cost of restrictions.

And I know someone will say “we don’t need lockdowns we only need little minor restrictions”, but as delta has shown us, little minor restrictions aren’t enough to stop it spreading.

please don’t make assumptions and generalisations that you know nothing about

Christ. Okay, name me one culture where it is a cultural standard for adults to all wear masks in all public places, all the time.

If you’re going to say “well obviously not all the time, just when there’s something of this health magnitude” then that’s really not the same.

@GoldenOmber

whether we can't do a bit more research into how well they work and, eg, how effective a cloth mask is against a properly fitted FFP2, especially in the context of delta?

There is loads of research into this at the moment, have a look at Google scholar and if you’re short on time then use the search term “meta-analysis”. The point is though, at what point do the perceived problems with masks override the precautionary principle? The world outside the UK has concluded we are nowhere near that point.

if we can maybe agree on some criteria for not having to wear them any more, that's a bit more specific than 'when we know more about covid'?

Several posters have given some very clear, important and outstanding questions that will have a huge impact on what the future looks like. If you aren’t able to process them to greater depth than “when we know more about Covid” then I’m afraid there is no agreement to be reached here.

What everyone needs to realise is that Covid response, like all public health, and like all public policy, involves a series of compromises and trade offs.

I’d really urge people to think of it from that perspective and ask what they’re really giving up, and in return for what, at every stage both now and going forwards. No one can ever have everything 100% their own way, there will always be a minority, and quite honestly, if you think you can do a better job, please… go out and find a way to make it happen. Night all x

@GoldenOmber

Christ. Okay, name me one culture where it is a cultural standard for adults to all wear masks in all public places, all the time

Read my post. Don’t extrapolate your own opinion, you do nothing but undermine your credibility. I even wrote in italics… when there is a health reason.

if you’re going to say “well obviously not all the time, just when there’s something of this health magnitude” then that’s really not the same

I didn’t say of this magnitude, as you well know, this is just you boxing yourself into a corner. I said a health reason. Which in countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and HK (to be specific) does not need to be a pandemic. It’s typically anything from a cold, to hay fever, to pollution. All of which happen regularly, which makes mask wearing among adults and children very normal.

Again, please do tell me which of these countries you’ve lived in. I’m waiting.

There is loads of research into this at the moment, have a look at Google scholar and if you’re short on time then use the search term “meta-analysis”

There is not actually that much research. We are well past time for some better research on this.

at what point do the perceived problems with masks override the precautionary principle?

The precautionary principle is a specific approach relating to doing new things, not a synonym for “being cautious”. The precautionary principle would say “we should be cautious about mask-wearing until we have better data about their possible detriments”, not “masks forever and delay taking them off”. (I don’t think it’s a brilliant principle to stick to in a crisis personally, but there you go.)

I would usually consider it a bit impolite of me to point out that you’re citing principles you don’t understand, but you seem unwilling to have any reasoned conversation about any concrete points, preferring instead to talk about how much better you understand the points you’re not discussing.

everyone in these cultures is quite happily wearing one without complaint.

And that’s just making you sound a bit naive.

@GoldenOmber

There is loads of research into this at the moment, have a look at Google scholar and if you’re short on time then use the search term “meta-analysis”

There is not actually that much research. We are well past time for some better research on this.

at what point do the perceived problems with masks override the precautionary principle?

The precautionary principle is a specific approach relating to doing new things, not a synonym for “being cautious”. The precautionary principle would say “we should be cautious about mask-wearing until we have better data about their possible detriments”, not “masks forever and delay taking them off”. (I don’t think it’s a brilliant principle to stick to in a crisis personally, but there you go.)

I would usually consider it a bit impolite of me to point out that you’re citing principles you don’t understand, but you seem unwilling to have any reasoned conversation about any concrete points, preferring instead to talk about how much better you understand the points you’re not discussing.

everyone in these cultures is quite happily wearing one without complaint.

And that’s just making you sound a bit naive.

But would research would you specifically want?

Epidemiologists have pointed out, reasonably, that it is hard to justify further research into the efficacy of cloth masks for use by the general population.

This is because we know they work to some degree (ie by reducing the amount of viral particles expelled if you are infectious), and all further research is going to achieve is to attempt to quantify this in a more precise manner. This isn't particularly helpful, and time/resources could be better spent elsewhere.

what research*

There is not actually that much research. We are well past time for some better research on this

“There is not much research that suits my agenda”

The precautionary principle is a specific approach relating to doing new things, not a synonym for “being cautious”

“I just looked it up on wiki”

And that’s just making you sound a bit naive

Rights because living in one of these countries for almost ten years is less relevant than your uninformed opinion. Again, which one of these cultures do you know? Since you’ve avoided the question we’ll all assume none.