Re the 1.5%, my understanding is that yes the quick tests have significant false positives but each positive test is re-checked with PCR.
It is almost impossible to find out stuff on google. There is clearly a lot of hands-on “information suppression” taking place about actual working practices.
UK not doing great right now – from here
with the rise due to small regions where there are “different social factors” (partly people not giving a sh*it and living for the night down the pub, partly vaccination refusal, and partly specific ethnic communities). Most of the new cases are the Indian variant, which is already on the mainland but has not got going yet, and nearly all are unvaccinated.
However I honestly do not understand why the UK mandates tests for people with 2 vaccines plus 14 days?
Extreme-PC. The political opposition is smelling blood (they always do) and has aligned itself behind the “solidarity at all costs” position. So the politicians are screwed.
What does not help is that the govt has repeatedly stated it will follow scientific advice, but scientists’ salaries are practically 100% secure regardless of the economic situation, so they are ultra cautious. If they did something contrary to “scientific advice” and the outcome was bad, they would get hammered, and this has happened before.
Also vacc certificates from certain countries would always be totally worthless – another PC challenge.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Which means you will not leave the country unless no more tests are required? Makes sense.
Probably. Depending on the setup – e.g. if you are processed and given a (free) test when arriving at say Heathrow and a +ve just means isolating at home then that might be tolerable. But then I find airline travel unpleasant enough at the best of times – all the waiting around and being processed – so I’m not really keen on anything that adds extra hassle.
I have no real need to travel abroad. I enjoy France, the United States and Greece in particular, but it isn’t the end of the world for me if foreign holidays have to wait for another year or two. There is plenty to see and do in the UK.
Peter wrote:
and partly specific ethnic communities
I would say the India variant surge is almost entirely this, nothing to do with pubs.
Certain ethnic communities live very closely together, distrust everyone outside it and do mostly as their ‘community leaders’ direct. They also travel to the Indian subcontinent a lot. Vaccine refusal/apathy will run high in these communities, and while overall takeup in a region/town is high you will have pockets even down to the street level where very few people are vaccinated and the virus can spread like wildfire. They also have poorer general health than the wider population, so the ratio of hospitalisation to infection will be higher.
I take the figures with a pinch of salt, bearing in mind that the UK continues to perform ~1m test each day which is many times more, on a per head of population basis, than nearly all other European countries. Our government is also doing a lot of ‘surge testing’ – where the moment you detect an infection hotspot you move in and try to test pretty much all the population, symptoms or not. Seek and ye shall find…
I would say the India variant surge is almost entirely this, nothing to do with pubs.
I partly agree, but why so focused geographically?
Certain ethnic communities live very closely together, distrust everyone outside it and do mostly as their ‘community leaders’ direct. They also travel to the Indian subcontinent a lot.
Exactly.
Also India is a country Boris wants to do a trade deal with, and in the shorter term buy some vaccine from, so one’s options are limited. They “fortunately” banned vaccine exports which made it politically possible to put them on the red list but if they restore them, the problem will return 
Peter wrote:
dumb to base policy
A lot of the policies are dumb, and at this point the UK seems to be missing the transition – with vaccination coverage high, and with very low rates of severe disease, the number of infections DOES NOT MATTER. It also does not matter if infected people enter the country because the majority of the population is protected.
Peter wrote:
Extreme-PC. The political opposition is smelling blood (they always do) and has aligned itself behind the “solidarity at all costs” position. So the politicians are screwed.
Well, for me this is an issue which may well cause a 4th or whereever we are now wave, as readiness to vaccine will obviously not be motivated with this kind of behaviour.
Peter wrote:
Also vacc certificates from certain countries would always be totally worthless – another PC challenge.
Ok, but here we are talking about the UK not reckognizing their own certificates or rather not honoring their own citizen/resident’s efforts. This is plain stupid.
We now will see how the situation develops here. The app for the certificate has just com online for android as well, only the certificates are not yet here.
Peter wrote:
I partly agree, but why so focused geographically?
Localised seeding I guess – they come back from India or wherever and it spreads among their close-living, vaccine-hesitant community.
Note that vaccine-hesitant has a slightly different meaning when I use it here. I’m not talking about people who are worried about side effects or believe anti-vax conspiracy theories, I’m talking about people (mostly the women in these communities) who do not do anything unless it is recommended/arranged/sanctioned by their menfolk and ‘community leaders’. People who rarely access healthcare or any other state-offered service as a (perhaps not so free) lifestyle choice.
It’s no coincidence that the outbreaks are in Bolton / Blackburn etc rather than Chipping Norton or Stow-on-the-Wold.
The government of course can’t / won’t mention this, but presumably they collect ethnicity statistics on infections and hospitalisations. I cannot remember whether or not I ticked an ethnicity box the one time I had a test, PROB90 it was part of the online booking process.
Interesting how the sentiment in this thread has changed over just 6 weeks.
6 weeks ago there was a clear “UK is doing so great because we vaccinate so many while Germany is messing up vaccination and establishes a comparatively hard lockdown which is completely useless”.
Now, as numbers go up again in the UK it is suddenly "well, yes, but it is isolated communities – basically “the others” – and …".
It gets harder to ignore the three simple facts:
- Even in UK the vaccination rate is not yet high enough establish sufficient protection against a new wave.
- As long as that is the case, the only thing that effectively protects against a new wave is to avoid close physical human to human contact (aka “social distancing”)
- If people do not do social distancing by themselves, there is the need of government measures (both rules as well as effective enforcement) if one wants to avoid a next wave.
Not at all, my sentiment hasn’t changed and it is what it is. Vaccination rollout and delivery is a large but relatively trivial logistics exercise. No-one has ‘done great’ or ‘messed up’, the question was and is simply one of supply.
The rapid spread of the India variant in the UK is largely in isolated communities, spilling out a bit obviously but that is where it is concentrated, brought back from well…. India.
I would suggest the vaccination numbers in the UK (I cannot comment on elsewhere) are large enough to establish protection against a new wave of such size that it becomes a public health emergency and warrants government intervention. Peter quoted some numbers earlier about how few of the hospitalisation cases were vaccinated.
I am not saying there will not be a rise in cases, hospitalisations and deaths. But it will not be on anything like the scale of the previous waves and whether it warrants government intervention is a purely political question. The popular narrative is that the government is responsible for everything, no covid death can be tolerated and that it must be completely stamped out whatever the cost. I disagree with that, as you might imagine.
