[mrmistoffelees]

Originally Posted by nffc

What he said is right though. Also, I didn't see him dictating anything - just a (correct) suggestion they need to be more effective with their vaccinations.


In any case, a packed bar wherever it is, is going to have potential to cause super spreading events, especially with something as infectious as omicron. But given that the people who had been in the packed bar and had presumably brought covid in had their own close contacts when infected, and could infect others in other places, as well as their households and colleagues - due to the incubation period and presymptomatic phases/milder illness it could have caused a significant outbreak even before this was traced.



Which is where isolation / contact tracing doesn't really work at all as the people wouldn't necessarily know anywhere near all of the people they had been in close contact with and by the time you get symptoms or test positive it's too late to stop it spreading anyway.


The funniest thing I've seen is that some people seem to have the idea they can stop a virus spreading - you can slow it down to buy more time but still need an exit strategy for this.


Even ours aren't really that good now so I'd hate to see what theirs are like.


Though there's an obvious blunting as opposed to them being ineffective, 1 shot was largely enough against original virus and alpha, it was only with delta we needed 2 though this was more down to the transmissibility than the slight escape the variant had. It was only when we got into Omicron that the third shot seemed to be needed... But then if you look at the ONS data, there was still an evident waning of antibody levels after longer than it has been now, so it may be that the 3rd shot was already going to be needed (given that this happened in younger groups too who had already been given mRNA doses).


Even though the vaccines aren't there to prevent people getting the virus totally, I still think even we need ones more specific to omicron, given how much it differs from the original, and that mutations are more likely to make this more so than less.

I'm not going to argue semantics with you. The simple fact is that China is within its rights to react as it sees fit, it doesn't 'need' to do anything.

We might wish or 'need' China to act in a certain way due to our dependencies