Sjoerd

Most people older than 50 have been fully vaccinated. We should be looking at hospitalisations and deaths, not at positive cases. Many positive cases among young people help to create herd immunity!

ryman554

correct. Although it is a lagging indicator by a week or two Unfortunately, the UK (which one might look at as the canary in this coal mine) is seeing an increase in said hospitalizations. I have not looked at cases vs. hospitalizations to see if it's lower than last time ( it should be). And the UK is further along the vaccination curve than Europe. So... Warning signs.

​​​​​​​USA is following the same trajectory as well. We will see.

fransknorge

Answers taken from other thread that applies there.

nk15

We are indeed seem to have increasing trends in Europe. From the worldometer this week's trends, here are the numbers:

Luxemburg +413%
Isle of Man +350%
Finland +92%
Malta +89%
Spain +88%
Greece +82%
Iceland +70%
UK +67%
Denmark +65%
Portugal +57%
and so on...

Europe as a whole is +38%

Silver Fox

"The spread of Delta has led the U.K. government to postpone by a month the ending of Covid restrictions until July 19. But ministers are increasingly confident that the unlocking will take place as planned because vaccinations have broken the lockstep between new cases, later hospitalizations and deaths.Data from Public Health England show that there were 117 deaths among 92,000 Delta cases logged through June 21. Fifty of those—46%—had received two shots of vaccine.

But rather than suggest Delta is displaying a worrying ability to evade the vaccine and cause severe illness, scientists say those figures support the shots’ effectiveness."

.....

"The data show that, overall, the fatality rate for confirmed cases of Covid-19 has been lower than it was with the Alpha variant, which was first spotted in the U.K. late last year and has since spread around the world. Public Health England pegged the fatality rate for Alpha at 1.9%. It estimates the fatality rate for Delta is closer to 0.3%, which scientists say reflects both mass vaccination and improved treatment for Covid-19. And the vaccine also reduces the chances of catching the virus at all."

Some Vaccinated People Are Dying of Covid-19. Here’s Why Scientists Aren’t Surprised.

WilcoRoger

As for Finland, the numbers "shot up" when many busloads of football fan tourist returned from Euro2021 from St Petersburg. Within a week numbers went beck to normal.

YYZ1313

And Iceland only had 5 fully vaccinated tourists test positive without showing symptoms so those percentages don't mean much.

squawk

Yet again, I feel as if people are misrepresenting the arguments for caution - effectively creating 'straw men'. Deaths are not the only metric that we should be concerned about.

Indeed, but this is not news (the evidence has simply grown stronger). I don't think anyone with any expertise is arguing the opposite; indeed many on here including corporate-wage-slave have been pointing this out for some time. We can quibble about "broken" vs "weakened" the link - I would argue the latter, because there very clearly still is a link between cases and deaths. But overall this is excellent news and something we should be very pleased by.

However...

Even if the proportion of infected people needing hospital treatment is very low (e.g. due to Delta being less serious), the absolutely numbers will still be large if the number of people infected is large. And if Delta continues to spread at the rate it has recently - which seems a distinct possibility, if not accelerating as a result of the plans for July 19th - then there will be a lot of people who catch it.

More importantly, we don't have a fully (or even near-fully) vaccinated population: the UK, which is further on in this process than most of Europe, is at not quite 2/3 of adults fully vaccinated (33,614,952) as I write this. The numbers are complex (e.g. 86% of people are partially vaccinated which offers a modicum of protection; but many others will be within 2 weeks of their first or second jab, which means they're less protected).

Either way, we're looking at a considerable number - perhaps 15 million adults - who are not fully vaccinated, plus quite a lot of under-18s who may themselves not be badly affected but will undoubtedly contribute to spreading the virus. Even at a 0.3% fatality rate, that suggests perhaps 45,000 total adult deaths were they all to be infected by Delta (this is a gross, gross oversimplification intended only to get a sense of scale, so don't rely on it for anything other than this).

But the real issue here is hospital capacity. A Delta wave, running unchecked through the unvaccinated/partially vaccinated remaining population, will eventually exceed the capacity of our hospitals to treat them. Even before that, it will constrain the non-Covid services that the NHS is able to offer - meaning more delayed cancer diagnoses and treatment, for example. If this becomes inevitable, then it will lead to more lockdowns down the line.

What I find genuinely baffling about the British government's new found enthusiasm for 'living with' the virus is that they appear to be adopting tactics that will prevent us from doing that for more than perhaps 6-8 weeks. It seems self-defeating.

Ignoring the spiralling infection rate now will simply mean a greater likelihood of an unsustainable number of people requiring hospital treatment later on. A more sensible approach would be to try to keep numbers suppressed until the double vaccination programme more or less at completion - which won't actually be that long now.

I truly hope my pessimism here is unfounded, but it does seem like nothing has been learned by politicians over the last year.

fransknorge

And there are still plenty of other problems:
- Death and hospitalizations: yes the link is weakened but there are still a large part of the European population unvaccinated or with a moderate/small vaccine efficiency due to medical conditions. In Bulgaria the vaccination rate is 14%. In France, 15% of the +65yo are unvaccinated, that means if all unvaccinated were to be infected the potential for 300 000 hospitalizations and 100 000 deaths.
As the link weaken, there are more young people in the hospitals in proportion. Of course absolute number are different. But if the transmission are not curbed then in absolute number this will grow enough to put stress on the hospitals in UK, France, etc ... And the big problem with the young is that they spend more time in the hospitals than the old ones, as they actually fight and usually survive, instead of dying and freeing a bed. That can quickly fill up hospitals which are already nearly full.





2. Long Covid. I think the UK governments knows what they are doing in a way as they have announced the opening of 15 new clinics 100% dedicated for children with long COVID. Around 8% of infected children develop long COVID. There are now around 380 000 people with COVID symptoms for more than one year. This can easily double by letting the transmission. And in countries with lower vaccination rate, this will be even more.

Twitter

13901

Hope you won't mind me fact-checking this one. from .gov.uk's dashboard, number of C-19 hospital cases and patients in mechanical ventilation:



.


Same for Italy but in one chart, again governmental data at national level. Ospedalizzati = hospital cases. Terapia intensiva = ICU.

fransknorge

This is COVID only, a small part of the picture, hospitals now are being filled by the long backlog of surgeries, treatments, etc ... delayed in the past months. They take beds and if you add some more COVID hospitalizations to the level of 10% of the wave of last winter this will be a problem again. And do not forget the flu this winter.
And also I was speaking Europe as a whole, not just UK. The picture is different there. The backlog problem is the same there but vaccination rates lower, specially among fragile populations.

Sjoerd

Cite?

For instance here in the Netherlands almost everyone >50 AND everyone vulnerable is now fully vaccinated. Most people between 30 and 50 have had one shot and they are currently busy with the 16-30 group.

fransknorge

This is variable per country. In France the +65 yo are 75% vaccinated. In Netherlands this is around 75-85% so higher but still some left. 15% left is a lot of susceptible people to get infected. Spain only 50% for the age range 60-69 yo (but higher for older).
https://www.rivm.nl/en/covid-19-vacc...tion-programme
https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/
https://www.spainenglish.com/2021/07...ions-in-spain/

Sjoerd

Thanks.

The Dutch example will be interesting to watch in the next few weeks: we have almost fully opened up on June 26 - restaurants, nightclubs all open, no more masks in shops (only public transport still requires a mask), lots of people going back into the office, loads of parties and gatherings where everything was like it was 2019….

So cases have gone up by 58% (last week compared to the week before) mainly amongst younger people. One nightclub in Enschede had 600 guests the first evening they were open, of which 180 are now confirmed to be infected…. Supposedly everyone was tested negative before being allowed in, however there are stories about forged negative tests, no checks of the QR code, bouncers waving everyone in….

Hospitalisations and deaths are still on the way down (still every day sees fewer people in hospital than the day before, and a few days with zero Covid dead or only one or two).

It will be interesting to see what happens the next couple of weeks.

nk15

These are all preparations for a mass casualty event....They are pulling the band aid....

Britain prepares to ‘live with the virus’ and remove nearly all covid restrictions (msn.com)