The UK response - Part II - read OP

JP Liz V1

Most changes to lockdown restrictions due on 21 June have been delayed for four weeks - Boris and his government must be worried about high cases and Indian Delta variant

A Dub in Glasgo

Considering Johnson allowed thousands of people into UK from India whilst the virus was on the rampage there is unforgiveable. Does the man not learn from past mistakes?

Lumen

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

Considering Johnson allowed thousands of people into UK from India whilst the virus was on the rampage there is unforgiveable. Does the man not learn from past mistakes?

Yes, by making new ones.

A Dub in Glasgo

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

Considering Johnson allowed thousands of people into UK from India whilst the virus was on the rampage there is unforgiveable. Does the man not learn from past mistakes?

when did Scotland add India to the Red List?

S.M.B.

Up until recently I was absolutely livid with Johnson's decision to keep India off the red list and to a certain extent I still am. However, I am starting to acknowledge that these decisions are by no means trivial as right now Ireland are in danger of repeating the same mistake. I want nothing more than to be able to move without restrictions within the CTA and not so long ago I thought that could have been the case as early as the start of this month. Now Ireland should be looking very closely at the numbers in the UK and seriously considering doing more than an extended quarantine for non-exempt, non-vaccinated visitors.

Chris_5339762

S.M.B. wrote: »

Up until recently I was absolutely livid with Johnson's decision to keep India off the red list and to a certain extent I still am. However, I am starting to acknowledge that these decisions are by no means trivial as right now Ireland are in danger of repeating the same mistake. I want nothing more than to be able to move without restrictions within the CTA and not so long ago I thought that could have been the case as early as the start of this month. Now Ireland should be looking very closely at the numbers in the UK and seriously considering doing more than an extended quarantine for non-exempt, non-vaccinated visitors.

To an extent I sympathise with the decision makers... its a very very tough call to make. But it might have to be made. The problem is that with exponential growth, when it gets bad, it gets very bad very quickly, as we saw back in January.


I don't think that'll happen again if we have enough jabs in arms by the time Delta (inevitably) becomes dominant here. It outcompetes Alpha, so that IS going to happen.


And it depends on whether NPHET hit the panic button based purely on cases, or on hospitalisations.

Lumen

S.M.B. wrote: »

Up until recently I was absolutely livid with Johnson's decision to keep India off the red list and to a certain extent I still am. However, I am starting to acknowledge that these decisions are by no means trivial as right now Ireland are in danger of repeating the same mistake.

I think you might be missing the reason that Johnson didn't put India on the red list - because he had a trip planned there to make a trade deal.

It was gutter politics.

Seth Brundle

This is a jaw dropping summary of events. Absolutely nothing learnt from the last year...

https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1404822229939113989

Lumen

Lumen wrote: »

I think you might be missing the reason that Johnson didn't put India on the red list - because he had a trip planned there to make a trade deal.

It was gutter politics.

was Sturgeon going with him and that is why Scotland didn't put India on the red list earlier?

Lumen

Aegir wrote: »

was Sturgeon going with him and that is why Scotland didn't put India on the red list earlier?

You keep prodding about Scotland without posting any opinion or facts.

I don't believe Scotland had a traffic light system until after the India screwup.

What is your understanding?

Arghus

Quoting this article that I read the last day on the Telegraph site. I signed up to the Telegraph around the time of the Brexit referdum, because I wanted to see what the other side of the debate was saying too. And what I've learned is that the high Tory side of Britain are absolutely stone cracked. The EU are evil and the right for you to take that flight to your second home in Portugal definitely trumps measures to safeguard health and hospitals in the public interest. It's an absolute mad house of entitled right wing whingers, so, as you can imagine, intensely anti restrictions in any form.

But I found this piece interesting all the same, considering that it's sober and fair. Maybe there's nothing new in this for many of you, but I thought it was a good summation of things in the UK.

I'm not posting this because I think the UK is fcked or that we're fcked or not. Nobody really knows at the moment, we all hope for the best.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/face-third-wave-covid-19-die-may-already-have-cast/

Making a bad decision is never good. But there is nothing worse than jumping into a fire when all your instincts tell you to move the other way.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, made this point in the Commons last week. He said he had heard from China in January 2020 that the virus was spreading asymptomatically but was assured this was not the case.

“The formal advice I was receiving was that asymptomatic transmission is unlikely, and we shouldn’t base policy on it,” he said.

“I bitterly regret that I didn’t overrule that scientific advice at the start and say we should proceed on the basis that there is asymptomatic transmission until we know that that isn’t, rather than the other way around.”

I’ve limited sympathy for Mr Hancock. A quick search of Google Scholar would have told him the spread of previous coronaviruses and indeed influenza – the disease the UK’s pandemic plan was based on – all have an asymptomatic element.

Once burned twice shy? It would be nice to think so but wave two of the pandemic was predicted by the Government’s own “reasonable worst case scenario” published in July last year, and still we walked straight into it, recording a further 90,000 deaths.

Now that we face a third wave of Covid-19, we must hope for “twice burned thrice shy” – but there are reasons to think that die may already have been cast.

On Monday, the Prime Minister is expected to announce the June 21 unlocking – the point at which “all legal restrictions” were to be lifted – will be pushed back a month.

As he told reporters on Saturday: “In order to have an irreversible roadmap, you've got to be cautious.”

It makes sense not to pour fuel on the nascent wave of the new delta variant which arose in India, but can a fire that is already spreading exponentially really be stopped without reversing course and cutting new fire breaks?

This is the real question occupying minds across Whitehall at the moment. Will we get lucky and see the third wave briefly flare up before petering out as vaccines douse it? Or will it grow and threaten to consume us like the others because we failed to stamp out the first sparks?

Following the data
The raw data does not look good. Cases of the delta variant have been growing exponentially from a low base since early May, and for the past seven days have averaged about 5,000 new cases a day.
Hopes that its transmission advantage would turn out to be moderate have been dashed, as its estimated R number has continued to climb.

It now appears to have settled at or about R1.5 with a doubling time of nine days. If you start from 5,000 and double three times you get to 40,000 cases a day by early July. If you double that again you get to 80,000 cases nine days later – a number that bursts through the January peak.

The epidemiologist Adam Kucharski captured the mood among Sage’s modellers on Saturday morning by Tweeting: “That depressing feeling of having to extend y-axes [vertical] again”.

He noted, too, that the variant’s estimated growth rate already “prices in” our existing firebreaks. “Without vaccination and the social distancing still in place, R would be *much* higher”, he said.

Other data show UK delta cases to have started in the young but to be moving up the age groups and even social classes.

A similar pattern was observed in the US last summer when a wave of virus started among the young in Florida and other southern states. At first, people dubbed it a “casedemic” – but then it found its way into older and more vulnerable age groups.

Vaccines and immunity
Cases, of course, are only a worry if they lead to hospitalisations – and this time around we have vaccines to protect us.

But here, too, the news is not all good with the delta variant. The latest Public Health England (PHE) data put the vaccine's effectiveness against symptomatic disease at 33 per cent after one dose and 81 per cent after two.

The mathematician and Covid modeller James Ward estimated this should rise to something like 80 per cent and 95 per cent respectively when it comes to protection against “severe disease and death”.

On one level, those numbers are reassuring, but the evidence to support it is incomplete. PHE is still awaiting evidence on how well the AstraZeneca vaccine, which accounts for about 70 per cent of all UK jabs, performs after two doses against the delta variant.

“There is uncertainty around the magnitude of the change in vaccine effectiveness after two doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine,” said its latest report.

The same report revealed that of the 42 people known to have died so far with the delta variant in the UK, 29 per cent (12 people) were fully vaccinated.

“Of note is the high percentage of severe outcomes among people [with vaccine] breakthrough infections”, observed the PHE epidemiologist Meaghan Kall on Friday.

“Who are they and why is that happening? Work ongoing to understand the profile of fully vaxxed people with severe outcomes,” she added.

It is speculation, but they are likely to be older or more frail people in whom immunity has faded since they were given their jabs.

A Lancet study published last week found the Government’s policy of spacing doses of the Pfizer jab beyond the manufacturer's three-week recommendation causes immunity to tail off faster than it otherwise would, especially in the old.

“These data therefore suggest that the benefits of delaying the second dose, in terms of wider population coverage and increased individual [protection] after the second dose [of Pfizer], must now be weighed against decreased efficacy in the short-term, in the context of the spread of B.1.617.2 [delta]”, said the authors.

Hospitalisations and the NHS
Ultimately it will be the number of hospitalisations that determines if the roadmap ends up having to be reversed and a new lockdown imposed.

It’s a hard truth but the UK pandemic strategy from 2011 has always allowed for a very significant number of deaths. What cannot happen is for the NHS to be overwhelmed as this leads to a wider socio-economic breakdown as seen in India last month.

The latest Sage modelling on hospitalisations is expected to be released on Monday to coincide with the Prime Minister’s statement and seems unlikely to contain good news.

The last set of modelling, published in May, contained projections for what might happen if a new, more transmissible variant broke loose – and the numbers were not pretty.

The University of Warwick’s modelling showed a variant that was 50 per cent more transmissible would, more or less, take the course that the delta variant has to date. It would then breach the second wave peak of about 4,000 hospital admissions a day in late July even if the final stage of reopening was postponed.

A new paper published by Warwick on Friday and adjusted to take account of age, showed a similar if slightly more optimistic pattern (see chart above). The two scenarios which best match the known characteristics of the Delta variant still breach the January peak if lockdown is ended on June 21 but come in underneath if – as is expected – it’s deferred. The timing of the peak is also pushed back a month.

The projections published by Sage on Monday will differ in their detail but the broad logic of the maths will remain the same: We have a lot of people vaccinated but about 57 per cent of the population are not yet fully protected. If you get a very big wave of infections, the total number being hospitalised – while a tiny proportion of the total – could still be too big for the NHS to handle.

But we may yet get lucky. The delta variant remains unevenly spread across the country, with cases still concentrated in about a dozen areas and there are very early indications is growth is slowing.

As Ms Kall of PHE points out, we were seeing a much wider dispersion of cases eight to 10 weeks after the Kent variant was first spotted. “This is cause for optimism that vaccines are indeed slowing and in some populations halting the spread of Covid-19,” she said.

On the other hand, if delta explodes across the country in the coming weeks, optimism will fade fast, just as it has Chile which locked down again last week despite a faster double-dose vaccine rollout than our own.

In that fireball scenario, we’ll remember the instinct of those in Whitehall who tried to sneak in local restrictions under the radar even as the Prime Minister pushed ahead with the last reopening on May 17. And we’ll ask: why didn't you jump the other way?

Lumen

Lumen wrote: »

You keep prodding about Scotland without posting any opinion or facts.

I don't believe Scotland had a traffic light system until after the India screwup.

What is your understanding?

my understanding is that Scotland has it's own rules on hotel quarantining and didn't put India on the list until the 19th April, the same day England announced that India was going on the "Red" list, not that either nation had the traffic light system in place then as all international travel was effectively banned.

The problem is though, you can't stop your own citizens entering the country, only implement rules on what they do when they get there.

there is also, of course, the "Dodge" of not flying directly as this couple did in February. https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/us-travellers-avoid-scottish-quarantine-with-short-stay-in-dublin-1081878.html

If you are going to hang Boris, then Sturgeon should be on the gallows next to him.

Lumen

Aegir wrote: »

my understanding is that Scotland has it's own rules on hotel quarantining and didn't put India on the list until the 19th April, the same day England announced that India was going on the "Red" list, not that either nation had the traffic light system in place then as all international travel was effectively banned.

The problem is though, you can't stop your own citizens entering the country, only implement rules on what they do when they get there.

there is also, of course, the "Dodge" of not flying directly as this couple did in February. https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/us-travellers-avoid-scottish-quarantine-with-short-stay-in-dublin-1081878.html

If you are going to hang Boris, then Sturgeon should be on the gallows next to him.

OK, so prior to the adoption of the traffic light system, was Scotland operating its own "red list" at the time?

Lumen

Lumen wrote: »

OK, so prior to the adoption of the traffic light system, was Scotland operating its own "red list" at the time?

Yes

Lumen

Aegir wrote: »

Yes

Are you sure about this drum you're banging?

I can't find much coverage, except this from 18 April.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nicola-sturgeon-scotland-government-boris-johnson-india-b930305.html

With Scotland requiring all travellers arriving in the country from overseas to self-isolate in a quarantine hotel, Ms Sturgeon said her Government was continuing to press the UK to adopt the same approach.
...
“In Scotland we insist that people quarantine in managed isolation wherever in the world they come from if they come directly into Scotland, and we continue to try to persuade the UK Government to take a similar approach."

Lumen

Lumen wrote: »

Are you sure about this drum you're banging?

I can't find much coverage, except this from 18 April.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/nicola-sturgeon-scotland-government-boris-johnson-india-b930305.html

remembering of course, that there were very few international flights arriving in Scotland at the time, so it was fairly easy to do, except that there was a very large Dublin shaped hole in those plans, as demonstrated in the article i linked to.

You have to remember as well, the Delta variant was only identified as a variant of concern on the 11th May, so a month earlier the spike in cases in India was seen as little more than a straight forward rise in cases. In Ireland we only red listed India on the 27th April, after England and Scotland did, so maybe we should add Stephen Donnelly to the list of names for the gallows?

fwiw, France added India on the 14th May.

S.M.B.

Lumen wrote: »

I think you might be missing the reason that Johnson didn't put India on the red list - because he had a trip planned there to make a trade deal.

It was gutter politics.

I'm aware that there were more than likely political reasons why India wasn't added to the red list sooner, reasons that seem somewhat farcical as outlined in the video above.

I guess my point is that there are also geo-political reasons (albeit arguably more valid reasons) why Ireland would not want to put the UK on a red list and you could very much make a case that this action should have been taken in recent weeks.

Lumen

S.M.B. wrote: »

I'm aware that there were more than likely political reasons why India wasn't added to the red list sooner, reasons that seem somewhat farcical as outlined in the video above.

I guess my point is that there are also geo-political reasons (albeit arguably more valid reasons) why Ireland would not want to put the UK on a red list and you could very much make a case that this action should have been taken in recent weeks.

We have an open border with the UK. I get your general point about political considerations, but this issue is mostly practical.

Lumen

Aegir wrote: »

remembering of course, that there were very few international flights arriving in Scotland at the time, so it was fairly easy to do, except that there was a very large Dublin shaped hole in those plans, as demonstrated in the article i linked to.

You have to remember as well, the Delta variant was only identified as a variant of concern on the 11th May, so a month earlier the spike in cases in India was seen as little more than a straight forward rise in cases. In Ireland we only red listed India on the 27th April, after England and Scotland did, so maybe we should add Stephen Donnelly to the list of names for the gallows?

fwiw, France added India on the 14th May.

I would be happy to add Donnelly to your red list, but it doesn't let Johnson off the hook.

You are indeed the king of Brit-licking whataboutery. For some reason I'd forgotten about your considerable body of such work in the Politics forum.

A Dub in Glasgo

Aegir wrote: »

when did Scotland add India to the Red List?

Scotland has no flights from India therefore it has to rely on the UK govt decisions for entry into England where the flights come in

Your squirrel looking is something else

A Dub in Glasgo

Seth Brundle wrote: »

This is a jaw dropping summary of events. Absolutely nothing learnt from the last year...

https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1404822229939113989

Absolutely scandalous

BonnieSituation

Seth Brundle wrote: »

This is a jaw dropping summary of events. Absolutely nothing learnt from the last year...

https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1404822229939113989

That's all well and good, but what's Scotland and Sturgeon doing about it?


---

But seriously, imagine living through the last 3 months and then watching that summary and still thinking that there's 'nothing to see here'.

bodhrandude

Was Pakistan added at the same time as India to the red list as there is a massive Pakistan community in Scotland too.

A Dub in Glasgo

bodhrandude wrote: »

Was Pakistan added at the same time as India to the red list as there is a massive Pakistan community in Scotland too.

there are no flights from Pakistan either

A Dub in Glasgo

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

Scotland has no flights from India therefore it has to rely on the UK govt decisions for entry into England where the flights come in

Your squirrel looking is something else

And the Irish government, obviously.

A Dub in Glasgo

What % of people who entered Britain from India came through flights into Dublin versus the flights into England? Your constant deflection is quite pathetic

BonnieSituation

Aegir wrote: »

And the Irish government, obviously.

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

What % of people who entered Britain from India came through flights into Dublin versus the flights into England? Your constant deflection is quite pathetic

At least you got out of Ireland. Poor Aegir is stuck here.

A Dub in Glasgo

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

What % of people who entered Britain from India came through flights into Dublin versus the flights into England? Your constant deflection is quite pathetic

Your refusal to accept that the SNP share the blame is pathetic to be honest.

But I guess Sturgeon’s lack of a crystal ball is understandable but Johnson’s isn’t?

The WHO classified the Delta variant as a variant of concern on 11th May. England put India on the red list on 21st April, before Ireland, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands

Sounds like they were ahead of the curve.

A Dub in Glasgo

The Indian variant seeding into Britain has absolutely nothing to do with the Scottish Government and the fact you are attempting to deflect away from the UK Government tells us everything about you

A Dub in Glasgo

A Dub in Glasgo wrote: »

The Indian variant seeding into Britain has absolutely nothing to do with the Scottish Government and the fact you are attempting to deflect away from the UK Government tells us everything about you

Yep. Can’t refute any points so goes for the ad hominem approach.