The Brick Castle: COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update 22nd / 23rd November 2021

COVID-19 Coronavirus UK and World News Update 22nd / 23rd November 2021

UK Daily Statistics:
Cases: 9,932,408 (+42,484)
In Hospital Yesterday Monday 22nd: 8,088
Using A Ventilator Yesterday: 928
Losses of Life: 144,137 (+165)
Tests: 979,922
Vaccinations 1st Dose: 50,800,732 (88.3% of UK age 12+)
Vaccinations 2nd Doses: 46,186,817 (80.3% of UK age 12+)
Boosters: 15,639,477 (27.2%)

Rep. Of Ireland: 538,255 (+3,661) cases and 5,609 losses of life

World: 258,755,918 reported cases and 5,179,602 losses of life

People in Northern Ireland are being asked to 'work from home if you can', in an effort to bring case numbers down. It has been the official guidance for a while, but ministers are keen to try and keep numbers down and are reiterating with a 'stronger message'.
This is also the guidance in Scotland and Wales - but has not been the case in England since June.

The Scottish Vaccine Passport won't currently be extended to cinemas, theatres etc, as case numbers have come down. Nicola is very impressed and quite rightly doesn't want to impose more measures if it's going the right way.
From 6th December any Scottish venue with the scheme in place will also allow proof of negative test as well as proof of double vaccination.
The public are asked to please do the lateral flow rapid tests before you go out socialising.
Every time someone gets a positive test and stays home, it cuts a chain of transmission and could prevent tons of new cases, and even avoid restrictions having to be brought it. It could also mean you don't infect your Great Aunt Maude...

The World Health Organisation have issued new guidelines on treatment of children with COVID who develop multisystem inflammatory syndrome or MIS-C (also known as PIMS - Paediatric Inflammatory Multi-system Syndrome):
"MIS-C is a rare but serious condition where children with COVID-19 develop inflammation affecting different organs of the body. Children with this condition need specialized care, and may need to be admitted to intensive care. Although MIS-C is a serious condition, with the right medical care, children with this condition recover.
WHO’s updated guidelines recommend the use of corticosteroids in hospitalized children (aged 0-18 years) with this condition, in addition to supportive treatment and care. This recommendation comes following the availability of three observational studies, pooling data from 885 patients in total."
MIS-C/PIMS usually develops 2-6 weeks after a COVID diagnosis. The main symptom is a high temperature that lasts for longer than 24 hours. There are likely to be other symptoms such as a rash, tiredness/lethargy, tummy pain, headache, peeling skin on hands and feet, swollen neck glands, red cracked lips etc.
MIS-C affects slightly more males than females (60%/40%) and is really very rare. The chance of a person under age 18 developing MIS-C/PIMS after COVID infection is likely less than around 1 in 1,100, and over 98% of cases are not fatal.
In North America almost 6 million US children and young people have tested positive for COVID since January last year, and up until 1st November 5,526 had developed MIS-C. Of those, 48 did not survive.

Figures from The Red Cross suggest that in England just 1% of the population account for 16% of visits to the 'emergency department'. (When did we stop saying A&E? I know there are differences between A&E, accidents, and emergency departments, but suddenly it's as if A&E doesn't exist any more.)
These 'high intensity users' may not always need A&E, but they may still need help and have no idea where to find it. Figures collected by 'My London' show some people visited A&E almost 300 times in a single year. If only I had that sort of free time!

Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn:
“By the end of this winter pretty much everyone in Germany... will have been vaccinated, recovered or died”.
Blunt. Also potentially true. Cases in Germany are doubling by the week, and they are running out of intensive care hospital beds. Areas including Saxony and Bavaria are overwhelmed and airlifting patients elsewhere to find an ICU with space.
Angela Merkel yesterday called it a "highly dramatic situation".

Anti vaccine mandate protests in Brussels, Belgium, turned really nasty on Sunday evening, with Police using water cannons and over 40 arrests.
Demonstrations also took place in The Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Croatia, Denmark and Switzerland. European governments are desperate to get control of the number of new daily COVID infections as we head towards Winter, and restrictions are being put into place or discussed across the region.

The World Health Organisation's European Regional Director Hans Kluge has warned that there could be 2.2 million COVID deaths in Europe by Spring. He feels Europe faces a "very tough" Winter.
Across Europe an average 54% of all people are fully vaccinated, and that varies massively from area to area, with coverage in some places as low as just 10%.

Why does Europe overall seem to be suffering more than the UK? Why are they having more hospitalisations compared to cases than the UK are?
Firstly - don't forget we actually are quite slow to hospitalise people in the UK, so often in other countries a larger percentage would be admitted anyway.
Secondly - Pascal Soriot, Chief Executive of AstraZeneca, was on Radio 4 earlier. He reckons it could be because older people were given the Oxford vaccine in the UK, but large parts of the EU didn't believe it worked in older people and barred it's use. We now know it has a much bigger effect on the T Cell longer term immunity than we first realised... and the proof of efficacy is right there for all to see.

More and more employers are asking for job applicants to fully vaccinated. Up until recently hardly anyone was fully vaccinated, now we can all be. The fact it's been mandated for several job roles already will also give others the confidence to require it. This is likely to be a bit of a snowball...
Jobs website Adzuna says of 1.2m UK job vacancies, 805 required vaccination in August, 2,161 in September and 2,324 in October.
In the US, where all public facing employees have to be vaccinated by January or do regular tests, 0.9% of advertised jobs already require full vaccination.

In yesterday's very important CBI speech to business leaders, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson:
- compared himself to Moses
- pretended to be a car "brmmmm brmmm"
- referred to himself in the third-person
- lost his notes and couldn't pick his speech back up without them
- talked about 'Technology Unicorns'
- told everyone he spent Sunday at Peppa Pig World "as one must"
- asked the room full of business leaders to raise their hands if they had been to Peppa Pig World
- he also made the claim that "There are also sound evolutionary reasons why Mother Nature does not like working from home, so I prophesise people will come back".
(I'm not convinced. I think Mother Nature probably prefers anything other than a concrete office block. Evolutionary reasons generally involve 1.birth, 2.sustaining life long enough for 3.reproduction, and then 4.dying. Which are we going back into the office specifically for Boris?)
I've said it many times - he's not been 100% right since he had COVID...
This is so visible that Downing Street today issued an official statement telling us that the Prime Minister is OK.
The mere fact they've felt a need to do that instils absolutely no confidence. We know COVID can cause brain injury, leading to symptoms such as confusion, lack of concentration, brain fog, tiredness etc. Do you have a genuine medical problem Boris? If so, join the other 1.2m people across the UK who are suffering.

It's been discovered that 11 residents at a care home in Lanarkshire, Scotland, were accidentally given saline injections rather than Pfizer vaccine. The Pfizer vaccine is stored as a concentrate at -70 degrees, and when it is taken out of the freezer, it's mixed with some saline before it's injected. It appears the medical staff simply forgot to add the Pfizer vaccine.
We are ALL human. We are all capable of errors, especially when we are rushed, stressed, tired etc. What happens next is usually at least as important.
In this case, the medical staff realised what they'd done and hot-footed it back to give the actual vaccinations. Then they wrote it all up like they're meant to, which is why we now know about it. No-one came to any actual harm, nothing of irreplaceable value was lost, and lessons were learnt. Overall, that's usually a good thing. I'd rather worry about any occasion when someone didn't realise their error, or didn't correct it and write it up in case they got into trouble (or the papers)...

Crikey what a day. I thought I could walk to my chemist and back within an hour, how wrong was I!? I am late, sorry, but only a bit. I will be back on Friday (hopefully on time). Take care of yourself - be kind to all humans...

Some people. They look like numbers, but they are all people:

Countries / Cases / Losses of life (since midnight GMT. In larger countries, such as the USA and India, some states /provinces have yet to report today):

Germany 5,463,131 (+44,450) 100,088 (+271)

UK 9,932,408 (+42,484) 144,137 (+165)

Russia 9,400,835 (+33,996) 266,579 (+1,243)

Netherlands 2,488,244 (+22,956) 19,048 (+53)

Poland 3,377,698 (+19,936) 81,228 (+398)

Czechia 2,018,069 (+14,480) 32,304 (+51)

Belgium 1,623,560 (+14,338) 26,669 (+35)

Ukraine 3,353,136 (+12,729) 82,318 (+720)

Italy 4,942,135 (+10,047) 133,330 (+67)

Austria 1,079,932 (+9,513) 12,114 (+72)

Greece 894,555 (+8,100) 17,517 (+92)

Spain 5,103,315 (+6,777) 87,866 (+34)

Slovakia 621,423 (+6,739) 13,985 (+66)

Hungary 1,032,215 (+6,518) 33,343 (+171)

USA 48,754,985 (+6,428) 794,965 (+101)

Iran 6,088,009 (+5,144) 129,177 (+132)

Sources:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus

https://twitter.com/PippaCrerar/status/1462728617662812160

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-loses-place-rambles-25515669

https://www.cbi.org.uk/events/annual-conference-2021/

https://twitter.com/i/events/1462882080610787329

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n385

https://www.who.int/news/item/23-11-2021-who-issues-guidelines-on-the-treatment-of-children-with-multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-associated-with-covid-19

https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/resources/paediatric-multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-temporally-associated-covid-19-pims-guidance

https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/conditions-and-treatments/conditions-we-treat/paediatric-inflammatory-multisystem-syndrome-pims/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(20)30304-7/fulltext

https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n385

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surveillance

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

https://twitter.com/i/events/1463093963963908098

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-covid-warning-vaccination-death-b1962094.html

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-11-22/germans-to-be-vaccinated-recovered-or-dead-in-months-health-minister-warns

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-covid-warning-vaccination-death-b1962094.html

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-11-22/ever-been-to-peppa-pig-world-pm-stumbles-through-bizarre-cbi-speech

https://twitter.com/i/events/1462702086123053056