It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
I’m in an absolutely foul mood because it looks like my Christmas getaway to Portugal is cancelled. Indeed, I am wondering if I will be able to go on into the US as planned.
I support the travel ban to/from Southern Africa of course. Grudgingly welcome the masks, although I personally loathe them.
They (governments of all stripes) wouldn’t be doing this of course unless they were incredibly concerned.
We await proper testing, but the markets on Friday told one story, and Israel’s complete border closure echoes that.
Sympathies. Seriously
I have some really cool travel assignments for the Knappers' Gazette lined up next year - the Deep South, Ukraine, Greece, possibly Thailand, and more - and now I wonder if any of them will happen, and indeed I doubt it. But fingers x'd. We dunno yet
I had a splendid day with my older daughter, 15, who, amazingly has developed a passionate interest in old houses and quirky villages and even ancient churches - which she shares with me. So we saw a few today. However on the way back one of my favourite songs boomed out of my bluetoothed iPhone - Rambling Man by Lemon Jelly
When he starts announcing all the marvellous destinations in the world - from Kentish Town to Gujarat, Ipanema, San Jose, MANDALAY! - I almost blubbed. In the car. The whole wide world: is it all gone? Taken away?
I am pretty sure it is mostly gone for 6-12 months, at least. As you say, that announcement by Israel is telling and ominous
I view almost everybody across the Political Spectrum on here as Internet friends and will be nice to meet some additional posters.
We'll finally be able to answer the question just how big is @bigjohnowls and how does he compare with @Big_G_NorthWales. Although perhaps the latter won't make it...
We can have Speak Your Weight Bingo if you bring a machine.
"One at a time, please" used to be the standard Beano line when I was a reader, a few years ago. I may have lost some kilos by Feb.
There's a PG Wodehouse story where the Drones Club have a Fat Uncle competition.
Disheartening to realise that we are now the fat (great) uncles.
Following the identification of the Omicron variant in the UK we are introducing new measures to ensure we maintain the excellent progress we have made against this virus. /1
I’m in an absolutely foul mood because it looks like my Christmas getaway to Portugal is cancelled. Indeed, I am wondering if I will be able to go on into the US as planned.
I support the travel ban to/from Southern Africa of course. Grudgingly welcome the masks, although I personally loathe them.
They (governments of all stripes) wouldn’t be doing this of course unless they were incredibly concerned.
We await proper testing, but the markets on Friday told one story, and Israel’s complete border closure echoes that.
Sympathies. Seriously
I have some really cool travel assignments for the Knappers' Gazette lined up next year - the Deep South, Ukraine, Greece, possibly Thailand, and more - and now I wonder if any of them will happen, and indeed I doubt it. But fingers x'd. We dunno yet
I had a splendid day with my older daughter, 15, who, amazingly has developed a passionate interest in old houses and quirky villages and even ancient churches - which she shares with me. So we saw a few today. However on the way back one of my favourite songs boomed out of my bluetoothed iPhone - Rambling Man by Lemon Jelly
When he starts announcing all the marvellous destinations in the world - from Kentish Town to Gujarat, Ipanema, San Jose, MANDALAY! - I almost blubbed. In the car. The whole wide world: is it all gone? Taken away?
I am pretty sure it is mostly gone for 6-12 months, at least. As you say, that announcement by Israel is telling and ominous
I pretty much blub at anything, these days. Old songs, classic movies…
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
Do keep up these "attacks". Quite entertaining.
If it goes badly with Omicron then a load of people die. You might think I get off on that, but I don't.
Most people who were watching don't seem to have heard that. Perhaps you are here to correct the record and tell us that whilst we didn't hear that we definitely did.
I was watching the BBC and I heard it.
It was in the middle of a garbled answer (no surprise there) but he said it.
Something like “we will want all of the contacts of people who are confirmed case of omnicrom, they will be required to self isolate, test and trace is working on that now”
We were talking about masks. Scroll back up the quotes. Sandy said "Sky's on-screen caption claims that the PM said masks will be mandatory. I didn't hear it."
Well your quote was “he can’t announce critical stuff” (I paraphrase) and you included a tweet about self isolation.
On masks he didn’t say they were to be mandatory. He said that they were bringing them back for transport and retail only, and that Saj would announce more detail In the next day or so
Well that was an epic fail on my part - I thought I was posting their tweet about masks.
I was watching Get Back at the time though and was being distracted by John Lennon
What’s your Get Back take?
Badly recorded shit.
Didn’t ask you, your phobia is a matter of record.
Don't you just bloody love it when you invest a lot of time and thought in a perfectly crafted heffalump trap, and somebody falls plumb into it?
That wasn't my judgement, that was John Lennon.
I’m aware of that. You obviously haven’t seen it, and to be honest, you don’t seem to have a clue on this subject.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
Yet no denials mate, you know it's true and all you can do is try and avoid looking in the mirror.
Max, But you have quit the being a Tory member and I'm sure declared on here that you will support another party in your marginal seat. That's not dissimilar to RP.
Neither of you are traitors or back-stabbers. You have simply changed political allegiances as have many others of the once mighty legion of pb Tories.
I think there's a difference. Tory membership is transactional in nature, no one really believes in the Tory party simply because there's nothing to believe in, no guiding principles and no "movement". Labour is a way of life, it's much more than just a political party. Abandoning Labour is the same as abandoning one's principles. I have a lot of respect for people like Jonathan and Southam who haven't abandoned their movement and principles to the hard left or given up and decided that the Lib Dems are the new flavour of the month.
The reason I hold it against RP is because I know it probably eats away at his core, ex-Labour people never really get over it. The one's I know haven't and most of them end up back with Labour. The problem for RP is that he went full turncoat, regretted it, tried to go back and they told him to get fucked because he betrayed them. Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him, I guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake.
What's worse is that he's about to vote for the SNP, breaking the one major policy of the Lib Dems in Scotland - don't fucking vote nationalist. Cementing himself as a man of few principles. I don't believe a 30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party can simply give it up or walk away, unless he never really believed in the first place.
1. Somebody travelling to work on the train while wearing a mask 2. The same person WFH I vote for 2. Bozo's policy is 1.
2 has great cost to the economy and personal mental health Government is about trade offs
Those who seem most anxious to get people back to offices seem to be commercial property owners, developers and their clients.
Do you have a scintilla of objective evidence for the point about mental health? I hear this quite often, again from those with a vested interest in having people back in office buildings working like battery hens at banks of desks but presumably free of mental health issues (apparently)?
Personal anecdotes only, but there are people who have really struggled with lockdown. I’ve also seen my team - many of whom were young and in shared flats - finding WFH very difficult
Not surprised. So many people live in flats not designed to live in. The assumption is that you're out at work all day and out having a social life half the rest of the time.
Yep. Big enough to eat, sleep and sh*t in. Do something about the dire state of housing and many, many other issues disappear. But nobody will.
What else do you do in your home?
People who claim to "live" at home are sad, deluded, asocial individuals
Ah, you mean engineers.
But seriously: who the f*ck are you to judge others in that manner? I could turn that around and say that perhaps people who *have* to be sociable all the time are just sad, shallow, deluded individuals? Ones who cannot even be happy in their own company?
I've known all combinations: people who are happy in their own company, and those who are lonely and could really do with getting out more. Those who say they have thousands of friends, but cannot name them; who desperately phone people up mid-afternoon to arrange going out somewhere - anywhere. And those who are genuinely gregarious and happy.
That's the key thing: whatever makes someone happy. If they're happy and content in their own company, what's the harm?
I live on my own and, despite the challenges of the last 18 months, would have it no other way.
I often travel on my own, and sometimes go for days out on my own.
But surely life is still about engaging with the world, however you choose to do it.
It's an interesting issue and I'm not sure what I think. But I was very impressed with this article which someone here linked to the other - it's by some conservative non-Trump Republicans, but not especially political:
There are an awful lot of wankers trying to hype this up for clickbait.
There are an awful lot of selfish wankers not wearing masks in this country.
There's an awful lot of selfish wankers wanting to inflict masks upon others in this country.
We have had a large scale real time experiment on this. Both Scotland and Wales have required much more mask wearing by law than England for some months now. In my experience there has been large scale, if decreasing, compliance with the law. If masks worked there really should be a clear and unequivocal change in the infection rate by now. But there is no evidence of this. Scotland actually went to a much higher rate than England although they have come down a bit since.
The onus now must surely be on those contending that masks used by the general public, as opposed to by professionals in medical settings, are useful. I would like to see their evidence. If they have a compelling case that other confounding factors are why we are not seeing this differentiation in 2 different countries I would really like to see it.
The only thing I can think of as a sort of general anecdote in their favour is that while they were compulsory in schools - which overwhelming evidence shows are the main vector of transmission - cases actually remained pretty low.
When they were removed, case numbers climbed rapidly.
Now that's not bad evidence that - contrary to what I would dearly wish - they can be quite effective.
However, there is another question. Is the considerable damage and inconvenience they can cause - particularly to those who, like me, are somewhat deaf and rely on lip reading to communicate effectively - worth the impact on transmission?
I would argue, not up to this moment.
What hasn't been laid out yet is clear evidence that this new form of the virus changes that.
All of Europe has been facemasking and they are now all in lockdown - they do sod all
Almost all of Europe has benefited from months of very low Covid rates
I thought Europe was in a covid crisis
Eh yeh. In spades. I've just read a long piece in this weekend's NewStatesman about how shit it all is, particularly in German speaking countries and those nearby.
They are looking at a long winter lockdown over xmas and well into the new year.
My point was that for the months and months that we have been suffering 30-40k new cases a day they haven't. That they are now isn't disputed.
As for "a long winter lockdown", there but for the grace of God go we"
I’ll dispute it
Wasn’t Germany >70k last week with a lower rate of testing
United Kingdom government organization · 2h COVID UPDATE: Face coverings will become compulsory on public transport and in shops. Not including hospitality.
OK.
So time for the on-bus refreshments service.
Does this mean that Restaurant Cars are exempt?
What about my sandwiches?
That has always been the avoidance mechanism on the train. Nurse an empty Costa cup for the entire journey. No mask coz you're drinking.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Omicron is an anagram of Moronic. For nearly all countries to reverse the public health policy that had served us well for >100 y, and had worked in 1957 and 1968 was moronic. Or else it was done for sinister reasons.
Probably both.
The vaccine-only narrative is particularly moronic. You only get early treatment with cheap, very safe drugs if you live in countries like India, Egypt or Japan, or in the USA if your doctor is prepared to prescribe off-label and ignore 'protocols'.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
1. Somebody travelling to work on the train while wearing a mask 2. The same person WFH I vote for 2. Bozo's policy is 1.
2 has great cost to the economy and personal mental health Government is about trade offs
Those who seem most anxious to get people back to offices seem to be commercial property owners, developers and their clients.
Do you have a scintilla of objective evidence for the point about mental health? I hear this quite often, again from those with a vested interest in having people back in office buildings working like battery hens at banks of desks but presumably free of mental health issues (apparently)?
Personal anecdotes only, but there are people who have really struggled with lockdown. I’ve also seen my team - many of whom were young and in shared flats - finding WFH very difficult
Not surprised. So many people live in flats not designed to live in. The assumption is that you're out at work all day and out having a social life half the rest of the time.
Yep. Big enough to eat, sleep and sh*t in. Do something about the dire state of housing and many, many other issues disappear. But nobody will.
What else do you do in your home?
People who claim to "live" at home are sad, deluded, asocial individuals
Ah, you mean engineers.
But seriously: who the f*ck are you to judge others in that manner? I could turn that around and say that perhaps people who *have* to be sociable all the time are just sad, shallow, deluded individuals? Ones who cannot even be happy in their own company?
I've known all combinations: people who are happy in their own company, and those who are lonely and could really do with getting out more. Those who say they have thousands of friends, but cannot name them; who desperately phone people up mid-afternoon to arrange going out somewhere - anywhere. And those who are genuinely gregarious and happy.
That's the key thing: whatever makes someone happy. If they're happy and content in their own company, what's the harm?
I live on my own and, despite the challenges of the last 18 months, would have it no other way.
I often travel on my own, and sometimes go for days out on my own.
But surely life is still about engaging with the world, however you choose to do it.
Life is what you make it. I've had times when I've been very sociable, and times when I've not. I can take it or leave it. But I've always 'engaged' with the world. That engagement just hasn't been going to the pub or theatre three times a week.
As an example of the opposite; an ex-colleague of Mrs J used to take photos of the meals he had in pubs and put them onto Facebook. Not special meals: just the fodder from the local chain pub. He went out every night, and was desperate to find someone to go out with. He ended up seeming a little attention-seeking and sad.
IMO an important key to a happy life (for me, at least) is to always have at least one challenge on the go. It doesn't have to be anything important or life-changing; just something that will stretch me and my abilities. Currently it is to do at least one run every day of the year, covid permitting. I don't know what next years challenge, or challenges, will be
Well I was well sluggish at this morning's parkrun. Post-COVID fatigue is something else. But I haven't done one for a month, due to an injury and COVID so it was good to meet up with my running buddies and have a Full English I didn't have to cook myself.
Injuries are absolutely the worst. Had six weeks when I couldn't get out at all earlier in the year after being struck down by PF, and at least as long afterwards when I was very wary of running as a consequence. Properly cricket batted my fitness, I'm still not quite back to where I was. So I feel your parkrun pain!
I was worried it was PF, but it responded well to icing and a week's rest. So I think it was a tendon. And I have now had 3 weeks rest due to the COVID so it's the least of my worries
My take on the press conference: if the situation is serious enough to reintroduce some restrictions then it's serious enough to make a decision this weekend on speeding up and extending the booster doses, instead of leaving that to the Joint Committee on Vacillation and Indecision.
We're buying time with travel restrictions so that a committee can take weeks to come to an obvious decision.
My wife is taking comfort from small mercies. She detects evidence of learning from previous repeated mistakes.
On which. Can I bring forward my booster at a walk-in or not? I am 55 now and booked Online, but was given no date before Dec 8. Exactly 6 months since my second. The website seems to imply not, but I know some who have had it earlier.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
How did you stab the Labour Party in the back ?
He left at the height of the great JC's...um... greatness.
It was definitely JCs fault. Had been unhappy for a while, then AS blew up in my CLP with a Jewish guy made to feel very unwelcome by one of the psychotic Corbynites.
We had a CLP meeting where the party had decreed we all take AS training. A party guide with a Corbyn forward. Describing what AS is. I read the guide. And looked at the images of JC walking behind an AS banner at a march that had just emerged. And heard the psychotics angrily denouncing the people saying AS is a problem.
Had a wonderful cleansing moment of absolute clarity, picked up my coat and walked out. I then joined the yellow lot and coordinated a GE campaign where we only targeted Tories and explicitly said Labour should win.
Which apparently is me being like one of the Mitford sisters only prettier.
Are you coming to the PB meet in February I want to confirm the prettier claim!!
Was my usual biting sarcasm. May make it down if I can co-ordinate work...
I'm wondering whether the PB meetup needs to be in Fitzpatrick's in Rawtenstall.
Drinking Sarsparilla.
Make it for an East Lancashire Railway diesel day and I'm in!
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
Yet no denials mate, you know it's true and all you can do is try and avoid looking in the mirror.
Max, But you have quit the being a Tory member and I'm sure declared on here that you will support another party in your marginal seat. That's not dissimilar to RP.
Neither of you are traitors or back-stabbers. You have simply changed political allegiances as have many others of the once mighty legion of pb Tories.
I think there's a difference. Tory membership is transactional in nature, no one really believes in the Tory party simply because there's nothing to believe in, no guiding principles and no "movement". Labour is a way of life, it's much more than just a political party. Abandoning Labour is the same as abandoning one's principles. I have a lot of respect for people like Jonathan and Southam who haven't abandoned their movement and principles to the hard left or given up and decided that the Lib Dems are the new flavour of the month.
The reason I hold it against RP is because I know it probably eats away at his core, ex-Labour people never really get over it. The one's I know haven't and most of them end up back with Labour. The problem for RP is that he went full turncoat, regretted it, tried to go back and they told him to get fucked because he betrayed them. Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him, I guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake.
What's worse is that he's about to vote for the SNP, breaking the one major policy of the Lib Dems in Scotland - don't fucking vote nationalist. Cementing himself as a man of few principles. I don't believe a 30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party can simply give it up or walk away, unless he never really believed in the first place.
"it probably eats away at his core" really doesn't. "regretted it, tried to go back" had a mental breakdown in lockdown, was desperate for "normal" and that was normal. "Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him" about a week in. "What am I doing"? Was the question I asked myself. Was greatly amused when the letter came through barring me. "guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake" I'm not a socialist. Had not been a happy fit for a long time. "30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party " 25 years and not sure which principles you think are relevant.
It is touching that you care so much about what I think. Despite not knowing me at all.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
1. Somebody travelling to work on the train while wearing a mask 2. The same person WFH I vote for 2. Bozo's policy is 1.
2 has great cost to the economy and personal mental health Government is about trade offs
Those who seem most anxious to get people back to offices seem to be commercial property owners, developers and their clients.
Do you have a scintilla of objective evidence for the point about mental health? I hear this quite often, again from those with a vested interest in having people back in office buildings working like battery hens at banks of desks but presumably free of mental health issues (apparently)?
Personal anecdotes only, but there are people who have really struggled with lockdown. I’ve also seen my team - many of whom were young and in shared flats - finding WFH very difficult
We've gone through different phases. At first, there was a sort of Dunkirk spirit - "we must all do what it takes, wfh no problem". Then came general lockdown so people couldn't see friends and family, and there was a lot of unhappiness and frustration. Once that eased, so did the mood, and now there's a lot of reluctance to return to the office, actually especially among younger staff because they tend to live further away (as rent is so expensive in Surrey) so they are faced with an unwelcome return to long commutes. And a lot of people have adjusted their lives to wfh, with reduced childcare costs etc. I can't see us ever going back to 5-day office work.
I think there may be a divide by location here. Your team is I think in London, where there is more flat-sharing and also better public transport. We will be restarting a hybrid model (typically 2-3 days a week in the office), but only from March. I live 10 minutes from work and don't really care, but I get that someone 60 minutes away is really not keen.
I see both ends of the spectrum. My office team live in London - we require 3 days in the office but don’t police it; most come for more. My foundation team has moved away from London because of cost - we are requiring 2 adjacent days a fortnight, one of which the entire team is in for.
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
Yep
And the fucking Chinese authorities - given that they launched this lovely bug - could put in 50 billion quid, as well, to get the whole world jabbed by summer
We thought we were in a race before, now we are in a death defying sprint
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
Treasury beancounters.
Did they lose count of all the beans they wasted on track and trace, “ppe” contracts and furlough? As I said the other day, shut the Treasury and build a new dept from scratch with entirely new employees.
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
It is entirely possible that Boris said to the speaker that due to the gravity of the situation he has to brief the nation today with full details being laid to Parliament on Monday.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Some very good news! This useless embarrassment of a Prime Minister is losing popularity at a speed that would make Jimmy Saville blush and Sir Keir Starmer's qualities are finally showing themselves.
A little more media training and he should go roaring ahead
(Could someone off stage tell Johnson that this is not intended as a political broadcast for himself. It really doesn't sound good)
As much as you protest he is Prime Minister and is right to address the nation
I foolishly thought he might do it with a certain decorum bearing in mind Macron was likely to be watching. After his Peppa Pig performance I should think most of Europe were.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
I'm still really annoyed at what HMG did to Valneva. I noticed that Johnson was asked a question about this at PMQs last week. I wish there was something I could do about it.
See link i posted below...it could be such that even a full lockdown won't be effective...
If a full lockdown doesn't work, and I bloody well hope that it's not that bad, then China's already implausibly low case numbers are going to look utterly proposterous.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
Yet no denials mate, you know it's true and all you can do is try and avoid looking in the mirror.
Max, But you have quit the being a Tory member and I'm sure declared on here that you will support another party in your marginal seat. That's not dissimilar to RP.
Neither of you are traitors or back-stabbers. You have simply changed political allegiances as have many others of the once mighty legion of pb Tories.
I think there's a difference. Tory membership is transactional in nature, no one really believes in the Tory party simply because there's nothing to believe in, no guiding principles and no "movement". Labour is a way of life, it's much more than just a political party. Abandoning Labour is the same as abandoning one's principles. I have a lot of respect for people like Jonathan and Southam who haven't abandoned their movement and principles to the hard left or given up and decided that the Lib Dems are the new flavour of the month.
The reason I hold it against RP is because I know it probably eats away at his core, ex-Labour people never really get over it. The one's I know haven't and most of them end up back with Labour. The problem for RP is that he went full turncoat, regretted it, tried to go back and they told him to get fucked because he betrayed them. Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him, I guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake.
What's worse is that he's about to vote for the SNP, breaking the one major policy of the Lib Dems in Scotland - don't fucking vote nationalist. Cementing himself as a man of few principles. I don't believe a 30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party can simply give it up or walk away, unless he never really believed in the first place.
The LDs in Scotland used to be Home Rulers. Now theyt're more Unionist than the Tories. Who's betraying whom?
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Or legislation.
Definitely no power over that. The Govt controls the Commons timetable.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
Treasury beancounters.
Did they lose count of all the beans they wasted on track and trace, “ppe” contracts and furlough? As I said the other day, shut the Treasury and build a new dept from scratch with entirely new employees.
The position we need to be in is this: have the capacity to produce all the vaccines we need for ourselves (including boosters) AND enough to significantly assist the global effort to jab the planet. We are a major economy. If it comes to it, devote the entire Aid budget to this, if the Treasury objects. There is nothing better we could possibly spend it on, right now
It will cost money, but save money in the end. We have just spent £330 billion, already
At the same time, tho, the "Global South" must step up. South Africa, when it came to jabs, did not. They smeared AZ, then threw it away, then sold it, then they got more than enough mRNA for the country but not enough people are willing to take it. 17m doses are rotting in South African warehouses, even as Omicron emerges
There is no point in the developed world sending out 9 billion Pfizer jabs if the developing world then sits back and says Nah, Bill Gates made it, I refuse
I fear that will mean mandatory jabs in quite a few countries. So be it
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Or legislation.
Definitely no power over that. The Govt controls the Commons timetable.
It would be interesting to see what he could do. Or would try to do.
Something does need to be done. This is government by press leak and press briefing on a scale even Alistair Campbell would blush at. Mostly very stupid ill-thought through policies as well, although that's a slightly different problem.
It's an interesting virus that spreads in shops and public transport but not in hospitality settings.
An economic choice. Mask wearing doesn't bother shoppers and commuters. It is an absolute pain in pubs, cafes and restaurants.
Of course the whole mask thing is panto
As Francis U implied downthread, there is a decent chance Omicron is so transmissible no plausible lockdown can contain it. In which case it's here and that's that. Jab jab jab
Some very good news! This useless embarrassment of a Prime Minister is losing popularity at a speed that would make Jimmy Saville blush and Sir Keir Starmer's qualities are finally showing themselves.
A little more media training and he should go roaring ahead
(Could someone off stage tell Johnson that this is not intended as a political broadcast for himself. It really doesn't sound good)
As much as you protest he is Prime Minister and is right to address the nation
I foolishly thought he might do it with a certain decorum bearing in mind Macron was likely to be watching. After his Peppa Pig performance I should think most of Europe were.
Some very good news! This useless embarrassment of a Prime Minister is losing popularity at a speed that would make Jimmy Saville blush and Sir Keir Starmer's qualities are finally showing themselves.
A little more media training and he should go roaring ahead
(Could someone off stage tell Johnson that this is not intended as a political broadcast for himself. It really doesn't sound good)
As much as you protest he is Prime Minister and is right to address the nation
I foolishly thought he might do it with a certain decorum bearing in mind Macron was likely to be watching. After his Peppa Pig performance I should think most of Europe were.
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Or legislation.
Definitely no power over that. The Govt controls the Commons timetable.
It would be interesting to see what he could do. Or would try to do.
Something does need to be done. This is government by press leak and press briefing on a scale even Alistair Campbell would blush at. Mostly very stupid ill-thought through policies as well, although that's a slightly different problem.
Mr Speaker Hoyle will not emulate Bercow: he will scruplously adhere to the procedural advice proffered by the Clerks. And his threats to allow ever more frequent UQs, requiring Ministers to be in the Commons and thus disrupting their Departmental work, is a powerful tool in the armoury.
I too deplore the leaks, pre-briefings and the like. But were any of the principal policy-making announcements of the Blair/Brown (even Major?) governments ever kept secret until the Commons met? A golden age that never was?
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
Yes, I really believe the government needs to seriously ramp up vaccine manufacturing, we currently do about 20m per month, we should be looking to 10x that number, even if it means they sell at a loss or we subsidise AZ per dose to a large degree. £10bn invested now by the UK and other countries in manufacturing will save millions of lives, countless jobs and livelihoods, spare billions from further lockdowns.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
It’s quite hard to understand why this wasn’t done. Even from an entirely self interested perspective, it would be great for national strategic resilience to know we could manufacture vaccines for our whole population in a month against any future variant or pandemic.
Treasury beancounters.
Did they lose count of all the beans they wasted on track and trace, “ppe” contracts and furlough? As I said the other day, shut the Treasury and build a new dept from scratch with entirely new employees.
The position we need to be in is this: have the capacity to produce all the vaccines we need for ourselves (including boosters) AND enough to significantly assist the global effort to jab the planet. We are a major economy. If it comes to it, devote the entire Aid budget to this, if the Treasury objects. There is nothing better we could possibly spend it on, right now
It will cost money, but save money in the end. We have just spent £330 billion, already
At the same time, tho, the "Global South" must step up. South Africa, when it came to jabs, did not. They smeared AZ, then threw it away, then sold it, then they got more than enough mRNA for the country but not enough people are willing to take it. 17m doses are rotting in South African warehouses, even as Omicron emerges
There is no point in the developed world sending out 9 billion Pfizer jabs if the developing world then sits back and says Nah, Bill Gates made it, I refuse
I fear that will mean mandatory jabs in quite a few countries. So be it
I do think there is a mentality in the establishment that the UK doesn't need to produce anything but should instead 'trade' for it.
With various people in the establishment being well paid middlemen in the 'trade'.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
Yet no denials mate, you know it's true and all you can do is try and avoid looking in the mirror.
Max, But you have quit the being a Tory member and I'm sure declared on here that you will support another party in your marginal seat. That's not dissimilar to RP.
Neither of you are traitors or back-stabbers. You have simply changed political allegiances as have many others of the once mighty legion of pb Tories.
I think there's a difference. Tory membership is transactional in nature, no one really believes in the Tory party simply because there's nothing to believe in, no guiding principles and no "movement". Labour is a way of life, it's much more than just a political party. Abandoning Labour is the same as abandoning one's principles. I have a lot of respect for people like Jonathan and Southam who haven't abandoned their movement and principles to the hard left or given up and decided that the Lib Dems are the new flavour of the month.
The reason I hold it against RP is because I know it probably eats away at his core, ex-Labour people never really get over it. The one's I know haven't and most of them end up back with Labour. The problem for RP is that he went full turncoat, regretted it, tried to go back and they told him to get fucked because he betrayed them. Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him, I guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake.
What's worse is that he's about to vote for the SNP, breaking the one major policy of the Lib Dems in Scotland - don't fucking vote nationalist. Cementing himself as a man of few principles. I don't believe a 30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party can simply give it up or walk away, unless he never really believed in the first place.
SO left the Labour Party at least once and if memory serves correct twice under Corbyn.
I don't think he voted Labour either but I am sure he would confirm if you pm'd him.
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Or legislation.
Definitely no power over that. The Govt controls the Commons timetable.
It would be interesting to see what he could do. Or would try to do.
Something does need to be done. This is government by press leak and press briefing on a scale even Alistair Campbell would blush at. Mostly very stupid ill-thought through policies as well, although that's a slightly different problem.
Mr Speaker Hoyle will not emulate Bercow: he will scruplously adhere to the procedural advice proffered by the Clerks. And his threats to allow ever more frequent UQs, requiring Ministers to be in the Commons and thus disrupting their Departmental work, is a powerful tool in the armoury.
I too deplore the leaks, pre-briefings and the like. But were any of the principal policy-making announcements of the Blair/Brown (even Major?) governments ever kept secret until the Commons met? A golden age that never was?
One example, albeit from a long time ago: Hugh Dalton was fired on the spot by Attlee on Budget Day 1947 for carelessly revealing some details of the tax reforms he was planning to a journalist while on his way to deliver his speech.
Some very good news! This useless embarrassment of a Prime Minister is losing popularity at a speed that would make Jimmy Saville blush and Sir Keir Starmer's qualities are finally showing themselves.
A little more media training and he should go roaring ahead
(Could someone off stage tell Johnson that this is not intended as a political broadcast for himself. It really doesn't sound good)
As much as you protest he is Prime Minister and is right to address the nation
I foolishly thought he might do it with a certain decorum bearing in mind Macron was likely to be watching. After his Peppa Pig performance I should think most of Europe were.
Macron is just as idiotic
No. Macron doesn’t come across as idiotic in the same way. He just comes across as sly and untrustworthy.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
IFR of Delta = 0.096%, said the DHSC in July.
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
Make yourself a cheese and grape pizza Rochdale, or is it Max? and let us know if you agree with me. 👩🏻🍳
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
IFR of Delta = 0.096%, said the DHSC in July.
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
Viruses certainly don't always evolve to be less deadly. Depends on the circumstances and selection pressures.
It's an interesting virus that spreads in shops and public transport but not in hospitality settings.
An economic choice. Mask wearing doesn't bother shoppers and commuters. It is an absolute pain in pubs, cafes and restaurants.
Of course the whole mask thing is panto
As Francis U implied downthread, there is a decent chance Omicron is so transmissible no plausible lockdown can contain it. In which case it's here and that's that. Jab jab jab
Last time I was on the Tube was on Thursday and mask wearing was down to about 50%. Previous time, a few weeks earlier, was about 70%.
United Kingdom government organization · 2h COVID UPDATE: Face coverings will become compulsory on public transport and in shops. Not including hospitality.
Here we go again!
Lockdown back in time to ruin everyone's Christmases for a second year?
United Kingdom government organization · 2h COVID UPDATE: Face coverings will become compulsory on public transport and in shops. Not including hospitality.
Here we go again!
Lockdown back in time to ruin everyone's Christmases for a second year?
I doubt it there's too much vaccination and acquired immunity among the population already.
And nobody will pay any attention to rules about who and where you can meet.
R in the UK with Delta is close to 1. My immediate conclusion to the change on facemasks is that they wanted to create a little nudge to make people a bit more cautious, so that R for Delta would dip below 1, and we'd accelerate the drop in pressure on hospitals before Omicron arrives in full force.
If you have only 3,000 Delta patients in hospital, instead of 6,000, at the time the Omicron admissions start in earnest then that could make a bit of a difference.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
Anyone know when the rules on mask wearing in shops/transport is coming into force? And is it being legally enforced again or just strongly advised?
Saj is giving more detail in the next day or so
I expect some form of legal 'mandate' to encourage compliance and for people to 'get the message'
I assume it has to be announced in the HOC
But it won't be, and Hoyle will be cross again.
At some point, if he wants to ensure compliance, he is going to have to make an issue of this and suspend a minister for 30 days.
Would that be in his power?
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
Has it ever been tried?
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
Er, then there wouldn't be any statments to the House! I'm absolutely sure the Speaker has no arbitrary power to suspend a Minister and a motion to hold in contempt would have to be passed which it clearly wouldn't with the 80 seat Tory margin.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
Or legislation.
Definitely no power over that. The Govt controls the Commons timetable.
It would be interesting to see what he could do. Or would try to do.
Something does need to be done. This is government by press leak and press briefing on a scale even Alistair Campbell would blush at. Mostly very stupid ill-thought through policies as well, although that's a slightly different problem.
Mr Speaker Hoyle will not emulate Bercow: he will scruplously adhere to the procedural advice proffered by the Clerks. And his threats to allow ever more frequent UQs, requiring Ministers to be in the Commons and thus disrupting their Departmental work, is a powerful tool in the armoury.
I too deplore the leaks, pre-briefings and the like. But were any of the principal policy-making announcements of the Blair/Brown (even Major?) governments ever kept secret until the Commons met? A golden age that never was?
One example, albeit from a long time ago: Hugh Dalton was fired on the spot by Attlee on Budget Day 1947 for carelessly revealing some details of the tax reforms he was planning to a journalist while on his way to deliver his speech.
Wasn't that only to a single journalist though ?
If he'd told the whole world he would have been fine.
Starmer has recovered to the extent that he has regained 2017 Remain Labour voters lost to the LDs in 2019 over Corbyn. He has also made it safe for Tory Remain voters to consider going LD in the South without worrying too much about the Labour leader becoming PM, which the LD gain in Chesham and Amersham may have been the first evidence of.
However, he has been far less successful in gaining 2019 Tory Leave voters, with more 2019 Tory voters going RefUK than Labour with Yougov. That was also clear in the council elections in May and the local by elections last week, LD and Independent gains from the Tories in the South and Remain areas, Tory holds or even gains from Labour in Leave areas.
Indeed it is possible Starmer could become PM with fewer Labour MPs than Brown got in 2010 or Corbyn got in 2017, due to LD gains from the Tories in the South and the support of the SNP
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
IFR of Delta = 0.096%, said the DHSC in July.
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
Ill informed gibberish. Smallpox and rabies have been just fine with 100% deadliness for literally millennia. Spanish flu as someone pointed out this morning evolved to be markedly more lethal than it started out. Why post this nonsense?
R in the UK with Delta is close to 1. My immediate conclusion to the change on facemasks is that they wanted to create a little nudge to make people a bit more cautious, so that R for Delta would dip below 1, and we'd accelerate the drop in pressure on hospitals before Omicron arrives in full force.
If you have only 3,000 Delta patients in hospital, instead of 6,000, at the time the Omicron admissions start in earnest then that could make a bit of a difference.
Yes, perhaps
I'm not going to lose my shit over it. But if they pointlessly lock us down again, especially against a new variant which can easily slip past any lockdown anyhow, then I will pull my grandpa's pitchfork from the thatch
R in the UK with Delta is close to 1. My immediate conclusion to the change on facemasks is that they wanted to create a little nudge to make people a bit more cautious, so that R for Delta would dip below 1, and we'd accelerate the drop in pressure on hospitals before Omicron arrives in full force.
If you have only 3,000 Delta patients in hospital, instead of 6,000, at the time the Omicron admissions start in earnest then that could make a bit of a difference.
bigJohnowls - My sympathy on the loss of your mother. Even when it is expected, as it was for me, it is still a hard blow for most of us when it comes.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
I do use pineapple, but not on many pizza. cheese and grapes is my favourite topping at the moment. If it was a squid pizza pineapple would deffo go with it. pineapple goes well with cheese as well.
You can do a lot with squid you can even make it look like pineapple like I do so you don’t know which you are about to have a mouthful of.
I might add lemons to my sumac and chicken topping like I add lemons when I casserole chicken. I’ll try it on friends and let you know. Alongs it gets called Jade’s kitchen chicken topping!
I wear a mask in places where I am asked because I'm naturally pliant, but most do not wear them now in my experience (shops more than trains though). However, in part that is due to little attempt at positive encouragement beyond a sign at an entrance. If it is law again, and places direct staff to ask people to please wear one, compliance will definitely increase.
But how effective is that really going to be? At every stage of the pandemic people have underestimated the willingness of the average public to go along with covid rules, but even if compliance is higher, will that have an appreciable effect at this stage of the pandemic, when for over 3 months many tens of thousands have been testing positive every day, so many more than that per day will actually have been positive or exposed? Even if compliance is higher, will it just be performative compliance and not as effective as previous, more genuinely cautious compliance?
I'm not about to throw a wobbler about masks on liberty grounds, but I'm skeptical that what worked before will work now. Rates don't seem meaningfully affected by it at this stage if different rules in different places is anything to go by,
If new nu covid is as suggested as infectious as measles, R0 = 16, realistically it isn't going to do anything....its already the case that really you need bare minimum a well fitting N95 one to do much.
Yes, see here:
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes I asked a Sage adviser about the need for full plan B in England, the reply is very telling:
"If what we think we know [about Omicron] now turns out to be approximately true (and let's hope it doesn't) then Plan B won't be anywhere near stringent enough to stop this."
The mask advice seems completely pointless in the face of OMICRON THE MIGHTY, unless it's a psychological step to soften us up, incrementally, for more restrictions later
One of the communist ones who wants to lock us down for ever?
Starmer has recovered to the extent that he has regained 2017 Remain Labour voters lost to the LDs in 2019 over Corbyn. He has also made it safe for Tory Remain voters to consider going LD in the South without worrying too much about the Labour leader becoming PM, which the LD gain in Chesham and Amersham may have been the first evidence of.
However, he has been far less successful in gaining 2019 Tory Leave voters, with more 2019 Tory voters going RefUK than Labour with Yougov. That was also clear in the council elections in May and the local by elections last week, LD and Independent gains from the Tories in the South and Remain areas, Tory holds or even gains from Labour in Leave areas.
Indeed it is possible Starmer could become PM with fewer Labour MPs than Brown got in 2010 or Corbyn got in 2017, due to LD gains from the Tories in the South and the support of the SNP
The thing is, Labour can't level up the North with the yellow NIMBY whoppers on the pursestrings, just like the Tories can't level up the North with Epping NIMBY whoppers on the pursestrings.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
Anchovy, green chiles and black olives. Maybe capers.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
Anchovy, green chiles and black olives. Maybe capers.
Interesting…
It could lead to asking does Gentleman’s Relish work on pizza
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
Starmer has recovered to the extent that he has regained 2017 Remain Labour voters lost to the LDs in 2019 over Corbyn. He has also made it safe for Tory Remain voters to consider going LD in the South without worrying too much about the Labour leader becoming PM, which the LD gain in Chesham and Amersham may have been the first evidence of.
However, he has been far less successful in gaining 2019 Tory Leave voters, with more 2019 Tory voters going RefUK than Labour with Yougov. That was also clear in the council elections in May and the local by elections last week, LD and Independent gains from the Tories in the South and Remain areas, Tory holds or even gains from Labour in Leave areas.
Indeed it is possible Starmer could become PM with fewer Labour MPs than Brown got in 2010 or Corbyn got in 2017, due to LD gains from the Tories in the South and the support of the SNP
The thing is, Labour can't level up the North with the yellow NIMBY whoppers on the pursestrings, just like the Tories can't level up the North with Epping NIMBY whoppers on the pursestrings.
No, Labour would need most seats to do that. They are still a million miles away from there, let alone a majority, probably only Burnham would give Labour the chance to regain enough northern and midlands Tory Leave Red Wall seats to get there.
If Starmer becomes PM it will likely not be through winning a majority of Red Wall seats, it will be through winning enough to get Labour to 250 seats or so (helped by 2019 LD voters there now voting Labour to beat the Tories) while his majority depends on a Remain coalition of LD seats in the South and SNP seats in Scotland
I wear a mask in places where I am asked because I'm naturally pliant, but most do not wear them now in my experience (shops more than trains though). However, in part that is due to little attempt at positive encouragement beyond a sign at an entrance. If it is law again, and places direct staff to ask people to please wear one, compliance will definitely increase.
But how effective is that really going to be? At every stage of the pandemic people have underestimated the willingness of the average public to go along with covid rules, but even if compliance is higher, will that have an appreciable effect at this stage of the pandemic, when for over 3 months many tens of thousands have been testing positive every day, so many more than that per day will actually have been positive or exposed? Even if compliance is higher, will it just be performative compliance and not as effective as previous, more genuinely cautious compliance?
I'm not about to throw a wobbler about masks on liberty grounds, but I'm skeptical that what worked before will work now. Rates don't seem meaningfully affected by it at this stage if different rules in different places is anything to go by,
If new nu covid is as suggested as infectious as measles, R0 = 16, realistically it isn't going to do anything....its already the case that really you need bare minimum a well fitting N95 one to do much.
Yes, see here:
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes I asked a Sage adviser about the need for full plan B in England, the reply is very telling:
"If what we think we know [about Omicron] now turns out to be approximately true (and let's hope it doesn't) then Plan B won't be anywhere near stringent enough to stop this."
The mask advice seems completely pointless in the face of OMICRON THE MIGHTY, unless it's a psychological step to soften us up, incrementally, for more restrictions later
One of the communist ones who wants to lock us down for ever?
So why won’t they put their name to it?
My suspicion is that the guy rather hopes that it is true.
Some people see permanent lockdown as the route to a better society.
It will be a real struggle to get people to wear masks again because Covid is a clear and present danger having told them that they don't need them because Covid is over.
Who told them Covid is over? Having no restrictions is not the same as saying it’s over. I agree that it will be a struggle though. I’ve never stopped wearing masks in shops, so no bother for me, but a lot have.
Its been the clear and consistent implication for yonks. No need to worry about it any more, and even if there's 40k cases a day for months and months so what.
Mate, you've got no fucking idea how the virus works. Look across the continent, hospitalisations and deaths are exploding. They're getting their exit wave in the winter and all at once. The idea that a nation can simply avoid it is something put forwards by simpletons.
That response went right over your head then.
I quite enjoyed "You have got absolutely zero loyalty, not to your party and not to your nation"
As you are a self-stated federalist, that certainly is wrong, whether Max meant the UK or Scotland!
[edited - sorry, suddenly realised soi-disant had a possible negative meaning, not intended]
For Max England = UK
I am a traitor to England in that I moved somewhere else. But I don't think that's what he meant. Not thinking like him and voting like him makes me a Traitor. Obvs
Nah you stabbed the Labour party in the back and now you're going to stab the UK in the back by voting for the SNP. You're so obsessed with the government being wrong that you're actually excited about the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines. I think you need to have a really hard think about where your life choices are taking you mate.
Blimey. You actually think that way? Bizarre.
"Excited by the prospect that Omicron can evade vaccines".
For "excited" substitute "very worried".
And yet, if it does go badly with Omicron would you be able to not say "I told you so"? I doubt it. You have a lack of integrity, you would never have stabbed your party in the back and abandoned the Labour movement. Worse still you're about to stab your new family in the back too by voting for the SNP. No integrity. At all.
*giggles* Can I get some of what you are smoking?
He’s an expert on anything he has a passing interest in. Get him onto pizza dough. He could teach those guys in Italy a thing or two.
Wow. Everyone on here has the same hobbies as me. I ❤️ Making my own Pizza. My fav toppings at the moment would be cheese and grapes. I made 2 today to watch racing with. Chicken and sumac I havn’t seen any ware else and will patent it. And squid and pineapple.
my default is pepperoni, jalapeno and.....pineapple
Anchovy, green chiles and black olives. Maybe capers.
Interesting…
It could lead to asking does Gentleman’s Relish work on pizza
My first thought is no, too salty, even with Lemon.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
IFR of Delta = 0.096%, said the DHSC in July.
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
Ill informed gibberish. Smallpox and rabies have been just fine with 100% deadliness for literally millennia. Spanish flu as someone pointed out this morning evolved to be markedly more lethal than it started out. Why post this nonsense?
As with every other "it's over" story of the last 18 months, it would be lovely to think that Covid is on its way out. Because the current situation sucks, and the idea that we don't need to go out of our way to keep things manageable is an attractive one. And humans like attractive blondes ideas.
There are those who flip between "there's no problem" and "the problem is so bad that nothing we can do will help, so we might as well take it on the chin" with no time at all in the intermediate state of "there's a problem which can be managed if we're careful". Unfortunately, some of them have the PM's ear.
I wear a mask in places where I am asked because I'm naturally pliant, but most do not wear them now in my experience (shops more than trains though). However, in part that is due to little attempt at positive encouragement beyond a sign at an entrance. If it is law again, and places direct staff to ask people to please wear one, compliance will definitely increase.
But how effective is that really going to be? At every stage of the pandemic people have underestimated the willingness of the average public to go along with covid rules, but even if compliance is higher, will that have an appreciable effect at this stage of the pandemic, when for over 3 months many tens of thousands have been testing positive every day, so many more than that per day will actually have been positive or exposed? Even if compliance is higher, will it just be performative compliance and not as effective as previous, more genuinely cautious compliance?
I'm not about to throw a wobbler about masks on liberty grounds, but I'm skeptical that what worked before will work now. Rates don't seem meaningfully affected by it at this stage if different rules in different places is anything to go by,
If new nu covid is as suggested as infectious as measles, R0 = 16, realistically it isn't going to do anything....its already the case that really you need bare minimum a well fitting N95 one to do much.
Yes, see here:
Oliver Barnes @mroliverbarnes I asked a Sage adviser about the need for full plan B in England, the reply is very telling:
"If what we think we know [about Omicron] now turns out to be approximately true (and let's hope it doesn't) then Plan B won't be anywhere near stringent enough to stop this."
The mask advice seems completely pointless in the face of OMICRON THE MIGHTY, unless it's a psychological step to soften us up, incrementally, for more restrictions later
One of the communist ones who wants to lock us down for ever?
So why won’t they put their name to it?
My suspicion is that the guy rather hopes that it is true.
Some people see permanent lockdown as the route to a better society.
Probably people named Mao, Stalin or Hitler.
Lord Sumption said we probably should not obey the police state laws. This seems an 'obvious' attempt to continue them for ever, a bit like the attempt to extend ID cards after 1945
To cap it all, you'll struggle to see any masks at elite events, like Obama's birthday party, except among the servants. I think that's rather the significance of this.
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Seems to me that today was just about messaging “we are doing something” when in reality they are quite deliberately doing nothing to slow the spread. About all there was is the return of mask theatre in limited circumstances which as we know, is not really moving the dial on R meaningfully at this point of the virus’s evolution (if it ever did). Amusing how worked up some here are about others not masking. Just wear an FPP3 and keep your weird anecdotes about cloths over genitals to yourself.
The telling answer was about there being two variants and our strategy for each being different. Essentially, we are continuing with the Let It Burn strategy for Dura Ace, Contrarian and their mates.
While doing some theatre around foreign travel so you can’t blame us in a month or two when Omicron is inevitably 99% of all new cases.
And using it as a chance to remind people to get boosted. Amazing how many people (including on here) still haven’t clocked that the strategy since July has been to deliberately infect all the last pockets of naive immune systems, while giving it a “boost” through modern science.
When is the penny going to drop for the thickos that this virus will be circulating pretty broadly for the rest of our lives? But that things will never again be as bad as March 2020 to March 2021 as it has now ceased to be a novel virus in this country.
A very fair analysis, perhaps a shade optimistic, globally
Omicron will now rip through ALL the unvaccinated in the world. And it will be nasty,
Here is the same SA doctor woman - Coetzee - who was being quoted before by the overly cheerful as saying Omicron is "mild".: She did not really say that. Her words have been somewhat twisted.
She definitely said this:
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said."
Sure, but her worry is "older, unvaccinated people" which they have in ZA. We don't, and to the extent we do it's by choice, so I say: Let 'em crash.
Yes, we have done well in jabbing the old and sickly. There is reasonable hope - though it is very early days - that Omicron will be Not Too Bad in the UK
Omicron could be pretty grim in countries with more vax hesitancy in older cohorts (surprising places like Germany), and it could be hellish in the developing world which has not vaxed at all.
I can foresee almost all borders closing, for a while
That's my major worry too, especially for some European countries that haven't got total vaccination of over 60s as we seem to have. Omicron could very easily overwhelm even the most stringent lockdown measures and may require the complete closure of all indoor and outdoor socialising as well as some kinds of indoor work in industries. I can't imagine how quickly it would spread on a factory floor, for example. It not evading vaccines or naturally acquired immunity would be absolutely great news for some places including the UK, Israel and a few other countries but if it spreads at a significantly faster rate than delta and still presents severe symptoms in the unvaccinated it could be really, really bad for big chunks of the world.
And if it is really really shit for 40% or 60% of the world, then in the end it will be really shit for us as well, quite apart from The Shared Suffering of Humanity - which compels us to act. We are all in this, no nation will escape, not even Israel
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
It's possible that the country most vulnerable to Omicron is China. If there is only a modest degree of immunity erosion then people in Europe with three doses of AZ or mRNA vaccines will mostly still be fine, but those with two doses of the Chinese vaccines would be more vulnerable. And if it is even more transmissable than Delta then the chance of keeping it from spreading would be remote.
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
IFR of Delta = 0.096%, said the DHSC in July.
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
Ill informed gibberish. Smallpox and rabies have been just fine with 100% deadliness for literally millennia. Spanish flu as someone pointed out this morning evolved to be markedly more lethal than it started out. Why post this nonsense?
As with every other "it's over" story of the last 18 months, it would be lovely to think that Covid is on its way out. Because the current situation sucks, and the idea that we don't need to go out of our way to keep things manageable is an attractive one. And humans like attractive blondes ideas.
There are those who flip between "there's no problem" and "the problem is so bad that nothing we can do will help, so we might as well take it on the chin" with no time at all in the intermediate state of "there's a problem which can be managed if we're careful". Unfortunately, some of them have the PM's ear.
Not been following the news. What are the restrictions?
Son is working in retail in London and, apparently, working on Xmas Eve and then again on the Monday, despite it being a Bank Holiday. So either he spends Xmas alone away from the family or I have to spend most of the Xmas hols on the motorway with him. Annoying. But it will be the most time I will spend with him all year and wanting all the family together - even if it is only for a day or two - is something I want very badly indeed. So if I have to spend time on the M6 so be it.
I don't like masks. But spare a thought for those like my son, who do have to wear them and are exposed to lots of people all day every day. That is how my other son caught Covid in January - the transmissible and infectious variant - and passed it to my husband, in part because his employers were not good at following all the precautions. At least Eldest Son's current employers are a bit more sensible. Even so there is a risk.
And as for my poor Daughter .....
I know I probably shouldn't say it but fuck China, its vile regime, its labs, its lies, its indifference to the human suffering it has caused its own people and others, its arrogance and aggression.
Not been following the news. What are the restrictions?
Son is working in retail in London and, apparently, working on Xmas Eve and then again on the Monday, despite it being a Bank Holiday. So either he spends Xmas alone away from the family or I have to spend most of the Xmas hols on the motorway with him. Annoying. But it will be the most time I will spend with him all year and wanting all the family together - even if it is only for a day or two - is something I want very badly indeed. So if I have to spend time on the M6 so be it.
I don't like masks. But spare a thought for those like my son, who do have to wear them and are exposed to lots of people all day every day. That is how my other son caught Covid in January - the transmissible and infectious variant - and passed it to my husband, in part because his employers were not good at following all the precautions. At least Eldest Son's current employers are a bit more sensible. Even so there is a risk.
And as for my poor Daughter .....
I know I probably shouldn't say it but fuck China, its vile regime, its labs, its lies, its indifference to the human suffering it has caused its own people and others, its arrogance and aggression.
You should say it, Ms. Cyclefree, because it’s true, and the truth should always be spoken.
Not been following the news. What are the restrictions?
1. Masks on public transport and in retail (but not hospitality). 2. Contacts of an Omicron case have to self-isolate for 10 days, regardless of vaccination status. 3. Self-isolation and day 2 PCR test for all international arrivals. Negative PCR result required to end self-isolation.
Not been following the news. What are the restrictions?
1. Masks on public transport and in retail (but not hospitality). 2. Contacts of an Omicron case have to self-isolate for 10 days, regardless of vaccination status. 3. Self-isolation and day 2 PCR test for all international arrivals. Negative PCR result required to end self-isolation.
Not been following the news. What are the restrictions?
1. Masks on public transport and in retail (but not hospitality). 2. Contacts of an Omicron case have to self-isolate for 10 days, regardless of vaccination status. 3. Self-isolation and day 2 PCR test for all international arrivals. Negative PCR result required to end self-isolation.
Think that's it.
Thank you.
Unfortunately you can instantly spot the weakness in this position the lockdown fans and media are going to have fun with. What sort of variant is it that makes shopping and public transport dangerous, but not hospitality? 😕
And Leon made a knowing remark, in what made me think of the old sitcom Yes Primeminister. What if this is Salami tactics? What if they have a destination in mind, but because of sensitivities will lead us there in baby steps, maybe based on some sort ongoing analysis, or maybe not, they already have timeline.
What they certainly got now they didn’t have last week is cover for the u turn for this years Christmas restrictions? Christmas shop early and Christmas shop often now I suggest.
Comments
The WHO criterion for "pandemic under control" is positivity rate below 5% - which some of our neighbours haven't been at since September.
I have some really cool travel assignments for the Knappers' Gazette lined up next year - the Deep South, Ukraine, Greece, possibly Thailand, and more - and now I wonder if any of them will happen, and indeed I doubt it. But fingers x'd. We dunno yet
I had a splendid day with my older daughter, 15, who, amazingly has developed a passionate interest in old houses and quirky villages and even ancient churches - which she shares with me. So we saw a few today. However on the way back one of my favourite songs boomed out of my bluetoothed iPhone - Rambling Man by Lemon Jelly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXDtQcuA5Bo
When he starts announcing all the marvellous destinations in the world - from Kentish Town to Gujarat, Ipanema, San Jose, MANDALAY! - I almost blubbed. In the car. The whole wide world: is it all gone? Taken away?
I am pretty sure it is mostly gone for 6-12 months, at least. As you say, that announcement by Israel is telling and ominous
Disheartening to realise that we are now the fat (great) uncles.
Following the identification of the Omicron variant in the UK we are introducing new measures to ensure we maintain the excellent progress we have made against this virus. /1
https://twitter.com/sajidjavid/status/1464682747440607238?s=20
It’s a kind of emotional long covid.
Starmer must resign!!!
If it goes badly with Omicron then a load of people die. You might think I get off on that, but I don't.
The reason I hold it against RP is because I know it probably eats away at his core, ex-Labour people never really get over it. The one's I know haven't and most of them end up back with Labour. The problem for RP is that he went full turncoat, regretted it, tried to go back and they told him to get fucked because he betrayed them. Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him, I guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake.
What's worse is that he's about to vote for the SNP, breaking the one major policy of the Lib Dems in Scotland - don't fucking vote nationalist. Cementing himself as a man of few principles. I don't believe a 30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party can simply give it up or walk away, unless he never really believed in the first place.
https://thedispatch.com/p/the-changing-face-of-social-breakdown
I was particularly struck by "To opt for perfect peace and quiet is to opt for death."
Um, yes.
Wasn’t Germany >70k last week with a lower rate of testing
Probably both.
The vaccine-only narrative is particularly moronic. You only get early treatment with cheap, very safe drugs if you live in countries like India, Egypt or Japan, or in the USA if your doctor is prepared to prescribe off-label and ignore 'protocols'.
We will know very soon how bad Omicron is for the vaxxed and unvaxxed, and also its effective and pure R number.
If it proves that vaxxes still mostly work - but that it hits the unvaxxed hard - then every nation must put maximum effort into pumping jabs out to the poor world, and the poor world must do its bit by making jabs mandatory. It is that crucial. We can't fuck about
Some basic maths
About 50% of the world has had one jab. Let's be optimistic and say they all have great protection. That still leaves 3.5 BILLION people with no protection. It looks like Omicron is so transmissible it will hit everyone in weeks, once it hits 1% of the population
If Omicron still has a CFR (like original Covid 19) of about 1% then that is 35 million dead. And that is ignoring the possibility of crashed health systems, which could multiply that by five
Of course none of this may happen. But these are not wild speculations
An MP can’t be held accountable for the actions of a Minister even if they happen to be the same person
He could of course simply refuse to call them. That's within his power.
"regretted it, tried to go back" had a mental breakdown in lockdown, was desperate for "normal" and that was normal.
"Magically he then decided that Labour wasn't for him" about a week in. "What am I doing"? Was the question I asked myself. Was greatly amused when the letter came through barring me.
"guess he needs to convince himself that he didn't make a huge mistake" I'm not a socialist. Had not been a happy fit for a long time.
"30 year Labour veteran and believer in the founding principles of the Labour party " 25 years and not sure which principles you think are relevant.
It is touching that you care so much about what I think. Despite not knowing me at all.
Being a vaccinated island has never sat well with me and IMO Boris and the wider government have made a big mistake in not simply building 10x our current vaccine manufacturing capacity and then giving it all to COVAX.
What Hoyle has threatened and has the power to do, is to grant as many Urgent Questions on the subject he sees fit, forcing the Minister(s) to attend the Commons and answer.
And the fucking Chinese authorities - given that they launched this lovely bug - could put in 50 billion quid, as well, to get the whole world jabbed by summer
We thought we were in a race before, now we are in a death defying sprint
What would a wave of Covid infection in China worse than the Delta wave in India do to Xi Jinping's standing, and what might he do to bolster it?
Starmer must resign!
It will cost money, but save money in the end. We have just spent £330 billion, already
At the same time, tho, the "Global South" must step up. South Africa, when it came to jabs, did not. They smeared AZ, then threw it away, then sold it, then they got more than enough mRNA for the country but not enough people are willing to take it. 17m doses are rotting in South African warehouses, even as Omicron emerges
There is no point in the developed world sending out 9 billion Pfizer jabs if the developing world then sits back and says Nah, Bill Gates made it, I refuse
I fear that will mean mandatory jabs in quite a few countries. So be it
Something does need to be done. This is government by press leak and press briefing on a scale even Alistair Campbell would blush at. Mostly very stupid ill-thought through policies as well, although that's a slightly different problem.
Of course the whole mask thing is panto
As Francis U implied downthread, there is a decent chance Omicron is so transmissible no plausible lockdown can contain it. In which case it's here and that's that. Jab jab jab
I too deplore the leaks, pre-briefings and the like. But were any of the principal policy-making announcements of the Blair/Brown (even Major?) governments ever kept secret until the Commons met? A golden age that never was?
With various people in the establishment being well paid middlemen in the 'trade'.
I don't think he voted Labour either but I am sure he would confirm if you pm'd him.
https://unherd.com/thepost/why-the-change-to-masking-rules-will-make-people-angry/
The IFR has never been 1%. Ioannidis put it at about 0.15% in 2020 but it's very sensitive to age and state of health.
Epsilon or whatever will have evolved as viruses do to be more infectious and less deadly. So, a bit less than 0.096%.
The people who want more controls always tell us the first point, the 'more infectious', but not the second. Funny, isn't it.
Eventually COVID will be a bad cold ... admittedly no laughing matter for the very elderly, who can die of them. Just a nuisance to others.
Lockdown back in time to ruin everyone's Christmases for a second year?
https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1464699610467872770?s=20
And nobody will pay any attention to rules about who and where you can meet.
If you have only 3,000 Delta patients in hospital, instead of 6,000, at the time the Omicron admissions start in earnest then that could make a bit of a difference.
If he'd told the whole world he would have been fine.
However, he has been far less successful in gaining 2019 Tory Leave voters, with more 2019 Tory voters going RefUK than Labour with Yougov. That was also clear in the council elections in May and the local by elections last week, LD and Independent gains from the Tories in the South and Remain areas, Tory holds or even gains from Labour in Leave areas.
Indeed it is possible Starmer could become PM with fewer Labour MPs than Brown got in 2010 or Corbyn got in 2017, due to LD gains from the Tories in the South and the support of the SNP
I'm not going to lose my shit over it. But if they pointlessly lock us down again, especially against a new variant which can easily slip past any lockdown anyhow, then I will pull my grandpa's pitchfork from the thatch
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59378849
Best to you and your family.
You can do a lot with squid you can even make it look like pineapple like I do so you don’t know which you are about to have a mouthful of.
I might add lemons to my sumac and chicken topping like I add lemons when I casserole chicken. I’ll try it on friends and let you know. Alongs it gets called Jade’s kitchen chicken topping!
That’s not a reference to you Topping!
So why won’t they put their name to it?
It could lead to asking does Gentleman’s Relish work on pizza
If Starmer becomes PM it will likely not be through winning a majority of Red Wall seats, it will be through winning enough to get Labour to 250 seats or so (helped by 2019 LD voters there now voting Labour to beat the Tories) while his majority depends on a Remain coalition of LD seats in the South and SNP seats in Scotland
Some people see permanent lockdown as the route to a better society.
There are those who flip between "there's no problem" and "the problem is so bad that nothing we can do will help, so we might as well take it on the chin" with no time at all in the intermediate state of "there's a problem which can be managed if we're careful". Unfortunately, some of them have the PM's ear.
Lord Sumption said we probably should not obey the police state laws. This seems an 'obvious' attempt to continue them for ever, a bit like the attempt to extend ID cards after 1945
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-tyranny-of-boris-johnson-s-mask-mandate
To cap it all, you'll struggle to see any masks at elite events, like Obama's birthday party, except among the servants. I think that's rather the significance of this.
Son is working in retail in London and, apparently, working on Xmas Eve and then again on the Monday, despite it being a Bank Holiday. So either he spends Xmas alone away from the family or I have to spend most of the Xmas hols on the motorway with him. Annoying. But it will be the most time I will spend with him all year and wanting all the family together - even if it is only for a day or two - is something I want very badly indeed. So if I have to spend time on the M6 so be it.
I don't like masks. But spare a thought for those like my son, who do have to wear them and are exposed to lots of people all day every day. That is how my other son caught Covid in January - the transmissible and infectious variant - and passed it to my husband, in part because his employers were not good at following all the precautions. At least Eldest Son's current employers are a bit more sensible. Even so there is a risk.
And as for my poor Daughter .....
I know I probably shouldn't say it but fuck China, its vile regime, its labs, its lies, its indifference to the human suffering it has caused its own people and others, its arrogance and aggression.
2. Contacts of an Omicron case have to self-isolate for 10 days, regardless of vaccination status.
3. Self-isolation and day 2 PCR test for all international arrivals. Negative PCR result required to end self-isolation.
Think that's it.
And Leon made a knowing remark, in what made me think of the old sitcom Yes Primeminister. What if this is Salami tactics? What if they have a destination in mind, but because of sensitivities will lead us there in baby steps, maybe based on some sort ongoing analysis, or maybe not, they already have timeline.
What they certainly got now they didn’t have last week is cover for the u turn for this years Christmas restrictions? Christmas shop early and Christmas shop often now I suggest.