Scunnered .... *insert tier pun

[dancemom]

New thread, couldn't think of a title 🙈

Did it come in up here before or after quarantine?

Ah yes - I remember. Thanks! They did crazy amounts of testing and vaccination to get it under control in Bolton (and Blackburn and Darwen, from memory) too, which may be why it didn't really spread from there at the time. And we discussed at the time why Glasgow seemed to always have higher levels, as you say... God. That all seems aaaages ago!

@Haudyourwheesht

Did it come in up here before or after quarantine?

Scotland brought in the quarantine hotels from 15th Feb (had to look it up... I don't just know that!) so it would have been after.

Well the UK Government didn't put quarantine for travellers from India into place until 23rd April ( post Brexit deal going on at the time so they ignored the higher levels of infections coming from India versus Bangladesh and also the fact that they were bringing a new strain into the UK). At least 500 but potentially 1,000 travelleres infected with the strain were able to come into the UK in a short period of time. Scotland had put quarantine in place 3 weeks earlier but as the UK Government did not, many simply flew to Manchester etc and drove up in order to beat the quarantine in Scotland.

*travellers

I hear the interchangeable jobs for the faithful CovidSwinneyBot has issued an apology for using a random internet meme graphic containing unverified information.

Still you follow, listen and trust. Crack on, folks, you’re in ‘safe’ hands. 🙄

😯 Surely not SG using unverified info potentially giving the wrong impression....... Nooooo never! Oh wait softplays lead to covid hospitalisation for children don't they....... 🙄

Oh quarantine hotels, forgot about that other waste of money where noone could manage to check which airports actually had flights arriving

NI steep increase could also be affected by the 12th July.

Possibly perihelion - I hadn't considered that . Though the rise seemed to start round then, which would be too early to reflect infections passed on there. I think the simplest explanation is "its complicated" .

@ResilienceWanker it was first identified in the UK in March but not known how much it spread within that time til April so way before most politicians (NS included) had a big focus on it. They don't genetic sequence every positive test just a selection which does mean in the early days of a new variant it's underestimated.

• 1,825 new cases of COVID-19 reported
• 33,280 new tests for COVID-19 that reported results
◦ 6.0% of these were positive
• 22 new reported death(s) of people who have tested positive
• 58 people were in intensive care yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 488 people were in hospital yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 3,989,927 people have received the first dose of the Covid vaccination and 3,028,271 have received their second dose

That’s good hospital numbers are coming down

Govt paper now backing up the zoe app initial research that the 8 week gap between doses is the most effective against covid especially alpha and delta variants.
Still needs to be peer reviewed which will be interesting to read but it's another govt gamble which appears to have paid off!
Jammy govt! 😂

@Scottishskifun one of the most eyebrow-raising aspects of pandemic commentary for me has been this insistence that we don't know anything about x/y/z. Sure, we didn't know the specifics of COVID but this virus didn't arrive from outer space and we do know a reasonable amount about the immune system and how it generally responds to viruses. The JCVI made that call, to much controversy because it hadn't been tested at that interval, on the basis of how the immune system usually responds to vaccination (in other words, it was a fair bet) and sure enough it turned out to be the right one. In fact, I think I've seen data from other countries who used the 'recommended' interval showing that the link to hospitalisations is stronger than here, supporting the idea that our vaccinated population actually have better protection. We shouldn't be scared to do our own thing if the logic is sound!

@Y0uCann0tBeSer10us yep there is this assumption that we don't know anything about coronavirus viruses which is not true at all! SARS is a type of coronavirus it's just covid 19 which is new. So we actually had a lot of data and years of previous research on them but that doesn't make good headlines so it becomes all "new".
It's like the idea that the vaccines are completely new well actually not really they have been under development and research for years it's just they were adapted for the particular spike proteins of C19. But again this doesn't make good headlines!

@Scottishskifun

Govt paper now backing up the zoe app initial research that the 8 week gap between doses is the most effective against covid especially alpha and delta variants. Still needs to be peer reviewed which will be interesting to read but it's another govt gamble which appears to have paid off! Jammy govt! 😂

Is that 8 weeks as opposed to the initial 3 (ish?) weeks - or 8 weeks as opposed to 12 weeks?! Or just 8 weeks is the best of all possible times?

And I agree about this being not entirely new! I was quite shocked at some of the insistence that it was risky and reckless to change the vaccine schedule - even though the vaccine schedule was just set in order to get the fastest possible results in the trials. It's not like our immune response to vaccines has somehow changed in the past 18 months from, well, basically every other vaccine ever... I suppose the mRNA ones are a bit new - but even those I understand have been used before. It's just the "coating" that has been tricky to make stable, but not too stable, so it actually gets into the cells, and so they are tricky to store - so they haven't really been able to mass produce them before. But the response to them from the immune system works in a similar way.

• 1,505 new cases of COVID-19 reported
• 25,795 new tests for COVID-19 that reported results
◦ 6.4% of these were positive
• 6 new reported death(s) of people who have tested positive
• 57 people were in intensive care yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 502 people were in hospital yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 3,992,327 people have received the first dose of the Covid vaccination and 3,044,803 have received their second dose

@ResilienceWanker yes the 8 week gap rather then the lab trial 3 week gap.
It seems to be the optimum for Pfizer I think AZ optimum is 12 weeks still but I could be wrong it's been a while since I've looked at vaccination details since I got my first jab (as I then counted as double protected due to covid infection)

Thanks dancemom! Fingers crossed things still seem to be heading in the right direction.

Yes scottishskifun - I was just talking about this with DH over lunch, and he'd been discussing it with his colleague who works with the immunologists. Apparently the mRNA ones seem to build immunity quite quickly and then stop (at around 8 weeks, coincidentally!) - and the 2nd dose then would start it building higher again. The AZ type seems to build more slowly, but carry on up to at least 12 weeks (and possibly beyond). So the 2nd AZ dose at 12 weeks may give better immunity overall than 8 weeks, but you have to weigh that against the immediate boost that the 2nd dose provides (especially when the virus is quite prevalent) and the fact that a single dose of AZ isn't really that effective against delta. So it seems the 8 week programme is a good balance all things considered.

Jammy indeed!

The immunologists were also saying that many of their colleagues reckon that covid will just continue circulating and mutating, and our bodies will just get better at dealing with it, and things like it, gradually over time - either through infection or vaccination or a combination of the two. Like with colds and flu. So children will get loads of variants in their childhood - but build up immunity through that so their immune systems are really alert to it and good at getting rid of it in a few years. And as adults it won't really matter about variants because we'll have seen so many similar versions of it our bodies will know what to do. Whereas now variants are a bit of a worry because we've only fought off/ have antibodies to one type, so when reexposed it takes a while for our immunity to know what to do with something "similar but not quite the same".

They also think our bodies may get less prone to overreacting and going all long-covid on us. There may still be some post-viral effect, but it would be at a rate more like with other viruses, rather than the 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 figures that could see lingering effects at the moment. Which could be good news - though may not be too useful for people like you already suffering!

(Of course - that is all second/ third hand through DH and his non-virus colleague, so I may have got the wrong end of the stick in armchair-virus-speak - but it seems to make sense to me!)

@ResilienceWanker makes sense and yes it's a quick mutator so a bit like flu in that there maybe several different versions in a bad season point! It's why I always took issue with the treat it like measles outbreaks statements it just was never going to happen due to mutation rate.

I hope it does stop causing such a pot luck response in people and becomes more like other viruses we are used to!

I'm very accepting of my long covid and that I have to just do what I can for symptom management and hope that eventually I will be back to some level of normal! But I'm lucky in that I can afford those treatments to help with symptoms and get so angry that many in Scotland simply aren't in a position to do so and with lack of support they are stuck in limbo.

Agree on measles. Though as measles has an R value of about 20 in an unvaccinated population, if that learnt how to mutate we'd be fucked pretty quickly!

Good summary Reslience. This is the paper underpinning the comments. Prof Francois Balloux did a very good twitter thread on it today.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879625721000730?v=s5

Yep measles is completely different kettle of fish.

Measles is totally different so Devi once again is a fuckwit