So, coronavirus...

[Saint]

Talking of vaccine supplies does anyone know where UK manufactured vaccine is going now that the UK has completed it's use? Are we allowing AZ to fulfill their EU contract, or are we requiring our contract be completed with supplies going to Covax?

Well Ireland is still waiting for the ones your scumbag politicians dangled as leverage, to use against the NI Protocol.

Imagine our surprise that they never arrived .....

So I assume we're donating directly to Covax. Would be nice to see what's happening

[BnM]

96 - going to be fun in a couple of weeks.

[Saint]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

[GogLais]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

Same here on the Wirral. Boris might be saying "I told you so".

[duke]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

Same here on the Wirral. Boris might be saying "I told you so".

Wiltshire is still rising but we always were a little slow...

[tabascoboy]

Australia and New Zealand have pulled out of the Rugby League World Cup because of "player welfare and safety concerns" related to Covid-19.

NZRL chief Peters said the decision to withdraw was made because the safety and wellbeing of the players and staff "cannot be guaranteed to our satisfaction".

"There are stark differences between how the pandemic is being managed in the UK compared to Australasia, and recent developments have highlighted how quickly things can change.

"The tournament organisers have moved heaven and earth to make this work, so it is not an easy decision, but the Covid-19 situation in the UK shows no sign of improving, and it's simply too unsafe to send teams and staff over."

"Pingdemic", shortages in the shops - still our wonderful government has it all under control...

[sockwithaticket]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

Same here on the Wirral. Boris might be saying "I told you so".

He better fucking not. After all the things he and his crony-capitalist cabinet have done to make this whole situation worse over the last 15 months he has no right to get smug with anyone for simply not fucking up again.

[Raggs]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

Limits of number of tests rather than limit of cases? How's the positivity %ages if you can see that?

[dpedin]

Over 600,000 pings last week in England and Wales. Beginning to have a real impact now. I suspect the Gov will be taking the batteries out of the fire alarm soon as the noise is now deafening.

[Paddington Bear]

Getting a bit silly. Wonder what the stats are for people deleting the app

[TheNatalShark]

Talking of vaccine supplies does anyone know where UK manufactured vaccine is going now that the UK has completed it's use? Are we allowing AZ to fulfill their EU contract, or are we requiring our contract be completed with supplies going to Covax?

Well Ireland is still waiting for the ones your scumbag politicians dangled as leverage, to use against the NI Protocol.

Imagine our surprise that they never arrived .....

So I assume we're donating directly to Covax. Would be nice to see what's happening

Given everything else I imagine UK gov is focused on building up supplies in case boosters are formally recommended?

Anything donated would likely have been loudly trumpeted as world leading by now. I would assume UK will follow others and ship on diplomatic outcomes, providing to India or other prospective international partners to be wooed.

[BnM]

Has AZ met their contract with us yet? Doses made here might not be ours at the moment. It's all gone very quiet after Belgian court judgement. Our vac rates have plummeted I know some are wary but we could easily reduce it from 8 weeks between doses if we had more stock, so I don't think we have the stock to do more at the moment. There's still plenty of older people unvaccinated who could use AZ. Looking at my old area in Pimlico the Vac rates are shocking, 60& and 40% ish. In Harrogate it's 85%+ and 65%+.

[tc27]

Surely the infection is so widespread now T&T is almost redundant or is only giving marginal benefits in slowing down the virus vs the economic damage its causing.

Or in other words the government made the decision to lean into this wave might as well go all in.

[tc27]

Another unscientific observation is that the vaccines are less successful at preventing infections than hoped even if they are keeping people alive and out of hospitals...the conclusion of this is that allowing the virus to spread through the population at a time when it causes the least damage is probably the only real way out of the lockdowns.

Countries that have implemented zero covid are eventually going to have to vaccine up and face the epidemic as the cost of being part of the global economy.

[Insane_Homer]

Stupid app

[TheNatalShark]

Has AZ met their contract with us yet? Doses made here might not be ours at the moment. It's all gone very quiet after Belgian court judgement. Our vac rates have plummeted I know some are wary but we could easily reduce it from 8 weeks between doses if we had more stock, so I don't think we have the stock to do more at the moment. There's still plenty of older people unvaccinated who could use AZ. Looking at my old area in Pimlico the Vac rates are shocking, 60& and 40% ish. In Harrogate it's 85%+ and 65%+.

Gov ordered 100mm doses, so unlikely to be fully met yet. Shouldn't be a million miles away though if they are making the original commitment of 2mm a week. The EU would have released a statement to the effect of "legal judgement forced AZ to supply from UK = EU win" if AZ were supplying them from UK sites.

Below is quick summary of where we are at/will end up being shortly. I assume UK gov is negotiating with Pfizer to accelerate a few deliveries before Sep to ensure sufficient supply in case sudden uptake.

[Saint]

Interesting..... the Zoe Covid symptom tracker looks like South Oxfordshire has hit the peak of this new wave. Active cases have pretty much plateaued for the last 5 days

Limits of number of tests rather than limit of cases? How's the positivity %ages if you can see that?

Zoe is a symptom tracker - so they take volunteer reported symptoms then convert that to an estimate of the number of active cases. It;s generally higher than positive test results and has been fairly accurate throughout the course of the pandemic, as if the number of people reporting drops they just adjust how they scale it out

[Saint]

Has AZ met their contract with us yet? Doses made here might not be ours at the moment. It's all gone very quiet after Belgian court judgement. Our vac rates have plummeted I know some are wary but we could easily reduce it from 8 weeks between doses if we had more stock, so I don't think we have the stock to do more at the moment. There's still plenty of older people unvaccinated who could use AZ. Looking at my old area in Pimlico the Vac rates are shocking, 60& and 40% ish. In Harrogate it's 85%+ and 65%+.

Gov ordered 100mm doses, so unlikely to be fully met yet. Shouldn't be a million miles away though if they are making the original commitment of 2mm a week. The EU would have released a statement to the effect of "legal judgement forced AZ to supply from UK = EU win" if AZ were supplying them from UK sites.

Below is quick summary of where we are at/will end up being shortly. I assume UK gov is negotiating with Pfizer to accelerate a few deliveries before Sep to ensure sufficient supply in case sudden uptake.

We touched on what AZ is doing with UK manufactured doses a couple of pages back. The assumption is that AZ are continuing to deliver to UK Gov, and that the majority, if not all, are being handed over to Covax. Our deliveries of Pfizer alone ought to be outsrtripping our current vax rate; especially for first doses, we appear to be really hitting the vax hesitancy point

[Saint]

Well Ireland is still waiting for the ones your scumbag politicians dangled as leverage, to use against the NI Protocol.

Imagine our surprise that they never arrived .....

So I assume we're donating directly to Covax. Would be nice to see what's happening

Given everything else I imagine UK gov is focused on building up supplies in case boosters are formally recommended?

Anything donated would likely have been loudly trumpeted as world leading by now. I would assume UK will follow others and ship on diplomatic outcomes, providing to India or other prospective international partners to be wooed.

There's a shelf life to these things, so even if we were building up stocks there would be a point coming at some point where we would need to start shipping it out or binning it. And if we were shipping to any country, I would have thought it would be shouted from the rooftops regardless

[TheNatalShark]

There's a shelf life to these things, so even if we were building up stocks there would be a point coming at some point where we would need to start shipping it out or binning it. And if we were shipping to any country, I would have thought it would be shouted from the rooftops regardless

Yes, but the initial shelf life submitted in Jan was 6 months (and likely longer), no? Given the informally proposed boosters would start being given from September, we could take an extremely optimistic production scenario that UK AZ produced the balance of circa 84/89mm doses by the end of May, meaning still a 2 month window to administer. Even if administration programme was scaled back that could still be achieved. Obviously those production levels didn't happen, so they can adjust back any delay to programme to match as advised. I would also assume they would attempt to keep large reserves for the mRNA people in case a variant arises that only AZ can tackle proficiently. If they approached end of shelf life with no foreseeable UK use that is when I would imagine permission to engage in exports, given history.

If your assumption is that they are being donated to Covax, but you also think that any shipments out would be announced, surely the latter thought now challenges the assumption given no announcements?

There is of course the remote possibility things are being done by the sly... I personally think that is very remote.

Edit: Struggling to find now but I believe the ad-hoc released EU export control mechanism hasn't shown movement for UK in between June and July, suggesting we've got our deliveries/they've been approved for first tranche of 40mm and the 2nd tranche is still pushed out to September atm.

[Saint]

There's a shelf life to these things, so even if we were building up stocks there would be a point coming at some point where we would need to start shipping it out or binning it. And if we were shipping to any country, I would have thought it would be shouted from the rooftops regardless

Yes, but the initial shelf life submitted in Jan was 6 months (and likely longer), no? Given the informally proposed boosters would start being given from September, we could take an extremely optimistic production scenario that UK AZ produced the balance of circa 84/89mm doses by the end of May, meaning still a 2 month window to administer. Even if administration programme was scaled back that could still be achieved. Obviously those production levels didn't happen, so they can adjust back any delay to programme to match as advised. I would also assume they would attempt to keep large reserves for the mRNA people in case a variant arises that only AZ can tackle proficiently. If they approached end of shelf life with no foreseeable UK use that is when I would imagine permission to engage in exports, given history.

If your assumption is that they are being donated to Covax, but you also think that any shipments out would be announced, surely the latter thought now challenges the assumption given no announcements?

There is of course the remote possibility things are being done by the sly... I personally think that is very remote.

Edit: Struggling to find now but I believe the ad-hoc released EU export control mechanism hasn't shown movement for UK in between June and July, suggesting we've got our deliveries/they've been approved for first tranche of 40mm and the 2nd tranche is still pushed out to September atm.

The booster programme is supposedly being delivered through Pfizer, not AZ, so I don't know how that's going to work out. As for done on the sly, there were exports to Australia not completely on the quiet earlier this year - I think it;s entirely possible that some things are being done like that. It's almost 100% certain now that we have more vaccine than we're delivering, and that stock build up is increasing on a daily basis

[BnM]

84 today

[Margin__Walker]

Infections 8.6k down on the same day last week.

Are testing numbers dramatically down? Otherwise that seems pretty positive

[BnM]

No they're not. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

down on last week by less than 20k a day. When you're testing over 1m a day it's nothing.

[Margin__Walker]

Cool. Hopefully reaching a plateau, with a few more weeks of rising deaths to follow, before that follows and starts to reduce.

[Saint]

An independent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine appears to confirm PHE assessments that both AZ and Pfizer are only marginally less effective against Delta than Alpha. Good to see multiple studies from different sources in agreement

[Calculon]

I've not read the actual study but there is a bigger difference between the vaccines than I expected. Happy I got the biontech now

Effectiveness after one dose of vaccine (BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) was notably lower among persons with the delta variant (30.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 25.2 to 35.7) than among those with the alpha variant (48.7%; 95% CI, 45.5 to 51.7); the results were similar for both vaccines. With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7% (95% CI, 91.6 to 95.3) among persons with the alpha variant and 88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant. With the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 74.5% (95% CI, 68.4 to 79.4) among persons with the alpha variant and 67.0% (95% CI, 61.3 to 71.8) among those with the delta variant.

Although I did think something like this might be a factor

There may also be differences among the populations that received each vaccine — for example, in younger age groups, health care workers are more likely to have received the BNT162b2 vaccine, whereas persons in clinical risk groups are more likely to have received the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine

[Gumboot]

Jacinda's just announced that the trans-Tasman travel bubble has been suspended for at least 8 weeks.

Edit: Just realised that all 3 Bledisloe Cup tests are scheduled to be played within that 8 weeks.

Bugger.

[Calculon]

This isn't good. Women being sexually haresssed by quarantine hotel guards. 16 women complained to the BBC with the hotels saying it's the DHSC's responsibility not theirs. One of the solutions now is for two male guards to escorts female guests instead of one.


https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57901154

[Slick]

This isn't good. Women being sexually haresssed by quarantine hotel guards. 16 women complained to the BBC with the hotels saying it's the DHSC's responsibility not theirs. One of the solutions now is for two male guards to escorts female guests instead of one.


https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57901154

I saw that, it’s a completely indefensible, shit situation

[Saint]

I've not read the actual study but there is a bigger difference between the vaccines than I expected. Happy I got the biontech now

Effectiveness after one dose of vaccine (BNT162b2 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) was notably lower among persons with the delta variant (30.7%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 25.2 to 35.7) than among those with the alpha variant (48.7%; 95% CI, 45.5 to 51.7); the results were similar for both vaccines. With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7% (95% CI, 91.6 to 95.3) among persons with the alpha variant and 88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant. With the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 74.5% (95% CI, 68.4 to 79.4) among persons with the alpha variant and 67.0% (95% CI, 61.3 to 71.8) among those with the delta variant.

Although I did think something like this might be a factor

There may also be differences among the populations that received each vaccine — for example, in younger age groups, health care workers are more likely to have received the BNT162b2 vaccine, whereas persons in clinical risk groups are more likely to have received the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine

Yep. That will need some significant number crunching to work out the differences

[Calculon]

With this type of study I'm not sure they have the data to effectively do that, however it's clear that both vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant

[Dinsdale Piranha]

With this type of study I'm not sure they have the data to effectively do that, however it's clear that both vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant

There's also evidence that the AZ vaccine builds protection over time. Those numbers are already up on the previous ones.

[Saint]

With this type of study I'm not sure they have the data to effectively do that, however it's clear that both vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant

Probably not.

It's one of those things where it will take a long term study of the real world deployment (likely in the UK) of the vaccines to compare aganst the baseline expectations of mortality, survivability, and then against each other in specific age groups. It takes a lot of data and a large amount of time to get the true numbers out of something like this

[Saint]

This isn't good. Women being sexually haresssed by quarantine hotel guards. 16 women complained to the BBC with the hotels saying it's the DHSC's responsibility not theirs. One of the solutions now is for two male guards to escorts female guests instead of one.


https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57901154

Or maybe we should stop hiring creeps to be security guards

[Insane_Homer]

My son, turns 18 in Oct, has got appoint to get first jab tomorrow

He's got no underlying health issues.

[Saint]

Yet more studies released - an as yet not peer-reviewed study suggests that 8 weeks is the "sweet spot" for a second dose of Pfizer, based on data from a range of gaps from UK delivered vaccine.

[Sandstorm]

This isn't good. Women being sexually haresssed by quarantine hotel guards. 16 women complained to the BBC with the hotels saying it's the DHSC's responsibility not theirs. One of the solutions now is for two male guards to escorts female guests instead of one.


https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57901154

Or maybe we should stop hiring creeps to be security guards

I thought that was part of the required skill-set.

[BnM]

Does anyone know how to spot a creep before they out themselves, because women for thousands of years have wanted this info

[tc27]

Last few days it feels like case numbers are turning the corner:



Expect deaths to go up for a while yet due to the lag but reasonable grounds for optimism??