Tieribly angry wee fannies fannying about with the tiers

[dancemom]

Things moved quickly so I just started a new one ...

• 5,021 new cases of COVID-19 reported
• 47,991 new tests for COVID-19 that reported results
◦ 11.0% of these were positive
• 5 new reported death(s) of people who have tested positive
• 44 people were in intensive care yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 391 people were in hospital yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 4,088,894 people have received the first dose of the Covid vaccination and 3,603,429 have received their second dose

Masks at my hairdresser too and you aren’t allowed to hang up your coat any more, you have to put it into a box and close the lid while the staff stand back.

Still, at least our Very Sensible Measures have put us in a much better case than the feckless English with their rising cases, eh?

"Still, at least our Very Sensible Measures have put us in a much better case than the feckless English with their rising cases, eh? hmm"

Well, quite. Remind me again which UK nation is the totally reckless one for allowing their citizens to make free choices about infection control measures?

I'm hearing anecdotally of lots of people not being able to get tests, but that's a high number of tests reported today.

You know what I don't get. Why our rates are so much higher than other European countries. I don't know what restrictions Germany, France etc are living with, but they're still obviously working, shopping, socialising, etc. So why are our rates SO much higher?

@IncludeWomenInThePrequel I wonder if our relative level of testing is something to do with it. I saw a chart somewhere (possibly one of the ZOE talks) showing that we are now doing more testing than the rest of Europe combined. If we're trawling through the asymptomatic cases more than other countries that might explain the apparent higher levels of infection.

Oh, maybe. I see from a quick look that we've performed the most tests.

But - if other countries are testing less amongst a less vaccinated population, what's going on?

Germany had 140 deaths last week to our 700+.

Why??

Maybe Germany are just counting people who died from covid rather than people who died from anything but had a positive PCR test?

@ElephantOfRisk the definition of a COVID death certainly varies a lot between countries, and ours is very liberal (as you say encompassing anyone testing positive). There was a fair bit of discussion about this last year I remember (all the 'been hit by a bus but counted as a COVID death' stuff). Excess deaths are the only reliable measure - not sure where you can get international comparisons of this though?

Even Devi is now saying to stop counting cases….

I think what is obvious though is that ScotGov in particular appear to be keen to show it as worse as it can be for some reason. All the "test if you are well", numbers scaremongering, back to the threats again, imo it's about control and being seen to be strong and caring and proactive. Sturgeon's approval rating is dropping so it's an attempt to get that back up and also it's a squirrel to detract from a lot of the other negative stuff surrounding the SNP.

I don't know - I was just looking at excess deaths and we're still close to double Germany's rate, 40k more than France, 25k more than Spain.

If anyone else is as bored as me

www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker

Interesting, I like numbers

For example though, Sweden had very few restrictions and has nearly half the excess deaths per 100k compared to Britain?

I DON'T UNDERSTAND! Is it also partially a space/poverty issue too maybe. Although plenty of families live in apartments right on top of each other in Spain, Italy, etc.

You can probably get some indicator on the compilation of the stats when comparing the number of excess deaths compared to how many are listed as covid deaths.

There are loads of factors I should imagine that affect it, we aren't the healthiest of populations and lack of vit D I think has a big impact which is where the med countries might benefit but there are plenty of hot sunny countries worse than us on the list. I think i'd quite like to be a statistician pouring all over this data and trying to work it all out. In another life maybe.

Shows the lockdowns/restrictions we’ve had don’t work

Agreed. Undoubtedly a complete lock down will stop spread but that doesn't necessarily appear to have helped in the long term and anything else is just tinkering imo and doesn't work.

That's a fascinating link @IncludeWomenInThePrequel, I could spend all day looking at it! It seems like Britain is very much in the mix of European countries overall when you look at the final column accounting for population size - Germany/France is doing well as you say, but Portugal, Spain, Italy and a lot of Eastern European countries doing considerably worse. I wonder if the underlying health/age of the population has something to do with it. I seem to remember that Italy had an older population (although I might be making that up!), and the UK (Scotland in particular) has quite poor general health. Ironically, all the 'keeping us safe' over the past year seems to have worsened general health, with heavy drinkers now drinking even more, people less active, and a massive increase in young people smoking!

I'm supposed to be getting cut, colour & blow dry for a wedding on Saturday and now my hairdresser has Covid.
It's a very inconvenient pandemic 🙈

I'd put money on the average person being less healthy post lockdown, that trend of rising drug and alcohol deaths is hiding a cohort of people who are drinking more but not a statistic yet.

I heard about the rise in smoking on the radio this morning - terrible and unsurprising news.

Can’t speak for other EU countries but here in France atm speaking to neighbours and friends here they only record a COVID death as dying from it. Not any underlying health conditions previously. No knocked down by a bus scenarios etc.
Their testing is half what rUK does with similar population and have similar number of cases (Worldometers) stats. If they tested more they would have the worlds top #4 cases 🤷‍♀️ Deaths are -20K less than UK so go figure…..

Anyway we find here in France to be less claustrophobic than Scotland though they still have restrictions in place like us masks in supermarkets shops etc. People seem happier the seaside resorts are very busy restaurants are full. They even take our paper vaccine certification in restaurants and café no problem ha ha (NS) and your Denmark contract.

Not been watching news since been here until today. It’s an exit wave like England had, ours maybe more due to our severe lockdowns longer than rUK when few of us caught it back then and vaccines going down age brackets which is now happening on the younger age group 18+ Who recently are getting back to clubbing as most of today’s cases are in age range to pub and club it who are without 2jab + 2wks protection in the main. Of course schools will be hot spot as young teachers not fully vaccinated +2 wks and school children begin mixing again with Delta being higher transmissible. She really needs to calm down in her rhetoric.

But it’s all about control with her and her saying bringing back restrictions. Bog of with your threats I say.
Watch PH saying that the joining with SNP is similar with NZ don’t they both love bumlicking Adhern.

I'm watching one of John Campbell's updates and there's some interesting discussion about immunity that might also partially explain why Scotland is harder hit now than elsewhere in the UK. Essentially, natural immunity gives a better breadth of immunity than vaccine-mediated (makes sense, as it targets the whole virus rather than just the spike). Interestingly, he talks about new data showing that this natural immunity is therefore much more resistant to new variants of concern than vaccine-mediated immunity, which we now know is less effective against delta than previous variants for instance. While vaccines became less effective against new variants like delta, natural immunity essentially held up. I seems likely that due to harsher restrictions in Scotland we had fewer people infected than in England (across all demographics, not just the vulnerable ones), and we're therefore more heavily dependent on vaccines for our immunity and therefore more susceptible to variants of concern. In essence, our immune situation is more fragile until/unless more people are infected naturally and thus build up immunity that way.

It all poses interesting questions about whether it's better to boost continually, or allow more natural infections, especially in the low risk groups, now that most people have been vaccinated (which should take the edge off the severity).

Interesting @Y0uCann0tBeSer10us
Scotland has 14% of uk cases today (for 8% of population)