Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Richard Hakluyt]

Let's hope no high-level government person will want to take charge of the program, so it won't be ruined.

This is a job for Super-Grayling!!!

[Sheilbh]

Let's hope no high-level government person will want to take charge of the program, so it won't be ruined.

This is a job for Super-Grayling!!!

Don't even joke about it.

But yeah we seem to be doing well. It's a big churn though. My job is linked to NHS services in some ways so without going into details its sufficient to say the vaccination drive is having a clear effect. My work is only connected to this quite indirectly so if I was a step further away from it I would be not connected at all, yet the cascading effects of a lot of people being busy on this reach me and keep me quite busy in turn.

Yeah in fairness I think we can say that there may have been an issue around insider trading/market abuse in her presentations, but the person appointed to run vaccine procurement was sensible (she runs a healthcare venture capital firm) and we bought lots and bought a diverse basket of vaccines. I think she did her job well.

I also wonder, structurally, if rolling out a new vaccine is something that the NHS is going to be good at - you knkow it feels like something that a slightly old fashioned, centralised single provider should be sort of built for. In comparison with the first wave when I think it had structural issues with testing compared to decentralised systems like Germany etc.

The numbers that are being released daily look good and are going in the right direction so we should hit the 2 million per week target.

Let's hope no high-level government person will want to take charge of the program, so it won't be ruined.

I read a thing about the head of the NHS apparently trying to basically take as many decisions as he can and then only present ministers with 2-3 options to avoid the risk of them fucking things up (which is, of course, how the civil service should work ).

On this - and it's a hell of a shift from Cummings - it's interesting that Johnson has appointed Sir Michael Barber to do a review of central government operations. He was the head of Tony Blair's first Delivery Unit and now travels round the world consulting governments on "deliverology" which is all about identifying metrics, setting targets, delivering etc. And ultimately we're in a big delivery moment for government now in getting people vaccinated.

[celedhring]

Spoke to a friend of mine today. His university advisor died (not Covid) and given the restrictions they are doing an online funeral, using zoom.

Really, when do we find out this is a Black Mirror episode?

[Duque de Bragança]

1% of new cases in France is due to the British strain, for now.

[Josquius]

The police are getting stupidly strict.
Guy I know's mam lives in rural Northumberland. Every week she drives half an hour to the nearest half decent sized town to do her shopping.
This week she was stopped by the police. They question what she is doing and she tells them. They say this isn't a valid excuse as there are shops closer to home for her and fine her £60.
After she finishes her shopping she gets stopped again. The police say I thought we told you not to do this - she says yes, but she had to do the shopping as she's here already.... Another £60 fine.

[mongers]

1,564 UK deaths reported today. 

[Sheilbh]

1,564 UK deaths reported today. 

Yeah - I think we've hit 100,000 which is awful.

The case numbers are starting to fall, but that still means we've probably got 2 weeks of a climbing death toll because new cases are just baked in deaths in 2-3 weeks time

[Sheilbh]

I guess that establishes that Jews are not as low in the British rankings as Chinese and Koreans. 

Incidentally on this I genuinely think we might have handled things better if Jeremy Hunt was still Health Secretary (not Chair of the Health Select Committee) because he is an absolute enthusiast/nerd for Japan and Korea. All of his questions for the last year have basically been: why are we not doing x that South Korea has been doing since day one? For which there normally isn't a very sensible answer (for example - border controls/quarantine/testing on arrival). I don't know if he'd be more competent than Matt Hancock (but it's hard to think he wouldn't be)...

Edit: Also I read this and got an alarming amount of deja vu:

Coronavirus variant from UK 'must not get out of hand' warns EU
EU health commissioner says bloc will assist with genomic sequencing to curb mutation
Jon Henley, Daniel Boffey and Sam Jones
Wed 13 Jan 2021 18.02 GMT
Last modified on Wed 13 Jan 2021 20.18 GMT

The EU has warned that the highly contagious coronavirus variant first found in Britain is now having "a significant impact" in other European countries, and said its spread "must be stopped at all costs".

"We cannot be complacent," Stella Kyriakides, the bloc's health commissioner, said on Wednesday. "We cannot let it get out of hand. So we are ready to help member states in the area of genomic sequencing of samples. There is no way around this."

Concerns were also shared during the virtual meeting of EU health ministers of a "significant under-reporting" of the new variant by member states, with the commission urging health ministries to make detection of the mutation a priority.

Germany's health minister, Jens Spahn, cited the UK-detected variant as he stressed the need for people to further reduce their contact with others, saying the country would not be able to lift all measures aimed at curbing the pandemic by the end of the month.

"One thing is already evident – it will not be possible to loosen all restrictions on 1 February," Spahn said, adding that it would take another two or three months for the effects of the vaccination campaign to kick in.

Berlin was set to approve stricter controls on people entering the country after the chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Tuesday reportedly told a working group of her Christian Democratic Union that the lockdown could last until early April.

In Denmark, the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said an extension of existing lockdown measures, due to end on 17 January, was "clearly necessary ... not least to ensure that the British mutation does not spread".

The Danish parliament is halting some of its activities, including debates on several new bills, for a month. Last week it announced it would only allow flights into the country on which every passenger had tested negative for Covid-19.

In Spain the regions of Galicia, La Rioja and Cantabria have become the country's latest to tighten restrictions amid a spiralling national infection rate that officials have blamed on lax adherence to the rules over Christmas.

The country recorded a record 38,869 new Covid cases over the previous 24 hours, the government said on Wednesday night, marking the highest single-day spike in infections since the pandemic began.

Spain's health minister, Salvador Illa, described the rise as "very worrying" and warned that the pressure on hospitals and their ICUs was building. "I ask people to scrupulously respect the measures adopted by each autonomous region," he said. "It's the only way we have of controlling the virus."

Unlike other EU countries that have extended, or are preparing to extend, nationwide lockdowns, Spanish authorities have repeatedly rejected a new national confinement, instead delegating regional authorities for the imposition of curfews, limits on gatherings and restrictions on business opening hours.

Galicia on Wednesday banned all nonessential travel in the seven largest cities, ordered bars and restaurants to close at 4pm, and brought forward a curfew to 10pm, while La Rioja closed non-essential businesses at 5pm and limited group meetings to four people. Shops in Cantabria were banned from opening at weekends.

Meanwhile, a judge in Santiago de Compostela, in the north-west, ruled that a woman in a care home in the city should be vaccinated despite her daughter's opposition.

The judge accepted the woman had "very limited" cognitive capacity to decide for herself but said that, despite the daughter's fears of possible secondary effects, vaccination would incur less risk for the 84-year-old than holding back.

"While the act of vaccination itself carries a risk," said the judge, "so does not getting vaccinated." He referred in his ruling to WHO advice, saying the longer vaccination was delayed and the more the number of cases grew "the higher the risk".

The top scientific adviser to the French government, Jean-François Delfraissy, said there was no need to close schools in France yet but new restrictive measures had to be taken to slow further coronavirus infections, in particular the spread of the new variant.

"We think English data on the variant is not definitive enough to lead us to recommend the closing of schools in France," Delfraissy said, adding that the challenge with the variant, which now accounts for about 1% of new Covid-19 infections in France, was "not to eliminate it but to slow its progression".

Italy's health minister warned against "unforgivable" distractions as the ruling coalition looked close to collapse. The minister, Roberto Speranza , urged colleagues to stay focused on the health crisis, which has killed almost 80,000 people in Italy.

"Let's keep political infighting, real or presumed electoral tensions, far and separate from the health of Italians," Speranza told parliament. "It would really be an unforgivable mistake to get distracted or to slow down near the finish line."

The government, led by Guiseppe Conte, the prime minister, is on the verge of imploding following weeks of internal criticism from the former premier Matteo Renzi, leader of the Italia Viva party.

In Russia, the president, Vladimir Putin, ordered officials to begin mass vaccinations from next week, touting Russia's homemade shot, Sputnik V, which was registered before the start of large-scale clinical trials, as the world's best.

"I ask you to begin the mass vaccination of the entire population next week," Putin told officials at a televised government meeting. "The Russian vaccine is the best in the world."

[mongers]

1,564 UK deaths reported today. 

Yeah - I think we've hit 100,000 which is awful.

The case numbers are starting to fall, but that still means we've probably got 2 weeks of a climbing death toll because new cases are just baked in deaths in 2-3 weeks time

I'm a bit worried about watching today's evening news, but here goes.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Public Health England has released a study on the immunity conferred by having a bout of covid :

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/14/recovering-from-covid-gives-similar-level-of-protection-to-vaccine

"A Public Health England (PHE) study of more than 20,000 healthcare workers found that immunity acquired from an earlier Covid infection provided 83% protection against reinfection for at least 20 weeks."

Mixed news I would say. It looks like we will be heading to a future of annual vaccinations and periodic waves of the virus caused by mutations 

[DGuller]

Wow, just 83%?  That's a far cry from having "no confirmed cases of reinfection".

[Richard Hakluyt]

The BBC has a little bit more info on the study :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55651518

"Of those who had no antibodies to the virus, suggesting they had never had it, 318 developed potential new infections within this timeframe, the tests indicated.
But among the 6,614 with antibodies, this figure was just 44."

[Tamas]

Public Health England has released a study on the immunity conferred by having a bout of covid :

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/14/recovering-from-covid-gives-similar-level-of-protection-to-vaccine

"A Public Health England (PHE) study of more than 20,000 healthcare workers found that immunity acquired from an earlier Covid infection provided 83% protection against reinfection for at least 20 weeks."

Mixed news I would say. It looks like we will be heading to a future of annual vaccinations and periodic waves of the virus caused by mutations 

So, basically, what we might be looking at is we'll have the nastiest version of the flu going around each year, which can be a proper danger to, say over 40s instead to just over 80s? All those years of worrying what to do with an aging population and we may not have one.

[Sheilbh]

First 200 pharmacies starting to roll-out the vaccine today. As I say they are key in delivering the flu vaccine every year so should be a really useful resource for getting people their jab and companies like Boots and Superdrug have the supply chain networks to be really helpful and could help give people closer/more local options.

I feel like they should have been included first but I do slightly get the roll-out of hopitals, then GPs, then the big centres, then the pharmacies and increase number/capacity in those categories as they go on.

[garbon]

First 200 pharmacies starting to roll-out the vaccine today. As I say they are key in delivering the flu vaccine every year so should be a really useful resource for getting people their jab and companies like Boots and Superdrug have the supply chain networks to be really helpful and could help give people closer/more local options.

I feel like they should have been included first but I do slightly get the roll-out of hopitals, then GPs, then the big centres, then the pharmacies and increase number/capacity in those categories as they go on.

No quite correct. The first 6 pharmacies will start rolling-out the vaccine today with it reaching 200 in two weeks time.