Re: Coronavirus
 

Re: Coronavirus
 

I knew he was a quack! He was quite assertive in his claims of vaccine embolism effecting his colleagues in hospitals though

Re: Coronavirus
 

Because if it’s positive, you have to isolate.

You don’t do that for flu, so why for omicron, which is similar?

Re: Coronavirus
 

Parroting the Telegraph line, I see…

Re: Coronavirus
 

True though!

Re: Coronavirus
 

It's certainly an argument worth making.


Isolation makes sense, where the risks of having the person out to others are obvious.



Less so when the person being infectious is less of a risk to others they may infect.


So this can go several ways. And it all depends on the exact situation.


If you have something like noro, which usually goes away after a day or so, after making your room look like a scene from Bridesmaids, and in most cases doesn't really make any lasting effects on people, the unpleasantness of the illness is a bit meh but the vast majority will recover perfectly fine, though you'd still be a bit of a dick to infect others which is why a lot of schools and workplaces do prefer 48 hours after last puke or diarrhoea before allowing people back - which is a form of isolation isn't it?


Colds, yeah, they're mild and unpleasant but people don't usually think about stopping when they do get one, maybe they should. Maybe we shouldn't be so phobic of getting mild illnesses, this has only recently become a thing (aside from practising good hand hygiene etc).



Flu kind of forces it because - aside from the serious infections still progressing to more severe outcomes - most people recover but whilst ill don't feel up to doing much. But again the virus itself is forcing the isolation isn't it?


So where did covid sit at various points in the pandemic?


Well, at the start it was a virus we knew very little of besides a fair amount of short term effects, medium and long term effects were not known, it hadn't been around enough, more crucially, we had no idea how to treat it, and nothing to prevent it. We knew it could put people in hospital, we knew it could cause deaths, so isolation to prevent others getting infection was a very sensible policy.


Where were we with vaccination? Well, they always have and still do prevent severe outcomes, and have an effect if not complete on infection and transmission: this effect has waned with various variants with Delta (where you'd need a booster to nigh-on prevent it) and Omicron (where the protection usually causes some illness once infected). Isolation in a vaccinated population makes significantly less sense when the progression to more severe outcomes is lessened.


And Omicron? So yeah, we know by now it's very infectious, we know it can partially sidestep immunity from infection or vaccination, we also know that especially in these situations, the illness which does arise may well be unpleasant but is milder, and NPIs make less effect because of the transmissibility gains. So, isolation is starting to make less sense.


All of this is making covid progress into a more cold/flu like illness, which of course doesn't have mandatory isolation. If the response is proportionate, then something's not consistent there.



FWIW, I do think people should consider - or limit - leaving home if they have any signs of infectious disease, and though the effect is partial at best, should consider a face covering to try and reduce the amount of virus they emit. But, then, if the virus isn't going to cause more than an illness for 2-3 days, how much benefit does this have?

It's a classic case of risk balancing, there's answers, but not a single correct one which suits every situation.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Can't believe you're still spouting that long debunked comparison.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Is it?

Re: Coronavirus
 

Little Jimmy's at it again.

Scottish National Party ministers plan to spend £300,000 chopping the bottoms off hundreds of classroom doors to try and stop the spread of Covid in schools.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...box=1643821386 (doesn't appear to be paywalled, at least not for me).

Re: Coronavirus
 

It's a skiver's charter, no one should need to isolate for a cold.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Maybe becasue it isnt ' long debunked'.
The symptoms of omicron are similar to flu, making it harder to tell the difference (feel free to use google).

---------- Post added at 01:47 ---------- Previous post was at 01:44 ----------

Its paywalled here.

As i cant read it, it makes no sense, how is it supposed to stop the spread :confused:

Re: Coronavirus
 

It would be cheaper and less hassle if they just left it ever so slightly ajar. :D

Re: Coronavirus
 

New study by John Hopkins university claims "Lockdowns" caused more harm than good and only prevented 0.2% deaths.

https://www.wcjb.com/2022/02/03/econ...hopkins-study/

the actual study paper is here.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/fi...-Mortality.pdf

So it was all worth it then.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Well that's a good question - is there an argument for isolating for flu? There is a strong culture of work presenteeism in this country that you don't see in other countries which certainly has the potential for frankly unnecessary spread of a disease which does kill.

Here is a comparison between COVID and inflenza from the BMJ

How many lives being saved is the limit to justify isolation programmes? 30,000 lives being lost in a bad flu year seems a hell of a lot. The Infection Fatality Rate for Omicron seems to be a bit up in the air at the moment with things slowly becoming clearer. What we have seems to be good news. I do feel a conversation needs to be had on what we as a society are willing to accept as an acceptable number of deaths.

Re: Coronavirus
 

Don't forget that if you've lost someone that's one too many regardless of the stats.


Covid is/was a novel virus. It was bound to cause problems both medically and epidemiologically as we had no natural immunity either as individuals or as a society.


The far east was badly hit by the 18/19/20 flu epidemic hence the tendency there to mask up in flu season. Was that due to it being bad flu or that their population was more susceptible? Maybe both, that flu killed a lot of people worldwide.


The problem is that we can't go back and try again with different approaches much though a number of "residents" of Westminster may wish they could. The approach taken was likely the sensible one given what was known at the time and the effect it did have on health services.


Going forward is going to be interesting. How will the next variant present? How do we deal with that? Remember the concern about household pets being vectors? Dogs are easy but cats? What would happen if cats were shown to be an unaffected vector? Vaccinate all the cats? Cat masks? Isolate your moggie? What if some "cute" wild critter was a vector? Imagine the outcry if need to cull off hedgehogs/voles/otters?