[Will Hunt]

I don't know, but I'm skeptical of Prof. Pete because I wonder whether his libertarian tendencies might influence his opinion.

I'm pretty skeptical too, but I don't know what I'm missing which means you can't, to all intents and purposes, compare SA and the UK given they both have high immunity, albeit from different sources.

I'm happy to admit that I haven't read up on this. My posts here should be discounted on the basis of my ignorance (I'm doing fuck all except work and guidebook at the moment). However the impression I get is that nobody can say with certainty what the impact of omicron on the UK will be. I don't think people are saying there is nothing to learn from data coming from South Africa. I think they're saying: just because South Africa has been fine it doesn't mean that the UK will also be fine.

[spidermonkey09]

However the impression I get is that nobody can say with certainty what the impact of omicron on the UK will be.

Yeah, I think this is true. What I think Pete's saying is that given the data is at least arguable, its disproportionate to be talking about big restrictions again.

But the consequences of assuming its all going to be fine are a lot worse than the consequences of assuming it's all going to be OK. If both sets of data are equally unreliable, and we needs to chose which one to listen to, I know what I'd be plumping for.

This is fine up to a point, but its not a cost-benefit analysis if we fail to include the costs! There are big consequences to restrictions as well as we all know by now. Obviously theres a discussion to be had but to me thats a misuse of the precautionary principle.

[Duma]

Away from Omicron for a min, there's been some good trends regarding deaths/hospitalisations Vs cases in the last few weeks:
Cases, start and end of the 4 weeks starting from 4th Nov
35362/46006 - up 23%
Hospitalised, 4 weeks starting 11th Nov (1 week offset)
8764/7401 - down 18%
Deaths, 4 weeks starting 19th Nov (2 weeks offset)
147/111.4 - down 32%

Appears treatment is improving, or is this just the impact of early boosters on the elderly?

[Paul B]

https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1472941687001522176?s=20

Looks like restrictions incoming from the 27/12.

PM says otherwise. No change but he's reserving the right for further restrictions etc.

What concerns me about this all of this is the PM's lack of support in his own party to implement any restrictions that may be required; with his form I'd bet on him acting in his own interests before that of the wider electorate.

[Will Hunt]

https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1472941687001522176?s=20

Looks like restrictions incoming from the 27/12.

PM says otherwise. No change but he's reserving the right for further restrictions etc.

What concerns me about this all of this is the PM's lack of support in his own party to implement any restrictions that may be required; with his form I'd bet on him acting in his own interests before that of the wider electorate.

Labour will make up the Conservative numbers if there's a vote, but he might not want to expose the fact again that his party is against him.
(Apologies if that's what you were getting at).

[Paul B]

(Apologies if that's what you were getting at).

That's exactly what I was getting at.

[abarro81]

Judging by the amount of colleagues and family (and me) testing positive over the past few days, I reckon a good proportion of Christmases will be canceled by default, irrespective of rules

[mrjonathanr]

Quite. Hope it’s short lived for you.

[Duma]

Ah that's rubbish, sorry Alex. Just spent the last two days waiting with bated breath on daughters PCR results, thankfully we're still ok (touch wood)

[Fiend]

(touch wood)

You're already prepared for isolating on the fingerboard instead of the TCA circuits then....

[Duma]

Did my first fingerboard session in about 8 months today!

[Offwidth]

Anyone taking covid science from The Spectator has a screw loose but equally some of the more apocalyptic extrapolations doing the rounds seem impossible to me (we already have at least tens of percent of London's young adults infected so it can't double more than twice more in that age group).

Thats playing the man not the ball, which you've accused me of in the past with some justification. I instinctively distrust the Spectator on almost everything but I'd be interested to know how their analysis is factually wrong. Also interesting that we agree that some of the apocalyptic modelling is ridiculous.

It's just a general point someone aimed at pete ( he's not like that imho) and certainly nothing to do with you!? The Spectator don''t do analysis ....they just misread models and point out 'predictions' were wrong that were covered in provisos (including if we don't do anything this will happen type things after something was done). The Spectator started the pandemic with lockdown denial, hence denying exponential growth. Middle period it said everyone had herd  immunity, so the proposed September 2020 lockdown was bs.. These days they are just an annoying press mosquito on covid.

[sdm]

The UK's biggest problem is we have been running hot on covid in the middle of a building crisis in patient throughput, and staff levels. We have very little slack for increased admissions. The good news is we have the best levels of population immunity from jabs and  infections in Western Europe.

I agree with this, but that would seem to imply that we would be locking down because our healthcare system is shit, not because Omicron is particularly bad.

The two aren't separable. If we lockdown because our healthcare system cannot cope with the omicron outbreak, it matters not in the short term whether we reached that point because our healthcare system is shit, because omicron is particularly bad, or because of some combination of the two. The outcome is the same.

Also, surely the UK healthcare system is at least comparable to SAs, which seemed to manage ok?

SA coping reasonably well does not mean that the UK will. A person's prospects with covid deteriorate significantly with age. SA has 6% of its population aged over 65, the UK has 19%. The UK's covid healthcare capacity needs to be significantly better than SA's to achieve the same outcome in a comparable covid outbreak.

My guess is that our levels of vaccination plus natural immunity will give us better protection overall for the same age than SA's largely naturally acquired immunity. But that is unqualified speculation.

[spidermonkey09]

It's just a general point someone aimed at pete ( he's not like that imho) and certainly nothing to do with you!?

I didn't take it as a personal slight, I just meant that you weren't criticising the substance of the argument but the medium through which it was delivered; the Spectator. I actually agree their analysis is generally nonsense but then I also think that about the Guardian a lot of the time; the point is surely to treat each case on its merits?

The two aren't separable. If we lockdown because our healthcare system cannot cope with the omicron outbreak, it matters not in the short term whether we reached that point because our healthcare system is shit, because omicron is particularly bad, or because of some combination of the two. The outcome is the same.

Yes, I understand this - my point was more about the framing, which seems to me to be a lot more focused on the dangers of Omicron as opposed to the structural problems it is exposing. If we also accept that these structural problems are unlikely to be solved in the short to medium term, which unfortunately I do, then the logical conclusion is that lockdowns will be an annual, or at least frequent, normalised policy tool to NHS pressure/new variants, just in case they overwhelm the system. I don't think this is sustainable or politically possible, whichever party is in office, so by far the most likely outcome is an annual 'muddling through,' with the NHS under huge winter pressures pretty much every year. I don't like this outcome much either but I think its preferable to annual lockdowns.

SA coping reasonably well does not mean that the UK will. A person's prospects with covid deteriorate significantly with age. SA has 6% of its population aged over 65, the UK has 19%. The UK's covid healthcare capacity needs to be significantly better than SA's to achieve the same outcome in a comparable covid outbreak.

My guess is that our levels of vaccination plus natural immunity will give us better protection overall for the same age than SA's largely naturally acquired immunity. But that is unqualified speculation.

Again, I understand this point but I still don't think that this justification for a lockdown will fly politically, even if it makes sense from a raw numbers perspective. You can't be introducing nationwide restrictions on peoples lives because we have an aging population. One might also respond that the vast majority of our over 65s have also been boosted, which lowers their risk significantly.

I'm as unqualified as the next person but I think lockdowns are a pretty blunt policy response now vaccines are available and shouldn't be seen as a normal policy measure or a tool like any other. The evidence is not clear cut like it was last christmas. Basically, I don't think a broadly restriction free society should be seen as an optional extra in the long term, and in the short term I'd rather we start getting used to what that will mean. Obviously it will have costs and it would be good for the government to be more honest about that. 

[Rocksteady]

Cover up the news, or compound the impact of the slow-to-emerge news, that the commons select committee heard evidence on Wednesday last week that a human-engineered virus and lab leak theory is now considered the most likely origin of covid. (notable that this didn't make the BBC or most of the other main media outlets)?

Interesting that this detail has been lost in the subsequent debate. This whole matter is unfairly lumped in with conspiracy theories in my opinion whereas actually it does seem more of a prima facie case that it's worth investigating whether a lab creating and researching novel coronaviruses was the origin of a novel coronavirus that emerged in the same city where the lab is based. 

I read this paper which has a very bland title but as Pete says actually is an examination by a parliamentary committee of (1) the flaws in the peer review system and (2) the potential origins of the Covid-19 pandemic as an escape from the Wuhan lab.

In summary: the editor of The Lancet admits that the letter they published at the outset of the pandemic that said it was extremely unlikely the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab was initiated by Dr Danszak, a virologist from the EcoHealth Alliance who failed to disclose his conflict of interest as a US government funded sponsor of said Wuhan lab to carry out research into novel coronaviruses. At the time this shut down the debate on the topic. It was revealed that The Lancet doesn't check conflicts of interest it just takes declarations on faith. Over 16 months later once they had worked everything through they amended the letter with information about the conflict of interest.

Subsequent examination of expert witnesses in the report makes it clear that it is plausible that (a) the virus is genetically modified and (b) that it could well have escaped from the Wuhan lab (accidentally). One interesting piece of unverifiable info from some of the expert witnesses is "there is a report from inside the US intelligence community that three of the first cases were workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who got sick in November 2019 with symptoms very like Covid-19."

They found the animal origins of SARS and MERS outbreaks within 8 weeks. Despite the global interest and the WHO investigation of I think 80k animals in China they have not found a plausible animal progenitor of this virus.

It might seem irrelevant next to the practical consequences right now but I think it's important. Not to finger point at China
 or virologists but to work out what needs to be done to prevent a future pandemic. Should more scrutiny and regulation be put on the type of experiments done in virus research? Is any benefit produced by splicing viruses together worth the cost of a global pandemic? Can similar benefits be achieved with less risky experiments?

"There is a database at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with 22,000 entries in it, 15,000 of them relating to viruses from bats. It has been offline since before the pandemic. It was there to help prepare for pandemics. Which pandemic are they waiting for before they share it with the rest of the world? Quite a lot of the entries in it relate to viruses collected with US Government funding through the EcoHealth Alliance. Why do they not have access to that data, which goes back to the earlier session about the importance of making data available?"

In principle I hate conspiracy theories as they obscure the truth and take convoluted explanations for things that are in fact simple, and usually relate to incompetence. I've fallen out with people at work in the past who were moon-landing deniers (FFS). But to me this is about truth and most simple/likely explanation. The waters are getting muddied by people saying  the virus was deliberately created to attack humans and deliberately released. I'm not saying that and the parliamentary investigation doesn't say that.
But given the lack of evidence of an animal source despite lots of investigation and much faster identification of said source in previous coronavirus outbreaks, it seems more likely than not that this coronavirus could have been created in the Wuhan lab and accidentally escaped from there. Conspiracy theory alert: Yes I do also think that this has been covered up or obfuscated by the Chinese government and other people involved (US-based lab sponsor EcoHealth Alliance) for fear of repercussion.

[tommytwotone]

I'm as unqualified as the next person but I think lockdowns are a pretty blunt policy response now vaccines are available and shouldn't be seen as a normal policy measure or a tool like any other. The evidence is not clear cut like it was last christmas. Basically, I don't think a broadly restriction free society should be seen as an optional extra in the long term, and in the short term I'd rather we start getting used to what that will mean. Obviously it will have costs and it would be good for the government to be more honest about that. 

Good point. Cars are exponentially / prove-ably safer than they were c.20 years ago now, and road deaths are at an all-time low.

Based on those improvements in preventative measure and the statistics, I think I'll stop me and my family wearing seatbelts in the car, it's a bit of blunt policy in terms of keeping me and those around me safe.

[Duma]

What a ridiculous comparison ttt, lockdowns are enormously damaging to society, especially those at least risk from the disease (school kids and young adults/students) and failure to acknowledge, or trivialising this harm (for example by comparing them to seatbelts) helps no one.

[Adam Lincoln]

Spanish officials meeting tomorrow (22nd) to decide if UK citizens will be banned from entering Spain. As per Germany and France.

Big day for climbers!

[teestub]

so by far the most likely outcome is an annual 'muddling through,' with the NHS under huge winter pressures pretty much every year. I don't like this outcome much either but I think its preferable to annual lockdowns.

I don’t think we will have many healthcare workers left if official policy is ‘suck it up’! 

Your phrase ‘muddling through’ is also a very nice way of saying ‘decide who we can care for and who we need to leave to die’.

[Nigel]

...the logical conclusion is that lockdowns will be an annual, or at least frequent, normalised policy tool to NHS pressure/new variants, just in case they overwhelm the system. I don't think this is sustainable or politically possible, whichever party is in office, so by far the most likely outcome is an annual 'muddling through,' with the NHS under huge winter pressures pretty much every year. I don't like this outcome much either but I think its preferable to annual lockdowns.

The worry in government is presumably that the NHS won't "muddle through" though. Rather that it will stop functioning. For clarity everything you say in your post makes sense and I completely agree that it is a balancing act. Absolutely no-one wants further restrictions. But we've already seen how relatively innocuous things like a lack of petrol at the pumps can really put the skids on things. Healthcare being unable to operate a functioning nationwide emergency service would be of a different order entirely. Its nice to look at the optimistic models and hope that this won't happen, but because of the lack of firm information on severity it is a gamble. Sometimes you can shrug off a loss on a gamble. On an individual level probably a lot of people can indeed cope without an emergency service for a bit. Fingers crossed it doesn't come to that anyway...

[spidermonkey09]

Good point. Cars are exponentially / prove-ably safer than they were c.20 years ago now, and road deaths are at an all-time low.

Based on those improvements in preventative measure and the statistics, I think I'll stop me and my family wearing seatbelts in the car, it's a bit of blunt policy in terms of keeping me and those around me safe.

Come on, that is a totally spurious comparison. Wearing a seatbelt has absolutely no downsides or costs, whereas as we all know, lockdowns do.

I don’t think we will have many healthcare workers left if official policy is ‘suck it up’! 

Your phrase ‘muddling through’ is also a very nice way of saying ‘decide who we can care for and who we need to leave to die’.

Agree that is definitely a concern. I think we need to pretty urgently increase the numbers of doctors and nurses in training and provide more funding for training progression across basically all of the specialities. Its not something we can fix short term but it could be medium term. That obviously requires significant additional funding and probably tax rises.

In the absolute worst case scenario it is, but as I've said before, I don't think thats particularly likely. In perhaps the more likely scenario it means 'deciding who's non urgent care/ elective surgery will be cancelled.' I don't think thats good either, for the avoidance of doubt (my Nan urgently needs a new hip, for example!), but I don't think it is remotely comparable to leaving people to die.

The worry in government is presumably that the NHS won't "muddle through" though. Rather that it will stop functioning. For clarity everything you say in your post makes sense and I completely agree that it is a balancing act. Absolutely no-one wants further restrictions. But we've already seen how relatively innocuous things like a lack of petrol at the pumps can really put the skids on things. Healthcare being unable to operate a functioning nationwide emergency service would be of a different order entirely. Its nice to look at the optimistic models and hope that this won't happen, but because of the lack of firm information on severity it is a gamble. Sometimes you can shrug off a loss on a gamble. On an individual level probably a lot of people can indeed cope without an emergency service for a bit. Fingers crossed it doesn't come to that anyway...

Yep, I agree with all of this. Ultimately we can't know for sure how likely NHS collapse is, and the discussion comes down to how justifiable massive restrictions are in the absence of such clarity. Personally, I think you have to be absolutely certain the shit is going to hit the fan before restrictions are brought back, they shouldn't just be introduced 'just in case.' Appreciate others disagree but I bet that view is becoming more and more mainstream across society, even if not on this forum!

[teestub]

Personally, I think you have to be absolutely certain the shit is going to hit the fan before restrictions are brought back, they shouldn't just be introduced 'just in case.' Appreciate others disagree but I bet that view is becoming more and more mainstream across society, even if not on this forum!

I agree here but I guess calling when that tipping point is, with the nature of the exponential growth and not knowing the severity of a variant until you have a decent mass of it, will be very difficult.

[spidermonkey09]

I agree here but I guess calling when that tipping point is, with the nature of the exponential growth and not knowing the severity of a variant until you have a decent mass of it, will be very difficult.

Definitely. I think it almost comes down to point of political philosophy regarding what level of state intervention one is happy with. I am pretty statist in quite a lot of my political and economic views but am definitely not when it comes to meeting my friends in my own house, for example.

[petejh]

Haven't properly read thread as I'm busy packing and xmas stuff. This is rushed so likely won't read well.

In reply to your 'prof Pete' comment Will:
I'm not posting to try to appear clever. I don't think I'm clever. I do think I have an OK capacity for researching and absorbing lots of info, spotting patterns, and a reasonable nose for bullshit or opportunity.

In reply to 'spectator covid science' playing the ball'ism: I've never knowingly read the spectator (I realise Fraser Nelson published his article in the spectator - it was also published in torygraph but the original tweets were on, well.. twitter). For news I read the Guardian and the Telegraph. For business news I read Bloomberg and the FT. For in-depth I read the economist and various other sources. The markets are a very good indicator of how omicron will play out, markets will know and act before we will.
I have libertarian ideals but as they say - 'I have strong opinions loosely held'. I'm not at all in favour of liberty at a cost to all other people, I'm very much centre-right economically in practise but on the left economically in my ideals (ideals meet real-life and quickly fall!), while libertarian on the 'authoritarian/libertarian' scale. 

The evidence is what it is. I'm totally open-minded to things getting bad enough that a lockdown is the only sensible option. The evidence from various sources not used in the worst-case modelling isn't currently suggesting things will be worst case or anywhere close to. That should be acknowledged in the framing of the decisions to be made. The public shouldn't be frightened in the way they have by the media/gov failing to give the estimated likelihoods of the worse-case/less worse and best case outcomes. Even their best-case estimates assume omicron is at least as severe in outcome as Deta.

Alex - yes I was careful in wording it 'severity of outcome'. Not 'severity of omicron' or some-such. The inherent severity of virus is what it is, ultimately it's obviously important but like you say not the most important thing in understanding the risk. To understand the risk a very important thing to understand is the severity of actual outcome. Doesn't matter too much how that outcome is reached - whether immunity, an inherently less severe virus, social behaviour, moon made of cheese etc.
Risk = hazard x likelihood.

We haven't been given the risk. Just some worst-cases and less-worse cases (hazards), but not their respective likelihoods. The likelihoods for even less-severe scenarios, which don't assume Omicron has same severity of outcome as Delta, haven't even been given to the public. Hence the risk to public health can't be framed in a wider frame just the narrow frame.
Some evidence suggests lower severity of outcome. Therefore the worst cases should at least be reverse engineered to see what needs to be different in the UK for that worst case to come about, versus places that have had less severe outcomes in real life. To me it's utter madness to not change your view when receiving updated evidence. I get the precautionary principle - it should apply to social harm too. The framing of this wave has been awful, I can't work out why.
I suspect because they know the health service is at high risk of falling over for a short time - but due to staff shortage not due to severity of illness from omicron. This is a very different problem and as Spider points out shouldn't demand locking down the normal operation of society and business to protect against this problem, that would be a wrong and potentially endless road.

[Offwidth]

I still think you are missing my main point and misreading my opinions on lockdown. Every citizen should care about freedoms, I think that way as well, but the virus doesn't care what anyone thinks. If the data says a lockdown is needed to prevent NHS overload in the next weeks, due to the sheer increase of numbers of seriously ill, it's better to lockdown fast as any delay means the peak is higher and longer so does more damage to the NHS, the economy, and the population's welfare (they all correlate... all this talk of trade-off is bogus). Some scientists say it's better to jump earlier to minimise damage further; which I'd agree with in an unvaccinated population facing a fast spreading dangerous new virus but I'm not convinced right now with omicron and the levels of covid immunity we have from vaccination and previous infections. So on the topic of lockdowns, in my opinion we are not at a point yet to call anything more than some extra restrictions as we still don't have enough omicron hospitalisation data and there is still a significant chance we won't need a lockdown.

Current modelling can't work medium term as it relies on hospitalisation data we don't have yet to give sensible outputs (the model can be excellent but put rubbish in and rubbish comes out). Paul Mainwood is a much better place to go than The Spectator for critique on the current modelling issues but it really comes down to my previous point.  Comparing Guardian errors with the Spectator's on covid is ridiculous....the latter was still pushing anti-lockdown when hospitals would be at absolute limits and tens of thousands more of us were likely to die (Sept and Dec 2020 influence on Boris's stupid delays) with all the avoidable extra economic and social damage...... as they put ideology above epidemiological basics.  The Guardian in contrast got some things wrong but although no one got hurt, they did piss off a few oversensitive middle class people.

Where politics matter is the national scandal that the NHS is in such a woeful state. Those extra staff we need will take years to train so we can only look to immigration to gap fill until then. If the NHS was healthy we might have only needed light restrictions for omicron. The government foot shooting responses throughout this pandemic (vaccines aside) is costing everyone a fortune in life, health and finance. It's not stopped either.... when the NHS is in crisis you don't push 5%  we desperately need from the front-line because they are unvaccinated; when any safe infection control protocol should make that irrelevant.