birch-chorley

Just an assumption but if someone is immune and they ‘catch’ the virus then their viral load of COVID will be low as the virus struggles to replicate (because the host is immune) The lower the viral load the harder it is to pass it on to another person, if it is passed on then the exposure would be massively reduced and the viral load in the new host will start off smaller giving them a better chance of fighting it naturally Part of the reason healthcare workers have been hit hard is the fact that they are generally exposed to large viral loads

According to the BBC... ‘The vaccine is given as two injections, 21 days apart, with the second dose being a booster. Immunity begins to kick in after the first dose but reaches its full effect seven days after the second dose.’ so from next week, as the most vulnerable will start to get vaccinated, they will have more immunity even after the first dose than they do now, reducing cases in the over 60’s almost immediately with a reduction in hospital admissions to follow 2 weeks behind (all be it reducing at a faster rate than that of cases in the +60 group)

If the vaccine stops cases or not, it’s largely irrelevant How many people end up in hospital and how many people die are the Two key considerations that the government will be looking at If a vaccine means cases continue to increase but the flow into hospitals (and subsequent deaths) drops then the country will slowly move down the Tiers from next week as the vaccine is rolled out The criteria for Tiers will reflect the risk to the NHS in each area. Once the vulnerable have been vaccinated it won’t matter if cases sky rocket in the under 60’s as they won’t lead to an NHS collapse

I think people are confusing what’s meant by ‘normal’ Plenty would snap your hand off for Tier 1 as that’s much better than Tier 3 whilst still not being ‘normal’. A shit load more jobs are better protected in Tier 1 than 2 or 3 As we know, the Tiers are calculated with 5 things in consideration. Two of the key ones being new cases in the over 60 age group & local hospital capacity. As each week passes and more vaccines are given out the numbers of new cases in the over 60’s will dramatically decrease, the hospital admissions will drop soon after (given most admissions are 60+). The vaccine is being administered according to risk so the first 5m doses given to the most vulnerable will likely do as much good for hospital admissions as the next 10m doses given to the slightly less vulnerable We have several million doses of the Aztra vaccine landing in December, more in January. Whilst a full dose requires 2 jabs 21 days apart the vaccine starts to work after the first jab. For me, all this means that cases in the 60+ category will start to fall dramatically from next week, hospital admissions will drop even faster (all be it 2 weeks behind). The impact of this should see regions moving out of tier 3 to tier 2 then into Tier 1. I suspect we will all be Tier 1 by February at the latest with Normal Normal late Spring into Summer

I can’t see them purposely delaying a vaccine to dampen down peoples Christmas plans. Delaying it means more deaths & job losses, I should imagine they are doing everything they can to start ASAP With regards the 99% bit, as you say no reason why folk should be losing their jobs in a lockdown once the vulnerable have had a vaccine. Should all be in Tier 1 as a minimum by that stage, hopefully February

Generally stopped reading the Guardian a while back, seem to have our Ed further and fourth er towards click bait nonsense in order to make some revenue Just charge folk for reading it and stop the click bait shite

I’d have thought they would have taken them and stored them on the assumption that approval would happen Any road, let’s get these vulnerable vaccinated and we can get back to some resemblance of normality, tier 1 all round once they are done

Only starting to vaccinate next week according to the BBC News, why lose a week ffs? Should have been ready to go tomorrow, they have only been waiting for the thumbs up from the regulator

As you say, no way conclusive They studied 10 people, 8 of which were suffering from long Covid / shortness of great, all of which showed signs of lung damage, which you would imagine is a given with someone suffering from being out of breath all the time The question will be, what % of cases develop long Covid, then you can work out the relative risk As a comparison the fact we use Diesel as a fuel means that thousands of people each year develop lung problems, it kills plenty along the way. But the % of cases relative to the population means we carry on regardless. The government could use tax payers money to buy up all the Diesel cars and vans so they get replaced by Petrol AND / OR electric vehicles, saving tens of thousands of lives over the coming years. But they don’t because it’s seen as a reasonable level of risk that’s part of day to day life.

Ah ok Think they act as wifi boosters as well don’t they? All ours paired up ok, about 10m between them at the longest point

Sky Q mini box (if you’ve got Sky) Ive got 3 mini boxes now, move them round and plug in at will, works via Bluetooth Brilliant set up now Sky

I’d have thought the ban on mixing with others inside is the main one that’s bringing the R number down

Another interesting piece on Sky News regarding South Korea Similar sized population to ours, located much more densely though, yet they have only had 500 deaths (100x better than us) whilst their economy has only contracted by 1% (at least 10x better) They had the Track and Trace software ready to go on March 21st (following MERS in 2015) and it’s helped reduce the spread all the way through so the economy can stay open. The data mining that they do on their population before, during and after the Pandemic is at the centre of their track and trace ability. Human rights groups have criticised the South Koreans in the past for this However, would you be happy for the U.K. government to have much greater ability to leverage all of our data to make the country safer and more efficient? Would certainly help us avoid another catastrophic pandemic

Interesting read (bit of a beast) A plethora of unintended consequences that have seemingly been overlooked when making decisions

I don’t think anyone is willing to kill old people, it’s just that plenty are unwilling to flush large chunks of the economy down the toilet for what could have been years In one of the press conferences recently one of the advisors (think it was Whitty) said that if the Vaccine wasn’t so close then they wouldn’t have been recommending another lockdown. As a strategy it’s becomes less and less sustainable the longer the pandemic goes on. You’d end up in a place where you have no finances left to fund a health service as we know it so the damage becomes worse than the virus (we could well be close to that point anyway) I think most supported lockdown 1, less so for lockdown 2. If it went into another year or even two then I think you’d have found public opinion would have been less and less supportive of multiple lockdowns as it went on. They knew this in March when they talked about lockdown fatigue If we have another one in our lifetime you’d think we would be much better prepared. The Far East countries are well drilled so got out the blocks quick and very decisively. They also benefited from having much greater power over their people (the ability to track people using mobile data etc). We had to create a lot of laws from scratch and rush them through Although god forbid we have another one in our lifetime, worst of all imagine if it was like the Spanish Flu that attacked middle age people. In many ways we have been lucky that with Covid the vulnerable groups generally aren’t the key workers who we need to run the country in lockdown (health workers, food production, utilities etc). If a Spanish Flu came along then who the fuck would keep everything going, we’d all starve to death long before the virus got us

To be fair to previous generations they paid most of the WW2 debt of themselves, it was 250% of GDP at the end of the war and only 50% of GDP 30 years later in 1975. If we were paying it off in the early 200’s it will have been very small numbers. Debt as a % of GDP was about 30% before the 2008 crash, 80% before Covid, its 110% now and likely to get to 150% over the coming years given the budget deficit. I’d say we have a duty to get that down on our watch just as previous generations did following WW2 £0.05 in the £1 tax increase sounds like nothing, however for the average salary (£30,500) it would see additional tax of £1k per year, that’s £83 a month more tax (take home down from £2k to £1,920 Your costs don’t come down, if anything they will be going up (council tax, food, mortgage etc). As a % of disposable income that tax rose is going to be a fair old chunk Unintended consequence of that is a lot less disposable income to spend, that will hit many industries really hard, most of them will be the ones hardest hit through Covid. Won’t do the unemployment numbers any good, with it our budget deficit as we pay more in benefits and bring in less tax

Aye, think it will be more of a freeze (or small gain) for some key services like Policing and the NHS rather than cuts, but in reality they will be called cuts given it’s a reduction in spending vs what was on the table. From 2010 to 2020 the NHS budget went up 10% yet the opposition party continually referred to it as ‘cuts to the NHS’ for this reason With regards Pensions, I’d like to see Public sector pensions get scaled back as well, certainly for higher rate tax payers working in the Public Sector. Its only fair if we are taking 15% out of higher rate tax payers in the Private Sector. I assume that’s on the table? Sure I read somewhere that the annual bill for Public Sector pensions is currently £40bn or £50bn a year, that’s about 6% of all government spending. On top of the £100bn state pension costs each year which is another 10-15%. Just think nearly 20p in every £1 spent by the government goes on pensions!

In terms of other countries, our GDP has been hit the hardest (apart from arguably Spain). In some cases our hit has been x2 or even x3 times worse than other comparable nations (France, Germany, US & Italy).most of which have a service sector the same size as ours. So you’d assume their debt and budget deficits will also be much smaller (given GDP has a direct correlation with tax and budget deficits) The pension relief will go as that doesn’t take money out of peoples pockets now so won’t have a negative impact on the economy now, think that only generates £4bn though. The pension triple lock will (and should) bite the dust, no reason why state pensions should outperform inflation year on year. That’s saved another £6bn, however it’s £6bn straight out of pensioners pockets so it will likely impact the grey economy. Basic rate tax, higher rate tax and VAT will surely have to go up, but again your taking billions out of peoples pockets immediately so they can’t spend the same and it impacts the jobs market now also. Meaning your struggling to re employ the millions who have just been made redundant through no fault of their own This foreign aid is a hot topic, you can make a case for scrapping it as much as you can for keeping it, that’s £10bn a year I think the NHS will have to kiss good by to all the extra money promised at the last election. Won’t go down well but it’s a huge chunk of money we can ill afford. Given the NHS required something daft like +5% a year to stand still in terms of what it can do I’d say we need to look at reducing its scope unfortunately In terms of passing all this debt on, I’m personally not comfortable leaving it all for future generations to sort out, it’s our mess, we have had the benefit so we should at least try to get it in better shape over the next 10 / 20 years. I think our national debt is now 3 times what it was 10 years ago when all major parties said it’s too high, unsustainable and needs bringing down (Gordon Brown, Cameron, Clegg at the 2010 election)

This economic picture is looking worse by the day Circa £400bn of additional debt taken on this year, higher now as a % of GDP than it’s been since it was in the 1950’s following WW2. The best case scenario saying our economy will always be -3% behind where it would have been otherwise We also need to find a way to close a £40bn a year gap in annual finances. To close that, as an example, we would need to either a) Close down all high schools b) reduce our NHS budget by 30% c) increase the basic rate of income tax from 20% to 27% d) a combination of loads of different tax rises and spending cuts. That’s just to keep the debt flat, we will need to go further if we want to pay the debt down to a more reasonable level so we aren’t leaving our kids and grandkids a bag of shit. Who knows, they may have a pandemic of their own to pay for in a few decades, we shouldn’t be asking them to pay ours as well because we couldn’t stomach the bill

They are currently getting dogs abuse on our local FB group as their internet has been intermittent at best in recent weeks, some major fault somewhere apparently

Aye, of course, but the point was they will be expecting a Winter Flu surge soon 30m vaccines (vs the the normal 15m) with restrictions in place that reduce all viruses spreading makes me think they won’t have any issues that way Winter Flu deaths are down -98% YTD which tells its own story (if correct of course)

According to this... https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsduetocoronaviruscovid19comparedwithdeathsfrominfluenzaandpneumoniaenglandandwales/deathsoccurringbetween1januaryand31august2020 ‘and 394 deaths due to influenza.’ It also has the 5 year average at over 17k on the Bar chart further down But we are agreed, the NHS won’t be needing to worry about any huge spikes of flu cases over the next couple of months

Surely they aren’t expecting much of an influx due to Winter Flu? So far this year only 300 have died from flu (if numbers are to be believed) vs the normal average of 17,000 I’d imagine the restrictions in place for Covid will also reduce Winter Flu transmission, both here and abroad, I wonder if the Southern Hemisphere Winter Flu was lower this year? That normally comes our way Add that to the fact 30m are being vaccinated for it this Winter this year vs the usual 15m and I doubt Hospitals have anything to worry about that way

Not far off the border with Merseyside, our favourite pub is just over the other side, we go a lot. Wouldn’t mind taking the Mrs as we had to cancel her Birthday meal a few weeks back It’s just bizarre that an elderly couple 70+, who pose a substantially greater risk to the NHS can go there no problem, yet it will be breaking / bending the rules if we go. It’s only a few miles away ffs If you can ask for people to observe different restrictions based on a patchwork of postcodes across the country then you can also ASK the vulnerable groups to avoid X, Y & Z places for a few weeks more until they get vaccinated. Let’s face it, anyone over 70 shouldn't be going into a pub or restaurant until they have been vaccinated, fuck knows why that’s not on the table here

If you live on / close to a boarder (i.e Lancs & Liverpool) I assume you can go for a meal in the Tier 2 region