| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster 16:28 - Dec 15 with 7062 views | StokieBlue |
Clearly most of the country don't want more restrictions which is absolutely understandable but Omicron is absolutely running riot.
78000 cases today is massive, a 19% increase on cases from last week and more importantly as of Saturday hospitalisations are up 10.4% so that's likely more than that given we have seen a huge jump in cases since Saturday.
Deaths are slightly down this week but that would lag behind hospitalisations.
Given >10 million aren't yet boosted it's hard to see how the current level of restrictions are going to do anything given the steep rise in cases even with them. Most of that rise is going to be from the SE and London as Omicron is only thought to be 5% of cases up North but once it hits there it's going to keep on rising.
It's an impossible situation now where people absolutely understandably don't want more restrictions but without it the trend is only going to go one way over a short time horizon.
Perhaps at the very minimum the schools should close for the last 2 days of term and WFH should become mandatory rather than advice.
What are peoples thoughts? Would people want some tougher restrictions for a few weeks or do we agree with the Tory rebels that enough is enough?
Boris is speaking at 5pm, we shall see what he says. Either way, getting your booster is absolutely key now.
SB [Post edited 15 Dec 2021 16:32]
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:56 - Dec 15 with 994 views | StokieBlue |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:48 - Dec 15 by Trequartista |
Stay as we are. Is there any evidence this 10% rise in hospitalisations is due to omicron? The number was 10 yesterday. I don’t see how we are going to fare worse than South Africa when we are far more vaccinated than they are when even 2 doses gives good protection against hospitalisations and death, even factoring in an older population (they still have some old people in SA) |
"Is there any evidence this 10% rise in hospitalisations is due to omicron?"
Without any other external stimulus there would be no other obvious reason why the cases would stay the same or drop given new restrictions. The only thing that is likely to explain the rise in cases is Omicron.
We know London is most severely hit with Omicron and the rise in hospitalisations is 38% this week (see Elders post). Correlation doesn't imply causation but that's a massive increase rather than a small one which can be easily dismissed.
Two doses of Pfizer gives a 70% protection against severe illness, I'm not convinced I'd label that as "good protection". It's certainly adequate but it leaves plenty of room for cases of severe illness.
It's pretty irrelevant to look at the specific number of Omicron infections in hospital like you're citing, not all PCR tests allow the S-gene dropout to be seen and the BA.2 variant doesn't have it at all so requires specific genetic testing to distinguish from Delta.
We probably will end up staying as we are but that is going to result in a huge number of cases and society pretty much shutting down anyway as workers won't be able to go to work due to isolation rules.
SB | | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:58 - Dec 15 with 973 views | Churchman |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:37 - Dec 15 by giant_stow |
I think its too late already personally. Its going to rip though the country and there's not a lot to stop it, short of individuals locking themselves up. |
I’m with you on this. It’s too late. If the government wanted a ‘fire break’ it should have been done the moment it was detected in this country. Children Don’t study much in December anyway so that’s a natural break point.
All too late now, as is the booster programme. Let small business stay open with the usual number/hygiene restrictions. Pubs and restaurants too. With numbers/hygiene restrictions. Mandate vaccination and nominate places (supermarkets etc) unvaccinated people can go. Draconian? Very. Necessary? I think so. It costs far more to pussyfoot around in the long run. Just a view. |  | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:01 - Dec 15 with 962 views | gordon |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:48 - Dec 15 by Trequartista |
Stay as we are. Is there any evidence this 10% rise in hospitalisations is due to omicron? The number was 10 yesterday. I don’t see how we are going to fare worse than South Africa when we are far more vaccinated than they are when even 2 doses gives good protection against hospitalisations and death, even factoring in an older population (they still have some old people in SA) |
If we stay as we are then there could be a period where we basically don't have a functioning healthcare system because the rate of infection will be so high (peaking much, much higher than previous waves because of the higher transmissibility) that there will be not enough healthcare staff, add in an extra chunk of sick people, and then a good number of people will die unnecessarily.
But then it'd be embarrassing for Boris to try and get more restrictions passed with the Labour party's help, so...
One way or another, we're basically going to learn the lesson that '30% milder' whatever that means (if it is milder, still not convinced) but 2x or 3x more transmissible is still a really, really bad combination. |  | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:05 - Dec 15 with 931 views | bluelagos |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:37 - Dec 15 by giant_stow |
I think its too late already personally. Its going to rip though the country and there's not a lot to stop it, short of individuals locking themselves up. |
Nah, if this thing is doubling every 2-3 days - then it may be too late to avoid severe difficulties - but doing nothing at all will see a peak that could be catastrophic for the NHS.
Think of Boris' "squash the sombrero" thing. Limit the peak, widen it if you like, and it could lesson the nightmare of overloading the NHS. And remember if we let it rip, not only do we end up with a fck load of ill people, we also end up with a fck load of NHS staff at home isolating - less staff to deal with increased need...
A accept it is too late to stop it altogether - absolutely - way too late given the way it is now seeded in the community. But not too late to take sensible steps to protect public health. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:05 - Dec 15 with 930 views | Nthsuffolkblue |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:42 - Dec 15 by ElderGrizzly |
Looks like the youngest taking the hit
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That is almost like there is a highly contagious strain on the loose while schools are still attending. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:07 - Dec 15 with 920 views | jeera |
Can someone please list these restrictions.
I thought it was simply masks in confined spaces.
Bit of common sense distancing.
Proof of vaccines but in a more definitive form.
What's the issue here? |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:07 - Dec 15 with 917 views | BanksterDebtSlave |
Has it arrived in China yet and if and when it does do you expect them to be able to contain it? |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:08 - Dec 15 with 915 views | homer_123 |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:35 - Dec 15 by Ipswich24 |
And where are these 'stats' coming from exactly?
BBC, Sky scaremongering again! |
Do you have any alternative information |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:10 - Dec 15 with 902 views | homer_123 |
Genuine question - is it too late?
Haven't we, for example, taken 11 African countries off the red list?
I do wonder whether we are at the lock the door the horse has bolted stage.....not to say we shouldn't do more but I do wonder if we are way way too late. | |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:10 - Dec 15 with 903 views | Trequartista |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 16:56 - Dec 15 by StokieBlue |
"Is there any evidence this 10% rise in hospitalisations is due to omicron?"
Without any other external stimulus there would be no other obvious reason why the cases would stay the same or drop given new restrictions. The only thing that is likely to explain the rise in cases is Omicron.
We know London is most severely hit with Omicron and the rise in hospitalisations is 38% this week (see Elders post). Correlation doesn't imply causation but that's a massive increase rather than a small one which can be easily dismissed.
Two doses of Pfizer gives a 70% protection against severe illness, I'm not convinced I'd label that as "good protection". It's certainly adequate but it leaves plenty of room for cases of severe illness.
It's pretty irrelevant to look at the specific number of Omicron infections in hospital like you're citing, not all PCR tests allow the S-gene dropout to be seen and the BA.2 variant doesn't have it at all so requires specific genetic testing to distinguish from Delta.
We probably will end up staying as we are but that is going to result in a huge number of cases and society pretty much shutting down anyway as workers won't be able to go to work due to isolation rules.
SB |
I will look into the London figures as I hadn’t seen them. Hospitalisations shot up in Gauteng contradicting the medics who say it was mild and then we found out a) they were counting people going into hospital for something else and then tested positive in hospital (76%) and b) the majority were breathing room air and were out in 2.5 days on average. It remains to be seen if a) or b) apply here.
70% is good compared to SA (30%) and “stay as we are” includes the massive booster campaign I am in favour of. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:12 - Dec 15 with 879 views | Nthsuffolkblue |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:07 - Dec 15 by jeera |
Can someone please list these restrictions.
I thought it was simply masks in confined spaces.
Bit of common sense distancing.
Proof of vaccines but in a more definitive form.
What's the issue here? |
Can't you see how oppressive that list is? Muzzles I tell you. We didn't win the Crimean War to have these freedoms taken away from us! I want to have my Christmas Party and hug everyone. What does it matter if the bodies pile high? Let them pile high.
We are British. We lived through the Blitz. We never ran away from it. It is time to take our stand and face up to this virus. It is microscopic for goodness sake. If we can't trample this out what hope is there for human kind? Live and let live. Let us do what we want.
Oh, and don't let those evil foreigners in either. They don't deserve the freedoms we have. They weren't born British! | |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:13 - Dec 15 with 868 views | jeera |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:12 - Dec 15 by Nthsuffolkblue |
Can't you see how oppressive that list is? Muzzles I tell you. We didn't win the Crimean War to have these freedoms taken away from us! I want to have my Christmas Party and hug everyone. What does it matter if the bodies pile high? Let them pile high.
We are British. We lived through the Blitz. We never ran away from it. It is time to take our stand and face up to this virus. It is microscopic for goodness sake. If we can't trample this out what hope is there for human kind? Live and let live. Let us do what we want.
Oh, and don't let those evil foreigners in either. They don't deserve the freedoms we have. They weren't born British! |
There's someone on this thread who will possibly up-vote this unironically. | |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:14 - Dec 15 with 868 views | NthQldITFC |
I haven't thought this out thoroughly, but I've always been of the opinion that at the start of a (big) wave like this thing to do is to hit it with a shortish, hard lockdown of 8-10 days to knock back the well of infections, as a throttling and spreading out mechanism. This would presumably need to be repeated again after a couple of months, until recently acquired immunity and natural abatement starts to take the pressure off.
As a country, we've been living with this for two years, and we have utterly failed in the educational aspect (against the tide of ill-informed misinformation), but the idea of living with long periods of 'freedom' interspersed with occasional short, hard lockdowns ought to have been accepted and engrained into people's psyches and into business practices. But it hasn't.
Fkn useless bunch of tvvats (primarily HM Government, but also all of us to some extent for being part of the failure.) |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:21 - Dec 15 with 814 views | BlueBadger |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:13 - Dec 15 by jeera |
There's someone on this thread who will possibly up-vote this unironically. |
Balls. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:27 - Dec 15 with 791 views | gordon |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:14 - Dec 15 by NthQldITFC |
I haven't thought this out thoroughly, but I've always been of the opinion that at the start of a (big) wave like this thing to do is to hit it with a shortish, hard lockdown of 8-10 days to knock back the well of infections, as a throttling and spreading out mechanism. This would presumably need to be repeated again after a couple of months, until recently acquired immunity and natural abatement starts to take the pressure off.
As a country, we've been living with this for two years, and we have utterly failed in the educational aspect (against the tide of ill-informed misinformation), but the idea of living with long periods of 'freedom' interspersed with occasional short, hard lockdowns ought to have been accepted and engrained into people's psyches and into business practices. But it hasn't.
Fkn useless bunch of tvvats (primarily HM Government, but also all of us to some extent for being part of the failure.) |
It's utterly insane that there are still right-wing journalists and tory MPs effectively going around saying no-one has anyone actually died of this Omicron yet so what's the problem. | | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:36 - Dec 15 with 755 views | ElderGrizzly |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:27 - Dec 15 by gordon |
It's utterly insane that there are still right-wing journalists and tory MPs effectively going around saying no-one has anyone actually died of this Omicron yet so what's the problem. |
Sounds like Whitty is warning them again in this press conference that doing nothing is not an option
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:38 - Dec 15 with 746 views | giant_stow |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:05 - Dec 15 by bluelagos |
Nah, if this thing is doubling every 2-3 days - then it may be too late to avoid severe difficulties - but doing nothing at all will see a peak that could be catastrophic for the NHS.
Think of Boris' "squash the sombrero" thing. Limit the peak, widen it if you like, and it could lesson the nightmare of overloading the NHS. And remember if we let it rip, not only do we end up with a fck load of ill people, we also end up with a fck load of NHS staff at home isolating - less staff to deal with increased need...
A accept it is too late to stop it altogether - absolutely - way too late given the way it is now seeded in the community. But not too late to take sensible steps to protect public health. |
The problem with that is that the level of lockdown required to stop this or even slow it might be behind anything we've seen yet, or for that matter beyond anything possible.
As someone already said, the moment to lockdown was a couple of weeks ago.
If the estimate for Omicron cases was 200,000 on monday and its doubling in less than 2 days, a really tough lockdown (Spanish style at min) starting tonight / now might have touched the sides. But its too late.
Sorry to be a downer, but I think we're screwed already.
Edit: apologies if I'm sounding like i know anything! Obviously I don't, but having said that, I did make a decent guess last week, about todays numbers. [Post edited 15 Dec 2021 17:40]
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:40 - Dec 15 with 733 views | J2BLUE |
Think we badly need some further restrictions to be honest.
This government is always late to act and then they always say the restrictions kick in a few days later.
Odds on restrictions announced on Christmas Eve to kick in on the 27th? |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:41 - Dec 15 with 722 views | pointofblue |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:27 - Dec 15 by gordon |
It's utterly insane that there are still right-wing journalists and tory MPs effectively going around saying no-one has anyone actually died of this Omicron yet so what's the problem. |
Particularly as they have.
The point that Omicrom was discovered was too late; it had already got into the community and let rip. For once, not necessarily the fault of the government because they had no chance.
SAYING THAT - mandatory face masks, Covid vaccine passports (know this is arguable) and LFT tests should have been in place throughout. That would have controlled some of the spread even before the presence of Omicron was known. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:41 - Dec 15 with 720 views | giant_stow |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:40 - Dec 15 by J2BLUE |
Think we badly need some further restrictions to be honest.
This government is always late to act and then they always say the restrictions kick in a few days later.
Odds on restrictions announced on Christmas Eve to kick in on the 27th? |
The daily infections could be in the millions by then - too late.
Edit: not recorded infections - estimated. [Post edited 15 Dec 2021 17:42]
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:42 - Dec 15 with 710 views | gordon |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:38 - Dec 15 by giant_stow |
The problem with that is that the level of lockdown required to stop this or even slow it might be behind anything we've seen yet, or for that matter beyond anything possible.
As someone already said, the moment to lockdown was a couple of weeks ago.
If the estimate for Omicron cases was 200,000 on monday and its doubling in less than 2 days, a really tough lockdown (Spanish style at min) starting tonight / now might have touched the sides. But its too late.
Sorry to be a downer, but I think we're screwed already.
Edit: apologies if I'm sounding like i know anything! Obviously I don't, but having said that, I did make a decent guess last week, about todays numbers. [Post edited 15 Dec 2021 17:40]
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It's inevitable that there's going to be some really serious problems now whatever we do, but any restrictions imposed between now and the peak of infections will help spread out the peak of hospitalisations, and I think people reckon the peak of infections to be in the last week of December. | | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:42 - Dec 15 with 707 views | J2BLUE |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:41 - Dec 15 by giant_stow |
The daily infections could be in the millions by then - too late.
Edit: not recorded infections - estimated. [Post edited 15 Dec 2021 17:42]
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#Tories | |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:45 - Dec 15 with 689 views | factual_blue |
To be fair, this government finds any decision difficult. |  |
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| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:46 - Dec 15 with 684 views | gordon |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:40 - Dec 15 by J2BLUE |
Think we badly need some further restrictions to be honest.
This government is always late to act and then they always say the restrictions kick in a few days later.
Odds on restrictions announced on Christmas Eve to kick in on the 27th? |
It's totally insane, again, what we're doing - as it is, the peak of infections is going to be somewhere around Christmas day or a bit after, so there's no way that a normal Christmas is going to be possible regardless of whether there are restrictions in place or not - if we'd gone hard from the start of this week, closed everything etc., then a more normal-ish Christmas might've been possible. | | | |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:46 - Dec 15 with 682 views | giant_stow |
| Some difficult discussions are going to have to be had in Westminster on 17:42 - Dec 15 by gordon |
It's inevitable that there's going to be some really serious problems now whatever we do, but any restrictions imposed between now and the peak of infections will help spread out the peak of hospitalisations, and I think people reckon the peak of infections to be in the last week of December. |
I saw this tweet earlier from one of Grizzlie's links which i think illustrates my point:
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