Having not been to see a doctor in around 30 years, I was also not registered. Living mainly abroad for the last few years made registration tricky, but I found an online way (I have a London address) via something called "GP at Hand / Babylon". It must have worked as I was emailed a couple of weeks ago saying I'll be contacted when I'm eligible for a vaccine. I'm way down on the list (group 9) but I assume they pro-actively emailed to stop millions of people contacting them and asking :)

I'm currently in Switzerland, but the vaccine rollout here is slow, so when the time comes I may go to London for it if possible and practicable.

Do registrations expire if you don't go for a while? They stopped contacting me a while go...

I gather some GPs, typically those based in large cities where people move home a lot, send out an email to people asking to confirm they still want to be registered at that surgery. If they don't hear anything they take the person off the list and send their medical records to the central commissioning group. That's not normal, since GP payment is partly based on numbers registered, so GPs would only be doing this if they were overloaded. That's if you haven't had any dealings with them at all. The issue for this OP is that s/he may not have an NHS number or record at all, so will be invisible to the system.

Incidentally if you are over 50 if you have an excuse to contact your surgery: influenza jabs are available free of charge from them, though it's a bit late in the season. The UK COVID-19 injections have to take place at least 7 days after the flu jab, indeed 7 days after any vaccination.

Yes, they can, but I believe they're meant to try and contact you first. I was registered at a practice in central London but never went. After about 10 years, I had an issue with wax build-up in my ears and wanted a nurse to syringe them (or whatever they do now). When I went they implied they'd never heard of me. Checking their records, they noticed I was registered but they had de-registered me after years of no contact,. They then wouldn't let me get my ears looked at without re-registering and that would have taken a week or two. They said they'd written to me and I hadn't replied hence was de-registered. I don't recall receiving the letter.

I walked to the Soho drop-in clinic instead and they saw me immediately. Interesting crowd uses that centre :)

I see the slow car crash of news strikes again. AZ is quite a lot less effective against the South Africa variant. At the moment the thinking is it will still stop the severe illness but not mild to moderate ( and the spread of the disease). I expect the same will be true for the other vaccines.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55967767

Which begs questions. How long will it take to modify the existing vaccines to take into account the new variants. What level of trials and testing is required? Logistically, what about manufacturing and moving the stuff? Can medicine and the whole supply chain adapt at a fast enough pace to keep up with ongoing mutations? The UK seems very fortunate at the delivery end, but dependent on others for everything before it.

I hate to be the doom monger, but I said towards the end of last year that I saw one lost year becoming two. I think this news pretty much guarantees it.

I have heard vague references of timescales of around half a year to have new versions of the vaccine available for use. My understanding is that 99% of that time is to go through the approval process, once they have a genetic sequence for the new target virus the process to develop the candidate vaccine is relatively quick. You then have the logistics of actually getting new vaccines deployed... Which will continue to take considerable time, the process will evolve and supply will improve, but it's still likely to take months for each iteration.

I think you are right. And that's assuming that there are not other variants that the existing vaccines cannot effectively target, which there will be. Unfortunately I see this will be a process that will take a few years where there are varying waves of infection until it settles into more of a steady state - similar to where we are globally with influenza. The evidence is already there that this is not a steady state virus that is going to be defeated by vaccine version 1.

Too early to say. The study is not yet peer reviewed and crucially says nothing of severe cases.

The other thing to bear in mind is the state of the economy and society as a whole. The cost of lockdown (on the national debt, on children/adolescents) and its side effects (deaths from alcohol have skyrocketed and so have overdoses) are going to make it very, very hard to have it extend for another year. The riots in the Netherlands are a cautionary tale not to be ignored.

I'm working on the assumption that there will be a 'booster shot' programme from September wherein a tweaked vaccination will provide additional protection for (some of) the newer Covid variants that have emerged, and that annual (or even 6-monthly) shots will almost certainly be needed 'in perpetuity', along with at least some physical mitigation measures (masks etc.) as depressing a prospect as that is.

I believe I caught Sarah Gilbert, the lead in development of the vaccine, telling Andrew Marr that Autumn would be a reasonable target for getting into play a vaccine tweaked to cope with the South African version of the virus.

I guess by that time we'll have the Morocco and Mongolia (etc) mutations to deal with. But she appeared confident that the existing vaccine platforms (not just her own) will be able to incorporate updates able to deal with most credible forms of mutation.

That's not great news, particularly with regards to spread. Does this mean that lockdown is likely to be extended even further? Apart from possibly schools coming back in March, and maybe a few really small changes in restrictions (say 2 households can mix for example), is it likely that we will remain in lockdown past the summer? Till we have a new iteration of the vaccine?

The article that opened this pandora's box is the summary of a preliminary, non peer-reviewed paper research of the efficacy of one vaccine on mild infections. It's not been peer-reviewed, it's not covering severe infections (i.e. those more likely to do damage) and, crucially, doesn't mention the other vaccines. Moderna is said to be effective against that variant, for instance.

So it's not (yet) all doom and gloom.

Reports are saying NHS Providers apparently wants the lockdown to remain until we are under 1,000 infections per day: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/poli...s-b918905.html

The latest number is 15k new cases today. Obviously no one can put a date on it, but 1,000 new cases a day is a very, very long time away.........

Until we can have an open and sensible debate about the level of risk society should tolerate (in terms of balancing the bad consequences of getting COVID vs the bad consequences of societal problems such as mental health issues and increased deprivation of locking down), we will remain in the same holding pattern, with the latest COVID iteration always seeming to be the issue which trump's all others.

However, I fear that we won't have the discussion, we'll keep on opening up and closing down and we'll be surprised that our society fragments and insulted when global comparisons determine that we've lost the way. I have no idea what the balance is, but I am pretty sure it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think you could be right. It will be a summer/winter open and shut cycle. Normal until November or December and then the restrictions will come back until March.

10 weeks if the numbers continue to drop by 25% a week. The vaccines could accelerate that. Given the Kent variant is meant to be 70% more transmissible, the numbers have come down very sharply..