RandoEFC

There's a guy called John Burn-Murdoch on Twitter who works for the Financial Times and does a lot of reliable and informative graph work. He posted an initial analysis of the outbreak in South Africa yesterday. The headlines are that compared to their previous waves, cases are rising faster this time, but hospitalisations are increasing at about the same rate, suggesting that the increased infectiousness of this strain is being somewhat 'cancelled out' by a slightly lower proportion of cases resulting in serious illness, the net result being that this strain puts similar pressures on the health system as previous ones, so not bad news or good. Pretty big caveats are that it's still very early days, and that the prevalence of cases in South Africa at the moment are in younger age groups compared to previous waves. Also the data at this stage is less reliable than most of what he publishes as the data received from hospitals in South Africa is very variable on a day-to-day basis. People who are interested should go and give him a follow on Twitter. It's all pure maths and science presented in easily digestible graphs. Not the sort of guy who projects his own opinions or desire to be acknowledged onto the information he shares.

What has the UK actually done to be an overreaction though? Return to face masks in crowded spaces and slightly more stringent testing measures to people entering the country? It's hardly tyrannical is it? We saw the devastation wrought by the Alpha and Delta variants before, taking some precaution against another mutation which we know nothing about other than there's a high risk of it dodging the vaccine a bit better is sensible. I'm not sure about the countries going for lockdowns and full border closures. Seems like an overreaction but none of us know yet.

I do worry that elements of the media and the scientific community have a certain subconscious streak in them (note my wording here please) are actually almost partially happy when things threaten to flare up again because it benefits them, a bit like Arsenal Fan TV actually enjoy it when Arsenal are shit. For news outlets, Covid drama generates hits and attention for them. Same for some of the scientific experts, if they've enjoyed their moment in the sun being invited on television and radio programs to share their expertise, then fair play to them in the first instance, but you can see some of them getting over-excited again at times like these where uncertainty creeps back in and people are looking for answers. It's annoying because there have been points in the pandemic where some experts have over-reacted to a new twist in the tale and it can cause unnecessary panic. It also gives the various factions of nut-jobs (anti-vaxx, lockdown-sceptic, conspiracy theorist, etc, etc) ammunition.

While I wouldn't trust GB News as far as I could throw them, there is merit in this suggestion. We've seen new strains become dominant because they're more transmissible and if a less lethal, more transmissible strain becomes dominant, that would obviously be good in a way. Can't get too carried away with this mindset though. More transmission means more chance of a new mutation which is more lethal and transmissible becoming dominant. Bit of a problem if not enough people have natural immunity yet, or if said new strain can dodge previously built natural immunity because the mutations make it unrecognisable to the antibodies. Even if Omicron is only equally dangerous to Delta or slightly less, that's still not great because a 50% increase in cases could lead to a 50% increase in hospitalisations and fatalities. Still, it can't be bad news coming out of South Africa that none of their Omicron cases have been hospitalised yet. The sample size is too small to be jumping up and down, but it's the best news you can have at this stage, especially as we're more likely to be talking about unvaccinated people in those countries. If they're coping then in theory, fingers crossed, populations with a higher vaccination level shouldn't be too heavily at threat. Too early to jump to that conclusion but we'll probably know a lot more in the next couple of weeks.

Good use of the emoji to stop anyone jumping down your throat but you are bang on. My housemate spent all of yesterday complaining about it being an overreaction and "what's the point in living if we're going to do this every time there's a new strain". In reality he's just annoyed because he was meeting a French girl in London in a few weeks that he probably can't do anymore. The world hasn't gone mad, if you look at it objectively, it's sensible to take precautions now. We don't know if this new variant is more dangerous but it might be, and it seems more than likely that it transmits easier. Our problem is that we've all got complacent. The first lockdowns were horrible, we were led to believe by politicians that the vaccine was the quick fix that would end it all and we all wanted to believe it so the scientists and advisors saying hang on, the pandemic isn't over just yet, were largely ignored. We're bored of there being a pandemic and we obviously therefore don't want to believe there might be more sacrifice to come. It's only a potential setback though. Some people seem to be very upset that the vaccine was a waste of time if it didn't end the pandemic in one fell swoop. Covid has been a beast though and it was never going to be that simple. We're following a two steps forward, one step back model here. The vaccines were two steps forward, a new variant is a step back, the Pfizer pill that prevents the majority of Covid cases ending up in hospitalisations that would have is another two steps forward, etc. All of the vaccine manufacturers have said they can roll out a new vaccine within a few months to respond to Omicron if they need to. I'd imagine getting too opinionated in any direction at this point is going to be overly emotional and an overreaction. We are still in a pandemic though so as fed up as everyone is of it, we should still act with caution, take precautions where possible and be patient while science and medicine finish winning this war (and they will). It sucks a bit having to miss out on a few more trips away and wear a piece of cloth over your face but it isn't the end of the world. And there's still a chance this whole Omicron threat fizzles out. It feels unlikely but nobody is calling for mass lockdowns or closed borders yet.

Flu is one thing, Covid-19 is around 2-3 times more infectious as influenza though, and that's going off the 2020 data which doesn't account for the increased transmissibility of the Beta variant from Kent and then the Delta variant from India. We heard early on that the natural "R" number for Covid-19 was around 3, while for flu it's around 1.3. This means that if 100 people in a community have the flu, then they'll pass it on to 130 people before they themselves recover from it. Those 130 people will infect roughly 169 people, they will infect 220 people, and then they will go on to infect 282 people. In reality, if people stay at home when they're sick and avoid coughing on others and stuff, this increase can be stemmed pretty easily within reason as long as people get flu jabs and follow basic hygiene. You take the R number up from 1.3 to 3 though (and the studies I've just looked up suggest that the now dominant Delta variant has an R number of more like 5). Start with 100 infected people in a community. They will pass it on to 300 people before they recover if they go about their lives pretty normally. 300 will become 900, then 2700, then 8100 by the fourth set of infections, compared to 282 from the flu's R number of 1.3. This is why the comparisons between influenza and Covid-19 are only relevant up to a point. The symptoms may be similar and if you have 8100 patients with flu in your city at once it might well be as bad as having 8100 patients with Covid-19. The level of infectiousness of each virus makes a massive difference though in how much you should do to track and suppress the case numbers where possible. What the vaccine does is decrease the rate at which Covid-19 cases become hospitalisations and deaths. The flu jab does essentially the same thing for those in vulnerable groups each year. If you have an unvaccinated population then you might be hitting 10,000 cases a day in the UK before that starts to overwhelm hospitals and require intervention from the government. With a fully vaccinated population, you might be able to hover around 50,000 cases a day without causing a problem for the NHS because less of those cases are translating into hospital beds being used up and people dying. It's just maths at the end of the day. And the maths is clear - those countries with high levels of vaccination are seeing less infections turn into hospitalisations, and have seen the rate of transmission decreased as well. What is worrying is that if the new strain has a higher R number than the Delta variant, which it sounds like it does, and it dodges the vaccines with even 25% more success than the strains we've been dealing with to date, over time those slight increases compound to cause a bigger problem, which is the curse of exponential growth. The numbers I've given you above demonstrate that a disease which gets typically transmitted to 3 other people instead of about 1.5 on average might not sound that much worse but causes a pretty big fucking problem over a longer period of time, and that is why it's disingenuous to keep shrugging Covid-19 off as largely similar to the flu in this context.

People can still acquire natural immunity by catching the virus after being vaccinated and it's much safer to catch it having had the vaccine. Not rocket science, mate.

I thought they caught the Hong Kong case as a returning traveller. Has it gone beyond that? Seems like we might be having another 'Delta' moment. Big test for the vaccines - hopefully in vaccinated populations we'll see deaths remain relatively low even if cases go wild. Problem is that even in the UK, hospitals have been close to the brink after the vaccine programme while cases have remained between 30k-50k a day. If this new variant pushes that even 50% higher we could have serious problems. That's not to mention the countries with lower vaccination rates. I dread to think what happens in those countries if this variant is as dangerous as suspected. We were all saying it a year ago, how the rich countries would hoard the vaccines, promise to share them out loudly enough to make people feel alright about it but vaguely enough to get away with not really following through with it. We are a really predictable species at the end of the day aren't we. Hopefully this is a false alarm.

Well we can distract as much as we like but you've made an assumption about those three players, one of them hasn't even had the vaccine so that put's the "must have been the vaccine claim" 1-0 down. At the very least you now need to prove that one of the other two players not only had the vaccine, but collapsed because of it, just to level the score.

New variant originating in Botswana has quickly become the dominant strain there and in parts of South Africa. Suggestion it has advantages in evading the vaccine and immune responses even over the Delta variant. Early days, hopefully just a blip but one to keep an eye on. Good to see the UK learning from past mistakes and acting ahead of time which they didn't do with India and Delta. Low bar to clear but hey.

I haven't read the thread so I don't know if I'm being the first to stick my neck out, probably not, but my gut feeling is that Poch and Man Utd somehow won't work out either. Don't ask me to explain it because it certainly should be one of the best options for them, just feels like it still won't pan out.

He's tailed off a bit but I wouldn't say he's been poor. Thing is that average is something worth fighting for when the backup is Iwobi.

Sunak/Truss in charge by the next election selling another "we're not like the old Tories from the last 5 elections" Tory campaign that the electorate fall for again?

LOL. Relegation scrap.

Lockdowns have been used as a last resort to buy time while science catches up. We were so determined to believe that the vaccines would fix everything that we mostly just fell for it. Now the UK is reporting about 200 deaths a day again which has been lockdown territory in the past but at least you know it's hit something of a ceiling. Talk of restrictions barely creeps into the public space now because people are so fed up by it. That pill Pfizer had approved the other week was another step in the right direction though, supposedly preventing 90% of cases of Covid becoming serious enough for hospitalisation. It's going to continue to be a case of mitigating against overwhelming hospitals and cases and deaths spiralling out of control again, and keep hoping that science and medicine does its job with these tools like that Pfizer pill adding to our toolkit to quash the virus. The much-maligned herd immunity will come into it as well, with cases of people catching Covid for a second time remaining low, which is a good sign this far into the pandemic as to how effective natural immunity has proved to be.

Horrible story developing in China as Chinese player Shuai Peng appears to have gone off the grid. She accused a top Chinese official of sexually assaulting her, has since deleted the social media post with the allegation and hasn't been heard of since November 2nd. Chinese state media have released an email supposedly from Shuai Peng to the WTA claiming that everything is fine. Hopefully she's alright but it doesn't sound good.

I would actually like to add some views of my own instead of just persistently challenging the anti-vaxx stuff. Health workers - I'm theoretically in favour of it being compulsory for health and care workers to get the vaccine because of the infectious nature of the virus and their regular exposure to vulnerable people. In practice though, at least in the UK where the NHS and social care are essentially in a constant state of crisis, it seems counter-productive to go as far as laying off thousands of staff that they can't afford to lose and I don't think it's an invalid point that it will cause a bigger, broader problem than continuing to employ unvaccinated staff. I do think that those who don't have a medical reason not to get the jab are being irresponsible in this instance if they don't have it, but I know very little of their lives and I have the utmost respect for people who choose caring for others as their profession, so I'm hesitant to go in two-footed on them and the threat of unemployment to coerce them into getting it done doesn't feel right to me. Children - I've seen first hand the chaos Covid has wreaked on kids' education. We've had a few waves at my place which basically brings your classes to a standstill or forces kids to miss loads of lesson time while isolating. However, the majority of kids do miss a week of school here and there to flu or whatever else. The risk posed by potential vaccine side-effects compared to the potential long-term effects of Covid itself are up for debate to an extent although you have to trust the medical bodies who have approved it. If I had kids I'd probably want them to get the vaccine, but it's one tool in suppressing the amount of chaos it's causing in education. The guidance is to leave windows open and get the ventilation going, etc. which at this time of year is really difficult with the weather and temperatures. Ultimately though, I don't think it makes a huge difference whether kids get the jab or whether they don't and end up missing two weeks of school with an illness. Individually, I can see why they wouldn't do it but there's no doubt that if there were widespread vaccinations among school-age children the effect of decreasing the spread of the virus would accumulate and become worthwhile.

You present "suspected adverse effect" figures as hard fact and less than a page later you're pedalling the "inflated Covid death figures" again. This is what I was talking about earlier. Guy with Covid gets hit by a bus, you lot are all like "I bet the government will count that as a Covid death bloody ridiculous", guy that's had the vaccine gets hit by a bus "yet another death from the vaccine 99.9% blah blah blah". You can't have it both ways. I've spent most of this debate assuming you at least partially had your tongue in your cheek but it's genuinely worrying if you think it's a credible position to paint "suspected adverse effects" as hard evidence of vaccine deaths and accuse the numbers of Covid deaths as being inflated.

Yeah if I was Labour I'd probably accept the prospect of coalition with SNP and just make sure I won enough seats in England and Wales to deny the Tories enough seats for a majority. Got to have a plan for the independence referendum though because if Scotland leave the UK we're probably consigned to permanent Tory rule. Anyway, came in this thread with nothing new, but every so often I get surprised again at the openness with which the Conservative party tells us exactly who they are (a lot of them anyway) whilst still being able to convince enough of the country that they're acting in their interests to stay almost constantly in power.

I didn't say anything about steroids did I? And I was talking about the Fox News morons anyway, not you. No offence but we've gone way past the point of there being any point in engaging with you on any of this stuff.

The right wing who call everyone who disagrees with them snowflakes once again doing Olympic-level mental gymnastics and Covid fan-fiction because wearing a mask and putting a needle in their arm for half a second is far too scary for them.

This is still rumbling on. They're now evacuating an entire street in Liverpool at one of the properties raided in connection to the explosion. Police have been arriving for hours including negotiators.

Yeah it's one poll and the election is a long way off but it's interesting in that second scenario that the only possible majority government would he a LAB-SNP or CON-SNP coalition. Probably whichever one agrees to a second independence referendum. Both major parties need to work out what their strategy is for convincing Scottish people that they should vote to stay with the UK again instead of just trying to figure out how to deny them the referendum, which seems to be the only strategy the current government have up their sleeves.

Oh boy, popcorn o'clock.