Covid vaccine

Quoted from Maringer

Of course there will be a huge surge in infections now the kids are back at school! Why wouldn't there be?

The mitigations in place in schools last September have been all but removed now - no bubbles, no masking, isolation requirements removed or greatly reduced etc etc. All this with Delta now utterly dominant which is more than twice as infectious as the virus in circulation a year ago. The vaccine programme has been a success at reducing the number of deaths and serious illness, but only among those who are vaccinated. Which is not children. A tiny proportion of children have been vaccinated and therefore have no protection against infection. Prior infection with Covid provides a reasonable amount of protection against Delta, but a lot of children haven't been infected and have no protection. That is a lot of people just waiting to be infected. Not to mention their parents and grandparents who are still vulnerable to infection even if vaccinated (though not for severe illness as was the case last September).

If you can think of a single piece of evidence which shows why you don't think cases are going to rocket now the schools are back, then please post it. It will be interesting to see, that's for sure. Note, the studies released claiming Covid doesn't spread in schools were pretty terrible, not least because one was carried out before Alpha even emerged (~50% more infectious than previous variants), but also because the second was carried out during the earliest part of the Delta surge where no end of kids were off school isolating and therefore couldn't spread the virus, if they had it. Pretty much gaslighting the way that 'evidence' was pushed.

Regardless, even if the absolute risk to most children is low, we've still been seeing around 300 hospitalisations of children per week over the summer when they weren't mixing so the numbers of infections will rise in children, as will the numbers of hospitalisations and the paediatric ICU capacity is at full-stretch already. Breakthrough cases into older relatives who are still more likely to become seriously ill, even if vaccinated are going to be a major problem as well. The difference in absolute numbers between now and this point last year is ludicrous, somewhere over 25 times as many daily cases:

Tweet 1433521321439227906 will appear here...

Covid hospitalisations are currently about 8 times the level they were at this time last year and rising slowly, even before the impact of school reopening is felt. Ah, you say, but the number of deaths is lower. No, the daily number of deaths is 10 times higher than it was a year ago and also still rising. The politicians might claim that the link between infections and deaths has been broken, but it hasn't. What has occurred is that the vaccines and available treatments have reduced the ratio of deaths to infections. A good thing, but we're not exactly out of the woods yet. The current daily rate of deaths equates to about 40,000 deaths a year and that's before we enter the colder winter months - that's not much under twice the level of typical flu deaths each year. Those flu deaths mostly occur in the winter and we will see another flu season this winter, possibly worse than the last real one a couple of years ago. That will be addition to most Covid deaths.

It is pretty obvious to me that government policy is to actively get the virus spreading through schools as quickly as possible before the winter kicks in and the NHS is too busy to treat the children who require hospitalisation. This will lead to more immediate cases over the next couple of months than would have been the case if masking and other mitigations had continued. Let's hope it doesn't lead to too many deaths and not too many tens of thousands of children suffering from 'Long Covid' by the end of the year.

I've resigned myself to my kids getting Covid, probably some time before Christmas. Can't keep them out of school/nursery and my wife will be surrounded by unvaccinated teenagers at school as well so I'm left hoping they don't get too poorly, don't suffer longer-term symptoms and don't pass on infections to their grandparents. All the adults in the family are vaccinated, but we know protection wanes so the risk isn't negligible.

Hope is not a good way to deal with a respiratory pandemic when we know what needs to be done to stop the spread of the virus. We're not even trying any longer so I can only hope it doesn't get too bad over the winter.

Quoted from Stadium

October lockdown

https://inews.co.uk/news/covid.....l-admissions-1185533

Oct 2020:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54518002

But hold on-what did the Professor say again??

https://www.theguardian.com/wo.....y-says-neil-ferguson

Quoted from Neilo83

Did u even read the article in the first link?

A full lockdown is unlikely and would be a last resort, but there are a range of measures the government could introduce.

So exactly the same as what the professor predicted..

Quoted from Stadium

I see your twitter expert is spreading fake news.

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https://www.kxmx.com/post/ivermectin-overdose-not-an-issue-at-sallisaw-emergency-room-or-hospital

Quoted from Maringer

Here's a good breakdown of the way things are going with ICU admissions in the NHS at present:

Tweet 1434474981342261250 will appear here...

Quoted from Maringer

A 2-word tweet about an article published in a national newspaper is spreading fake news? Crikey, that's a very low bar for 'spreading fake news' from somebody promoting articles from the likes of the AIER!

Anyway, how about responding to the contents of my post instead? The numbers posted in the tweet by Dr. Robertson are readily available, the content of my post was very clear, so feel free to comment on that rather than just attempting to discredit the source.

As for the Ivermectin overdose article, I hadn't seen it before now. Not sure why the Doctor McElyea quoted in the article would make up stories about such overdoses. Perhaps he's encountered one or two cases and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to the stress of the surge hitting Oklahoma?

https://eu.oklahoman.com/story.....-doctors/8241772002/

I know there have been a few hundred cases of idiots overdosing with Ivermectin across the US (hence the CDC stuff the other week reminding people they aren't pigs or cows), but that shouldn't make much of a difference in a single state, especially as they are already overwhelmed with Covid cases to the extent that they are shipping patients out to other states to try and get them treatment. Just a similar situation to the idiots who overdosed on hydroxychloroquine last year, really. Oddly enough, both of these drugs with no evidence that they work at all, are promoted by anti-vaxxers/Covid-deniers. I'd imagine thousands of people will die from trusting these quack 'cures' in the US and elsewhere rather than trusting real scientific investigation. Before the vaccines and confirmed treatments were available, you could sort of understand it, but we're not in that place any longer.

Luckily, real science continues to do its thing and is discovering repurposed drugs such as baricitinib (normally used to treat rheumatoid arthritis) which can be used in conjunction with dexamethasone to save even more lives:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00358-1/fulltext

So, based on computer modelling which indicated the drug might be efficaceous, a randomised control trial was carried out which showed it certainly is and it will be saving lives around the world right now.

This is in comparison to Ivermectin where various meta-analyses of lots of different papers, many extremely flawed or lacking any sort of statistical power, have shown it was effective. However, these analyses all included the data from a study whose results were so dodgy that it skewed the numbers to make Ivermectin appear to be really effective when there is little true evidence it is at all effective.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-w

I notice that case numbers have started to ramp up now as expected following the return of kids to schools, mass gatherings etc etc. The good news is that deaths seem to have flattened out even as hospitalisations have continued to creep upwards. Still at too high a level, but it might be that we can keep the number of deaths at a flat rate, relatively high though that may be. We'll probably have to wait a few weeks to see if the surge in cases in younger people works its way up through to the older and more vulnerable members of the community as has been seen in previous waves.