The UK government is doing a fine job with vaccinations, which started in December 2020 and really got up to speed in January 2021, averaging 2.5 million vaccinations per week. These appear to be driving down new infections (all data from Worldometers.info):
Slam dunk, you might think, 1-0 to the UK's strategy!
That is, until you look at daily new cases in other north European countries which have barely started with vaccinations. In these three countries, daily cases also peaked in late December or early January and have been falling since then. I am aware that you could also cherry pick countries which show a slightly different pattern, but that is not the point. More things for which there is no obvious explanation:
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Well yes and no - I don't think anyone is seriously using the decay in infection +ves as evidence of a vaccine effect.
What they are pointing out is things like the decline in the proportion of CV-19 hospital admissions amongst the groups vaccinated first and the decline in the proportion of ARIs in care homes as a proportion of the total.
Getting data on these for your comparator countries is hard work though.
AC, thanks. So it's the proportions that matter, not absolute numbers.
Evidence from India suggests that wearing glasses helps you avoid getting Covid:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9283471/Glasses-wearers-three-times-likely-catch-Covid-people-without-spectacles.html
RM, ISTR reading that about colds, too, another coronavirus, which suggests that a common transmission route is water droplets from nose or mouth into eyes.
Rm, that is genius. Although B's explanation of way makes more sense than 'touching your face less'. Surely, spec wearers touch their faces more often to adjust their specs?
Mark, if I am anything to go by, when I adjust my specs I only touch my specs, not my face.
Sweden's cases are in fact increasing, they have a statistical lag which means the last 10 days don't show increases.
Anyway probably all of this could have been avoided if governments had simply handed out free vitamin D, the latest trial from Spain showed those treated with calcifediol were 64% less likely to die vs the control group, and those with already higher levels in their blood were even less likely, another meta study showed those who took supplements were about 1/3 less likely to catch it in the first place.
T, I agree on Vitamin D. The whole thing is a mystery, this has been reasonably well know for decades, why didn't the govt push people to take it?
Sweden might veer off the path of falling cases again, that's not hte point. I just chose a few countries at random that appeared to show falling cases to highlight that the UK was not unusual.
Been taking supplements since the spring and advising others to do so, but I didn't imagine the effects would be nearly as strong as the latest data indicates.
There's an interview with David Davis on Dr Campbell's YouTube channel which is worth a watch, both have been pushing for more action on Vitamin D basically since the start. Davis's conclusion was not that there is some grand conspiracy but that the medical establishment is highly sceptical of the supplement industry, often with good reason, and this has led to inertia.
It is also overly tied to the double blind methodology even if that is and should remain the gold standard, the claim vs the many observable correlations regarding lower levels of the vitamin was always correlation doesn't prove causation, and to be fair with some logic, when you get a cold/flu it lowers your vit D which doesn't mean an initially lower lower vitamin D caused you to contact it or have a worse outcome, however it is now known the drop is not nearly enough to explain the entire correlation in patients.
Really though we know vitamin D is both very safe and cheap, unlike many vitamins you have to take a very large amount over a long period of time to get any toxicity so what would have been the worst if it didn't work re cov19? We end up with stronger bones and Holland and Barrett shares go up.
We sensibly rushed through vaccines, but dithered on D.
TS, I watch Dr John Campbell's videos nearly every day. It's part of my routine now. The Davis interview went on a bit too long and I only watched the first ten or fifteen minutes.
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