National Covid lockdown expected across England next week

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Boris Johnson has bowed to pressure from his scientific advisers for new national lockdown restrictions, which are expected to be announced early next week, the Guardian has been told.

Sir Patrick Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty, who head the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), are understood to have warned the prime minister that the time has come for national action across England. Sage scientists presented Johnson with evidence at a meeting in Downing Street, where they explained that Covid-19 is spreading significantly faster than their worst-case scenarios.

The scientists, who are supported by the health secretary, Matt Hancock, and Michael Gove, are understood to have argued that local measures are no longer enough and that the virus could kill 85,000 people this winter. Sage’s proposals for a two-week “circuit breaker” over half-term were turned down by ministers. It is now thought something longer will be needed.

However, the exact extent of the new lockdown restrictions have yet to be decided. That will be thrashed out this weekend as Johnson and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, try to work out what can be imposed across England without major damage to the economy.

www.theguardian.com

National Covid lockdown expected across England next week

Boris Johnson bows to pressure from experts who warned worst-case scenario could soon be surpassed
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
and on the horizon here come the greedy panic buyers again leaving very little for anyone else.

all very well coming from sage they are not the ones suffering from the damage they are wanting to impose!
 
Is what it is.

Vaccine only months away government has to act now to prevent more deaths & misery for those effected by this damn virus, damage limitation perhaps but something had to be done.

When this all over inquiry will be held & heads will roll, certainly wouldn't want to be in government making these decisions.
 
I don’t think it will be like March as schools are probably going to stay open. Personally, I’d welcome short lockdowns now before Xmas to allow us all a family Xmas of some type.
 
Looks like it’s needed, but do they have to pick the week we were meant to be escaping to Devon for a short walking break?
 
reading a bit more looks like they are discussing things but we all know how the press behave, they should know better to print when nothing has been finalised and it then leads to panic setting in.

i was discussing this with a carer and both agreed you can't have a lock down if you aren't prepared to shut borders just totally pointless.
 
The SAGE doc from a couple of weeks ago these stories refer to:



In the same batch there's also a short note addressing the calls to open up for young people while protecting the aged, making points which shouldn't need to be made by now:


Such a strategy would not be viable because: • It would not be possible to prevent the virus spreading from younger people to older people. • A very large proportion of the population would need to withdraw from daily life for many months, which would have profound negative effect on them. • An uncontrolled epidemic in younger age groups would have dire consequences for the NHS as well as having unknown long term effects in those infected. • We do not know if long term immunity results from infection with SARS-nCOV-2 • Even if high levels of immunity could be achieved with in the younger age group, it is almost certain that a further epidemic wave in older people would happen occur once segmentation ended.


There are also a couple of technical papers analysin case characteristics, eg this one for recent cases: https://assets.publishing.service.g...Dynamic_CO-CIN_report_to_SAGE_and_NERVTAG.pdf

FWIW, a bit interesting to look at the little analysis of mortality risk factors. I'm sure that you can't really draw very firm conclusions, but FWIW for the data under consideration:

1604138798418.png

Mortality hazard ratios not statistically significant for males vs females, obesity, CKD. Age far and away the most significant risk.
 
mikeyB said:
It was needed three weeks ago, in truth. I agree with @mikeydt1, it's a bit daft if you don't close borders. And schools.
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If you don't close borders and you just do some kind of lockdown for four weeks or some inadequate period and then open up for Christmas/NY for people to go shopping in crowds, get drunk at indoor parties and crowd together in families, surely you're just setting yourself up for some even worse situation in Jan/Feb.
 
Since the last time we had a lockdown so many people have lost their jobs and businesses have had to close down. When the country opened up there was no "exit strategy", some people just don't know what to do or how to behave. There are too many rules that are confusing and when you get people in government not following the rules THEY made with no consequences people think why should they themselves. I also think the media have a hand to play as they create panic before things are decided.
This week i went to a local supermarket. While sanitising my trolley and hand gelling there must have been 30-50 people walk past me. Not one sanitised before entering. When i spoke to a member of staff i got a shrug and "we can't enforce that" before he walked away. Funny that..they did during lockdown. It only needs a reminder at the door.
I wonder what the impact will be if we locl down now so we can have christmas. The virus will still be there when we get together again so we need some kind of end plan.
 
Robin said:
Looks like it’s needed, but do they have to pick the week we were meant to be escaping to Devon for a short walking break?
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It looks like half the country has descended on both Devon and Cornwall at the moment. So very over crowded so you wont be missing much.

There was a heated argument in one of the local supermarkets last week before the visitor was removed from the premises.
Visitor *uck the regulations I came down here to escape the virus and I aint wearing no mask in your bleeping shop whilst on holiday.

Staff member,
we don't want your germs or money so please shop elsewhere. (Good response and the young lady received a round of applause from other customers) Security escorted the gentleman!! from the premises.
 
You can see Indie SAGE's little analysis here:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1322174177781178368

Total lock-down for 4 weeks to screw R down to 0.6 and get new cases to ~3,000 per day, while making sure you have an excellent TTI in place to allow you to open up a lot while keeping R=1.

Or do the same thing with a pretty strict lockdown but with schools still open, reducing R to 0.85, for 9 weeks.

(If you nerd through the numbers you can see that they're assuming a 5 day infection window.)

For the nothing it's worth, I think this analysis is off the mark.

First, how realistic is it to think the UK could have a TTI capable of dealing with 3,000 new infections per day? To do things right, that could easily involve 45K - 60K contacts per day. Where in the world have we seen that kind of capability? Think of South Korea: it's been a big effort for them to keep things at 100-200 new cases per day. NSW has really excellent TTI, capable of dealing with a bolus of infections from Victoria without requiring any lockdown; the public health teams there were busy dealing with less than 20 per day, the same kind of scale as South Korea in per capita terms.

Looking at things just in terms of R really obscures the impact of new seeds arriving from overseas. You have to add them to each generation of new infections, independent of what's being generated from your existing infections. If you want to use a simplistic R-model like this you need to add them as a constant factor or whatever to your R, which means getting this "quasi R" down to 0.6 would probably be really difficult.

They use 25,000 new infections as the base-line but of course there are actually a lot more new daily infections than that right now. I think the current SAGE estimate is about 50K. Plugging that in as the starting point gives you 3 months to get to 3,000 daily cases with an R=0.85 target.

Why not bite the bullet and do a Victoria? Lock-down hard for 3 months, close borders, get R to around 0.7 and target re-opening with ~100 new infections per day on this model. Christmas/NY would be screwed and the economy would take a big hit. But the economy is going to take a big hit anyway and it's hard to see the most of 2021 not looking grim without doing something like that.
 
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Pumper_Sue said:
It looks like half the country has descended on both Devon and Cornwall at the moment. So very over crowded so you wont be missing much
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Sounds dire! Which was why we’d planned to tiptoe in once everyone else had gone home! We would have been happy to contribute to the local economy in a quiet way out of season, but it'll probably have to wait.
 
Amity Island said:
Or better still, put the wasted £billions instead, into diabetes which affects 415million people, 24hrs a day 365 days a year?
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Because COVID makes (a small proportion of) people ill enough that they need hospital treatment. So if you ignore it, hospitals won't be able to provide any other kind of care, and eventually won't be able to care for all COVID patients either because the people sick with COVID will keep increasing and wanting care.

It's not a choice: to have a healthcare system that can provide for cancers, diabetes, heart issues, food poisoning, we must limit the virus somehow. And where we are, something fairly extreme (for this country) is needed. (May still be regional.)
 
I was at hospital this morning - follow up appointment with a neurologist. He stated that the government missed the boat and should have gone into lockdown 2-3 weeks ago. I was his last patient before the last lockdown and he was then on the front line dealing with those hospitalised with Covid; something that he said he will never forget. His view is that lives come first no matter what and that the current data suggest there will be thousands of deaths each day by mid to late November. In his opinion the NHS is not going to cope and deaths that could have been prevented are a result of the government trying to please too many people and being far to indecisive. What is more important - a hit on the economy in the £billions or deaths in the tens of thousands? Economies recover, other than Lazarus I'm not sure of many others coming back from the dead.
 
Bruce Stephens said:
Because COVID makes (a small proportion of) people ill enough that they need hospital treatment. So if you ignore it, hospitals won't be able to provide any other kind of care, and eventually won't be able to care for all COVID patients either because the people sick with COVID will keep increasing and wanting care.

It's not a choice: to have a healthcare system that can provide for cancers, diabetes, heart issues, food poisoning, we must limit the virus somehow. And where we are, something fairly extreme (for this country) is needed. (May still be regional.)
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Absolutely :( It's not an either/or - you can't choose to address what are very long-term health problems and forget Covid unless you are prepared to just deny treatment to Covid patients :(
 
Amity Island said:
So.......why not apply these same tactics to prevent food posioning which affects 6million each year?
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What could we do about food poisoning? The "same tactics" don't seem like they'd work. I agree we should try to reduce it (by trying to make sure that restaurants and cafes are clean and know how to prepare food safely, and to try to make sure the public knows how to do that).

I don't see a risk that food poisoning victims will increase to the extent that the NHS can't treat anything else, provided we continue what we're doing (though I agree we should invest more in local public health services so they can more effectively inspect and advise food outlets in their areas, and we should invest more in food education for the general public for lots of reasons).

Amity Island said:
Why not improve the environment which is attributed to 12.6million deaths every year.
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Yes! We absolutely should do that. In particular air pollution: Europe really seems to have messed up encouraging diesel.

Amity Island said:
Why not take away peoples rights and ban smoking and alcohol?
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Smoking's on the decrease (in the developed world). We should certainly help other countries restrict it if they want (which is obviously heavily resisted by companies wanting to sell tobacco). Similarly alcohol, I think, though alcohol has the added issue that people can make it themselves, so banning it's tricky to do.

It seems plausible that vaping will take over from smoking and that vaping will remain quite a bit safer, while still providing profits to the same people as benefitted from tobacco. That would potentially be a stable state which I'd be OK with, and maybe wouldn't need so much policing. Lots easier than trying to ban everything, anyway.

Not sure what's practical with alcohol, or what we ought to do. Being more relaxed about other mind altering drugs might work: maybe there's things safer than alcohol that could substitute?
 
Bruce Stephens said:
Not sure what's practical with alcohol, or what we ought to do. Being more relaxed about other mind altering drugs might work: maybe there's things safer than alcohol that could substitute?
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What Scotland did, despite furious opposition from the drinks industry, is introduce minimum alcohol pricing. 50p per unit. What that did was instantly price out cheap cider from the teen market - a litre of cheap strong cider went from around £3 to £7. They banned multi can offers in supermarkets - that's why when yous see ads on the telly for 12 cans of Stella for a tenner there is small print at the bottom of the screen screen saying "Not available in Scotland". And it does appear to have reduced alcohol related admissions to hospital. It's not a huge effect, but it points the way forward. Booze is furiously expensive in Norway, so you will never see drunks snoozing on park benches.

Something safer than alcohol? Easy, cannabis. Alcohol disinhibits mental controls on aggressive behaviour and sexual norms. Cannabis has the opposite effect. Imagine the difference in towns currently filled with rowdy drunks - everybody would be completely relaxed and happy. Crime rates would plummet. Alcohol is a poison, damages your liver and pancreas. Cannabis doesn't.

And as cannabis can give you the munchies, the late night kebab industry would be completely unaffected. It's a win-win. And if you make it entirely legal, you can tax it and close down half the illegal drug industry. What's not to like?
 
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