UKC

Pubs and restaurants to close, people asked not to travel to Aberdeen, locals not allowed in each others' houses.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53666665

The current outbreak appears to have been spread in a pub, and grown from there.

I'm not convinced that track and trace is working quickly enough yet; this is obviously a bit of a worry with the schools due to reopen.

Unitil testing is faster I can't see it working.

We just had a scare with a guy who I was away with all weekend, his wife had symptoms. We put our life on hold for 24 hours and the result was negative. We'd only shared cars for a short journey with masks on and otherwise had been hiking so it was pretty low risk but still.

If it was 1 to 2 days more people just cant afford to not go to school and not send kids to school etc. We were lucky in that I teach and my wife is on maternity leave.

Some places take names, mobile number and email. Others just have a URL (largely ignored?) on the menu for supplying contact details.

This is exactly why the Mrs and myself have not been in a pub or restaurant since February and have no plans to. 

I'm not being a Guinea pig for the government's let's see how much we can unlock before things break again plan. 

Why are you out and about working then? You shouldn't be leaving your house in that case.
OK for you to carry on earning a living, but not pub landlords.

Because he fixes shit farms for a living?

Pub closes, not really a big deal. WWTW stops working, everyone downstream wants it fixed yesterday

Very poor argument, the risk/reward of the workplace vs risk/reward of the boozer. 

"OK for you to carry on earning a living but not the pox ridden whore" 

I also have no intention of being in indoor spaces unnecessarily for the foreseeable, certainly won't be going to pubs and restaurants. I'm doing this precisely because I have to keep working!! Why do extra risky things? I can half my risk of spreading it if I was to contract it by halving the places I go to! 

Anyone here in Aberdeen?

My mate is there and said a lot of people were carrying on like the virus had gone away. 

Seems pub crawls may have helped spread it.

My bit of Manchester has a lot of people who aren't following the increased restrictions; there are just so many people who are prepared to just stretch things; "yes I know but...". Probably because they aren't seeing people dying in front of them (yet) and they don't appreciate that what they're doing is drawing it all out.

Doesn't directly affect me because all in our house have had Covid, but it does mean it'll be longer before my parents can escape from their flat since being in their 90's they're in a rather high risk group.

My parents are about 20 miles outside the city.

They had also heard the pub crawl and supposedly they've named the pubs and closed them down.

I don't understand how people can seriously be in bars at this time. It's just stupidity. 

I work a stones throw from the pub at the centre of the outbreak and pre covid we had our lunch there every Friday. They shut the doors before they were told to as did other places. The list of pubs circulating in the press are all over Aberdeen and on the outskirts. That's not to say there wasn't any pub crawls going on but essentially that is what people do on a night out. Not saying it's right. Friends are telling me the test centre has been extremely busy.

Yeah I understand, tbh if I was single and in my 20's etc I'm not sure how safe I'd be. 'd hope to be better but not convinced..

I remember H1N1 being around when I was in the US and I didn't change my behavior, I was still going to bars.

But this is getting much more press and has killed 10 times that amount already.

They think Covid immunity may not last very long. Antibodies fade quickly (although that does not definitely mean you have no immunity if I have understood correctly). At this stage of our understanding of the disease, I don't think people can assume they won't get it again

I'm assuming we've got some immunity that will be decreasing over time.

But until properly evidenced accounts of people getting covid twice start to emerge, I think we're fairly safe to assume we have some immunity.

Of course we are risking not being the first to get it twice, but I think the odds on that are pretty low 😁

One reason why if you have been infected and have antibodies you should be out socialising, continual reinfection is key to maintaining antibody levels. There are many reports about how lockdown has actually increased our vulnerability to other viral infections due to lack of transmission.

Also lack of antibodies doesn't necessarily mean lack of immunity, the antibodies will fade but the body has other mechanisms for remembering how to tackle disease.

I think this is dangerously wrong. 

Please provide them

I think they are kidding themselves about opening schools.

If you get an outbreak with 54 new cases in a day as a result of a pub crawl and need to shut a city then sending tens of thousands of kids back to school is not going to work.   

I just got a letter from my daughter's school and the plan is that everybody goes back as usual and face masks are not compulsory but they'll have provision for washing hands and more ventilation.    The building is the same size as it was before, if they put the same number of people in it they are not going to be able to keep them 2m apart.   Especially after summer holidays when people have been travelling and increasing their risk opening schools completely seems like a recipe for a spike in infection and rapid shut down.

It looks like they're making up the rules to accommodate what they want to do rather than starting from what is known about virus transmission and working back to see what is safe.

Absolute quakery!!!

So you go out and get it again and pass it on to another young person who then goes to see their gran at the weekend. Penny dropped yet?

Who's 'they' - the SNP government?

I certainly hope not. Kids deperately need to get back to proper education and socialising, and working parents and their employers desperately need either school or childcare to open.

Maybe. But it has certainly been reported that children appear less likely to both catch and spread the disease. And I don't think you can really compare schools, where some degree of discipline is possible, to pubs. Times may have changed, but in my day we hardly ever got drunk at school, and school-crawls were restricted to the occasional lunchtime brawl with St. Modan's, which I believe has relocated now anyway.

At least the schools going back next week in Scotland can be a useful test for the rest of the UK, where it's a couple of weeks later...

Just do what the local High school near me has done., pupils are too wear face masks when in the school buildings. Sounds sensible to me and is a local decision, which is how it should be, based on school layout etc.

I’ve heard people say that BJ not doing his daily depressing afternoon updates may have contributed to the ‘its all gone away’ feeling in England. 

There still seems to be very limited evidence on whether kids spread or not. This article has a few case studies from around the world. The general impression I get from this is primary is far less risky than secondary, background infections need to be low and there needs to be controls in place like smaller class sizes, masks etc.

At this stage though, with much of the rest of the chat about this virus, solid evidence just isn't there yet

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/health/coronavirus-schools-reopen.html

Funny, lack of evidence would make me take the complete opposite approach and assume I could get it again until proven otherwise! 

So only those who have had it should socialise? You do realise that even though most younger people survive it, there are many many previously healthy people who are now barely functional months after "recovering" from it?

No, but we don't yet know if that function is applicable to this virus yet. Until further studies confirm it, we should be cautious.

The Greater Manchester thing is, in some ways, bonkers.  Thursdays stats: 38 new cases Oldham, 1 new case Wigan and Wigan is way bigger than Oldham. In Liverpool they noticed younger people boozing etc was a problem so they brought in extra measures in one council ward - makes sense. The government shud enforce stricter measures in key areas rather than broad brush. 

Yeah, I was going to say it seems to have been ok-ish in Sweden, but they do tend to have smaller classes.

Neither of our schools are requiring mask use (leaving it to pupil discretion). Our after school care, by contrast, are requiring kids to wear masks at all times.

I could only find this (not exhaustive search, there may be more);

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8466931/Lockdown-leave-people-vuln...

The DM report based on a Telegraph article by Sunetra Gupta...........which contains many if's buts and mights. So no, not really all that credible.

She does however make an excellent point towards the end of the article by pointing out that the crisis was not helped by the cutting of hospital beds over the last 10 years meaning the NHS was more prone to being overwhelmed than it should be, so we failed to protect the most vulnerable (care home residents, elderly and frail for the most part), which i was quite surprised to see so openly in a DT / DM article.......

I don't see us getting back to socialising without immediately kicking it off again until we either get a vaccine or very near to zero cases.   I think we were getting towards near zero cases even in Scotland but now it is getting slowly worse rather than better because people have lost discipline.  

Yes, pubs are worse than schools because of the alcohol.  But the number of people involved is massively higher in schools than pubs.  If you've got 1,500 pupils in a secondary school and you are going to shut it if one of them gets Covid you'll be shutting it all the time unless it is pretty much suppressed.

Yeah. I'm kind of thinking I don't want to be part of that experiment and maybe sitting out the first couple of weeks to see if the sh*t hits the fan would be a plan.

You sound like Boris Johnson: it's all our own irresponsible fault; nothing to do with the Government at all.

People have generally kept good discipline throughout all this, but St Nicola authorized the opening of pubs in Scotland and, if you allow people to go, they will.

I’d be absolutely certain from my own professional experience that kids do spread it, although my understanding from the research is that they don’t spread it as much as adults. 
 

I’ve dealt with a case where an asymptomatic child tested as part of a school outbreak infected his mum and dad, who tested positive 5 days later than him. 

Yep, visit your loved ones in the pub but not in their garden.

The "not in homes or gardens" restriction has certainly led to some people thinking this was targeted to lessen any "problems" that might occur with people gathering for Eid.

No idea whether that's true or not.

My thinking is that properly evidenced re-infection will be a BIG, BIG news story that I'm quite likely to hear about. I also don't believe there's been any significant papers/studies etc stating that re-infection has occurred - again I think it would make it into the general news.

If 20+ million people have had Covid, then my chance of being #1 is pretty slim.

Having said all that, we are still being careful and conscientious; but maybe not quite as much as if we hadn't had Covid.

Edit: I wish my dislikers to this and previous similar posts on the subject would comment rather than disliking - I'm a bit bemused about whether they're disagreeing with my thinking or whether they think I'm being an a**e.

I’m 100% convinced  Eid played a key part for the areas of high Muslim population*, and Nicola Sturgeon eluded to this in one of her press conferences (where she acknowledged families from South Side Glasgow meeting up with people from NW Eng), Before the restrictions in the north west, there was pretty much a direct correlation with % South Asian people living in a community and increase infection. Wigan has lowest % BME community and lowest Covid, reverse appears true. Just been googling and there has been an increase in Islamophobia.  The health authorities have access to all demographic and geographic data now (they didn’t until recently) and will be correctly very concerned about an increase in death rate given South Asian people appear to have higher death rate with Covid. The issue of over crowded, multi generational households and examples of simply ignoring  the guidelines have made this problem worse.

 
* in other parts of Grter Manc, folk out boozing and not following the regs and a recent outbreak in postal sorting office.

You might be right about track and trace.

https://twitter.com/ZambeziOutpost/status/1291075078365409282?s=19

Doesn't seem like it's functioning.

I'm baffled as to why we haven't been doing track and trace since this all started.

So far of four pubs/restaurants we've been to only one asked for contact details. Unless they can get my details from my card payment they don't who I am or how to contact me.

We were doing it with the earliest cases but it was abandoned very quickly when it exceeded the central capability, something like five cases a week.  [1]. It almost makes the decision to centralise lots of highly effective, locally trained and aware public health observatories into PHE look like a dogma driven, catastrophic mistake.  

Then the Deputy CMO said testing wasn't appropriate and that the WHO's recommendation of testing was really only meant for poor countries. [2].  I nearly choked on that at the time and it's still nonsensical to me months later. 

Then apparently it was decided to abandon it as we'd have too many cases to trace [3].  One might have hoped people would be thinking about the exit strategy from lockdown once the insane case number quickly came under control.  Exit strategies seems to be a foreign concept don't they?

Then of course there was the bizarre decision to forsake all the work given away for free by Apple and Google and to go with a bespoke App solution run out of the Cummings special "NHSX".  That duck is dead but presumably still paid for.   Now a bunch of papers are reporting hints that the second go at a contact tracing app is going to be watered down [4] 

The weekly surveillance report from PHE and the weekly Infection Survey from PHE both land tomorrow.  I think they're both going to show that R is greater than 1 beyond any reasonable doubt, and (in the breakdown by setting in the PHE report) that the gains from closing schools (for the summer hols) have more than been wiped out.  Today we had the highest detected case count in I think 41 days, and it's the second time this week we've had a standout high number.  Last week's ONS update strongly suggests this is a genuine rise and not (just) a result of better test/trace.

I think re-opening the pubs was a big mistake and is likely going to get reversed after tomorrow's reports are out or those of the week after.  A bridge too far. 

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/30/revealed-test-trace-abandoned-s...

[2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/unflappable-confidence-of-uk-s-hea...

[3] https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/coronavirus-uks-testing-chief-say...

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/06/uk-reported-to-be-ditching-coronavirus-co...

To give some balance, outside of localised hot spots cases might not be rising at all in the UK.  Some evidence suggesting Pilar 1 positives are decreasing and increase in Pilar 2 might be due to increased testing and problems with false positive when virus levels are low in the community.

I think in Norway just now they have a policy of only testing known Contacts of positive cases plus people with symptoms as for every 10000 people you test you are likely to pick up 10 false positive, so also think Norway has policy of also retesting positive not linked to particular outbreaks for accuracy.  Would hope this would surely be a priority here. The ONS weekly survey is great, and positives been virus levels stayed stable for around 5 weeks after opening up society, but problem now when cases are shown to be rising is knowing what percentage of these are false positive, in a week if they are only picking up 20 to 30 case in there sampling I would hope that they are retesting each case for accuracy.

Here is a link to Oxford university centre for evidence based medicine for more information https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-cases-in-england-arent-rising-heres-why...

I am not saying that the above is correct but always good to have some balance, will be interesting to see if hospital admission pick up in next week or so which will give us a better indication of what is happening, certainly from Sweden in June I think they seen a rapid increase in case yet deaths still decreased, maybe the virus is less lethal over the summer months, or it has been way more prevalent than first thought, and we are just starting to pick up more asymptomatic cases through increased testing. There is evidence suggesting Leicester lock down was not required and infection levels at outbreaks in North West of England may have peaked before implementation of more restrictions.

Certainly things still look good in Scotland, with government own modeling showing total cases around 300-400 at minute, so I guess we never be in a better position to reopen schools, and we have to at least give it a try.

You could be right.  Indeed as you say the rise in PHE data is in pillar 2; pillar 1 is level or decreasing and deaths are going down.

The ONS data disagrees with your view but only mildly - it’s a seperate random population sample controlled for bias (I know you know but I’m adding this if anyone else is bothering to read my “excessively verbose” posts...).  Last weeks report didn’t have much significance to R>1; that’s why tomorrow’s is so important...  As you say it’s small numbers, but as each week is independently measured, the significance of trends develops each week (if the trend is real).

Another way that cases can increase without deaths is when the centroid of the age distribution decreases; this is apparently happening in the USA I think as younger people go out more and elderly don’t.  This would also correspond to falling Pilar 1 and rising Pilar 2 numbers.

I very much hope your view is correct.

What’s the deal with CEBM? Why isn’t it on a .ox.ac.uk URL?   I was rather disappointed with the page you linked - their first plot has data with a clear 7-ish-day periodicity (due to weekend and bank holiday artefacts in data reporting I presume) and then does a linear fit to a window that isn’t an integer multiple of 7 days in size; this locks in a bias due to aliasing of the periodicity and not the data.  Likewise the second figure.  Then they go on to draw conclusions about linearity vs exponential behaviour without any basis - no consideration of the uncertainties on the data as a measure of the population; no residual analysis, no acknowledgment that an exponential over a sufficiently small time scale and with added noise is not distinguishable from a linear form (perhaps they have a grudge against Brook Taylor with him being from Cambridge).  Combined with an opening paragraph talking about government limiting freedom of millions of people it starts to smell distinctly biased and propaganda driven.  Being from Oxford is no badge of excellence as Gupta has shown us, with some of their outputs being trivially demolishes with basic maths.

Quite.

In Germany I think people fill in forms, as Germans would, in those sorts of circumstandes. In the Far East they are tracking bank cards.

I realise this is an infringement of personal liberty but for the duration of the pandemic I'd be prepared to give up some privacy for the greater good.

Well yes.

At the same time we hear reports of tracers sitting at home idle. In Scotland we have only been using 20 - 25% of our test capacity even though 40% of care home staff have never ever been tested. We seem to have resources that aren't be used and it baffles and frustrates me that they aren't. Fine tracing may well have been overwhelmed for some weeks but surely if working flat out tracers were able to get X number of people to self isolate every day that would have been worth it, especially if they're being paid anyway. Even if we can't test evry care home resident and worker regularly surely some testing would have been of benefit? I just don't get it.

No, nor do I.  To my understanding, any and all spare testing capacity should be used to round-robin test people at high risk of transmitting the virus such as healthcare and care-home workers.   Given what’s known about transmission by symptom free individuals this would make a beneficial difference.

I’m clearly missing something.

Thankfully the CEBM team is total separate from Gupta so no way tainted in that respect, but true academic excellence is no proof of credibility.  the team seem to publish lots of good data on covid, and everything seems very balanced only using the actual evidence to inform there opinion, it was also the team that first highlighted than no one could ever recover from covid in England, but sadly PHE still seem to have not updated there recording process.  Though from following them a lot I do think there lead scientist is a little sceptical on effectiveness of lockdown though he will never outright state this in official documents or TV interviews etc.

Will be interesting to see the ONS data tomorrow, right from the start the pilot study has gave a good early indication on how the virus is progressing, in recent weeks then have aligned close with the Zoe/king college survey, just notice there website has been updated showing daily infections are down, but totally number of infectious people around the same, will wait and see if ONS matches this tomorrow.

Interesting thing is we have reportedly been seeing around 2000 daily Infections for last 5 to 6 weeks though we have only been picking up under half of them with track and trace etc, would be progress if we started picking up more of these infections without the overall picture worsening.

Personal I think we are probably starting to see a small increase in number of daily infection, other European countries seems to have seen a larger upsurge during July but no corresponding increase in deaths so hopefully we would see a similar pattern here.

My main concern is in Scotland ispis get too negative looking at the situation in Aberdeen, seems to me to be a problem specifically with young people drinking in over crowded bars, also seems to be a problem in Glasgow just now, surely the problem can be managed by limiting this sort of practice, but wouldn't use it personally as proof we can't continue in good position we are in just now in Scotland for opening schools next week.

Thanks for the reply.  

Not much to add except I also thought there was some lockdown skepticism there, and my position remains - as ever - that now is the time to err on the side of caution to afford us the space to learn the answers, not to lean into skepticism bourne from a lack of answers and so risk screwing the pooch.  Some mistakes can’t ever be reversed.

I now know I’m not the only person from this parish who is going to be refreshing the ONS page regularly tomorrow...

We are tested weekly, so I presumed all care workers were by now. Is that not the case? Thursday is always testing day for us. Residents aren't on a regular schedule, but as they can only get it if we bring it in, weekly testing of us should be sufficient.

I don’t know; would be interested to hear from others and I thank you for stating your experience.  It seems from scattered news reports that testing capacity is often not fully used.  There are about 0.9m pillar 2 tests run per week which should be enough to cover all care and healthcare staff regularly; so perhaps I’m drawing some bad conclusions from the press articles - there’s frustratingly little good solid data for armchair experts like me to understand what’s really happening.

On a lighter note, the Janey Godley voiceovers of Nicola are very good.

youtube.com/watch?v=HNvWj9OPA7k&

She's on The Stand, Live on Saturday (8.30pm, online, the host Mark Nelson is very good too).

https://www.thestand.co.uk/saturday-night-live-at-the-stand/

It's taken out a chunk of Aberdeen FC!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/53682640

People are busy and don't like having swabs put up their nose and they aren't getting tested unless they are scared they have it.