The Brick Castle: COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update 9th / 10th August 2021

COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update 9th / 10th August 2021.

The UK added 23,510 cases today (UP from 21,691 a week earlier / identical to 23,511 two weeks earlier), and now has reported a total of 6,117,540 positive cases of COVID-19. We completed 725,764 tests yesterday.

The counter says 47,091,889 people (89% of UK adults) had been given at least one dose of a vaccine in the UK by midnight last night. 39,688,566 people (75%) had received 2 doses and are fully vaccinated 2 weeks after that 2nd dose.

5,909 people were in hospital yesterday, Monday 9th August (DOWN from 6,099 a week earlier / 5,918 two weeks earlier), with 859 using a ventilator (DOWN from 895 a week earlier / UP from 820 two weeks earlier).

In the 24 hours up until 5pm yesterday, we officially reported the loss of another 146 people who have tested positive to COVID-19 within 28 days, making a total of 130,503 losses of life in all settings.
Up until Friday 30th July, 154,202 people had COVID listed as a cause on their death certificate.

Area: Deaths / Rate per 100,000 population
Wales: 7,906 / 249.4
Scotland: 10,354 / 189.4
Northern Ireland: 3,014 / 159
England: 131,867 / 233.2

Rep. Of Ireland 313,876 cases and 5,044 losses of life. (Not yet reported today.)

There have now been a total of 204,469,679 reported cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives worldwide to COVID-19 is 4,322,202. Already 183,645,612 people have recovered.

UK Gov Lets keep masking up image of man and woman wearing masks

"30.2% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 15.6% is fully vaccinated.
4.48 billion doses have been administered globally, and 36.36 million are now administered each day.
Only 1.1% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose."
Our World In Data.

The A Level results were out today, and a record percentage of students received A and A* results.
It's a pandemic. Anyone who has received an A Level pass (or any formal qualification) has done an extraordinary thing in extraordinary times. Well done to all of you.

If you didn't get the grades you wanted, you are part of a huge club of people who were forced to have a re-think. Focus on what you HAVE achieved, and where you CAN go now. For many people, this turns out to be the best thing that could have happened. It'll be okay.

In other student news, Education Secretary Gavin 'Childcatcher' Williams has said that university students shouldn't expect to pay full fees if they don't go back to in-person learning next year. I have to agree. The Open University have been teaching people remotely for decades, and they only charge around £3k. That said... the Government should really pick up the shortfall, because whether students are there or not, the buildings, teaching and support staff and are still there, and they need paying for. It would be a tragedy if universities started selling things off to fund themselves.

UK Health Minister Sajid Javid has asked the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) to investigate the cost of private PCR tests, because charging an average 75 quid a time is extracting the urine (reword at your own leisure). Even with bundle offers and packages, it makes a foreign holiday for a family of 4 prohibitively expensive for many people who would otherwise go away each year.
Yes, there is a cost involved, and they get the results to you really quickly, but according to Which (who have a great article about this at the moment), some providers are charging up to £399 for a PCR test, and they found lateral flow tests costing "from £7.50 to silly money". There's no excuse for profiteering.
This is going to be looked into immediately (what, no think tank or 6 month report?? Cor blimey). Options could include simply putting a cap on the maximum price retailers can charge.
(When it says Antigen test, it can refer to one or more of several tests that check to see if you have COVID right now. PCR lab testing, and rapid testing - lateral flow testing, LAMP testing and there are a couple of others too.)

100821 Share of people vaccinated against COVID Our World In Data

Rishi Rumours:
Apparently Boris and Rishi Sunak, UK Chancellor, haven't seen eye-to-eye all along, and aren't bezzies. There are rumours Rishi is being demoted, Rishi is being sacked, Rishi is being moved to Health Secretary. Who knows?

There are more rumours and hints - it does seem that booster COVID jabs, especially for the most vulnerable, but eventually everyone over 50 in the UK, will be coming from September onwards with your flu jab.

The UK's Institute for Fiscal Studies have plotted potential NHS waiting list scenarios, and it's grim. We currently have 5.3m people waiting for pre-planned care/treatment, and the NHS is so stretched right now that this is definitely going to get worse before it gets better. Just how much worse is the big question?
We can't know how many people will join waiting lists in the next few months, how much of an extra burden delayed treatment is going to be, how many people will recover or die waiting? When will the NHS be able to work at full non-COVID capacity?
The estimates for where we'll be in 4 years time are very broad, but very daunting. Scenario 1 is the worst, where we could potentially have over 15 million people waiting for treatment by the end of 2025.
"Even in our most optimistic scenario (scenario 4), the number of people waiting for treatment would rise to over 9 million next year, and would only return to pre-pandemic levels in 2025. That would require the NHS to increase capacity by 5% in 2021 and 2022 compared with 2019 and then by 10% in 2023 onward (the equivalent of treating around 1.6 million additional patients per year, relative to 2019 volumes, at a potential annual cost of at least £2 billion, before any allowance for additional infrastructure)."
And, of course, this doesn't have any wiggle room if we have another influx of COVID patients into hospitals...

There is a new study out this week, which claims to have found SARS-COV-2 in Italy as early as September 19th 2019.
It is getting panned by the peer-reviewers.
Other scientists are not happy with the results and feel it could lead people astray. They claim the sample that the researchers have found does not look like any ancestor of the original Wuhan strain or early strains in Italy, instead it matches strains found in China and Italy since Spring 2020. We also have to say it is highly unlikely a strain evolved in Italy and sat there really quietly, causing no bother at all for almost 6 months before causing mayhem, sooo... there are questions over whether maybe some later contamination got into the samples.
It'll be interesting to see how the arguments develop over this one - and if the press report it...

UK Gov lets keep air moving image of wide open window

The French are great at protesting, and the French Government aren't winning universal favour with their COVID Health Pass. COVID restrictions are now in place, requiring you to prove vaccination, recovery or negative test before you can use public transport, attractions, cafes, restaurants etc. There were massive protests at the weekend.
UK holidaymakers are legally allowed to prove their own COVID status in France by using the UK COVID app.

A large group of anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protestors stormed the Headquarters of the BBC on Monday - I have no idea why, possibly they were hoping to get onto the live telly news and shout randomly for the 3 seconds before they were replaced with a repeat of Homes Under The Hammer.
1. The lockdown has finished and vaccinations are not mandatory. Sorry, what were you protesting again?
2. The BBC moved it's Headquarters back in 2013, a whopping 8 years ago, so the protestors actually stormed Soho House, which is mainly some offices and the sets for Loose Women, This Morning and Graham Norton.
Erm yeah... If this reflects the quality of their research into COVID vaccinations, I think I may have discovered why they are still anti-vaxxers...
Words fail me.

Texas Governor Greg Abbot literally fiddled at a maskless political rally on Sunday while his state of 29 million people had less than 500 free ICU beds.
It has earned him the nickname Nero.
Bizarrely while I was researching this, I discovered he proudly boasts he was named "Best Governor In The Nation 2020". It took a while, but I found he was given this title by a group of financial consultants and conservatives, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Criteria are mainly about keeping spending low, including healthcare and COVID, as well as tax policy, union regulation, education etc.
It reminds me of when I was a teenager and worked in a pub, and they won an award for spending the least in the whole country on cleaning products. (Just think about that for one moment.)
Neither are awards I'd feel proud to have on the mantlepiece...

Different US states have VERY different approaches. some, including California, have different mask rules for vaccinated/ unvaccinated people (cheers to Ian for pointing this one out).
EVERYONE is required to wear masks in the following settings:
- Public transport
- Healthcare, adult and senior care facilities
- Indoors in ALL schools, childcare, and other youth settings
- State and local correctional facilities and detention centers
- Homeless shelters, emergency shelters, and cooling centers
Masks are required for unvaccinated people and recommended for everyone in other indoor public places, including:
- Retail
- Restaurants
- Theaters
- Family entertainment centres
- Meetings
- State and local government offices that serve the public
Deaf people and the people they're chatting to, those with genuine medical reasons and children under 2 are among those exempt.

Image of kindly social care worker supporting someone

Tokyo 2020 ended with a grand total of 430 Olympic-related COVID-19 cases, which is certainly not as anything like as bad as some people thought it might be (how many thousands of cases in the UK were due to the Euros?). Japan meanwhile now have to get a handle on their outbreak, and it has levelled off slightly in the last couple of days, so fingers crossed.

Worldwide Delta Variant is causing a nightmare.
Iran have never ever managed to bring COVID under close control, but even they are clearly suffering more with Delta, and now reporting almost 40,000 daily cases.
Australia cannot get a hold of their outbreak, it must be so infuriating. 383 new cases today.
Iceland and the Seychelles are both having a bit of an outbreak at the moment. Iceland had 107 new cases yesterday, 56 today. The Seychelles reported 132 new cases today. Those are not big numbers, but nor are their populations.
Poland and Hungary are reporting really low daily new cases (average around 125 a day) - well done to both of them, because they were really suffering not long ago.
The USA yesterday reported a total of 102,375 new cases. 28,317 were in Florida, California 9,978, Texas 6,158 and Louisiana 5,515. The picture is very different around the USA.
Asia is where Delta is really having a massive impact at the moment, and cases are rising across the world in many countries which had escaped the worst so far.

The UK figures are static, but bouncing a bit. We do look like we may have plateaued, but at a very high rate, and no-one really has a lot of faith in the UK case numbers being accurate just now - the Zoe Symptom app. and the random testing suggest we actually have about twice as many cases as we're noticing / officially reporting.

However, you can't just ignore needing a ventilator, and those numbers are also fairly level. Vaccinations ARE still keeping people out of hospital, preventing them becoming seriously ill, and lets hope that also prevents a lot more people from developing long term symptoms.
We need to get numbers down further and save some more lives, but at the moment we are holding our own, and this race is pretty much neck and neck.

I'm not going to believe it's all over just yet though... we have Summer and closed schools on our side, and a lack of testing... but every person not given a number is a win.

Some numbers. They're people:

Countries / Cases / Losses of life (since midnight GMT. In larger countries some states /provinces have yet to report today):

Iran 4,238,676 (+39,139) 95,111 (+508)

India 32,033,333 (+36,316) 429,183 (+468)

Indonesia 3,718,821 (+32,081) 110,619 (+2,048)

UK 6,117,540 (+23,510) 130,503 (+146)

Russia 6,491,288 (+21,378) 166,442 (+792)

Malaysia 1,299,767 (+19,991) 11,162 (+201)

Thailand 795,951 (+19,843) 6,588 (+235)

Spain 4,643,450 (+15,680) 82,227 (+102)

Japan 1,043,625 (+12,068) 15,297 (+17)

Bangladesh 1,376,322 (+11,164) 23,161 (+264)

Iraq 1,732,298 (+9,970) 19,336 (+66)

Morocco 711,103 (+9,778) 10,509 (+105)