A 2-week 'circuit breaker' could be coming after Christmas

[dancingstars]

Reported by The Times and The Guardian which means another NYE stuck indoors...

To the people saying that the doctors and nurses can’t and won’t, refuse to offer treatment to anti vaxers etc… if they catch covid, because it’s not morally right etc…

I get the point, as you could argue that smokers get treatment for lung cancer etc where do you draw the line? Should drinks not get treatment when they fall over pissed?

To play devil’s advocate though, an alcoholic wouldn’t be given a new liver if they were found to be drinking again, it would go to someone else.

People that are too overweight won’t get a gastric bypass if they don’t try dieting etc themselves first, so there are cases whereby personal responsibility comes in to it.

The amount of people’s that are having operations and treatments cancelled (and were talking millions affected) due to covid, where is the moral duty to those people?

Where is the moral duty to the hundreds of thousands of people suffering severe mental health outcomes?

I find it strange that we always impose restrictions after the wave of the virus has peaked. It's too late then.

Tbf this hasn’t happened yet, we have introduced and brought down numbers.

What this delay will do we’ll see - we usually get an idea of when a wave will likely peak but I’m yet to see one for this

Tabbacus

A circuit breakers just kicks it down the road, what's the point? Surely low level restrictions over a longer period are more effective than harsh ones for a short time“

Time for more boosters to work?

@TheWayTheLightFalls

If this lasts just two weeks I’ll run through trafalgar sq naked.

If all 68 million of us are susceptible to omicron because it can get round vaccines to some degree, and reinfect those of us who have already had covid then I see no reason why it would peak and subside within two weeks.

Two weeks wouldn't even turn the boat around.

It would give the police, NHS, fire brigade and ambulance service less to do at a time when they are likely to have major sickness absence though.

It's bad enough now.

@AnkleDeep

The bars and nightclubs you blithely shrug off are what funds the NHS

We need to have people working and paying taxes in order to have a well-funded health service.

Frankly we’ve spent 2 years ‘protecting the NHS’, during which time people’s businesses, education and mental health has been cast aside.

Frankly if the NHS cannot cope with the 3000 hospitalisations a day projected in this bogus model (bearing in mind there were 4000 in January), it needs to be replaced with a health service that can.

@Mindareno

chickenrun

My mistake, it’s the ICU beds not the general beds which are primarily the unvaccinated (despite being such a minority of the population). So that’s ok with you, as are the 36% of general admissions, or do you accept that the unvaccinated are exacerbating this problem significantly?

Fullfact, October data: 35 percent unvaxd in hospitals Data from gov website on covid in October, 46 million had second dose Overall population in UK - 68 Million That means around 67 percent of the population are double vax'd in october, and the rest not. Which means the 35 percent of unvax'd in hospitals is entirely relative. Wowzers, didn't even realise how right I was until I checked it that way.

[quote rrhuth]@DaisyNGO the whole thread is a discussion about why it is needed![/quote]
Sorry, I was only up to page 8.

I'll leave now. This is ideological. Some people love it and they don't care that our children will pay for it.

They should lockdown antivaxer adults! Make it illegal for then to go out socialising, instead of the rest of us!!

@IWannaWishYouANutNutsChristmas

Giving services ‘less to do’ is not a valid reason to shut down society and the economy once again.

I knew that once lockdowns were normalised as a policy tool, we’d never see the back of them.

@Chickenrun771

Haven’t checked your maths, and I’m not sure about your use or children in the unvaccinated group because that will skew it, but just to be clear, your contention is that the unvaccinated make no difference to the pressure on hospitals?

And full fact are wrong about the majority in the ICU beds (you know, the high dependency beds eg cancer patients need after their ops) being unvaccinated?

Why would we have a health service designed to cope with hundreds of thousands of admissions that we don’t usually have? That would be so incredibly wasteful in times when there was no pandemic.

What has happened is Independent Sage have recommended it. The Government have not agreed to it. Yet.

We don't really know at this point what the PM will decide to do. It's complex (politically) in that the experts are saying we need one, politically with the No10 parties held last year + revolt from his own backbenchers & hospitality industry he doesn't know which way to turn.

I don't have a crystal ball. My guess is we may see more restrictions, but I think they won't fully lockdown again. But I don't have any evident it is just my opinion. I think they will do anything to keep schools open. However lots may close if staff get ill or there are high rates

@charles11

The issue is that we have tiny amount of NHS free capacity, so we are very easily overwhelmed. In a normal year, we struggled to cope with 'flu. Even if Covid was just an extra 'flu, we would still see the NHS overwhelmed with many thousands dying uneccesarily each year.

Also, our supply chains accross society have been made so efficient that there is no slack and the systems so they are unstable. Brexit has compounded the problem. A sudden spike in people taking time off sick means our supply chains may collapse and supermarket shelves will be empty and people will start panic buying again. Even a relative mild illness can cause this to happen, if everyone catches it at the same time.

Now that most people in vulnerable groups have had booster, the problem is not so much death rate (though every unnecessary death is a family's tragedy) but the sheer number of people getting ill at the same time. We need to flatten the curve and the only way to do that rn is another lockdown. The only long-term fix is to have a much higher rate of vaccination with annual booster. One more "escape" mutation like Omicron and we'll have to start mandating vaccinations OR suffer big tax increases and high inflation along with reduced services in both public and private sectors.

@Starcup there is data from Denmark and New York that omicron infection is being driven by young vaccinated people. Shall we lock all of them up too even though it’s a mild illness?

MarshaBradyo Based on anecdata and the fire crew and hospital staff data, roughly a fifth of working age people are currently isolating in London (and the rate in some workplaces is higher ) and cases are concentrated in the 11-18 and 18-30 age groups. It will still have potential for more transmission in those demographics but further transmission to parents and then the rest of communities will take longer. The rate in our borough is now doubling every day but it has not yet reached the levels it was this time last year (over 1000 per 100k of a less virulent variant that was affecting a wider demographic) and at the current exponential rate of increase it won’t for at least a week. Christmas will see increased household mixing so it will be a superspreader in itself. And the rest of the country is a week behind London.

So I think I am safe from the nude pool party in Trafalgar Square.

[quote Charles11]@Starcup there is data from Denmark and New York that omicron infection is being driven by young vaccinated people. Shall we lock all of them up too even though it’s a mild illness?[/quote]
They aren’t taking up the beds though are they?….

[quote Mindareno]@Chickenrun771

Haven’t checked your maths, and I’m not sure about your use or children in the unvaccinated group because that will skew it, but just to be clear, your contention is that the unvaccinated make no difference to the pressure on hospitals?

And full fact are wrong about the majority in the ICU beds (you know, the high dependency beds eg cancer patients need after their ops) being unvaccinated?[/quote]
I'm giving you the numbers and the numbers alone. They are factual - Full Fact are regulated and independent, they reference their data from Government sources. Either the gov are wrong or right, which is it?

Children don't skew the data, because they're included in the overall population number, as are the number of hospital patients - so they are both relative figures. You take the numbers as a whole, rather than chopping them up into groups. The entire population of the country, versus the entire number of people in the hospitals - that way it makes it equal.

Cite your data on the figures in ICU.

The survival of the fittest types don't sound like they are the fittest to survive.

@Emilyontmoor

MarshaBradyo Based on anecdata and the fire crew and hospital staff data, roughly a fifth of working age people are currently isolating in London (and the rate in some workplaces is higher ) and cases are concentrated in the 11-18 and 18-30 age groups. It will still have potential for more transmission in those demographics but further transmission to parents and then the rest of communities will take longer. The rate in our borough is now doubling every day but it has not yet reached the levels it was this time last year (over 1000 per 100k of a less virulent variant that was affecting a wider demographic) and at the current exponential rate of increase it won’t for at least a week. Christmas will see increased household mixing so it will be a superspreader in itself. And the rest of the country is a week behind London.

So I think I am safe from the nude pool party in Trafalgar Square.

When would you say for peak?

One question is, how worthwhile is flattening the curve, if the flattened curve still exceeds hospital capacity?

@Nellodee

Why would we have a health service designed to cope with hundreds of thousands of admissions that we don’t usually have? That would be so incredibly wasteful in times when there was no pandemic.

We don’t need a health service that can cope with the demand of an unmitigated pandemic it faces once every 100 years.

We do need a health service that has more capacity to deal with the challenges it is already facing, which include covid on the back of that. A health service which was at its limits in a normal winter was never going to manage covid demand and lockdown demand on top. And ideally, a health service which is not run (at political level) on a ‘just in time’ ideology where a spare bed ever is seen as an inefficiency, and joined up to a decently resourced social care system too (we can dream…)

@vera99

The survival of the fittest types don't sound like they are the fittest to survive.

And the anti vaxer adults don’t sound too sharp either…

Just seen a tweet saying an emergency covid cabinet meeting has been called, so it seems like new restrictions might be happening soon. Can't bloody believe we are back here

After over 400 comments I think we can all agree that there are no easy answers, and indeed much uncertainty over the science. The only thing I know for sure is I wish I could persuade some antivaxxers, but being rude and abusive is not going to persuade them.

Standard operating for this shambles of a government.
Leak to the press, let it sit over the weekend, see what the chatter is.
Make a decision based on what is least likely to affect popularity.
We will have Christmas - but expect to be locked up for New Year and most of January - kids home-schooling - no pubs/clubs etc.