PM announces end of restrictions!

[Deleted member 21371]

I really have no thoughts either way.
As a country, we appear to have decided to move on from covid.
It will spread now, and herd immunity will develop, or not.
People wil get over it, or die.
Personally, if 90% of those in ICU are unvaccinated, I'm good with my chances as vaccinated.
Other operations will restart, covid will become a "nuisance" problem, and won't be an instant "clear space in ICU" issue, as human nature will start to disregard it generally.
Either way it'll resolve the hospital backlog.

 

[Deleted member 21371]

........Are you going to say "i've got plenty of radiation swilling around me"? and "I would have no idea what would make anything tricky down the line personally"......

Since you mention it........ 🙂

 

[Deleted member 21371]

Johnson said "90% of those in ICU have not had a booster" not 90% in ICU are unvaccinated.

I'm still good with that.
It'll sort itself out, whether it's 61% completely unvaccinated, or 90% that haven't finished the full course.

 

[Drummer]

It seems to be very much a matter of luck - I caught covid, I am pretty sure, just before Christmas, but there was no way to get a confirmatory test.
I had two jabs, but was ill when called to go for the booster.
I would probably have gone to work if I'd still been working, as it wasn't bad at all really, yet other people in the same circumstances were in dire straits.
It will take some further analysis to work out what the actual death rate was - if that is even possible, as the recorded 'evidence' is not going to be sufficient from what I can see - those dying within so many days of being vaccinated are recorded as not vaccinated, for instance, which seems calculated to muddy the waters.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

That's not very long, in my view to decide how safe it is over the longer term.

How many vaccines have long term safety issues?

Other medication do, sure, but vaccines are (by their nature) short term things, aren't they?

With the obvious issue that if they train your immune system to attack something it shouldn't then that would be a problem, and maybe that wouldn't be seen in the short term. Though I'd have thought that sort of problem would be seen after a year? There's ADE, but they seem well aware of that possibility and there's no sign of it happening with these.

On the other side, viruses quite often seem to have long term effects. And we know this one does: among survivors are people who've lost limbs (from clotting problems), lost lung function, etc., as well as the less easily provable symptoms like brain fog and fatigue.

I'm just so glad I am not a parent of a child deciding whether or not they have this vaccine. I'm not sure which side of the line I'd land on right now.

It would be really interesting to get good survey information: of people with relevant expertise, what have they recommended to their friends and family? Have they had their children vaccinated?

Based on my reading on twitter I'm guessing the overwhelming majority recommend vaccination. However, I'm well aware that that may well be because of who I follow on twitter (and of who choose to say things on twitter).

 

[AndBreathe]

How many vaccines have long term safety issues?

Other medication do, sure, but vaccines are (by their nature) short term things, aren't they?

With the obvious issue that if they train your immune system to attack something it shouldn't then that would be a problem, and maybe that wouldn't be seen in the short term. Though I'd have thought that sort of problem would be seen after a year? There's ADE, but they seem well aware of that possibility and there's no sign of it happening with these.

On the other side, viruses quite often seem to have long term effects. And we know this one does: among survivors are people who've lost limbs (from clotting problems), lost lung function, etc., as well as the less easily provable symptoms like brain fog and fatigue.

It would be really interesting to get good survey information: of people with relevant expertise, what have they recommended to their friends and family? Have they had their children vaccinated?

Based on my reading on twitter I'm guessing the overwhelming majority recommend vaccination. However, I'm well aware that that may well be because of who I follow on twitter (and of who choose to say things on twitter).

Bruce, I have stated my view and given my feelings on things. I'm not trying to persuade anyone to change their mind, or adopt my standpoint. They can do their own thinking or not.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Johnson said "90% of those in ICU have not had a booster" not 90% in ICU are unvaccinated.

Instinctively, I’m not all that sure I’d trust BJ to have spoken with sufficient precision to be able to draw a definitive conclusion about the (possibly varying?) levels of vaccination within the 90%. This os a guy who sometimes ‘clarifies’ what he said before by saying something entirely different, after all

My guess would be that within that 90% there would be a mixture of completely unvaccinated, and one or two doses. The govt catchphrase recently has been all about the importance of ‘getting boosted’, and the extra protection that provides.

It would be interesting to know the detail behind the rhetoric though.

 

[Deleted member 21371]

Instinctively, I’m not all that sure I’d trust BJ to have spoken with sufficient precision to be able to draw a definitive conclusion about the (possibly varying?) levels of vaccination within the 90%. This os a guy who sometimes ‘clarifies’ what he said before by saying something entirely different, after all

My guess would be that within that 90% there would be a mixture of completely unvaccinated, and one or two doses. The govt catchphrase recently has been all about the importance of ‘getting boosted’, and the extra protection that provides.

It would be interesting to know the detail behind the rhetoric though.

Covid-19: Fact check—how many patients in hospital are unvaccinated?

Intensive care units in the UK are filling up with patients with covid-19 who have not been fully vaccinated, a number of media reports have claimed over the past week. It led to the prime minister, Boris Johnson, urging people to get vaccinated to reduce the pressure on hospitals. He said that...

www.bmj.com

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Looks like much hunch played out (ish). The distribution of one dose vs 2 dose seems a bit counter-intuitive, but I guess there are far fewer ‘one dose’ people as a proportion of the whole UK population. The bigger groups seem to be ’boosted’, ‘double dosed’ and to a lesser extent ‘unvaccinated’ I think?

This was a striking summary at the end, it seemed to me

The Office for National Statistics’ latest report on deaths from covid-19 covering the period from January to October last year in England found that the age adjusted rate of death was 96% lower in people who had received a second dose of vaccine than in those who were unvaccinated.​

 

[Deleted member 21371]

A bigger population, older people had vaccines before younger, so either more likely to have had all three jabs, or missed the last jab and more likely to have had the vaccine wear off, and the youngest more likely not to have been jabbed, or not as far down the program as the eldest are.
I reckon I'll be on my next booster before some are on their first booster.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

So as an absolute benefit is it a less than 0.5% improvement.

I'll take that. It's free, after all.

Another way of thinking of the risk (which may not be quite right any more) is that an infection has about the same risk you'd have over a whole year normally. So it's very much not uniform across the population.

And death is very much not the only risk. Even just looking at the various heart issues which are accepted as side effects of the mRNA vaccines, getting infected is more of a risk for them. (And while there are conflicting studies about how well the vaccines protect against the sequelae, nobody thinks they don't do anything.)

 

[Deleted member 21371]

The 99.5% is a myth.
No one has any stats on what a world unvaccinated population would do.
The only take away we have is 4% of the patients in ICU are fully vaccinated, 96% aren't.
So if you are doing the maths, I'm more than happy to be in the 1 in 25 group, than the 24 in 25 group.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

The 99.5% is a myth.
No one has any stats on what a world unvaccinated population would do.

For individuals it's useless even if we knew the correct figure. And it wouldn't be that useful even for an individual country. (There's no way the UK's population matches the world population in risk factors, for example.)

 

[Deleted member 21371]

Lets just deal in real measured figures.
1 in 25 group, or 24 in 25 group?

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

99.5% does sound like ‘almost everyone survives’.

But 0.5% of the UK population is around 335,000 people. And we are already at 153,000 deaths from only(!) 15.6million cases

So the virus is doing pretty well so far - More like 1% fatality than the 0.5% rate.

And of course, you aren’t factoring in long covid into that, only deaths.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Is it 96% of the 0.5% who would possibly die without a vaccine?

Things would be much easier if they could have determined the 0.5% who might die! It's not like that, of course: the probability is strongly skewed by age, comorbidities, but there's still some (small) risk to younger healthy people, and plenty of older people survive (like Michael Rosen, though he certainly hasn't made a complete recovery).

What is known (from the f.o.i request) is that in 2020 there were 1549 covid deaths in healthy people under age of 65. That's from a population of 55million under 65's.

55 million under 65's, but how many healthy people under 65? And shouldn't we care about the people who aren't healthy (like all people with diabetes, for example)?

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Thanks for replying. I was relating to the quote referred to. Which was only about deaths, nothing else.

My question is about 96% of what?

This is the source referenced in the BMJ article, below the ‘methods’ section there are tables of figures that might answer your question?

Deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status, England - Office for National Statistics

Age-standardised and age-specific mortality rates for deaths involving COVID-19 by vaccination status; deaths occurring between 1 January and 31 October 2021 in England.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

when as I say at the same time we were told covid was nothing to be overly alarmed about given a 99.5% survival rate

Sorry you couldn’t find the answer to your question.

Death rate in the UK certainly seems higher than 0.5% though tragically.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

I do know that the quoted 100% 95% effective had been quoted after the trials.

The trials were each slightly different, and each will have given the precise definitions. A general definition is easy enough to find. For example https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/vaccine-efficacy-effectiveness-and-protection

as I say at the same time we were told covid was nothing to be overly alarmed about given a 99.5% survival rate, and you had to catch it first.

That was then.

 

[Deleted member 21371]

I found the answer!

Link below explains it. There is relative risk and absolute risk improvement. This is akin to my question about how much improvement do you actually get on the existing survival rate of 99.5% with covid19. One can compare this with other diseases where fatality rate is much greater without vaccination and thus the benefit of vaccination is much greater.

It is around 1% improvement for the original variant.

It says the reason the companies don't refer to the absolute risk improvement because.......... it doesn't look very impressive!

COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room

Approximately 96 COVID-19 vaccines are at various stages of clinical development.1 At present, we have the interim results of four studies published in scientific journals (on the Pfizer–BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine,2 the Moderna–US National Institutes of Health [NIH] mRNA-1273 vaccine,3 the...

www.thelancet.com

And clearly, the initial data assumptions were based on no actual know measurements.

With hindsight, knowing that ICU has 24 times more uncompleted vaccine patients than completed, it ties in very well with the original 95% reduction forecast.
It means covid was prolific, and had a high infection rate, as we now know.