Important and underexamined question. What happened in the UK?
It reminds me of the financial news. "Commodities markets are spooked as backlash to latest Justin Bieber video mounts!"
In all seriousness, apart from the vaccination rate and strictly enforced lockdowns, I have yet to see an explanation for cases going up or down in a particular region that isn't contradicted by the results in some other region. I think we should just admit that except for vaccines and physically forcing 90% of the population into isolation, we don't have a clue what works and what doesn't.
Edit:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-obesit...
If that was true why can I take the population adjusted graphs for any interesting statistic, overlay several countries or states, and see the shape of them all is basically the same?
I would assert that for any of these non-pharmaceutical interventions to have been worthwhile the effect on such charts should be absolutely noticeable to any layman on the street. If you need PhD level math to tell a country who "did it right" apart from a country who "did it wrong"... it probably means that it wasn't worth "doing right".
Did you forget about the half-million dead in the richest country in the world? That didn't not happen, and is extremely different from other places.
Many other countries had huge death rates but didn't test much before and don't test the dead, unlike the States.
Then control for age and obesity, the two factors that make a population most vulnerable.
Please show me a chart where competent governments like NZ, Japan, Australia, China and Indonesia are somewhat similar to incompetent ones like Brazil, USA or South Africa.
Everyone had bad spikes and changes in circumstances eventually.
The US did uniquely badly in the first wave relative to Europe, and their fortunes reversed in the second wave.
Japan and Taiwan did great up front and more poorly later on.
It's not over yet, don't count anyone in or out.
We don’t even know the answer to whether delta is vaccine resistant. With challenge trials it would be dead simple. Take 10,000 vaccinated volunteers, randomize into a delta and alpha groups. Spray them in the face with Covid. Compare rates one week later. Question answered immediately with statistical certainty.
Right now, we’re trying to answer questions like this using nothing other than extremely messy observational data that’s subject to all sorts of uncontrollable confounding variables.
We have nearly the world's toughest lockdown in Sydney, and weeks later the cases are higher than ever.
Same thing happened here in Melbourne last year, with "officially" the toughest lockdown in the world, for 120 days. It was absolutely miserable.
It eventually works - but the UK eventually saw a similar precipitous decline, along the same timeframe, while only relinquishing restrictions.
The only common thread is that in 5-8 weeks, the spike reverses and plummets, regardless of policy.
(Lockdowns may keep the spike much lower, along with the general spread. But I'm more interested in why they seem to have no effect on arresting or reversing the spread once it takes hold.)
Perspective: Aussie, plugged in, watching the West and India closely.
Until we find viruses capable of teleportation, quarantine will remain a very effective strategy.
I'd support this by noting that the numbers in Scotland surged earlier then started declining earlier (where universities and schools go on summer holidays weeks before England). When English schools later broke up for summer, numbers there started declining too.
So no doubt numbers will start going up again when school returns, and will do so first in Scotland - as the virus burns through the young, unvaccinated population.
Note the peak is around a week _prior_ the end of the school term in England (23 July), and this is true across basically all age groups.
And this isn't really an issue so long as the overwhelming majority of the old and vulnerable are vaccinated. But there still the potential for scary looking case numbers but not so much death numbers.
I think this Autumn will reveal whether the vaccinations are giving us the protection needed to gradually open up society again.
For my part I really hope it does, as it will also encourage other countries to do the same and give the vaccination campaign a worldwide boost.
You have coronavirus symptoms. During the middle of a surge in cases, the government has announced that all coronavirus restrictions have ended and everybody can go back to normal. The vast majority of older and vulnerable people have been fully vaccinated.
Do you:
A: get a test and risk having to isolate
B: not get a test and live your life like normal as the government said you should
I would install it if it meant free paid holiday from work but I'm not employed and if I were I could probably work from home.
further, the borders remained open so people mixed at home and then went on holiday/visited family etc. UK is a major international transport hub and also has a large population of Indian descent so we likely "imported" delta from India relatively early as a result and then likely helped seed it in other western nations.
They should have put India on the red list several weeks earlier than they did when it was obvious for anyone to see what was going on, but they delayed for unknown reasons
Being in central London right now, through anecdotal evidence I don't think we've suddenly become less sociable.
- [1] UK infections grouped by age. School years 6, 7, 11, and 12 are ages 11, 12, 17, and 18 respectively. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
I have some doubts about how generalizable the results are. A circuit party is not a produce aisle.
The % of total population who actually visits nightclubs is pretty low, so it took like a monh for this segment to hit herd immunity basically
Doesn’t mean their immune system did nothing though. I’d wager a lot of UK population basically got an ”organic 3rd vaccine dose”. My prediction is they have probably the highest immunity rates in the world atm
Isn't that how the vaccination regime is supposed to work, actually? With two jabs in, contracting Covid still comes with something like 4%..20% hit rate.[ß] However, with two jabs the risk of hospitalisation is mercifully low, and roughly half of the cases are asymptomatic.
So instead of vaccinated people overloading the NHS, when they do get unlucky, they are much more likely to get through with only mild symptoms. For majority that "organic 3rd dose" works as a booster shot. They can still infect others, though...
NB. As far as I know, there are no good studies on how Long Covid manifests in a vaccinated population. I think the working assumption is that very mild symptomatic Covid also ends up with less severe Long Covid, but have heard of no data to back that up.
ß: Depending on the study, the vaccine in question and the variant. IIRC 2xPfizer provides ~88% protection against Delta, 95%+ against earlier non-Beta variants; 2xAstraZeneca provides 60%+ protection against Delta, 90%+ against non-Betas.
Disclosure: UK resident, with two jabs.
I'd think it sounds quite a lot like those people were really rather ill. I don't think people should expect to go back to running marathons or whatever a week after fighting to survive
It's the same for flu and other major viral infections. It can take a while to get back to full health - I don't think covid is anything new here? Just the usual "you almost died"?
Other countries had some of these factors. Few if any had all of these factors.
What happened next? The vaccines turned out to be really effective.
The UK certainly doesn't have all of them for a start.
The lock-downs had high levels of compliance, just a lot of people moaning from their sofa (or whatever soapbox they have available, reach varies greatly, inversely with intelligence in many cases).
Population density, travel hub, obesity levels, delayed first lock-down would be my list.
It instead means that there are 20 million potential virus hosts in the UK instead of 67m. Way more than the population of lots of EU countries.
Instead he managed to brew an exciting new variant, which is what every health official was warning against.
And I'm guessing that unless the majority of the population are rapidly inoculated then exciting new strains could constantly evolve until we have something truly nasty.
I could reframe your hypothesis in a falsifiable way such as "perhaps ending lockdowns in the UK caused individuals to spend more time outdoors or in open air restaurants rather than smaller closed doors activities such as dinner parties", or "perhaps ending lockdowns in the UK caused people to spend more time in other locations rather than large shared ventilation apartment complexes".
It's much more likely to have peaked because of Euro finals on 11th July and school holidays starting on 15th July
It should take about a week to start seeing the effect of a change in policy. From incubation time to testing to results. Usually, we count two weeks to be sure.
It could be coincidence but this date was planned and intentional.
From this article:
> “Something strange is happening in Britain,” the Washington Post declared this week. “COVID cases are plummeting instead of soaring.” A few weeks ago, when the country’s new daily-case total was around 60,000, the prominent British epidemiologist and government adviser Neil Ferguson declared that a rise to 100,000 a day was inevitable, and that 200,000 a day was possible. The country is now at 27,000 and falling.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
That's showing hospitalisations rather than cases, and most scenarios show the peak in early August. Hospitalisations lag cases, and it looks like early August will be right: we haven't seen the peak yet.
Peak was several days ago.