Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Wait. There's an anti-lockdown protest now in Westminster?!

Lads, open a newspaper

In case anyone had any doubts on just how stupid they are. 

[Zanza]

This policy of opening up does not seem wise.

[Maladict]

This policy of opening up does not seem wise.

Yeah, I think we have been an excellent example of how not to do it.

[Josquius]

We all know its a terrible decision.
The question is, is it a horrible cynical move to kill people off now and avoid a winter spike, or are the government genuinely that stupid?

[Sheilbh]

This policy of opening up does not seem wise.

Although the UK has had stricter lockdown restrictions than most of the rest of Europe more or less for this entire year - and especially around travel/borders there are still quite a lot of restrictions.

The complication for whether this is right or not is this chart:


That goes to the start of this month and deaths are rising and rising on a straight line at the minute so it might be a little different but not wildly. You can see how much the vaccines have weakened but not eliminated the direct link of cases to deaths. So for me the key is how many cases do they expect and how many deaths is that (weaker) link likely to cause - and I don't think there's much clarity on that.

Cases in Scotland are declining rapidly and that may be the picture in England in two weeks time (because the two "Scottish" factors come into play: schools will have closed, England's out the Euros). If that's the case and we see deaths in that chart peaking at around 2-3 then I think it's right to open up (though I'd delay it a week until schools close). It may well be that this week is the peak because schools will close, fewer people are crowding into pubs and there's evidence people are changing their behaviour because cases are rising.

On the other hand it may be that the indoor venues open up and it starts speeding up rapidly and hospitalisations and deaths follow, just cases get higher.

I still don't know what the right answer is - and depending on the time of day and mood I range from thinking we should actually impose stricter restrictions through to we should end the legal restrictions, move it to private sector (and provide support for businesses imposing voluntarily covid passports/capacity limits).

I've also probably moved on internal vaccine passports - I see the number of people in France who've booked for a vaccine since Macron announced they were implementing that and I think it's probably justifiable - but again touch and go.

Edit: Oh and it appears that is now policy. Apparently Johnson has said that from the end of September there will be a mandated vaccine passport for clubs (but presumably this could be extended). The end of September has been chosen because that's the point at which every adult in the UK will have been offered both doses (if they accept a vaccine), so it's to avoid the risk of discrimination. Apparently driven by concern in government at the lower up-take of the vaccine among younger people so far.

Edit: Clubs and large indoor venues apparently - so presumably gigs too.

Edit: Also a mere 18 months after this was adopted as the Japanese slogan/approach Jonathan Van Tam has explained that people should avoid the "three Cs" where covid is most likely to spread: closed settings (with low ventilation); crowded settings (with many people around); close-contact settings (especially with strangers).

The emphasis on hand-washing etc not ventilation is I think one of the biggest mistakes in this entire pandemic. Even now there was some poll showing that people would be more comfortable eating indoors in a busy restaurant than shaking hands with/hugging someone from outside their household

Edit: In fact there was a poll today - hand washing still seen as a priority, ventilation isn't. Two thirds of people think hand washing is more effective at stopping the spread of covid compared with one third who think it's ventilation. That's a catastrophic failure of government/public health messaging. You can't ask people to make decisions based on risks if you've not been giving them good information about those risks

[Barrister]

This policy of opening up does not seem wise.

I'm not sure about that.

Restrictions and lockdowns can not go on indefinitely.  They just can't.  Our economy, our mental health, won't allow it.  Now putting up with restrictions until we all got vaccinated is possible - and it's what we have done.

But now what?  We know the virus (and variants) are still circulating.  We also know that the vaccines greatly decrease (but do not eliminate) both catching the disease and the seriousness of infection.  So surely at some point we just open up and then deal with the decreased but still real consequences of Covid-19?

[Zanza]

Opening clubs without strict enforcement of hygiene concepts or rules on being tested/vaccinated seems unwise at this point. There is probably no better place for a superspreading event.

There are still plenty of unvaccinated, even in Britain, and vaccinated people can still transmit. We have not yet reached full vaccination of the population anywhere.

Death is not the only outcome. The current working assumption is still that between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 infected suffer from various degrees of Long Covid. It is not clear if that rate also applies to children, which are almost completely unvaccinated. Having 50,000 new cases per day means that you have potentially 5000 persons per day with longer term health complications.

I agree that eventually we will have to live with Covid. I just doubt that this is now already.

By the way, at this point in the second wave  Britain started locking down. While the relation between the cases going up and the other indicators going up looks slower and less steep, it still exists. More people on ventilators and less dying could also be a sign of generally more resilient patients. But once you are ventilated, you will likely have long term health consequences.

[Zanza]

By the way, this is not a uniquely British phenomenon. You can see it across Europe - with less vaccinated than Britain...

[garbon]

Feels strange that we've now come around again to having domestic vaccine passports.

[Sheilbh]

Opening clubs without strict enforcement of hygiene concepts or rules on being tested/vaccinated seems unwise at this point. There is probably no better place for a superspreading event.

I totally agree - I think we've spent far too much time worrying about masks which I feel are probably marginal and not enough about indoor venues. And I don't understand the logic of opening them for two months with no controls and then implementing covid passports in September.

I get why they're waiting until everyone has had a chance to be double vaxxed before introducing vaccine passports. But this interim free-for-all is just madness. Especially when we have the evidence from the Netherlands were clubs were re-opened that they have been a major area of infections.

Although vaccine passports haven't been ruled out for pubs either.

There are still plenty of unvaccinated, even in Britain, and vaccinated people can still transmit. We have not yet reached full vaccination of the population anywhere.

Death is not the only outcome. The current working assumption is still that between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 infected suffer from various degrees of Long Covid. It is not clear if that rate also applies to children, which are almost completely unvaccinated. Having 50,000 new cases per day means that you have potentially 5000 persons per day with longer term health complications.

I agree that eventually we will have to live with Covid. I just doubt that this is now already.

Agreed although I note Adam Kucharski's back of a fag packet calculation that herd immunity is now probably at 98% with antibodies (either from infection or vaccination). Which is a level we're not going to get to with vaccines alone.

I am worried about a bit of mission creep around restrictions - to my mind this is a state of emergency with exceptional powers and restrictions on civil liberties. I think that is justified to stop the spread of a deadly disease in a pandemic or to stop the health service from being overwhelmed. I am not sure these sort of state of emergency powers can be justified to reduce pressure on the health service or for long covid (which is a collection of syndromes).

It's something I think about a lot - that some of the East Asian states that succeeded in controlling covid like Taiwan and Singapore did it in a way that was extremely privacy-intrusive. As a lawyer in that area I remember at the start of the pandemic thinking those solutions were not lawful in Europe and would be wrong. Looking back I now actually wonder if the better option was to have a state of emergency around privacy laws but allow society to carry on - especially as we're facing real consequences from the impact of lockdown on mental health, these outbreaks of infant hospitalisations/illnesses due to the lack of social acquired immunity, I imagine flu will be awful this year because of how repressed it was last year.

It's my job so I care about privacy but I wonder if our approach was too fundamentalist on that and the consequence is we failed to control covid, we will deaths from other causes and as I've mentioned really profound and intimate restrictions on individual rights: how often you can leave your home, for what reasons, who you can see, where you can go etc. I don' tknow.

Edit: And of course I check into track and trace everywhere I go and have been pinged through the NHS app so it's not even 100% clear to me the privacy "gains" we made were that significant.

By the way, at this point in the second wave  Britain started locking down. While the relation between the cases going up and the other indicators going up looks slower and less steep, it still exists. More people on ventilators and less dying could also be a sign of generally more resilient patients. But once you are ventilated, you will likely have long term health consequences.

Yeah - the more resilient patients is a thing, but also better treatments.

Apparently at the minute 40% of patients in hospitals have been double vaxxed - so this is probably the more vulnerable/older patients who are sadly the exception where it's not effective. Even with this many cases a significant proportion are still the most vulnerable even with vaccines (and it gives a sense of how many lives they must have saved this year).

[Sheilbh]

Feels strange that we've now come around again to having domestic vaccine passports.

Yeah I've come round on it. I think this has wavered a lot in government too - I think Michael Gove's been looking at Israel's "Green Pass" system (which was shut down after they got most people vaccinated). It went from being a serious option to not, not least because Israel decided they didn't need it anymore. They've since re-introduced some restrictions which makes you wonder if it'd be a better idea to have kept Green Pass running.

My initial view (pre-delta) was that it wouldn't be necessary because the gap between everyone having a dose and things re-opening would be quite narrow so at best we'd need them for 2-3 months. But also the impact of Macron's announcement of this on people booking vaccine slots is extraordinary:

[Tamas]

Wife is going to get her second Pfizer on Saturday. Unfortunately we won't be able to hunker down entirely for two more weeks, due to her job. It's going to be mighty annoying if she catches this literally weeks before immunity.

[crazy canuck]

This policy of opening up does not seem wise.

I'm not sure about that.

Restrictions and lockdowns can not go on indefinitely.  They just can't.  Our economy, our mental health, won't allow it.  Now putting up with restrictions until we all got vaccinated is possible - and it's what we have done.

But now what?  We know the virus (and variants) are still circulating.  We also know that the vaccines greatly decrease (but do not eliminate) both catching the disease and the seriousness of infection.  So surely at some point we just open up and then deal with the decreased but still real consequences of Covid-19?

No one is suggesting that they go on indefinitely.  The suggestion is that is a bad idea to remove them when the number of cases is increasing and vaccination levels are not yet where they need to be.

The "at some point" when a country should open up is when the number of cases has decreased or is decreasing.

The UK is doing the reverse.

[Zanza]

Regarding the vaccine pass: when we had higher incidence levels in June, you had to show either a vaccine pass (paper or digital) or an antigen quick test result no older than 24 hours (paper or digital) to get into restaurants etc.

This is still mandatory for bigger events, e.g. I am invited at a wedding in four weeks and they already wrote that everybody has to show vaccine or test result.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/19/scientist-casts-doubt-on-validity-of-boris-johnsons-workplace-pilot

Scientist casts doubt on validity of Boris Johnson's 'workplace pilot'

Statistician says PM's initial excuse for not self-isolating is part of pattern of pilot studies that lack transparency

A scientist has cast doubt on the validity of a workplace pilot scheme used by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to initially avoid self-isolation, accusing the government of secrecy surrounding it and other research.

On Monday, 24 hours on from a hasty U-turn by the prime minister and chancellor, Downing Street faced fresh questions about the workplace study and was still unable to provide basic details such as its criteria, protocols and name.

The basic scientific validity of the study was questioned by Prof Jon Deeks, who is co-chair of a Royal Statistical Society working group reviewing evidence on Covid-19 testing, after it emerged that it has no control group.

A better-known, separate Department of Health and Social Care study involved some participants self-isolating and others being allowed to take daily tests instead after being selected at random.

Deeks, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, speaking in a personal capacity said: "Without a control group what is this [workplace] study going to tell us? The question is also: what is the status of this alleged secret study which none of us knew about? It should have a name, a protocol, and approval from Public Health England's ethics committee.

"Part of the problem is that the Department of Health have been quite secretive about their studies. They are just not transparent."

Deeks said the workplace scheme was part of a pattern of government pilot events, which have included Euro 2020 and Wimbledon. "The government has also been doing a thing where they set up what they describe as a 'pilot' if they want something to happen," he said.

"This was the case back in January as well in relation to schools. Rather than waiting for a proper scientific study to be done they call something a 'pilot' and because they are in charge of everything they appear to get away with it."

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