Coronavirus - is enough being done to contain it?

I wonder if the scheduler who rearranged the schedule, knew that would likely happen?


sums him up perfectly tbh when doing an address

Herd immunity is the final common pathway to defeating the virus as a disease. There is no other option. How you get there is the question. There are 2 routes: mass vaccination and natural spread of the virus. The vaccine is months away.

No Rake there is only one solution which is mass vaccination because the alternative is accepting that the forecasts earlier this year of 500,000 deaths is the solution. I'm sure that is not what any sane person would recommend but I'm sure some lunatics would send my elderly relatives to their deaths if they could party. In fact why not speed up the process and use the empty trains to transport anyone with a pre-existing condition to a death camp to speed up he process.

I've seen some scum already today saying why do all this when the death rate is only 1%. Well the UK population is just over 66 million which would equate to 660,000 deaths.

Obey the rules for the love of god people!

Vaccine is months away but how far away is herd immunity ? A considerable time longer I'd wager, assuming herd immunity is even possible with Covid in the short to medium term. In the meantime the elderly and people with compromised immune systems (I'm one of them) would have to basically cut ourselves off from the rest of the populace to accommodate this herd immunity response, not really fair or feasible. Not all hope is on the vaccine though, check this out, possible anti-viral treatment shows promise.

https://www.rte.ie/amp/1166648/

Here we go - another Raab spanner in the works.....

Dominic Raab warns that a second lockdown may be needed.....'if the current measures don't work'

Israel has already imposed a second national lockdown.....And as usual we are probably going to be lagging behind the rest of Europe if European countries end up doing the same thing as Israel .

Boris also said yesterday (in parliament) - that track and trace "does not stop the spread of the virus" WTF? Ludicrous so if the trace and track doesn't stop what is the fucking point of having it in thr fucking first place? I get the feeling he will end up abandoning it. This Government's ineptness is there for
all to see.

Finland are bringing in specially trained dogs at their airports to sniff out passengers with Covid.

It's a pilot trial.

^The Sniffer Dogs were first mentioned a couple of months ago, there was a trial running in Milton Keynes. They're supposed to be extremely reliable.

(22-09-2020 20:45 )SecretAgent Wrote:  No Rake there is only one solution which is mass vaccination because the alternative is accepting that the forecasts earlier this year of 500,000 deaths is the solution. I'm sure that is not what any sane person would recommend but I'm sure some lunatics would send my elderly relatives to their deaths if they could party. In fact why not speed up the process and use the empty trains to transport anyone with a pre-existing condition to a death camp to speed up he process.

I've seen some scum already today saying why do all this when the death rate is only 1%. Well the UK population is just over 66 million which would equate to 660,000 deaths.

Obey the rules for the love of god people!

Both my elderly parents are vulnerable due to their age and other conditions and both have just been accepted onto the Oxford Vaccine clinical trial, so will get regime variants of the vaccine early, in the next couple of months. I wasn't advocating sacrificing half a million people, simply stating facts.

This problem in my view requires a more nuanced, age-risk stratified containment and protection response rather than the crude, blunt instrument of pan-societal lockdowns because this shit ain't going away any time soon and the damage to the economy and livelihoods and the consequent mental and other health morbidity deaths (suicides, cancer etc etc.) will overtake the Covid toll. We won't be getting vaccinated until next spring/summer at the earliest and it will be the elderly and vulnerable first (quite rightly of course). Then there is the question of if the immunity it confers is lasting or not...quite possibly not, meaning boosters or updated vaccines annually similar to the flu vaccine programme.

Indeed. The timetable for mass vaccinations will be extensive. And the capacity is no where near yet either: https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-va...ute-2020-9
(The original FT interview is paywalled.)

London St Pancras has deployed robots, they look like air purifiers on wheels, that go about the station emitting ultraviolet light that apparently kills the virus & pretty much all bacteria

In regards to herd immunity by natural infection, a heated debate over such a point developed between Senator Dr. Rand Paul & Dr Anthony Fauci during the latter's congressional hearing in the Senate in which Paul an ophthalmologist favors herd immunity by natural infection & Fauci an immunologist & Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 36 yrs raises several problems with that approach, also citing the Director of the Center for Disease Control



In addition to that here is an article published by The Mayo Clinic, one of the most prestigious & regarded medical institutes in the world (ranked number 1 in the United States for 2019-20 U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll), in regards to herd immunity

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-cond...t-20486808

"However, there are some major problems with relying on community infection to create herd immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19. First, it isn't yet clear if infection with the COVID-19 virus makes a person immune to future infection.

Research suggests that after infection with some coronaviruses, reinfection with the same virus — though usually mild and only happening in a fraction of people — is possible after a period of months or years. Further research is needed to determine the protective effect of antibodies to the virus in those who have been infected.

Even if infection with the COVID-19 virus creates long-lasting immunity, a large number of people would have to become infected to reach the herd immunity threshold. Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the epidemic. If many people become sick with COVID-19 at once, the health care system could quickly become overwhelmed. This amount of infection could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions."

This was why the UK Government abandoned it's original herd immunity strategy because the projections were that the health system would be completely overwhelmed, hence the "Protect the NHS" part of the slogan. The whole point of the lockdown was not beat the virus it was to buy us time in order to establish an affective and robust test, track & trace system, the Government completely failed in doing so & now after opening up again we are unsurprisingly going backwards.

My cousins volunteered for track & trace & said that they spent most of the time doing nothing. My sister had to get a test after someone she was socialising with tested positive, she got the all clear but track & trace did not contact her until 9 days after at which point they just told her to isolate for the remaining 5 days (how many people could she of infected in that time had she not known) & there was a story about a plane for a small airline company that had an outbreak of the virus & the company only found out that this had happened on one of their planes when The Guardian contacted them for comment because track & trace hadn't got round to it yet

On top of that testing is an absolute mess. My sister was clearly one of the lucky ones because people have struggled to test, up to 750K requests unanswered every day. Demand is said to be outstripping means by 3 or 4 to 1 & The head of Test & Trace, Dido Harding, told the Commons Science & Technology committee that they were not expecting a surge in cases.