One-*** efficacy questions

[Selwyn]

People did change their behaviour, the vulnerable did indeed shield as much as they could.
And still we had hospitals full.

So herd immunity would been much much worse

Hospitals weren't always all full of covid patients. Many many hospitals were empty. Some were busy for sure but crucially these peaks did not last long - they have not lasted long anywhere in the world - they level off quite quickly and the pattern is the same worldwide - doesn't matter if there has been a lockdown/ masks etc or not

This whole shielding idea doesn't really stand up to scrutiny anyway. Unless you genuinely stayed indoors alone 24/7 then you may have reduced risk but every clinically vulnerable person would likely have been exposed to all these covid particles.

Do you mean there were thousands of NHS clinical staff with no work to do?

Oh yes for sure. For a short time. GP's managed to get rid of quite a few timewasters as well though. I've met about 6-10 nursing and paramedic people who were twiddling thumbs for a bit.

 

[Rorschach]

So you keep saying. It doesn't answer my question.

So you keep saying, I can't do any more if you refuse to read it.

 

[Selwyn]

Well, I'm glad you had covid-free hospitals. That certainly wasn't the case anywhere around here.

I think you need to read the answer properly. I did not say they were covid-free. Covid free is a fantasy

 

[Chris152]

It's a real shame the thread has degenerated to this level. Same old nonsense.

 

[Blackswanwood]

There are always alternative facts. It's a known fact, in fact.

These are fun: Arundhati Roy peddles blatant lies in her propaganda article in The Guardian
https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/nyp...covid-19-india-retracts-funeral-pyre-details/
The problem with India is the colossal number of people. Everyone is excited by the numbers, but no one is putting it in context. India currently has the same number of deaths per 100,000 as Greece. We are coming out of lockdown and getting ready for tourists - no dead littering the streets and overflowing hospitals here, but the number of deaths as a percentage of population is the same. How does that work?

I agree that the data is incomplete, imperfect and open to interpretation.

I would suggest there are many differences between India and Greece. Based on what I know from people I work with the number of deaths reported since the Indian Government realised they had an emerging problem has been massively understated which is probably one factor. FWIW I’d be surprised if a number of other countries have not also massaged their data to suit their narrative.

 

[RobinBHM]

Many many hospitals were empty

Please could you provide the evidence.....as you seem to be stating opinion as fact.

 

[D_W]

Not the majority no. But where there were lots of covid deaths localised in one hospital (where the blame went on people having parties or breaking lockdown rules) it was often a spread within the hospital environment.

Remember when people die when they are old it is not one single virus or morbidity that carts them off.

That's probably trackable (number of cases that originate in a hospital). Of staff at mayo clinic,, it's about 7% (not 7% of people get covid, but 7% of staff that had positive covid tests were tracked to an internal source, 93% external).

Not getting too far into the debate about whether someone with heart failure (who may otherwise live several years) dies of covid or heart failure, they do die much earlier on average if they're exposed to covid. Around half a million excess deaths here last year , almost identical to the number of covid cases with no drop in cause of death for most other cases other than the flu (which is a tiny fraction of that number any given year). average life years lost for patients across the board (which means deaths and most deceased have a comorbidity) is about 10 years here, meaning that introducing covid to a same cohort (not vs. healthy people) reduces life expectancy 10 years. Overall population life expectancy decreases 1.13 years in one year due to covid. Not sure when the last time was that such a thing happened - WWII?

 

[Blackswanwood]

It's a real shame the thread has degenerated to this level. Same old nonsense.

I agree Chris - a few pages back there was comment that it was good that the thread had avoided the nastiness of the previous threads.

 

[RobinBHM]

It's a real shame the thread has degenerated to this level. Same old nonsense.

Yes I was thinking the same thing.

We need to get back to the thread title.

The data is still emerging on vaccine efficacy and its really useful to have this thread alive to discuss it as it does.

 

[RobinBHM]

I agree Chris - a few pages back there was comment that it was good that the thread had avoided the nastiness of the previous threads.

That's very true.

It is partly my fault, I should know better than just going over old ground. I will drop out until this thread returns to its title....which is highly relavent still.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

Do you mean there were thousands of NHS clinical staff with no work to do?

 

[Selwyn]

I'm just astonished so few of you on here see the role of natural immunity. It does a massive job

The other issue of course is if the comfy pensioners on here look the other way they may see the damage they do to the poor.

 

[Jonm]

To try and get this back on track, I posted some information about onward transmission of coronavirus. There has been much talk in the media about restricting access to say theatres to people who were either vaccinated or tested negative for coronavirus. The assumption being that if you are vaccinated you are not likely to pass coronavirus on but with no evidence to support that.

The research suggested a reduction of only about 43%. It is not as simple as that but my comments received very little in the way of response to what seems to me to be an important issue about how we get back to near normal.

Here are some links to my comments.

I have been looking at the recent reports of vaccines reducing the transmission of coronavirus. No distinction is made between types of vaccine. Here are some links

Covid: One dose of vaccine halves transmission - study

One dose of COVID-19 vaccine can cut household transmission by up to half

expert reaction to preprint looking at COVID-19 vaccination and household transmission | Science Media Centre

Public Health England have investigated the effect of the vaccine on
transmission of coronavirus within households

• They have looked at 24000 cases of vaccinated people with laboratory confirmed symptoms of coronavirus, and how it spread to their household members who had not been vaccinated.
• They then compared this with unvaccinated people with laboratory confirmed symptoms of coronavirus, and how it spread to their household members who had not been vaccinated

They found that the vaccine reduced onward transmission by between 38% and 49%.

This protection is on top of the reduced risk of a vaccinated person developing symptomatic infection in the first place, which is around 60 to 65% – 4 weeks after one dose of either vaccine.

So putting that together, one dose of the vaccine reduces catching Covid and showing symptoms, by 62% and reduces passing it on to an unvaccinated household member by a further 43%. So the vaccine reduces onward transmission to an unvaccinated household member by nearly 80% overall (that is my conclusion).

It is good news that the vaccine actually reduces onward transmission in the home setting and hopefully It will do even better after two doses and possibly even better again in the non home setting. It seems to be a thorough unbiased analysis.

I am not sure where it leaves us with asymptomatic disease and I have some concerns about it possibly being elderly vaccinated people with younger unvaccinated people, not being as physically close as say an unvaccinated couple.

Perhaps I am being too critical or cautious but this disease has wrong footed us a number of times.

I shall try to explain my last but one paragraph. My comment is specifically about this research which is the onward transmission of Covid by people living in the same household , showing symptoms of Covid and the effect of the vaccination on transmission. It is not about the vaccines in general and reducing hospitalisation.

I am talking about the type of households being compared. A household with a vaccinated person living with unvaccinated people is likely to be an elderly person (vaccinated and showing signs of Covid) living with younger unvaccinated people. This is different to the households without a vaccinated person where the unvaccinated person is more likely to be part of a couple who sleep in the same room together. The social distancing is very different in the two above cases and could account for some of the difference in transmission.

The reports I have seen do not explain how the households were selected, other than to say “There were 552,984 residential households of two to 10 people where there was at least one case.” After excluding households that didn’t meet the (very appropriate) study criteria there were 365,447 households, 1,018,842, and 102,662 secondary cases in the study. These are substantial numbers, so the conclusions are robust”

I hope that explains the point I am trying to make.

 

[Peterm1000]

Very amused that the most controversial thread right now is not in the controversial forum!

 

[RobinBHM]

The research suggested a reduction of only about 43%. It is not as simple as that but my comments received very little in the way of response to what seems to me to be an important issue about how we get back to near normal

It seems to me we have multiple factors that will lead to a return to a (new) normal

1. Almost all vulnerable cohorts are now vaccinated.
2. Those vaccinated have a much reduced chance of being hospitalised
3 those vaccinated are 43% less likely to spread infection
4 the remaining cohorts are in age groups far less likely to be very ill.

I suppose it could be argued if everybody above 18 is vaccinated, does it matters if vaccination reduces infection spread at all?

I wonder what lifespan the vaccine has in offering protection and whether protection and reduction in infection spread decay at the same rate.

 

[Terry - Somerset]

I think you may have missed one part of the equation - the probability of getting infected once vaccinated.

Assume after two jabs the vaccine is 80% (+/-) effective. The risk of someone vaccinated passing on the infection is ~60%.

Therefore the overall risk of someone vaccinated being able to transmit the virus is 20% x 60% = 12%. Well below the R rate of even the more virulent strains.

As approx 70% of the UK adult population already have covid antibodies, overall we are now at a point where herd immunity will kick in and limit R to below 1.

I know this is slightly simplistic as it assumes the population is homegenous - in younger largely unvaccinated age groups R could increase beyond 1. Whether this really matters is questionable as they are far less impacted by the virus anyway.

 

[D_W]

The nonsense trying to figure out per individual case rates completely ignores the real data pools like washington state where you can view the cohort data for both different cohorts. Despite the vaccinated cohort being much more vulnerable, in two months where there were 185 covid deaths in the state, 2 were from the vaccinated cohort.

Thousands of hospitalizations and 10 from the vaccinated cohort

44000 covid cases and 100 positive cases from the vaccinated cohort. The vaccinated cohort was 17% of the total population, so you can adjust those to be on a per capita basis if you want. The idea that the transmission rate is half is some sort of poor study.

If you distilled the general population to similar size cohorts, you'd expect about 8800 cases in gen-pop vs. the 100 from the vaccinated cohort.

If the transmission rate was only halved or even quartered for vaccinated populations, you wouldn't get anything close to that.

 

[sometimewoodworker]

I wonder what lifespan the vaccine has in offering protection and whether protection and reduction in infection spread decay at the same rate.

That data is not yet available to be collected.

The reason is that trial 4 (this involves all vaccinated individuals) has not been in place long enough to allow any firm conclusions, and yes they are being intensely studied.

The only indication there is is the immune response that SARS & MERS have generated. This immunity is at 17 years (that when they appeared) and going up each year.

This of course is only an indication and certainly not anything that can be relied on.

Influenza immunity is also long lasting but because influenza has a large number of different possible “H” & “N” combinations, each one of them different from others, this means that immunity to 1 version doesn’t do much for another.

fortunately covid19, so far, is not producing changes that are evading the current vaccine effectiveness. So the current vaccine protection may drop from 95% to 80% but even at that level it is still way better than the flue vaccination that is usually around 50% effective.

 

[rwillett]

I agree Chris - a few pages back there was comment that it was good that the thread had avoided the nastiness of the previous threads.

That was my comment. I also pointed out that blocking some people improved the quality of the thread.

I cannot improve on some of the highly knowledgeable people on here, this is 100% not my area of expertise, which is why I do not normally comment, however I can follow many of the arguments both for and against some of the actions of the govt and NHS.

I found that blocking some people meant that whenever their blocked comment appeared I simply ignore their comment and the reply. This meant I never went down their rabbit hole. The blocked comment was a nice and easy to see 'red flag'.

Some people love throwing out posts which appear on the surface to have a ring of truth but really don't have much to support them. It takes a lot of effort from people to unpick their arguments. Simply ignoring them is easier. Whilst I may miss the 1 in 20 posts that add value, I also miss the 19 in 20 stuff that misses the mark.

I have no issues with arguments backed up with real facts. I also understand that we still do not know everything about covid-19 so people can't always be certain. Some people seem to latch onto areas where no one is clear to try and drive a wedge into the argument. I tend to skim their responses as their names are familiar.

I appreciate that some people are genuinely knowledgeable and try to fight rumours, half truths and garbage with real arguments backed up by facts. Please keep doing this.

Rob

 

[Robbo60]

In the end

You make a valid point and it is a case of looking at what has happened here and around the world when we get to a better situation regarding Covid. The government will talk about vaccine rollout and try to make us forget what happened before.

Personally I want to know what “Exercise Cygnus, a 2016 exercise to test the UK’s preparedness for a flu pandemic“ told the government and what action they took. This report has been suppressed but it may now be published.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3953
It seems that countries who have dealt with mers and SARS did better than us so what lessons did we learn from them at the start of the pandemic.

Yes it is easy to be wise after the event but the government has vast resources and advice to call upon. It is a case of whether they took the threat seriously, looked at what other countries were doing, obtained and listened to the available advice and made informed decisions. Or did follow their instincts until they were forced to change by the number of deaths and serious Illness.

In the end it is what people believe at the next election, whether it is relevant then and what the alternatives are.

In the end it doesn't matter what rules/guidance/laws they bring in if certain sections of the population don't take any notice. e.g. Students returning last Autumn, Liverpool supporters having street parties when they won the PL! (probably a bit of jealousy there as my team will never win it)