UK's coronavirus alert level moves from level 4 to level 3

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Northerner

Northerner

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The Uk's coronavirus alert level has been moved from level 4 to level 3.

The Government announced a five-stage alert level for the virus from 5 - where the NHS is overwhelmed to 1 - where the virus is no longer any threat.

The UK’s chief medical officers said in a statement: “The Joint Biosecurity Centre has recommended that the Covid-19 alert level should move from Level 4 (A Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially) to Level 3 (A Covid-19 epidemic is in general circulation).

“The CMOs for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have reviewed the evidence and agree with this recommendation to move to Level 3 across the UK.

www.leicestermercury.co.uk

UK's coronavirus alert level to move from level 4 to level 3

“It does not mean that the pandemic is over. The virus is still in general circulation, and localised outbreaks are likely to occur."
www.leicestermercury.co.uk www.leicestermercury.co.uk
 
Just heard this on the radio Alan, hope people will still obey the rules.?
 
KARNAK said:
Just heard this on the radio Alan, hope people will still obey the rules.?
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I expect the government will now start telling us that we 'are in transition from 3 to 2' and reopen all the pubs 🙄

Personally, I'm not encouraged :( 33,000 new infections a week, most of which we don't know about and therefore can't be traced, plus we can't even trace a quarter of those we do know about. Meanwhile, New Zealand goes into overdrive and calls in the military because they've got 2 new cases! 😱

The spin and dishonesty from the government make it very hard for me to trust anything they say :( First it was 'herd immunity', later completely denied - there are clips of Johnson on This Morning waxing lyrical about how it would be our policy 🙄 Now we have an app that was going to revolutionise things, except we find it doesn't work 🙄 I knew about the bluetooth problem with Apple phones back in April, why has the government only just discovered it? Johnson in PMQs shouting 'schools schools schools!' at Starmer, saying they are perfectly safe when nothing is perfectly safe, and anyway it completely overlooks the fact that the government's own rules man that schools have limited space to accommodate anything greater than half a class, but the government haven't done anything to find the extra space for them :(

I noticed on last night's briefing that Hancock didn't mention that number of hospital admissions had actually risen for the first time in a while, they still aren't telling us how many actual people they are testing after 3 weeks of 'checking the numbers', and the number of new infections according to the 7-day average now appear to have plateaued :(

Rant over! :D
 
Northerner said:
they still aren't telling us how many actual people they are testing after 3 weeks of 'checking the numbers',
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He (and probably other ministers) are very proud of our testing capacity (about the only good thing that's world beating, I suspect), though not confident enough to separate out the antibody test numbers (or to do anything meaningful about the postal ones in the stats).

And from the sounds of it the local authority contact tracers are way more effective than the script-reading staff subcontracted out by Serco. Who'd have guessed that local people who do this for a living would do a better job at this other than literally anyone that thought about it for a moment (or anyone who looked at what other countries were doing)?
 
If you want a good run down of where things stand with Covid then you could do worse than finding todays proceedings of the House of Lords Select Committee on the science of Covid 19.

The Lords committee were intelligent and perceptive, the witnesses knowledgeable. Some things I got from what I saw...

The understanding of CV and how it develops is getting better understood. Explanations of why some people get bad reactions and some do not are beginning to emerge. For example, the amount of virus ingested is important and could well explain the reason why a lot of medics succumbed early in the outbreak, their exposure was greater. Other things, like why age is important and why children are unaffected even though infected are beyond my ability to summarise but suffice to say ideas are developing and things are more subtle than you might expect. I was taken by one of the experts who, when asked a question, rambled a little then concluded that his ramblings were his way of saying he had no answer to the question. Very refreshing.

All the experts were quite clear that a second phase was inevitable although impossible to predict what it might be like. Might be worse than first time around. Might be better. Trying to predict it would send the modellers into a tailspin was the verdict of one expert.

Vaccines and vaccination is a long way from straightforward. The idea that somebody would develop a vaccine such that you could get a jab and then be immune forever was way off their collective radar. A vaccine giving some protection for a limited period was much more likely.

Something which is never talked about, but I have picked up elsewhere, is that survivors of bad attacks (about 10% of those infected) are likely to be left with permanent, debillitating, damage of one sort or another and since it attacks all parts of the body when it goes rogue any system can be affected. A lot of people, a lot more than those who have died, are going to have serious long term effects from it.

Final point is that it is really something you do not want to catch particularly if you fall into one of the higher risk groups - male, poor, old or have some very specific medical conditions. A 10 to 1 chance of having your life blighted is a risk not worth taking.
 
Whilst I understand and appreciate that last comment entirely, those of us told to protect ourselves and the NHS by staying entirely isolated and not even being allowed to leave our own garden to take exercise until a fortnight ago are actually chomping at the bit by now, They wouldn't let us walk down the road when the weather was glorious and there was hardly any traffic but waited until the traffic was far greater than it ever was cos now folk are going hither and yon to visit eg Primark en masse or go to work to allow us to go out. There are few large outdoor spaces you can go to where the carpark is within it and the countryside is pretty flat so he and I would be able to go for a walk - remember all the places we used to be able to go in the week are now crammed with furloughed parents and their kids whose schools are closed and anyway you can't have a pee when you get there or go far enough away to find seclusion and still get back the same day!

We're both ruddy old - so how much longer is it reasonable to require us to isolate - no point in living if you are not allowed to enjoy life.
 
quote,ian dumbcon smith
"go back to work and stop whinging,,,,,only 1 in 10 who die will be working age adults with no pre-existing conditions,,,and there is plenty of space in ITU currently, "
 
Tricky isn't it TW. Trouble is that relying on a bunch of PR people who listen more to focus groups and money doners than they do to the scientists to guide you through it is going to get you nowhere.

To my mind, what you have to do is look at the risks and decide on what suits you. Again for me, I'm going to avoid situations where interaction with somebody infected with the disease is anything but negligibly low. At the extreme you won't find me in wandering about a covid ward in a hospital where the probability of becoming infected is very high. I will not be going anywhere where crowds gather - pubs, fast food restaurants, busy public transport - where you cannot assess the risk of coming into contact with an infected person. I would meet up in a group where I had a decent degree of confidence that none of the members was infected. I won't be bothered at all about passing close to strangers in the street.

The biggest problem I have in assessing the risks is the lack of information about the prevalence in my local area. UK wide numbers are useless in this regard and county wide numbers only marginally more helpful. What I would like to know is whether covid was common or not in the environment I inhabit.

I think of it as a bit like driving. Loads of people get killed and maimed in car accidents but it does not stop me driving. I manage the risk by not drinking and driving, only driving the right way on motorways, having a conservative approach overtaking and not driving particularly fast. The residual risk I will live with and if I go round a corner and encounter a drunken, speeding idiot on my side of the road, then so be it.
 
atoll said:
quote,ian dumbcon smith
"go back to work and stop whinging,,,,,only 1 in 10 who die will be working age adults with no pre-existing conditions,,,and there is plenty of space in ITU currently, "
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This is the mentality of a lot of them, unfortunately :( You might just as well have not had a lockdown at all with everyone under 65 just going about their business and those above it trying to avoid it, but if they end up in hospital we've got enough beds - completely overlooking the fact that many who go into hospital die, and a significant proportion of those who don't may end up with debilitating life-long conditions. I'm afraid Mr IBS has form, having culled 130,000 of the most disadvantaged in society courtesy of his Universal Credit system and other austerity measures :( It's turning into Logan's Run 😱
 
all they are bothered about is money money and more money, playing the virus down and using the press to prop up their playing down to try and pull the eyes over the general population. as far as they are concerned if someone dies there is all ways someone to replace.

cases are now popping up all over, Wales, Leicester, Kirklees, Manchester, Merseyside, Cumbria and over here it is still spreading.

Northerner is right, they didn't care less for the last 10 years killing loads so why should they be bothered now.
 
mikeydt1 said:
all they are bothered about is money money and more money, playing the virus down and using the press to prop up their playing down to try and pull the eyes over the general population.
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I think they're really worried about the cost of not having an economy, and really worried that what passes for a lockdown is likely to break down regardless of what they do. And they're really worried that they're not going to look like they handled this very well unless something improbable happens over the next 6 months or so (another wave of infection which harms other countries much more than it does the UK, which doesn't seem likely to me, anyway).

I don't think those are bad things to worry about (well, the first two; nothing much they can do about the third except be competent for a while and hope).

I'd just like to see some evidence they've considered alternatives. For example, how much would it cost to get the incidence down to (say) 1 in 100,000 (rather than about 1 in 2,000) and how much easier would it then be to open the economy (and effectively do testing and tracing)? Could we do that before September, for example, and wouldn't that make school opening much easier?
 
Bruce Stephens said:
I think they're really worried about the cost of not having an economy, and really worried that what passes for a lockdown is likely to break down regardless of what they do. And they're really worried that they're not going to look like they handled this very well unless something improbable happens over the next 6 months or so (another wave of infection which harms other countries much more than it does the UK, which doesn't seem likely to me, anyway).

I don't think those are bad things to worry about (well, the first two; nothing much they can do about the third except be competent for a while and hope).

I'd just like to see some evidence they've considered alternatives. For example, how much would it cost to get the incidence down to (say) 1 in 100,000 (rather than about 1 in 2,000) and how much easier would it then be to open the economy (and effectively do testing and tracing)? Could we do that before September, for example, and wouldn't that make school opening much easier?
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Really, why not aim for local eradication? While you have any significant level of community transmission it's just difficult for me at the moment to envisage things being anywhere near "normal".

I'm influenced by my local Oz view of course.

Every state/territory now except for Victoria has pretty much achieved local eradication, as far as you can tell from the detection reports. Zero new local cases (plus a few amongst quarantined arrivals from overseas), with several areas conducting fairly extensive asymptomatic investigations and detecting nothing. Generally the outcomes have been comparable to or even better than NZ.

But Victoria for whatever reason hasn't managed to completely get rid of community transmission, despite seeing only a handful of new cases per day for several weeks, and now it's gotten into some extended household settings - the main transmission setting everywhere - and it's growing again. The state is reintroducing some restrictions it was in the process of lifting, and may have to start doing more stringent neighborhood lockdowns in Melbourne - while the rest of the country looks at them like they're (forgive me) the UK of Oceania.

There have been apparent management failures - two clusters stemming from security guards at quarantine hotels! - and it seems like a much less nimble cluster-busting response than the rest of the country. But simple bad luck might deliver the same kind of result, for any place with un-zapped community transmission, and it's just hard for me to imagine "normality" in such a situation.

It's interesting that Victoria has had the most stringent lock-down response and the worst outcomes so far. I wonder if their "lock-down" focus has meant that case-based TTI & cluster-busting measures have gotten less attention than elsewhere.

"Eradication" on the other hand is such a simple clear motivating message and as goal it may be more appropriate & achievable than "normality moderated by a bit of community transmission".
 
The English government may have reduced the alert level to Level 3, but that level is really dependent on an effective track and trace system. It's simply a political decision, nothing to do with Covid death rates and infection rates which are rock steady, not falling. That's why, at their briefings, they use UK figures. No new cases of Covid in NI yesterday, 26 in Scotland. At the beginning of this pandemic, the briefings focussed on English results. Now, to make the numbers look better, they use whole UK figures.
 
Eddy Edson said:
Really, why not aim for local eradication? While you have any significant level of community transmission it's just difficult for me at the moment to envisage things being anywhere near "normal".
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I'd like to see that considered, too, and really 1 in 100,000 would (I'd imagine) just be a stepping stone to getting there . (I'd very much like to be able to resume my hobby of dancing tango, for one thing.)

I'm not sure that loosening the lockdown as planned is a particularly bad idea, but I'd be reassured to see consideration about it and about alternative courses (beyond opinion polling and focus groups, which the Sunday Times suggests are being used on a grand scale). But so far the government seems wedded to their "we're following The Plan" line, even though it doesn't seem at all convincing given where we are.
 
mikeyB said:
That's why, at their briefings, they use UK figures. No new cases of Covid in NI yesterday, 26 in Scotland. At the beginning of this pandemic, the briefings focussed on English results. Now, to make the numbers look better, they use whole UK figures.
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Which charts they show varies a bit but I'm not seeing a change from England to UK. It looks to me like they've mostly used UK figures all along. (They've shown admissions to hospital for England only, but I'm guessing that's some administrative thing.) Oh, I see they've added other parts of the UK to hospital admissions, but I'm not sure that makes the graphs look particularly better.

(I'm not suggesting the graphs are useful or particularly honest. Seems obvious that the testing numbers are deliberately misleading, and the abrupt dropping of the global comparison graph is transparently deceptive. But I'm not so sure about the England vs UK distinction.)

(The slides are all here: https://www.gov.uk/government/colle...ts-to-accompany-coronavirus-press-conferences )
 
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