Herd Immunity

[Andy_W]

You're right BoroFur, but I don't think that is what Redwurzel is suggesting. Some data over time, tracking vaccinated folks and the rate of infection and ultimately mortality rate.

This would be really useful to get a picture of how effective vaccinations are going to be in saving lives. We have what, 30 million first dose vaccinations and about 7 million second doses.

We should be able to provide some data for these people so we can get a clearer picture of where we are now and where we will be in 3 months or 6 months.

You might be forgiven for thinking the government don't want us to know.

I don't think it's that sinister, I think it's more that they've finally got something right (vaccine/ lockdown/ reduced cases) and don't want to screw it up again.

We're below "normal" weekly deaths now, already (as of w/e 19th March), so no longer in excess. I think it's currently about 95%, but there's some new figures out today.

It's probably difficult to say how many people the vaccines have saved with any accuracy, as cases are declining rapidly, maybe hard to tell on fast moving data, but it's obviously absolutely massive. Cases have come down due to restrictive measures, but vaccines are no doubt stopping a great deal of transmission amongst older groups too, and accelerating that, along with having more testing, and hopefully better tracing (cringe).

The key concern is that they don't want another breakout whilst vaccines are going so well, we got a good chance now of getting this effectively near zero (which is something they probably thought they would not get, so early), and then having so many vaccinated (or previously had it), that we get no resurgence.

 

[Andy_W]

I do believe in the current precautions as its best to do a bit of overkill, but to me we are getting on top of Covid19. This country has been blasted by C19, but in some ways that gives some protection on top of use of the vaccines. Of course there will be some on here that say herd immunity does not exist and the vaccines are not very effective.

Anyone saying herd immunity doesn't exist or vaccines are not effective would not be worth listening to, as they would be talking crap.

The thing is though. herd immunity gets talked about as a general percentage of adults or population for some reason, but it's incorrect to do that so simplistically, as it doesn't represent which groups congregate or represent how we're rolling out the vaccine. It would only work that way, if the vaccines were evenly distributed. So there would definitely already be massive herd immunity in the over 70's and 80's, who have had two jabs, maybe also in the 60's, not yet in the 50's and nowhere near in the 18's - 50's.

So what they don't seem to want is it getting rife in the 18-50 year olds (which it would if they opened shops, restaurants, pubs, bars, nightclubs etc), as those groups are not heavily vaccinated yet, so "herd immunity" of those age group is not yet there, and won't be until maybe August? This is probably the reason for not opening up already, ahead of schedule, deaths have been stopped, and won't go into excess again, but cases and long covid bases aren't covered yet, and they need that sorted to be able to return healthcare back to normal. They're obviously $hit scared of uni bars, nightclubs, busy nights out etc, which are obviously mainly 18's-50's. Highest risk areas with the currently unvaccinated age groups.

 

[Laughing]

I don't think it's that sinister, I think it's more that they've finally got something right (vaccine/ lockdown/ reduced cases) and don't want to screw it up again.

We're below "normal" weekly deaths now, already (as of w/e 19th March), so no longer in excess. I think it's currently about 95%, but there's some new figures out today.

It's probably difficult to say how many people the vaccines have saved with any accuracy, as cases are declining rapidly, maybe hard to tell on fast moving data, but it's obviously absolutely massive. Cases have come down due to restrictive measures, but vaccines are no doubt stopping a great deal of transmission amongst older groups too, and accelerating that, along with having more testing, and hopefully better tracing (cringe).

The key concern is that they don't want another breakout whilst vaccines are going so well, we got a good chance now of getting this effectively near zero (which is something they probably thought they would not get, so early), and then having so many vaccinated (or previously had it), that we get no resurgence.

I am not really referring to any of that Andy.

Regardless of cases falling and the associated mortality. People are still becoming infected and still being hospitalized, albeit in very small numbers.

How many of those small numbers are people who have been vaccinated and how many are unvaccinated. It's a simple calculation, you would think and would give a decent picture of how effective vaccinations are.

Why are we not seeing this data? It would, assuming the data looks good, encourage people to get vaccinated. If it's not so good, we need to know that vaccinations are not panning out as we had hoped.

I can see a case for the government hiding this data either way. I can't see a single good reason not to share that with the public.

 

[Andy_W]

I am not really referring to any of that Andy.

Regardless of cases falling and the associated mortality. People are still becoming infected and still being hospitalized, albeit in very small numbers.

How many of those small numbers are people who have been vaccinated and how many are unvaccinated. It's a simple calculation, you would think and would give a decent picture of how effective vaccinations are.

Why are we not seeing this data? It would, assuming the data looks good, encourage people to get vaccinated. If it's not so good, we need to know that vaccinations are not panning out as we had hoped.

I can see a case for the government hiding this data either way. I can't see a single good reason not to share that with the public.

It's not that simple, as it would need to be cross referenced with time of first dose, time of second dose, how long has it been since those have had time to build immunity, are they in a heavily infected area, have they already had covid.

It's a wild data set, and would be open to wild interpretation. Some 40 year old healthcare worker that has already had covid, and had two jabs is incomparable to some 65 year old who has only had their first jab 3 weeks ago.

Vaccine uptake is massive, people are obvisouly concerned enough to have it and impressed enough with results/ advice/ risk to have it, which is great.

The only way to compare the data would be on age group by age group basis, of hospital admissions/ deaths, of which there are graphs and data that show this published every week by ONS, here is an extract below. You could cross reference this with a graph of vaccine uptake per age group, I bet someone on twitter has already done it, you see that sort of thing often, if you look.

 

[Laughing]

Come on Andy, we can land a robot on mars, have self driving cars and self landing rockets. You trying to tell me we have no one who can do the maths to figure out how effective the vaccinations are in a handful of scenarios?

I think it would be very simple, there are people who do this for a living. There is a shed load of data available on testing, vaccinations and the cohorts.

I am not buying for one second that the government do not have a pretty clear picture of how vaccinations are effecting both infection rates and mortality rates.

 

[Muttley]

I am not buying for one second that the government do not have a pretty clear picture of how vaccinations are effecting both infection rates and mortality rates.

Well it can be found on a Government website for one.

Vaccine Effectiveness in the UK

Time magazine has an article which shows the effectiveness of the three vaccines in use in the USA including the Pfizer-Biontech and Johnson & Johnson (Oxford-AZ not approved when article written)

Vaccine	Pfizer-BioNTech	Moderna	Janssen (J&J)
Received U.S. FDA authorization	12/11/2020	12/18/2020	2/27/2021
Overall efficacy	95%	94%	66%
Against severe disease*	75% (92%**)	100%	85%
Lowers hospitalization rate*	100% (87%**)	89%	100%

As stated it is complicated by the delivery and even once vaccinated peak immunity is not achieved for several weeks and full immunity not until the second dose has been administered. As someone who has been critical of the way the Johnson Government has handled this crisis, the cronyism, the incompetence, the uncaring blundering and poor communication; I feel they are getting this just about right. I would rather that they took a few weeks longer and erred on the side of caution than saying "open everything NOW!"

 

[Andy_W]

Come on Andy, we can land a robot on mars, have self driving cars and self landing rockets. You trying to tell me we have no one who can do the maths to figure out how effective the vaccinations are in a handful of scenarios?

I think it would be very simple, there are people who do this for a living. There is a shed load of data available on testing, vaccinations and the cohorts.

I am not buying for one second that the government do not have a pretty clear picture of how vaccinations are effecting both infection rates and mortality rates.

No, that's not what I'm saying, I could do that now (the various scenarios), so they could obviously. I'm just saying there are a ton of variables, which 95% of people won't appreciate or be able to interpret, but the data is available if someone wanted to do their own specific comparison. There are tons of variations, for every age group, it can't be shown on one graph easily unfortunately.

Comparing a 12 week two jab 40 year old, to a 2 week single jab 65 year old is miles apart, just like it is comparing it to a 12 week two jab 65 year old or people in various settings, roles and locations.

There are easily available charts on cases in general, cases per age group, hospital admissions, hospital admissions per age group, deaths per age group etc, and these can all be cross-referenced with the vaccine rollout to get a broad indication? If you want something specific, look for it or do it yourself, the data is there?

 

[Laughing]

Well it can be found on a Government website for one.

Vaccine Effectiveness in the UK

Time magazine has an article which shows the effectiveness of the three vaccines in use in the USA including the Pfizer-Biontech and Johnson & Johnson (Oxford-AZ not approved when article written)

Vaccine	Pfizer-BioNTech	Moderna	Janssen (J&J)
Received U.S. FDA authorization	12/11/2020	12/18/2020	2/27/2021
Overall efficacy	95%	94%	66%
Against severe disease*	75% (92%**)	100%	85%
Lowers hospitalization rate*	100% (87%**)	89%	100%

As stated it is complicated by the delivery and even once vaccinated peak immunity is not achieved for several weeks and full immunity not until the second dose has been administered. As someone who has been critical of the way the Johnson Government has handled this crisis, the cronyism, the incompetence, the uncaring blundering and poor communication; I feel they are getting this just about right. I would rather that they took a few weeks longer and erred on the side of caution than saying "open everything NOW!"

Cheers mutley. That's for the USA, it would be good to now the figures for the UK, we have a slightly different strategy and specifically AZ, for obvious reasons.

Looking at those hospitalization rates amongs vaccinated folks it seems that very shortly we may be out of this sitiation totally.

 

[Laughing]

No, that's not what I'm saying, I could do that now (the various scenarios), so they could obviously. I'm just saying there are a ton of variables, which 95% of people won't appreciate or be able to interpret, but the data is available if someone wanted to do their own specific comparison. There are tons of variations, for every age group, it can't be shown on one graph easily unfortunately.

Comparing a 12 week two jab 40 year old, to a 2 week single jab 65 year old is miles apart, just like it is comparing it to a 12 week two jab 65 year old or people in various settings, roles and locations.

There are easily available charts on cases in general, cases per age group, hospital admissions, hospital admissions per age group, deaths per age group etc, and these can all be cross-referenced with the vaccine rollout to get a broad indication? If you want something specific, look for it or do it yourself, the data is there?

Yup loads of people wont understand the data, that's why the government should be providing it.

 

[Redwurzel]

For the record there were quite a few posters on here saying there was no evidence of herd immunity in 2020 and that lots of people have had covid twice. I have always believed in some form of herd immunity its often how we have overcome a lot of past viruses. The same with natural immunity, people often don't account for some of the population who will never catch covid19 even when exposed to it.

 

[Andy_W]

Yup loads of people wont understand the data, that's why the government should be providing it.

The data is there, you can compare what you like? If people want something specific then they should have the ability to find it? If they can't find it, then I wouldn't trust them to be able to understand what it is they're looking at (or what they're not looking at, more importantly).

If people can't understand there are 2 (no now 3) different vaccines (soon to be 5/6), over 5 months of time frames for taking them, for 10 different 10 year age groups, over varying degrees of health risk, for 10 different regions, over a 5 month period of case changes, over 4 months of differing seasonality, then they will have no idea that a graph comparing 2 of those scenarios is missing out 50,000 scenarios.

If you want something specific, then you have to be specific and look at exactly what you want over a specific timeframe, otherwise you have to just accept that vaccines and social distancing massively reduce cases, and work better over their certain timeframes, and vaccines also reduce the effect if people still do get it.

What that data also won't show is how quickly the new variants could still spread through the under 60's who have little protection, and what long term effects this could have on people, or on healthcare. The modelling will cover this though, but again, many, many viarables.

 

[Randy]

For the record there were quite a few posters on here saying there was no evidence of herd immunity in 2020 and that lots of people have had covid twice. I have always believed in some form of herd immunity its often how we have overcome a lot of past viruses. The same with natural immunity, people often don't account for some of the population who will never catch covid19 even when exposed to it.

Spanish Flu never had a vaccine developed for it and it died out after two years.

 

[Andy_W]

For the record there were quite a few posters on here saying there was no evidence of herd immunity in 2020 and that lots of people have had covid twice. I have always believed in some form of herd immunity its often how we have overcome a lot of past viruses. The same with natural immunity, people often don't account for some of the population who will never catch covid19 even when exposed to it.

Maybe that was because there was no herd immunity in 2020? Nowhere had anywhere near enough infection in 2020, or had anywhere near enough people vaccinated to reach herd immunity level? It doesn't mean herd immunity was not possible or wasn't a thing, just that nowhere was near it then.

A few places and people claimed we/ they had herd immunity in 2020, but they've been since disproven.

The UK and Isreal are seemingly quite close, as are some others, but as for the UK that's only in certain age groups. Some age groups are 90%+, some others are probably no more than 20%. Different age groups mix with their own age groups more, especially the younger ones, that's where the herd immunity is more important, where we currently have little.

 

[Andy_W]

Spanish Flu never had a vaccine developed for it and it died out after two years.

Yup, after 1/3rd of the world population had it and it killed 20-50 million. The countries didn't have a vaccine get-out back then, and also had the wars and returning troops etc, so were pretty much forced into herd immunity by actually getting the virus and natural immunity.

I don't think it ever totally went away though, well H1N1 hasn't and has popped up numerous times since.

 

[Randy]

From The Telegraph.... It's a long read.

Almost a quarter of registered Covid deaths are people who are not dying from the disease, new official figures show, as the Government was urged to move faster with the roadmap in the light of increasingly positive data.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that 23 per cent of coronavirus deaths registered are now people who have died "with" the virus rather than ‘from’ an infection.

This means that while the person who died will have tested positive for Covid, that was not the primary cause of their death recorded on the death certificate.

Other data also shows an increasingly positive picture of the state of the pandemic in the UK.

Daily death figures by "date of death" reveal that Britain has had no more than 28 deaths a day since the beginning of April, even though the Government-announced deaths have been as high as 60. This is because the Government gives a daily update on deaths based on the number reported that day, which can include deaths from days or weeks previously and therefore may not reflect the true decline in deaths.


On Tuesday the Government announced that there had been 23 further deaths.

Likewise, Oxford University has calculated that the number of people in hospital with an active coronavirus infection is likely to be around half the current published daily figure. Tuesday's official figure showed there were 2,537 Covid patients in hospital with 230 new admissions.

However, despite the positive statistics Boris Johnson issued a caution over the lifting of lockdown as he said it was the restrictions, not the vaccine rollout, that predominantly had kept Covid numbers low.

“It is very, very important for everybody to understand that the reduction in these numbers - in hospitalisations and in deaths and in infections - has not been achieved by the vaccination programme,” he said.

"People don’t, I think, appreciate that it's the lockdown that has been overwhelmingly important in delivering this improvement in the pandemic and in the figures that we’re seeing.

“So yes of course the vaccination programme has helped, but the bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown.”

The Prime Minister cautioned that case numbers will rise in the coming weeks as people gather in pub gardens and visit shops again, with Number 10 carefully watching changes in the data.

He added that "at the moment I can't see any reason for us to change the road map, to deviate from the targets that we have set ourselves".

Tory MPs privately noted that Mr Johnson’s comments on the vaccine struck a more cautious note than those used by Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, in a letter also issued on Tuesday to MP colleagues.

In that letter, parts of which The Telegraph has seen, Mr Hancock said “it is because of the success of the vaccination rollout”, alongside falling infection cases and hospitalisations, that “we are able carefully to lift restrictions” across the UK.

Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, brought forward the reopening of non-essential shops. The speeding up of her reopening timetable comes after Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales, brought forward indoor mixing in Wales by a week.

MPs urged the Prime Minister to also be driven by the positive data.

Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the Covid Research Group of Tory MPs sceptical about lockdown, told The Telegraph: “I know the Prime Minister is worried about case data in other countries. But we were promised the vaccine would break the link between cases, hospitalisations and deaths.

“We’ve been told repeatedly it has done. So of course we’re looking to the Prime Minister to follow the data so that we can end the other harms that come with restrictions and lockdown.

“The sooner we’re talking about the crisis in cancer care, the sooner we’ll be solving it.”

Covid deaths now make up just 4.9 per cent of deaths registered in England and Wales compared with 45 per cent in mid-January, according to the ONS.


Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, said: “All the data is highly reassuring. There is becoming a case over the next couple of weeks to bring forward the reopening of hospitality, but that’s offset with caution around big events.

“The issue is as we go about our daily lives, there will be a slight increase in cases but the key is not to panic. I think this over-cautiousness can be overcome by using a data driven approach.”

Experts also said it was clear the vaccination was having a "major" impact, with the death rate for over-60s now close to that of the under-60s despite being 43 times higher at the January peak.

Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics, at the Open University, said: “There’s nothing in the death registration data that proves for certain that the differences in trends between older and younger people are caused by the vaccination, but vaccination must surely be playing a very major role.

“I’m not complacent and we must still be careful, now that restrictions on what we can do are being lifted. But the news so far is good.”

More than 32 million people have now had a vaccine in the UK, with the Government announcing on Monday that the target of offering a jab to all those over 50, care home residents, those who are classed as vulnerable and those who work in health or social care had been reached.

However, a new analysis based on the fact that NHS England has said 19 out of 20 of those most at risk have had the jab suggests that 1.3 million vulnerable people have not yet taken up the offer of a vaccine.

It is believed the Prime Minister's cautious message is being deliberately stressed now so that people will not be overly alarmed if Covid cases numbers begin to rise again throughout April.

Mr Johnson has said since first announcing his reopening roadmap back in February that Covid cases would rise as restrictions eased. Downing Street believes the correct balance has been struck between limiting virus spread and helping businesses.

A well-placed senior government source downplayed any quickening of the reopening roadmap for England, stressing the current "earliest date" targets remained.

The Department of Health and Social Care has been approached for comment.

 

[Liamo]

Absolute fecking madness isn’t it - 7.8 billion people on the planet an only a tiny fraction of them have actually had Covid. We’ve shut down most of the world for over a year for something that kills about 0.2% of the people who get it - bonkers.

That's not so. In the US (which actually has one of the lower case fatality rates), it's almost 2%. As mentioned in a Washington Post article today:

Since the pandemic emerged, more than 561,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. That’s about 1.8 percent of the 31.2 million people who have contracted it.

In other countries the CFR is much higher. See the figures below from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Yemen may be a bit of a statistical anomaly because of the small number of reported cases but Mexico for instance, has a case fatality rate of over 9%.

 

[Liamo]

Spanish Flu never had a vaccine developed for it and it died out after two years.

It didn't die out, just subsided for a while. It was caused by the H1N1 strain of influenza which is still around today, and was responsible for (among others) the Russian Flu pandemic of 1977 and the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009.

The seasonal flu vaccines for at least the last five years (and probably more, I just don't have the data to hand) have always included H1N1 because it's still prevalent.

 

[MolteniArcore]

Excess deaths would be the judge of how many died due to Covid - this was stated right at the start of the pandemic by the PM himself. I'm not sure why people are dragging the 'covid on the death cert argument' back up.

Either way a staggering amount of excess deaths was recorded in 2020 - I'm not sure why certain posters celebrate that covid didn't kill some of them. A dead person is a dead person.

 

[bear66]

Excess deaths would be the judge of how many died due to Covid - this was stated right at the start of the pandemic by the PM himself. I'm not sure why people are dragging the 'covid on the death cert argument' back up.

Either way a staggering amount of excess deaths was recorded in 2020 - I'm not sure why certain posters celebrate that covid didn't kill some of them. A dead person is a dead person.

It's not a statistic that the PM has any say over. Our death registration system is the official and only way of recording deaths. There were a lot of excess deaths at the start of the epidemic which were not recorded on death certificates as Covid and are not stated as Covid deaths by the ONS.

 

[Andy_W]

Excess deaths would be the judge of how many died due to Covid - this was stated right at the start of the pandemic by the PM himself. I'm not sure why people are dragging the 'covid on the death cert argument' back up.

Either way a staggering amount of excess deaths was recorded in 2020 - I'm not sure why certain posters celebrate that covid didn't kill some of them. A dead person is a dead person.

Some keep saying that there is no flu either, which is fine (as it is low), but if they're saying that they have to accept that covid has replaced that, and then made it even worse, bringing a massive excess unlike we've recently seen (twice, in the space of 9 months). They bang not that people are/ were missing treatments, yet won't acknowledge it's because loads of resources, funding and staff were being diverted to tackling the more imminent threat (covid). Adding more covid would not make those "missed treatments" less numerous, it would have forced it to be even worse. These treatments are starting to resume now, the covid wards closing and resources being moved back to less priority threats.

People complained that lockdowns and measures don't work, then whinged about the lockdowns when the cases get miraculously low (not on their own, by lockdown) saying we should be opening up, and then complain again when we have to lock down again as cases have gone up again (not on their own, because lockdown was lifted). People were claiming we had herd immunity early last summer, and making the same claims in Autumn, both disputed at the time and both proven to not have herd immunity due to the waves that came after and return into excess.

People complain about mental health, yet won't acknowledge the mental health of those that died, the family of those that died, those living in fear of catching it and those that have had long covid, and are unsure if it will ever clear up.

Too many just can't see the bigger picture, that more covid will work out worse for everyone, eventually.

The situation is still quite crap at the minute, but we really are getting there and seemingly quite close to a 95% return to normal, the vaccine will bail us out, science is always our best chance.
Support for those, and those industries that need it most has been inadequate (in a lot of cases it has been terrible), and seemingly people in these badly supported industries are being forced to deny what is covid reality, to basically keep a roof over their heads or their business afloat. I can understand them doing this, but it shouldn't have needed to get to that, and the government is largely responsible for that.