Main Coronavirus / Covid-19 Discussion Thread

[dsr-burnley]

I'm not saying you are wrong but its a lot more complicated than that. A very large UK study in the Lancet published on 29/10/2021 showed the following:

There is no statistically significant difference in the likelihood of you catching Covid from someone who enters your household who has Covid, between vaccinated (28% chance) and unvaccinated (38% chance) individuals.

Overall the SAR (SARS attack rate) is 26% whether you have been vaccinated or not. Just to be clear, you have a 26% chance of being attacked by COVID whether you are vaccinated or not.

The chance of being attacked by any airborne disease is unaffected by whether you have been vaccinated or not. Vaccines do not stop you breathing in the virus. What they do is help you fight it off. The vaccinated and unvaccinated alike will breathe in the disease, but the vaccinated will fight it off better, essentially because they start the fight earlier because their antibodies are ready to go.

It seems that this virus is at its most infectious early on. In the first few days, there is little difference in the degree of infection between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, and hence (I understand) little difference in degree of intectiousness. After that, the unvaccinated have more infection that the vaccinated, but neither is particularly spreading the disease.

 

[n1 gull]

Front page of the Telegraph this morning;

At least not every part of the media is peddling fear.

We need to take back our lives from the permanent Covid panic-mongers
Even before the new variant emerged, the lazy and risk-averse were threatening everyone with procedures and precautions
JULIET SAMUEL

 

[Guinness Boy]

Front page of the Telegraph this morning;

At least not every part of the media is peddling fear.

We need to take back our lives from the permanent Covid panic-mongers
Even before the new variant emerged, the lazy and risk-averse were threatening everyone with procedures and precautions
JULIET SAMUEL

You've not given much to work with there but I assume as Juliet Samuel is a regular Telegraph columnist, rather than a Doctor she's no more qualified to write about Covid than anyone who contributes to this thread. In fact, all you've proved there is that someone who is paid by the Telegraph to write things that appeal to the right of the Tory Party, has written something in the Telegraph that will appeal to the right of the Tory Party.

Unless you were planning a holiday in Cape Town or Zambia you're no less "free" today than you were last week.

 

[n1 gull]

New Covid variant is less worrying than delta, says Prof Chris Whitty
Chief Medical Officer urges calm in face of warnings around omicron mutation, saying concern should focus on ‘immediate threats’

 

[dazzer6666]

The chance of being attacked by any airborne disease is unaffected by whether you have been vaccinated or not. Vaccines do not stop you breathing in the virus. What they do is help you fight it off. The vaccinated and unvaccinated alike will breathe in the disease, but the vaccinated will fight it off better, essentially because they start the fight earlier because their antibodies are ready to go.

It seems that this virus is at its most infectious early on. In the first few days, there is little difference in the degree of infection between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, and hence (I understand) little difference in degree of intectiousness. After that, the unvaccinated have more infection that the vaccinated, but neither is particularly spreading the disease.

Agree with this, and the data is backing this up IMO…..whilst cases are staying relatively high (and still drifting upwards), the number of admissions, the number in hospital and deaths are all on a fairly sustained downward trend. Message remains that if you’re vaccinated, you’re quite unlikely to get seriously ill.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

South Africa medical officer (whilst they would say this) are saying its an over reaction, guess we will see.

 

[Pondicherry]

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-protection.html
In today’s MMWR, a study of COVID-19 infections in Kentucky among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus. These data further indicate that COVID-19 vaccines offer better protection than natural immunity alone and that vaccines, even after prior infection, help prevent reinfections.

https://www.immunology.org/coronavirus/connect-coronavirus-public-engagement-resources/covid-immunity-natural-infection-vaccine
The UK-CIC is looking at what parts of the immune system are involved in generating a protective response against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as after vaccination. It's likely that for most people vaccination against COVID-19 will induce more effective and longer lasting immunity than that induced by natural infection with the virus. Even if you've had COVID-19, you're recommended to get the vaccine because it will boost whatever immunity you have from natural infection.

So when immunologists were asked on both R4 and Jeremy Vine by people opposed to vaccines, “from what they heard, having previously had Covid, they were safer than vaccinated people, what’s the point”, the answers from the experts were a clear “no, you can’t have too many antibodies, please get vaccinated”.

We have to be careful with this type of information. Your first source is from a very small population (246 individuals) and contains a major flaw (which the report writers acknowledge) in that they only selected people who had been tested rather than a random population sample. "persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated." The other major flaw with this study is that a more recent Swedish study of over 1 million individuals has shown that by day 220 there is no measurable benefit from any of the currently available vaccines. And this is the fundamental problem for those advocating vaccines as the "solution". Are you proposing that we vaccinate the entire world once every 6 months (the point at which vaccine effectiveness drops below 50% according to the Swedish study) ad infinitum? I would suggest this is not sustainable or practical.

The Swedish study is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

I am not suggesting that people should not get vaccinated. However I am suggesting that vaccination might not be the solution that the general media and some government sources are suggesting. They might be part of the solution.

Your second source has no data backing it up and has some information that is clearly not correct. For example it says that two doses of the main vaccines produce long term protection. We know this is not true. It also says vaccination reduces the chances of spreading the virus to others. Again we know this is not true.

Your third source is un-named individuals giving advice based on what data? The advice might be correct or it might not be. There are no published large scale long term studies looking at outcomes based vaccination status, age, sex, health and general immunity status that I am aware of. What I mean by this, as an example, if you looked at 10,000 men aged 20-25 in good health and with healthy immune systems over a year, you might find there is no significant difference in COVID health outcomes based on vaccination status. If this was the case, you might then conclude that there is no point vaccinating that population any further.

 

[vegster]

You've not given much to work with there but I assume as Juliet Samuel is a regular Telegraph columnist, rather than a Doctor she's no more qualified to write about Covid than anyone who contributes to this thread. In fact, all you've proved there is that someone who is paid by the Telegraph to write things that appeal to the right of the Tory Party, has written something in the Telegraph that will appeal to the right of the Tory Party.

Unless you were planning a holiday in Cape Town or Zambia you're no less "free" today than you were last week.

I think that we should be very concerned now in the light of the news that 61 people have tested positive ( for the new variant I believe) on a plane that has just landed from SA..

I think it's to be expected that this will be in our country already with the recent arrival of many SA Rugby fans who will be mixing with thousands of UK Rugby fans at Twickenham this afternoon...this could be a super spreader event sadly.

 

[Bozza]

I think that we should be very concerned now in the light of the news that 61 people have tested positive ( for the new variant I believe) on a plane that has just landed from SA..

I think it's to be expected that this will be in our country already with the recent arrival of many SA Rugby fans who will be mixing with thousands of UK Rugby fans at Twickenham this afternoon...this could be a super spreader event sadly.

It's almost certainly here already.

It wasn't in Belgium until they went back and re-processed some recent tests to specifically look for it, and they found it. I suspect in labs in the UK tests are being re-processed and we'll find the same.

That's not to say that we should be panicking at all - there's still not enough known about this variant and what it means in terms of transmissibility, immune escape (and this is a sliding scale not an on/off switch) nor severity of illness. Plenty of those involved in vaccine development are currently sounding quite bullish in their belief that our existing vaccines will continue to do a good job standing up against severe illness and death.

If nothing else, if this variant is going to make things worse, we're lucky it came along now post-vaccine and not a year ago...

 

[Weststander]

Agree with this, and the data is backing this up IMO…..whilst cases are staying relatively high (and still drifting upwards), the number of admissions, the number in hospital and deaths are all on a fairly sustained downward trend. Message remains that if you’re vaccinated, you’re quite unlikely to get seriously ill.

Mrs.W’s received the latest weekly email to all staff from the CE of the hospital trust covering Royal Sussex, Worthing, Chichester and Haywards Heath. Caring for a 1.8m population.

10 patients with Covid in intensive care, in total.

 

[Weststander]

Calmer perspectives:

 

[n1 gull]

South Africa's health minister says, based on a small sample of Omicron cases, the majority of hospital patients are unvaccinated: "It indicates that the vaccines are providing protection"

 

[vegster]

It's almost certainly here already.

It wasn't in Belgium until they went back and re-processed some recent tests to specifically look for it, and they found it. I suspect in labs in the UK tests are being re-processed and we'll find the same.

That's not to say that we should be panicking at all - there's still not enough known about this variant and what it means in terms of transmissibility, immune escape (and this is a sliding scale not an on/off switch) nor severity of illness. Plenty of those involved in vaccine development are currently sounding quite bullish in their belief that our existing vaccines will continue to do a good job standing up against severe illness and death.

If nothing else, if this variant is going to make things worse, we're lucky it came along now post-vaccine and not a year ago...

I agree, no need to panic but it is concerning..I did hear an " expert " saying that Pfizer are already tweaking their vaccine to include cover for the new variant. They reckon it will take 100 days in total to get from the start to the updated vaccine. I note that we had 50k new cases yesterday... This new variant could push it to ridiculous levels.

 

[n1 gull]

I agree, no need to panic but it is concerning..I did hear an " expert " saying that Pfizer are already tweaking their vaccine to include cover for the new variant. They reckon it will take 100 days in total to get from the start to the updated vaccine. I note that we had 50k new cases yesterday... This new variant could push it to ridiculous levels.

On Nov 1st, there were 9667 people in hospital with covid. Yesterday there were 7000.

 

[dazzer6666]

On Nov 1st, there were 9667 people in hospital with covid. Yesterday there were 7000.

Been said by others on here previously - the correlation between infection numbers and hospitalisations/deaths is becoming increasingly broken. It’s those two numbers that are key - and both are still trending downwards despite case numbers going up.

 

[Weststander]

I agree, no need to panic but it is concerning..I did hear an " expert " saying that Pfizer are already tweaking their vaccine to include cover for the new variant. They reckon it will take 100 days in total to get from the start to the updated vaccine. I note that we had 50k new cases yesterday... This new variant could push it to ridiculous levels.

From what I understand, the pharma's have been successfully doing that from the very beginning. Modifying their vaccines for new strains, world-leading genome sequencing in the UK and Denmark predicting new strains before they've occurred in real life!

 

[Weststander]

On Nov 1st, there were 9667 people in hospital with covid. Yesterday there were 7000.

On 26th November 2020, there were 16,711.

 

[n1 gull]

On 26th November 2020, there were 16,711.

Wowzers, that really does give it some perspective at how far we have come

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

South Africa's health minister says, based on a small sample of Omicron cases, the majority of hospital patients are unvaccinated: "It indicates that the vaccines are providing protection"

So that asks the question, should vaccine passports be brought in here?

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59445388

Its already here - Guess we will see if the vaccine works or not