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[martinuzz]

Our government has ordered the hospitals to scale down and cancel regular care. Only emergencies can be treated.
Our ICUs are only half full, but, despite pretty extensive lockdown measures, the number of infections is still rising, and more and more corona patients are admitted to the hospitals.
The shortage to be hit soon is not in ICU capacity, but in medical staff capacity. More and more medical professionals are on sick leave, they are becoming burned out from a year of corona care (or caught corona themselves).

It's worrisome though that despite severe lockdown, the R number isn't going down.  Last week, we had 70000 new cases detected (most of those didn't need hospital but still).

This is so different from our first wave and first lockdown, when we got down from 1100 to 0 patients on ICU in about 5 weeks.
And I don't really understand what's so different now. Our current lockdown is more extensive. During our first lockdown, we didn't even wear masks or close retail stores...

Our schools and universities are closed, all public places are closed, all non-essential stores are closed, coming together with more than 2 people is forbidden, facemasks are mandatory (but if anything, since they are made mandatory by law, infection rates are going back up. It looks like facemasks have a pretty big net negative influence on virus spread. R was going down until facemasks became mandatory. Perhaps because people stopped washing hands and being generally more careless when wearing a mask, thinking it is enough protection).

My best guess is that the autumn and winter seasons are really a better habitat for the virus.

[Starver]

My guess is that the Lockdown One era was still benefitting from it mostly only being sparse hotspots of discovered/undiscovered infection, so lockdown-beating leakage was from just a small wavefront of hotspot edges where it wasn't sufficiently locked-down either by legislation or adherence to legislation.

But once we unlockedup somewhat and got back into a situation of free(er)-association the potential rolling waves picked up steam and found inroads into far more 'mutually isolated' groupings so that by this point of Lockdown Two it has have inculcated much more forward-edge.

(Imagine a circle. Double the area, you only √2 the circumference. Let the original circle spawn a new circle of the original size you double both and the potential rate is more per current incidence. Or else consider it a fractal surface, where the 'crinkles' at the resolution of the smallest unit of infection are more significant.)

Also, "Survivor Fallacy". The number of people who never saw how lucky they were before ("We locked down, but I didn't catch anything, nor did anybody I know, so we only^[sic] had the pain of Lockdown") so are less likely to strictly adhere to various precautions (mandated or suggested) afterwards.


'Luckily', this won't go on forever. With no other changes (including vaccination, which is an additional and far more preferable limitation) eventually the cycle of increasing spottiness/crinkliness makes it less "much more infective edge in proportion" as the inspected spots properly link up and it becomes "much less infective edge in proportion" as the remaining intersticial unininfected spots shrink in size and quantity. Or topologically grow your fractalesque-crinkles around the sphere of humanity, at some point it'll have around half the area under its influence and any advance reduces the potential rate of gain on the boundless but finite area surface.


Vaccines of course spot similar (but not naturally spreading[1]) polkadots of areas-of-denial for the virus (hopefully) with all the gain of no longer being newly infectible, as per those already touched by the Real Thing™ (hopefully!) without the pain of the actual death/other life-limiting effects.


[1] Until someone designs a "just-live-enough" virus to spread itself but only induce protective responses against both it and the original, without the harm. Well, that's been done with computer viruses; worms that used the self-same code exploit to get into systems vulnerable to another extant worm and auto-patching the vulnerability away (and sometimes disabling the original infection/results if it found it already visited), but even that tended to be highly problematic and I've never seen it been done without sparking further problems. ((Heck, even non-viral 'official system updates' automatically rolled out by the vendor to deal with a newly discovered vector has caused problems to people from stopping legitimate co-software working, without notice, to totally bricking devices.)) I am fairly sure no biologist with any integrity at all would currently think it's a good idea to release an actual biological "anti-virus virus" into the wild.

[Caz]

And I don't really understand what's so different now.

Probably it's that new much easily transmissable strain that Westminster shat a brick over. Apparently it's been known since September, yet they only started lockdown because of it a few days ago

[MonkeyHead]

And I don't really understand what's so different now.

Probably it's that new much easily transmissable strain that Westminster shat a brick over. Apparently it's been known since September, yet they only started lockdown because of it a few days ago

My hunch is that those in power rolled with the assumption that existing protocols would act to contain it, ignoring the notions that...

a) It is more transmissible.

b) The existing protocols were not working.

Thats what you get though when a nation of morons elects a moron.

[Zangi]

Lots of wishful thinking, willful ignorance, and inaction.  Some of the themes of the year.

And the whole of China is still sitting pretty with low double digit infections per day.

[Starver]

Well, it's officially worldwide.

36 cases discovered at the Bernardo O'Higgins (yes, really!) research base in Antarctica, probably via resupply ships.

[MonkeyHead]

Its now literally following the exact playbook for winning Plague Inc - dump all points into transmission while trying not to become too deadly. We all know what comes next.

[Zangi]

Winning play is to infect the animals inheriting the world and not kill them in the process.

[King Zultan]

I thought the winning play was to kill everything, and leave the planet a barren lifeless ball of dirt.

[Egan_BW]

A curious game. The only winning move is to crack the planet open.

[dragdeler]

-

[Vector]

Easy paint vaccine red, make vaccine go vroom, praaagh tip: add squiggle with syringe make extra Rfuson. We need smash drivyboys and fly'yboys then gork and mork pleased and shaman invoke strength.

I didn't think I acquired a concussion lately but now I'm not so sure

[Frumple]

is no concussion, only waaagh

Though I guess orkz showing up would be one way to top covid in the last week or so of 2020. It'd also explain the functional plague worship we've seen out of a lot of folks; turns out it actually was nurgle and not just nergal getting some new traction in the new millennium! It wouldn't be reassuring at all but at least it'd make more sense

[martinuzz]

The mutated UK variant has reached as far as Japan. 5 Japanese travellers who returned from the UK were tested positive.
The Japanese government says it hopes to contain the spread of this more contagious variant through extensive contact research and quarantaine.

[Starver]

It's probably a useful metric to test the systems every country should have organised by now, even if they totally messed it up the first time round... And get a handle on what social vectors are active but can't be identified in the swamp of the current wash of older versions.

(And get ready for the variant that develops itself in direct competition to the initial vaccines. The UK/ZA ones are just more spready, no reason yet to believe they look different to a pre-trained immune system by pure chance.)