Mike4 wrote:Dr John says the recent plummeting prevalence in the UK is now stopping and levelling off. Tim Spector notices the same.
Looks to me as though a reversal might be next on the menu what with kids being back at school and close neighbours France and Germany in 3rd wave - perhaps knocking the guvverment "road map out of lockdown" right off course.
Tim Spector suggests otherwise, probably because of the vaccine. I hope he is right, he seems to know more about this stuff than me
My one firm opinion on how this is going to pan out as far as a third wave is concerned, which I assume would emerge sometime in late autumn or early winter, is that what will actually happen is extremely uncertain right now with a very wide difference between best and worst case scenarios...
Best case scenario - Nasty new variants such as the South African one don't get a foothold in the UK and vaccine uptake across the whole UK adult (and maybe even ultimately child) population is excellent together with continuing excellent observed efficacy against symptomatic infection, severe illness and death. In fact in the best case scenario efficacy against transmission is also seen as excellent. If all of that could come together then I don't think we'll see a third wave at all, or at least not in any meaningful sense.
Worst case scenario - Nasty new variants such as the South African one (said now to be becoming quite widespread in France which is worrying) do get a significant foothold in the UK, in fact in the absolute worst case something like the SA variant becomes dominant, and the escape properties against the vaccines are as bad or worse than we think right now. In that case while booster jabs can of course be developed and rolled out I suspect it would be difficult to get them administered to enough of the population in time to stop another very serious third wave potentially of similar magnitude, or in a real worst case scenario even worse than the second wave we're just coming out of.
Where will the actual outcome be within those best and worst case bounds? I have no idea but many of the variables are in our (the citizens and the government's) control and there is still an awful lot to play for particularly during the remainder of 2021.
On the lockdown release timetable I don't yet detect enough warning signs to suggest to me that it is about to get delayed. I believe that the government's plans do anticipate and factor in an increase in cases due to the schools reopening and hospitalisation and death data are all still showing good declining trends. In one of the press briefings last week it was either Chris Whitty or Boris himself (and I think it was Boris) who explicitly said that the lockdown release timetable was factoring in the negative (in terms of cases and R number) effect of the schools reopening so I don't think it's the case that any stall or even some modest reversal of daily case rate reductions is necessarily a trigger to delay.
I still think that the potential for a new variant exhibiting a troubling degree of vaccine escape getting a substantial foothold in the UK is our single biggest threat right now. Assuming we do stick to the unlock timetable while still being able to exit this lockdown with daily case numbers(*) similar to where they were when we unlocked on 4th July last year we, as a few other posters have mentioned, really should be able to use a functional test, trace and isolate system to at least substantially delay any new variant running wild until booster jabs can be administered if necessary. Right now the test bit looks very good to me, trace is actually not bad if the 93% of first contacts that I read is accurate although there is always room for improvement, but a lot more thought, investment and perhaps legislation needs to go into the isolate bit because that seems to me to be be the weak link right now.
- Julian
(*) It's a bit tricky to compare case numbers between the two lockdowns since, on 4th July 2020, there were 114,274 tests conducted in the UK vs 1,437,257 tests conducted yesterday (and yesterday was by no means a record). Although I do moan from time to time it is too easy to forget sometimes just how far we have come in some areas.