UK covid not over

[Bird on a Fire]

It would be fabulous news if we could make it the greatest cause of death. Mean we'll have cured cancer, Alzheimer's and flu.

Covid's already overtaken cancer and flu in those statistics. (Although it's the worst year ever for bird flu (mostly birds but also scavenging mammals infected so far, so we could be in for a surprise late entrant.) And ultimately covid's going to stop a lot of people getting Alzheimer's.

I don't think it's scaremongering to say that covid's added a new high-scorer to the league table, after many decades' success of removing them.

[lpm]

That's pandemic Covid, hitting a world with no immunity.

Endemic Covid has a different fatality rate, facing a population with several jabs and 2 or 3 prior infections.

There will be bad years, as there are for flu, and you and I might well die from it eventually. It's in the Premier League, but no longer competitive for the stop spots.

[Bird on a Fire]

Well it was in the top 3 in April. Seems to be competing just fine.

[lpm]

It's not endemic yet. Still in transition.

I've never had it (at least not symptomatic / tested positive). None of my elderly relatives have had it. Our little virus friend still has plenty of vaccinated people to meet for the first time, plus a few unvaccinated.

Wait 10 years. It's only going one way - down the charts.

[Herainestold]

It will be interesting to see how it affects life expectancy.

[Martin_B]

It will be interesting to see how it affects life expectancy.

You have a different definition of "interesting" to me

[Bird on a Fire]

It will be interesting to see how it affects life expectancy.

You have a different definition of "interesting" to me

You're not interested in how it affects life expectancy?

I think we really don't know at this stage whether it'll be non-negligible, and I've stopped looking out for models (because a lot of them are depressing, as well as interesting). But if we end up in a situation where most people get infected every few years, I'd take a punt on that at least shortening the right tail of the age distribution, especially when variants that avoid the vaccine become prominent. Loss of QALYs from long covid is probably way more relevant, though.

[lpm]

The economic damage will have the biggest impact.

[Sciolus]

The economic damage will have the biggest impact.

Do you mean "biggest impact on stuff I care about" or "biggest impact on life expectancy" or "biggest impact on overall quality of life" or what?

[KAJ]

coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Updates will be weekly after Friday 1st July 2022
From Friday 1 July 2022, the COVID-19 Dashboard will move to weekly reporting. The last daily update of the Dashboard will be on Friday 1 July 2022. Weekly updates will be published every Wednesday at 4pm commencing on 6 July 2022.

Daily data up to the most recent available will continue to be added in each weekly update.

This will bring COVID-19 reporting in line with typical reporting schedules for other respiratory infections. This approach reflects the move from an emergency pandemic response to managing COVID-19 in line with the Government's Living with COVID strategy. This decision will be kept under review in the coming weeks.

[lpm]

The economic damage will have the biggest impact.

Do you mean "biggest impact on stuff I care about" or "biggest impact on life expectancy" or "biggest impact on overall quality of life" or what?

Life expectancy, it was replying to BoaF

[plodder]

The economic damage will have the biggest impact.

Do you mean "biggest impact on stuff I care about" or "biggest impact on life expectancy" or "biggest impact on overall quality of life" or what?

Life expectancy, it was replying to BoaF

Agreed. Poverty is a big old killer, especially (but not exclusively) of poor people. Global recessions are bad news for health outcomes.

[Herainestold]

Captalism is bad for life expectancy. Capitalism and covid.

[WFJ]

Captalism is bad for life expectancy.

Do you have any empirical evidence for that?

[shpalman]

Captalism is bad for life expectancy.

Do you have any empirical evidence for that?

Look at health outcomes vs. health spending for the US vs. the rest of North America and Western Europe, for example. A bit of socialism is definitely a good idea as far as the health of a nation is concerned.

Of course, communism and fascism are also pretty terrible, but then Eastern Europe and Russia have terrible life expectancy in men especially due to a culture of serious alcohol abuse. And if you're not an ethnicity which the Chinese authorities approve of, for example, you're also going to have about ten years less of life expectancy .

[shpalman]

Danny Altmann is a professor of immunology at Imperial College London and his opinion is

Contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film. There’s nothing cold-like or friendly about a large part of the workforce needing significant absences from work, feeling awful and sometimes getting reinfected over and over again, just weeks apart. And that’s before the risk of long Covid. While we now know that the risk of long Covid is somewhat reduced in those who become infected after vaccination, and also less in those from the Omicron than the Delta wave, the absolute numbers are nevertheless worrying.

[WFJ]

Captalism is bad for life expectancy.

Do you have any empirical evidence for that?

Look at health outcomes vs. health spending for the US vs. the rest of North America and Western Europe, for example. A bit of socialism is definitely a good idea as far as the health of a nation is concerned.

Sure. But that is just a comparison of a sh.t healthcare system with better healthcare systems. They all exist in capitalist countries.

Of course, communism and fascism are also pretty terrible, but then Eastern Europe and Russia have terrible life expectancy in men especially due to a culture of serious alcohol abuse. And if you're not an ethnicity which the Chinese authorities approve of, for example, you're also going to have about ten years less of life expectancy.

The move to a capitalist system in China has coincided with a steady increase in life expectancy there.

[shpalman]

Do you have any empirical evidence for that?

Look at health outcomes vs. health spending for the US vs. the rest of North America and Western Europe, for example. A bit of socialism is definitely a good idea as far as the health of a nation is concerned.

Sure. But that is just a comparison of a sh.t healthcare system with better healthcare systems. They all exist in capitalist countries.

The country may be capitalist as a whole, but the better healthcare systems themselves are not fully capitalist.

[WFJ]

Look at health outcomes vs. health spending for the US vs. the rest of North America and Western Europe, for example. A bit of socialism is definitely a good idea as far as the health of a nation is concerned.

Sure. But that is just a comparison of a sh.t healthcare system with better healthcare systems. They all exist in capitalist countries.

The country may be capitalist as a whole, but the better healthcare systems themselves are not fully capitalist.

How are you measuring how capitalist a country's healthcare system is? If it depends on how much is paid by governments through taxation then Germany's system, for example, is at least as capitalist as the US's.

The US is not the archetype of capitalism, and nor is its healthcare system. It just represents a libertarian mess of a system. It's definitely not evidence for Herainestold's claim that capitalism is bad for life expectancy.

[shpalman]

UK life expectancy stopped going up in 2010-2012 or so

Figure 1_ Life expectancy in the UK in 2018 to 2020 fell to the level of 2012 to 2014 for males and was similar to 2015 to 2017 for females.png (26.16 KiB) Viewed 6193 times

Over the last 40 years life expectancy in the UK has been increasing, albeit at a slower pace in the last decade. This increase has been primarily because of improvements in mortality at older ages driven by advances in health care, and improvements in living and working conditions. In the latest period, 2018 to 2020, life expectancy at birth in the UK was 79.0 years for males and 82.9 years for females.

In the first decade of the 21st century, we saw improvements for males of between 42 weeks and 53 weeks, and improvements for females of between 29 weeks and 42 weeks, when comparing life expectancy at birth in one three-year period with the previous non-overlapping three-year period (Figure 2). However, in the last 10 years, improvements in life expectancy at birth have slowed. Since 2010 to 2012, the improvements for each period when compared with the previous non-overlapping period have been declining for both males and females, with the exception of 2017 to 2019 when improvements increased slightly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Unit ... l_election

[Herainestold]

This article has been making the rounds..

The rapid appearance of more variants in ever shorter periods of time spells incalculable trouble. Many researchers now suspect some of the variants have arisen in immunocompromised patients with no real defences where mutations can evolve at hyper speed. “The possibility of SARS-CoV-2 evolving resistance to existing therapies during such infections is real,” warns Cambridge researcher Ravindra Gupta in a recent Lancet letter. “Hence, curing COVID-19 infections in immunocompromised individuals is of crucial importance as it is possible that an existing patient might harbour the next variant, a highly transmissible new variant of concern that challenges immunity and existing therapeutics.”

Meanwhile, the virus is now evolving at a rate faster than vaccine development (three waves this year alone). And the effectiveness of current vaccines are now waning. Mother Nature offers no guarantee that virus will evolve to a benign or endemic state this year or the next. Meanwhile human behaviour has increased biological risk instead of dampening it.
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In real terms “living with the virus” means living with a normalization of death, reinfections, long COVID, disruption and exhausted health-care workers. People would never vote for a deteriorating quality of life and risk, but that’s where public policy is now taking us.

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/07/04/ ... =editorial

I am stockpiling PPE, storable food and everyday medical supplies. It could be a long and grim winter.

[Martin_B]

I am stockpiling PPE, storable food and everyday medical supplies. It could be a long and grim winter.

Still? You made the same post 2 weeks ago: viewtopic.php?p=125352#p125352

[Chris Preston]

It is like the people who hoarded toilet paper.

[tom p]

Sure. But that is just a comparison of a sh.t healthcare system with better healthcare systems. They all exist in capitalist countries.

The country may be capitalist as a whole, but the better healthcare systems themselves are not fully capitalist.

How are you measuring how capitalist a country's healthcare system is? If it depends on how much is paid by governments through taxation then Germany's system, for example, is at least as capitalist as the US's.

The US is not the archetype of capitalism, and nor is its healthcare system. It just represents a libertarian mess of a system. It's definitely not evidence for Herainestold's claim that capitalism is bad for life expectancy.

It's certainly the archetype of the freest of free-market capitalisms, and especially so in the healthcare domain.

[Herainestold]

I am stockpiling PPE, storable food and everyday medical supplies. It could be a long and grim winter.

Still? You made the same post 2 weeks ago: viewtopic.php?p=125352#p125352

I have to admit I am worried.