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.
How long is long? I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove. The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so. But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what you are told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
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.
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.
How long is long? I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove. The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so. But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
I am about a month in and it is getting better so not at the point where I would regard it as a long term health condition. But it is noticeably worse than a winter cold or flu. One thing that has been troubling me is that, until I got Covid, I hadn't been sick at all for 2 years. So it may be that my immune system was weakened as it hadn't been exposed to seasonal bugs due to the consequences of Covid suppression measures. I don't really know, so a lot of this is just speculation. But the point definetly holds that, on reflection, it felt more severe than a typical winter flu episode and that is because of the ongoing fatigue.
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what youare told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
Watch out for "curbs on private prosecutions"
These will, entirely accidentally, hamstring actual private prosecutions. While, mysteriously, not effect Government Depts, NGOs, or outfits such as the Post Office using them.
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
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.
How long is long? I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove. The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so. But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
Long Covid is 4 weeks. Anything beyond that is Post-Covid syndrome.
Personally, I am still struggling with running 3 months after having Covid, and need 8 hours of sleep when, at my age, I shouldn't. But is is far from being the worst post-viral fatigue I have had.
Of course many people who were seriously ill have systemic damage, intensive care syndrome etc.
The final irony for the consummate people-pleaser may be that he ends up pleasing no one: He remains in post, weakened, but too strong to depose, waiting for his legendary ballot box appeal to run out once and for all.
"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....
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.
One must question whether this really a wise strategy for factory work when you effectively have full employment? Sounds like arrogance.
Can also be the mysterious workings of HR professionals. Have seen it on both sides of the table.
I was initially turned down for interview because I didn't have direct experience in the field. The recruiting manager explicitly was interested in seeing candidates with relevant experience in other fields - recruiter had to appeal to the manager directly so they could overrule HR (and I got the job).
I was recruiting and looking for young / hungy candidates who had some experience but had the spark as opposed to more experienced but stuck in their ways professionals. So I only get the latter. Have to physically lift rejected CVs off HR's desk - and found the winning candidate there. She went on to get several promotions as was exactly what the company needed.
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what you are told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
" The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose"
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what youare told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
Watch out for "curbs on private prosecutions"
These will, entirely accidentally, hamstring actual private prosecutions. While, mysteriously, not effect Government Depts, NGOs, or outfits such as the Post Office using them.
I think this is wise advice. The woman who was abused and assaulted by the police at Stoke Newington Police Station eventually got justice by way of a private prosecution, as I recall.
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)
The lesson seems to be that a "do nothing" assumption is not needed and should be replaced by a "no legal restrictions" assumption in future.
Is the No.10 comms department still that shambolic that it leaks a decision to end Covid restrictions without having worked out the finer details?
Evidently yes
Big Dog barking too soon?
A couple of times, COVID announcements were delayed, because the devolved governments wanted things changed/added late in the process.
Have you got examples of that? I must say extensive consultation, compromise and agreement between HMG and the devolved governments has not been my abiding memory of the last 2 years.
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.
For sure the Palmer family has a member whose experiences are relevant for every available discussion topic on PB.
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
This may well be something positive that comes out of the Post Office scandal. Private Prosecutions may come to be subject to outside review and scrutiny.
Anyone with any common sense would have quickly figured that the PO was going over the top and that its campaign against the postmasters was based on flawed assumptions and faulty evidence.
There were also Ministers for postal affairs in place during the period, along with presumably some civil servants. What were they doing?
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.
"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....
Is the No.10 comms department still that shambolic that it leaks a decision to end Covid restrictions without having worked out the finer details?
Evidently yes
Big Dog barking too soon?
A couple of times, COVID announcements were delayed, because the devolved governments wanted things changed/added late in the process.
Have you got examples of that? I must say extensive consultation, compromise and agreement between HMG and the devolved governments has not been my abiding memory of the last 2 years.
Not immediately to hand - but I remember that on a couple of occasions things were delayed by needing to get everyone signed up. It's not especially surprising - getting 4 political systems/bureaucracies aligned is generally an exercise in cat herding.
EDIT: if you don't remember all the stuff about meetings where Nicola came out and made an announcement first, followed by the English/Welsh/NI announcements... Really?
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.
Chronic bronchitis which can develop from a cold seems similarish to long covid.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
I very much sympathise with those who have "Long Covid" and wish them all a speedy return to full fitness.
But it is a measure of how we have skewed (how the government has skewed) our perception of illnesses that we are thinking of continued moderated laws on account of what is undoubtedly a nasty illness. But only an illness and an illness that our health service can cope with which was the reason that all those restrictions were imposed in the first place.
It's awful having all kinds of illnesses but if our health service can cope then we must just get on with it and seek appropriate treatment and attention.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what youare told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
Watch out for "curbs on private prosecutions"
These will, entirely accidentally, hamstring actual private prosecutions. While, mysteriously, not effect Government Depts, NGOs, or outfits such as the Post Office using them.
I think this is wise advice. The woman who was abused and assaulted by the police at Stoke Newington Police Station eventually got justice by way of a private prosecution, as I recall.
Don't worry - in future she will be prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison for the crime of Vexatious Prosecution Of Public Officials.
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)
The lesson seems to be that a "do nothing" assumption is not needed and should be replaced by a "no legal restrictions" assumption in future.
I think we should still have "do nothing" but call it "baseline" and then the first useful projection is "broad public awareness of severity".
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.
Chronic bronchitis which can develop from a cold seems similarish to long covid.
Well said. The common cold can and always has been able to cause all these symptoms, but people dismiss it in their head as 'just sniffles' when actually it can be fatal to some people, or lead to post-viral syndromes etc
Just because people are talking more about Covid post-viral, rather than the long-running post-viral syndromes that other viruses have long caused that never got spoken about much, doesn't make it unique.
The final irony for the consummate people-pleaser may be that he ends up pleasing no one: He remains in post, weakened, but too strong to depose, waiting for his legendary ballot box appeal to run out once and for all.
I suspect as time goes on Bozo isn't going to be too strong to depose it's more going to be no consensus in who can replace him so better the devil you know (to cop the blame when the election goes pearshaped).
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
Been thinking the same. Market yourself globally as "Oxbridge University*". See which of them tries to sue first!
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.
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.
For sure the Palmer family has a member whose experiences are relevant for every available discussion topic on PB.
Now, now. Some of us have all sorts of people in our extended families. I've got a plumber, a prison officer, a fairly senior FO official and a professor, among others, in mine. When I worked in the NHS extended sick leaves were not very uncommon. And a damn nuisance if someone in a small department was on such, and I was trying to manage it.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
This may well be something positive that comes out of the Post Office scandal. Private Prosecutions may come to be subject to outside review and scrutiny.
Anyone with any common sense would have quickly figured that the PO was going over the top and that its campaign against the postmasters was based on flawed assumptions and faulty evidence.
There were also Ministers for postal affairs in place during the period, along with presumably some civil servants. What were they doing?
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.
For sure the Palmer family has a member whose experiences are relevant for every available discussion topic on PB.
Now, now. Some of us have all sorts of people in our extended families. I've got a plumber, a prison officer, a fairly senior FO official and a professor..
"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....
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.
Bit more complicated even then that! It's 3 full academic years (i.e. 1st September 3 years earlier) and time spent in the UK purely for education wouldn't normally count as residency AFAIK. So either she'd have to convince the universities that she was only in Thailand temporarily (e.g. for education, or parents moved there temporarily for e.g. a X-years work contract), or she'd have to convince the universities that she hadn't just moved to the UK only for education but for proper ordinary residence (probably hard to do if parents haven't also moved 'back')
All very complicated, dozens of pages of guidance about Fee Status on UKCISA. While all universities follow that guidance, there's still no guarantee each university would make the same decision in tricky cases.
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.
For sure the Palmer family has a member whose experiences are relevant for every available discussion topic on PB.
Now, now. Some of us have all sorts of people in our extended families. I've got a plumber, a prison officer, a fairly senior FO official and a professor..
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
Is the No.10 comms department still that shambolic that it leaks a decision to end Covid restrictions without having worked out the finer details?
Evidently yes
Big Dog barking too soon?
A couple of times, COVID announcements were delayed, because the devolved governments wanted things changed/added late in the process.
Have you got examples of that? I must say extensive consultation, compromise and agreement between HMG and the devolved governments has not been my abiding memory of the last 2 years.
Not immediately to hand - but I remember that on a couple of occasions things were delayed by needing to get everyone signed up. It's not especially surprising - getting 4 political systems/bureaucracies aligned is generally an exercise in cat herding.
EDIT: if you don't remember all the stuff about meetings where Nicola came out and made an announcement first, followed by the English/Welsh/NI announcements... Really?
I remember frothing on here certainly. You could have just said no rather than do the ‘not immediately to hand’ dance.
The final irony for the consummate people-pleaser may be that he ends up pleasing no one: He remains in post, weakened, but too strong to depose, waiting for his legendary ballot box appeal to run out once and for all.
I suspect as time goes on Bozo isn't going to be too strong to depose it's more going to be no consensus in who can replace him so better the devil you know (to cop the blame when the election goes pearshaped).
In an ideal political world, there's an extended sweet valley between complacency (Big Dog will turn it round) and despair (Nobody can turn it round), which is where you insert the new leader.
1990 worked like that, helped by there being an obvious policy problem that could be solved. 1995 and 2008 didn't work like that, and the least bad moment was missed in each case.
It feels awfully early for Conservatives to be going down with the Good Shop Boris, but who knows?
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
Been thinking the same. Market yourself globally as "Oxbridge University*". See which of them tries to sue first!
*Oxbridge in Dorset, of course.....
It was under Brown, IIRC that Oxford was only just stopped from setting up "International College Oxford".
The plan was to to offer as many places as there were qualified applicants who could pay, and staff the expansion with lavish pay from the huge fees they could demand.
The Brown government quashed it, because the optics (to them) of vast numbers of rich foreigners getting all the new places at the University.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
I quite enjoy it. And it's much easier to be more productive too. Sharing resources is easy, you can use specialist powerpoints, and above all you can switch from one pupil to the next in literally seconds. All while using your own (in my case custom built) equipment.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
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)
The lesson seems to be that a "do nothing" assumption is not needed and should be replaced by a "no legal restrictions" assumption in future.
I think we should still have "do nothing" but call it "baseline" and then the first useful projection is "broad public awareness of severity".
The fatalists and sensationalists will still pick the "do nothing" assumption and it will be heard the loudest. I am not sure what benefits it brings over "broad public awareness" which is inevitable so should be factored in.
On Topic. By Moon Rabbits countdown, only two days to go now before Boris leadership comes to an end. 🙂.
I’m sticking to that. My analysis agrees with Mike’s header, it’s not going away. I disagree with header, that an apology from Boris saves him, in fact he’s remained in post a few weeks longer on the basis he’s avoided making such an apology. Such an apology is an admission of guilt - and that moment, either through apology or some other means, finishes him. The penny dropped weeks ago, even in number ten, he can’t survive this. It’s not a simple law that has been broken - through the messaging of the law, that law was Boris own policy what we all needed to do, the whole sense of British fair play is built into it, the prime ministers own leadership, to lead by example built into it. He broke that law. He told whoppers to Parliament and media to avoid being found out. There’s no coming back from that.
It’s just a question of when. And my countdown till Tuesday is based on two things I have learned from all this and hold to be true. Firstly, there is no clever manoeuvring how the letters go in, a vonc can happen any second based on MPs deciding in their own mind at their own speed they want a change. Secondly, Boris has had a degree of control over delay and filibuster up till now. Last Friday he lost control. What he has stated to police can become public knowledge any moment now.
It’s also noticeable he has very little support inside his own tent now, just the same old loyalists in the media defending him, and contorting themselves to manage that like Cleverly did today
Given Boris has halved the Labour poll lead he is secure for now.
Only if he is fined, the Labour lead expands to double digits again or the Tories see massive losses in the local elections will he be under threat again
Which looks better for the Conservative Party? Swift action on a matter of principle: Johnson gone when it is clear he has lied to Parliament and broken the law. Or waiting until the polls look bad and then acting?
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.
Bit more complicated even then that! It's 3 full academic years (i.e. 1st September 3 years earlier) and time spent in the UK purely for education wouldn't normally count as residency AFAIK. So either she'd have to convince the universities that she was only in Thailand temporarily (e.g. for education, or parents moved there temporarily for e.g. a X-years work contract), or she'd have to convince the universities that she hadn't just moved to the UK only for education but for proper ordinary residence (probably hard to do if parents haven't also moved 'back')
All very complicated, dozens of pages of guidance about Fee Status on UKCISA. While all universities follow that guidance, there's still no guarantee each university would make the same decision in tricky cases.
Very useful, thanks.
Doesn’t affect me (yet) but I know several friends who got caught out paying £30k/year in fees as a result of it!
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)
The population did an awful lot even before the first lockdown.
Indeed.
Looking back at hospitalisations and working back, I think R levelled off at around 1 after about the Saturday prior to lockdown (a few days before it). To be fair, restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, gyms, cinemas, theatres, and schools were all closed by then. And an R of 1 would have left a constant stream of hospitalisations and deaths (the peak would have been a plateau).
It looks to have slowed considerably from about the 17th of March (just after the Monday warning from Boris) but was still around an R of 1.5 (so still climbing exponentially).
It tapered down to around an R of 1.0 sometime between the 22nd and 24th of March (which would have left a constant plateau of infections) and finally to sub 1.0 from about the 28th of March.
All of this is a little over-precise, as whilst the median time from infection to hospitalisation is 10 days, the distribution isn't perfect.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
I quite enjoy it. And it's much easier to be more productive too. Sharing resources is easy, you can use specialist powerpoints, and above all you can switch from one pupil to the next in literally seconds. All while using your own (in my case custom built) equipment.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
I know some DfT types, and have heard stories of some of their colleagues who have been dismissed. The one which leaps immediately to mind was for a creating a blog in which he suggested enthusiastically that all civil servants should be killed. Then there was one dismissed for squirrelling over a million pounds of DfT procurement money into personal funds. I know neither of those technically fall under 'incompetence'.
Even if you take all the current Russian claims at face value, they're pretty small beer. You could justify some airstrikes on Ukrainian army positions in the Donbas, maybe a peacekeeping buffer zone between the two sides, but nothing that would make taking Kyiv, or the Black Sea coast, as anything other than wildly disproportionate.
So it would seem likely that we'd have quite a bit more in the way of pretexts and provocations being ramped up over several days or longer to justify a full invasion.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
I quite enjoy it. And it's much easier to be more productive too. Sharing resources is easy, you can use specialist powerpoints, and above all you can switch from one pupil to the next in literally seconds. All while using your own (in my case custom built) equipment.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
I know some DfT types, and have heard stories of some of their colleagues who have been dismissed. The one which leaps immediately to mind was for a creating a blog in which he suggested enthusiastically that all civil servants should be killed. Then there was one dismissed for squirrelling over a million pounds of DfT procurement money into personal funds. I know neither of those technically fall under 'incompetence'.
The second one is genuinely astonishing. How did he ever get caught given the lack of auditing?
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
We've been "world beating" because we've been pissing away billions per month on it and nobody else has felt the need to do so.
There's even less justification to keep pissing away billions per month now.
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
This may well be something positive that comes out of the Post Office scandal. Private Prosecutions may come to be subject to outside review and scrutiny.
Anyone with any common sense would have quickly figured that the PO was going over the top and that its campaign against the postmasters was based on flawed assumptions and faulty evidence.
There were also Ministers for postal affairs in place during the period, along with presumably some civil servants. What were they doing?
Among them, AIUI, one Jo Swinson.
For a time, when she was heir apparent, I wondered if it was just me who failed to see her qualities. Nice to be reassured in the end, I guess.
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.
How long is long? I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove. The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so. But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
Longest I know personally was around 5 weeks. Oddly seemed to pick up after the booster jab, but I assume that's unrelated.
There are lots of issues around long covid. It needs clear definition for a start. Some normal viruses can be a bugger to shake off. I've heard of the hundred day cough for instance, although that seems to be a bacterial infection. Its common to be run down after being ill. For those who suffered badly enough to be hospitalised its likely there will be long term effects.
What's more interesting and worrying are those who had only mild effects, but now have long covid. Explaining the symptoms experienced is not easy. It can present a bit like CFS, which some believe is a functional neurological disease. This is often a possibility when patients have symptoms that migrate, such as starting with breathing issues but becomes joint pain etc. People don't like the idea of FND's as in Western medicine we like to find physical causes to fit effects. That it might be more complicated than this leads people to say that the patient is faking or imagining things, when they are not. They experience genuine symptoms, just with no obvious physical reason.
My worry is that the fear and stress generated by the government(s) around covid have led to lots of people succumbing to FND's as 'long-covid'.
I'm probably completely wrong in this, but the reported comments of some long covid sufferers matches very closely both CFS and other FND presentations. Whatever the cause, these people need help to get better.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
Wouldn't the ONS report be funded via the treasury? I doubt that it's particularly expensive to run. What the government wants to do is shut down all of the very expensive testing infrastructure, I expect PCR tests will be only be available by post rather than the current walk in and drive through centres dotted around the country those cost real money to maintain.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
The surveys are relatively cheap - a few 100K tests, some fairly standard data science.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
I quite enjoy it. And it's much easier to be more productive too. Sharing resources is easy, you can use specialist powerpoints, and above all you can switch from one pupil to the next in literally seconds. All while using your own (in my case custom built) equipment.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
I know some DfT types, and have heard stories of some of their colleagues who have been dismissed. The one which leaps immediately to mind was for a creating a blog in which he suggested enthusiastically that all civil servants should be killed. Then there was one dismissed for squirrelling over a million pounds of DfT procurement money into personal funds. I know neither of those technically fall under 'incompetence'.
The second one is genuinely astonishing. How did he ever get caught given the lack of auditing?
Now it's not me in DfT, so I forget the details, but I think it was partly luck. And partly through a sudden increase in conspicuous consumption which he did nothing to hide from his colleagues (indeed, he was inviting them to parties, etc.)
That's literally insane. Javid has lost the plot if its his position.
Expected the argument would be to reprioritise Covid surveillance funding to the NHS, not the other way around (!)
I’d assumed that the testing budget came straight from the Treasury, rather than via NHS funding, and that the NHS now wanted to secure these as additional funds for the department when the testing stopped.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
The surveys are relatively cheap - a few 100K tests, some fairly standard data science.
What is actually costing £2bn / month? Could, say, £20 million a month secure proper health surveillance? £200m?
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.
I found DPD crap, 3 times tehy failed to pick up a parcel and evrey time it was signed off as customer refused. When they finally sent someone he said he knew who the lazy barsteward was who could not be bothered going so far to pick it up.
(FPT) Private prosecutions are increasingly common, thanks to constraints on CPS funding. The Post Office is far from the only organisation bringing private prosecutions (see eg local authorities, or the RSPCA…).
The courts are effectively the regulators of private prosecutions, but for obvious reasons that regulation is not systematic. The CPS has powers to intervene in private prosecutions in particular circumstances, but has no overall regulatory role at all….
There are good arguments in favour of having a system of private prosecutions, but it does seem extraordinary that we recognised as far back as the mid 80s that there were dangerous conflicts of interest in having those who investigated a crime also bring prosecutions. As a result the CPS was set up to take over that role from the police.
And yet in the intervening three and a half decades we’ve never done anything about setting up a system to regulate decisions to prosecute still taken by those who do the investigation - ie for pretty well all private prosecutions.
There have been concerns about RSPCA prosecutions for some time now. I believe they now no longer want to do them. I encountered them at the start of my career and was not impressed.
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what youare told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
Watch out for "curbs on private prosecutions"
These will, entirely accidentally, hamstring actual private prosecutions. While, mysteriously, not effect Government Depts, NGOs, or outfits such as the Post Office using them.
The problems of lack of regulation of private prosecutions, conflict of interest combining the role of investigator and prosecutor, the financial incentive to take out private prosecutions versus civil action, and the injustice of costs lumped on innocent defendants all need attention. I think the bigger problem, though, is the lack of funding for the criminal justice system as a whole.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
We've been "world beating" because we've been pissing away billions per month on it and nobody else has felt the need to do so.
There's even less justification to keep pissing away billions per month now.
My personal stance starts with: what would we do if we started from here?
Omicron for the vaccinated seems to be between a common cold and earlier covid. Which is a wide range, of course. My impression is that Omicron for the vaccinated can present all across the spectrum of previous outcomes but is heavily skewed towards the milder presentations. Very roughly, something like this:
Long covid is also certainly a concern, but is considerably less of an issue in the vaccinated. And yes, cardiovascular issues are significantly more common in the recovered-from-covid, but this seems to be heavily related to how severe it was.
With all that, I would suggest that the need for strong restrictions is currently in the past. Surveillance should continue (in the form of the ONS survey, with sequencing of a proportion of the results from that) in order to act as an early warning for potential future variants, which may well not skew as often mild as Omicron, and for waning immunity.
Provision of FFP3 masks could be subsidised for the clinically vulnerable for them to decide to use in busy indoor spaces. LFTs subsidised for the clinically vulnerable and those caring for vulnerable people, but not any longer for the wider population. The daily test figures should also now be unnecessary.
Having plans in hand for levels of restrictions and test resumption that could be rolled out if and when a worse variant does appear would be wise, but we can hope that no such variant does present. Increasing stocks of antivirals such as paxlovid and having the ability to ramp up vaccinations if necessary following waning immunity would also be wise. As would taking whatever steps are possible to help the NHS recover from two years of extreme overload.
But the daily restrictions we've seen to date? I don't see the current need for them. We wouldn't be going to them if we hadn't been through covid already.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
We've been "world beating" because we've been pissing away billions per month on it and nobody else has felt the need to do so.
There's even less justification to keep pissing away billions per month now.
The ONS survey only involves a small fraction of the overall number of PCR tests done. If we scaled back PCR tests to hospital admissions and the ONS survey then we'd save the vast majority of the money spent on PCR testing.
All the other testing we've done has mostly been a waste of time, because we never did the follow-up work to ensure isolation or do contact-tracing quickly enough. But the ONS survey is genuinely useful and worth retaining.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
The surveys are relatively cheap - a few 100K tests, some fairly standard data science.
What is actually costing £2bn / month? Could, say, £20 million a month secure proper health surveillance? £200m?
Having all of the testing centre infrastructure. Those people have to be paid and could be doing something a lot more useful within the NHS rather than endless swabbing of the worried well.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
If universities dared to think a little outside the box, they’d notice that they could sell additional online-only undergrad courses in many disciplines for half the regular tuition fees, not bound by physical space, only by finding enough doc students to do the marking and grading.
You are expecting university managers to show imagination and intelligence?
I've just had a thought. Unless DfE is completely unique, they must, each year, fire some people for incompetence.
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
I quite enjoy it. And it's much easier to be more productive too. Sharing resources is easy, you can use specialist powerpoints, and above all you can switch from one pupil to the next in literally seconds. All while using your own (in my case custom built) equipment.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
I know some DfT types, and have heard stories of some of their colleagues who have been dismissed. The one which leaps immediately to mind was for a creating a blog in which he suggested enthusiastically that all civil servants should be killed. Then there was one dismissed for squirrelling over a million pounds of DfT procurement money into personal funds. I know neither of those technically fall under 'incompetence'.
The second one is genuinely astonishing. How did he ever get caught given the lack of auditing?
Now it's not me in DfT, so I forget the details, but I think it was partly luck. And partly through a sudden increase in conspicuous consumption which he did nothing to hide from his colleagues (indeed, he was inviting them to parties, etc.)
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
I was recording and podcasting lectures at Aberystwyth as long ago as 2011.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
I don't think it's the ONS study that the arguments are over. It's the free LFT and PCR tests and all the infrastructure for testing stations on council car parks and so on. I doubt the ONS costs much compared to the rest of it.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
I was recording and podcasting lectures at Aberystwyth as long ago as 2011.
True but I doubt that £9000 per year students were being compelled to listen to podcasts instead of attending in-person lecture or tutorials.
Having some element of online, for cheaper courses, is entirely reasonable. Refusing to teach in person people who are paying £9000 for the privilege of it is not.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
I have been thinking of doing an on-line MA, which was on-line pre-Covid. An on-line course would be more convenient for me.
Really? Javid thinks that is a priority for money when waiting lists are off the charts?
I don’t know how expensive either the ONS or REACT studies are, but one of the areas the UK has been genuinely “world beating” has been in surveillance - it would be a pity to drop it entirely - possibly scale it back - but stopping it would be a mistake.
Wouldn't the ONS report be funded via the treasury? I doubt that it's particularly expensive to run. What the government wants to do is shut down all of the very expensive testing infrastructure, I expect PCR tests will be only be available by post rather than the current walk in and drive through centres dotted around the country those cost real money to maintain.
With low levels of COVID I don’t see the harm in switching PCR testing to “by post” only - and start charging/do by prescription. But with the end of legal restrictions not sure what purpose it still serves beyond a diagnostic one.
What I do think would be a pity would be ending the surveillance which as others have pointed out is not costing “billions per month”.
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.
How long is long? I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove. The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so. But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
I am about a month in and it is getting better so not at the point where I would regard it as a long term health condition. But it is noticeably worse than a winter cold or flu. One thing that has been troubling me is that, until I got Covid, I hadn't been sick at all for 2 years. So it may be that my immune system was weakened as it hadn't been exposed to seasonal bugs due to the consequences of Covid suppression measures. I don't really know, so a lot of this is just speculation. But the point definetly holds that, on reflection, it felt more severe than a typical winter flu episode and that is because of the ongoing fatigue.
A lack of exposure to seasonal bugs like flu will have had no impact on your response to COVID-19. That’s not how the immune system works. AIUI, there may be some slight cross-protection from exposure to other coronaviruses: so some colds might leave you with a bit of protection against COVID, and vice versa. But it’s not much of an effect.
The reason you’ve been hit hard by COVID is because it’s a nasty bug. There is a lot of interpersonal variation, so you’ve also been unlucky.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
Quite a lot of students really like online lectures. If the lecture is well done, and the students can watch when they want, and pause etc it can work well. Last thursday I gave three 1 hour (well 50 minutes - there is a 10 min change-over gap) to the same cohort. The last lecture was their seventh hour of the day. I think many would have rather had the option to watch when ready.
However some stuff for me doesn't work online - tutorials and workshops work best wandering round the room and interacting with the students.
And clearly practical classes have to be in person.
So really the best thing is probably a mix or a blend.
And lastly - in previous times last Friday would have been a write-off for my Uni - red warning so closed campus, but most teaching was able to switch to online.
"Universities must ditch online lectures when all remaining Covid restrictions are lifted, minister says
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
We did online lectures before COVID; we will do so in the future too. It’s an efficient way to deliver teaching to NHS staff who take our educational courses. But I suspect such subtlety and an understanding of how we can use a range of educational technologies to best suit different student groups is lost on the Daily Mail or Conservative MPs…
I was recording and podcasting lectures at Aberystwyth as long ago as 2011.
True but I doubt that £9000 per year students were being compelled to listen to podcasts instead of attending in-person lecture or tutorials.
Having some element of online, for cheaper courses, is entirely reasonable. Refusing to teach in person people who are paying £9000 for the privilege of it is not.
They were recordings of the actual lectures. Including the moment where a young man was speaking to his girlfriend and therefore the lecture went, 'and Tom Paine said perhaps the gentleman in the bobble hat could pay attention.'
Oddly, we had endless complaints one time I forgot to turn the recording system on, as people had taken to having a nice lie-in instead and listen to the lecture at their convenience.
Comments
I haven't come across anyone who has had long covid, though I have heard of such cases at one remove.
The longest covid I have come across was a colleague at work who was one of the first 100-odd or so confirmed cases in the UK - so obviously pre-vaccine or other acquired immunity. He was pretty ill with it at the time, and there were suggestions that it had done permanent damage to his lungs. He struggled with any sort of physical exertion for a good three months or so.
But he is fine now. So I don't think that is long enough to be long covid.
MP Michelle Donelan said there is 'no excuse' for keeping lectures online when all legal restrictions to curb coronavirus are lifted in England on Thursday
It comes as several universities admitted they plan to continue remote learning "
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10533909/Universities-ditch-online-lectures-Covid-restrictions-lifted-minister-says.html
From a few threads back -
"My very first job was as a government lawyer. I was responsible for advising the team which deal with offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, specifically in relation to the then very widespread and profitable trade in stealing the eggs of birds of prey. The unit was in Bristol and worked closely with the RSPCA who, in a small way, were quite as bad as the Post Office in the way they abused their powers .
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose etc, and the relevant Minister would be mightily pissed off to find that not only were civil servants breaking the law but doing so even after they had been advised otherwise. (Those were the days, eh!)
The fury this engendered among the older male career civil servants in the unit was quite something to behold. My crimes involved being "a girl" (adorned by a number of crude epithets), young, a lawyer, not understanding how things were done around here etc etc. The RSPCA was especially outraged because they were on the side of the poor birds so how dare anyone challenge them.
Anyway I didn't give a toss, escalated and eventually got some changes. After a couple of years I left. It made me realise the importance of challenge, the value of and power you can have as a lawyer, and made me very sceptical indeed of charities and others which claim the moral high ground and use it as a reason to fob off scrutiny. See other charities, the police, the NHS, churches etc.
"The louder he spoke of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons."
It's a good maxim to bear in mind. Asking why and challenging and scrutinising what you are told is an essential life skill. When things go wrong, you will invariably find that at the heart and start of it, it is because this does not happen or people don't listen when it does."
(Thank you Spitting Image!)
I am about a month in and it is getting better so not at the point where I would regard it as a long term health condition. But it is noticeably worse than a winter cold or flu. One thing that has been troubling me is that, until I got Covid, I hadn't been sick at all for 2 years. So it may be that my immune system was weakened as it hadn't been exposed to seasonal bugs due to the consequences of Covid suppression measures. I don't really know, so a lot of this is just speculation. But the point definetly holds that, on reflection, it felt more severe than a typical winter flu episode and that is because of the ongoing fatigue.
These will, entirely accidentally, hamstring actual private prosecutions. While, mysteriously, not effect Government Depts, NGOs, or outfits such as the Post Office using them.
Personally, I am still struggling with running 3 months after having Covid, and need 8 hours of sleep when, at my age, I shouldn't. But is is far from being the worst post-viral fatigue I have had.
Of course many people who were seriously ill have systemic damage, intensive care syndrome etc.
The final irony for the consummate people-pleaser may be that he ends up pleasing no one: He remains in post, weakened, but too strong to depose, waiting for his legendary ballot box appeal to run out once and for all.
https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-partygate-lockdown-scandal-conservative-london-mayor/
That's 1p on income tax every two months, he notes.
https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1495696804222017540
I was initially turned down for interview because I didn't have direct experience in the field. The recruiting manager explicitly was interested in seeing candidates with relevant experience in other fields - recruiter had to appeal to the manager directly so they could overrule HR (and I got the job).
I was recruiting and looking for young / hungy candidates who had some experience but had the spark as opposed to more experienced but stuck in their ways professionals. So I only get the latter. Have to physically lift rejected CVs off HR's desk - and found the winning candidate there. She went on to get several promotions as was exactly what the company needed.
I pointed this out - that neither the people in the unit nor the RSPCA could do what they were doing, that if any of the people arrested brought a challenge the department would lose"
What were they doing that they couldn't ?
You don't need to do all the finer details until after you've made the decision generally.
Or not.
Not another euphemism?!
“Changing trains at Baker St” was bad enough…
Put the £2bn on clearing the backlog to the NHS and/or reversing the NI uplift.
EDIT: if you don't remember all the stuff about meetings where Nicola came out and made an announcement first, followed by the English/Welsh/NI announcements... Really?
Let’s just say, when the clock strikes 14 in Verkhoyansk, ALL the fluffy mice will explode
But it is a measure of how we have skewed (how the government has skewed) our perception of illnesses that we are thinking of continued moderated laws on account of what is undoubtedly a nasty illness. But only an illness and an illness that our health service can cope with which was the reason that all those restrictions were imposed in the first place.
It's awful having all kinds of illnesses but if our health service can cope then we must just get on with it and seek appropriate treatment and attention.
Just because people are talking more about Covid post-viral, rather than the long-running post-viral syndromes that other viruses have long caused that never got spoken about much, doesn't make it unique.
*Oxbridge in Dorset, of course.....
When I worked in the NHS extended sick leaves were not very uncommon. And a damn nuisance if someone in a small department was on such, and I was trying to manage it.
All very complicated, dozens of pages of guidance about Fee Status on UKCISA. While all universities follow that guidance, there's still no guarantee each university would make the same decision in tricky cases.
The latest: the FSB claims a Ukrainian shell destroyed a border checkpoint near Rostov, with no casualties.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1495698870361374723
Imagine someone who is too incompetent for the DfE.
No, I can't. I can imagine multiverses, 26 dimensional space etc. But I have a limit in my brain.
You mentioned the other day increasing private tuition work - and possibly retiring from teaching. How do you find online tuition? Since lockdown, nearly all such private tuition among people I know is online.
STOP PRESS Ukraine invades Sakha Republic.
You could have just said no rather than do the ‘not immediately to hand’ dance.
1990 worked like that, helped by there being an obvious policy problem that could be solved. 1995 and 2008 didn't work like that, and the least bad moment was missed in each case.
It feels awfully early for Conservatives to be going down with the Good Shop Boris, but who knows?
The plan was to to offer as many places as there were qualified applicants who could pay, and staff the expansion with lavish pay from the huge fees they could demand.
The Brown government quashed it, because the optics (to them) of vast numbers of rich foreigners getting all the new places at the University.
Plus there's no geographical limit to whom you can tutor.
As for your first point, how often are Civil Servants actually fired for incompetence? It would be like being asked to leave the Communist Party for having an irrational obsession with Menshevism.
Javid said to be pushing for DH to be allowed reprioritise existing funding so it can continue with Covid surveillance
Extraordinary given ministers were already in No 10 before Cabinet was delayed
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1495726192753885187
Doesn’t affect me (yet) but I know several friends who got caught out paying £30k/year in fees as a result of it!
Looking back at hospitalisations and working back, I think R levelled off at around 1 after about the Saturday prior to lockdown (a few days before it). To be fair, restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, gyms, cinemas, theatres, and schools were all closed by then. And an R of 1 would have left a constant stream of hospitalisations and deaths (the peak would have been a plateau).
It looks to have slowed considerably from about the 17th of March (just after the Monday warning from Boris) but was still around an R of 1.5 (so still climbing exponentially).
It tapered down to around an R of 1.0 sometime between the 22nd and 24th of March (which would have left a constant plateau of infections) and finally to sub 1.0 from about the 28th of March.
All of this is a little over-precise, as whilst the median time from infection to hospitalisation is 10 days, the distribution isn't perfect.
Then there was one dismissed for squirrelling over a million pounds of DfT procurement money into personal funds.
I know neither of those technically fall under 'incompetence'.
So it would seem likely that we'd have quite a bit more in the way of pretexts and provocations being ramped up over several days or longer to justify a full invasion.
Expected the argument would be to reprioritise Covid surveillance funding to the NHS, not the other way around (!)
There's even less justification to keep pissing away billions per month now.
There are lots of issues around long covid. It needs clear definition for a start. Some normal viruses can be a bugger to shake off. I've heard of the hundred day cough for instance, although that seems to be a bacterial infection. Its common to be run down after being ill. For those who suffered badly enough to be hospitalised its likely there will be long term effects.
What's more interesting and worrying are those who had only mild effects, but now have long covid. Explaining the symptoms experienced is not easy. It can present a bit like CFS, which some believe is a functional neurological disease. This is often a possibility when patients have symptoms that migrate, such as starting with breathing issues but becomes joint pain etc. People don't like the idea of FND's as in Western medicine we like to find physical causes to fit effects. That it might be more complicated than this leads people to say that the patient is faking or imagining things, when they are not. They experience genuine symptoms, just with no obvious physical reason.
My worry is that the fear and stress generated by the government(s) around covid have led to lots of people succumbing to FND's as 'long-covid'.
I'm probably completely wrong in this, but the reported comments of some long covid sufferers matches very closely both CFS and other FND presentations. Whatever the cause, these people need help to get better.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmjust/497/49705.htm
Nothing has been done yet, of course.
The problems of lack of regulation of private prosecutions, conflict of interest combining the role of investigator and prosecutor, the financial incentive to take out private prosecutions versus civil action, and the injustice of costs lumped on innocent defendants all need attention.
I think the bigger problem, though, is the lack of funding for the criminal justice system as a whole.
Omicron for the vaccinated seems to be between a common cold and earlier covid. Which is a wide range, of course. My impression is that Omicron for the vaccinated can present all across the spectrum of previous outcomes but is heavily skewed towards the milder presentations. Very roughly, something like this:
Long covid is also certainly a concern, but is considerably less of an issue in the vaccinated. And yes, cardiovascular issues are significantly more common in the recovered-from-covid, but this seems to be heavily related to how severe it was.
With all that, I would suggest that the need for strong restrictions is currently in the past. Surveillance should continue (in the form of the ONS survey, with sequencing of a proportion of the results from that) in order to act as an early warning for potential future variants, which may well not skew as often mild as Omicron, and for waning immunity.
Provision of FFP3 masks could be subsidised for the clinically vulnerable for them to decide to use in busy indoor spaces. LFTs subsidised for the clinically vulnerable and those caring for vulnerable people, but not any longer for the wider population. The daily test figures should also now be unnecessary.
Having plans in hand for levels of restrictions and test resumption that could be rolled out if and when a worse variant does appear would be wise, but we can hope that no such variant does present. Increasing stocks of antivirals such as paxlovid and having the ability to ramp up vaccinations if necessary following waning immunity would also be wise. As would taking whatever steps are possible to help the NHS recover from two years of extreme overload.
But the daily restrictions we've seen to date? I don't see the current need for them. We wouldn't be going to them if we hadn't been through covid already.
All the other testing we've done has mostly been a waste of time, because we never did the follow-up work to ensure isolation or do contact-tracing quickly enough. But the ONS survey is genuinely useful and worth retaining.
Having some element of online, for cheaper courses, is entirely reasonable. Refusing to teach in person people who are paying £9000 for the privilege of it is not.
What I do think would be a pity would be ending the surveillance which as others have pointed out is not costing “billions per month”.
The reason you’ve been hit hard by COVID is because it’s a nasty bug. There is a lot of interpersonal variation, so you’ve also been unlucky.
I hope you feel better soon! Being ill sucks.
Oh, and KBP airport is east of the city, Russian side of the river.
IEV airport (the older, smaller one) is west of the city.
However some stuff for me doesn't work online - tutorials and workshops work best wandering round the room and interacting with the students.
And clearly practical classes have to be in person.
So really the best thing is probably a mix or a blend.
And lastly - in previous times last Friday would have been a write-off for my Uni - red warning so closed campus, but most teaching was able to switch to online.
Oddly, we had endless complaints one time I forgot to turn the recording system on, as people had taken to having a nice lie-in instead and listen to the lecture at their convenience.
That strikes me as ironic now...