ealing_ayatollah wrote:Bluebina wrote:
The NHS is not under strain yet due to the fact that so many people are vaccinated? If the people who don't want people to have vaccines had their way and the uptake was low the NHS would be overrun, and we would presently be in lockdown?
The reason lots of vaccinated people are in hospital is because virtually everyone who is close to death, or extremely old are vaccinated so that's the main reason the figures are skewed, proportionately in younger fitter people there are much more unvaccinated per 100,000 than vaccinated in hospitals and ICU.
(dropped the full quote just because it makes it easier to read the thread)
I'd argue the NHS
is under strain and has been under strain long before COVID (regular winter operations of 92% capacity being a pre-pandemic standard) - this is due to decades of mismanagement by both political parties. COVID hasn't changed that.
However, three stats in that previous post that I think are worth reiterating are:
- 17% of all hospital admissions in Nov 2020 were COVID related - including suspected and confirmed
- A&E admissions in Wales during that period were down 1,000 a day in that period
- By the time the Nightingale hospitals were closed they had seen just 304 patients.
November 2020 was when Alpha had been detected and was becoming the dominant strain. Remember Alpha was a strain more virulent than Delta which replaced it (which in turn is set to be replaced by the less virulent strain Omicron.)
All of these statistics are pre-vaccine. However, as this thread can be a testament to, statistics are often used like drunks use lamp posts, more for support than illumination.
But what we can unequivocally state that is beyond refute is:
November 2020, with a significantly more virulent strain, and no vaccine
- the very uppermost percentage of COVID related hospitalisations was 17%
Now let us consider that in addition to over half a billion pounds being wasted on Nightingale hospitals that were essentially never used we also see know that:
- bed capacity in the NHS was deliberately reduced due to COVID policy during the period (1)
- but even with that reduction as per NHS statement "even in the winter wave – which saw more than 100,000 patients with the virus admitted in a single month – there were beds available across the country."(2)
And just to hammer the point home again
this was all before the vaccine.
I would therefore say that it is a reasonable assertion that the impact of COVID at the peak of the Alpha variant on the population in and of itself didn't put any significant additional strain on the NHS.
Now a year later, whether we want to celebrate the overwhelming success of the vaccine for further reducing hospitalisations, whether we want to just believe that it is simply down to the virus mutating to less virulent dominant strains, or whether we want to believe it is a mix of the two is irrelevant - hospitalisations are down year on year and half the level of demand of the previous year
when the NHS still had beds available nationwide.
By that very simple logic, it is simply no longer possible to put forward the argument of protecting the NHS as a reason for
mandatory or coerced vaccination and this has always been my absolute position that we need to push back against.
If people want to take a vaccine under their own free will, it is their responsibility to assess the pros and cons and make a decision accordingly. When governments start mandating vaccination or coercing a population into vaccination with impartial data and ill-thought-out policy it is another matter entirely. It then becomes in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights (articles 8 and 9 specifically) and shouldn't be taken lightly. (3)
Sources:
And here -
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... ds-answersThen goes on to say thank God for the vaccines !
Why is Delta more infectious and deadly? New research holds answers.
Studies show that Delta replicates more quickly and generates more virus particles than other variants, but vaccines still protect against serious infections.
BYSANJAY MISHRA
PUBLISHED AUGUST 6, 2021
• 13 MIN READ
As the United States battles a fourth surge of COVID-19, scientists are learning much about the Delta variant that wasn’t known when it was first reported in India in March: it is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses known, it causes more severe COVID-19 than other variants, and it is more likely to evade antibodies.
Evidence of all these traits is clear. The Delta variant has caused a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the U.S. and the rest of the world. Driven by relaxed social distancing and mask guidelines, poor vaccine uptake in parts of the U.S., and lack of availability elsewhere, Delta has rapidly become the dominant variant in the U.S., causing more than 93 percent of new infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has also spread to more than 135 countries, according to the World Health Organization.
The secret to Delta’s success is the ease with which it spreads. The CDC estimates that Delta can be as infectious as chicken pox and is only slightly less contagious than measles, which is considered one of the most transmissible viruses. Now the Delta variant is spreading like wildfire through the South, particularly in Louisiana, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country; only 37 percent of the population is fully vaccinated compared to 50 percent nationally. In the U.S., daily cases are now averaging 100,000, a nine-fold jump from mid-June.
“It's surprising the extent of how infectious this particular variant is, and how well it can then replicate in the upper respiratory tract. Just the increased infectivity of this Delta variant has sort of increased our concern relative to what was there for the Alpha variant, which was increased relative to the original virus,” says Mehul Suthar, a virologist at Emory University.
Because the Delta variant is so much more contagious than previous variants, CDC issued new guidelines on July 27, 2021, which recommend that even after vaccination, people should “wear a mask indoors in public if you are in an area of substantial or high transmission.”
A vastly more transmissible virus
To track how easily an infectious disease such as COVID-19 spreads, epidemiologists use a metric called the basic reproductive number or R0 (pronounced “R naught”). R0 is the average number of susceptible people that each infected person is expected to infect. It is difficult to be certain about the R0 for ancient pandemics, but for the 1918 influenza pandemic, the average infected person is thought to have passed the disease to between two and three people, giving it an R0 of between 2.0 and 3.0. The first SARS coronavirus epidemic of 2002, has an R0 of three; for the second coronavirus epidemic—Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) first identified in 2012—R0 was between 0.69 to 1.3.
Now the CDC estimates that people infected with Delta pass the virus to between five and 9.5 people. This is higher than the original virus identified in Wuhan, China, which had an R0 between 2.3 and 2.7, and the Alpha variant which had an R0 between four and five. Delta can be as infectious as chicken pox, which has an R0 between 9 and 10.
If R0 is larger than one, the number of infected people will keep growing exponentially until all susceptible people have either died or recovered and herd immunity is reached. If R0 is less than one the outbreak will likely fizzle out on its own.
For the original SARS-CoV-2, herd immunity could be reached when around 67 percent of the population was immune—either through natural infection or vaccination. “For Delta, those thresholds we estimate being well over 80 percent, maybe approaching 90 percent,” Ricardo Franco, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham said at a press briefing organized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
A higher viral load
Delta is not only more transmissible than previous SARS-CoV-2 variants, it can also cause more severe disease. People infected with the Delta variant harbor about 1,000 times the number of viral particles (which experts call the “viral load”) in their nasal swab compared to those infected with another strain, “which is an enormous increase,” says Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who was not involved in this study.
One reason for this is that the Delta variant replicates more quickly in the nose. A study, not yet peer reviewed has shown that the Delta variant took an average of four days to reach detectable levels after exposure to a sick person, compared to about six days for the original Wuhan virus.
Even after vaccination, Delta infections produced a 10-fold higher viral load than non-Delta infections. In fact several recent studies, none peer reviewed yet, show that vaccinated people carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated. “We are seeing infections and seeing the large number of people being infected by a single case, which is quite worrying. It means that the virus is highly transmissible and is able to avoid … vaccine-induced immunity,” said Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, who led the study that is not yet peer reviewed.
Delta is also better at destroying cells because of a mutation at position 681 of its spike protein, which is fast becoming common in other variants around the globe and is thought to be an evolutionary game changer. This P681R mutation makes it easier for Delta and the related Kappa variants to invade the host cell by fusing infected cells into structures called syncytium, which is a way of accelerating infection. Syncytia are also formed by other viruses such as HIV. “We found in cell culture experiments that Delta variant shows bigger syncytia when compared to SARS-CoV-2,” explained Kei Sato, a virologist at The University of Tokyo, Japan.
The Delta variant has also undergone multiple mutations in its spike protein that seem to improve the virus’s ability to bind to the ACE2 receptor and evade the immune response.
Breakthrough infections and boosters
The good news is that a complete dose of the currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines remains effective. “All the vaccines work pretty well," said Jeff Kwong, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. "And the vaccines were more protective against the severe outcomes compared to symptomatic infection,” Kwong has shown in a study, not yet peer reviewed, the effectiveness of Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines against symptomatic infection, hospitalization, or death between December 2020 and May 2021.