Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[celedhring]

Our fourth wave is starting, with the steepest curve since the pandemic started.
Just when all lights were supposed to turn green and everyone is busy booking their holidays.

New restrictions will not going to go over well, especially since the government (rashly) decided to end all restrictions just weeks ago and all the kids went out partying immediately and haven't stopped since.

¨
That's pretty much what's happening over here.

[Sheilbh]

Looks like they're getting rid of quarantine for vaccinated arrivals from the 19th,falling in line with the rest of Europe.
What I need to figure out is what if you arrive a day or two before the 19th-still need the full 10 (my suspicion despite it being illogical) or you're free on the 19th?

I think it only applies to NHS vaccinations/people with the NHS app at the minute. I understand the UK and EU are working on recognising each others' apps (some member states do already) and that's going quite well so I imagine it'll expand at some point. But initially apparently only the NHS app.

[Tamas]

Looks like they're getting rid of quarantine for vaccinated arrivals from the 19th,falling in line with the rest of Europe.
What I need to figure out is what if you arrive a day or two before the 19th-still need the full 10 (my suspicion despite it being illogical) or you're free on the 19th?

I think it only applies to NHS vaccinations/people with the NHS app at the minute. I understand the UK and EU are working on recognising each others' apps (some member states do already) and that's going quite well so I imagine it'll expand at some point. But initially apparently only the NHS app.

I haven't seen the European countries I have checked specify it has to be an EU-issued validation. You just need to prove you have got your second shot two weeks hence.

[Sheilbh]

I haven't seen the European countries I have checked specify it has to be an EU-issued validation. You just need to prove you have got your second shot two weeks hence.

But there's different standards for proving you've got your second shot/doucments that you might need. The EU digital certificate is operable all over the EU, I think they've agreed mutual recognition of the equivalent US one and they're working with the UK on mutual recognition (and interoperability of QR codes) there. My suspicion is this will end up being some international framework that multiple countries end up working on or using but we're not there yet.

But the EU agreements are base level and if there isn't one then it goes to member states - so I think Italy, for example, doesn't recognise the the NHS app as proof but Greece does. I can't remember where but I read of one country that didn't accept the app but does accept a formal letter from the NHS as proof etc.

[Josquius]

Its weird there's all this trouble and controversy over an international vaccine standard... when the yellow book has always been perfectly acceptable for this use.
I guess its just not too well known amongst the general population who never venture beyond their continent.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yes, i haven't had to get one for over 30 years but I had assumed that they were still the thing to get and that we would simply do the same for covid.

It might be something to do with numbers, governments probably want a phone app because the process of filling in loads of yellow certificates by hand would waste a lot of medics' time 

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. But there's also the issue of different approved new vaccines which I don't know how we solve. My instinct is for travel purposes, recognise all vaccines on the WHO list which I think includes Sputnik and the two Chinese vaccines.

At the minute I think countries are only recognising vaccines they've authorised (see the kerfuffle about Indian manufactured AZ batches in the EU). And at this point I can sympathise with being conservative and cautious, but I hope we get to recognising all of them if they're used internationally.

[Josquius]

Yes, i haven't had to get one for over 30 years but I had assumed that they were still the thing to get and that we would simply do the same for covid.

It might be something to do with numbers, governments probably want a phone app because the process of filling in loads of yellow certificates by hand would waste a lot of medics' time 

I dunno, you do get the little card when you get the vaccine which they have to fill in. The yellow book doesn't seem to involve too much more work, I remember it being very quick when I got all mine back in the day.

Maybe they're paranoid about how easy to forge it seems to be ?

[alfred russel]

I haven't seen the European countries I have checked specify it has to be an EU-issued validation. You just need to prove you have got your second shot two weeks hence.

But there's different standards for proving you've got your second shot/doucments that you might need. The EU digital certificate is operable all over the EU, I think they've agreed mutual recognition of the equivalent US one and they're working with the UK on mutual recognition (and interoperability of QR codes) there. My suspicion is this will end up being some international framework that multiple countries end up working on or using but we're not there yet.

But the EU agreements are base level and if there isn't one then it goes to member states - so I think Italy, for example, doesn't recognise the the NHS app as proof but Greece does. I can't remember where but I read of one country that didn't accept the app but does accept a formal letter from the NHS as proof etc.

It is absurd that the system hasn't been worked out. This has been the biggest issue in the world for almost a year and a half, and we already have an international system of vaccine recognition that could have been used (yellow cards).

Just another example to build pessimism on far more difficult international topics like minimum taxation levels for corporations or climate change.

[Syt]

The Olympic Games will be held without audience. There were plans to allow up to 10,000 local viewers, but this has been scrapped because of the current state of emergency.

[Tamas]

So last weekend we finally booked our East European family visit tickets, flying back and forth between Warsaw and Budapest as the way back to London is far cheaper that way.

Well, it took the Polish Airlines less than a week to start messing about and cancelling flights. Thanks to their automated switches, now our Warsaw-London flight is half a day earlier than the Budapest Warsaw one that's supposed to be the first leg of our journey back. 

This is going to be so much fun. Not.

[Tamas]

Meanwhile, there are signs hospitalisations in Hungary are starting to rise off the floor they reached not too long ago (number of cases is an entirely useless statistic there as barely any testing is done). Slovenia and Czech Republic are already struggling with the Delta variant so I am pretty sure it has entered Hungary as well even if it hasn't been made official yet.

Also, the official Covid death toll there has now passed 30k, which in a country of 10 million isn't very good. 

[The Larch]

Some Brits seem quite radical regarding the kind of permanent measures that could be established to fight Covid.

[crazy canuck]

I did not peg you for a libertarian. 

I think that once restrictions are put in place to protect public health, the burden shifts to establishing it is safe to reduce those restrictions rather than try it to see what happens.

Unless you subscribe to the Dorsey view of the world that restrictions should not have been imposed in the first place.

I'm not a libertarian - but I do think civil liberties and human rights matter. I'm a signed up member of Liberty and Amnesty

And as someone who's a member of Liberty and Amnesty, my default view is that you generally shouldn't give an inch to the state or the police because they will not give back emergency powers, they will become normal powers and they will abuse them. Because that's what the police and the state generally do. I think it happens with counter-terrorism laws, immigration enforcement etc.

The restrictions have been really serious and intimate interferences with people's lives. In the UK we've had restrictions on who you can meet, how many people you can meet, what you can do when you meet them (we have twice banned sex for people who don't live with their partners and extra-household hugging), we've banned travel without a good purpose, shut down certain types of business, mandated collecting data of everyone who enters public enclosed space for the government track and trace scheme etc. There is also - and I laugh about people who go crazy about putting on a mask as much as the next person - but there is also a mask mandate and my default view is the state has no business telling people what or what not to wear. I think all of those measures are very serious and they were all enforced by the police.

But I think in the context of covid it was a crisis that was sufficiently serious to justify those measures. But I think they have to be - as infringements on human rights - necessary and proportionate. I don't think there's a bias in favour of keeping them or that the burden shifts (because that's also the exact argument used around counter-terrorism), I think they still need to be necessary and proportionate. I think that is a really tough judgement call at this point because deaths and hospitalisations are rising and the key, for me, is how high they are likely to get. But I don't think preventing cases on its own is enough to make them necessary and proportionate - so it's the point that vaccines haven't yet broken the link, so cases are still relevant but they have weakened it a lot and how much it's been weakened is I think the key question.

It strikes me as odd that you start from the premise that government should not be trusted on principle and but then defend your government's decision to do something that flies in the face of all reason - reduce restrictions at the very moment infections are rapidly rising.


This is a very good case of ideology getting in the way of good public policy decision making.  This is not a tough judgment at all.  If infections are increasing take steps to decrease the infections. Don't do the opposite.

[Sheilbh]

It strikes me as odd that you start from the premise that government should not be trusted on principle and but then defend your government's decision to do something that flies in the face of all reason - reduce restrictions at the very moment infections are rapidly rising.

This is a very good case of ideology getting in the way of good public policy decision making.  This is not a tough judgment at all.  If infections are increasing take steps to decrease the infections. Don't do the opposite.

I'm not defending it - I don't know if it's the right decision. As I say I think it's a very difficult decision. I think the previous unlocking steps were easier calls, I think the previous locking steps were easier calls (if sometimes a bit late). This one I think is in the balance and I personally don't feel like I know enough to really make a judgement.

But this just goes back to the point of what the purpose is of these restrictions. I do not think they are or have ever been described as being about stopping people getting covid. They were to stop people getting seriously ill and dying and to stop the NHS from being overwhelmed. We would not lock down society for a new infectious disease with an IFR of 0.085% - there is a level of deaths from any disease or social behaviour that society is willing to tolerate. Covid has been around 1-2% during the pandemic and the risk is really severe for older people and people with certain conditions which meant the number of deaths were outside of that tolerable range which is why we locked down - and my understanding is there will always be an exit wave from a pandemic.

That's why I think this chart from the Guardian is key:

And, for me, the key question is what is the projected numbers of cases and consequent hospitalisations/deaths? If the projection is that even if we lift restrictions cases will peak in the next week or so and there'll only be a small bump on hospitalisations/deaths, then I think that's probably okay. I think if the projection is that we'd see hundreds of thousands of cases and daily deaths in the hundreds again I probably think it isn't. I don't think that position is ideologically driven - not that ideology is a bad thing. I think it's saying we need to judge the data and because of vaccines cases are no longer the most relevant factor because as closely tied to hospitalisations and deaths.

Some Brits seem quite radical regarding the kind of permanent measures that could be established to fight Covid.

Yeah. No-one ever lost money betting on the authoritarian streak of the British public

And we are already seeing people saying that actually maybe we should keep these restrictions for longer for other diseases because they will reduce the strain on the NHS which I think is wrong (we should just properly fund the NHS). There are also other epidemiologists saying that could be a big mistake because we've not been exposed to as many illnesses through the course of the last 18 months as is normal and we may be more vulnerable to, for example, flu this winter and doing this more or less indefinitely would increase that risk more and more. I think it is important to keep hammering home that these are emergency measures that should expire and the impact of these measures is not equally distributed.

It is kind of interesting though because there are more anti-lockdown types in the Tories and at the elite level this has split in a similar way to Brexit so the Telegraph, Spectator, Spiked and their commentators are broadly lockdown sceptical, while the Guardian, Times, Indy etc are more supportive. But on polling of actual people it's the opposite. The people who are most pro-lockdown and want it continued forever are older (so exposed to more risk, but also more likely to have a comfortable lockdown experience) while the most anti-lockdown are young people and students etc (who are lower risk, but more likely to feel the negatives of lockdown).