Re: Vaccine passports
Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2021 2:16 am
We’re already struggling to cope. This is not something that’s coming in the next couple of months. We’re already in a terrible place where we have got large queues of ambulances with vulnerable people waiting in those ambulances to be offloaded into departments and other patients at home waiting to be picked up by the ambulance.
That’s the thing that really worries me; that these are patients who have not yet received treatment that we don’t necessarily know what’s wrong with them that we’re really struggling to get into our healthcare facilities to then work out what we need to do.
We didn’t go into the pandemic in a great place in emergency care. We didn’t have enough beds then. The problem is that things are worse at the moment so we need everybody to be as careful with the healthcare resources as they possibly can be, and try and minimise the need for healthcare resources.
So if we’ve got 8,000 patients in hospital who are suffering Covid, if we didn’t have those patients that would be another 8,000 beds in the system.
So every bed that gets filled by a patient with Covid in a sense is in a hospital bed with a potentially avoidable disease, and that’s what we need people to focus on if we want to get through the elective backlog.
"At the peak"? The peak in April 2020 was a weekly death rate of roughly 22,000 in England and Wales. Which was the last year in which the death rate was 22,000 per week for the whole year? If you think that needs correcting for the change in population size and age structure, then do it.sheldrake wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:16 pmHave you entertained the possibility that reports of the NHS struggling are because of supply and staff absence issues rather than massive numbers of additional people requiring treatment (referencing our mortality level which jumped up to.. 2009 norms at the peak).headshot wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:46 pm
The NHS, or at the very least, parts of it, are very much not coping adequately with the pressures added by having to deal with Covid and Flu, health leaders are sounding alarm bells because they’re concerned that the struggle to cope will tip into an inability to cope.
Deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test peaked at around 1400 per day in January 2021 https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths (we're currently running way below that)shpalman wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:38 am"At the peak"? The peak in April 2020 was a weekly death rate of roughly 22,000 in England and Wales. Which was the last year in which the death rate was 22,000 per week for the whole year? If you think that needs correcting for the change in population size and age structure, then do it.sheldrake wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:16 pmHave you entertained the possibility that reports of the NHS struggling are because of supply and staff absence issues rather than massive numbers of additional people requiring treatment (referencing our mortality level which jumped up to.. 2009 norms at the peak).headshot wrote: ↑Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:46 pm
The NHS, or at the very least, parts of it, are very much not coping adequately with the pressures added by having to deal with Covid and Flu, health leaders are sounding alarm bells because they’re concerned that the struggle to cope will tip into an inability to cope.
Mr Montgomery rejected a suggestion that the numbers being turned away was a sign the scheme was working properly in keeping unvaccinated people away from higher risk settings.
Of course there isn't any evidence that this is what brought cases down, but something brought cases down and something seems to be bringing them down again. So there's data which needs to be explained if we're to have any chance of guessing what's going to happen next.
Yes - as for lots of things we don't have an RCT.
You're not helping.bob sterman wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 10:58 amYes - as for lots of things we don't have an RCT.
Just as we don't have evidence that it was the parachutes that saved people from major trauma related to gravitational challenge...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
Or people voluntarily changing their behaviour before isolation orders go out, or testing errors, or some combination. What technique would you suggest to tease them apart?shpalman wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 10:48 am
Of course there isn't any evidence that this is what brought cases down, but something brought cases down and something seems to be bringing them down again. So there's data which needs to be explained if we're to have any chance of guessing what's going to happen next.
It's either that or the model of inhomogeneous spread such that covid quickly infects a cluster within a tightly-connected social group but an infected group has looser contact with as-yet uninfected groups.
That is why we need something stronger than vaccine passports. Right now it looks like the Tories think even passports will be too damaging to the economy, so they are going to dither a while longer.Do vaccine passports work? The COVID-19 task force has produced an analysis on introducing COVID certification for mass events for the proposed five-month Plan B period. The analysis found COVID certification would reduce transmission at these events by 40-45 percent, but warned that because only 2-13 percent of overall community transmission takes place in venues covered by the certification scheme, there would only be a “moderate impact from reduced community transmission.” The figures suggest that certification would reduce overall community transmission by just 1-5 percent.
Data doubts: Vaccine passports would have a “high impact” on the economy and could cause “wider impacts” exacerbating Britain’s supply chain crisis, the assessment found. The key line of the document concluded that certification was “likely to have a positive impact in reducing transmission, although it is not possible to say accurately by how much.” The Telegraph’s Ben Riley-Smith has got hold of a different paper this morning showing domestic vaccine passports would cost businesses in the events sector between £1.4 billion and £2.3 billion.
https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/lond ... ter-boost/That’s the problem for ministers: Plan A is seeing a huge spike in cases and rising hospitalizations, Plan B doesn’t appear to be enough to stop it and will smash the economy, while Plan C — harsher measures — is something no one wants to think about.
There will be a Christmas.
Mum's just booked her travel to come to us for Christmas so I think that's guaranteed that it's cancelled again.
Also from the live blog,Among the rules to be introduced in Austria are barring the unvaccinated from hotels, events of more than 25 people and, importantly for a country that is a winter sports hotspot, ski lifts. There will be a four-week transition period in which a first vaccination plus a PCR test will grant admission to places where the unvaccinated will be banned, Reuters reports. After that, only the fully vaccinated and those who have recently recovered from a coronavirus infection will be let in. While those dining out will have to show they have been vaccinated, the waiters serving them will not.
The German state of Saxony has announced sweeping new curbs for people who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 or recovered from the disease, AFP reports.
From Monday, access to indoor dining and other indoor events will be limited to those who are fully vaccinated or can show proof of recovery, local government minister Petra Koepping told a news conference in Dresden.
“We have not managed to build a protective wall of vaccinated people over the past few weeks and months,” Koepping said.
The new rules would mark the toughest state-wide restrictions in Germany against non-inoculated people. Only children as well as those who cannot receive jabs for medical reasons will be exempt.
tl;dr a tiny minoronity has been ruining it for everyone and we're sick of their sh.t.Italy has clamped down on protests against the country’s Covid-19 health pass.
The protests, at times violent, have become more prolific since Italy made the pass mandatory for all workers in October.
Demonstrations will no longer be able to take place in city or town centres.
“For weeks the so-called ‘no pass’ protests have been paralysing the centres of many cities every Saturday, creating inconvenience for citizens and shop-keepers, as well as creating crowds of unvaccinated people,” said Carlo Sibilia, undersecretary at the interior minister.
Protests in the northern city of Trieste are believed to have triggered a surge in coronavirus infections.
There was also controversy earlier this month after protesters marched through the streets of the city of Novara wearing striped bibs while comparing themselves to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps.
In October, a demonstration in Rome turned violent after neo-fascist group militants ransacked the headquarters of a trade union.
The so-called ‘green pass’, which shows evidence of vaccination, immunisation or a negative test, is required by Italians when entering their workplaces and for dining inside at bars or restaurants, travelling by plane or long-distance train as well as entering museums, theatres, cinemas, nightclubs and stadiums.
Emmanuel Macron has... announced that many citizens will need a third vaccination for a valid health pass from next month.shpalman wrote: ↑Tue Nov 09, 2021 5:36 pm... many countries accept that a previous infection does confer some degree of immunity, by giving those recovered from the virus a 6-month Green Pass or only requiring that they get one dose of a two-dose regime, for example. However, their approach to the waning of efficacy of the vaccine is not to limit the validity of a Green Pass obtained by vaccination (currently 12 months after the second dose) even as they call up the old and fragile for an extra dose.
A third dose is currently available to those aged over 65 or with medical conditions that make them vulnerable, such as heart or respiratory problems. But only about half of those eligible have booked a third injection.
To accelerate this, Macron said that booster shots will be extended to those aged 50 and over from early December. Those aged over 65 would from 15 December have to give proof of a Covid booster shot in order to maintain their health passes.