up to 90% in hospital ICU are unboostered.

[EleonorBronte]

Last week the report said most of those in ICU were unvaccinated.
Seems like a drastic turnaround.
So double vaxxed people make up to 90% of those in ICU beds? All of a sudden?

Interested in people's thoughts on this manner of reporting. It's ok to urge people to get boosters but this seems off.

On closer research, it seems the majority in ICU are actually unvaxxed, so why this headline?

Currently i believe the booster is just that, a booster. it boosts our already given immunity if we are vaccinated.

As for the messaging, I am not pleased. Something amped the fuck up this week, mid way between xmas and new year - bbc full of tearful nhs workers, young men pleading in icu. I am uncomfortable with the tone of the messaging, especially in Scotland.
Something feels off, and i am generally pro active and accepting of covid restrictions, etc.

Have you say, for someone like me who has health anxiety and now tested positive just before my booster is due, Boris has some big shit scaremongering going on.

Sure unboosted means no vaccinated - 1 dose - 2 doses and not only 2 doses

He probably means unvaccinated completely. Twisting of words to get people to have their booster.

Less than three will be considered unvaccinated for adults very soon won't it?

@Woowoe

What boris meant was that one Dr had told him that his icu was 90% un boosted. Reminder that to be fully boosted 14 days have to pass

Not the country
One random place

Lies

I wonder if he read it from a twit on twitter?

@SLH2003

Hold up , I need to get my bingo card out.

Its nice to have this thread again, its like an old friend. Anyway. I would like to respectfully suggest that the unboosterised not be allowed access to the NHS.

Utter horseshit

We need to see data in the totally unvacced in hospital because of covid symptoms versus the data for those in hospitals because of covid who are vacced (double and triple respectively).

Numbers. Not odd percentages based on some boy down the pub

Sturgeon can’t produce those figures either. Why not? This is bloody odd as if this was me I would be looking at those figures daily to make decisions

As it happens I remain unvacced and unboosted for now as I want decent data (have had covid)

All this scaremongering of reporting and not knowing what to believe is damaging.

The flu jan is time limited. People have one every year if they are vulnerable. This will be the same no?

What's the point of giving someone a booster that the omicron virus has proven to evade

It still tops up your antibodies, so overall less people catch omicron. If less people catch it, that also means that less people can transmit it.

That may not stop omicron but it will have an overall impact on the number of cases at any one time. Its like a compound interest effect.

Interestingly research from SA is showing that T Cell response is holding up well against omicron. This isn't as good in older people so it is worthwhile boosting them for this reason.

And if you booster younger people you hopefully have at least some reduction in transmission which will protect the more vulnerable.

What the data is showing us is we will be better with variant specific boosters going forward to top up antibodies but many of us will retain protection from severe disease through tcells anyway. Antibody protection is our outer layer of protection which stops us getting infected but tcell immunity is our inner layer of protection which stops the worst of the damage if we do get it.

The crucial thing here is we don't know who has poor t cell protection. Hence giving it everyone. So we try and protect them with the highest level of antibody protection and a top up of t cell protection with a booster.

It will probably be the case that we will have regular boosters for a while - but it may become more targeted like flu vaccines as time goes on as they figure it out.

We know that tcell immunity in people who caught SARS is still detectable in some people 17 years later which is a positive thing.

The news is largely positive and means we should have some protection against other new mutations.

So the benefits of a booster are less than the first two doses but are worthwhile overall at a population level until things settle down. Which looks likely to be the case relatively soon.

The pressing concern is over sheer numbers of people sick - not just because of illness but more because of labour shortages which pose a safety risk in their own right.

A friend of mine was in Mayday (Maydie) Hospital with heart trouble coming up to Christmas. No covid ward, No running around like the battle of thermopylae, it wasn't over run like wall street the day of a stockmarket crash. Just a regular hospital day.
What about Debbie Hicks, Filmed inside Gloucester Hospital, said it was like a Ghost ship in there?
What about Shelley Tasker? A nurse who filmed inside Truro hospital and said it was Deserted inside and she was scratching around for things to do?
www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8916871/Whistleblower-NHS-worker-reveals-whats-REALLY-going-NHS-hospitals.html

That article was from November 2020, when ordinary admissions had been suspended, and if she had walked down the corridor a bit to the covid wards she'd have found a a completely different picture.

The misrepresentation in that article and others of its ilk was exposed and roundly condemned at the time (something that seem s to have passed you by)

I follow a blog by an ICU consultant in the NE. He posted this today

The hospital has been admitting increasing numbers of COVID patients over the past 72 hours and the total number of such patients in the hospital is almost double what it was a week ago. Currently, over two-thirds of the patients admitted to our ICU are unvaccinated. They are all relatively young and nearly all of them have the usual risk factors for severe COVID pneumonitis; they tend to be male, overweight and have type 2 diabetes. Some of these patients are fundamentally opposed to vaccination but many more seem to have simply not appreciated that they might be more at risk of severe illness. When offered vaccination, they have simply told their GP that they would rather ‘take their chances’.

www.nomoresurgeons.com/post/fourth-wave?postId=3fbd0091-f7a4-44d1-a432-950a3631e2ba

It’s interesting as rather than boost everyone every three to six months, we surely need a risk based approach.

Overweight/obese males seem to suffer the worst. Why would we then boost your teenage girls?

Ooo I’m have a proper deja vu experience.

“I’m pro vaccination (yeah right) but more than happy to misrepresent or find a bit of emerging science to cast shadows of doubt in people’s minds.”

And let’s pull out the fear and coercion card while I’m at it.

Any news on the obese in ICU??

Oh and “I’m not a conspiracy theorist” btw…and I absolutely detest the term ‘anti vaxxer’.

I think the bingo card needs updating every few weeks :

• fear and coercion (has been pretty consistent throughout)
• obese in ICU (a fairly new one)
• I hate the terms conspiracy theorist/anti vaxxer, and I’m definitely not one
• I’m pro vaccination (fairly new)
• natural immunity (has been pretty consistent throughout)
• I’m a ‘doctor’
• anecdotal evidence

Any others?

@Beadebaser

Any news on the obese in ICU??

Table 2 on page 25

www.icnarc.org/DataServices/Attachments/Download/596485d8-c264-ec11-9139-00505601089b

Aim off for these being straight numbers, and I don't know off hand what the typical distribution in the whole adult population ie not clear from this which brackets are most over or under represented

Bil works for an nhs turst in a senior role.

He said just before Christmas that one of the issues in hospitals was how they had to split things into hot and cold areas - in effect every department had to have a covid area and a none covid area. This meant problems with staffing because if you had one ward 1/2 full of brain surgery patients with covid and one 1/2full of brain surgery patients without covid, you were effectively doubling the amount of staff you needed.

Before Christmas that was already causing problems.

He said he envisaged it being exceptionally difficult stopping omicron spread in hospitals so rather than it being a case of isolating covid positive patients it was likely to switch to isolating covid negative patients in the next few weeks!

All this does have an effect on safety and health outcomes and not just for patients admitted severely ill with covid.

Whether or not we get a huge wave of seriously ill covid (only) patients is almost irrelevant in this context. It will add to the problem comorbid covid + another condition will produce.

He was expecting it to get crazy in January but then he said he expects that every year now anyway. Covid just adds another layer to it.

He said the biggest problem was even before they had to double up on wards they were understaffed and the predicted level of staff sickness was going to be the big issue. Not numbers of covid patients.

He has seem projections of numbers that his hospital was anticipating and right up to the days before Christmas it was tracking on a very optimistic and favourable curve so he was positive about covid itself.

Its just all the other stuff he was worried about.

It was an interesting conversation.

Anything that can take the edge off the number of cases should help though.

@Woowoe

Is it effective?

Delta was as deadly as the flu
Omicron as deadly as a cold

Praise the booster

Odd logic there!

@WineGetsMeThroughIt

It's all lies and careful manipulation using words to push their agenda on us now. Boris is pushing for boosters so he can claim a price for the most extensive and successful booster campaign ever.

They're now saying 90% of patients don't have their booster. This was based on (from what I understand) a conversation Boris had with a single hospital or area. Not at all reflective of the entire country.

They're also not giving us the full pictures. How much does 90% actually equate to? Or the 'majority' that are unvaccinated? It could only be 200 in total which is minuscule. We really have no idea!

An NHS spokesperson has already come out this week and said that hospital admissions are actually relatively low, and that the strain put on the NHS is not because of patients suffering from covid (unvaxx'd or not), but is because of staff shortages due to employees having to isolate. She also went on to say that the majority of patients in hospital 'WITH' covid are not there because of covid. Instead they were admitted for other reasons and ended up testing positive when they were admitted.

The booster is ridiculous not for anyone remotely healthy. It's now been proven (after the government dismissed the claims from SA) that Omicron is very mild and like a cold. Do you remember the press conference where they were trying to tell us not to listen to that, and that Omicron was the most significant covid threat to us yet? It's not. It's now the equivalent of a cold. And I can guarantee 3 years ago most people would not be isolating for 7 days or not going into work if they had a cold. All of this needs to stop now. The booster was developed for the original strain which is now only 10% of cases, and decreasing even more every day. The booster also looses effectiveness at the 10 week mark. It's also been reported in a lancet study that after 10 weeks the viral load between a vaccinated and unvaccinated person is pretty much the same. The booster is there to prevent you from something as mild as a cold, so of course when people get omicron now they're all excited because it's so mild and it must be because of the booster..... or um - it could just be because the body variant is so mild! Loads of triple jabbed are getting it now.

The data from SA has also showed that their wave of omicron has peaked and they're saying people there faired pretty well due to previous immunity from Delta. In a country with much lower vaccination rates than the UK. Which I would assume means NATURAL immunity.

It has also been reported this week that getting omicron who'll help protect you against delta.

So much bloody confusing info. But a whole lot of scaremongering going on as well!

Hallelujah! Some sense.

@BoPeeple
@WineGetsMeThroughIt

Yea! Full house!

Perhaps Farage will get in next election and all our dreams will come true!

Hurrah for personal freedom! Hurrah for our individual needs! Hurrah for survival of the fittest!