4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
What are people expecting from the announcement re COVID.
I am wondering whether the smart move would be to announce using the ONS survey to monitor the COVID, rather than mass testing. The delay in reporting could be dealt with by making the sampling more frequent.
I am expecting PCR tests to be via your GP, possibly keep lateral tests for the moment...
I hope that is basically correct. I think the messaging around isolation will be that its not a legal issue, but down to personal responsibility.
Does present issues for those who can't WFH and perhaps have unsympathetic employers though. I think realistically we need to change the culture around working when unwell. For those who can WFH there should rarely be a need to attend a workplace with a cold etc. Don't know what the solution is for those who cannot WFH though.
And sadly there will be some who swing the lead with sickness.
Yes it is about personal responsibility but it's also, as you hint, about economics. As usual, it's the less well off who will struggle to exercise personal responsibility.
A lot of people just can't afford to take time off even if they know they're spreading germs, either because they get no income or because sick pay isn't enough to pay the bills. So they carry on delivering goods or whatever even though they're clearly likely to spread disease. It would be helpful if the government could come up with a proposal to resolve this (not just for Covid, but any transmissible disease).
When this is all over and all the analyses done, I'm confident that it will be the disadvantaged, as ever, who have suffered by far the most physical and economic harm from Covid; while many of us on here, including me, pontificate from the security of our comfortable jobs or retirement.
Great post and it really disappoints me that the rhetoric of the early pandemic had been abandoned by this government. We talked about key workers as heroes but the government has flunked the opportunity to reward them by reforming sick pay. My mum worked in a dentist where the company doesn't provide sick pay. She had to go to work regardless of how she felt and potentially infect dozens of people a day. She took early retirement despite not really being able to afford it because she has lung problems and didn't want to be put at risk anymore.
For those crowing about Boris "getting it right" I'd say that rushing people back to the shame shitty situation they found themselves in pre pandemic is a poor reward for the sacrifices they made.
Thanks, and agree with all you say. Tough on your mum - and tough on the millions of low paid workers on zero-hours contracts, 'self-employed' Uber-type contracts and so on. What do those millions have in common? Very few of them vote Tory, so they can go hang.
Absolutely and while I'm in rant mode if I hear one more politician talking about "getting people back to work" I will scream. I like many other people in the public sector (and beyond of course) worked my fingers to the bone through the pandemic. I was doing 12 hour days at home which is more than I did in the office when I had to factor in travel times. There are plenty of people who did longer hours from home. It wasn't a fucking holiday working from home.
Politicians, particularly city mayors, are desparate for the transport revenue, and for businesses serving commuters to keep afloat. They forget that, for most people, the commute was not something they looked forward to, and are over the moon if they no longer have to put up with it five days a week in order to work in the City.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
2 - the falls in testing and cases match falls in
- The ONS data to date - positivity - hospital admissions - in hospital numbers - MV bed numbers - deaths.
Which in previous peaks/troughs in COVID has meant that the detected cases are falling... because the cases are falling.
What are people expecting from the announcement re COVID.
I am wondering whether the smart move would be to announce using the ONS survey to monitor the COVID, rather than mass testing. The delay in reporting could be dealt with by making the sampling more frequent.
I am expecting PCR tests to be via your GP, possibly keep lateral tests for the moment...
I hope that is basically correct. I think the messaging around isolation will be that its not a legal issue, but down to personal responsibility.
Does present issues for those who can't WFH and perhaps have unsympathetic employers though. I think realistically we need to change the culture around working when unwell. For those who can WFH there should rarely be a need to attend a workplace with a cold etc. Don't know what the solution is for those who cannot WFH though.
And sadly there will be some who swing the lead with sickness.
Yes it is about personal responsibility but it's also, as you hint, about economics. As usual, it's the less well off who will struggle to exercise personal responsibility.
A lot of people just can't afford to take time off even if they know they're spreading germs, either because they get no income or because sick pay isn't enough to pay the bills. So they carry on delivering goods or whatever even though they're clearly likely to spread disease. It would be helpful if the government could come up with a proposal to resolve this (not just for Covid, but any transmissible disease).
When this is all over and all the analyses done, I'm confident that it will be the disadvantaged, as ever, who have suffered by far the most physical and economic harm from Covid; while many of us on here, including me, pontificate from the security of our comfortable jobs or retirement.
Great post and it really disappoints me that the rhetoric of the early pandemic had been abandoned by this government. We talked about key workers as heroes but the government has flunked the opportunity to reward them by reforming sick pay. My mum worked in a dentist where the company doesn't provide sick pay. She had to go to work regardless of how she felt and potentially infect dozens of people a day. She took early retirement despite not really being able to afford it because she has lung problems and didn't want to be put at risk anymore.
For those crowing about Boris "getting it right" I'd say that rushing people back to the shame shitty situation they found themselves in pre pandemic is a poor reward for the sacrifices they made.
Thanks, and agree with all you say. Tough on your mum - and tough on the millions of low paid workers on zero-hours contracts, 'self-employed' Uber-type contracts and so on. What do those millions have in common? Very few of them vote Tory, so they can go hang.
Absolutely and while I'm in rant mode if I hear one more politician talking about "getting people back to work" I will scream. I like many other people in the public sector (and beyond of course) worked my fingers to the bone through the pandemic. I was doing 12 hour days at home which is more than I did in the office when I had to factor in travel times. There are plenty of people who did longer hours from home. It wasn't a fucking holiday working from home.
Our mistake. We should have had more business meetings. Because apparently they still counted with cheese, wine and cake, so we could have discussed work over that.
- An alert system for when seasonal respiratory (and other?) viruses are circulating at high levels, encouraging very limited voluntary use of masks at such times, especially public transport, and distancing. - Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available. - The withdrawal of the COVID alert, when government removes any remaining mask advice and LFT support, will be made clear once the virus is circulating at low levels. - Yes, end legal mandation of COVID isolation, but emphasise continued LFT use and that anyone testing positive really should eliminate outside contact as much as possible, and support school and workplace policies that firm that up. - Develop a fixed price, cheap, (e.g. 30p per unit) LFT offer in case of further waves, AND for seasonal flu. Make these available whenever alert levels are raised. - NHS: move infection control for COVID in healthcare settings towards what you want it to be long term, to get back towards full treatment volume. Envision something like already existing seasonal flu controls, but with some bolstering (again e.g. mask and LFT). Again, for enhanced protocols to be used whenever alert level is raised. - SHIELDERS: They are frightened to bloody death. No package can omit spending cash helping the vulnerable with their anxiities and the fact life is returning scarily to normal around them. Info campaigns on the known courtesy to not don't visit that care home / hospital / vulnerable person with a cold. Access to a certain supply of LFTs for friends and relatives, an 'as often as it takes' commitment to boosting. Bloody tell them that Sainsbury's isn't dangerous, you inhale bugger all of another peorson's breath, masks or no, as you flit quickly through those aisles.
Truth is life was always tricky for. shielders even prior to COVID.
"Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available."
What do you define as a high level? - genuine question.
Tricky as ONS suggests 1 in 20 in England would test positive, yet actual reported positive tests are collapsing and the landscape is different. Very few anecdotes flying of 'everyone I know is ill' now, as there was a month ago.
I think ONS is picking up a lot of very mild to non-existent infections now, that people do not even know they have.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Had a fun half hour trying to attack the sheet ice out there with a shovel. Have cleared enough of a path to the office so that I won't break my neck, and tried to clear as much footpath as I could for the kids walking to school. Roads are clear, other side of the road is clear, just our side which has been in the shade.
Then looked at the driveway. Mrs RP needs to go to work at lunchtime so thought I'd have a go at getting her car (Ioniq EV) up the drive. No. So pulled mine out (Outlander PHEV) and parked it on the road. Just reinforces what I had already thought - all wheel drive definitely a bonus up here, and winter tyres really needed next year.
Many people buy all wheel drive cars and put normal tyres on them which takes them almost back to where they started. For most people if they need an all wheel drive car they need appropriate tyres. If they don't then they don't need an all wheel drive car.
How many people in the UK routinely swap out for winter tyres, if they’re not driving to a ski holiday somewhere in Europe?
Very few I'm sure but I'm not talking about "winter tyres" I'm talking about at least hybrid if not full off-road tyres eg Grabbers.
AT3s only go down to 50 profile in huge sizes and 70 in normal sizes so they are not much use unless you're driving al Al-Shabab technical with a dushka in the bed. I have Pirelli Cinturato P7s in 225/45R17 on my daily F90 330i and they are good in ice and snow.
I know plenty of people who switch to winter tyres but my top tip is never tell anybody if you've got a tyre machine otherwise you'll spend your fucking life putting other people's winter tyres on.
Why bother with changing the tyres? Just have two sets of wheels like everyone did in Switzerland when I lived there. If you don’t want to or can’t store them yourself your local garage would look after them for about £50 a year so you just drove there and got them to change the wheels.
I always used to find it weird my first winter there why so many people had cars with the shitty basic black or grey steel and was informed that a lot of people just buy the cheapest shittiest wheels for their winter wheels as they get messed up anyway.
Why just change the tyres? Cos wheels cost a wee bit more than tyres.
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
I once worked with a firm that had a simple customer service philosophy: "Apologise, give them what they want, give them something extra". The cost of marketing to get and retain a new customer to replace a lost customer is far, far greater than keeping your existing customers happy - even if you weren't in the wrong or some customers will take the piss if they know they can get away with it.
Having said that in any firm I've ever worked at, the one rule that has to trump that is to put your staff first - if someone turn abusive on a colleague then that's it, zero tolerance for that nonsense.
As a teenager shopping in a computer game store I once saw someone turn abusive to the staff working there, I wasn't sure what prompted it but the Manager dealt with it brilliantly. The customer was swearing and shouting at the staff then said "the customer is always right" and the Manager very calmly said "they are, but since you're swearing at my colleagues I'm banning you from the store, so you are not a customer here, so please leave before I call security". That incident has always stayed with me as precisely how it should be handled.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. There is no definitive scientific answer to this. What we need is politicians who can balance the risks and the benefits in light of scientific advice. Boris has called this right since before Christmas as we have seen from a peak that was significantly less than most forecast and the continued drop in cases, hospitalisations and deaths over the last month now. I know you are of the Boris can do no right school and believe that everything he does is distracting from him multiple faults but it’s time. It really is.
R4 had one of the Oxford vaccine scientists (Andrew Pollard) on who remarked that “of course it’s a decision for politicians to take, not for scientists” he also didn’t reckon that a couple of weeks either way in reopening was going to make much of a difference in any case.
If all of this is about “saving Boris” why did Guernsey scrap all COVID regulations last week?
For all his very many faults and unsuitability for office Johnson has got a lot of the big calls on COVID right, and his critics wrong.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden got rid of COVID measures around two weeks ago including isolation. The world hasn't ended and our immunity profile is better than all three of those countries due to booster uptake among over 60s and very high prior infection rates in the under 50s.
There's so many things that Boris has fucked up, the unlockdown process isn't one of them.
I personally wouldn't mind the UK government sticking to the original schedule and ending restrictions in another month, but for the critics it will always been the wrong time, "too soon" or "too late" it doesn't matter what the government do.
Boris removing restrictions is the correct thing to do and we all need to accept personal responsibility
The costs of free tests of 2 billion a month is eye watering and swallows the whole of next years NI increase in just 6 months
Of course Scotland and Wales will continue restrictions no matter as they cannot bring themselves to follow England no matter whether it is the right thing to do and no matter the cost
Free lateral flow tests don't cost anywhere near that; probably an order of magnitude less.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
On 4, are the other European nations who are doing the same doing it to save Johnson's career too?
I don't deny that politics is playing a role here, but its also the right time to do this. The absence of outrage from the scientists is striking. Beyond a few NHS doctors and the odd scientist, on the whole the reaction is this its probably the right time.
Are other European nations with their own experiences of Covid and restrictions different from the UK?
Bit of foam at the side of your mouth there, needs a wipe.
Last sentence is a bit unnecessary. I think lots of countries are coming to the same conclusion about where they are with covid (omicron) and are making the same decisions. I think you are letting your view of Johnson cloud your judgement. No doubt some of the decision is about his own survival, but its also the right time.
The last sentence was unnecessary and I do not understand why it seems OK just to be downright rude
You say that like it’s a bad thing. There is no definitive scientific answer to this. What we need is politicians who can balance the risks and the benefits in light of scientific advice. Boris has called this right since before Christmas as we have seen from a peak that was significantly less than most forecast and the continued drop in cases, hospitalisations and deaths over the last month now. I know you are of the Boris can do no right school and believe that everything he does is distracting from him multiple faults but it’s time. It really is.
R4 had one of the Oxford vaccine scientists (Andrew Pollard) on who remarked that “of course it’s a decision for politicians to take, not for scientists” he also didn’t reckon that a couple of weeks either way in reopening was going to make much of a difference in any case.
If all of this is about “saving Boris” why did Guernsey scrap all COVID regulations last week?
For all his very many faults and unsuitability for office Johnson has got a lot of the big calls on COVID right, and his critics wrong.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden got rid of COVID measures around two weeks ago including isolation. The world hasn't ended and our immunity profile is better than all three of those countries due to booster uptake among over 60s and very high prior infection rates in the under 50s.
There's so many things that Boris has fucked up, the unlockdown process isn't one of them.
Re not getting the unlockdown wrong, More or less was interesting on this, mainly because it wasn't looking at Boris's decision but how wrong the forecast was. The actual figures looked at (deaths, hospitalisations etc) were a 1/3 of the best projection and 1/30 of the worst projection.
Unless Boris had a crystal ball or had lost all confidence in the scientists he took one hell of a risk. As it turned out he was right and the scientist very wrong, but I find it worrying if he was not following scientific advice.
Luckily he made the right decision.
I hope he was following this site and actually looked at the evidence from South Africa rather than the mad modellers who were just looking to get press coverage.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
Yodel 'lost' a box of wine that I'd ordered from Majestic. Driver said he'd left it, we were in all the time, no-one knocked etc. Clearly addressed to me, neighbours know me etc. Have to check with driver; no, nothing to add. No photo. Sorry, end of. Contacted Majestic; Oh dear, send us the answer from Yodel. Did, and was told to go to local Majestic branch who sorted out a replacement, in fact to higher value. Majestic 10 Yodel nil. IMHO
The supplier (Majestic in this case) will be very happy to have received the feedback on their courier. One can imagine how much ‘shrinkage’ they must suffer on deliveries of things like wine.
Not promising. Elysee Palace: “Biden & Putin both accepted the principle of a summit” White House: “Biden accepted in principle a meeting with Putin” Kremlin: “no concrete plans” for Biden-Putin summit. Kremlin: Putin to chair unscheduled meeting of Russia’s Security Council.
Had a fun half hour trying to attack the sheet ice out there with a shovel. Have cleared enough of a path to the office so that I won't break my neck, and tried to clear as much footpath as I could for the kids walking to school. Roads are clear, other side of the road is clear, just our side which has been in the shade.
Then looked at the driveway. Mrs RP needs to go to work at lunchtime so thought I'd have a go at getting her car (Ioniq EV) up the drive. No. So pulled mine out (Outlander PHEV) and parked it on the road. Just reinforces what I had already thought - all wheel drive definitely a bonus up here, and winter tyres really needed next year.
Many people buy all wheel drive cars and put normal tyres on them which takes them almost back to where they started. For most people if they need an all wheel drive car they need appropriate tyres. If they don't then they don't need an all wheel drive car.
How many people in the UK routinely swap out for winter tyres, if they’re not driving to a ski holiday somewhere in Europe?
Very few I'm sure but I'm not talking about "winter tyres" I'm talking about at least hybrid if not full off-road tyres eg Grabbers.
AT3s only go down to 50 profile in huge sizes and 70 in normal sizes so they are not much use unless you're driving al Al-Shabab technical with a dushka in the bed. I have Pirelli Cinturato P7s in 225/45R17 on my daily F90 330i and they are good in ice and snow.
I know plenty of people who switch to winter tyres but my top tip is never tell anybody if you've got a tyre machine otherwise you'll spend your fucking life putting other people's winter tyres on.
Why bother with changing the tyres? Just have two sets of wheels like everyone did in Switzerland when I lived there. If you don’t want to or can’t store them yourself your local garage would look after them for about £50 a year so you just drove there and got them to change the wheels.
I always used to find it weird my first winter there why so many people had cars with the shitty basic black or grey steel and was informed that a lot of people just buy the cheapest shittiest wheels for their winter wheels as they get messed up anyway.
Why just change the tyres? Cos wheels cost a wee bit more than tyres.
That's why in Switzerland the winter tyres are on the cheapest wheels possible - it's often possible to find wheels that are cheaper than an alloy repair.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
On 4, are the other European nations who are doing the same doing it to save Johnson's career too?
I don't deny that politics is playing a role here, but its also the right time to do this. The absence of outrage from the scientists is striking. Beyond a few NHS doctors and the odd scientist, on the whole the reaction is this its probably the right time.
Are other European nations with their own experiences of Covid and restrictions different from the UK?
Bit of foam at the side of your mouth there, needs a wipe.
Last sentence is a bit unnecessary. I think lots of countries are coming to the same conclusion about where they are with covid (omicron) and are making the same decisions. I think you are letting your view of Johnson cloud your judgement. No doubt some of the decision is about his own survival, but its also the right time.
My original post said "there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting"
Suggesting that completely different countries who had completely different experiences / deaths / restrictions as us are somehow linked to us is literally the mouth-foaming shouting I was referring to.
So again. Its clear that Omicron is receding into the past and that we can start lifting our response to it. Its also clear that the pace of the lifting and the absence of any science to back it up shows that Save Big Dog is the rationale rather than Whitty etc having slides to back it up.
Both your side of the argument and ScottnPaste's side need to stop shouting.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Why do you make a habit of ruining any comment you may have by being plainly insulting to your fellow posters?
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
Yodel 'lost' a box of wine that I'd ordered from Majestic. Driver said he'd left it, we were in all the time, no-one knocked etc. Clearly addressed to me, neighbours know me etc. Have to check with driver; no, nothing to add. No photo. Sorry, end of. Contacted Majestic; Oh dear, send us the answer from Yodel. Did, and was told to go to local Majestic branch who sorted out a replacement, in fact to higher value. Majestic 10 Yodel nil. IMHO
Had a new one yesterday. We needed a medium-value but obscure piece of tech kit, and was surprised to find it cheapest on Amazon - on Prime. I ordered it on Friday evening, and it arrived yesterday.
The delivery driver asked for a six-digit passcode before he gave me the parcel, which I had never been asked for before, and he said it should be on gmail. Whilst I have a gmail account, it is not linked to Amazon. When I couldn't find it after a few minutes, he went off to do some other deliveries and found it on the 'track my parcel' page for the delivery.
On the whole, good service. I got the kit at a good price, delivered fast. I just wish I'd known they needed a passcode, as I can't recall seeing it on the email. Still, a good security feature IMO.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
2 - the falls in testing and cases match falls in
- The ONS data to date - positivity - hospital admissions - in hospital numbers - MV bed numbers - deaths.
Which in previous peaks/troughs in COVID has meant that the detected cases are falling... because the cases are falling.
Not disputing that cases are falling. Even my friends who have had it this last week think that. But one way to guarantee that is to stop testing - and we know that "oh look, cases have dropped" will parroted by pro-Big Dog MPs sent out to triumph the end of Covid.
Boris removing restrictions is the correct thing to do and we all need to accept personal responsibility
The costs of free tests of 2 billion a month is eye watering and swallows the whole of next years NI increase in just 6 months
Of course Scotland and Wales will continue restrictions no matter as they cannot bring themselves to follow England no matter whether it is the right thing to do and no matter the cost
Free lateral flow tests don't cost anywhere near that; probably an order of magnitude less.
What are people expecting from the announcement re COVID.
I am wondering whether the smart move would be to announce using the ONS survey to monitor the COVID, rather than mass testing. The delay in reporting could be dealt with by making the sampling more frequent.
I am expecting PCR tests to be via your GP, possibly keep lateral tests for the moment...
I hope that is basically correct. I think the messaging around isolation will be that its not a legal issue, but down to personal responsibility.
Does present issues for those who can't WFH and perhaps have unsympathetic employers though. I think realistically we need to change the culture around working when unwell. For those who can WFH there should rarely be a need to attend a workplace with a cold etc. Don't know what the solution is for those who cannot WFH though.
And sadly there will be some who swing the lead with sickness.
Yes it is about personal responsibility but it's also, as you hint, about economics. As usual, it's the less well off who will struggle to exercise personal responsibility.
A lot of people just can't afford to take time off even if they know they're spreading germs, either because they get no income or because sick pay isn't enough to pay the bills. So they carry on delivering goods or whatever even though they're clearly likely to spread disease. It would be helpful if the government could come up with a proposal to resolve this (not just for Covid, but any transmissible disease).
When this is all over and all the analyses done, I'm confident that it will be the disadvantaged, as ever, who have suffered by far the most physical and economic harm from Covid; while many of us on here, including me, pontificate from the security of our comfortable jobs or retirement.
Great post and it really disappoints me that the rhetoric of the early pandemic had been abandoned by this government. We talked about key workers as heroes but the government has flunked the opportunity to reward them by reforming sick pay. My mum worked in a dentist where the company doesn't provide sick pay. She had to go to work regardless of how she felt and potentially infect dozens of people a day. She took early retirement despite not really being able to afford it because she has lung problems and didn't want to be put at risk anymore.
For those crowing about Boris "getting it right" I'd say that rushing people back to the shame shitty situation they found themselves in pre pandemic is a poor reward for the sacrifices they made.
Thanks, and agree with all you say. Tough on your mum - and tough on the millions of low paid workers on zero-hours contracts, 'self-employed' Uber-type contracts and so on. What do those millions have in common? Very few of them vote Tory, so they can go hang.
Absolutely and while I'm in rant mode if I hear one more politician talking about "getting people back to work" I will scream. I like many other people in the public sector (and beyond of course) worked my fingers to the bone through the pandemic. I was doing 12 hour days at home which is more than I did in the office when I had to factor in travel times. There are plenty of people who did longer hours from home. It wasn't a fucking holiday working from home.
Agreed. At a micro level, my impression is that people wfh work overtime more readily, feeling that it's a fair tradeoff for not having to trek into work. Another plus for employers is that it's really hard to justify taking a day off because you're sniffly. But the absence of sick pay is one of those things that people in middle-class permanent office jobs often don't imagine even happens - I've never worked anywhere that you couldn't take 3 days off on full pay just self-certified (indeed I know people who have been off for 6 months on full pay). Conversely, a relative worked as a senior editor for a big publishing firm on an external contract - when she was ill for a few weeks they simply terminated the contract.
It will be interesting to see what employers do once it is no longer mandatory. They will want people to go into work, but presumably won't want people to spread it to everyone else.
I'm working from home today having had a sore throat since yesterday, and now a runny nose and some tiredness. Pre-Covid I wouldn't have thought twice about going into the office, today it seems a sensible precaution despite a negative LFT (a colleague tested negative for several days before getting a positive PCR).
And even if I am well enough to work, I have gained from not having to go out in the cold and drive, and I won't be spreading my germs to colleagues and customers (although we fo still wear masks at work).
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
Yodel 'lost' a box of wine that I'd ordered from Majestic. Driver said he'd left it, we were in all the time, no-one knocked etc. Clearly addressed to me, neighbours know me etc. Have to check with driver; no, nothing to add. No photo. Sorry, end of. Contacted Majestic; Oh dear, send us the answer from Yodel. Did, and was told to go to local Majestic branch who sorted out a replacement, in fact to higher value. Majestic 10 Yodel nil. IMHO
The supplier (Majestic in this case) will be very happy to have received the feedback on their courier. One can imagine how much ‘shrinkage’ they must suffer on deliveries of things like wine.
Agree. There were a couple of similar cases in this area, around the same time, according to the local Facebook page.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Why do you make a habit of ruining any comment you may have by being plainly insulting to your fellow posters?
Because some of their positions are insulting?
I started my original post pointing out that both extremes of the argument are shouting at each other so hard that they're foaming at the mouth. Both sides, not only one side. The cartoon posted by Scott is a great example of foaming from the other side.
Again, we're doing this now because whilst cases are clearly dropping off the cliff the political impetus means it has to happen NOW.
Anyone seen Chris Whitty recently? Will we ever see him again?
Had a fun half hour trying to attack the sheet ice out there with a shovel. Have cleared enough of a path to the office so that I won't break my neck, and tried to clear as much footpath as I could for the kids walking to school. Roads are clear, other side of the road is clear, just our side which has been in the shade.
Then looked at the driveway. Mrs RP needs to go to work at lunchtime so thought I'd have a go at getting her car (Ioniq EV) up the drive. No. So pulled mine out (Outlander PHEV) and parked it on the road. Just reinforces what I had already thought - all wheel drive definitely a bonus up here, and winter tyres really needed next year.
Many people buy all wheel drive cars and put normal tyres on them which takes them almost back to where they started. For most people if they need an all wheel drive car they need appropriate tyres. If they don't then they don't need an all wheel drive car.
How many people in the UK routinely swap out for winter tyres, if they’re not driving to a ski holiday somewhere in Europe?
Very few I'm sure but I'm not talking about "winter tyres" I'm talking about at least hybrid if not full off-road tyres eg Grabbers.
AT3s only go down to 50 profile in huge sizes and 70 in normal sizes so they are not much use unless you're driving al Al-Shabab technical with a dushka in the bed. I have Pirelli Cinturato P7s in 225/45R17 on my daily F90 330i and they are good in ice and snow.
I know plenty of people who switch to winter tyres but my top tip is never tell anybody if you've got a tyre machine otherwise you'll spend your fucking life putting other people's winter tyres on.
Why bother with changing the tyres? Just have two sets of wheels like everyone did in Switzerland when I lived there. If you don’t want to or can’t store them yourself your local garage would look after them for about £50 a year so you just drove there and got them to change the wheels.
I always used to find it weird my first winter there why so many people had cars with the shitty basic black or grey steel and was informed that a lot of people just buy the cheapest shittiest wheels for their winter wheels as they get messed up anyway.
I screwed myself being too cheap doing that. The guy at the chain shop suckered me into getting normal kei-size wheels for my Copen instead of the slightly bigger ones they normally have, which TBF was like half the price. But that had the result of making me the lowest thing on the road so I spent the whole winter dragging the bottom of the copen along the ice in between the ruts. That was until I moved to my current town and got a new tyre guy (also the town real estate guy, he has a lot of talents) and he fixed me up with some higher-sided tyres to compensate for the teensiness of the wheels.
Boris removing restrictions is the correct thing to do and we all need to accept personal responsibility
The costs of free tests of 2 billion a month is eye watering and swallows the whole of next years NI increase in just 6 months
Of course Scotland and Wales will continue restrictions no matter as they cannot bring themselves to follow England no matter whether it is the right thing to do and no matter the cost
Free lateral flow tests don't cost anywhere near that; probably an order of magnitude less.
It's still a waste of money at this point. COVID is background noise now.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
2 - the falls in testing and cases match falls in
- The ONS data to date - positivity - hospital admissions - in hospital numbers - MV bed numbers - deaths.
Which in previous peaks/troughs in COVID has meant that the detected cases are falling... because the cases are falling.
Not disputing that cases are falling. Even my friends who have had it this last week think that. But one way to guarantee that is to stop testing - and we know that "oh look, cases have dropped" will parroted by pro-Big Dog MPs sent out to triumph the end of Covid.
You said - "Less testing equals less positive results" - it doesn't, necessarily. Testing is demand driven at the moment.
EDIT: the logical thing is to move to using the ONS infection survey for case levels.
President Macron just had a second (!) phone conversation today with President Putin which lasted one hour. This conversation follows calls of the 🇫🇷 President with his 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 counterparts. Intense diplomatic activity from Paris.
Brexit has given the French a free run at being Europe’s principal power on the world stage.
PMSL.
Britain has been Europe's leading pro-Ukraine principle power since this began.
The reason Macron is the one doing these phone calls is because to his eternal shame, he's not been supporting Ukraine in the same way.
Ask any concerned democratic nation in Eastern Europe who the principle power has been in this crisis and they won't say France or Germany.
and after Ben Wallace's "Munich appeasement" comment I'm not sure they'll be cheering the UK either
I thought he was sticking up for them? Criticising those who were selling them down the river?
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
On 4, are the other European nations who are doing the same doing it to save Johnson's career too?
I don't deny that politics is playing a role here, but its also the right time to do this. The absence of outrage from the scientists is striking. Beyond a few NHS doctors and the odd scientist, on the whole the reaction is this its probably the right time.
Are other European nations with their own experiences of Covid and restrictions different from the UK?
Bit of foam at the side of your mouth there, needs a wipe.
Last sentence is a bit unnecessary. I think lots of countries are coming to the same conclusion about where they are with covid (omicron) and are making the same decisions. I think you are letting your view of Johnson cloud your judgement. No doubt some of the decision is about his own survival, but its also the right time.
My original post said "there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting"
Suggesting that completely different countries who had completely different experiences / deaths / restrictions as us are somehow linked to us is literally the mouth-foaming shouting I was referring to.
So again. Its clear that Omicron is receding into the past and that we can start lifting our response to it. Its also clear that the pace of the lifting and the absence of any science to back it up shows that Save Big Dog is the rationale rather than Whitty etc having slides to back it up.
Both your side of the argument and ScottnPaste's side need to stop shouting.
Tbh, you're the only one foaming at the mouth here RP.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
Lifting more restrictions now feels right given the situation.
I guess some on here are complaining because they realise that continuing restrictions might hurt the government, as I see little other reason for them to continue.
My main fear is that we regress and start getting an uptick in cases, but I can't see a reasonable route where that happens without a new virus variant striking.
- An alert system for when seasonal respiratory (and other?) viruses are circulating at high levels, encouraging very limited voluntary use of masks at such times, especially public transport, and distancing. - Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available. - The withdrawal of the COVID alert, when government removes any remaining mask advice and LFT support, will be made clear once the virus is circulating at low levels. - Yes, end legal mandation of COVID isolation, but emphasise continued LFT use and that anyone testing positive really should eliminate outside contact as much as possible, and support school and workplace policies that firm that up. - Develop a fixed price, cheap, (e.g. 30p per unit) LFT offer in case of further waves, AND for seasonal flu. Make these available whenever alert levels are raised. - NHS: move infection control for COVID in healthcare settings towards what you want it to be long term, to get back towards full treatment volume. Envision something like already existing seasonal flu controls, but with some bolstering (again e.g. mask and LFT). Again, for enhanced protocols to be used whenever alert level is raised. - SHIELDERS: They are frightened to bloody death. No package can omit spending cash helping the vulnerable with their anxiities and the fact life is returning scarily to normal around them. Info campaigns on the known courtesy to not don't visit that care home / hospital / vulnerable person with a cold. Access to a certain supply of LFTs for friends and relatives, an 'as often as it takes' commitment to boosting. Bloody tell them that Sainsbury's isn't dangerous, you inhale bugger all of another peorson's breath, masks or no, as you flit quickly through those aisles.
Truth is life was always tricky for. shielders even prior to COVID.
"Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available."
What do you define as a high level? - genuine question.
We're back down to the autumn levels of circulating Delta. Low levels are what we experienced during early mass testing around Jun-Aug 2020 (can't remember exactly when it came in) or what we saw or in April/May 2021 (or be sure we are heading towards those levels. I'd expect us to reach those levels during the spring. What I regard as low are the gaps between the three main waves.
On the usual panto debate over Covid rules ("oh yes it is! / oh no it isn't!") there are some obvious things that both sides should be able to agree on if they wipe the froth from their mouths and stop shouting:
1. We are well past the peak on Omicron. That all the numbers are collapsing rapidly is what happens when you have an exponential rise on the upside 2. We are testing less as we wind down that operation. Less testing equals less positive results 3. People largely have absolutely had enough of Covid. Three jabs and likely 4 jabs have tamed it - so another promo push to keep people getting jabbed is likely enough for what we have, providing that people don't completely drop their guard 4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
Are we well over the Omicron spike? Yes. Is it sensible to be scaling back operations? Yes. Is the driver for doing so now in this manner driven by political not medical expediencies? Yes.
What will be fascinating is what happens if another variant breaks out. "Just live with it" may not hold in the early weeks of another exponential curve before we know that its as mild as Omicron turned out to be. Nor will "just follow the science" when they're openly throwing it in the big to save big dog.
Either way, we're doing it, and we hope thats the last we hear of it.
2 - the falls in testing and cases match falls in
- The ONS data to date - positivity - hospital admissions - in hospital numbers - MV bed numbers - deaths.
Which in previous peaks/troughs in COVID has meant that the detected cases are falling... because the cases are falling.
Not disputing that cases are falling. Even my friends who have had it this last week think that. But one way to guarantee that is to stop testing - and we know that "oh look, cases have dropped" will parroted by pro-Big Dog MPs sent out to triumph the end of Covid.
Except that positive test results are falling faster as a percentage than the number of tests are. The percentage of tests that are returning positive results is going down, not up. 🤦♂️
The justification for the end of Covid restrictions is that it doesn't matter if you catch Covid anymore any more than any other virus that is widely circulating. You've had three or four vaccine doses by now and the vaccine works.
Cases go up, down or stay the same - it doesn't matter. Its a background circulating virus now, just like a plethora of other common cold viruses which it is joining in circulation.
Lifting more restrictions now feels right given the situation.
I guess some on here are complaining because they realise that continuing restrictions might hurt the government, as I see little other reason for them to continue.
My main fear is that we regress and start getting an uptick in cases, but I can't see a reasonable route where that happens without a new virus variant striking.
R is pretty much 0.8 in the UK.
What are the remaining restrictions, and how much do they contribute to reducing R?
As Whitty et al repeated a number of times, it is a bit like budgeting - restrictions of various kinds "buy" an R reduction.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Why do you make a habit of ruining any comment you may have by being plainly insulting to your fellow posters?
Because some of their positions are insulting?
I started my original post pointing out that both extremes of the argument are shouting at each other so hard that they're foaming at the mouth. Both sides, not only one side. The cartoon posted by Scott is a great example of foaming from the other side.
Again, we're doing this now because whilst cases are clearly dropping off the cliff the political impetus means it has to happen NOW.
Anyone seen Chris Whitty recently? Will we ever see him again?
I am relaxed about the change despite being in a high risk category as both my wife and I will act sensibly
Unfortunately there is far too much politics in this and at present I do not expect this to be a popular move, but it is the right thing to do
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
We've had exactly the same situation. They were delivering 2m+ long roller blinds - not a small athletic matter to hurl such a package over a fence. We've also had them hurl a smaller package over the garden fence, where it sat in the rain for two weeks, because we were on holiday.
My favourite was the Amazon driver (normally these fellas are pretty reliable) who delivered a note to say he'd left our package with a neighbour. It turned out the neighbour in question lived half a mile away. He'd left his entire load with that neighbour: she had 50 or 60 packages with her. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.
Not disputing that cases are falling. Even my friends who have had it this last week think that. But one way to guarantee that is to stop testing - and we know that "oh look, cases have dropped" will parroted by pro-Big Dog MPs sent out to triumph the end of Covid.
If it was just a trick, to cut testing and claim cases were falling we would see a rise in positivity, or at least no decline. That is not what has happened, cases have been falling quite a bit faster than the testing has, at roughly double the rate. That means positivity rates are falling, which almost certainly means that the virus is spreading less, as it is highly implausible that the testing at the scale we are still doing is missing large pools of infection.
The UK does a huge amount of testing even now, we have have had one of the highest testing rates in the world, the only countries who have higher rates all have populations much smaller than ours.
One thing the UK has done really well at is mass testing. Essentially no other country has testing of the scale and depth that the UK has.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
The last of it as an end-of-days threat to our normal way of life. It fading off into the background like Norovirus is absolutely fine.
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
Yodel 'lost' a box of wine that I'd ordered from Majestic. Driver said he'd left it, we were in all the time, no-one knocked etc. Clearly addressed to me, neighbours know me etc. Have to check with driver; no, nothing to add. No photo. Sorry, end of. Contacted Majestic; Oh dear, send us the answer from Yodel. Did, and was told to go to local Majestic branch who sorted out a replacement, in fact to higher value. Majestic 10 Yodel nil. IMHO
The supplier (Majestic in this case) will be very happy to have received the feedback on their courier. One can imagine how much ‘shrinkage’ they must suffer on deliveries of things like wine.
I had a case of wine go missing before Christmas, which they claimed to have delivered; it took me over a week to get a copy of the delivery photograph sent to me, of the box sitting in someone else's doorway. Although the photo was too close up to see where it had been taken, fortunately this meant that the label could be read and I could see that it had been misaddressed. When I went round to the address they professed not to know anything about it, but when on impulse I lifted the lid of the recycling bin by the front door, there were some of my empties. Whereupon the tenant claimed to have only just moved in that week!
I did at least get a replacement case from the supplier, but they have now marked me as 'signature only' on their database so no more cases left on my own doorstep when I am out.
- An alert system for when seasonal respiratory (and other?) viruses are circulating at high levels, encouraging very limited voluntary use of masks at such times, especially public transport, and distancing. - Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available. - The withdrawal of the COVID alert, when government removes any remaining mask advice and LFT support, will be made clear once the virus is circulating at low levels. - Yes, end legal mandation of COVID isolation, but emphasise continued LFT use and that anyone testing positive really should eliminate outside contact as much as possible, and support school and workplace policies that firm that up. - Develop a fixed price, cheap, (e.g. 30p per unit) LFT offer in case of further waves, AND for seasonal flu. Make these available whenever alert levels are raised. - NHS: move infection control for COVID in healthcare settings towards what you want it to be long term, to get back towards full treatment volume. Envision something like already existing seasonal flu controls, but with some bolstering (again e.g. mask and LFT). Again, for enhanced protocols to be used whenever alert level is raised. - SHIELDERS: They are frightened to bloody death. No package can omit spending cash helping the vulnerable with their anxiities and the fact life is returning scarily to normal around them. Info campaigns on the known courtesy to not don't visit that care home / hospital / vulnerable person with a cold. Access to a certain supply of LFTs for friends and relatives, an 'as often as it takes' commitment to boosting. Bloody tell them that Sainsbury's isn't dangerous, you inhale bugger all of another peorson's breath, masks or no, as you flit quickly through those aisles.
Truth is life was always tricky for. shielders even prior to COVID.
"Make clear that COVID, although blunted, remains at high levels, masking remains encouraged but voluntary and LFTs remain available."
What do you define as a high level? - genuine question.
Tricky as ONS suggests 1 in 20 in England would test positive, yet actual reported positive tests are collapsing and the landscape is different. Very few anecdotes flying of 'everyone I know is ill' now, as there was a month ago.
I think ONS is picking up a lot of very mild to non-existent infections now, that people do not even know they have.
Remember case rates vary a lot by location so unless your acquaintances are proportionately spread out across the whole country, what happened near you a month ago may be happening to another town right now (and which would have been lower back then).
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Why do you make a habit of ruining any comment you may have by being plainly insulting to your fellow posters?
Because some of their positions are insulting?
I started my original post pointing out that both extremes of the argument are shouting at each other so hard that they're foaming at the mouth. Both sides, not only one side. The cartoon posted by Scott is a great example of foaming from the other side.
Again, we're doing this now because whilst cases are clearly dropping off the cliff the political impetus means it has to happen NOW.
Anyone seen Chris Whitty recently? Will we ever see him again?
I am relaxed about the change despite being in a high risk category as both my wife and I will act sensibly
Unfortunately there is far too much politics in this and at present I do not expect this to be a popular move, but it is the right thing to do
Elder Grandson and his wife came to lunch yesterday. They're both teachers. Rang up to tell us they were on their way..... they live about an hour away, ..... and that they'd both tested negative. So Mrs C & I each did a quick test. Negative, too.
I get the feeling that for some people..... teachers perhaps ..... testing is becoming a routine. Eldest Granddaughter goes in and out of schools for her course, and routinely tests twice a week.
President Macron just had a second (!) phone conversation today with President Putin which lasted one hour. This conversation follows calls of the 🇫🇷 President with his 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 counterparts. Intense diplomatic activity from Paris.
Brexit has given the French a free run at being Europe’s principal power on the world stage.
PMSL.
Britain has been Europe's leading pro-Ukraine principle power since this began.
The reason Macron is the one doing these phone calls is because to his eternal shame, he's not been supporting Ukraine in the same way.
Ask any concerned democratic nation in Eastern Europe who the principle power has been in this crisis and they won't say France or Germany.
and after Ben Wallace's "Munich appeasement" comment I'm not sure they'll be cheering the UK either
I thought he was sticking up for them? Criticising those who were selling them down the river?
Isn't the revisionist view that we were hopelessly prepared and it bought valuable time?
The country did at least throw itself into mobilisation re-armament after Munich, rather than acting as if peace really had been secured.
Rearmament began in 1932. Before Hitler came to power. When the previous German Government laid down the pocket battleships, the UK Navy Vote was increased to plan for more ships etc.
The various measures increased each year, until by about 1936, the only limitation on re-armament spending in the UK was *what to spend it on*
A lot of people (historians included) make what I call the Tiger-Tanks-Equal-Potatoes mistake - if you switch x millions of spending from potatoes to Tiger Tanks, you get x million worth of Tiger Tanks. This ignores the fact that advanced technical products require a complex infrastructure. Without that infrastructure - no Tiger Tanks. Doesn't matter how many potato fields you don't plant.
A classic example is that in 1940 a small number of machine tools were rescued from Belgium - they were evacuated on a destroyer, IIRC. Without them, making 20mm canon barrels would have been put back 18 months in the UK.
In the context of British rearmament, the first problem was military-industrial capacity. This had been massively run down since WWI. So orders were placed, with huge subsidies to get capacity up.
So money was being spent for little apparent increase in output - at that time,
Secondly, the course of German rearmament was clear - to be ready for war in late 1942. This was apparent in their naval build up and elsewhere.
So British rearmament was tailored to being at it's peak for 1941-42
The classic example of that was building a zillion Fairey Battles - a cheap bomber to build out squadrons of the RAF, train crews etc, ready for the heavy bombers (B1.39 Standard Bomber project) coming down the road..
So it would be fair to say that buying time in 1939 was worthwhile - Hitler went to war before *he* was ready - but not that rearmament was substantially ramped up in 1939. More money was being spent each year - because of the previous years investments in production capability, there was, already, somewhere to spend the money.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
We've had exactly the same situation. They were delivering 2m+ long roller blinds - not a small athletic matter to hurl such a package over a fence. We've also had them hurl a smaller package over the garden fence, where it sat in the rain for two weeks, because we were on holiday.
My favourite was the Amazon driver (normally these fellas are pretty reliable) who delivered a note to say he'd left our package with a neighbour. It turned out the neighbour in question lived half a mile away. He'd left his entire load with that neighbour: she had 50 or 60 packages with her. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.
You arranged delivery for a time you'd be on holiday?
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
We've had exactly the same situation. They were delivering 2m+ long roller blinds - not a small athletic matter to hurl such a package over a fence. We've also had them hurl a smaller package over the garden fence, where it sat in the rain for two weeks, because we were on holiday.
My favourite was the Amazon driver (normally these fellas are pretty reliable) who delivered a note to say he'd left our package with a neighbour. It turned out the neighbour in question lived half a mile away. He'd left his entire load with that neighbour: she had 50 or 60 packages with her. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.
I hope people complained about that as the DSP needs to know - my guess is they were short a driver and gave extra parcels to this driver who told them he could do it even when he couldn't, and at the end of the shift rather than ask for another driver to take over what was left he just dumped them all at his next stop.
(I went through the Amazon driver training when it looked like I'd need something to tide me over for a few weeks between jobs, but as it turned out I didn't, but it has heped me make complaints when things have gone wrong...)
President Macron just had a second (!) phone conversation today with President Putin which lasted one hour. This conversation follows calls of the 🇫🇷 President with his 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 counterparts. Intense diplomatic activity from Paris.
Brexit has given the French a free run at being Europe’s principal power on the world stage.
PMSL.
Britain has been Europe's leading pro-Ukraine principle power since this began.
The reason Macron is the one doing these phone calls is because to his eternal shame, he's not been supporting Ukraine in the same way.
Ask any concerned democratic nation in Eastern Europe who the principle power has been in this crisis and they won't say France or Germany.
and after Ben Wallace's "Munich appeasement" comment I'm not sure they'll be cheering the UK either
I thought he was sticking up for them? Criticising those who were selling them down the river?
Isn't the revisionist view that we were hopelessly prepared and it bought valuable time?
The country did at least throw itself into mobilisation re-armament after Munich, rather than acting as if peace really had been secured.
Rearmament began in 1932. Before Hitler came to power. When the previous German Government laid down the pocket battleships, the UK Navy Vote was increased to plan for more ships etc.
The various measures increased each year, until by about 1936, the only limitation on re-armament spending in the UK was *what to spend it on*
A lot of people (historians included) make what I call the Tiger-Tanks-Equal-Potatoes mistake - if you switch x millions of spending from potatoes to Tiger Tanks, you get x million worth of Tiger Tanks. This ignores the fact that advanced technical products require a complex infrastructure. Without that infrastructure - no Tiger Tanks. Doesn't matter how many potato fields you don't plant.
A classic example is that in 1940 a small number of machine tools were rescued from Belgium - they were evacuated on a destroyer, IIRC. Without them, making 20mm canon barrels would have been put back 18 months in the UK.
In the context of British rearmament, the first problem was military-industrial capacity. This had been massively run down since WWI. So orders were placed, with huge subsidies to get capacity up.
So money was being spent for little apparent increase in output - at that time,
Secondly, the course of German rearmament was clear - to be ready for war in late 1942. This was apparent in their naval build up and elsewhere.
So British rearmament was tailored to being at it's peak for 1941-42
The classic example of that was building a zillion Fairey Battles - a cheap bomber to build out squadrons of the RAF, train crews etc, ready for the heavy bombers (B1.39 Standard Bomber project) coming down the road..
So it would be fair to say that buying time in 1939 was worthwhile - Hitler went to war before *he* was ready - but not that rearmament was substantially ramped up in 1939. More money was being spent each year - because of the previous years investments in production capability, there was, already, somewhere to spend the money.
I don't understand why some people appear to think there's no lead time to events. Example: 'We're going to recruit and train 5k more doctors' The young person who decides to study medicine now will be qualified in about 2030.
What are people expecting from the announcement re COVID.
I am wondering whether the smart move would be to announce using the ONS survey to monitor the COVID, rather than mass testing. The delay in reporting could be dealt with by making the sampling more frequent.
I am expecting PCR tests to be via your GP, possibly keep lateral tests for the moment...
I hope that is basically correct. I think the messaging around isolation will be that its not a legal issue, but down to personal responsibility.
Does present issues for those who can't WFH and perhaps have unsympathetic employers though. I think realistically we need to change the culture around working when unwell. For those who can WFH there should rarely be a need to attend a workplace with a cold etc. Don't know what the solution is for those who cannot WFH though.
And sadly there will be some who swing the lead with sickness.
Yes it is about personal responsibility but it's also, as you hint, about economics. As usual, it's the less well off who will struggle to exercise personal responsibility.
A lot of people just can't afford to take time off even if they know they're spreading germs, either because they get no income or because sick pay isn't enough to pay the bills. So they carry on delivering goods or whatever even though they're clearly likely to spread disease. It would be helpful if the government could come up with a proposal to resolve this (not just for Covid, but any transmissible disease).
When this is all over and all the analyses done, I'm confident that it will be the disadvantaged, as ever, who have suffered by far the most physical and economic harm from Covid; while many of us on here, including me, pontificate from the security of our comfortable jobs or retirement.
Great post and it really disappoints me that the rhetoric of the early pandemic had been abandoned by this government. We talked about key workers as heroes but the government has flunked the opportunity to reward them by reforming sick pay. My mum worked in a dentist where the company doesn't provide sick pay. She had to go to work regardless of how she felt and potentially infect dozens of people a day. She took early retirement despite not really being able to afford it because she has lung problems and didn't want to be put at risk anymore.
For those crowing about Boris "getting it right" I'd say that rushing people back to the shame shitty situation they found themselves in pre pandemic is a poor reward for the sacrifices they made.
Thanks, and agree with all you say. Tough on your mum - and tough on the millions of low paid workers on zero-hours contracts, 'self-employed' Uber-type contracts and so on. What do those millions have in common? Very few of them vote Tory, so they can go hang.
Absolutely and while I'm in rant mode if I hear one more politician talking about "getting people back to work" I will scream. I like many other people in the public sector (and beyond of course) worked my fingers to the bone through the pandemic. I was doing 12 hour days at home which is more than I did in the office when I had to factor in travel times. There are plenty of people who did longer hours from home. It wasn't a fucking holiday working from home.
Politicians, particularly city mayors, are desparate for the transport revenue, and for businesses serving commuters to keep afloat. They forget that, for most people, the commute was not something they looked forward to, and are over the moon if they no longer have to put up with it five days a week in order to work in the City.
Agreed and it's rather odd that a government with a levelling up agenda should be so keen to get people back to funnelling money to big cities which are already doing well for themselves. A quick calculation showed me that I've spent £780 at my local sandwich shop over the pandemic. I'd rather they got it than Pret personally.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
Google "cv buzzword matching" or some such (maybe keyword rather than buzzword, or the American resume rather than CV for trans-Atlantic comparisons). As an aside, the word commonplace might imply a value judgement.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Why do you make a habit of ruining any comment you may have by being plainly insulting to your fellow posters?
Because some of their positions are insulting?
I started my original post pointing out that both extremes of the argument are shouting at each other so hard that they're foaming at the mouth. Both sides, not only one side. The cartoon posted by Scott is a great example of foaming from the other side.
Again, we're doing this now because whilst cases are clearly dropping off the cliff the political impetus means it has to happen NOW.
Anyone seen Chris Whitty recently? Will we ever see him again?
I am relaxed about the change despite being in a high risk category as both my wife and I will act sensibly
Unfortunately there is far too much politics in this and at present I do not expect this to be a popular move, but it is the right thing to do
Elder Grandson and his wife came to lunch yesterday. They're both teachers. Rang up to tell us they were on their way..... they live about an hour away, ..... and that they'd both tested negative. So Mrs C & I each did a quick test. Negative, too.
I get the feeling that for some people..... teachers perhaps ..... testing is becoming a routine. Eldest Granddaughter goes in and out of schools for her course, and routinely tests twice a week.
With Covid still ripping through various schools its a basic defence mechanism to still be testing. Even as Covid recedes into the background there will be places that remain hotspots. Stamping out the last of these is the way to have it properly recede, not keep smouldering away.
Has anyone done the analogy between Macron/ Chamberlain vs Johnson / Churchill? To me, it seems completely naive to try to do any 'deal to avoid war' with Putin while he is encircling Ukraine with 100,000's of troops and he has a track record of not acting in good faith. It is very reassuring to see for once the west doing the right thing, I have to say that it has changed my opinion of Biden and it seems like he is doing far better than Trump would in this scenario. Also Starmer is playing this exactly right. If Putin really wants to avoid Ukraine or Finland joining NATO, then he needs to recognise their autonomy and stop the various arms of the russian state making claims over a dubious 'sphere of influence' outside its territorial borders. Russia needs to adopt other forms of soft power to try and achieve their foreign policy objectives. It is a fascinating country which should be free to pursue a different course of political, social and economic development to the west - as China is doing - but red lines should be drawn over any threat of military expansion. That should be the message that gets through to Russia, and perhaps it is starting to.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Had a fun half hour trying to attack the sheet ice out there with a shovel. Have cleared enough of a path to the office so that I won't break my neck, and tried to clear as much footpath as I could for the kids walking to school. Roads are clear, other side of the road is clear, just our side which has been in the shade.
Then looked at the driveway. Mrs RP needs to go to work at lunchtime so thought I'd have a go at getting her car (Ioniq EV) up the drive. No. So pulled mine out (Outlander PHEV) and parked it on the road. Just reinforces what I had already thought - all wheel drive definitely a bonus up here, and winter tyres really needed next year.
Many people buy all wheel drive cars and put normal tyres on them which takes them almost back to where they started. For most people if they need an all wheel drive car they need appropriate tyres. If they don't then they don't need an all wheel drive car.
How many people in the UK routinely swap out for winter tyres, if they’re not driving to a ski holiday somewhere in Europe?
Very few I'm sure but I'm not talking about "winter tyres" I'm talking about at least hybrid if not full off-road tyres eg Grabbers.
AT3s only go down to 50 profile in huge sizes and 70 in normal sizes so they are not much use unless you're driving al Al-Shabab technical with a dushka in the bed. I have Pirelli Cinturato P7s in 225/45R17 on my daily F90 330i and they are good in ice and snow.
I know plenty of people who switch to winter tyres but my top tip is never tell anybody if you've got a tyre machine otherwise you'll spend your fucking life putting other people's winter tyres on.
Why bother with changing the tyres? Just have two sets of wheels like everyone did in Switzerland when I lived there. If you don’t want to or can’t store them yourself your local garage would look after them for about £50 a year so you just drove there and got them to change the wheels.
I always used to find it weird my first winter there why so many people had cars with the shitty basic black or grey steel and was informed that a lot of people just buy the cheapest shittiest wheels for their winter wheels as they get messed up anyway.
Why just change the tyres? Cos wheels cost a wee bit more than tyres.
It’s a false economy - if you are levering on and off tyres twice a year those tyres get damaged by the process so you have to replace them quicker than otherwise.
It also becomes cheaper if more people do it then a market builds up to supply cheaper wheels and storage/changing of the wheels for winter tyres.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
We've had exactly the same situation. They were delivering 2m+ long roller blinds - not a small athletic matter to hurl such a package over a fence. We've also had them hurl a smaller package over the garden fence, where it sat in the rain for two weeks, because we were on holiday.
My favourite was the Amazon driver (normally these fellas are pretty reliable) who delivered a note to say he'd left our package with a neighbour. It turned out the neighbour in question lived half a mile away. He'd left his entire load with that neighbour: she had 50 or 60 packages with her. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.
You arranged delivery for a time you'd be on holiday?
Well I'd ordered it three weeks previously. I'd actually given up hope of it coming. But that one was largely my fault. I'd ordered a pair of what I thought were Merrell shoes, following a link from somewhere I thought was a reputable site on the internet. I clearly hadn't been careful enough though. Nowadays I'm well aware of the proliferation of dodgy Chinese retailers selling bad knock-offs of western brands, but I hadn't come across this at the time. In a way I was surprised to get any shoes at all, though they clearly weren't Merrell shoes. The fact that they were soggy was the least of their problems. They weren't even the right size. Lesson learned about indiscriminate internet shopping. But I can't blame the Chinese for lobbing them over the garden wall though. My brother in law now uses them as reserve gardening shoes.
Mail: At least two cabinet ministers will withdraw support for the Prime Minister if he is handed a fixed penalty notice in relation to Covid rule breaches, it has been reported.
It's about lying to Parliament....there was no coming back from that.
There ought to be no coming back from that, but there will be. Johnson will simply say that he was mistaken, didn't realise how innocent, morale-boosting-intended, support for staff would or could be interpreted by others. And that, as Jack said, will be that. For all but 53 Tory MP's.
Not just that.
One of Johnson's first acts was to clear out anyone who questioned him.
Even if it was necessary, the side effect is that there's nobody in Cabinet, and hardly anyone in the Parliamentary party, with the backbone to tell Boris he's wrong.
If you select a bunch of cheerleaders, you can't complain that they don't play football.
No. One of Johnson's first acts was to clear out people who refused to get on board with the government's agenda. Same as every other new PM in the history of the role has done. That's the very nature of Cabinet - if you can't get on board with Cabinet Responsibility then you can't be in the Cabinet.
That doesn't make every Cabinet minister a cheerleader, it just means they were [initially at least] on board with the government's agenda, as you'd expect. As other PMs throughout time have found, there's no reason an initial alignment needs to last indefinitely.
Nevertheless he has not surrounded himself with titans of either intelligence or integrity
Of course not, he may be entirely morally compromised but he’s not stupid!
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
He's an extreme right winger who said he was happy to see the Troubles return to Northern Ireland as a price worth paying for a proper Brexit.
That might help you put his other views in context.
Mail: At least two cabinet ministers will withdraw support for the Prime Minister if he is handed a fixed penalty notice in relation to Covid rule breaches, it has been reported.
.......and I bet one rhymes with bus and the other with pissy...
Has anyone done the analogy between Macron/ Chamberlain vs Johnson / Churchill? To me, it seems completely naive to try to do any 'deal to avoid war' with Putin while he is encircling Ukraine with 100,000's of troops and he has a track record of not acting in good faith. It is very reassuring to see for once the west doing the right thing, I have to say that it has changed my opinion of Biden and it seems like he is doing far better than Trump would in this scenario. Also Starmer is playing this exactly right. If Putin really wants to avoid Ukraine or Finland joining NATO, then he needs to recognise their autonomy and stop the various arms of the russian state making claims over a dubious 'sphere of influence' outside its territorial borders. Russia needs to adopt other forms of soft power to try and achieve their foreign policy objectives. It is a fascinating country which should be free to pursue a different course of political, social and economic development to the west - as China is doing - but red lines should be drawn over any threat of military expansion. That should be the message that gets through to Russia, and perhaps it is starting to.
In answer to your first question, I think you'll find that a certain B. Johnson has frequently imagined the Johnson/Churchill analogy.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Equally - a lot of it is now automated.
CV Parsing software will take a CV and hunt for keywords while transforming the CV into a standard format (cost is pennies).
That parsed CV is then used to identify keywords and select the most likely candidates for initial screening / initial interview.
That initial interview may not even be conducted by a human being - it could be a set of questions read be a computer that the interviewee responds to in a video call.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Fascinating, thank you.
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
Customer service done right: Customer not in when DHL try to deliver. Customer has a pre-existing issue with her local DHL reps and arranges to collect from the depot rather than try for another delivery. That takes too long and the products are defrosted. Cue complaint about us using DHL.
Not our fault, not DHL's fault. But she still gets an apology, a full refund and a voucher off a replacement order. Because its better to lose a bit of money making up for a poor experience than lose their business entirely plus anyone else they speak to about how badly we treated them plus their friends who pass o the story etc etc.
So how do bigger companies not get this? A computer says no approach where you are in the wrong even when its clearly the other way round and a grudging "gesture of goodwill" if you're lucky? Those three words do trigger me I confess, especially (as I once had) the company was legally in the shit and I was threatening to take them to court.
Apologise. Refund. Make right. Next customer please. It's not difficult.
Yodel 'lost' a box of wine that I'd ordered from Majestic. Driver said he'd left it, we were in all the time, no-one knocked etc. Clearly addressed to me, neighbours know me etc. Have to check with driver; no, nothing to add. No photo. Sorry, end of. Contacted Majestic; Oh dear, send us the answer from Yodel. Did, and was told to go to local Majestic branch who sorted out a replacement, in fact to higher value. Majestic 10 Yodel nil. IMHO
The supplier (Majestic in this case) will be very happy to have received the feedback on their courier. One can imagine how much ‘shrinkage’ they must suffer on deliveries of things like wine.
I had a case of wine go missing before Christmas, which they claimed to have delivered; it took me over a week to get a copy of the delivery photograph sent to me, of the box sitting in someone else's doorway.
I cancelled my Amazon Prime because they kept leaving parcels on other people's doorsteps. Several items went missing and then the final straw was something turning up on my doorstep two days later with all of the contents carefully removed.
DPD are in my experience the best delivery firm. They do what you ask, have a brilliant real time tracking system and are super efficient.
Through the pandemic Hermes have been terrible, closely followed by Royal Mail and Amazon.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
“Last of Covid” is a straw man erected by government critics to put words into the governments mouth. These are the only people saying “last of COVID” - no one else. Because they’ve run out of arguments to sustain restrictions.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Equally - a lot of it is now automated.
CV Parsing software will take a CV and hunt for keywords while transforming the CV into a standard format (cost is pennies).
That parsed CV is then used to identify keywords and select the most likely candidates for initial screening / initial interview.
That initial interview may not even be conducted by a human being - it could be a set of questions read be a computer that the interviewee responds to in a video call.
Indeed - a low level person mechanistically searching through a CV for keywords is prime for replacement with automation.
A recruiter I spoke to said that nearly all companies doing white-collar recruitment used CV uploads, which then needed a manual check to make sure that key stuff was correct. Such as the universit(ies) and grade of degree....
I will bet that they then run that against a world wide database of universities and subjects....
President Macron just had a second (!) phone conversation today with President Putin which lasted one hour. This conversation follows calls of the 🇫🇷 President with his 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 counterparts. Intense diplomatic activity from Paris.
Brexit has given the French a free run at being Europe’s principal power on the world stage.
PMSL.
Britain has been Europe's leading pro-Ukraine principle power since this began.
The reason Macron is the one doing these phone calls is because to his eternal shame, he's not been supporting Ukraine in the same way.
Ask any concerned democratic nation in Eastern Europe who the principle power has been in this crisis and they won't say France or Germany.
and after Ben Wallace's "Munich appeasement" comment I'm not sure they'll be cheering the UK either
I thought he was sticking up for them? Criticising those who were selling them down the river?
Isn't the revisionist view that we were hopelessly prepared and it bought valuable time?
The country did at least throw itself into mobilisation re-armament after Munich, rather than acting as if peace really had been secured.
Rearmament began in 1932. Before Hitler came to power. When the previous German Government laid down the pocket battleships, the UK Navy Vote was increased to plan for more ships etc.
The various measures increased each year, until by about 1936, the only limitation on re-armament spending in the UK was *what to spend it on*
A lot of people (historians included) make what I call the Tiger-Tanks-Equal-Potatoes mistake - if you switch x millions of spending from potatoes to Tiger Tanks, you get x million worth of Tiger Tanks. This ignores the fact that advanced technical products require a complex infrastructure. Without that infrastructure - no Tiger Tanks. Doesn't matter how many potato fields you don't plant.
A classic example is that in 1940 a small number of machine tools were rescued from Belgium - they were evacuated on a destroyer, IIRC. Without them, making 20mm canon barrels would have been put back 18 months in the UK.
In the context of British rearmament, the first problem was military-industrial capacity. This had been massively run down since WWI. So orders were placed, with huge subsidies to get capacity up.
So money was being spent for little apparent increase in output - at that time,
Secondly, the course of German rearmament was clear - to be ready for war in late 1942. This was apparent in their naval build up and elsewhere.
So British rearmament was tailored to being at it's peak for 1941-42
The classic example of that was building a zillion Fairey Battles - a cheap bomber to build out squadrons of the RAF, train crews etc, ready for the heavy bombers (B1.39 Standard Bomber project) coming down the road..
So it would be fair to say that buying time in 1939 was worthwhile - Hitler went to war before *he* was ready - but not that rearmament was substantially ramped up in 1939. More money was being spent each year - because of the previous years investments in production capability, there was, already, somewhere to spend the money.
I don't understand why some people appear to think there's no lead time to events. Example: 'We're going to recruit and train 5k more doctors' The young person who decides to study medicine now will be qualified in about 2030.
Sometime this leads to comic statements such as "We can't recruit more police officers. Since there aren't anymore spaces in the police training system."
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if that goes on.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
A good friend of mine is really struggling to recover from her bout of "common cold". Long-Covid is not something to just dismiss.
Not promising. Elysee Palace: “Biden & Putin both accepted the principle of a summit” White House: “Biden accepted in principle a meeting with Putin” Kremlin: “no concrete plans” for Biden-Putin summit. Kremlin: Putin to chair unscheduled meeting of Russia’s Security Council.
Not really sure what a summit could achieve other than private assurances, and a major claim in all this has been Russia's pouting about assurances around NATO not being followed. But anything that keeps the talking going a bit longer helps.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
President Macron just had a second (!) phone conversation today with President Putin which lasted one hour. This conversation follows calls of the 🇫🇷 President with his 🇺🇦, 🇺🇸, 🇩🇪 and 🇬🇧 counterparts. Intense diplomatic activity from Paris.
Brexit has given the French a free run at being Europe’s principal power on the world stage.
It was as predictable as it was that the UK would be sidelined and in an an election year he's certainly making the most of it.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Fascinating, thank you.
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
Second Granddaughter, 16 and in school in Thailand, is beginning to think about this sort of thing. Has decided that as she probably won't be working in Thailand, she'd be well advised to go 'somewhere else' in a couple of years. She won't come to UK, though. Too expensive for someone from overseas she (and more importantly her father) thinks, even with a UK passport.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
What should we compare it with instead? Heart attacks? Cancer? Diabetes?
For some people Covid is like the flu, for some its like the common cold. And the common cold absolutely can hit people for six and leave people with high temperature and incapacitated too.
You said two of them are unwell, what is the third like?
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
The solipsism of the COVID nationalists seems incapable of accepting that just as with individuals, countries have different circumstances, pressures and motivations and therefore make different decisions wrt COVID (some successful, some less so). They seem to have now moved on to Ukraine with this mindset..
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
Pretty common, as is making reference within the CV itself to methodologies used and qualifications applied for or under instruction, purely to get past the computer and seen by a human. I keep a couple of lines blank within my CV, to stuff with the keywords on the advertised JD.
Worst of all are the websites who want you to upload your CV speculatively - that will almost never result in anything, as there’s no opportunity to tailor the CV to the job description.
Another option is to send your CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text.
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Fascinating, thank you.
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
Second Granddaughter, 16 and in school in Thailand, is beginning to think about this sort of thing. Has decided that as she probably won't be working in Thailand, she'd be well advised to go 'somewhere else' in a couple of years. She won't come to UK, though. Too expensive for someone from overseas she (and more importantly her father) thinks, even with a UK passport.
Even if you have a UK passport, you have to pay the full overseas student price in the UK, with no student loan or other support available. You have to be resident for I think two years prior to application, to be considered a UK student, something that many expatriates (and their kids) find out the hard way.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
Pretty common, as is making reference within the CV itself to methodologies used and qualifications applied for or under instruction, purely to get past the computer and seen by a human. I keep a couple of lines blank within my CV, to stuff with the keywords on the advertised JD.
Worst of all are the websites who want you to upload your CV speculatively - that will almost never result in anything, as there’s no opportunity to tailor the CV to the job description.
Another option is to send your CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text.
"CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text" - that will either cause the CV to be rejected as "badly formatted" or the OCR system in the CV reading software will read it anyway.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
I heard something recently - can't remember where - that a common approach to creating your CV is to absolutely stuff it with keywords - MBA, Oxford, Prince 2, whatever the job spec will be looking for - in white text on a white background, then PDF it. The first sift for many companies will be automated and such as CV will pass through to the human stage.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
Pretty common, as is making reference within the CV itself to methodologies used and qualifications applied for or under instruction, purely to get past the computer and seen by a human. I keep a couple of lines blank within my CV, to stuff with the keywords on the advertised JD.
Worst of all are the websites who want you to upload your CV speculatively - that will almost never result in anything, as there’s no opportunity to tailor the CV to the job description.
Another option is to send your CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text.
"CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text" - that will either cause the CV to be rejected as "badly formatted" or the OCR system in the CV reading software will read it anyway.
Yep - in fact to bypass the white text trick, it's common to OCR the word / pdf document to get the actual CV - remember none of this is difficult anymore.
Two sources confirm @patrickkmaguire that the cabinet meeting to sign off final Covid regs has been pushed back... not yet clear why. Ministers were expecting to meet imminently.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
What should we compare it with instead? Heart attacks? Cancer? Diabetes?
For some people Covid is like the flu, for some its like the common cold. And the common cold absolutely can hit people for six and leave people with high temperature and incapacitated too.
You said two of them are unwell, what is the third like?
The third is also unwell, just less so.
My point really is that you weaken your own argument by trivialising Covid as the common cold, and then dig a deeper hole with your daft comment on heart attacks/cancer. In my experience, severe flu would be a better comparator. I'm in favour, like you, of ending all restrictions (though I think people should still steer clear of others if they're symptomatic). But we should do so with a realistic assessment of how nasty Covid can still be rather than just shrugging it off as a common cold.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
A good friend of mine is really struggling to recover from her bout of "common cold". Long-Covid is not something to just dismiss.
I was a 'long Covid' sceptic, until I got Covid. I've been exhausted for the last 3 weeks, lying on the sofa all day. Every so often I will have an active day going out etc, but then I will need a day to recover afterwards. I am open to the possibility that there is a psychological element to this, but it definetly feels pretty real . @DavidL warned about a statistically significant amount of people having heart attacks whilst recovering from Covid, it does feel like the more you push yourself the worse the fatigue gets. Just my experience, and I am in favour of removing the restrictions, but it has been quite an alarming set of events.
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
A good friend of mine is really struggling to recover from her bout of "common cold". Long-Covid is not something to just dismiss.
I was a 'long Covid' sceptic, until I got Covid. I've been exhausted for the last 3 weeks, lying on the sofa all day. Every so often I will have an active day going out etc, but then I will need a day to recover afterwards. I am open to the possibility that there is a psychological element to this, but it definetly feels pretty real . @DavidL warned about a statistically significant amount of people having heart attacks whilst recovering from Covid, it does feel like the more you push yourself the worse the fatigue gets. Just my experience, and I am in favour of removing the restrictions, but it has been quite an alarming set of events.
I hope you recover quickly. Any idea what made you sceptical of the long Covid in the first place?
King Cole, Yodel once delivered a (relatively hefty) box of dog food to entirely the wrong house. Nice old lady who lives there, but it turns out it doesn't take a long distance for me to grow tired of carrying such a box.
Our best courier drop ever was a card pushed through the letter box - whilst we were in - that they had delivered it behind the gate. And we don't have a gate. What they had done was hurl said parcel over an 8 foot fence into the back garden, smashing the contents to bits.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
Two sources confirm @patrickkmaguire that the cabinet meeting to sign off final Covid regs has been pushed back... not yet clear why. Ministers were expecting to meet imminently.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Fascinating, thank you.
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
Second Granddaughter, 16 and in school in Thailand, is beginning to think about this sort of thing. Has decided that as she probably won't be working in Thailand, she'd be well advised to go 'somewhere else' in a couple of years. She won't come to UK, though. Too expensive for someone from overseas she (and more importantly her father) thinks, even with a UK passport.
Even if you have a UK passport, you have to pay the full overseas student price in the UK, with no student loan or other support available. You have to be resident for I think two years prior to application, to be considered a UK student, something that many expatriates (and their kids) find out the hard way.
And to be honest, why bother. It is likely that when my son is considering university he will be resident of another country. If he turns out to be academically inclined enough to go to Oxford or Cambridge and got a place, I would pay up. Otherwise I wouldn't. Cost would be a big factor in any decision.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. There is no definitive scientific answer to this. What we need is politicians who can balance the risks and the benefits in light of scientific advice. Boris has called this right since before Christmas as we have seen from a peak that was significantly less than most forecast and the continued drop in cases, hospitalisations and deaths over the last month now. I know you are of the Boris can do no right school and believe that everything he does is distracting from him multiple faults but it’s time. It really is.
R4 had one of the Oxford vaccine scientists (Andrew Pollard) on who remarked that “of course it’s a decision for politicians to take, not for scientists” he also didn’t reckon that a couple of weeks either way in reopening was going to make much of a difference in any case.
If all of this is about “saving Boris” why did Guernsey scrap all COVID regulations last week?
For all his very many faults and unsuitability for office Johnson has got a lot of the big calls on COVID right, and his critics wrong.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden got rid of COVID measures around two weeks ago including isolation. The world hasn't ended and our immunity profile is better than all three of those countries due to booster uptake among over 60s and very high prior infection rates in the under 50s.
There's so many things that Boris has fucked up, the unlockdown process isn't one of them.
Re not getting the unlockdown wrong, More or less was interesting on this, mainly because it wasn't looking at Boris's decision but how wrong the forecast was. The actual figures looked at (deaths, hospitalisations etc) were a 1/3 of the best projection and 1/30 of the worst projection.
Unless Boris had a crystal ball or had lost all confidence in the scientists he took one hell of a risk. As it turned out he was right and the scientist very wrong, but I find it worrying if he was not following scientific advice.
Luckily he made the right decision.
A more worrying thing is that the scientists weren't following the scientific evidence in their forecasts.
I hope the modelling is looked at in the inquiries. However, the modellers will stick to the line of 'it wasn't a prediction', even if it was used by the media and politicians as such.
Not all the modelling has been bad. Its hard to argue that Fergussen was wrong in 2020 with his 500,000 dying without taking action. We've hit 160,000 at least with all the drastic actions we've taken.
I have a lingering suspicion that some of the modelling teams, or those using the data (civil service) wanted tighter restrictions (probably for decent motives, as they genuinely believed they were needed), and picked models/settings that provided scary numbers. That finally got called out with omicron, after the July 2021 reopening exposed some of the scenarios as frankly nonsense.
I'd suggest that Ferguson was in error in the low direction, to be honest. The IFR in practice was higher than he and his team assumed, as was R.
The key table for what would happen unmitigated, with mitigation, and with suppression was this one:
In practice, we followed school/universities closure in the first and third lockdowns (PC), Case Isolation (CI), Home Quarantine of immediate contacts (HQ) and social distancing (SD), and didn't really follow the "On Trigger" method, so we far exceeded the 48,000 in the below right box of total deaths. In practice, IFR was about half again as high (1.4% versus 0.9%) and R was more like 3.0 than 2.6 in the first wave, and 4.5 in the Alpha wave. Adjust for that, and it's probably pretty damn close (albeit the "Do nothing" numbers would have been far higher, of course; then again, he emphasised that "do nothing" wasn't really an option, because the population would damn well "do something" as the bodies started to pile up. As per rcs1000's often made point)
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
What should we compare it with instead? Heart attacks? Cancer? Diabetes?
For some people Covid is like the flu, for some its like the common cold. And the common cold absolutely can hit people for six and leave people with high temperature and incapacitated too.
You said two of them are unwell, what is the third like?
The third is also unwell, just less so.
My point really is that you weaken your own argument by trivialising Covid as the common cold, and then dig a deeper hole with your daft comment on heart attacks/cancer. In my experience, severe flu would be a better comparator. I'm in favour, like you, of ending all restrictions (though I think people should still steer clear of others if they're symptomatic). But we should do so with a realistic assessment of how nasty Covid can still be rather than just shrugging it off as a common cold.
Being realistic I would put it [post-vaccines] as less serious than the flu, but more serious than the common cold, but its a spectrum.
I think most triple-vaccinated people will be on the common cold end of the spectrum, but then some will be on the flu-end of the spectrum. But as I said, for some people the common cold viruses can cause flu-like symptoms anyway.
"Some issues needed ironing out between DH, HMT and No10" says a source.
Hear Chancellor and Health Sec are holed up in talks about it now with Barclay etc.. unclear what the exact nature of disagreement is but clearly ££... issue was expected to be resolved over weekend, but wasn't....
4. Its absolutely the case that the driver for the rapid dropping of restrictions is to throw red meat at the feral backbenchers and save Big Dog.
I expect thats what informed the decisions in Norway, Denmark, Guernsey......too.
Several of you need to wipe that bit of foam from the side of your mouth.
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
Who cares? Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons - after the two years we've just had - is still doing the right thing.
If we've seen the last of Covid I will be ecstatic. Whilst I have taken full advantage of the opportunities it has presented it has been a hateful heinous experience.
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
Last of Covid?
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
You keep repeating this 'Common Cold' mantra. As it happens, three members of my extended family, all triple-jabbed, currently have Covid - cases where I live are still high. They do not have a common cold. Two of them are really quite unwell, and one has been so for 10 days. High temperature, and incapacitated. Even if they hadn't chosen to isolate, they're not well enough to leave home. Yes, they're not going to die, but it's ludicrous to compare their illness with a common cold.
A good friend of mine is really struggling to recover from her bout of "common cold". Long-Covid is not something to just dismiss.
I was a 'long Covid' sceptic, until I got Covid. I've been exhausted for the last 3 weeks, lying on the sofa all day. Every so often I will have an active day going out etc, but then I will need a day to recover afterwards. I am open to the possibility that there is a psychological element to this, but it definetly feels pretty real . @DavidL warned about a statistically significant amount of people having heart attacks whilst recovering from Covid, it does feel like the more you push yourself the worse the fatigue gets. Just my experience, and I am in favour of removing the restrictions, but it has been quite an alarming set of events.
I hope you recover quickly. Any idea what made you sceptical of the long Covid in the first place?
I also hope @darkage recovers fully. As I'm reasonably fit and healthy I didn't so much fear Covid as I did Long Covid. OK so it could have killed me but such is life. But having an open-ended debilitating condition?That was the fear. My mum has it (OK she's 74 but it has *floored* her) and I have a couple of early 30s friends with it and it sounds bloody horrible.
Which is why Covid is not and never has been the common cold.
Ignorant query - I'm doing a localisation job ("translating" American usage to English) for an American company advising large manufacturing companies on recruitment of large numbers of people at a time, e.g. when setting up a new factory, or simply handling turnover in an existing one. They say that it's commonplace for HR departments to screen out most applicants by computer, based on the presence or absence of keywords in the application and possibly online forms, so that the busy HR people don't waste time interviewing people who they assume don't tick the right boxes. They're not saying it's a good or bad practice (it sounds potentially chilling to me); the material just assumes this is the norm, and is all about how to interview the people who survive the computerised cull.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
In one large company I worked at, I got to know the admin people (as is my habit)
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs - Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through - There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*. - If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
Fascinating, thank you.
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
Second Granddaughter, 16 and in school in Thailand, is beginning to think about this sort of thing. Has decided that as she probably won't be working in Thailand, she'd be well advised to go 'somewhere else' in a couple of years. She won't come to UK, though. Too expensive for someone from overseas she (and more importantly her father) thinks, even with a UK passport.
Even if you have a UK passport, you have to pay the full overseas student price in the UK, with no student loan or other support available. You have to be resident for I think two years prior to application, to be considered a UK student, something that many expatriates (and their kids) find out the hard way.
Indeed. This was realised very early on and the idea of the girl coming over to stay with us for her A levels was suggested. However, her father was reminded that meant a 16 or so year old living with two octogenarians. Only sensible, perhaps, if she had her heart set on nursing as a career!
Comments
Amazingly enough each country who have had in some cases completely different experiences of Covid in terms of deaths and restrictions make their own decisions for their own specific reasons. What we do has nothing to do with what they do and vice versa.
Again, its right to be winding down Covid operations (even if the end to testing is a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting in cases falling) as we're well over Omicron. Personally I hope thats the last we ever hear of Covid.
But lets not pretend that the rapid shift from the science to the politics isn't being done as the latest desperate play in Operation Save Big Dog. They're not even pretending - no Whitty / Vallance "good news everyone" presser with slides showing the exponential drop off to justify this.
- The ONS data to date
- positivity
- hospital admissions
- in hospital numbers
- MV bed numbers
- deaths.
Which in previous peaks/troughs in COVID has meant that the detected cases are falling... because the cases are falling.
I think ONS is picking up a lot of very mild to non-existent infections now, that people do not even know they have.
Having said that in any firm I've ever worked at, the one rule that has to trump that is to put your staff first - if someone turn abusive on a colleague then that's it, zero tolerance for that nonsense.
As a teenager shopping in a computer game store I once saw someone turn abusive to the staff working there, I wasn't sure what prompted it but the Manager dealt with it brilliantly. The customer was swearing and shouting at the staff then said "the customer is always right" and the Manager very calmly said "they are, but since you're swearing at my colleagues I'm banning you from the store, so you are not a customer here, so please leave before I call security". That incident has always stayed with me as precisely how it should be handled.
Elysee Palace: “Biden & Putin both accepted the principle of a summit”
White House: “Biden accepted in principle a meeting with Putin”
Kremlin: “no concrete plans” for Biden-Putin summit.
Kremlin: Putin to chair unscheduled meeting of Russia’s Security Council.
https://twitter.com/BBCSteveR/status/1495691696759267336?s=20&t=U234wTfT71Jo3-cPyHWG2A
Suggesting that completely different countries who had completely different experiences / deaths / restrictions as us are somehow linked to us is literally the mouth-foaming shouting I was referring to.
So again. Its clear that Omicron is receding into the past and that we can start lifting our response to it. Its also clear that the pace of the lifting and the absence of any science to back it up shows that Save Big Dog is the rationale rather than Whitty etc having slides to back it up.
Both your side of the argument and ScottnPaste's side need to stop shouting.
The delivery driver asked for a six-digit passcode before he gave me the parcel, which I had never been asked for before, and he said it should be on gmail. Whilst I have a gmail account, it is not linked to Amazon. When I couldn't find it after a few minutes, he went off to do some other deliveries and found it on the 'track my parcel' page for the delivery.
On the whole, good service. I got the kit at a good price, delivered fast. I just wish I'd known they needed a passcode, as I can't recall seeing it on the email. Still, a good security feature IMO.
I'm working from home today having had a sore throat since yesterday, and now a runny nose and some tiredness. Pre-Covid I wouldn't have thought twice about going into the office, today it seems a sensible precaution despite a negative LFT (a colleague tested negative for several days before getting a positive PCR).
And even if I am well enough to work, I have gained from not having to go out in the cold and drive, and I won't be spreading my germs to colleagues and customers (although we fo still wear masks at work).
I started my original post pointing out that both extremes of the argument are shouting at each other so hard that they're foaming at the mouth. Both sides, not only one side. The cartoon posted by Scott is a great example of foaming from the other side.
Again, we're doing this now because whilst cases are clearly dropping off the cliff the political impetus means it has to happen NOW.
Anyone seen Chris Whitty recently? Will we ever see him again?
EDIT: the logical thing is to move to using the ONS infection survey for case levels.
The country did at least throw itself into mobilisation re-armament after Munich, rather than acting as if peace really had been secured.
Ah couriers. A small number of idiots brings down the reputation of the entire industry.
I guess some on here are complaining because they realise that continuing restrictions might hurt the government, as I see little other reason for them to continue.
My main fear is that we regress and start getting an uptick in cases, but I can't see a reasonable route where that happens without a new virus variant striking.
The justification for the end of Covid restrictions is that it doesn't matter if you catch Covid anymore any more than any other virus that is widely circulating. You've had three or four vaccine doses by now and the vaccine works.
Cases go up, down or stay the same - it doesn't matter. Its a background circulating virus now, just like a plethora of other common cold viruses which it is joining in circulation.
What are the remaining restrictions, and how much do they contribute to reducing R?
As Whitty et al repeated a number of times, it is a bit like budgeting - restrictions of various kinds "buy" an R reduction.
I've never come across this in Britain, but I've never worked in a mass-production industry like cars. Is it common over here, or becoming common? As my task is to advise them on whether their material makes sense to British readers, it'd be useful to know.
Unfortunately there is far too much politics in this and at present I do not expect this to be a popular move, but it is the right thing to do
What we need to do is not assume that the rapid release from Omicron's clutches doesn't mean there won't be a nastier variant to follow. Pull the plugs out of as much of the pandemic systems as we can, but don't just throw them in the big - we may need them again.
What part of we're going to live with Covid are you struggling to wrap your head around?
We've seen the last of Covid in the same way as we've seen the last of the Common Cold.
We've also had them hurl a smaller package over the garden fence, where it sat in the rain for two weeks, because we were on holiday.
My favourite was the Amazon driver (normally these fellas are pretty reliable) who delivered a note to say he'd left our package with a neighbour. It turned out the neighbour in question lived half a mile away. He'd left his entire load with that neighbour: she had 50 or 60 packages with her. She was surprisingly cheerful about it.
The UK does a huge amount of testing even now, we have have had one of the highest testing rates in the world, the only countries who have higher rates all have populations much smaller than ours.
One thing the UK has done really well at is mass testing. Essentially no other country has testing of the scale and depth that the UK has.
I did at least get a replacement case from the supplier, but they have now marked me as 'signature only' on their database so no more cases left on my own doorstep when I am out.
So Mrs C & I each did a quick test. Negative, too.
I get the feeling that for some people..... teachers perhaps ..... testing is becoming a routine. Eldest Granddaughter goes in and out of schools for her course, and routinely tests twice a week.
The various measures increased each year, until by about 1936, the only limitation on re-armament spending in the UK was *what to spend it on*
A lot of people (historians included) make what I call the Tiger-Tanks-Equal-Potatoes mistake - if you switch x millions of spending from potatoes to Tiger Tanks, you get x million worth of Tiger Tanks. This ignores the fact that advanced technical products require a complex infrastructure. Without that infrastructure - no Tiger Tanks. Doesn't matter how many potato fields you don't plant.
A classic example is that in 1940 a small number of machine tools were rescued from Belgium - they were evacuated on a destroyer, IIRC. Without them, making 20mm canon barrels would have been put back 18 months in the UK.
In the context of British rearmament, the first problem was military-industrial capacity. This had been massively run down since WWI. So orders were placed, with huge subsidies to get capacity up.
So money was being spent for little apparent increase in output - at that time,
Secondly, the course of German rearmament was clear - to be ready for war in late 1942. This was apparent in their naval build up and elsewhere.
So British rearmament was tailored to being at it's peak for 1941-42
The classic example of that was building a zillion Fairey Battles - a cheap bomber to build out squadrons of the RAF, train crews etc, ready for the heavy bombers (B1.39 Standard Bomber project) coming down the road..
So it would be fair to say that buying time in 1939 was worthwhile - Hitler went to war before *he* was ready - but not that rearmament was substantially ramped up in 1939. More money was being spent each year - because of the previous years investments in production capability, there was, already, somewhere to spend the money.
(I went through the Amazon driver training when it looked like I'd need something to tide me over for a few weeks between jobs, but as it turned out I didn't, but it has heped me make complaints when things have gone wrong...)
Example: 'We're going to recruit and train 5k more doctors'
The young person who decides to study medicine now will be qualified in about 2030.
It turned out that all applications for white collar jobs were screened as follows -
- The most junior person in HR went through all the incoming CVs
- Only Russell Groups Universities with a 2.1 or a 1st went through
- There was an equivalent list for overseas universities, both accept and reject*.
- If it wasn't on the overseas lists, it went into a question make pile.
This was all done by someone who didn't have a degree......
*The accept and reject was to make it easier for the person to do the screening. The accept list was the equivalent of Russell Group.
It also becomes cheaper if more people do it then a market builds up to supply cheaper wheels and storage/changing of the wheels for winter tyres.
But that one was largely my fault. I'd ordered a pair of what I thought were Merrell shoes, following a link from somewhere I thought was a reputable site on the internet. I clearly hadn't been careful enough though. Nowadays I'm well aware of the proliferation of dodgy Chinese retailers selling bad knock-offs of western brands, but I hadn't come across this at the time.
In a way I was surprised to get any shoes at all, though they clearly weren't Merrell shoes. The fact that they were soggy was the least of their problems. They weren't even the right size. Lesson learned about indiscriminate internet shopping.
But I can't blame the Chinese for lobbing them over the garden wall though.
My brother in law now uses them as reserve gardening shoes.
That might help you put his other views in context.
CV Parsing software will take a CV and hunt for keywords while transforming the CV into a standard format (cost is pennies).
That parsed CV is then used to identify keywords and select the most likely candidates for initial screening / initial interview.
That initial interview may not even be conducted by a human being - it could be a set of questions read be a computer that the interviewee responds to in a video call.
I have no idea how genuine or commonplace this is though!
Many years ago I knew someone who had grown up in Asia who applied for a Civil Service job, and was asked where he went to school. He told them, and they opened a book entitled "Public schools and their international counterparts" to see if he'd been to somewhere, um, suitable.
DPD are in my experience the best delivery firm. They do what you ask, have a brilliant real time tracking system and are super efficient.
Through the pandemic Hermes have been terrible, closely followed by Royal Mail and Amazon.
A recruiter I spoke to said that nearly all companies doing white-collar recruitment used CV uploads, which then needed a manual check to make sure that key stuff was correct. Such as the universit(ies) and grade of degree....
I will bet that they then run that against a world wide database of universities and subjects....
She won't come to UK, though. Too expensive for someone from overseas she (and more importantly her father) thinks, even with a UK passport.
https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1495707760582868999
For some people Covid is like the flu, for some its like the common cold. And the common cold absolutely can hit people for six and leave people with high temperature and incapacitated too.
You said two of them are unwell, what is the third like?
Worst of all are the websites who want you to upload your CV speculatively - that will almost never result in anything, as there’s no opportunity to tailor the CV to the job description.
Another option is to send your CV as a PDF of a single image file, so the software can’t pick up the text.
So two choices - blame them and lose them, or make it right, keep their business and have them use you as an example of a good experience.
I can understand why several large companies choose the first option...
https://twitter.com/jessicaelgot/status/1495714802076946433
My point really is that you weaken your own argument by trivialising Covid as the common cold, and then dig a deeper hole with your daft comment on heart attacks/cancer. In my experience, severe flu would be a better comparator. I'm in favour, like you, of ending all restrictions (though I think people should still steer clear of others if they're symptomatic). But we should do so with a realistic assessment of how nasty Covid can still be rather than just shrugging it off as a common cold.
Any idea what made you sceptical of the long Covid in the first place?
The key table for what would happen unmitigated, with mitigation, and with suppression was this one:
In practice, we followed school/universities closure in the first and third lockdowns (PC), Case Isolation (CI), Home Quarantine of immediate contacts (HQ) and social distancing (SD), and didn't really follow the "On Trigger" method, so we far exceeded the 48,000 in the below right box of total deaths. In practice, IFR was about half again as high (1.4% versus 0.9%) and R was more like 3.0 than 2.6 in the first wave, and 4.5 in the Alpha wave. Adjust for that, and it's probably pretty damn close (albeit the "Do nothing" numbers would have been far higher, of course; then again, he emphasised that "do nothing" wasn't really an option, because the population would damn well "do something" as the bodies started to pile up. As per rcs1000's often made point)
I think most triple-vaccinated people will be on the common cold end of the spectrum, but then some will be on the flu-end of the spectrum. But as I said, for some people the common cold viruses can cause flu-like symptoms anyway.
"Some issues needed ironing out between DH, HMT and No10" says a source.
Hear Chancellor and Health Sec are holed up in talks about it now with Barclay etc.. unclear what the exact nature of disagreement is but clearly ££... issue was expected to be resolved over weekend, but wasn't....
Feels like its going to be a long day.
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1495716859190161414
Which is why Covid is not and never has been the common cold.