Coronavirus

[pauld]

Hopefully over the coming months the treatments from SNG, interferon etc get signed off as ultimately if the virus can be treated and has minimal death rate case rates will no longer be much of an issue as you'll have broken the link between case numbers and deaths.

While I take your point overall, it's not just deaths, hospitals can still be overwhelmed even if we improve mortality rates among hosptial cases. And perhaps more important Covid isn't a binary die/not die disease, there are lots of people still extremely ill with Long Covid or suffering long-term effects after "recovering" from the virus itself.

[Batch]

Bit early to declare case rates.

hospitalisations is the key now anyway, and they lag even more

[Bob's Orange]

There was lots of rhetoric about schools going back being a stupid idea but ultimately that has had little to no impact on case rates and hospital numbers are continuing to fall to the extent the NHS want to or have downgraded to level 3 now.

The news at 2 on Radio 2 earlier stated that numbers in Scotland were going up. Given that they have been back in schools for longer than in England that suggests that it could be linked to the schools.

However the chart on google suggests that the rate has been more or less the same in Scotland for a while now so its probably gone up by a tiny amount rather than a worryingly large number.

[Panda Paws]

It's going up because we're testing double the number of people. Only those between 6 and 18 are seeing that uptick, and they're at next-to-no risk of being seriously ill.

[Batch]

I find it hard to get the breakdown per age. most of the figures seem to be over 60 and under 60

the heat map here may show the vaccine at work, easy to draw to many conclusions on a small sample size

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Swindon

[Shrivvy Road]

I find it hard to get the breakdown per age. most of the figures seem to be over 60 and under 60

the heat map here may show the vaccine at work, easy to draw to many conclusions on a small sample size

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Swindon

Is that 15 positive tests in Swindon?

[Flashheart]

While I take your point overall, it's not just deaths, hospitals can still be overwhelmed even if we improve mortality rates among hosptial cases. And perhaps more important Covid isn't a binary die/not die disease, there are lots of people still extremely ill with Long Covid or suffering long-term effects after "recovering" from the virus itself.

This has to be explained to some people so many times that it makes one wonder if they choose to deliberately ignore it.

[theakston2k]

This has to be explained to some people so many times that it makes one wonder if they choose to deliberately ignore it.

A lot of said treatments actually being tested on and showing positive results on long covid so I include that in the generic treatment tag!

[pauld]

A lot of said treatments actually being tested on and showing positive results on long covid so I include that in the generic treatment tag!

Might be helpful to say so then as your initial answer talked about breaking the link between case numbers and deaths, maybe breaking the link between case numbers and serious/long-term illness might have been a better way of putting it.

[Shrivvy Road]

Hopefully, we can all agree that it does appear that rates are going down and so are hospital admissions. Lockdown of course plays a part but i think the vaccine is playing a bigger part.

[Bogus Dave]

Is there any scientific basis that says Long Covid is anything other than standard viral fatigue that people commonly get after a heavy viral infection?? Not trying to downplay it, as it’s not something I’d particularly want, but I was under the impression it wasn’t some new unknown

[pauld]

Hopefully, we can all agree that it does appear that rates are going down and so are hospital admissions. Lockdown of course plays a part but i think the vaccine is playing a bigger part.

Far too early to say on any of that. There's a contra story based on data from ONS today that rates have stopped falling and are instead now plateauing. Cue, then, an impassioned debate between two sides with equally little understanding of the stats that this is definitely due to schools reopening or isn't happening at all it's just a red herring from more testing etc etc

Overall direction of travel does look good, but it's just too early to be saying what's actually happening, whether it's a trend that will continue (or has already started to reverse) and what the causal factors are. All of which needs to be understood before determining next steps. Wait a couple of weeks for the smoke to clear and see where trends in data have gone then. And what the scientific advice is on which levers have been most important in that.

[Bogus Dave]

Rates look steady because we’re doing 1.8m tests a day - there must be a decent shout given the testing boom between now and last summer that there arent many more,
 cases in the country currently than there were in august

[Shrivvy Road]

Far too early to say on any of that. There's a contra story based on data from ONS today that rates have stopped falling and are instead now plateauing. Cue, then, an impassioned debate between two sides with equally little understanding of the stats that this is definitely due to schools reopening or isn't happening at all it's just a red herring from more testing etc etc

Overall direction of travel does look good, but it's just too early to be saying what's actually happening, whether it's a trend that will continue (or has already started to reverse) and what the causal factors are. All of which needs to be understood before determining next steps. Wait a couple of weeks for the smoke to clear and see where trends in data have gone then. And what the scientific advice is on which levers have been most important in that.

This is where i struggle though, deaths and hospital admissions are going down week on week surely? I don't go to deep into everything because i am thick as fuck but surely if admissions and deaths are down and positive cases are down it's ok to be positive and say cases are down

[pauld]

Is there any scientific basis that says Long Covid is anything other than standard viral fatigue that people commonly get after a heavy viral infection?? Not trying to downplay it, as it’s not something I’d particularly want, but I was under the impression it wasn’t some new unknown

Whether it's new or not isn't the point so much as that a lot of people seem to treat COVID as a simple "two or three weeks of symptoms and then you either recover or die" binary and it's not as easy as that. Around 10% of those with serious infection go on to suffer for many months with symptoms and there are also cases where people have been asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in the initial illness that have then suffered far more serious issues in the Long COVID phase. There are some people who got ill in the first wave of infections that still haven't recovered.