Interesting article. So what is the risk level of a vacced man aged 50 ?
I think as long as we target zero new cases, we will never get out of this. And the Davos/GAFA men will be happy 
We need some temporary hospitals dedicated to covid patients for next say 5 years, vaccines for the people at risk, and carry on with our lives.
Did any country hire and train new medical staff specialized in covid intensive care ?
In France, there are still today, and even during the worst times of covid, hospital beds being closed for cost cutting. Resilience has a price, hasn’t it ?
The social/psy/mental/youth problem come from the lockdowns, ie the general mishandling of the virus, not the virus itself.
Never ever, in human history, healthy people had been kept from walking around and even going to work in entire countries.
Now the virus will mute again, and we will all wait for the new vaccine which will save us all, and you know the rest …
As a pilot forum, it should be especially simple to understand how vaccination works on a population level and why a large share of vaccinated people is important.
Just think about anti collision systems. Everybody who wants to have one can buy and install one. So everybody at risk is protected, right? Why should we discuss anti collision systems (or any mandate to install them) at all?
As most SEP traffic (despite a few Non-TRXXers) is actually using a Transponder these days, there even is a anti collision system (TAS/TCAS) for those who want to protect themselfes against traffic that does not care about vaccination ah collision avoidance.
Very same with Covid vaccination: It is your own decision to protect yourself but even if you do, that only protects you to something around 75-85%. If nobody else is protected, that is not much. (Actually, if all others are not protected, the risk of actually getting Covid is btw. far higher than those 15-25%).
I think as long as we target zero new cases, we will never get out of this. And the Davos/GAFA men will be happy
Exactly.
We need some temporary hospitals dedicated to covid patients for next say 5 years, vaccines for the people at risk, and carry on with our lives.
Very much doubt new hospitals will be needed. The UK has about 20k die each winter just due to flu so there is plenty of capacity.
From DavidS’s article:
The PHE report also reveals that nearly a third of deaths from the Delta variant are of unvaccinated people over 50, which may be surprising given high vaccine coverage; for example, OpenSAFELY estimates more than 93% among the 65-69s. But there are lower rates in deprived areas and for some ethnicities and communities with limited coverage will continue to experience more than their fair share of loss.
That is a lot of people and over time that number should shrink, especially if vaccinated people get privileges e.g. travel with no quarantine. Here in the UK I can see queues of young people for the vaccine, just for this reason.
DavidS wrote:
“all the vulnerable are now protected”
…insofar as we are reasonably able to protect them. That is Spiegelhalter’s context, as I understand it.
I am glad that the position of the UK government is gradually shifting to one of ‘we cannot go on like this’, because clearly we cannot. It is not a government’s role to attempt to protect every citizen from an endemic respiratory infection with a relatively low mortality rate on a money-no-object, shut-everything-down basis.
We are going to see further variants, and we are going to see vaccine-resistant variants with the vaccine manufacturers chasing after them. We all wish it were not so, and while we might wish we could eradicate it we have to accept that it’s simply impossible. As well as now being endemic throughout the world, the virus is too transmissible and too mild in effect (meaning some very large % of cases go unnoticed) that it cannot be hunted down and cornered like ebola or smallpox.
As a counter to Spiegelhalter’s rational stance, you have guys like this getting column inches in the Guardian:
Stephen Reicher, a professor at the University of St Andrews who is also a member of the government subcommittee advising on behavioural science, said: “It is frightening to have a ‘health’ secretary who still thinks Covid is flu. Who is unconcerned at levels of infection. Who doesn’t realise that those who do best for health also do best for the economy. Who wants to ditch all protections while only half of us are vaccinated.”
He added: “Above all, it is frightening to have a ‘health’ secretary who wants to make all protections a matter of personal choice when the key message of the pandemic is: this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing.
As has been pointed out before, folks like this tend to have zero relevant stake in the economy with a role and salary that are secure no matter what happens. They are PROB99 absolutely happy to continue in a dystopian lockdown world forever because for them it’s just something extremely interesting happening at work – long may the interesting stuff keep happening and the media keep asking me for my opinion!
long may the interesting stuff keep happening and the media keep asking me for my opinion!
Exactly, but the funny aspect of this is that IF you are on any govt advisory committee, or in receipt of govt research funding (and quite a lot must be since R&D money is coming direct and not via Brussels now) then you can read only from a script. So each time they interview one of the well known faces, you get, guess what, exactly the same anodyne banal stuff, aimed at the totally thick. The most irritating current one is “the vaccine has weakened the link between infections and deaths” – that must be #3 on the crib sheet. It must be months since any of the “famous scientists” said anything on TV which was not completely anodyne banal and obvious.
My wife and I got our second AZ jab. The first jab created some mild side effects, but the second one zerodecimalzerozero. Maybe AZ is supplying water know, to save costs, and/or to prevent further hysterical trombodrama. On that topic, maybe I’m missing something, but I have not heard of any further deaths caused by trombosis. What’s behind that?
Airborne_Again wrote:
So clearly Sweden is handling the lightning hazard better than Norway does
Yes, obviously more and better tests, more to the point lightning social restrictions and higher lightning vaccination rate
DavidS wrote:
Which is largely true but has a twist to it.
That subject is on the headline in the news here today. 450 fully vaccinated have been infected by Covid. 26 of those have been hospitalized and 19 have died. Which means about 0.03% of the fully vaccinated gets Covid 19. It also means that about 13 per million will die from Covid even though they are (fully) vaccinated. To me it means Covid + Pfeizer has slightly better survivability odds than a shot with AZ and no Covid. hmmm
Peter wrote:
Exactly, but the funny aspect of this is that IF you are on any govt advisory committee, or in receipt of govt research funding (and quite a lot must be since R&D money is coming direct and not via Brussels now) then you can read only from a script.
The odd thing to me was that this particular bloke was being overtly critical of the health secretary. I wonder how long his role will last? I thought that they can advocate different courses of action, but direct criticism was off limits.
The UK has finally done it and is getting on with it, from 19 July.
Removal of quarantine for returns from abroad is still under discussion but seems highly likely. More detail in the Daily Trash.
gallois wrote:
It has been possible to have your jabs at 2 different places for a long time in France. As is having 2 different types of vaccine if wanted.
So why do the news state today that this rule had now been changed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/french-to-get-access-to-covid-jabs-on-holiday-including-at-the-beach
