Lockdown #2

[monkeysarefun]

Another day of zero new local infections in Australia. Its still out there though, they are regularly testing sewage at all locations and notifying  locals where it is found to be alert for symptoms. Eg, this morning the alert was for Northwest Sydney.

 

Things are slowly reopening in stages,  very carefully - no one (apart from our local equivalent of Fox News enthusiasts) is complaining, we see the horror stories from overseas at the moment, and have the local example of how it got away so quickly in Melbourne to understand what can happen if we stop restrictions too soon.

 

One positive has been the endless days of excellent air quality, presumably  due to reduced traffic due to more  people working from home, and the decimation of aircraft movements. 

 

Global biotech company CSL is beginning to manufacture the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to get a head start on making up to 30 million doses, should ongoing clinical trials be successful. If approved this will be rolled out free to all Australians early next year.

Edited November 8, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[Pete the Elaner]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

Or, even simpler:

 

You are going to meet for an hour long gossip in the park, anybody you meet for that gossip will definitely be infectious.

 

Would rather spend the hour gossiping with:

 

a) one infectious person; or,

 

b) four infectious people?

 

 

I would view it as the same risk because only 1 person can speak at a time. 1/4 * 4 = 1.

I'm still partially immobile from a broken leg & have plenty to do on the layout so I wasn't previously doing anything which has now been restricted.

 

I have a different concern though & this is something which has been largely ignored:

I recovered from the virus in April. In theory I should have developed antibodies but how long do these last? There has been mention of the body only producing these for a finite time.

So was it wise for me to observe lockdown (which I did) or would I have been better off with further exposure to keep my immune system 'awake' to the threat?

[Nearholmer]

People do tend to exhale on a regular basis, and to cough and sneeze involuntarily, and to guffaw when a good joke is made, and talk over one another, though. At least the people I'm missing meeting-up with do.

 

I did read in a BBC report that there were suggestions form a recent study (possibly the ONS random sampling one) that hospital workers who may have been exposed to the bug regularly seem to have retained active immunity for longer than those who haven't been re-exposed, but for goodness sake don't use my unreliable memory as a source of health advice.

 

I hope the leg is recovering well.

 

K

[Andy Hayter]

Immunity levels.

No easy answer to that Pete.

 

Antibodies are not the be all and end all.  Yes they are important but many diseases see the antibody levels drop with time and yet immunity is maintained - and by immunity we do not necessarily mean you cannot get it again, but that if your body is attacked a second time, its defences are pre-armed and will attack quickly to reduce the impact of a second infection.

Alongside antibodies we also have T-cells (aka Killer cells).  Generally these seem to retain a memory of foreign invaders and will quickly re-activate if the same invader returns.

 

It has to be said that all of this is based around common bodily reactions and I have seen nothing specific about C19.  On the other hand there have only been a handful of clinically proven cases of people getting the virus twice out of 50million known infected people.  This would seem to back up theories that immunity is retained in some form for perhaps at least the 10 months this virus has been with us.  

 

Good luck with the leg repair - at least you have an opportunity to model.

[boxbrownie]

Oddly, well it sounds odd......our Grand daughter (4) was sent home from school on Friday as one of the little children’s family has been found positive, Grand daughter is now on 14 days isolation at home along with the whole school (small’ish school) but the parents of the all isolating children can still go about their business as usual.....

[boxbrownie]

16 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

I see what you mean, but the probability of someone passing it on within a household is surely almost 100%, much larger than from a casual meet-up?

Early on during the first lockdown our best friends neighbours were struck, the husband felt ill for a week and then went down very fast and was dead before the ambulance got there......the wife had been nursing him all week but was not affected at all.

[Hibelroad]

I got an email from that nice Mr Hancock to say I should maintain 2m distancing within the house. If my house was that big I would be modelling Gauge 1. 

[Joseph_Pestell]

7 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Early on during the first lockdown our best friends neighbours were struck, the husband felt ill for a week and then went down very fast and was dead before the ambulance got there......the wife had been nursing him all week but was not affected at all.

 

Was she tested negative? Or tested and found positive but asymptomatic? Or not tested at all?

 

I had a similar case in the family. My cousin and her son got it but her brother, who lives with her for most of the year, did not despite already suffering badly with COPD. He is now stuck in Spain and unable to get back.

[Reorte]

16 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Oddly, well it sounds odd......our Grand daughter (4) was sent home from school on Friday as one of the little children’s family has been found positive, Grand daughter is now on 14 days isolation at home along with the whole school (small’ish school) but the parents of the all isolating children can still go about their business as usual.....

The line needs to be drawn somewhere, otherwise you'd follow through chains and end up saying everyone in the country has to isolate for 14 days from just one case.

[boxbrownie]

6 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

Was she tested negative? Or tested and found positive but asymptomatic? Or not tested at all?

 

I had a similar case in the family. My cousin and her son got it but her brother, who lives with her for most of the year, did not despite already suffering badly with COPD. He is now stuck in Spain and unable to get back.

I have no idea, it was within the first couple of weeks of the first lockdown, very early days and I doubt testing was as easy then as now.......

[boxbrownie]

6 minutes ago, Reorte said:

The line needs to be drawn somewhere, otherwise you'd follow through chains and end up saying everyone in the country has to isolate for 14 days from just one case.

Oh I agree, what seemed odd was the whole school was sent home rather than just the class she was in, as small children don’t pass on the virus easily it seemed OTT for the whole school to be sent home.

 

[big jim]

Our youngest is off today as someone in his year group has tested positive, we will know later if he is back tomorrow, I can only assume he is if it’s someone in another class? 

[Reorte]

26 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Oh I agree, what seemed odd was the whole school was sent home rather than just the class she was in, as small children don’t pass on the virus easily it seemed OTT for the whole school to be sent home.

 

Very much strikes me as being way overcautious, but in this day and age can the school afford to be anything else?

[rockershovel]

I see the much-cried-up “Nightingale hospitals” have seen little, or no use and at least one has been quietly closed, another repurposed. My daughter, who works in the NHS tells me that this was only to be expected, there being no means of staffing them for any length of time. She also offers the observation that there was no means of beating them effectively, either! 

 

One of the difficult questions no-one seems to want to discuss, are the actual effects of the widespread use of agency contract labour in the economy generally. I see that once again, to get the Liverpool testing up and running, the job was given to the Army... I thought the whole purpose of the destruction of our employment and training system, was to provide an “efficient, flexible workforce” that could do anything, straight away at no cost? 

 

I’ve remarked before, on the near-complete absence of observation in some areas of Peterborough. To be fair, if I was living in the Millfield and Lincoln Road areas (its one of those areas where narrow Victorian sidestreets are bumper-to-bumper with parked cars, both sides, at any hour of the day and the shops open before dawn and stay open late at night), I don’t think I’d be making any serious effort to socially distance, either. 

 

I seem to recall that in the great public health campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, when endemic killers like whooping cough, scarlet fever, polio and TB were all but eliminated, improving housing standards played an important role.  

 

 

[Andy Hayter]

59 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

Oddly, well it sounds odd......our Grand daughter (4) was sent home from school on Friday as one of the little children’s family has been found positive, Grand daughter is now on 14 days isolation at home along with the whole school (small’ish school) but the parents of the all isolating children can still go about their business as usual.....

 

Smallish school means that all of the children are treated as prime contacts  with the possibility of have contracted covid.  The parents of all of the (up till now) covid free children are secondary contacts and are treated as not being likely to be infected - up until their child goes down with it and then they will go into isolation.  The parents of the child identified as having the virus should have gone into isolation along side the child because they too are primary contacts.

 

I hope that makes sense of what does seem odd at first view.

[rockershovel]

16 minutes ago, Reorte said:

 

Very much strikes me as being way overcautious, but in this day and age can the school afford to be anything else?

 

Well, they could. When Risk Assessments are written, ALARP is the magic word - As Low As Reasonably Possible. Get that box ticked, and a lot of your problems are clarified, if not necessarily solved. 

 

I’ve had experience from pretty much Day One, of trying to write and work within acceptable procedures. I’ve been profoundly unimpressed with the actual levels of information within the general uproar coming from HMG. The whole “lockdown” procedure seems solely designed to achieve local reduction in transmission, which immediately returns... HMG spent taxpayers money, a while ago, on a epidemiological study (Cygnus) but they didn’t seem to learn much from it. 

 

Edited November 9, 2020 by rockershovel

[Nearholmer]

4 minutes ago, Reorte said:

Very much strikes me as being way overcautious, but in this day and age can the school afford to be anything else?

 

Difficult to know, isn't it?

 

A small school might not be split into "bubbles", so might be allowing free mingling between classes in the playground, lunch-room etc.

 

Round here primary schools range greatly in size, both physically and in terms of numbers of pupils, and I can think of a couple of tiny ones, what would have been called "infants schools" when I was a boy, that are on fairly small sites and have only c40 pupils in three classes, and would be impossible to "bubble". At the other end of the range, the primary school that our youngest attends has c540 pupils and is pretty well "bubbled" at class level (c30) and very solidly at year level (c90).

 

Our eldest is at secondary school, and they are "bubbled" by year, but the two positive cases they've had so far (one pupil, one teacher) have been dealt with by getting specialist contact tracers in "at the double" and making a close analysis of degrees of contact, which has allowed them to keep the "whole bubble home" down to one day in each case, and the numbers into 14-day isolation surprisingly small.

 

Fingers crossed that the odds, which are frankly against it, allow ours to get through the winter without a period of isolation.

 

 

[Reorte]

7 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

Well, they could. When Risk Assessments are written, ALARP is the magic word - As Low As Reasonably Possible. Get that box ticked, and a lot of your problems are clarified, if not necessarily solved.

Problem there is sending everyone home is always reasonably possible, even with a very small risk. It might have long-term consequences but it's always reasonably possible now.

[rockershovel]

4 minutes ago, Reorte said:

Problem there is sending everyone home is always reasonably possible, even with a very small risk. It might have long-term consequences but it's always reasonably possible now.

 

You misunderstand my point. It is ALWAYS possible to resolve a RA and minimise the Risk, by shutting everything down and doing nothing; the purpose of a RA is that you don’t do this, but control the Hazard consistent with achieving the goal, or task.

 

The problem in the present situation, is the lack of clarity regarding the goal. 

 

 

[Reorte]

15 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

You misunderstand my point. It is ALWAYS possible to resolve a RA and minimise the Risk, by shutting everything down and doing nothing; the purpose of a RA is that you don’t do this, but control the Hazard consistent with achieving the goal, or task.

 

The problem in the present situation, is the lack of clarity regarding the goal.

You mean is the goal no infections or educating children? The reality is that it's not completely 100% one or the other - certainly don't want to set one goal that matters to the exclusion of all else.

[Nearholmer]

The 'P' in ALARP isn't for 'possible', it stands for 'practicable', which has a very different meaning legal indeed, involving taking into account the "time, cost and trouble" involved, and balancing it against the benefits achieved.

 

A lot of the less-sensible (ranging through to down right daft) applications of risk assessment are the outcome of not understanding that important distinction, and often involve assessments made by people who haven't been trained properly.

 

 

[Reorte]

The real problem as far as I can see is that it's ultimately subjective. Of course it has to be; language isn't up to the task of being anything otherwise, and I suppose the law acknowledges that by precedent being important.

[Nearholmer]

It is dealt with by case law, the key case being from IIRC 1947*, there is also a stack of guidance published by HSE.

 

It isn’t too hard to apply properly in most cases, but can get pretty difficult and controversial in the case of low-probability events that, if they do occur, have very high consequences.
 

*No, 1949, Edwards vs National Coal Board.

 

Having just skimmed the Wikipedia entry on ALARP, that contains some little bits (with no cited source) that I don’t think are correct, and seem to me to be at odds with the HSE position - I suspect that a debate/argument is being played-out between entry editors!

Edited November 9, 2020 by Nearholmer

[rockershovel]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

The 'P' in ALARP isn't for 'possible', it stands for 'practicable', which has a very different meaning legal indeed, involving taking into account the "time, cost and trouble" involved, and balancing it against the benefits achieved.

 

A lot of the less-sensible (ranging through to down right daft) applications of risk assessment are the outcome of not understanding that important distinction, and often involve assessments made by people who haven't been trained properly.

 

 

 

Correct - the curse of autocorrect strikes again! It isn’t ideal, replying on an iPad. You illustrate my point clearly though; the whole point being, “where does the balance lie, between progressing towards a goal, and the possible consequences”. 

 

I am quite unable to understand, what HMG are seeking to achieve. The actual course pursued, seems to consist of temporary suppression at enormous cost, in the hope that the problem will eventually go away, and the certainty that the infection will return once suppression is lifted. 

 

The root of the problem lies in the emotive language employed (“don’t kill your granny”) combined with the practice of treating all risks and outcomes as being of equal severity. Add in the lack of will to address hard questions for ideological reasons (especially international mobility, as others have already pointed out) and there is no apparent solution; there is no identifiable goal, and no means of defining the balance between Hazard, Risk and Outcome.

 

Historically, we have not followed such policies because the Defined Goal has been along the lines of “we anticipate that an epidemic will produce casualties at a certain level, over a certain period of time. How can we best manage this?” in conjunction with the unstated assumption that wrecking the economy and suspending civil liberties, was simply not an option. Historically, it would have been inconceivable that the present legislation would have been introduced, far less passed; it is only the present climate of hysteria, the constant reinforcement of simplistic messages in the media, the concentration on individual cases “this could happen to YOU!!,” which has made this possible. 

 

[Nick C]

8 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

I am quite unable to understand, what HMG are seeking to achieve.

 

Don't worry, they don't know either...