The U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has advised the Government that “stringent national measures” should be imposed by December 18th to stop the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, and ensure that the NHS is not overrun by Covid hospital admissions. Health Secretary Sajid Javid was warned by the UKHSA that, although the new variant appears to be less dangerous than the Delta strain, 5,000 people a day could be hospitalised because of the virus, and that further restrictions may have to come sooner rather than later. The Guardian has the story.
Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, received a presentation from the UKHSA on Tuesday warning that even if the new Omicron variant leads to less serious disease than Delta, it risks overwhelming the NHS with 5,000 people admitted to hospital a day.
In an interview with the Guardian, the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson said the total could be double that number.
No 10 insisted there were no imminent plans to bring in more measures after ‘Plan B’ measures were announced for England this week but Michael Gove, who chaired a Cobra meeting on Friday, said the Government had been presented with some “very challenging information” about the speed of the spread.
The Guardian has seen leaked advice from UKHSA for Javid marked “official, sensitive” saying: “The key point is that under a range of plausible scenarios, stringent action is needed on or before December 18th, 2021, if doubling times stay at 2.5 days. Even if doubling times rise to around 5 days, stringent action is likely still needed in December.”
It adds: “The rapid spread of Omicron means that action to limit pressures on the health system might have to come earlier than intuition suggests.” Its calculations suggest that even if Omicron causes a less severe hospitalisation rate of 1% or 0.5% compared with Delta’s 1.5%, then “stringent national measures” would be needed by December 18th at the latest.
On the current trajectory of 2.5 days doubling time, and without any further restrictions, the document warns that Omicron cases could be at 248,000 cases a day by December 19th. It also stresses that the figures are not a projection but an estimate of Omicron prevalence and doubling times seen in the U.K. so far.
The document does not detail what the necessary curbs would be but defines “stringent national measures” as those that bring the R number below one.
Boris Johnson triggered ‘Plan B’ this week including more wide-ranging mask mandates, asking people to work from home and Covid passports for big venues but a senior Whitehall source said few inside UKHSA believe this will have much effect on slowing the spread of the variant.
Further measures, now being referred to as ‘Plan C’, could include stricter isolation requirements for contacts of Covid cases, masks in pubs, shutting hospitality entirely, more restrictions on visitors to care homes and hospitals or even the return of curbs on social contact.
Worth reading in full.
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if you don’t need a mechanical ventilator you should be at home in bed with a lemsip
One of the very few plus points of this total shit show is that it might have stopped the type of plonker who would have gone to A&E with a broken nail or a bit of wind. But then I suppose their places might have been taken up by the ludicrous hyperchondriacs who are clearly actually having propaganda-induced panic attacks rather than genuinely suffering from the deadly Covid. Many of my mates have had Covid (as have I), but only one still claims she ‘almost died’. Not surprisingly she’s a self-obsessed drama queen.
ha! yes – I think people should pay upfront for A&E or GP visit and get paid back if its not trivial
That was my conclusion when noting empty GP waiting areas during 3 appointments in the course of a week just over a month ago.
Absent the hypochondriacs with imaginary conditions who are most likely the same individuals still ‘shielding at home’ 12 months after the arrival of scary Covid.
I have a friend who talks on Facebook about her “recovery journey” after Covid. One step from “Covid survivor” type stuff.
She is a triathlete and had a high temp with increased heart rate during her infection. Had a check up and sent home.
Or given Ivermectin, dexamethasone, etc, to get them better faster and out of hospital. Or an asthma inhaler.
This PPE story is a diversion. Anecdotally, at my local hospital patients are being sent to Covid wards if they have respiratory symptoms, even if they test negative for the virus. They go in these wards without the virus, they come out with it. Sometimes in a box. Someone needs to get a proper investigative journalism hat on and actually uncover this outrage.
Last I remember reading (some months back) such was the scale of Government over-ordering of PPE that some Container docks were jammed solid with bulk containers full of PPE with nowhere to go.
But these findings were discovered by an international team of researchers, I’ll have you know!
Official guidelines.
Drawn up by “experts” presumably. Who’d have thought it?!
“The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine can give strong protection to children as young as 12, the two companies have announced following a trial.
In a small study involving 2,260 US volunteers aged 12 to 15, there were no cases of Covid-19 among those who have been fully vaccinated. Eighteen of those who received a placebo were infected.”
but how is their fertility?
How many of those infected had any symptoms?
If they don’t get symptoms, why do they need a vaccine?
If they don’t have symptoms, they don’t spread the virus, as illustrated in the article above, therefore they don’t need the vaccine.
Sushhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Quite a long time ago lockdownsceptics showed a chart that compared Covid deaths among working age people broken down by job type. It showed that health/care workers were no more likely to die from Covid than the working age population. This would appear to show that a supposed lack of PPE last spring was never a major problem despite all the media hype.