And on another point that was raised, the care shambles continues.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56112622
If people are being told they can't do things with the force of the law behind that then these fuckers should be given the ultimatum of have the vaccine or get another job, with immediate effect.
In better news, the Daily Mail are running with the government suggesting that 40-49 year olds will be offered their first jab as soon as March.
Who's laughing at my age/zimmerframe now.
On the downside, it'll be some sort of sick joke if I still can't fucking do anything having been vaccinated.
Strong series of posts
The care home stuff is just the ethnics at it again, isn't it?
I don’t know why it didn't occur to me earlier - presumably because my mind had been fucked in a way that it hasn't been in years - but the obvious come back to a nonsense statement like "the unvaccinated don't need to be released from lockdown" is "Neither do the vaccinated".
If freedom is to be treated so flippantly, then nobody needs freedom.
You need bread. You need water. You need oxygen. Welcome Chairman 7om.
Last edited by Spikey M; 19-02-2021 at 07:29 AM.
Frozen dinners latest:
Based on my lived experience I find this genuinely incredible. Is it because I live alone? Is it because I have a life? I don't even have THAT much of a life normally. Is it because they're loving furlough?When do you think people from different households should be allowed to meet again?
Immediately 7%
Sometime in March 18%
Sometime in April 22%
Sometime in May 18%
Sometime in June or later 26%
Don’t know 10%
I just don't understand it.
Maybe they only poll absolute losers.
Those picking ‘I don’t know’ should be banned from ever receiving the vaccine.
I'm a twit
When I wrote that post I meant it literally, as it was in response to Spikey questioning why we hadn’t shut down hospitals yet.
When I say ‘need’, I mean it in the same sense that you need to drink water to stay alive. If you don’t drink you’ll die. What I meant was that people will not (necessarily) die if we force them to stay home via lockdown, but people will definitely die if we shut hospitals, like Spikey intimated.
Regarding the impact of the vaccine, we are nowhere near the point where it will protect enough people. And no, I’m not saying we wait 6 months. I’ve never said that. What I’m saying is we must continue lockdown until we reach two milestones: 1) we get case numbers down to levels where test and trace can adequately function. I don’t know exactly what that number is but I would imagine it would have to be below 1,000. And 2) all people over 60 and those with underlying health conditions are vaccinated.
You start opening up society before then and cases will skyrocket, just like they have after every other time we’ve released people.
I know you don’t like the variant talk, but it is a worry. You let tens of thousands walk around with this you are just begging for it to happen and then we are in the shit.
Last edited by 7om; 19-02-2021 at 08:26 AM.
72% of BAME "unlikely" to get the vaccine.
Fuck me.
Not true
Lots of things are a worry. Earthquakes are a worry, cancer is a worry, climate change is a worry. We don't use authoritarian measures to shut the world down for them outwith the immediate killing zone, and we shouldn't for this either. If a vaccine resistant killer variant develops (vanishingly unlikely, from what I've read) we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
What makes the release from this lockdown any different to the one last summer? Don’t say ‘because old people have been vaccinated’. That wouldn’t be a reasonable argument.
Those comparisons to COVID are ridiculous, but I think you probably know that. If one bloke gets cancer that is a whole different ball game to one person getting COVID and coughing in a room of people.
I also wish people would stop extrapolating my arguments and then criticising them. I haven’t said the worry is of a killer variant. All we need is enough of a mutation to bring the vaccine efficacy down and all our hard work has gone to shit. Do you believe that possibility is ‘vanishingly unlikely’? I don’t. I think keeping case numbers consistently in the thousands makes it increasingly likely.
Have you looked at what actually happened last summer? We started releasing some restrictions from May (outdoor meeting / recreation in limited numbers was allowed, for example). First it was two people and then it went to six. Non-essential shops and garden gatherings opened from I think June. Hospitality came back in July along with larger (but not mass) indoor and outdoor gatherings being allowed. Cases fell until July, remained very low until mid September and only then rose (if you look at the variant timelines, I'm fairly convinced this was due to other variants coming back from European holidays). So the oft quoted idea that cases 'skyrocketed' as soon as any restrictions were lifted is, if I may use the phrase, complete bollocks.
Armed with the vaccines, a similar type of schedule (but obviously several months ahead in the year) should be the least of our ambitions.
Those comparisons are not to Covid, they are to the possibility of the emergence of a vaccine-resistant Covid variant of considerable severity. Given that we know that the existing vaccines are highly effective against severe disease in all known variants (and that they are highly effective against everything in almost all variants), this is not a risk for which we should curtail freedoms.
They are good comparisons imo. We could ban lots of things to protect people from cancer. We could shut down Naples and move them all to Norway. But we don't, because a certain amount of risk MUST be accepted in human society. So it is with Covid variants.
The post summer bump could also have something to do with Eat out to Help Out. The main thing about the current lockdown is how occupied the hospitals are. That will take a month to come down, maybe more. If politicians want this to the be the last lockdown, you have to royally stamp it down.
It’s the schools and somewhat uni. Scotland didn’t have any deaths for weeks and barely any cases throughout when the pubs opened. Only increased again in September. Open the pubs
I think what everyone is trying to say is:
Don't look back. That's not the way we're headed.
What's the worst thing you would do to get out of lockdown?
I would have sucked a dick to avoid the last 12 months. I can't imagine the long term mental scars would be any worse.
Pretty low bar imo.
If we are relying on track and trace as a metric for escape we are struggling.
I imagine a lot of the younger generation aren’t bothering with having it , and the older ones will become bias to ignoring it and not knowing so they can keep going with what they need to do.
I don’t have the app, and I won’t ever get it.
To chime in a little also, if the steer of “the vaccinated can do what they want but you can’t” becomes the norm I all but guarantee the majority of 16-28 year olds completely ignore that.
The police will either be fining them all, or turning a blind eye. Selective enforcement will not work.
Last edited by Foe; 19-02-2021 at 10:15 AM.
I imagine it would be more like 16 - anyone who isn't vaccinated and isn't a sap.
That wouldn't work for me. Get me in an Airport Lounge and it's all aboard the Felching Boat though.
I've had a quick Google but I can't find the testing capacity numbers back then but I don't think they were anywhere near what we have now. Hospitalisations, on the other hand, began rising again in late August. Why do you think that might be?
On these points we don't know the efficacy of the vaccines versus the variants. Very little of that has gone through peer-review and publication. We have absolutely no data on how the vaccines handle the transmissabilty of the variants, which is exactly what I am worried about. I don't give a shit about mild-moderate disease.Those comparisons are not to Covid, they are to the possibility of the emergence of a vaccine-resistant Covid variant of considerable severity. Given that we know that the existing vaccines are highly effective against severe disease in all known variants (and that they are highly effective against everything in almost all variants), this is not a risk for which we should curtail freedoms.
They are good comparisons imo. We could ban lots of things to protect people from cancer. We could shut down Naples and move them all to Norway. But we don't, because a certain amount of risk MUST be accepted in human society. So it is with Covid variants.
And I agree will will have to accept a degree of risk in future. I can't see us eradicating this.
The problem here is that your default position is that we should extend lockdown until we are absolutely certain, just in case, which is not a humane one and even in a world where it does save lives otherwise lost to Covid, unfortunately those are not the only concern. There will also be a massive Pandora's Box of unintended consequences.
Things always end up like this when I get into debates with scientists. There is such a massive difference between the way scientists think and the way a politics grad / salesman like me would think, for you it's about being sure and doing things carefully and methodically; for me it's a real world results business, I don't give a fuck what is or isn't peer reviewed, if it looks pretty good then let's run with it. And these vaccines look pretty good.
That's why peer review exists. Because you have the dishonest twats who run the media will not (read: can not) report science to save their lives. Until proven otherwise I believe we need to assume the vaccine does not stop transmission and unfortunately that equates to continued lockdown.
I don't want this long term. Get the over-60s done and get case numbers down and I'll join you in asking for easing.
Peer review exists so bored scientists can argue over trivialities for decades.
(I know what the purpose of it is, but that's what becomes of it)
How the beach 'super-spreader' myth can inform UK's future Covid response
They were images that seemed to define a hot, febrile, and dangerous summer: massed ranks of daytrippers swamping Britain’s beaches, making the most of the June sunshine after months of restrictions – and, some front pages suggested, creating an appalling risk of coronavirus infection.
Eight months later, the headlines tell a different story: there was no real danger at all.
According to Prof Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at Edinburgh University who sits on the government’s SPI-M committee, the chance of a super-spreader event among the crowds that turned up from Bournemouth to Southend was minimal in theory – and nonexistent in practice.
“Over the summer we were treated to all this on the television news, pictures of crowded beaches, and there was an outcry about this,” he told MPs. “There were no outbreaks linked to public beaches. There’s never been a Covid-19 outbreak linked to a beach, ever, anywhere in the world, to the best of my knowledge.”
If that version of events seems at odds with stern warnings from the health secretary, Matt Hancock, that outdoor exercise could be banned, and an accusation that sunbathers were putting lives at risk, it is wholly consistent with the scientific evidence, other experts agree.
“We have known for some time that only about 10% of transmission events are linked to outdoor activities,” said Dr Müge Çevik, a lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St Andrews.
“Even those events generally involve either prolonged close contact or a mixture of indoor and outdoor time. We had a lot of existing knowledge even when the pandemic began about respiratory viruses and how they transmit in general, and everything directs us to the conditions in people’s homes and workplaces.”
Nobody disputes that there were some possible knock-on risks during the heatwave, on crowded trains or overused toilets – and the traffic jams and litter the crowds brought had a very real effect on local residents’ quality of life.
Still, reality was never quite as apocalyptic as the telephoto lens pictures which appeared to show a sea of humanity all but on top of each other – in fact, for the most part, just a trick of perspective.
Instead, some suggest, Woolhouse’s intervention is a reminder that the narrative propagated in parts of the media about the daytrippers had some of the qualities of a moral panic.
Woolhouse, for his part, has been taken by surprise by the interest in his comments – which he presumed to be a statement of a generally understood fact.
“This is not a subtle picture,” he said. “The published studies were already quite clear at the time … but after the reaction to my comment I am now concerned that this is not fully understood and maybe this is something the politicians do need to factor more into their thinking. As they make their plans to get us out of this, maybe they do need to be reappraised of where the risks really lie.”
To Vikki Slade, the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council leader for the Lib Dems who was ousted a few months later by the Conservatives, Woolhouse’s evidence is a bitterly ironic reminder of the difficulties she and her colleagues faced. “We were under siege,” she said. “I was working all hours, I had satellite trucks lined up outside my house for interviews. It felt like the world had come to Bournemouth.”
With the media spotlight simply intensifying local anger, “we were trying to balance the message that there was no evidence that large numbers of people coming to the beach presented a risk, but there was a negative impact on the local community in terms of their fear and perception of harm. And we just had insufficient resources to deal with the influx. But there was not a danger around the virus – it was the arrival of so many people into a small area without enough facilities open to deal with them.”
Lucy Yardley, a professor of health psychology at the University of Southampton who sits on Sage, suggested that the government must learn the lessons from last summer’s debacle – and bear in mind that if people are barred from congregating outside, they are more likely to do so indoors, where the risks are greater.
“It’s a really important message, and this is the right time to push it home,” she said. “The difference between indoor and outdoor is huge. Every report about restrictions and enforcement focused on outdoor contacts distracts from the places where the transmission is really happening.”
To Çevik, the hysteria over the beach gatherings in some quarters was, above all, evidence of how dislocated some pockets of social media users are from the reality of about 15 million people who are still going to work every day. “Low-income families have been working throughout this pandemic, and they are much more likely to live in overcrowded housing,” she said. “If you live in a big house and order everything on Amazon, you might be shocked by those images. But they’re missing the bigger picture.”
Yeah, but the problem is that science is about process but governance is about decision-making. If you hand either one over to the clutches of the other then it fucks everything up.
I was told yesterday only 30% of eligible healthcare workers in the biggest hospital conglomerate in the region signed up for the vaccine.
30%. These are doctors nurses radiologists you know anybody in the hospital lol
Oh! And that 30% was actually high!!! We have the highest region!! Lmao
God bless Florida.
We've done first jabs on almost every hospital worker.
I've read that niko article and signed up for a game of 5-a-side tomorrow. Fuck it.
Can't wait to lockdown all summer only for Bruh to visit with the Florida VARIANT.
yea there’s no way this ever ends.
Cheer up Yev mate
I'm a twit
If they don't announce some kind of relaxation on outdoor sports and recreation in Boris's unlock speech next week, it's going to be pretty outrageous.
Last year the following was relaxed on 13 May with reported deaths at a rolling average of 368.3 We're currently at 551.5 and falling fast (was 750+ a week ago), so all these should be allowed within 1-2 weeks imo:
From today, people are allowed to spend more time outdoors
They will be able to go to parks and beaches to sunbathe, have a picnic and go fishing
Outdoor sports courts can reopen, including tennis and basketball courts as well as golf courses
People will also be able to see one person from another household, as long as they follow social distance guidance
This follows scientific advice that the risk of infection outside is significantly lower than inside
All of the new regulations are subject to social distancing rules
Some more things.
"We absolutely can't afford another lockdown, so we mustn't relax this one too soon"
I'm increasingly seeing this and err, they're the same thing.
"Numbers must be reduced until test and trace can cope with it"
Test and trace has never coped, it's useless and we're useless at it.
"Variants"
Variants will be everywhere, absolutely everywhere. We know about some. If we're genuinely worried about them close the borders properly and close them now. I know we can grow them, but if we're waiting for point 2 to be enacted then why would we let any others in.
International travel is the lowest of low hanging fruit and should probably be restricted all year, and I say this as someone with parents who live abroad.
I can't imagine many of us disagree there.
The Niko article
Pull up the pages of the thread where we discussed the Bournemouth/Sydney/etc beach pics and publically humiliate every cretin that said a bad word about man enjoying mother nature in the most natural of acts.
My short and long-term recall is fully burned out thanks to this so I will be sweating I am not one of said cretins.
That article is from the fearmonger generals at the Grauniad as well.
It's before we knew better to be fair. Anyone still panicking about passing someone in the street needs help though.
I still remember holding the door open for a woman at a shop and having her look at me like I was a dangerous lunatic, before saying "no, it's ok" and letting the door shut in her face so she could open it herself.
OTT Feminist or OTT Team Panic member. TTH decides.
I've found a post from 25 June where I lol at those thinking that there would be outbreaks on beaches, although further down the same page I also say the government will never impose another lockdown because it's too costly, so yeah.
Responsible citizen