aintforever

There is plenty to read on the subject without just listening to what Whitty and Bozo have to say on their news conferences.

I don't listen to a word that fat sack of shite says, only a fool would put their trust in politicians especially the Torys. Listen to the doctors and scientists.

It's all good. I expect once we are past this wave it wont be long before it becomes endemic and it will just be like the flu with yearly jabs for those that want it. All depends how it mutates though I suppose.

They have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, most sensible people understood what the modelling is for. Problem is they do the worst case modelling (which they have to do), the media pick up on it and make sensationalist headlines with some scary graphics and some people don't understand the context, and either shit them selves or think it's some big conspiracy.

It's always a balancing act and we are still yet to see how many hospitalisations the NHS will have to deal with but the priority has to be health and the NHS. The government just need to make sure decent compensation is available to businesses effected.

Agree with this. I hate the scruffy fat cunt with a passion but we were right to take precautionary measures until more was known about the virus. Not sure why anyone is wetting their pants over it, we can still go out and get pissed up and go to a football match/nightclub/strip club whatever.

They obviously want people to be jabbed with two doses before they classify them as vaccinated - what's the big deal?

I guess the vaccines take while to take effect so you are not fully vaccinated until some time after your second jab. Makes sense.

I would email Chris Whitty or an epidemiologist if you want to know more about it if I were you. There are obviously a lot of factors involved such as age of population, geography of the country, previous exposure and effectiveness of vaccines. It should become clearer in the next couple of weeks or so.

How well two vaccines can stop serious illness is obviously one of the things SAGE are working out, it looks like they help make illness less severe which is great. But this variant has a huge ability to bypass immune protection and cause breakthrough infections and as it spreads way faster it will reach more vulnerable people quicker, it's right we are taking precations while SAGE works out the risks.

What, the WHO website that also says: "Countries should continue to implement the effective public health measures to reduce COVID-19 circulation overall, using a risk analysis and science-based approach. They should increase some public health and medical capacities to manage an increase in cases. " I'm pretty sure that's what Bozo is doing.

It's not my research, I'm guessing confirmed cases is different to actual cases, the more a country tests the more confirmed cases there are. The point of the article is that each country will have to work out how the virus could possibly effect their populations, that's obviously what SAGE are doing now and why they are taking precautionary measures until they know more.

According to infectious disease specialist Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya and epidemiologist William Hanage that's not right. Maybe you should email them to let them know the findings of your research.

This is what the article said, as I said it’s American but the principle is the same just different numbers: As a country, South Africa had already gone through three massive COVID surges, as vaccination rates there remained low, compared to the U.S. and Europe. So, while only about a quarter of South Africans had been vaccinated when omicron finally arrived, the vast majority of residents had likely already been infected with previous variants of SARS-CoV-2. (Scientists have predicted this based on the excess mortality rate observed in the country through the pandemic.) Given this history, scientists say most South Africans already probably had some level of immune protection generated by these prior infections. "Thus, omicron enters a South African population with considerably more immunity than any prior SARS-CoV-2 variant," concluded Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya, an infectious disease specialist, and epidemiologist William Hanage in a recent paper published online. In other words, there are very few South Africans who have never been exposed to the coronavirus — either through a vaccine or a natural infection. That means the omicron infections happening in South Africa aren't, for the most part, primary infections, but rather secondary infections, also known as reinfections. Here's the thing about secondary infections from SARS-C0V-2: They tend, on average, to be milder, scientists have found. For example, a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that if you survive the first infection, it reduces the risk of severe illness from a second infection by about 90%. And thus, even before omicron hit South Africa, the population as a whole had built up a significant amount of immunity to COVID-19. A large proportion of people who were once — early in the pandemic — at high risk for severe disease, are now probably at a lower risk. This background level of immunity within a population muddies the water when trying to figure out if omicron causes more mild illness, according to Ryan Noach and his colleagues at Discovery Health. Given South Africa's current level of immunity, you would expect more mild illness – even if the omicron variant is actually just as dangerous as its predecessors. To put it another way, this background immunity only makes omicron appear less harmful. But what happens when omicron makes its way into a population without that background level of immunity? Bhattacharyya and Hanagepoint out another confounding factor: it's still early days. During the initial stages of a surge, the lag between cases and hospitalizations can make a new variant seem less severe — especially if the variant is also spreading much faster than previous variants, as omicron is doing now.

Different countries have different amounts of people who have been exposed. The article I read was American and it said SA had more people infected in the previous waves so their concern is that in the US there was a large amount of people who have had no exposure and are not vaccinated. As it is so contagious it will find them.

Think being previously infected doesn’t stop you catching it but makes serious illness less likely. This is why they are not sure yet wether the virus itself is milder or just that the high amounts of SA people who have already had it in previous waves makes it seem milder.

Do you not know how to use Google?

It’s a balancing act though isn’t it, if we didn’t lock down and the NHS gets complete overwhelmed with Covid patients even more cancer treatments will get effected. It’s a complex situation, SAGE will be more than aware of the negative effects of lockdown.

If the restrictions and vaccine roll out are working it makes sense that we are nowhere near the worst case scenario. Governments always use scare tactics in public health massaging, I’m not sure why you are wetting your pants over it.

True, but if Adrian’s daughter was overweight and died of COVID it would be no less tragic than if she were not. Youngsters getting vaccinated is a different issue to those more at risk but it still makes sense to help minimise spread IMO, agree it’s nothing like a fat middle aged man not being vaccinated though which is just dumb and selfish.

True, some young people are fat though.

Some young people get serious illness, I guess it’s pot luck.

Because Covid only exists on the BBC

Exactly. These bell-ends like to bang on about Nazi Germany but you have to wonder how pussies like this would have coped during the blitz, probably moan about how having to put up black-out curtains infringed their human rights. How hard is it just to put a mask on for a few minutes or show a qr code at the door of an event?