It’s here again covid at the club

[flourbasher]

To those of you on here and you're families who are in the grip of this virus we wish you well and we,ll try and make you feel a bit better by bringing three points home
Best wishes

[caytonmiller]

Fingers crossed for your dad cayton 🤞

Thanks ronners. At 81 it's the last thing he wanted.

[Grist_To_The_Mill]

I read that the other way round at first, the population treating the government as adults ... oh wait ....

Lol yes I see your point, but our vaccine rollout has probably been the best in the world

You can lead the sheep to water...etc

[mygiddypant]

Listening to a top virologist yesterday Cam and he reckons we could be entering the end game. He said that viruses, indeed all genetic entities (our cells included), constantly mutate. In a nutshell that's what evolution is. It's only when a mutation offers a clear advantage, by pure chance, that it becomes dominant.

Omicron has mutated to become more transmissible (simply by accidentally mutating additional spike proteins which bind onto our cells) but causing less illness, and death. In evolutionary terms that's a huge "win" for the virus because by causing milder illness it's hosts go about their daily lives and thus take the virus out and about further afield. The additional spike proteins ensure it infects all it comes into contact with. By sheer weight of numbers it will ultimately dominate other covid strains and eventually settle into being symbiotic with humanity.

Ultimately it ends up endemic, not pandemic, and is viewed much as influenza. It's here to stay and will join it's coronavirus cousins that we have lived with for years (which, along with the rhinovirus cause the common cold).

History will view the episode as a score draw between covid and humanity.

An excellent post Grumpy. As you say, the long-term outlook is for the virus to become pandemic and, hopefully, less threatening. However, while there are people who remain unvaxed the virus will continue to mutate. The virus may become more transmissible, as with the omicron variant, but there is no guarantee that it will become less of a threat at the same time. My understanding is that there will always be the possibility that transmissibility and potency could combine. The only long-term solution is to vax the world.

[PerigordMiller]

Lol yes I see your point, but our vaccine rollout has probably been the best in the world

You can lead the sheep to water...etc

I was thinking more of xmas parties, and doing as you're told.

No idea whether the vaccine rollout has been the 'best in the world'

[mygiddypant]

No idea whether the vaccine rollout has been the 'best in the world'

Neither has Grist

[Grist_To_The_Mill]

Neither has Grist

Can’t think of any better to be honest

But it seems to be fashionable to rubbish everything we do well in the U.K.

[mygiddypant]

Can’t think of any better to be honest

But it seems to be fashionable to rubbish everything we do well in the U.K.

Just another Boris lie. Rubbish.

[fc_miller]

An excellent post Grumpy. As you say, the long-term outlook is for the virus to become pandemic and, hopefully, less threatening. However, while there are people who remain unvaxed the virus will continue to mutate. The virus may become more transmissible, as with the omicron variant, but there is no guarantee that it will become less of a threat at the same time. My understanding is that there will always be the possibility that transmissibility and potency could combine. The only long-term solution is to vax the world.

So if everyone is vaccinated the virus wouldn't mutate?

[John2]

Can’t think of any better to be honest

The question is - by what metric?

We had a massive head start since the UK is an R&D and manufacturing centre for such things, but Israel and the USA were quicker than us initially.

By September there were 13 countries ahead of us in rollout including 6 from the EU.

So, by what measure do you claim ours was best?

Edit - to be fair if I recall we did administer the first ever dose - so maybe by that metric it's the best in the world, but a pretty weak metric under the circumstances for the label you're giving.