I appreciate it. Now on to try and kick this thing’s ass.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
Boris is just wasting valuable time by not enforcing a lockdown now. Absolute cnut.
Watching the broadcast of the cricket in New Zealand & it’s like they’re living in an alternate reality. Stadium full, no masks, no social distancing... enjoying life & they’ll get their population vaccinated. I wish we had that leadership here.
Watching the broadcast of the cricket in New Zealand & it’s like they’re living in an alternate reality. Stadium full, no masks, no social distancing... enjoying life & they’ll get their population vaccinated. I wish we had that leadership here.
Amen Brother.
This somewhat sums up the problem with how things are currently being managed. Despite tiers 3 and 4, we’re still not even close to what a full lockdown was like in April.
It is that and general complacency. Must admit I hate leaving the house now. Complacency is everywhere. Supermarkets letting a lot of people in and a good 40% of people aren’t even wearing a mask covering their nose. Delivery drivers all happy to hand parcels over and stand at door again. Basic messaging has been lost.
If people in the UK think we’re already being tough in our approach to the virus, we all need a rethink.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
It is that and general complacency. Must admit I hate leaving the house now. Complacency is everywhere. Supermarkets letting a lot of people in and a good 40% of people aren’t even wearing a mask covering their nose. Delivery drivers all happy to hand parcels over and stand at door again. Basic messaging has been lost.
If people in the UK think we’re already being tough in our approach to the virus, we all need a rethink.
It's looking at what should have been. Fair play to the Kiwis but we should have been more decisive.
Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
Tbf, in one sense that's a very flat curve.
get well soon mate
It's pretty clear just taking a standard walk how the mood has shifted. During the first lockdown the roads were practically dead, right now there's a steady stream of traffic where I live and it's been that way for a while. The sense of fear that was palpable in April does not exist anymore, I think people see other people flouting rules and feel emboldened to do so themselves. We appear to be in a worse situation than we did in April and I think the Government should be conveying that better, the difference now is we have vaccines being rolled out. Surely it cannot be hard to sell people on being super responsible for 2 more months or whatever after everything we've been through?
It would be very easy to sell this if the government didn't contradict itself at every moment. There should be a March-style lockdown with only the most essential services still operating. Anything short of that is on the government.
Thanks fellas
The government has thrown the entire teaching profession under the bus. I’ve witnessed concern, anger and anxiety across entire organisations today as individual teachers, TAs, cleaners, admin and caterers have been forced into making an individual choice that was completely and utterly avoidable. Many of us have been told to inform leadership of our intention to enact Section 44 of the health and safety regulations. Even then, guidance differs from union to union.
The school you mention has (likely) only issued communication to parents now because it has been forced into a position in which it can no longer safely care for your child due to staff absence.
I’m attending work tomorrow and feel dejected and ashamed. I am not vulnerable and neither is my household. But I’m either letting down my colleagues who are in difficult situations, or I’m letting down the pupils and parents of those who wish their child to attend. Our school has already issued the decision to remain open to parents and that has come in for criticism. The decision to close the school would come in for criticism, too.
The government has completely failed in their ability to govern on schools and the pupils, parents and staff are paying the price (both physically and mentally). I don’t know how these bastards sleep at night. If you need to project your anger anywhere, please direct it towards said bastards.
On a side note, home learning provision in primary schools should have significantly improved by now. You may find that it improves this time around, as further closures are clearly in the pipeline.
Really I don't know enough about the school system to know what they are / aren't capable of, but from the one friend I have that teaches secondary school in Dagenham, there was no hope they would have the resources for kids to be taught online, nor any belief that the majority of the kids would have the appetite to learn remotely if resources were available.
It doesn't seem that implausible to me that they looked at the options in the summer and came to the realisation that all the issues raised about the public education system for years before covid were very real, and very limiting. So rather than crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, they realised they were stuck between a rock and a hard place: no real education, or no possibility to crush the curve with schools open. And there was no shortage of evidence on the huge risks to children's development without proper education for a long time.
Boris' interview today suggested to me that they had no intention to match the results of March, which probably explains all the rest. We committed to suppression then, now we're in mitigation with a high tolerance for community transmission and a willingness to let hospitals reach their absolute capacities. Which is what Boris wanted to do at the beginning of March before the mad scramble, which mostly followed from some worst-case scenarios in the modelling that were a lot worse than we now believe possible.
Closing schools and the other essential services were only tolerable as a temporary choice when we had no testing capacity, had a lot of flimsy models of virus transmission and we didn't know the effects of public health measures or the degree of compliance that would follow. Now we have clearer ideas on that we don't need to take such severe measures, because we don't think proactively crushing the curve for a limited period of time is a worthwhile sacrifice for the economic and social damage that comes with it. This was the most honest thing he's said in a while (at 51 mins):
So I agree with you that we haven't done enough to match what happened in March, but I don't think that was because they hadn't thought about it and just hoped for the best. They just accepted worse public health outcomes than you (or presumably anyone in the NHS, along with huge swathes of society) would have accepted. But then he pays attention to what folks in The Telegraph and the like say. They think he's still doing too much harm to the economy by taking these public health measures.Boris Johnson said:
We definitely know that the worse strain was in most parts of the country pre-Christmas, we know a lot more of it was spread around the country from people jumping on trains from St Pancras to Leeds and the like, and we have every reason to expect the spread accelerated around various communities during Christmas mingling. So I'm not saying the issue is exclusively limited to London or that we should expect it to remain that way. It's just that the government currently hopes it hasn't spread as badly as many fear, and that extreme containment measures in the South East can hold it back somewhat while Tier 4 measures in other areas cut the chains of transmission early enough that things won't get out of control there too.
If that isn't the case, they'll have another haphazard national lockdown because their current mitigation plan goes out the window in that scenario. They're just desperately clinging to the belief that this worst-case scenario hasn't materialised, and they can hobble by until mass vaccination starts having an effect. They will only accept that worst-case scenario once the data confirms it, which inevitably comes with a time lag. We don't really know what proportion of new cases are the new strain in e.g. Newcastle right now, and won't for a little while. I wouldn't take the same position but I can understand the motivation behind it.
My uncle who is a doctor in the UK just tested positive after being vaccinated one week ago. Major bad luck with the timing.
Get well mate
Not your biggest fan but wish you a speedy recovery
5000 cases in Ireland. Shit hitting the fan.
Look after yourself CR.
Hope you both get well soon mate, chin up
Depending when he got infected vs when he was vaccinated it might lessen his symptoms though.
On top of that back in April I had to cue for an hour to get into supermarkets. Now they just let you straight in.
Don't see how it will. Its no coincidence things have got gradually worse since September
I fear this is going to be a tough 2 weeks
Gradually worse when schools reopened in September. Dramatically worse when they closed in December. The connection isn’t that obvious. Although I agree it makes sense to defer opening while things are as crazy as they are now. Definitely colleges and secondary schools anyway.
Does it matter if you are a fan or not?
Don't have the time to read all that but is Sweden as fecked as we are atm?
But schools have only been closed two weeks. Surely that would only begin to be seen in data now?
Which has very unusual circumstances, Xmas day, ny etc. Massive gatherings that are out of the normal.
A Xmas rise was inevitable wasn't it? I don't think it argues against the quite obvious rise since schools went back.
But I would defer to your knowledge of the subject
You’d think so, right? Hence it makes sense to push out their start until tomorrow week (which is the plan in Ireland) There’s such an insane upwards curve right now it would be great if they take the edge off things in the next few days. I’m not too hopeful though.
I’m just speculating like you. To me, the surge looks to be more related to non-school stuff like crowded shops, bars, restaurants and people drinking and hanging out together. That’s what the timing fits best of all. In Ireland we got cases under control before half term by closing hospitality etc. As soon as that decision was reversed cases went bonkers again.
I also wonder if the news about vaccines was a big factor. The virus suddenly felt less of a worry when we heard about vaccines. And that surely influenced behaviour.
Having said all that, if schools are open when the virus is as rampant as it is now, there’s a good chance they’ll throw fuel on the fire. Especially with older kids.
At a minimum. I would say any benefit to schools being closed the last two weeks will be outweighed by mixing at Christmas in all likelihood when we start to see those cases being reflected.
I’d attribute that to panic buying and knowing very little about the transmission of the virus.
For those that are interested, UK’s surveillance reports for the final week of 2020 have been updated:
https://assets.publishing.service.g...948638/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w53.pdf
https://assets.publishing.service.g...-19_and_Influenza_Surveillance_Graphs_w53.pdf
https://assets.publishing.service.g...948638/Weekly_Flu_and_COVID-19_report_w53.pdf
https://assets.publishing.service.g...-19_and_Influenza_Surveillance_Graphs_w53.pdf
Depends on the criteria for national lockdown. Tier 4 is pretty much shut down except essential shops and schools. Maybe national lockdown would close schools too.
It is starting to look that way.
Rrgarding schools, I was saying in this very thread back in May/June that they should invest to ensure every child has access to remote leaning. As it stands if they go to remote learning now, there will be an unacceptably high number of kids without laptops or other hardware capable of accessing online leaning.
Yes, I think we agree that the reason is desperation and the UK government not "following the science" yet again.
"Immunised" is not 100% is it. The vaccine is ~95% effective when delivered in 2-3wk interval (depending on manufacturer).
There is zero data on how much immunisation will be provided if we spread this out to 12 week gaps. It is a desperate and risky change, onky happening in the UK, moving away from the vaccine manufacturer recommendations.
Hope you recover well. Liposomal vitamin C and Zinc supplements may help.
Isn't he more likely to test positive because he had the vaccine?