Pubs opening July 4th - Gigs?

[paul_c2]

8 minutes ago, Greg Edwards69 said:

I also feel this affects rehearsals too. Singing involved sustained, raised voices. I'm not comfortable with the idea of sharing a grubby rehearsal room with 5 other people all from different households for 4 hours. 

Would you be comfortable to share a larger (so that everyone can be socially distanced, probably at 2m because the extra mitigations for 1m would be difficult) rehearsal venue, which was much cleaner (regularly cleaned) and has a Covid-specific risk assessment published and available for all to see? Because I think that's the reality - but its now up to venues to take those next steps (for rehearsals).

[PaulWarning]

8 minutes ago, TwoTimesBass said:

I wonder where showing live sports on a big screen sits with these guidelines? Can't imagine a local derby where everyone stays in their seats and doesn't raise their voice...

chatting the the landlord of my local yesterday, (it shows Sky sports) I said "opening up on July 4th then? he said "might wait till the 6th, Derby and Forest are playing on the 4th, not fair on the staff having to manage people while they're watching that"

[spectoremg]

3 hours ago, la bam said:

Anywho....... thinking laterally - why does live music have to be stuck in with drink and pubs? Remove those 2 obstacles and there will be plenty of options where to play.

That's a hell of an idea. 

Edited June 24, 2020 by spectoremg

[PaulWarning]

16 minutes ago, Greg Edwards69 said:

The guidance puts paid to any gigs, indoors or outdoors.  Part of the guidance is to reduce the risk of infection caused by people raising their voices, as this increased the chance of droplets/aerosols being spread.  This can happen indoors or outdoors.

I also feel this affects rehearsals too. Singing involved sustained, raised voices. I'm not comfortable with the idea of sharing a grubby rehearsal room with 5 other people all from different households for 4 hours. 

depends of attitude to risk, our rehearsal room is big enough to easily stay 2 metres apart, and it's people I know, I take the view that the risk is minimal, a lot safer than shopping in Tesco

[Chezz55]

1 hour ago, Chezz55 said:

Extract from https://www.gov.uk/guidance/working-safely-during-coronavirus-covid-19/the-visitor-economy   (Last sentence of paragraph following 'The 14 Steps That Will Usually Be Needed')

"At this time, venues should not permit indoor performances, including drama, comedy and music, to take place in front of a live audience."

Dammit.

Chris

 

17 minutes ago, Muppet said:

That's the summary guidance.

 

The detailed guidance is slightly different and is as follows

Objective: To maintain social distancing when providing entertainment within or outside restaurants, pubs, bars and similar venues that serve food or drink.

At this time, venues should not permit live performances, including drama, comedy and music, to take place in front of a live audience.

 

 

Thanks for the clarification Muppet, I missed that !

Chris

[Happy Jack]

6 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

Re figures - the 5% is probably not far off overall - antibody testing in my hospital has it slightly higher for staff, but as you would expect their risk of exposure is greater.

We still need to keep vigilant though

How reliable is that testing?

Not a provocative response by me ... I mean that as a genuine question.

I doubt that I'm up to speed on the latest in Covid-19 testing, but very little I've read or heard in the last month has suggested that the testing is anything other than patchy and unreliable.

 

[Muppet]

1 minute ago, Chezz55 said:

Thanks for the clarification Muppet, I missed that !

Your point is valid - there are two different versions of the guidelines!

[Cuzzie]

@chris_b herd immunity requires larger than 60%.

@fretmeister is correct in what he says about the vaccine. Immunity is a funny word, it’s not like diplomatic immunity where you can do what the eff you want and not pay the price, it does confer protection To a degree and would cause a mild illness instead of a bad one should re-infection occur with the same strain. Different strain could lead to different problems, I stopped counting when there were at least 21 variants.

Will it mutate, inevitably, but does not mean it will mutate and become über dangerous, although it is a possibility.

As @fretmeister also said there are some not nice complications of this people didn’t readily appreciate before but are now more so.

Back to its lifespan - simply put viruses are opportunistic and want to co-exist with us, if they are too effective and virulent they lose the host (tragically) therefore it needs to settle into its niche to live. This is some of the substance that the Italian professor was talking about when he said it is losing virulence if you caught out on the news. In our lifetime remember how awful Ebola and SARS was. It’s now settled - standard influenza kills.

It will no doubt stay here and unfortunately we may have a flu season, a Covid season etc. On the face of it, there is certainly nothing wrong in some of the lifestyle changes such as sanitisation, appropriate cough and sneeze capture technique, not struggling on and coming into work regardless etc.
 

Loads you can write on this.

Back To gigs - playing we’ll have to see for us lesser mortals but, proper bands, sing along wearing masks may be the thing - I’ll miss a mosh pit though, that will be ferrol

[Cuzzie]

11 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

How reliable is that testing?

Not a provocative response by me ... I mean that as a genuine question.

I doubt that I'm up to speed on the latest in Covid-19 testing, but very little I've read or heard in the last month has suggested that the testing is anything other than patchy and unreliable.

 

Testing for C-19 via the swab relies on the load of the virus (how much is present in the upper airways tract), and the operator hitting the right spot in the nose/mouth To pick it up, hence as many as a third can be unreliable.

Antibody test is a blood test and should be very very reliable, provided it’s not one of the dog plop ones On the market

Edited June 24, 2020 by Cuzzie

[Monkey Steve]

7 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

How reliable is that testing?

Not a provocative response by me ... I mean that as a genuine question.

I doubt that I'm up to speed on the latest in Covid-19 testing, but very little I've read or heard in the last month has suggested that the testing is anything other than patchy and unreliable.

 

having done a Covid-19 test in the last fortnight (negative - I have a chest infection) the test was only offered if I was within the first few days of experiencing symptoms. It is linked to Track and Trace, so the idea is to contact other who you have been in contact with before they start to show symptoms.  If you've had it for a week then it's to late and they're not fussed about testing you.

This is a slight movement from a couple of months back when a friend of mine definitely had it, but despite being very unwell indeed, was not ill enough to be taken in to hospital, and at that time they were only testing hospital admissions.  She she almost certainly doesn't appear in the statistics despite having had the disease.

[Cuzzie]

As a follow on, there of course will be false negatives in the antibody test - you could have had it sub clinically and not produced enough of an immune response to make it detectable on a test.

Broadly speaking when we have these test you look for reliability and specificity - you will only ever hit 99 % max - Tests made by Abbot and Roche are about the best out there - I think Oxford May use its own assay (rest) for the vaccine trial to keep results standard across liking how it works

[louisthebass]

2 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

 

It will no doubt stay here and unfortunately we may have a flu season, a Covid season etc. On the face of it, there is certainly nothing wrong in some of the lifestyle changes such as sanitisation, appropriate cough and sneeze capture technique, not struggling on and coming into work regardless etc.
 

Unfortunately, people will still go into work "under the weather" as a very large number of employers will not pay out for the first 1-3 days if employees go sick. I think this will be even more acute given current job losses and employees needing every penny they can get.... 

[Cuzzie]

Just now, louisthebass said:

Unfortunately, people will still go into work "under the weather" as a very large number of employers will not pay out for the first 1-3 days if employees go sick. I think this will be even more acute given current job losses and employees needing every penny they can get.... 

True - but what I/we hope is that (Job dependent) measures have been put in place to work from home And we now see this as a possibility.

Also can we work smarter - if someone had to leave the house and work, can it be done in as safe a way as possible

[louisthebass]

1 minute ago, Cuzzie said:

True - but what I/we hope is that (Job dependent) measures have been put in place to work from home And we now see this as a possibility.

Also can we work smarter - if someone had to leave the house and work, can it be done in as safe a way as possible

Yep, I don't think it's the work from home (office based) employees who have to worry so much as they can "suffer, work, and isolate" (so to speak even if it sounds a bit Draconian), it's the manual employees (manufacturing etc) who stand to suffer the most financially. I would hope that most employers in that particular field who would display some leniency in these difficult times towards their employees where sick pay is concerned.

[Cuzzie]

If anyone is interested in Vaccines - broadly speaking there are 4 types of vaccine, and depending on the organism the beat is chosen.

Live attenuated - MMR, nasal flu spray (Not injection)  - small portion of actual virus in a tiny quantity to stimulate to body to immunise itself - Can confer lifelong immunity (small pox, chicken pox etc.) - love vaccines have implications in that you need to keep away from vulnerable for a couple days after having it as you can pass it on.

Inactivated - Flu - 1 shot, linked to ‘current’ strain. The vaccine being worked on for C-19 is like this. They take an existing less harmful virus scaffold which is similar, add in the specific markers of C-19 and hopefully it works.

Subunit - Hep B - they take a bit of it and give it to you, these need to be topped up.

Toxoid - Tetanus - they take the toxin it makes and give that

Quick overview for any interested 

 

[Happy Jack]

12 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

Testing for C-19 via the swab relies on the load of the virus (how much is present in the upper airways tract), and the operator hitting the right spot in the nose/mouth To pick it up, hence as many as a third can be unreliable.

Understood, but where does that "as many as a third" stat come from? Have they done clinical testing on how many operator errors will be made by all those who may have to operate the testing kit? I rather suspect not, which translates as "that's yet another made-up stat".

11 minutes ago, Monkey Steve said:

having done a Covid-19 test in the last fortnight (negative - I have a chest infection) the test was only offered if I was within the first few days of experiencing symptoms. It is linked to Track and Trace, so the idea is to contact other who you have been in contact with before they start to show symptoms.  If you've had it for a week then it's to late and they're not fussed about testing you.

So no number of such tests run on me, for example, would ever know that I've had Covid-19. Which was pretty much my point.

8 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

As a follow on, there of course will be false negatives in the antibody test - you could have had it sub clinically and not produced enough of an immune response to make it detectable on a test.

Broadly speaking when we have these test you look for reliability and specificity - you will only ever hit 99 % max - Tests made by Abbot and Roche are about the best out there - I think Oxford May use its own assay (rest) for the vaccine trial to keep results standard across liking how it works

But "broadly speaking" is exactly what we DON'T want. What we want is accurate and specific testing for Covid-19, and the above responses offer little encouragement that any such test actually exists.

Please let me stress that I will be DELIGHTED to be proved wrong on this and on so much else besides, but I've spent my entire adult life calling it as I see it, and that's not about to change. I see NO evidence that we have ANY reliable testing, which means that we have NO idea how widespread Covid-19 now is in the UK population.

Can I use some MORE capitals yet?

 

[Cuzzie]

4 minutes ago, louisthebass said:

Yep, I don't think it's the work from home (office based) employees who have to worry so much as they can "suffer, work, and isolate" (so to speak even if it sounds a bit Draconian), it's the manual employees (manufacturing etc) who stand to suffer the most financially. I would hope that most employers in that particular field who would display some leniency in these difficult times towards their employees where sick pay is concerned.

I completely get that - but you would think in some areas, especially using machinery that can be harmful - they need to not be unwell, believe me I have seen consequences, even tiredness as a delivery/truck driver

[ClassicVibes]

6 minutes ago, Happy Jack said:

Understood, but where does that "as many as a third" stat come from? Have they done clinical testing on how many operator errors will be made by all those who may have to operate the testing kit? I rather suspect not, which translates as "that's yet another made-up stat".

So no number of such tests run on me, for example, would ever know that I've had Covid-19. Which was pretty much my point.

But "broadly speaking" is exactly what we DON'T want. What we want is accurate and specific testing for Covid-19, and the above responses offer little encouragement that any such test actually exists.

Please let me stress that I will be DELIGHTED to be proved wrong on this and on so much else besides, but I've spent my entire adult life calling it as I see it, and that's not about to change. I see NO evidence that we have ANY reliable testing, which means that we have NO idea how widespread Covid-19 now is in the UK population.

Can I use some MORE capitals yet?

 

DM poster confirmed. 

[Monkey Steve]

30 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

Back to its lifespan - simply put viruses are opportunistic and want to co-exist with us, if they are too effective and virulent they lose the host (tragically) therefore it needs to settle into its niche to live. This is some of the substance that the Italian professor was talking about when he said it is losing virulence if you caught out on the news. In our lifetime remember how awful Ebola and SARS was. It’s now settled - standard influenza kills.

It will no doubt stay here and unfortunately we may have a flu season, a Covid season etc. On the face of it, there is certainly nothing wrong in some of the lifestyle changes such as sanitisation, appropriate cough and sneeze capture technique, not struggling on and coming into work regardless etc.
 

I'll apologise in advance if this sounds a little heartless - I say nothing about the human tragedy of current events, and what follows shouldn't be taken as me saying that I don't care, it's purely about the numbers and the risks...It also takes us further off topic, so again, apologies

I was on a mortality webinar a couple of weeks ago (for work - I'm a pensions manager and life expediencies and mortality rates have a huge impact on pension funding) and the somewhat surprising message is that nothing much has changed.  While 40,000+ people have died of Covid-19 so far,  that's against an expected rate of death of about 500,000 over the same period.  While they wouldn't have been expected to die of this new disease, most of the deaths are those who were at risk of dying from something else to begin with.  Obviously there are exceptions and otherwise healthy people have died, but they are exceptions.  There is a slight increase against the expected number of deaths, but not a statistically significant one, and the potential reduction in life expectancy has to be set against the steady increase in life expectancy over the last few decades - as things stand we might be knocked back to life expectancy from around ten years ago, but there has only been a marginal increase over the last decade. 

The data is emerging to show a correlation between Covid deaths and economically deprived areas, which are acknowledged to already have a link to poorer health and shorter life expediencies than wealthier areas.  As a Type 1 Diabetic I should probably be worried that diabetics make up an alarmingly large number of the Covid deaths (although that seems to relate to poorly controlled diabetes rather than diabetics per se) and the spike in Covid deaths in the BAME community looks heavily linked to the high incidence of diabetes in the South Asian population

The quote I remember was "it's not the black death - the overwhelming majority of people who get Covid-19 will not die from it".  Obviously that doesn't take away from the risk to vulnerable people

Of course there are a number of factors at play here -for instance, deaths from car crashes is almost certainly down over the same period.  This will play out for a long time to come

Edited June 24, 2020 by Monkey Steve

[Happy Jack]

6 minutes ago, ClassicVibes said:

DM poster confirmed. 

???

[ClassicVibes]

Just now, Happy Jack said:

???

Notorious for using capitals in the middle of their sentences. 

[Cuzzie]

1 minute ago, Happy Jack said:

Understood, but where does that "as many as a third" stat come from? Have they done clinical testing on how many operator errors will be made by all those who may have to operate the testing kit? I rather suspect not, which translates as "that's yet another made-up stat".

So no number of such tests run on me, for example, would ever know that I've had Covid-19. Which was pretty much my point.

But "broadly speaking" is exactly what we DON'T want. What we want is accurate and specific testing for Covid-19, and the above responses offer little encouragement that any such test actually exists.

Please let me stress that I will be DELIGHTED to be proved wrong on this and on so much else besides, but I've spent my entire adult life calling it as I see it, and that's not about to change. I see NO evidence that we have ANY reliable testing, which means that we have NO idea how widespread Covid-19 now is in the UK population.

Can I use some MORE capitals yet?

 

When I say broadly speaking in this context it’s without getting into the exact details scientifically of the process, statistical evaluation, research phases from animal through to human trials etc.

So here we go (no capitals!) Its an absolute - the Best test will only be 99% specific and 99% sensitive - end of, there will always be error - that figure is acceptable. You can accept less if that’s the best you can do, but that caveats any decision you make in treating people clinically. As it stands Abbot and Roche are leading which is why I stated it incase people felt they wanted a ‘private’ antibody test and bought a crock of poo one and wasted their money.

If you had the antibody test which is a blood test where they spin it down and look for the antibodies to the specific C-19 spike proteins, and they can do all kinds of things like PCR, check immune markets etc if they want, but essentially they check to see if your body has mounted some form of response to the infection as it keeps a copy of it for future use, you can be very confident if negative that you haven’t had it. That doesn’t mean that you cannot get it again or carry it, but it means you have had it - that test is reliable. Also you do have to wait a period of time for the antibodies to be made and saved, so potentially you could test too early, or like I said have levels too low to measure hence 99%

The swab in some respects is like playing battleships - but it’s currently all we have as you have to wait to produce antibodies. 
 

Re false negatives on swabbing and the actual figure - I cannot remember where I read it, but it is up to a third by all accounts and that’s based on what I have read as well as practical experience in the NHS.

So to conclude - you have to separate swab testing for current disease from antibody testing for having had it disease.

[Happy Jack]

1 minute ago, ClassicVibes said:

Notorious for using capitals in the middle of their sentences. 

Who are? What are you talking about?

 

[louisthebass]

10 minutes ago, Cuzzie said:

I completely get that - but you would think in some areas, especially using machinery that can be harmful - they need to not be unwell, believe me I have seen consequences, even tiredness as a delivery/truck driver

Agree 100% with your point here, and I think that is where employers in "manual" trades (I know that's a pretty broad term) should be treating their most valuable assets (employees) interests as a priority. I feel it's better for them to "take a hit financially" by paying sick pay, rather than risking a Health & Safety penalty which could be huge.

[Beedster]

3 hours ago, bertbass said:

No singing allowed in venues, churches and theatres as it's more likely to spread the virus.

....or music sufficiently loud to cause people in the venue to have to raise their voices apparently. A low volume Shadows tribute act might have a chance, but that would of course deter the clientele