What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Hang on, you say day 1-3, say 1-4 is typical symptoms. But 1-6 are the most infectious,. 7-9 also somewhat. But even 4/6 is 65% at most, less so if one allows for the tailing off. That's not 70-80%.
Anyone who thinks the Dems attempted a coup to overturn the 2016 election result needs the mendacious or moron test applied to anything they say.
And moron can be safely ruled out. There are no morons on a site where more people than not understand how spacetime struts its stuff!
Well, Kinabalu, you were pontificating this week about how we could not say the Coulston defendants had committed criminal damage because they had been acquitted of the charges.
Since the FBI has not charged anyone with sedition or insurrection, then surely the Jan 6 rioters cannot be accused of sedition and insurrection either if you would apply your own standards to another case? Or that doesn’t work if it doesn’t fit with your views……
I was - can we go with 'pointing out' rather than 'pontificating'? - pointing out that saying one accepts the verdict AND the act was criminal means one doesn't really accept the verdict.
The mental gymnastics needed to map this onto the Jan 6th Capitol proceedings in any meaningful way are not for me on a Saturday night.
What you said was they couldn’t be said to have committed criminal damage because they had been cleared. So all that doing is applying your logic to this.
Much as you are trying to wriggle out of it, your basic problem is that, if we accept your original argument (as I did), then you can’t call the Jan 6 rioters insurrectionists. You can believe they are but you can’t state it as a fact.
Not that hard.
Ed, the topic merits better than this.
You - for reasons you'll know and I can't - have got yourself into such a lather about 'wokeness' and the Dems and the 'libs', that whole side of life, that you are prepared to defend and go along with what no decent person should defend or go along with.
This, my friend, is the truth. You'd be better off speaking it plainly rather than attempting all this softhead sophistry.
Oh Kinabalu, please don’t start with your “I’m a rational, neutral chap who listens to the evidence” stuff. It comes off as slightly patronising and the truth is you are a partisan and a biased one at that, as I am, when it comes to certain issues.
In any event, the truth is you post far more stuff about social issues and your views than I do, which is why I only have 4000 posts and you over 26000. I’ve only been on here as much as I have these past few days because I have COVID and isolating.
I'm not being patronizing, quite the opposite, I'm opining to you clearly and without artifice. You are so consumed with anti-woke culture war stuff that you've signed up to Donald Trump. That's my read in a nutshell and I'll let you know if it changes.
Well, if you think I have signed up to 100% Donald Trump, you haven't read my posts in the past or, more likely, viewed them through a certain prism. I could go on and on but my simple premise has always been this: in a 2 horse race, you choose whom you think is the better candidate and I thought Trump. Does not mean they are perfect which DJT isn't.
I think though it may also reflect differences when it comes to outlook. I'm a Catholic so believe that what you should focus on people's actions and that is how you judge them, and that everyone is a sinner so you should be careful of judgements and seeing things in black and white terms. I suspect your mindset is more Calvinist which, of course, believes that being a Calvinist automatically makes you naturally good, regardless of what you do, and - conversely - that, if you are not a Calvinist, you are wrong.
Now, obviously, I do not think you are religious but I suspect you have the secular equivalent which is "I hold these beliefs, therefore I must be right / good". I find that a dangerous mindset.
Should we dispense with all the waffle? I think we should. If he runs again and gets the Nom will you be rooting for him to win back the White House?
I’ll lay aside my hurt on dissing my theological chat as waffle. On question, it depends who runs. My view is this:
1. I’d prefer if he didn’t run. He’s too decisive and will be older. For the Republicans, I think a Tim Scott would be a good candidate with DeSantis as VP;
2. If he does run, and it’s against Biden or Harris, then, yes, I would back him over either. Both are proving to be even worse than I thought they would be, particularly Biden, whom I thought would be ok-ish;
The postulated 'Calvinist v Catholic' juxta just wasn't helping, interesting though it is.
Well I said IF he gets the Nom, so, ok, that's a caveated yes where the caveat is if it's against Biden or Harris.
Now let's see if we can remove that last caveat. Is there any realistic Dem candidate for 24 who you'd be rooting for to beat the (delete to taste, ie depending if you have any) wannabe fascist strongman / champion for ordinary decent Americans?
From what can see at the moment re the leading possibles, probably no:
Buttigieg - no; lightweight and his paternal leave thing raises serious questions; Warren - no; Clinton - definitely not; Klobuchar - probably not but wouldn’t mind if she won; Abrams - no way but it would be hilarious to see the Democrats pin the “you didn’t accept your defeat” on Trump when they put forth Ms I’m the Rightful Winner herself;
I’d vote for a Tulsi Gabbard type. I would also have considered voting for Sanders.
Now you can answer my question. Would there be any credible Republican candidate you would vote for if the 2024 nominee was Harris?
No because it seems 'credible' in GOP terms means has drunk the Trump kool aid. But I can tell you this. If a Dem president - let's call him David Tramp - had done what the real DT has done and then was running again 4 years later against ANY Republican who I judged not to be an existential threat to democracy, I'd vote Republican. Wouldn't even have to dwell on it. Republican.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
Report from my local gastropub in north London suburbia.
Packed.
Heading to Ave Mario in a bit, will report back!
William IV was empty earlier, although their crepes remain fantastic
I don’t think you better say “their” crepes to the crepe stand. I think they and the William IV don’t get on.
The William IV now has its own crepe stand… to which we went (the reviews of the other one are full of reports of how rude they are). They said that relations are now “ok” between the two crepesters
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Hang on, you say day 1-3, say 1-4 is typical symptoms. But 1-6 are the most infectious,. 7-9 also somewhat. But even 4/6 is 65% at most, less so if one allows for the tailing off. That's not 70-80%.
It might however be a higher proportion of infections since you are more likely to be spreading it when you have no symptoms yourself?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
If only Boris Johnson had made that nuanced argument back in 2016 when he said Brexit meant getting rid of the 5% VAT rate.
Once more he's hoist by one's own petard.
That was in the context of the UK government wanting to eliminate VAT on fuel and being prevented from doing so by EU rules.
It’s very different to cutting VAT to reduce the impact of price increases
The virus itself induces social distancing because meeting anyone is a known unknown. It will change our habits and interpersonal relationships permanently as long as it is in circulation unless really effective antidotes come on stream.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
The point is that there's no containing COVID. The genie is out of the bottle already. You're living in a fantasy world where making people stay home will prevent anyone from dying.
It's called personal responsibility, not demented libertarianism. Like I paid for my asbestos garage to be decontaminated properly, I'm not going to knowingly put anyone at risk.
Wrt asbestos it's also the law. Aside from that, it's not comparable. Half of cases are entirely without symptoms, that's the vector. We're currently testing obsessively and still registering 150k cases per day.
There's "victory" against COVID. We just get on with life and consign testing, isolation and everything else to do with it to the dustbin of history. We don't have mandatory isolation for people with the flu and COVID is now less deadly than the flu and those same people who are at risk from COVID are also at risk from the flu (old people and people with no immune systems).
How do you propose to stop asymptomatic spread of COVID and what is the difference between some old person catching it from someone without symptoms or someone with the sniffles? The result is the same, they catch it and die. It's of little comfort to the dead person that they got it from someone who didn't know.
The issue is 'knowingly'. Some of us would rush out after a positive test and scatter it around knowingluy like some death-zombie in the London Underground. I wouldn't.
Unknowingly: nothing one can do. But one has to try.
But ultimately that person is still going to die, do you think they care whether they get it from someone who didn't know they had it vs someone that did? They're still dead.
Oh yes, like I am happy to push granny out into the traffic because she'll get a stroke next year?
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Is that really so? I saw a graph posted on here a week or so ago that plotted days from infection against sensitivity of LFT & PCR tests, and infectiousness. That graph seemed to suggest that the days when the LFTs gave +ve results (days 3 -7 IIRC) corresponded with the time of infectiousness.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Hang on, you say day 1-3, say 1-4 is typical symptoms. But 1-6 are the most infectious,. 7-9 also somewhat. But even 4/6 is 65% at most, less so if one allows for the tailing off. That's not 70-80%.
It might however be a higher proportion of infections since you are more likely to be spreading it when you have no symptoms yourself?
Ah, quite. Certainly in my case. But that is irrelevant if one is a PBCovidLibertarian.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
Who decides who needs It exactly ?
The sort of rise we are going to see, or expecting to see, will have a major impact on many households, not just the poorest who, of course should be helped, but so should many others and characterising it in the terms of people either being poor or rich doesn’t help,as a great many are in between.
You can argue exactly where to draw the line in providing any extra support but it's not really hard to recognise there's a clear scale. We already use the measures of income and wealth to determine whether a household gets means tested benefits.
Having said that, this is a really tough one to address.
If the projected energy price rises come through, removing VAT isn't going to cut it. I doubt HMG will have any way of mitigating the adverse effect on the population at large. People will blame the government - another reason Starmer will likely be PM after GE24.
It’s incredibly difficult given the anticipated scale of the expected increases coming. We need to transition to renewables, preferably self sufficient ones for our own energy security but we are not there yet and nowhere near there yet so will need gas and other fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. We have been fortunate, so far, that this winter has been relatively mild.
People will blame the govt and probably also green policies too and that is pretty damaging. The govt deserve any blame they get.
This is a major problem and the govt needs to put plans in place to mitigate for next winter, pretty sharp too. Mind you there seems no will to do that.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Heaven help us if you are in charge when Ebola really breaks out of Africa.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
They won’t be as demanding patients as last year though. Ventilation levels are actually going down right now. With prevalence so high many of those patients are there for something other than Covid.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Possibly the more pertinent point on free mass testing is that the government only just the other day announced that 100,000 key workers needed to test daily and would be provided with tests for that.
So if nothing else, announcing the end of free mass testing soon is probably going to cause the usual feeling of government-doesn't-quite-know-what-it's-doing uncertainty.
I don't actually get that feeling very often. Normally I get the feeling near to certainty that the government is completely deranged and doesn't have an actual fucking clue what it's doing.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Fucking hell, necrotising fasciitis is entirely natural, and indeed part of the Circle of Life. You want some of that?
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
You're screwing around and with people's lives and livelihoods to avoid spreading a virus that is going to spread either way anyway and for which vaccines have already been distributed.
I don't consider screwing around with people's lives and livelihood to be at all normal, or considerate.
What the hell is wrong with you?
That really is the Tyuphoid Mary defence. "Oh yes, officer, she's working for my hotel, but it would be so disruptive to my profits to sack her,
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Hang on, you say day 1-3, say 1-4 is typical symptoms. But 1-6 are the most infectious,. 7-9 also somewhat. But even 4/6 is 65% at most, less so if one allows for the tailing off. That's not 70-80%.
No, days 4-9 are typically symptomatic. Days 1-3 aren't. It's an exponential decay, days 7-9 aren't very infectious which is why the government has already moved to introduce the rules on clear LFTs, those negative LFTs on days 6 and 7 would be PCR positives for sure.
Don't forget that half of all people don't have symptoms at all but can still spread the virus. That's already 40-60% of infectious days without any symptoms (with Omicron it may be closer to 60%).
We're going back to fundamentals of how COVID spreads and why it's needed such tough measures to contain or slow down. With Omicron we're in even more trouble with containment measures. It seems impossible to slow down let alone halt. It may make you feel better about yourself and superior to those who want to get on with life now but you or anyone staying in with the sniffles will do nothing to prevent anyone from dying.
The best measures are fit tested N95 masks for people who are still vulnerable because they can't get the current vaccines or for older people at risk and maybe that's the kind of thing we should be looking at as a free optional NPI, but the onus will fall on the individual to wear it, not on society by staying home with the sniffles.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
New infections seem to be on a definite downward path with the peak being 29/12.
Time to talk about removing restrictions.
They do not normally report the total in hospital for the day of the report, i.e. the 8th of Jan on the 8th of Jan, i suspect that this is an 'admin blip' at that is a provisional number that will be revised up.
Possibly - I was surprised to see it reported.
But its interesting that the number on ventilators has been falling - which suggests that those being hospitalised with Omicron are less seriously ill and so are likely to be leaving hospital sooner.
There's also the possibility that the number of anti-vaxxers not previously infected has now reached such minimal levels that they're having less of an effect on hospital numbers.
I'm really not trying to be clever, but is it possible that the number on ventilators is falling at least partly because quite a lot are dying and have no further need for a ventilator? From what I can see there are currently around 850 on ventilators. 1,271 deaths have been reported over the last 7 days (yes, I know that some of these deaths happened more than 7 days ago).
The number on ventilation has been totally flat throughout, you'd think they'd at least need a period on ventilation before dying.
This is an interesting aspect. If the death rate of measuring covid is "died within 28 days of a positive test" then anyone who might have died of another cause, e.g. cancer but also coincidentally had covid at the same time this would be added to the covid tally would it not (please correct me if I am wrong)?
Surely the best way would be saying that someone died due to medical complications related primarily to Covid. This would require a little more interpretation but would give a greater level of confidence in the data
28 days was used, not because of any medical properties - other than the numbers dying with COVID and not of it, kind of balance with those who took so long to die that they were outside the 28 days.
Case of death then ends up as a bit of rabbit hole - COVID will be mentioned on death certificates, but is it the primary cause, a contributory cause, or a may have been... or what. People are arguing endlessly over individual cases.
There is no exact answer. All the statistics are approximate when you dig into them. 28 days is a pretty useful approximation.
Indeed, but if we get to a situation where Omicron infects huge numbers of people there are going to be a large number of people who will become part of the statistic. If I had had a tachycardia unrelated to covid when I had the pox, and had been submitted to hospital and then subsequently went to sing with the choir invisible then I would be one of the statistics even though my demise had nothing to do with the plague!
Deaths where covid is mentioned on the death certificate exceed deaths within 28 days of diagnosis. There are more deaths involving Covid that occur after 28 days than "coincidental" Covid deaths, and I'm afraid it boils my piss that this is never ever ever mentioned by anyone ever.
I recall the death certificates were unreliable though because there was a period when covid was being cured as cause of death regardless of whether it was actually implicated or not
Eh?
GPs were putting covid on the certificate regardless of involvement.
But how was it being cured as a cause of death?
Generally speaking, death indicates that there was no cure.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Is that really so? I saw a graph posted on here a week or so ago that plotted days from infection against sensitivity of LFT & PCR tests, and infectiousness. That graph seemed to suggest that the days when the LFTs gave +ve results (days 3 -7 IIRC) corresponded with the time of infectiousness.
I can't find the graph now - damn.
With Omicron it has been pulled back a bit, read the earlier discussion about why Omicron spreads so quickly despite the R0 value not being that high.
There was some early suggestion that with Omicron the timeline of progression from infection, infectious, etc was shortened. Any hard evidence for this?
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Heaven help us if you are in charge when Ebola really breaks out of Africa.
Why do you think it hasn't already done so? And what makes you think that one day it will?
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
They won’t be as demanding patients as last year though. Ventilation levels are actually going down right now. With prevalence so high many of those patients are there for something other than Covid.
I know that it's fashionable on here to dismiss it all as just a cold. And yes, perhaps you know more than the NHS Trust CEOs talking to the NHS Providers CEO about the state of things in reality on the ground.
Have you and the others not considered a rather basic point? If it's just a cold, if it's just staff absences, if its not a problem why are hospitals desperately building mini nightingales in their carparks?
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Fucking hell, necrotising fasciitis is entirely natural, and indeed part of the Circle of Life. You want some of that?
Last I checked everyone in the country is going to end end up with Covid, many times probably. If not infected by one person then will still get it from someone else.
Is that the case with necrotising fascitis? I don't think so.
New infections seem to be on a definite downward path with the peak being 29/12.
Time to talk about removing restrictions.
They do not normally report the total in hospital for the day of the report, i.e. the 8th of Jan on the 8th of Jan, i suspect that this is an 'admin blip' at that is a provisional number that will be revised up.
Possibly - I was surprised to see it reported.
But its interesting that the number on ventilators has been falling - which suggests that those being hospitalised with Omicron are less seriously ill and so are likely to be leaving hospital sooner.
There's also the possibility that the number of anti-vaxxers not previously infected has now reached such minimal levels that they're having less of an effect on hospital numbers.
I'm really not trying to be clever, but is it possible that the number on ventilators is falling at least partly because quite a lot are dying and have no further need for a ventilator? From what I can see there are currently around 850 on ventilators. 1,271 deaths have been reported over the last 7 days (yes, I know that some of these deaths happened more than 7 days ago).
The number on ventilation has been totally flat throughout, you'd think they'd at least need a period on ventilation before dying.
This is an interesting aspect. If the death rate of measuring covid is "died within 28 days of a positive test" then anyone who might have died of another cause, e.g. cancer but also coincidentally had covid at the same time this would be added to the covid tally would it not (please correct me if I am wrong)?
Surely the best way would be saying that someone died due to medical complications related primarily to Covid. This would require a little more interpretation but would give a greater level of confidence in the data
28 days was used, not because of any medical properties - other than the numbers dying with COVID and not of it, kind of balance with those who took so long to die that they were outside the 28 days.
Case of death then ends up as a bit of rabbit hole - COVID will be mentioned on death certificates, but is it the primary cause, a contributory cause, or a may have been... or what. People are arguing endlessly over individual cases.
There is no exact answer. All the statistics are approximate when you dig into them. 28 days is a pretty useful approximation.
Indeed, but if we get to a situation where Omicron infects huge numbers of people there are going to be a large number of people who will become part of the statistic. If I had had a tachycardia unrelated to covid when I had the pox, and had been submitted to hospital and then subsequently went to sing with the choir invisible then I would be one of the statistics even though my demise had nothing to do with the plague!
Deaths where covid is mentioned on the death certificate exceed deaths within 28 days of diagnosis. There are more deaths involving Covid that occur after 28 days than "coincidental" Covid deaths, and I'm afraid it boils my piss that this is never ever ever mentioned by anyone ever.
I recall the death certificates were unreliable though because there was a period when covid was being cured as cause of death regardless of whether it was actually implicated or not
Eh?
GPs were putting covid on the certificate regardless of involvement.
But how was it being cured as a cause of death?
Generally speaking, death indicates that there was no cure.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
I suspect that there's a lot of truth in this. One of the trends of the autumn was doctors getting really worried about a tsunami of flu and RSV infections caused by lack of exposure to the relevant viruses during previous lockdowns.
It just so happens that this hasn't happened again (some will contend that this is because of masking, some because every other respiratory infection has been crowded out by Covid, yet others will say it's down to a combination of the two.) But regardless, I suspect that delaying population exposure to these kinds of routinely circulating illnesses isn't a good idea. It's not practical to suppress them, and if they're not doing the rounds for whatever reason then you're simply running down the immunity of the population and storing up a larger number of more severe cases for the future.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
It wouldn't be just journalists who got the reduction, would it? That sounds plain bonkers and also very clumsy politics.
No, but it will be journalists that bitch and moan when they don’t get it. A lot of policy is set, unfortunately, by the interests of national journalists
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Heaven help us if you are in charge when Ebola really breaks out of Africa.
Why do you think it hasn't already done so? And what makes you think that one day it will?
I said 'really'. I have read various accountrs of emerging diseases.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
Who decides who needs It exactly ?
The sort of rise we are going to see, or expecting to see, will have a major impact on many households, not just the poorest who, of course should be helped, but so should many others and characterising it in the terms of people either being poor or rich doesn’t help,as a great many are in between.
You can argue exactly where to draw the line in providing any extra support but it's not really hard to recognise there's a clear scale. We already use the measures of income and wealth to determine whether a household gets means tested benefits.
Having said that, this is a really tough one to address.
If the projected energy price rises come through, removing VAT isn't going to cut it. I doubt HMG will have any way of mitigating the adverse effect on the population at large. People will blame the government - another reason Starmer will likely be PM after GE24.
It’s incredibly difficult given the anticipated scale of the expected increases coming. We need to transition to renewables, preferably self sufficient ones for our own energy security but we are not there yet and nowhere near there yet so will need gas and other fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. We have been fortunate, so far, that this winter has been relatively mild.
People will blame the govt and probably also green policies too and that is pretty damaging. The govt deserve any blame they get.
So do its and its predecessors' idiotic green energy policies that account for five times as much of the bill as VAT - cheered on and even exceeded by the oppositon parties incidentally.
If only Cameron had had the courage of his convictions and scrapped the Green Crap.
So often these days you see the government panicking about totally predictable problems its policies cause and having to put in place half-baked, short-term solutions that cause even more problems down the line. Housing, energy, the economy, law and order, illegal immigration ...
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
You're screwing around and with people's lives and livelihoods to avoid spreading a virus that is going to spread either way anyway and for which vaccines have already been distributed.
I don't consider screwing around with people's lives and livelihood to be at all normal, or considerate.
What the hell is wrong with you?
That really is the Tyuphoid Mary defence. "Oh yes, officer, she's working for my hotel, but it would be so disruptive to my profits to sack her,
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
I really did try not to. It's called consideration for other folk. Used to be a great big public health thing in the UK. Really did. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases."
Perhaps someone who knows more about this can confirm or say otherwise, but as I understand it, you are at your most infectious before you show symptoms.
If day 0 is the day you get infected then days 1-6 are the most infectious 7-9 less so then from 10 onwards not really at all and day 4 is when the majority of people get symptoms. Around half of the infectious period is before symptoms and for half of all people they don't get symptoms at all (my dad is an example, tested positive for 9 days in a row in the end, not even a cough or sniffles).
Again, the idea that forcing people with the sniffles to stay home will reduce the death rate it's laughable. The reason COVID has spread so fast and so far is that something like 70-80% of the infectious days are when people have no symptoms.
Hang on, you say day 1-3, say 1-4 is typical symptoms. But 1-6 are the most infectious,. 7-9 also somewhat. But even 4/6 is 65% at most, less so if one allows for the tailing off. That's not 70-80%.
No, days 4-9 are typically symptomatic. Days 1-3 aren't. It's an exponential decay, days 7-9 aren't very infectious which is why the government has already moved to introduce the rules on clear LFTs, those negative LFTs on days 6 and 7 would be PCR positives for sure.
Don't forget that half of all people don't have symptoms at all but can still spread the virus. That's already 40-60% of infectious days without any symptoms (with Omicron it may be closer to 60%).
We're going back to fundamentals of how COVID spreads and why it's needed such tough measures to contain or slow down. With Omicron we're in even more trouble with containment measures. It seems impossible to slow down let alone halt. It may make you feel better about yourself and superior to those who want to get on with life now but you or anyone staying in with the sniffles will do nothing to prevent anyone from dying.
The best measures are fit tested N95 masks for people who are still vulnerable because they can't get the current vaccines or for older people at risk and maybe that's the kind of thing we should be looking at as a free optional NPI, but the onus will fall on the individual to wear it, not on society by staying home with the sniffles.
Thanks for the helpful discussion. But as sniffles at present are quite likely to be covid, I wouldn't want to risk it.
Carolyn Andriano, who testified in the trial of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in New York last month, has claimed that Virginia Giuffre told her in 2001 that she slept with Prince Andrew.
The claims, made in an interview with the Daily Mail, will ratchet up the pressure on the prince, as it is a contemporaneous report of his alleged sexual assault of the then 17-year-old Giuffre. He has vehemently denied the claims and his lawyers have been urging a US judge to dismiss Giuffre’s civil suit against him.
Andriano, then 14 and living in Florida, said she was texted by Giuffre (formerly Virginia Roberts, before her marriage) in 2001 from London, who claimed she had slept with the prince.
“[Giuffre] said, ‘I got to sleep with him’,” Andriano told the Mail.
I don’t see how Prince Andrew is under any pressure whatsoever. His career is finished and he will go down in history as a disgrace to the House of Windsor.
He’ll never be convicted. He’ll never be cleared. It’s over.
Makes the point that there are no good options for the DoY. The *best* is:
"The prince’s lawyers have taken an aggressive approach to protecting their client. They first argued that the court summons had not been properly served, then attempted to get the case thrown out on the grounds that Giuffre doesn’t live in the US.
Now they are seeking their client’s salvation with the grim fact that he qualifies as a potential defendant in any sex abuse case connected to Epstein. In other words, it appears his possible culpability is being used as his defence.
Even if this legal loophole works, and Kaplan dismisses the case, it will be an outcome that will not clear the prince’s name, which his friends insist is his prime aim. Instead, added to all those letters that come after his title, will be a toxic question mark."
Randy Andy needs to hire this dude's barrister, greatest barrister ever, from 2015.
LONDON - A Saudi millionaire was cleared of raping a teenager after telling the court that he might have accidentally penetrated the 18-year-old when he tripped and fell.
Property developer Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on the teenager as she slept on the sofa in his flat in Maida Vale, west London, in August in 2014.
But he claimed that he might have fallen on top of her while his penis was poking out the top of his underwear,
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
But as far as you are concerned, is not really far enough to give much comfort to the rest of us. Have you adjusted your position to take account of the incredibly disappointing performance of the vaccines, vs what we were promised when they were first released?
Report from my local gastropub in north London suburbia.
Packed.
Heading to Ave Mario in a bit, will report back!
William IV was empty earlier, although their crepes remain fantastic
I don’t think you better say “their” crepes to the crepe stand. I think they and the William IV don’t get on.
The William IV now has its own crepe stand… to which we went (the reviews of the other one are full of reports of how rude they are). They said that relations are now “ok” between the two crepesters
Yes, now you mention it, I remember the William IV did that...will take a look when over Hampstead way.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
I am off to do something else. I just cannot cope with the idea that not giving other folk colds, flu, covid, etc. if I know I have them is the height of social irresponsibility. Not least because those are the conditions to fucking increase viral virulence under basic theories of natural selection.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
if the PB Brains Trust say it is over it must be over.
To be fair this Omicron spike does look like it's over. We're going to have a rough month and the things will calm down. Until the next variant comes at is again.
The point remains that Covid is not just a cold, the NHS in towns/regions is under threat, and saying "it's over" doesn't cure the massive staffing crisis caused by all the people ill with this "cold"
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
I am off to do something else. I just cannot cope with the idea that not giving other folk colds, flu, covid, etc. if I know I have them is the height of social irresponsibility. Not least because those are the conditions to fucking increase viral virulence under basic theories of natural selection.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Given the scale of the increases we are likely to see it isn’t just UC recipients who will be seriously adversely impacted by this though. 60/70 quid a month is a major chunk of your monthly take home even if you’re on a reasonable wage, above the national average. It will also feed into inflation with the consequences there too. This is a problem coming that really cannot just be solved by giving those on UC a few quid to help out.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Fucking hell, necrotising fasciitis is entirely natural, and indeed part of the Circle of Life. You want some of that?
Last I checked everyone in the country is going to end end up with Covid, many times probably. If not infected by one person then will still get it from someone else.
Is that the case with necrotising fascitis? I don't think so.
We can cross the necrotising fascitis bridge when we come to it, I suppose, is what you're saying here, Bartholomew.
On the Covid, can you not just relax and ride out this final phase of the pandemic without going all pantomime libertarian and yelling that it's just a cold and we have to forget all about it NOW!?
I think you've decided you compromised your purity when supporting previous lockdowns and so now, feeling dirty, you're overcompensating.
Bit like Owen Jones trying to bury his wobble on Corbyn with ultra slavish support post GE17.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
I am off to do something else. I just cannot cope with the idea that not giving other folk colds, flu, covid, etc. if I know I have them is the height of social irresponsibility. Not least because those are the conditions to fucking increase viral virulence under basic theories of natural selection.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
You can take precautions, but you cannot go in to self isolation every time you have a cold. It is not a natural state of affairs, and is not good for the economy or society generally.
One of my grandparents died in hospital from a superbug. I got norovirus myself whilst in hospital a few years later and got badly sick there. The hospital did what it could to control the outbreak but some people will die from diseases like this whilst in hospital. Thats just the way it is. And so it is with Covid. People have to die of something.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
With the reduced energy efficiency associated with implementing carbon capture on CCGT power plants and in the production of blue hydrogen we will actually need more gas to deliver the same energy to consumers.
This just a cold rhetoric is really unhelpful. My partner, 50, triple jabbed, tested positive on Christmas Day. She's been asymptomatic, apart from tiredness, since about December 28. However. She started back at work Tuesday, and hasn't got out of bed today due to fatigue after a 4 day week. That is one hell of a cold by anybody's standards.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
I am off to do something else. I just cannot cope with the idea that not giving other folk colds, flu, covid, etc. if I know I have them is the height of social irresponsibility. Not least because those are the conditions to fucking increase viral virulence under basic theories of natural selection.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
You can take precautions, but you cannot go in to self isolation every time you have a cold. It is not a natural state of affairs, and is not good for the economy or society generally.
One of my grandparents died in hospital from a superbug. I got norovirus myself whilst in hospital a few years later and got badly sick there. The hospital did what it could to control the outbreak but some people will die from diseases like this whilst in hospital. Thats just the way it is. And so it is with Covid. People have to die of something.
I wonder if, once this covid becomes endemic, we will move away from the culture of people going into work with a cold, thus ensuring it spreads through the office, as has happened in every office I’ve worked in and ive been guilty of it myself.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
With the reduced energy efficiency associated with implementing carbon capture on CCGT power plants and in the production of blue hydrogen we will actually need more gas to deliver the same energy to consumers.
Hopefully the government will choose to support wind, storage, tidal and other alternatives that free of us from a dependence on imported gas, and the gyrations of the market price of gas.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
With the reduced energy efficiency associated with implementing carbon capture on CCGT power plants and in the production of blue hydrogen we will actually need more gas to deliver the same energy to consumers.
We're not actually going to do carbon capture on CCGTs, are we? What a monumental waste of money, given how efficient they are.
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
If, thanks to HMG policy being reported, you can't get a LFT and can't tell the difference between a cold and covid?
Then Covid colds can be treated the same as every other rhinovirus and coronavirus etc cold.
Just as they should be!
There is this small difference of the heterogeneity of people's actual response to the virus. But of course you don't want to acknowledge that covid isn't just a cold and that you kill people by scattering it around. It's not a moral responsibility I want.
Mine was just a cold. As has been the case for everyone I know post vaccines. 🤷♂️
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
That's nice. We still need to find a way to allow the NHS in hotspot areas to cope. They're going to comfortably overtop the number of people in hospital with your it's just a cold, and they can't cope
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
I am off to do something else. I just cannot cope with the idea that not giving other folk colds, flu, covid, etc. if I know I have them is the height of social irresponsibility. Not least because those are the conditions to fucking increase viral virulence under basic theories of natural selection.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
You can take precautions, but you cannot go in to self isolation every time you have a cold. It is not a natural state of affairs, and is not good for the economy or society generally.
One of my grandparents died in hospital from a superbug. I got norovirus myself whilst in hospital a few years later and got badly sick there. The hospital did what it could to control the outbreak but some people will die from diseases like this whilst in hospital. Thats just the way it is. And so it is with Covid. People have to die of something.
I wonder if, once this covid becomes endemic, we will move away from the culture of people going into work with a cold, thus ensuring it spreads through the office, as has happened in every office I’ve worked in and ive been guilty of it myself.
It's a bit like fresher's flu. Catching a cold or two every year is probably no bad thing. I'm worried that COVID has turned us into a bunch of germphobic hypochondriacs.
Carolyn Andriano, who testified in the trial of sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in New York last month, has claimed that Virginia Giuffre told her in 2001 that she slept with Prince Andrew.
The claims, made in an interview with the Daily Mail, will ratchet up the pressure on the prince, as it is a contemporaneous report of his alleged sexual assault of the then 17-year-old Giuffre. He has vehemently denied the claims and his lawyers have been urging a US judge to dismiss Giuffre’s civil suit against him.
Andriano, then 14 and living in Florida, said she was texted by Giuffre (formerly Virginia Roberts, before her marriage) in 2001 from London, who claimed she had slept with the prince.
“[Giuffre] said, ‘I got to sleep with him’,” Andriano told the Mail.
I don’t see how Prince Andrew is under any pressure whatsoever. His career is finished and he will go down in history as a disgrace to the House of Windsor.
He’ll never be convicted. He’ll never be cleared. It’s over.
Makes the point that there are no good options for the DoY. The *best* is:
"The prince’s lawyers have taken an aggressive approach to protecting their client. They first argued that the court summons had not been properly served, then attempted to get the case thrown out on the grounds that Giuffre doesn’t live in the US.
Now they are seeking their client’s salvation with the grim fact that he qualifies as a potential defendant in any sex abuse case connected to Epstein. In other words, it appears his possible culpability is being used as his defence.
Even if this legal loophole works, and Kaplan dismisses the case, it will be an outcome that will not clear the prince’s name, which his friends insist is his prime aim. Instead, added to all those letters that come after his title, will be a toxic question mark."
Randy Andy needs to hire this dude's barrister, greatest barrister ever, from 2015.
LONDON - A Saudi millionaire was cleared of raping a teenager after telling the court that he might have accidentally penetrated the 18-year-old when he tripped and fell.
Property developer Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46, was accused of forcing himself on the teenager as she slept on the sofa in his flat in Maida Vale, west London, in August in 2014.
But he claimed that he might have fallen on top of her while his penis was poking out the top of his underwear,
One of the most disgusting and perverse court decisions ever.
It only took the jury 30 minutes to acquit though?
I wonder what evidence was given in the 20 minutes when the press was excluded from the court?
Is it normal for the press to be excluded from the court? A child giving evidence?
I’ve only read the mail article linked above. But it implied it was the defendant who gave evidence in that time. I suppose it might have been the teenager.
This just a cold rhetoric is really unhelpful. My partner, 50, triple jabbed, tested positive on Christmas Day. She's been asymptomatic, apart from tiredness, since about December 28. However. She started back at work Tuesday, and hasn't got out of bed today due to fatigue after a 4 day week. That is one hell of a cold by anybody's standards.
What I'd hope to see is less attention paid to emergency short-term measures - like masks, and testing - and more to the long-term issues that consequently arise, such as post-viral fatigue syndrome.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Given the scale of the increases we are likely to see it isn’t just UC recipients who will be seriously adversely impacted by this though. 60/70 quid a month is a major chunk of your monthly take home even if you’re on a reasonable wage, above the national average. It will also feed into inflation with the consequences there too. This is a problem coming that really cannot just be solved by giving those on UC a few quid to help out.
No indeed. Martyn Lewis was reckoning it comes out at about £50 a month on average. Now, if there is one thing to finish off the hospitality removing 50 smackers of discretionary spend would be it.
This just a cold rhetoric is really unhelpful. My partner, 50, triple jabbed, tested positive on Christmas Day. She's been asymptomatic, apart from tiredness, since about December 28. However. She started back at work Tuesday, and hasn't got out of bed today due to fatigue after a 4 day week. That is one hell of a cold by anybody's standards.
Fingers crossed that isn't the start of so-called Long COVID.
But...From an individual's perspective, it is unrealistic to avoid this thing. You are going to get it.
The only question is, do we need to do anything to help the NHS? Now, I get that it's debateable, but ultimately it's a question of numbers. Individuals don't really come into it.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
I'm currently in contact (for about another month) for gas at about 2.5p/kwh. The current spot wholesale price is around 8p/kwh. The pesky laws of mathematics indicate that if the cap lifts to allow my supplier to merely recover their wholesale purchase costs, my bill will slightly more than tripple - in reality it's probably going to quadruple.
My electricity supplier went bump in October, and I lost my fix - my unit price almost doubled overnight, and it will presumably do so again when the current cap is reset.
All this means that I'm looking at the cost of running my modest terrace going from £50 to £200 a month. Having to find HMRC an extra £7.50 monthly windfall because of VAT seems the ultimate kick in the teeth. If the abolished all the stupid green subsidies (and perhaps gave up on the stupid smart meter saga - my house's current 1970s electromechanical meter is likely to outlast several generations of smart meters that have all gone on the bill), it might all combine so my bill only rises to £140 a month.
My main plan is to switch to a log burner for primary heating - I've access to limitless free pallet wood at work. It's not particularly environmentally friendly, but frankly I don't care.
All the means tested ideas are stupid - the number of people who won't be able to afford to pay their energy bill far exceeds the number who are currently on benefits, so to actually have anything like the desired effect would mean creating another expensive bureaucracy, and probably still benefit the wrong people. At least by abolishing VAT it actually simplifies things, and saves money!
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
With the reduced energy efficiency associated with implementing carbon capture on CCGT power plants and in the production of blue hydrogen we will actually need more gas to deliver the same energy to consumers.
True, we will, at a time investment in this is in sharp decline.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Fucking hell, necrotising fasciitis is entirely natural, and indeed part of the Circle of Life. You want some of that?
Last I checked everyone in the country is going to end end up with Covid, many times probably. If not infected by one person then will still get it from someone else.
Is that the case with necrotising fascitis? I don't think so.
We can cross the necrotising fascitis bridge when we come to it, I suppose, is what you're saying here, Bartholomew.
On the Covid, can you not just relax and ride out this final phase of the pandemic without going all pantomime libertarian and yelling that it's just a cold and we have to forget all about it NOW!?
I think you've decided you compromised your purity when supporting previous lockdowns and so now, feeling dirty, you're overcompensating.
Bit like Owen Jones trying to bury his wobble on Corbyn with ultra slavish support post GE17.
A previous poster on this site used the words exit wave several times a day while declaring it over during the Summer ISTR.
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
He's right though. Let's manage the disease and look at how we can reduce death rates for vulnerable people who get vaccinated or those who are unable to get the vaccine. Let the virus burn through those last 1-3% of unvaccinated people who haven't already had it.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
if the PB Brains Trust say it is over it must be over.
To be fair this Omicron spike does look like it's over. We're going to have a rough month and the things will calm down. Until the next variant comes at is again.
The point remains that Covid is not just a cold, the NHS in towns/regions is under threat, and saying "it's over" doesn't cure the massive staffing crisis caused by all the people ill with this "cold"
I genuinely believe for most people it is just a cold, maybe even a bad cold, and that is certainly the case for our family which has seen both my daughter and sons families go down with it in the last two weeks
Throughout their social media, and indeed our family in Scotland, nobody knows anyone who has needed medical intervention but of course with the huge numbers the NHS is under severe stress but let's be fair covid/omicron illness within the NHS is having a serious staffing effect
However, my daughter's family are back at work as will be my sons be on Tuesday having had the 7 days isolation and it has to be assumed that the 39,000 NHS staff off on the 2nd January most will have returned by Monday, though of course others will be off
We have to get through the next few weeks but it is time to loosen restrictions as soon as possible
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Given the scale of the increases we are likely to see it isn’t just UC recipients who will be seriously adversely impacted by this though. 60/70 quid a month is a major chunk of your monthly take home even if you’re on a reasonable wage, above the national average. It will also feed into inflation with the consequences there too. This is a problem coming that really cannot just be solved by giving those on UC a few quid to help out.
No indeed. Martyn Lewis was reckoning it comes out at about £50 a month on average. Now, if there is one thing to finish off the hospitality removing 50 smackers of discretionary spend would be it.
At a time when that sector is expecting to start reaping the benefits of people coming out during the better weather after the post Xmas slowdown.
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
That's not a grenade that's the preferred and expected future!
You'll get no argument from me on that point. I'm just waiting for someone to turn up and start yelling about waning immunity and whataboutnewvariants?
But the argument appears to have moved on to gas prices so...
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
With the reduced energy efficiency associated with implementing carbon capture on CCGT power plants and in the production of blue hydrogen we will actually need more gas to deliver the same energy to consumers.
We're not actually going to do carbon capture on CCGTs, are we? What a monumental waste of money, given how efficient they are.
Several projects are likely to apply for funding to be part of the Track 1 clusters. For example, BP is promoting one on Teesside.
This idea that we should 'stop spreading diseases' in winter time is nonsense. Exposure to them is a good thing for our immune system. I've not been sick at all for two years and it doesn't feel right to me. I accept I might be prejudiced, but I trust my common sense on this.
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Presumably the removal of the UKs gas storage capacity hasn’t helped us either.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
if the PB Brains Trust say it is over it must be over.
To be fair this Omicron spike does look like it's over. We're going to have a rough month and the things will calm down. Until the next variant comes at is again.
The point remains that Covid is not just a cold, the NHS in towns/regions is under threat, and saying "it's over" doesn't cure the massive staffing crisis caused by all the people ill with this "cold"
Restrictions were specifically to protect the NHS. The NHS is on its arse.
I don't dispute Johnson's epidemiology genius in calling Omicron as relatively harmless before the science did, but wasn't his key job to keep the NHS's head above water?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
You've partly answered the question I posted a few mins ago, so thanks. But are the price increases here forever or could prices drop off again?
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Presumably the removal of the UKs gas storage capacity hasn’t helped us either.
Good point: at the same time we've become more dependent on gas, we've got rid of storage faciltiies.
The numbers I saw were that the UK has 9TwH equivalent against 150TWH in Germany or Italy.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Given the scale of the increases we are likely to see it isn’t just UC recipients who will be seriously adversely impacted by this though. 60/70 quid a month is a major chunk of your monthly take home even if you’re on a reasonable wage, above the national average. It will also feed into inflation with the consequences there too. This is a problem coming that really cannot just be solved by giving those on UC a few quid to help out.
I do expect help for the lower paid and those on UC and some help generally, but there is a limit to just how much the state can subsidise this
I have already taken a hit on my new energy contact agreed in September and as pensioner not on pension credit I do not expect a large payment from HMG
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
They won’t be as demanding patients as last year though. Ventilation levels are actually going down right now. With prevalence so high many of those patients are there for something other than Covid.
I know that it's fashionable on here to dismiss it all as just a cold. And yes, perhaps you know more than the NHS Trust CEOs talking to the NHS Providers CEO about the state of things in reality on the ground.
Have you and the others not considered a rather basic point? If it's just a cold, if it's just staff absences, if its not a problem why are hospitals desperately building mini nightingales in their carparks?
They need space because the Covid positive broken legs need to be separated from the non Covid broken legs. Look, I’m not denying pressures on the nhs. I would not want to work at a hospital. But I’m not sure what you want us to say, or do. Lockdowns are not working for omicron. For better or worse we need to see out the next few weeks. It’s not going to be easy. But it is true that the patients are generally a lot less sick. Hopson himself has tweeted this. We also have the problem that fairly routine things in winter in hospitals are being blown up by the media and Twitter. Hospitals have a system in place for when they come under pressure and several trusts have used this. Some have already come out of this.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Given the scale of the increases we are likely to see it isn’t just UC recipients who will be seriously adversely impacted by this though. 60/70 quid a month is a major chunk of your monthly take home even if you’re on a reasonable wage, above the national average. It will also feed into inflation with the consequences there too. This is a problem coming that really cannot just be solved by giving those on UC a few quid to help out.
No indeed. Martyn Lewis was reckoning it comes out at about £50 a month on average. Now, if there is one thing to finish off the hospitality removing 50 smackers of discretionary spend would be it.
At a time when that sector is expecting to start reaping the benefits of people coming out during the better weather after the post Xmas slowdown.
There are an awful lot of people out there - in both public and private sector jobs - who, even if they're comfortably off and by no means struggling, are sick of many years of pay freezes or very low settlements (i.e. treading water at best, real terms cuts at worst,) for whom a whacking great dump of inflation is going to exhaust their patience with crap wages.
And then on top of that we have labour shortages caused by the combined effects of Brexit and the increased willingness of many workers to quit jobs they hate, after re-evaluating their circumstances during the Covid crisis.
One thing to look out for later this year may, therefore, be a resurgence in strike action. Government and business insisting they can't afford large pay deals; and workers being neither willing nor, in many cases, able to settle for anything else.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Not just UC though. There are other benefits for people on low income and disabled. Seem to be always forgotten in the endless debates about what rate UC should be paid at etc etc.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
I miss my Grannies, so I don't mean to sound heartless, but isn't that what we've done with influenza for decades, stay in bed when unwell, but otherwise go about our lives as normally as possible. Clearly this means that many thousands of grannies have died every winter because we didn't have lateral flow tests for influenza, and we didn't self-isolate for 10 days after the onset of influenza symptoms.
But, well, that's just part of life, isn't it? There are risks. Infectious diseases will spread, and some people will die of them.
Covid was different during the period March 2020 - March 2021, because it was that much more deadly and infectious than the seasonal flu, but since then we've had our most vulnerable immunised against it, and the risk is much reduced - and so should our response to it. I don't think it is reasonable to continue with massive levels of community testing, and all the other extraordinary interventions, now that vaccines have reduced the risk from Covid to the normal level of seasonal influenza.
If someone in 2019 had suggested introducing lateral flow tests for influenza, and asked everyone to test themselves before meeting anyone else, and isolating for 10 days if they tested positive, and wearing masks when out and about, just in case the negative test was a false negative, or you'd become infectious since you took your test - everyone would have thought they were mad. Despite all the resulting dead grannies from not doing those things.
We've been through a terrible trauma with the pandemic, but we really ought to put some effort into unwinding all the coping mechanisms we adopted to get through it. I almost feel like we have to try and pretend it didn't happen.
I take the point, but equally it's a matter of knowing. I;'d have been very pleased to have LFTs available for flu iuf I felt unwell before going to visit my elderly parents or other members of their generation.
In the Before Times there were various infection control measures put in place at one time or another. I remember seeing reminders about norovirus at the entrance to our local hospital back in the day, for example. And I also once cancelled a visit to my Grandad because I had a cold and didn't want to pass it on to him. And I agree with stodge completely that I hope the pandemic will have seen the end of the martyrs who would drag themselves into work when suffering from a heavy cold and then pass it on to all and sundry.
And yet, we do need to keep our response in proportion to the level of the risk. Is routine mass-testing and mandatory self-isolation enforced by the law proportionate? I really don't think so.
I'm just saying that if you know you have covid you shouldn't behave in a way to pass it on. Simple as that.
And I don't agree.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
Fucking hell, necrotising fasciitis is entirely natural, and indeed part of the Circle of Life. You want some of that?
Last I checked everyone in the country is going to end end up with Covid, many times probably. If not infected by one person then will still get it from someone else.
Is that the case with necrotising fascitis? I don't think so.
We can cross the necrotising fascitis bridge when we come to it, I suppose, is what you're saying here, Bartholomew.
On the Covid, can you not just relax and ride out this final phase of the pandemic without going all pantomime libertarian and yelling that it's just a cold and we have to forget all about it NOW!?
I think you've decided you compromised your purity when supporting previous lockdowns and so now, feeling dirty, you're overcompensating.
Bit like Owen Jones trying to bury his wobble on Corbyn with ultra slavish support post GE17.
A previous poster on this site used the words exit wave several times a day while declaring it over during the Summer ISTR.
Yep, the virus has been consistently underestimated because of ignorance and wishful thinking. And "just a cold" is bollocks. And the NHS is under great stress and will remain so for a while. However I do think we're close to the end of the pandemic now. And it is time to start changing the mindset towards living with it as we do the flu. This is also what will happen, I think. People will be surprised at how quickly this goes away in the UK as a massive deal. I'm feeling pretty confident about it. But please flip this back at me in Oct if we're knee deep in another immunity evading wave of serious illness and still mass testing and isolating etc.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Presumably the removal of the UKs gas storage capacity hasn’t helped us either.
Good point: at the same time we've become more dependent on gas, we've got rid of storage faciltiies.
The numbers I saw were that the UK has 9TwH equivalent against 150TWH in Germany or Italy.
The justification for us having less storage than our European neighbours used to be that we were self sufficient in gas whereas they relied on imports from dodgy sources.
Well that argument doesn't hold water anymore, so we've got ourselves into a bit of a pickle.
Can someone just remind what's caused the sudden hike in energy prices over the past six months and why it's a permanent increase?
The initial pandemic lockdowns reduced demand for gas, so a lot of the most marginal gas production in the US shut down - and now many of the laid-off workers there have better paying jobs elsewhere.
When economies reopened I believe demand for gas rebounded strongly, among other trends China is attempting to switch from coal to gas for a variety of reasons. Leading up to this winter Russia has restricted exports of gas, presumably for use in leverage over future Ukraine conflicts, or to have Nordstream 2 opened, or both.
Given enough time, you would expect US production to increase in response to the higher prices, and this should bring prices back down. The thinking seems to be that "enough time" probably won't be until after next winter, but I'm not sure about that. Also, if Chinese demand for gas grows in a similar way to its previous demand for coal, then supply may lag some way behind demand for a good while longer, which would keep the pressure on prices high.
Another domestic British factor is that one of the possible ways to deal with the present spike in prices is for HMG to loan the energy companies tens of billions of pounds so that they can sell gas at below market prices in the short term (say, until increased US supply brings the price back down) and then allow them to charge considerably above the then lower market prices to pay the loans back. We'd still see prices go up a lot in April, but not as much as otherwise, but the prices wouldn't come down for a few years as the loans would need repaying.
We could do with speeding up our transition away from fossil fuels entirely.
This just a cold rhetoric is really unhelpful. My partner, 50, triple jabbed, tested positive on Christmas Day. She's been asymptomatic, apart from tiredness, since about December 28. However. She started back at work Tuesday, and hasn't got out of bed today due to fatigue after a 4 day week. That is one hell of a cold by anybody's standards.
My wife has had a stinky cold since 30th Dec. Just about over it, now post viral fatigue. Colds can be nasty too.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Presumably the removal of the UKs gas storage capacity hasn’t helped us either.
Good point: at the same time we've become more dependent on gas, we've got rid of storage faciltiies.
The numbers I saw were that the UK has 9TwH equivalent against 150TWH in Germany or Italy.
That’s About right, yes. This was the figures I saw earlier in the week.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
I disagree. The doubling of rates is I believe based on some extreme examples, eg being on a very heavily discounted rate from one of the aggressive retailers and then ending up on the price cap instead.
But "targeted help" is in general the worst possible thing that creates the poverty trap.
The rich will benefit the least because the amount of tax removed will be a tiny proportion of their income, a bigger proportion of middle incomes and a much bigger proportion of poor ones.
VAT on energy is a regressive tax not a progressive one.
A one time targeted payment is fine re poverty trap and it eliminates the deadweight cost. I would get something like £180 from eliminating VAT on fuel which I would save.
It just kicks the can down the road though. This is unlikely to go away in the next few years. We will still need gas, and plenty of it, to generate electricity and for domestic heating and cooking as well as industry. A one off payment really is just short termism. There needs to be something to manage the transition, affordable, to self sufficient renewables.
There's metric shit tonnes of gas in the world - the problem is that electricity generators have been able to make more money by buying spot than entering into long term supply contracts.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Presumably the removal of the UKs gas storage capacity hasn’t helped us either.
We only ever had a very small amount of gas storage capacity anyway, so I doubt it would have made any difference. And, in any case, I believe one of the issues is that Russia has restricted supply so that the continental Europeans haven't been able to fill up their storage in advance of the winter.
I think there's an Opinium poll tonight, here's some of the supplementaries.
an Opinium poll for the Observer suggests households are already noticing price inflation. About 70% of voters said they had seen their cost of living increase more than their income over the last 12 months, despite reports of pay rises. A majority who voted Tory at the last election (57%) said they backed removing VAT from energy bills.
One in eight voters (12%) would now describe their financial situation as “struggling”, up slightly from 9% from the end of lockdown in April. A huge majority of the public say they have noticed price rises. About 86% have noticed a rise in the overall cost of living, 83% a rise in grocery bills, 80% a rise in energy bills and 59% a rise in council tax.
The issue with removing VAT is it’s gesture politics.
I remember reading that the average bill is going to double from £600 to £1,200. No idea if that is true but let’s use fir illustrative purposes.
Cutting 5% off the £1,200 saves £60 - which won’t be noticed by the average person in the context of a £600 rise and will benefit the rich more (on the assumption they have higher energy bills).
Far better to use the money - I think someone said £1.4bn - for targeted help at those who need it rather than middle class journalists
How do you target the help? UC recipients only? Otherwise it's a big added bureaucracy. And there will be even more outcries from the DT journos about pampering the proles.
You need a substantial change to income tax taper, which, for this purpose, reall means dealing with the NI increase.
UC recipients is a good start. I think @Big_G_NorthWales suggested a 1 time payment like the winter fuel payment
Yes I did as it targets those in need with a cash sum which should be far more generous than giving a 5% vat reduction to those who have much broader shoulders
Not just UC though. There are other benefits for people on low income and disabled. Seem to be always forgotten in the endless debates about what rate UC should be paid at etc etc.
Yes. Essentially we have two separate parallel systems of benefits running now. Those on UC for new claimants and those migrated over due to change of circumstances. And legacy benefits for the others and those in places where it hasn't been rolled out yet. Which makes any potential scheme doubly complicated. However. This is Conservative governments' fault for not rolling out competently. And losing cases in Court due to poorly drafted legislation. So no tears shed for them.
I see we are going lots of nonsense tweets. Italy are 140k, France are 125k, Germany are up to 115k now....and UK have gold plated all their stats.
Not to say UK could and should have done better, but people saying well 10-20k was the line to be judged by is idiotic.
It was Vallance who gave us the 20k number to judge the government against. As far as I'm concerned there is a lot of blood on Bozo's hands for his failure to act in the right way at the right time in 2020.
The BBC said in its reporting of this story that a slur about Muslims could be heard from inside the bus - which the Board of Deputies of British Jews has disputed.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
What does PB think? I'd go for lat flows on onset of symptoms, reasonable precautions (no pub, WFH) if possible. All voluntary. Plus booster vax every autumn.
Get vaccinated.
Get boosters as often as required.
Stop all other bullshit. Stop testing. Stop isolating.
I've just had the virus and while it was unpleasant for a couple of days, I've had much worse manflu in prior winters. Based on symptoms alone I'd have just taken 48 hours off, not a week.
And killed a few grannies with the spread. What is not bad for you is hellish for others. That's the problem, and no sounding like Bartholomew Roberts of the Pirates talking about merchant sailors resolves that.
And we're straight back to the balance of harms problem again.
Whole population test, trace and isolate to contain a deadly pandemic is one thing. Whole population test, trace and isolate for the rest of time to save the occasional frail oldie or leukaemia patient is quite another.
Having a situation in which we lock everybody up several times a year whenever they catch Covid (or Flu, for that matter, because by your reasoning we should also be testing, tracing and isolating for that deadly illness as well,) means making everyone take several weeks off work every year whether they are ill or not, making children take several weeks off school every year whether they're ill or not, and making it impossible for anyone to plan to do anything in advance, because they're at constant risk of being forced to lock themselves up at home for 7 or 10 days whether they're ill or not. These are significant harms.
Or, to borrow an oft-used example from the last couple of years, you could save every single child that's killed each year by being runover by a car or truck via the simple expedient of banning motor vehicles. It doesn't necessarily follow that this would be a good idea. By your logic the failure to take motor vehicles off the roads means endorsing the cruel slaughter of children to preserve the freedom of motorists, but we all know that's nonsense.
BR doesn't want to stay at home for fivea days. FIVE DAYS. He's happy to spread disease because he can;t be arsed to be responsible. Decent. Civilised.
I wouldn't do that (go out after 48hrs) for 'normal' flu - never mind covid.
I did stay at home for my seven (not five in England, or Scotland AFAIK) days despite being perfectly healthy and as a result our NYE table for seven people and however many hundreds of pounds we'd have spent at our local restaurant we had a table booked for was cancelled.
Had isolation not been a rule then yes I would have gone out.
You may consider disrupting everyone's lives and people's work and businesses etc civilised and decent, I certainly don't.
There is this thing about viruses. They spread. To other people.
Cancelling a party if I had flu was a COMPLETELY FUCKING NORMAL AND CONSIDERATE action long before covid. I couldn't give a monkey's about the pub - I always paid a cancellation fee if required.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you get flu bad, you ain't going anywhere.
But are you seriously telling us that you've never gone out when you've had a cold? Because that's what omicron is for the vast majority of people that are symptomatic.
That being the case, why do we have a growing NHS swamping crisis across chunks of the country?
"Its just a cold" is fuck you to the poor sods in the NHS trying to keep people alive.
The crisis isn’t the patients it’s the staff absences through isolation.
In parts of the country the crisis is staff absences AND hospitalisation heading well north of the previous peak 12 months ago.
if the PB Brains Trust say it is over it must be over.
To be fair this Omicron spike does look like it's over. We're going to have a rough month and the things will calm down. Until the next variant comes at is again.
The point remains that Covid is not just a cold, the NHS in towns/regions is under threat, and saying "it's over" doesn't cure the massive staffing crisis caused by all the people ill with this "cold"
Restrictions were specifically to protect the NHS. The NHS is on its arse.
I don't dispute Johnson's epidemiology genius in calling Omicron as relatively harmless before the science did, but wasn't his key job to keep the NHS's head above water?
What are the full admissions numbers like? Remember a good chunk are Covid incidentals, so they are actually part of the normal admissions. I think ive seen elsewhere that overall admissions are a bit lower than normal, but that could be bullshit.
Comments
Also, you cant stop turning up to important work meetings because you've got a bad cold etc. Sometimes business needs to be done and you need to go to meetings. Nor should teachers miss school because they have colds. WFH is appropriate for some jobs when people are sick, but having a cold should not be a free pass to stay at home, that is just a road to lost productivity in large parts of the economy.
https://twitter.com/ChrisCEOHopson/status/1479887481352994818?t=WySMgC44Qpyik4jdc4cJZQ&s=19
It’s very different to cutting VAT to reduce the impact of price increases
I can't find the graph now - damn.
Viruses like that spreading is part of life. It's entirely natural.
Besides if we stop endemic testing we will mean people don't know, so they can safely by your logic go out and about. Win/win.
People will blame the govt and probably also green policies too and that is pretty damaging. The govt deserve any blame they get.
This is a major problem and the govt needs to put plans in place to mitigate for next winter, pretty sharp too. Mind you there seems no will to do that.
Don't forget that half of all people don't have symptoms at all but can still spread the virus. That's already 40-60% of infectious days without any symptoms (with Omicron it may be closer to 60%).
We're going back to fundamentals of how COVID spreads and why it's needed such tough measures to contain or slow down. With Omicron we're in even more trouble with containment measures. It seems impossible to slow down let alone halt. It may make you feel better about yourself and superior to those who want to get on with life now but you or anyone staying in with the sniffles will do nothing to prevent anyone from dying.
The best measures are fit tested N95 masks for people who are still vulnerable because they can't get the current vaccines or for older people at risk and maybe that's the kind of thing we should be looking at as a free optional NPI, but the onus will fall on the individual to wear it, not on society by staying home with the sniffles.
Just as they should be!
Have you and the others not considered a rather basic point? If it's just a cold, if it's just staff absences, if its not a problem why are hospitals desperately building mini nightingales in their carparks?
Is that the case with necrotising fascitis? I don't think so.
It just so happens that this hasn't happened again (some will contend that this is because of masking, some because every other respiratory infection has been crowded out by Covid, yet others will say it's down to a combination of the two.) But regardless, I suspect that delaying population exposure to these kinds of routinely circulating illnesses isn't a good idea. It's not practical to suppress them, and if they're not doing the rounds for whatever reason then you're simply running down the immunity of the population and storing up a larger number of more severe cases for the future.
If only Cameron had had the courage of his convictions and scrapped the Green Crap.
So often these days you see the government panicking about totally predictable problems its policies cause and having to put in place half-baked, short-term solutions that cause even more problems down the line. Housing, energy, the economy, law and order, illegal immigration ...
You don't kill people by scattering it around since colds like Covid spread whether you want to spread it or not.
People are vaccinated. That's it as far as I'm concerned.
"Djokovic pictured maskless at public event one day after positive Covid test"
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/08/novak-djokovic-relied-on-december-covid-infection-for-vaccine-exemption-court-documents-reveal
Like smallpox was "just a rash".
And cholera is "just the runs."
Sometimes it is for you, but other people ...
Your rhetoric doesn't change their reality.
if the PB Brains Trust say it is over it must be over.
Maybe we ought to have antibiotic-resistant syphilis and gonorrhoea parties while we are at it?
The point remains that Covid is not just a cold, the NHS in towns/regions is under threat, and saying "it's over" doesn't cure the massive staffing crisis caused by all the people ill with this "cold"
Told you so (that this doesn't damage Andrew[s position)
Though it doesn't help that he has denied it happened at all; tricky to plead that It didn't happen at all but if it did she loved every minute of it.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1479931191444791296?s=20
On the Covid, can you not just relax and ride out this final phase of the pandemic without going all pantomime libertarian and yelling that it's just a cold and we have to forget all about it NOW!?
I think you've decided you compromised your purity when supporting previous lockdowns and so now, feeling dirty, you're overcompensating.
Bit like Owen Jones trying to bury his wobble on Corbyn with ultra slavish support post GE17.
One of my grandparents died in hospital from a superbug. I got norovirus myself whilst in hospital a few years later and got badly sick there. The hospital did what it could to control the outbreak but some people will die from diseases like this whilst in hospital. Thats just the way it is. And so it is with Covid. People have to die of something.
My partner, 50, triple jabbed, tested positive on Christmas Day. She's been asymptomatic, apart from tiredness, since about December 28.
However. She started back at work Tuesday, and hasn't got out of bed today due to fatigue after a 4 day week.
That is one hell of a cold by anybody's standards.
Covid should now be treated as an endemic virus similar to flu, and ministers should end mass-vaccination after the booster campaign, the former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce has said.
With health chiefs and senior Tories also lobbying for a post-pandemic plan for a straining NHS, Dr Clive Dix called for a major rethink of the UK’s Covid strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the last two years and returning to a “new normality”.
“We need to analyse whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary,” he said. “Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.”
He said that ministers should urgently back research into Covid immunity beyond antibodies to include B-cells and T-cells (white blood cells), which could be used to create vaccines for vulnerable people specific to Covid variants: “We now need to manage disease, not virus spread. So stopping progression to severe disease in vulnerable groups is the future objective.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/08/end-mass-jabs-and-live-with-covid-says-ex-head-of-vaccine-taskforce
Now, if there is one thing to finish off the hospitality removing 50 smackers of discretionary spend would be it.
But...From an individual's perspective, it is unrealistic to avoid this thing. You are going to get it.
The only question is, do we need to do anything to help the NHS? Now, I get that it's debateable, but ultimately it's a question of numbers. Individuals don't really come into it.
My electricity supplier went bump in October, and I lost my fix - my unit price almost doubled overnight, and it will presumably do so again when the current cap is reset.
All this means that I'm looking at the cost of running my modest terrace going from £50 to £200 a month. Having to find HMRC an extra £7.50 monthly windfall because of VAT seems the ultimate kick in the teeth.
If the abolished all the stupid green subsidies (and perhaps gave up on the stupid smart meter saga - my house's current 1970s electromechanical meter is likely to outlast several generations of smart meters that have all gone on the bill), it might all combine so my bill only rises to £140 a month.
My main plan is to switch to a log burner for primary heating - I've access to limitless free pallet wood at work. It's not particularly environmentally friendly, but frankly I don't care.
All the means tested ideas are stupid - the number of people who won't be able to afford to pay their energy bill far exceeds the number who are currently on benefits, so to actually have anything like the desired effect would mean creating another expensive bureaucracy, and probably still benefit the wrong people. At least by abolishing VAT it actually simplifies things, and saves money!
https://twitter.com/merrynsw/status/1479056365792509952?s=21
I saw on LinkedIn, of all places, Birmingham has a fleet of hydrogen powered buses now. This does seem to be a trend That is only growing.
If you were at Centrica in 2007 and bought a 10 year gas supply contract, you lost your job in 2009 because spot gas prices were a quarter of where you'd committed to buy gas.
The UK retail electricity market has encouraged people to buy short and sell long. Which is a recipe for disaster if there's ever a disruption. (In this case, three disruptions: US gas drilling dried up in the pandemic, Russia has caused trouble by restricting supply to Europe, and the wind didn't blow.)
Throughout their social media, and indeed our family in Scotland, nobody knows anyone who has needed medical intervention but of course with the huge numbers the NHS is under severe stress but let's be fair covid/omicron illness within the NHS is having a serious staffing effect
However, my daughter's family are back at work as will be my sons be on Tuesday having had the 7 days isolation and it has to be assumed that the 39,000 NHS staff off on the 2nd January most will have returned by Monday, though of course others will be off
We have to get through the next few weeks but it is time to loosen restrictions as soon as possible
At a time when that sector is expecting to start reaping the benefits of people coming out during the better weather after the post Xmas slowdown.
Inflation could also hit 7%.
It’s a very bleak outlook.
https://twitter.com/merrynsw/status/1479750167775567875?s=21
But the argument appears to have moved on to gas prices so...
I don't dispute Johnson's epidemiology genius in calling Omicron as relatively harmless before the science did, but wasn't his key job to keep the NHS's head above water?
The numbers I saw were that the UK has 9TwH equivalent against 150TWH in Germany or Italy.
I have already taken a hit on my new energy contact agreed in September and as pensioner not on pension credit I do not expect a large payment from HMG
Look, I’m not denying pressures on the nhs. I would not want to work at a hospital. But I’m not sure what you want us to say, or do. Lockdowns are not working for omicron. For better or worse we need to see out the next few weeks. It’s not going to be easy. But it is true that the patients are generally a lot less sick. Hopson himself has tweeted this. We also have the problem that fairly routine things in winter in hospitals are being blown up by the media and Twitter. Hospitals have a system in place for when they come under pressure and several trusts have used this. Some have already come out of this.
It's being cheerful what keeps me going.
And then on top of that we have labour shortages caused by the combined effects of Brexit and the increased willingness of many workers to quit jobs they hate, after re-evaluating their circumstances during the Covid crisis.
One thing to look out for later this year may, therefore, be a resurgence in strike action. Government and business insisting they can't afford large pay deals; and workers being neither willing nor, in many cases, able to settle for anything else.
I see we are going lots of nonsense tweets. Italy are 140k, France are 125k, Germany are up to 115k now....and UK have gold plated all their stats.
Not to say UK could and should have done better, but people saying well 10-20k was the line to be judged by is idiotic.
Well that argument doesn't hold water anymore, so we've got ourselves into a bit of a pickle.
When economies reopened I believe demand for gas rebounded strongly, among other trends China is attempting to switch from coal to gas for a variety of reasons. Leading up to this winter Russia has restricted exports of gas, presumably for use in leverage over future Ukraine conflicts, or to have Nordstream 2 opened, or both.
Given enough time, you would expect US production to increase in response to the higher prices, and this should bring prices back down. The thinking seems to be that "enough time" probably won't be until after next winter, but I'm not sure about that. Also, if Chinese demand for gas grows in a similar way to its previous demand for coal, then supply may lag some way behind demand for a good while longer, which would keep the pressure on prices high.
Another domestic British factor is that one of the possible ways to deal with the present spike in prices is for HMG to loan the energy companies tens of billions of pounds so that they can sell gas at below market prices in the short term (say, until increased US supply brings the price back down) and then allow them to charge considerably above the then lower market prices to pay the loans back. We'd still see prices go up a lot in April, but not as much as otherwise, but the prices wouldn't come down for a few years as the loans would need repaying.
We could do with speeding up our transition away from fossil fuels entirely.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/688149/underground-gas-storage-volume-by-country-europe/
Those on UC for new claimants and those migrated over due to change of circumstances.
And legacy benefits for the others and those in places where it hasn't been rolled out yet.
Which makes any potential scheme doubly complicated.
However. This is Conservative governments' fault for not rolling out competently. And losing cases in Court due to poorly drafted legislation. So no tears shed for them.
BBC News - BBC seeks swift response to bus anti-Semitism story complaints
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59921656
They still repeating this as if there is a debate to be had. As for swift....how many weeks has it been rumbling on. Just f##king apologise.