So when do you guys think that the first lockdown of 2021 will be?
I am guessing January 15/20ish?
Very early in Jan.
Last couple of days of 2020 is possible.
So when do you guys think that the first lockdown of 2021 will be?
I am guessing January 15/20ish?
It turns out they are just discussing stricter restrictions on the South East.It needs to happen , with hospital beds filling up rapidly it feels like we are just sleepwalking towards a disaster in all the four nations , whatever each nation has tried hasn`t worked and it just feels like we are coming to a critical point a lot of people seem hell bent on letting go for the week .
No chance. 28 soonest.I have a feeling we are going to go into lockdown again on stephens day, which would mean no free bank holiday this year, do ye think they will make one for July next year, if shit is somewhat under control at that time.
I wouldn’t be able to bite my tongue like you.
anonymous tip-off?
For the greater goodReport your mate. Nice.
Both my wife and me had the symptoms, I was ill 2-3 months ago and stayed at home for 14 days, and she had the symptoms 15ish days ago, and isolated and all, while living with me, sharing the table, bed, bathroom, and all the usual stuff, we haven't isolated from each other.
We were pretty sure it was Covid in both cases, so we did the antibodies testing today, and guess what? My wife has antibodies and is negative at the moment, and I don't have antibodies. How on earth is that possible?
Both my wife and me had the symptoms, I was ill 2-3 months ago and stayed at home for 14 days, and she had the symptoms 15ish days ago, and isolated and all, while living with me, sharing the table, bed, bathroom, and all the usual stuff, we haven't isolated from each other.
We were pretty sure it was Covid in both cases, so we did the antibodies testing today, and guess what? My wife has antibodies and is negative at the moment, and I don't have antibodies. How on earth is that possible?
Interesting, up to what level of crime would you refuse to report?Report your mate. Nice.
Interesting, up to what level of crime would you refuse to report?
Whats the likelihood of Boris actually cancelling Christmas now? I mean the 5 days he told everyone about.
Do you think he has it in him?
Whats the likelihood of Boris actually cancelling Christmas now? I mean the 5 days he told everyone about.
Do you think he has it in him?
Those are terrible figures. I hate to think what it'll be like around the middle of January.3,648 new cases of Covid in South Carolina today with a positive test rate of 25.9%.
One of the new cases is our governor’s wife. He had a press conference a few days ago where he bitched about all schools not being open full time yet, then told us we only have a couple hundred thousand doses of vaccine in the state, then told us to be sure to mask up. He and his wife were photographed 2 days later at a church service presenting an award to someone on stage... nobody in the whole shot wearing a mask and nobody socially distanced.
Christ. Grow up.Report your mate. Nice.
Ahhh, yes, those idiotic, ignorant rituals like having to go to church in order to ‘worship properly.’3,648 new cases of Covid in South Carolina today with a positive test rate of 25.9%.
One of the new cases is our governor’s wife. He had a press conference a few days ago where he bitched about all schools not being open full time yet, then told us we only have a couple hundred thousand doses of vaccine in the state, then told us to be sure to mask up. He and his wife were photographed 2 days later at a church service presenting an award to someone on stage... nobody in the whole shot wearing a mask and nobody socially distanced.
Look at where we are right now after a secular holiday. This upcoming religious holiday will be even worse, then top it off with the stupidity that will be evident over NYE.Those are terrible figures. I hate to think what it'll be like around the middle of January.
I personally don’t care as the travel restrictions have ruined Christmas and pretty much the whole year for me, but there’s just no chance. There would be riots.
Whats the likelihood of Boris actually cancelling Christmas now? I mean the 5 days he told everyone about.
Do you think he has it in him?
Why on earth would there be riots if Christmas is cancelled? To think like this is almost psychopathic.I personally don’t care as the travel restrictions have ruined Christmas and pretty much the whole year for me, but there’s just no chance. There would be riots.
Boris holding a press conference later today (don't know the time)
Travel ban to/from SE? Lockdown is SE?
Why on earth would there be riots if Christmas is cancelled? To think like this is almost psychopathic.
fecking skip a Christmas, it’s not like one is dying or contracting a disease that could kill them.
It’s selfishness, hubris, & narcissism like this that is keeping this pandemic virulent.
I suppose they can use the "new strain" as a way to update some of the rules over Christmas, thus avoiding having to admit that the original advice was premature and too generous. Though I'm not doubting the validity of any new strain.
I suppose they can use the "new strain" as a way to update some of the rules over Christmas, thus avoiding having to admit that the original advice was premature and too generous. Though I'm not doubting the validity of any new strain.
fixed that for you.We've not left the house in a week and were due to travel tomorrow. We're going no matter what they fecking announce
If i was beingcynicalright on the money, they rolled the dice purposely keeping restrictions low in December to support retail. The Tories will take a lot of flak for their handling of this and rightly so.
Well said. At the very least, use the cancellations to enforce the idea that change has to occur due to this virus. It’s laughably embarrassing & bereft of common sense to think that the world will be able to go back to what it was like circa 12.2019. It just won’t. There will be permanent changes in all aspects of world culture due to this, even if it is as simple as the covid vaccine becoming mandatory. But it’s going to be much more negatively impactful than that. To not engender people to this is a failure of governmental leaders, cultural leaders, & in this case, religious leaders. To think & demand that these silly rituals should & will continue unabated is a farce & plays to the weak minded among us.I do think it's also a bit weird given the UK is reasonably multicultural, so we already have best experience of how UK citizens experienced Eid, Diwali, etc.
We're much more adaptable than people intuitively believe. You'd think most of this year would be evidence enough of that but we just seem to screen that out. When they had to close the shops on the Golden Mile in Leicester, people just had to convince themselves that, yeah, while this is devastating for the economy and tragic for our community spirits, there is a bright side to it. Maybe a smaller, less commercial Diwali where we focus on our immediate family, and spend more time embracing the spiritual aspects of Diwali, that has its own special quality. We know next year people won't be saying that, it's just a welcome delusion, the simplest way to deal with the difficult reality. As much as this thread is a bit of a downer, generally speaking humans are overly optimistic more often than they're overly pessimistic. We do most things because we think something better will come from it, almost ubiquitously.
I really think we would have been better off doing that for Christmas too. I think people are going to be devastated by the impact of January. Most people are just focusing on the one aspect they care most about in the short-term, so the people who are most panicked about the rise in cases now are most conscious of the medical impacts. But the economic impacts will be devastating again too, and it's really not that clear to me that the social benefits of a big get-together for a few days will outweigh the complete shutdown of social contacts for a few weeks. It just doesn't seem to me that people are looking at the totality of these things.
Yeah. And while it's useful political cover, it probably does make some sections of the population more likely to accept the decision. The government have got plenty wrong but you can see there's constant consideration of the behavioural science sort of things in many of their decisions.
Little reason to think that a new strain will be less serious. A virus is out to better itself & to make itself more effective.I get the feeling the new strain is much more serious than they're letting on, sudden mass rising of cases in London indicates this but obviously a few weeks until we know if the death figures will significantly shoot up. Hopefully won't happen given they're already grim but would be final middle finger up to 2020 from this virus.
Well said. At the very least, use the cancellations to enforce the idea that change has to occur due to this virus. It’s laughably embarrassing & bereft of common sense to think that the world will be able to go back to what it was like circa 12.2019. It just won’t. There will be permanent changes in all aspects of world culture due to this, even if it is as simple as the covid vaccine becoming mandatory. But it’s going to be much more negatively impactful than that. To not engender people to this is a failure of governmental leaders, cultural leaders, & in this case, religious leaders. To think & demand that these silly rituals should & will continue unabated is a farce & plays to the weak minded among us.
We are approaching critical mass in many regions in my country after a pointless secular holiday was not skipped by millions. It will only get worse by potentially thousands of more deaths a day after this silly religious & capitalistic ritual of Christmas is adhered to due to selfishness, aggressive & willful ignorance, & narcissism.
Someone on here earlier stated that any increase in January cases / deaths will probably be blamed on NYE & I agree. The damage that the absurdity of of maintaining this silly christian & capitalistic ritual will be obfuscated time try to ensure the perpetuity of these ‘positive’ institutions, fairy tales that they really are. It’s just sad that common sense won’t come to the fore due to not wanting to alienate some even though more get alienated daily for numerous other reasons.
Little reason to think that a new strain will be less serious. A virus is out to better itself & to make itself more effective.
True re Eid and Diwali - but those to populations combined make up less than 8% of the UK Population.
Christmas rules may be largely adhered too, but you only need 1 in 5 to say bollocks, and that translates into much bigger numbers taking part in this potential super spreader event
What's the chance that this mutated strain has vaccine escape potential?
But sequencing data suggest that coronaviruses change more slowly than most other RNA viruses, probably because of a ‘proofreading’ enzyme that corrects potentially fatal copying mistakes. A typical SARS-CoV-2 virus accumulates only two single-letter mutations per month in its genome — a rate of change about half that of influenza and one-quarter that of HIV, says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Other genome data have emphasized this stability — more than 90,000 isolates have been sequenced and made public (see www.gisaid.org). Two SARS-CoV-2 viruses collected from anywhere in the world differ by an average of just 10 RNA letters out of 29,903, says Lucy Van Dorp, a computational geneticist at University College London, who is tracking the differences for signs that they confer an evolutionary advantage.
Despite the virus’s sluggish mutation rate, researchers have catalogued more than 12,000 mutations in SARS-CoV-2 genomes. But scientists can spot mutations faster than they can make sense of them. Many mutations will have no consequence for the virus’s ability to spread or cause disease, because they do not alter the shape of a protein, whereas those mutations that do change proteins are more likely to harm the virus than improve it (see ‘A catalogue of coronavirus mutations’). “It’s much easier to break something than it is to fix it,” says Hodcroft, who is part of Nextstrain, an effort to analyse SARS-CoV-2 genomes in real time.
...
The clearest sign that D614G has an effect on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in humans comes from an ambitious UK effort called the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, which has analysed genomes of around 25,000 viral samples. From these data, researchers have identified more than 1,300 instances in which a virus entered the United Kingdom and spread, including examples of D- and G-type viruses.
A team led by Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, epidemiologist Erik Volz, at Imperial College London, and biologist Thomas Connor at Cardiff University, studied the UK spread of 62 COVID-19 clusters seeded by D viruses and 245 by G viruses7. The researchers found no clinical differences in people infected with either virus. However, G viruses tended to transmit slightly faster than lineages that didn’t carry the change, and formed larger clusters of infections. Their estimates of the difference in transmission rates hover around 20%, Volz says, but the true value could be a bit higher or lower. “There’s not a large effect in absolute terms,” says Rambaut.
It’s possible that D614G is an adaptation that helps the virus to infect cells or compete with viruses that don’t carry the change, while altering little about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads between people or through a population, Rambaut says. “This might be a bona fide adaptation to humans or some human cells,” agrees Grubaugh, “but that doesn’t mean anything changes. An adaptation doesn’t have to make it more transmissible.”
Grubaugh thinks that D614G has received too much attention from scientists, in part because of the high-profile papers it has garnered. “Scientists have this crazy fascination with these mutations,” he says. But he also sees D614G as a way to learn about a virus that doesn’t have much in the way of genetic diversity. “The virologist in me looks at these things and says it would be a lot of fun to study,” he says. “It creates this whole rabbit hole of different things you can go into.”