Autumndays Well clearly you only see the sense you want to see. “Shut down the country” is a total straw man, we have vaccines so we are already suppressing the virus and hospitalisations.
I will put it in simpler words without any confusing numbers for you. London is suffering economic damage and high levels of hospital admissions as a result of an exponential rise in cases, currently concentrated in the younger age groups . Hospitalisations have risen 52% in a week and it is still behind the lag between infection, hospitalisation and death, particularly as it has been not spread to the most vulnerable parts of the population. It is early days and yet it is approaching the rate that even the politicians who are staking their political futures on libertarianism are conceding will require restrictions to protect the NHS.
The rest of the country, apart from Manchester, is yet to see the rise in cases. let alone the rate of hospitalisation. It is simply too soon to say that this is such a mild disease that with huge case numbers even a small proportion being hospitalised won’t cause the NHS to crash as it already looks set to do in London. Measures like restrictions on household mixing won’t cause the same level of economic damage that the high case numbers we are seeing in London already are. What is causing the damage apart from sickness absence and lack of footfall is the lack of any government framework to support our industries through this.
If you are looking to paint me as a lockdown nut you are far from the truth but I am seeing on the ground within my community the damage that high case numbers are doing. And that chimes with the scientific consensus.
Iced It is simple public health logic that if you limit the number of interactions as they have elsewhere it will slow down the rate of transmission, maybe not by as much as with other variants but even if it is just by 1%, 1% of the very big number of cases which Omichron is set to cause, will slow the rate down. I am quite sure infections flattened in the 20 something age group last week because they stayed home. We will see what happens when they all go out at the weekend.
There is a false comparison between Covid and Colds and Flu as if branding it as such somehow changes it’s nature. The fact is that if flu or another Coronavirus had the transmissibility and impact on the economy and public health of Covid it would be subject to infection control strategies as it was for Swine Flu in 2009, Hong Kong flu in 1957 (which killed my grandfather at the age of 45 ) etc . That was exactly what the (inadequate) pandemic response plans in place in 2019 were designed to do. Even the initial wild type of Covid was three times more transmissible than flu, we don’t know exactly yet but clearly Omichron is many more times transmissible than that.