I would like to talk about COVID

 

Sometimes, you don't need words.. 

Yeah I know, and what a way to make a blog popular - let's just bring up the thing that everyone's been talking about for the last 18 months and is controversial for, reasons.. 

Anyway - I need to declare my political ideology and thoughts before I go into this topic. I believe in socialism, I consider myself on the left of the political spectrum. But, I am also a realist and believe that change happens when people compromise - unfortunately sometimes on even some core things. If you want change, then sometimes any change is better than none. So I would say my views most closely correspond with Labour here in the UK. 

I'm a pragmatic, realist. But I believe in changing society through compromise - as mentioned above. Isn't a shame that more people wouldn't be willing to cross the divide in order to make things happen? Anyway. 

So I'm not going to dive into the history of COVID as we all know it, and every other country has handled it better or worse and in slightly different ways. This isn't meant to be a political discussion either, but ultimately public health and the economy are directly effected by COVID so it will always become political. 

Here in the UK, we have had an excellent uptake of the vaccine - regardless of what the press my spit out about vaccine hesitancy. Something like 86% of adults have had at least one jab and like 60% have had two (I had my second on the 16th of July) which in terms of statistics, is pretty good. I was deeply concerned that at the beginning of the year, that this what feels like larger group of people being "anti-vax" were going to cause real problems to us reaching any kind of critical mass of vaccinations but the statistics say otherwise, which is good. Social media sometimes massively amplifies one part of society, more so than they're actual presence. 

The vaccine as I'm sure you know, isn't perfect - nor was it ever going to be. It's really not that different to the flu jab in the way that it works (also not going into that here, and yes I know about the mRNA vaccines that are different). But at the beginning of the year, it was you know anywhere from 70-95% effective, which is pretty amazing given the flu jab is around 50% each year (COVID is big money for pharma!). This has obviously changed somewhat with new variants passing around (I'll come back to this) and the current variant, being 95% dominant and the previous "COVID-19" infection being almost dead due to the vaccine uptake and various different government and global restrictions. 

It's still effective against this new variant, maybe not as high as we'd like but some say as high as 80% (perhaps higher)... against preventing serious illness. And that's where we're at, because that's different isn't it -  I think, preventing against actually catching it is quite a bit lower than that around 40-50%. Now, I mentioned in my other post about absolutism and how bad it is - I think perhaps this "well it won't protect me against it so why bother with it" attitude is quite bad and not only in the behaviour it drives in vaccine uptake (for first or second jabs) and societal behaviours that secondarily impacts. 

As I've been over the whole behavioural thing, I won't go there. But there's a disconnect in the way that our government is moving things forward (based on certain information and thought processes) and the way that people think about COVID and how we should handle it. I write this blog post on the eve of all final restrictions being lifted, so is particularly pertinent at the moment (I will come back to the future later.. no pun intended..) 

The government, had it's multi-step plan with it's tests etc on how we move forward and we have at each stage moved forward except for this final step which was delayed by 4 weeks I believe due to rising infections (somewhat expected with the easing of restrictions) on paper, this is exactly what we needed given the disorganised chaos of last year, knee-jerk reactions and inability to make reasonable restrictions and changes to have a decent enough impact on the infection rate. But, this is where politics steps in - Boris, is definitely somewhat right of the centre line. A lot of his cabinet and MP's are far-right, have very safe seats and wield a lot of power when they club together with little threat of being unelected at a general. I am of course, talking about the "COVID Recovery Group" and the "1922 Committee" which are basically far-right clubs of MPs that are able to exert pressure when things aren't working the way they want. Throw in "whipping" culture and you've got a big problem.

The pressure, on Boris to lift all restrictions on the economy and society has been very strong for quite a while. With these people preferring to "Get on with it" and "let herd immunity do it's thing" and he's faced a lot of back-lash and immense pressure to move forward with things as soon as possible. You bet that we'd have come out of lock-down months ago if they had their way, perhaps not even having gone into one this or many times before. Unfortunately, we come at a point where this pressure on Boris is such that he has to move forward or the men in grey suits will come for him. 

Now, I both agree and disagree with the thought process and reasons behind this to some extent. 

I don't agree with data being massaged to make things look better than they are, the COVID-19 app being "adjusted" to stop it pinging people (at least until the data reflects a valid reason to do that) or the very notion that the laid out plans and process can be "pressured" to move forward. 

I do agree, that from a statistical point of view summer time is the lowest point of pressure on the NHS for seasonal issues. Whereas the winter can be very tough with issues such as the flu and other problems causing problems and taking up resources to deal with. 

The government's thought process is now is the time to unlock and this is because it's summer, there is a strong vaccine uptake (keeping deaths and serious infections down) and the NHS isn't under it's usual seasonal pressures. Throw into this, that if it wasn't now, with the winter infection rate we are most likely looking at spring next year - and you can imagine how that sounds to Boris and his peers, let alone the general public.

So here we are, moving forward tomorrow with the removal of basically all restrictions tomorrow. The only things remaining is isolation for another month, for fear of the infection rate spiking too much. Whereas I believe from mid-August that changes to something voluntary I believe which makes it worthless. Heck tomorrow, mask wearing is optional but "advisory" (don't get me started on that) so for all intents and purposes, tomorrow is in most people's eyes "normality". 

Saying what I've said above and understanding the reasoning behind it, we run a massive risk of just creating more problems for ourselves. We know that variants, that can sometimes completely elude the current crop of vaccines are bred in a hotbed of infections - even if they aren't serious infections, the chances of mutations is very high. These have both national and a global impact, as they inevitably make their way out of the country (with our non-existent COVID border policy). The global stage is watching us right now to see what happens, as no one has done this thus far (barring some very poor decisions that were made in Belgium I believe recently?) and it is, unnerving to say the least. We're running a human experiment on our population and it feels.. not good.

But, the other side of me says... how can we move on from COVID? (yes I can hear you saying "I know! but not like this!!") but how else can we move on this pandemic we find ourselves in? It does often feel like "now is not the time" is the answer every time. COVID, much like the flu will almost certainly become endemic (which means it happens every year in small outbreaks) and there will be winter jabs for it just like the flu. It's just that bit between now and then that's the big issue and in reality, no one knows - scientists can give their advice but ultimately politicians (sadly) make the big life-changing decisions to our day to day lives, sometimes based more on what's best for the economy rather than peoples health. 

So I do think, that it makes sense for us to do this now. Now that doesn't mean I am throwing myself back into normality like so many are, chanting "Freedom day!" as if to say they have been locked up in prison for the last 18 months. I think the next 4 weeks are going to be absolutely pivotal to the future of what happens in lockdown, infections and our NHS. 

There is a general feeling of people being "bored of COVID" and are "fed up" which is understandable, but it leads to them not really caring about why they're doing anything so are just happy that the government has validated them in saying that they can go back to their normal(ish) lives. So right now, on the 18th of July 2021 I think rule compliance is fairly low, in terms of mask wearing etc because of this fatigue. Tomorrow, even though "personal responsibility" (yeah because people are great at that) is being advised I think the vast majority will apply no sense or care for that matter any more - which compounds concerns about infection rates. 

So... that comes back to the next 4 weeks and how critical it is. We'll see (by how much) cases pick up (because they are going to go way up) what the impact is on death rates, hospitalisations etc but we won't see what the outcome of mutations are for a couple months.. and even then that's down to gene sequencing continuing (remember I was talking about data massaging?)

Side comment - the government is essentially massaging data, there are talks of reducing the sensitivity of the COVID-19 app so it doesn't tell people to isolate for as long. The at-home lateral-flow tests are going to become chargeable (and the average person would never pay for them - so less tests, less data) as well as the NHS PCR tests that will become chargeable (less tests, means less data and less sequencing). I think the bad thing here is that we'll have less of a dataset for gene sequencing, meaning things will "look better than they are" and we won't know about anything we need to be concerned about.

Some of my friends have big "post-COVID" plans and tout "freedom day"! as the best thing that's happened to them for a while. Planning night-club nights out, parties and all-sorts in the next week and I just can't think of anything worse. It's a perfect breeding ground (well some gays love that) for the virus and it will run rampant in a restriction-less environment. 

I'm not worried about COVID to some extent, let me say. I am a fit, young guy who's generally healthy (except some post-surgery worries - but I think we're over that now) so I'm fairly sure I'd survive it. But I apparently more so than most - care about not wanting to be ill, I mean.. who want's to be sick? It's not even as if you can get it, like the chicken pox and then be immune to it next time. Long COVID does worry me, as people report problems with brain fog, lug capacity, tiredness and many other things. 

I think for now, I will sit and wait things out - let people who are desperate for some semblance of normality (to them) run out and risk themselves. See what happens in 4 weeks time and make a judgment call then, as I'd be lying if I said to you there wasn't some things about our current situation I didn't love. 

I just don't want to be the countries guinea pig, considering we've waited 18 months - I'm happy waiting another month to see what happens and then making a decision on what to do with life. Part of me sniffs a government u-turn somewhere in the making, but it'll be the end of Boris.. not that he wasn't going to up and disappear as soon as this had settled anyway and he'd "delivered brexit"!

Just have to sit and wait it out.