From:
slider@anashram.com
A roulette table does not offer bets on NHS blue but, if it did, that's
the colour on which Boris Johnson has placed our chips.
It's an outside bet and, if it comes good, will provide a reasonable
indication that we are over the worst of Sars-Cov-2 and the need for
lockdowns, in this pandemic at least.
But the wheel is still spinning. Indeed, the ball was only really put into
play eight days ago when we all got together for Christmas.
As Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer (and croupier) for
England, put it on Saturday: "Data show one in 25 people in England had
Covid last week, with even higher rates in some areas.
"The wave is rising and hospital admissions are going up. Please protect yourself and those around you."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/frightening-new-covid-data-shows-boris-johnsons-omicron-gamble/
Whether the gamble will pay off is still unknown, but the odds have
lengthened in the past few days, which is why tents are being thrown up in hospital car parks across the country.
The larger ones, known as Little Nightingales or "Boris wards", are where improving but not fully recovered patients will be kept should hospitals
start to overflow. The smaller ones are made by Nutwell Logistics and
other purveyors of "soft-shell body storage solutions".
Ahead of Christmas, there were reasons to be cheerful. South Africa's
hospitals had not been overwhelmed, case growth was slowing and doctors
were reporting a milder illness.
Government scientists cautioned that Africa was not England, and that
festive mixing could not be later undone, but the odds seemed pretty even
when the Cabinet met on the afternoon of Dec 20 to spin the wheel.
Today, alas, things are not looking as good. The logarithmic charts of
Prof Oliver Johnson, the Bristol mathematician, show that hospital
admissions are rising exponentially.
There were 2,370 admissions in England on Friday – up 69 per cent on the
week – and the surge is now impacting not just London and the young but
all areas of the country and all age groups.
In the North East and Yorkshire NHS region, admissions have more than
doubled in a week, up 117 per cent.
There is also nothing yet in the UK data yet to suggest that hospital
stays are any shorter, and Covid occupancy of ICU beds has once again
started to creep up. It climbed seven per cent in England on the week,
with growth focused on London and the East.
But if there is a storm to come, it has yet to make itself felt.
Front-line doctors to whom The Telegraph talked last week said they were
seeing a "milder illness" and that, while things were busy, there was no
crisis yet.
Dr Andrew Goddard, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, said
staff absence was his biggest concern.
"It's workforce, workforce, workforce," he said. "I think omicron is
hopefully going to be a relatively short sharp shock… Provided the number
of hospital admissions as omicron hits the over-65s isn't too bad, I don't think there's going to be as much of an impact on the services as a year
ago."
He added, however, that if the tents were needed it would signal an
"emergency in extremis".
Two other new findings will be worrying ministers as the roulette ball completes its final few loops of the wheel. Late on New Year's Eve, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) released a report which showed that vaccine efficacy against hospitalisation was not as good as initially hoped.
Booster jabs work well for 10 weeks before starting to wane, but two doses
of vaccine were estimated to have an efficacy of just 52 per cent after
six months.
"These estimates suggest that vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic
disease with the omicron variant is significantly lower than compared to
the delta variant and wanes rapidly," said the report.
The UKHSA also found the virus itself may not be as mild as it was in
South Africa, where night curfews and other restrictions to contain
infections have now been lifted.
An updated analysis of over a million cases by the Biostatistics Unit of
the University of Cambridge suggested the risk of hospital admission with omicron was approximately a third of that for delta in the UK, falling to
about half if "emergency care" was included.
### - so it really WAS a gamble eh boris?? (i gots that right then you
total shit!)
a gamble with people's LIVES & livelihoods!?
a gamble you appear to have now disastrously lost UNLESS it turns-out that omicron is sooo mild it's actually gonna effectively inoculate the whole
damn planet! (another even bigger gamble!)
you thus put money AND your own job security BEFORE the lives of this
nations citizens???
the next few weeks in the uk could well now become an unprecedented 'disaster-zone' for ALL you ever did to prevent it! in fact you've quite deliberately engineered the opposite!!!
what goes down here NOW in the uk as a DIRECT result of YOUR non-action,
being what will likely also happen everywhere else that didn't lockdown either... (so watch this space america coz you're up next!)
imho that fat-fuck should be dragged through the streets and pelted with
rotten fruit!
booo! booo! hiss! :D
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)