Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
They were both close elections. The first US election I guess I was really aware of was Reagan in 1984. He got 525/538 electoral votes on 58.8% of the popular vote. That’s what not being close means to me.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Nah, bollocks; anyone who posted any sort of thesis about why Trump could or would win, and why regular posters were wrong about Harris winning, were subject to what counts by their standards as a pile-on.
"So, uh, just curious, when you say "I like freedom," is that code for MAGA, or am I reading too much into it?"
"Quick test: If I say "covfefe," do you a) laugh ironically, b) Google it, or c) salute an invisible flag?"
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
She was closer to losing New York than winning Florida... that says a lot.
@leon did you see my question earlier. Did you travel under Amber restrictions? Most people couldn't because of the isolation restrictions on return. I could and it was a pleasure because I wad one of the fortunate few who could without it being too restrictive on my life. Empty ferries, empty airports and planes, no queues anywhere, just some boring forms and tests. I assume you were in the same position. Did you take advantage of it?
Honestly don’t even remember what “amber” was. I know I traveled as much as possible within restrictions - and sometimes beyond them. Come arrest me, officer
I do recall the Strangeness of the Tiers. Essex was bisected. On one side of the road everything shut, on the other I could happily eat oysters on Mersea island, so I did
Travelling abroad. Very simplified: Green ok, Amber restrictions, Red no.
For most people Amber was impossible because of the restrictions, but if you could isolate on return you could do it with lots of admin and tests. I had no commitments so could isolate and took the gamble on anywhere going red.
I went on holiday even though it wasnt allowed in my tier. But the airport didnt check anyway. Had conversations when away which suggested they didnt really check if you isolated on return so never bothered isolating on return and just left the phone landline off the hook when i was out.
I isolated because I could easily. I was checked on several times, but on my mobile so I could have been anywhere, although I did hear of people being caught by door checks. The cheaper testing kits were a bit of a scam. I avoided one that I had read often didn't arrive and paid for a more expensive one. Someone I knew went for the cheaper one and as per expected it didn't arrive, but as long as you had the code for the form that was all that was actually needed to travel. Stupid situation because you are complying with the paperwork, but not actually the tests. You were really buying a number for the form not a test kit.
Initially the online forms were a mess that didn't work for all circumstances. On my first trip I had to give the return flight details but didn't have any as I hadn't booked a return and couldn't move forward on the screen. I had to phone the FCO. I also had an issue because my 2nd trip was too close to my first trip (I can't remember what the issue was), but was able to get around that by manipulating the form.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
I never received the slightest bullying for my position
- That Trump was consistently a bit ahead, according to the polls - That Harris was a suboptimal, but not insane or evil, candidate. - That the result was too close to call, but with an edge to Trump.
Because that was an entirely anodyne and uncontentious point to make.
It was the posts with the analysis why Trump could or would win that copped the abuse.
I wrote a header analysing why I thought Trump could win and received precisely zero abuse. I think you're tilting at windmills.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
They were both close elections. The first US election I guess I was really aware of was Reagan in 1984. He got 525/538 electoral votes on 58.8% of the popular vote. That’s what not being close means to me.
Because that makes you feel better about the fact they both lost.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
He's right though. You spend 90% of your time trying to contrive Paxman/Maitlis "gotcha" moments.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Although, you and Leon are currently dishing out lots of virulent and unnecessary abuse to a poster you don't happen to agree with on Covid.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
You mean Susan Michie - yeah that was the actual SAGE.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Official SAGE iirc, but indy SAGE had a few as well. Susan Michie was the one on SAGE. Fully paid up member of the Communist Party and she was on the advisory board for lockdowns. We allowed this to happen.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
They were both close elections. The first US election I guess I was really aware of was Reagan in 1984. He got 525/538 electoral votes on 58.8% of the popular vote. That’s what not being close means to me.
Because that makes you feel better about the fact they both lost.
You're simply working back from that.
I feel terrible that they both lost. I am interested in how well we can predict election results, which is kinda the point of this site. To do that, we need to look at election results, polling and the betting odds. The numbers are clear that both were close elections. If we line up every US election, they were both much nearer the close end than the landslide end.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Boris didn't even believe in lockdown.
I mean, he implemented them. He was Prime Minister. He didn’t have to.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
So, how much did you make on the betting?
the 28th closest. An amazing result.
She’s such an unimpressive human being she couldn’t even be arsed to go and speak to her supporters on election night when she lost. She went home to bed.
I put a small wager on her, when she went out to 4/1 it was worth a punt so I put a few quid in that.
So, it was obvious to you that she was going to lose and yet you bet on her?
Presumably, as it was so obvious, you also bet on Trump and made a killing?
She drifted out to 4/1 on election night and I thought it worth a few quid as a punt in case she was able to win the rust belt.
She was a shit candidate. This Is not hindsight as I said it during the campaign. PB4Harris posters rebutted that but I was, of course, right. She lost. You’ll come to terms with it one day. You need to acceptance on the grief cycle. I’d have preferred to see her win because recognising her complete ineptitude I’d prefer her to Trump due to the tariffs.
This is what pisses people off about Woke. Why can't they just say, "Merry Christmas", even if it's in a couple of days time, rather than today?
Big corporates have no problem shouting out for Diwali or Eid, why not Christmas?
Twats.
It is quite twattish but it is also an American thing, and Google is an American company
Because of the US constitutional division of chucrh and state Americans have long been warier of saying "Merry Christmas". That's WHY the phrase "Happy Holidays" sounds so American
What's twattish, however, is that they break these rules in trillions of ways all the time, yet not this time
Should be noted that of all the big Tech companies Google is by FAR the most Woke. Remember their image generator that made black Vikings and black Founding Fathers. Remember the famous "engineer's email" about Wokeness in the ranks
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Nah, bollocks; anyone who posted any sort of thesis about why Trump could or would win, and why regular posters were wrong about Harris winning, were subject to what counts by their standards as a pile-on.
"So, uh, just curious, when you say "I like freedom," is that code for MAGA, or am I reading too much into it?"
"Quick test: If I say "covfefe," do you a) laugh ironically, b) Google it, or c) salute an invisible flag?"
"Do you own a red hat? Don’t lie. We can tell."
That sort of thing. At the very mildest end.
.....eh? I don't recall anything like that at all.
Fwiw, I stated that I thought the Walz nomination would be peak Harris, and people were quite open to that idea. And there was a broad consensus that Biden was falling apart (though a fun debate about precisely what problem he had - I didn't think it was dementia but rather something more physical).
You're developing a persecution complex. The idea that PB lefties scared all the right wingers away is just silly.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Boris didn't even believe in lockdown.
I mean, he implemented them. He was Prime Minister. He didn’t have to.
And had the media acted more responsibly, he might have been able to not.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
So, how much did you make on the betting?
the 28th closest. An amazing result.
She’s such an unimpressive human being she couldn’t even be arsed to go and speak to her supporters on election night when she lost. She went home to bed.
I put a small wager on her, when she went out to 4/1 it was worth a punt so I put a few quid in that.
So, it was obvious to you that she was going to lose and yet you bet on her?
Presumably, as it was so obvious, you also bet on Trump and made a killing?
She drifted out to 4/1 on election night and I thought it worth a few quid as a punt.
She was a shit candidate. She lost. I’d have preferred to see her win because recognising her complete ineptitude I’d prefer her to Trump due to the tariffs.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
That "because" is dubious.
Also, have you forgotten when our government told us that the mask mandate was literal virtue signalling?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
Except that the Japanese then got so attached to masks they carried on wearing them, catastrophically, for months and years after Covid and even on my recent visit I saw 20-25% in masks and kids wear masks in schools all the time, which is psychologically horrific. Korea is quite similar, and many are speculating that the continued apocalyptic collapse in East Asian birthrates is being considerably worsened by mask culture
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Unfortunately, it won't.
The lesson I drew from it is that our population is quite supine and likes State authoritarianism. And, worse, would happily collaborate with an occupying power if it ever came down to it.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
Neighbours basically became PCSOs.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
You’re absolutely right and Covid just emboldened these people.
In one opinion poll at the time, 20% wanted nightclubs to never re-open.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Boris didn't even believe in lockdown.
I mean, he implemented them. He was Prime Minister. He didn’t have to.
And had the media acted more responsibly, he might have been able to not.
I’m not defending the UK media, but is it naive of me to imagine that the Prime Minister shouldn’t be running scared of the media?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
None. You are the establishment, I'm just calling that out to people so they know what you represent.
There are, I might suggest, politer and less polite ways of saying someone is “the establishment”. (Not that I accept that description, but did I have a formal, paid role advising the Government at the time.)
I do hope that you offered somewhat better advice than your commentary here would indicate.
You still haven't answered my question about the figures you gave for deaths during covid.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Diet Sage. Someone called Susan Michie who moved on to other well paid gigs.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Boris didn't even believe in lockdown.
I mean, he implemented them. He was Prime Minister. He didn’t have to.
And had the media acted more responsibly, he might have been able to not.
I’m not defending the UK media, but is it naive of me to imagine that the Prime Minister shouldn’t be running scared of the media?
If you're not taking human nature into account then, yes, you are naive.
The atmosphere the media created in February-March 2020 was an absolute disgrace and a harbinger of what would come with endless demands for stricter restrictions and anyone daring to question whether a lighter touch might be appropriate being ostracised.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Diet Sage. Someone called Susan Michie who moved on to other well paid gigs.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
Boris didn't even believe in lockdown.
I mean, he implemented them. He was Prime Minister. He didn’t have to.
And had the media acted more responsibly, he might have been able to not.
I’m not defending the UK media, but is it naive of me to imagine that the Prime Minister shouldn’t be running scared of the media?
No different to SKS and labour refusing to put ministers on Times Radio because Andrew Neil is critical of them Boris and his team wouldn’t even appear on GMB as Piers Morgan pissed them off.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
They were both close elections. The first US election I guess I was really aware of was Reagan in 1984. He got 525/538 electoral votes on 58.8% of the popular vote. That’s what not being close means to me.
Because that makes you feel better about the fact they both lost.
You're simply working back from that.
It’s on a par with Corbynites going on about how many votes he got compared to Starmer. Totally delusional.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
There's no perfect outcome.
Every choice comes with trade offs: Japanese masking culture enabled them to keep viral reproductive rates low with very minor other restrictions on freedom. Schools, for example, were fully essentially fully open from May of 2020.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
Indeed. I love Japan and the Japanese but it is also a fucked up place and the mask culture that became entrenched during Covid was calamitous
Some say "oh the Japanese have always worn masks" but it's a fucking lie. I LIVED in Japan in the 90s and about 1-5% would wear a mask - usually if they had a cold or on polluted days. The vast majority never wore them
Now?
This is one of the saddest lines relating to Covid that I have ever read:
"People in Japan who became so used to wearing face masks during the pandemic are signing up for lessons to teach them how to smile again."
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
It was closed down for the same reason that the dashboard team was quickly shut down - it represented an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government.
Likewise the mass testing system - one person actually wrote that its *success* was an insult to Proper Process.
These are the headwinds that Starmer & Co. Is encountering now.
That’s bonkers, Malmesbury. It was closed down so they could cut spending. Now on Earth was the vaccine institute “an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government”?
Imagine you are in the management of a lab in an NHS trust, say.
Along comes a mega-lab. Latest testing gear, automation, economy of scale.
Might well do stuff faster and cheaper than your little empire….
I’ve seen the same many, many times in various organisations.
It’s why Starmer is encountering resistance to change. If you cut the planning process, there are office blocks of people who will lose their jobs.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
A strong, competant government would have the balls take the advice of the scientists seriously on scientific matters, and push back strongly on scientists trying to do policy. One commie on the committee, even if she strays into policy, should not be a problem.
It is possible to be an unrepentant commie and still objective on a given subject: Hobsbawm on History, for an example. Rare but possible.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
One of the things most Red states did really well was to devolve restrictions down to cities and counties. So Florida had almost no statewide restrictions, but it allowed cities and counties to impose restrictions if they wished.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
It was closed down for the same reason that the dashboard team was quickly shut down - it represented an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government.
Likewise the mass testing system - one person actually wrote that its *success* was an insult to Proper Process.
These are the headwinds that Starmer & Co. Is encountering now.
That’s bonkers, Malmesbury. It was closed down so they could cut spending. Now on Earth was the vaccine institute “an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government”?
Imagine you are in the management of a lab in an NHS trust, say.
Along comes a mega-lab. Latest testing gear, automation, economy of scale.
Might well do stuff faster and cheaper than your little empire….
I’ve seen the same many, many times in various organisations.
It’s why Starmer is encountering resistance to change. If you cut the planning process, there are office blocks of people who will lose their jobs.
But this was for developing vaccines, which is not something an NHS Trust would be doing. That argument doesn’t make sense.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
A strong, competant government would have the balls take the advice of the scientists seriously on scientific matters, and push back strongly on scientists trying to do policy. One commie on the committee, even if she strays into policy, should not be a problem.
It is possible to be an unrepentant commie and still objective on a given subject: Hobsbawm on History, for an example. Rare but possible.
Indeed. The government had no difficulty at all pushing back or ignoring SAGE advice.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Nah, bollocks; anyone who posted any sort of thesis about why Trump could or would win, and why regular posters were wrong about Harris winning, were subject to what counts by their standards as a pile-on.
"So, uh, just curious, when you say "I like freedom," is that code for MAGA, or am I reading too much into it?"
"Quick test: If I say "covfefe," do you a) laugh ironically, b) Google it, or c) salute an invisible flag?"
"Do you own a red hat? Don’t lie. We can tell."
That sort of thing. At the very mildest end.
.....eh? I don't recall anything like that at all.
Fwiw, I stated that I thought the Walz nomination would be peak Harris, and people were quite open to that idea. And there was a broad consensus that Biden was falling apart (though a fun debate about precisely what problem he had - I didn't think it was dementia but rather something more physical).
You're developing a persecution complex. The idea that PB lefties scared all the right wingers away is just silly.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
The DPP president has vetoed the KMT parliament's bill to change the rules on judicial review.
The president would like a fresh election, and polls show a DPP landslide, but it cannot be called on a whim: parliament must complain about its frustrated bill first - and they don't want the election. A stand-off.
Apparently many taiwanese voted split ticket, fearing DPP hegemony, and are now regretting it.
This is on top of a separate crisis earlier this year:
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
We would be in a better place if governments had encouraged such research - and, indeed, had considered the downsides of their actions from the very beginning.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
@TSE while watching the celebrity Chase and getting annoyed at the piss easy questions the slebs get this came up in a question. I immediately thought of you.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
We would be in a better place if governments had encouraged such research - and, indeed, had considered the downsides of their actions from the very beginning.
There has been a lot of research done on COVID from many possible angles, mostly funded by governments. I just don’t off-hand know of any particularly on this question. I am absolutely in favour of more funding for more research. It is noticeable how COVID research funding has dried up more recently in the UK; I don’t know about in other countries.
The UK and other governments did consider (some) downsides of their actions from the very beginning. Again, this has been made clear by the COVID-19 Inquiry, albeit some downsides were overlooked (e.g., domestic violence).
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
An absolute monster. He killed all five of his kids in the bunker IIRC
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
I thought in "Downfall" it was his wife who did the actual poisoning?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
You stated 'red states had higher deaths' - I assume that you mean deaths from (or with) covid, not overall deaths. It's a very important clarification, and one you've now failed to make twice in a single comment thread.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
But I think you are overstating the influence of covid. I have been in Japan twice, both pre-covid, and I've never known a more alien culture.
In my view the central problem is how deferential everyone is. So whether it's a culture of masks or a fetishising of the old at the expense of everyone else, I think the Japanese have a problem in that they are too unwilling to be the fly in the ointment.
ETA: just to add, I also love the place - probably second on my list of destinations I'd love to return to behind Colombia.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
We would be in a better place if governments had encouraged such research - and, indeed, had considered the downsides of their actions from the very beginning.
There has been a lot of research done on COVID from many possible angles, mostly funded by governments. I just don’t off-hand know of any particularly on this question. I am absolutely in favour of more funding for more research. It is noticeable how COVID research funding has dried up more recently in the UK; I don’t know about in other countries.
The UK and other governments did consider (some) downsides of their actions from the very beginning. Again, this has been made clear by the COVID-19 Inquiry, albeit some downsides were overlooked (e.g., domestic violence).
Hah. Where was the cost-benefit analysis when Cabinet ministers asked for it? It didn't exist.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
An absolute monster. He killed all five of his kids in the bunker IIRC
With Cyanide. All of their first names began with H as a mark of respect to Hitler.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
I thought in "Downfall" it was his wife who did the actual poisoning?
May well be right, I had read otherwise but it may be the case.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
But I think you are overstating the influence of covid. I have been in Japan twice, both pre-covid, and I've never known a more alien culture.
In my view the central problem is how deferential everyone is. So whether it's a culture of masks or a fetishising of the old at the expense of everyone else, I think the Japanese have a problem in that they are too unwilling to be the fly in the ointment.
ETA: just to add, I also love the place - probably second on my list of destinations I'd love to return to behind Colombia.
BUT THEY WEREN'T MASKING
Yes it's alien, yes it's weird, yes I love Japan too. But I lived there (when it was a happier place) and they didn't generally wear masks. Only a few sick people, out of politeness (which is a very good idea)
Masking got so bad, and so societally damaging, last year the Japanese government was urging the people to set them aside
Why is Japan unable or unwilling to unmask? Despite a need for balance, society sticks to habit amid COVID-19
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
An absolute monster. He killed all five of his kids in the bunker IIRC
With Cyanide. All of their first names began with H as a mark of respect to Hitler.
What a twit.
And he was shagging a half-Jewish woman on the quiet.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
But I think you are overstating the influence of covid. I have been in Japan twice, both pre-covid, and I've never known a more alien culture.
In my view the central problem is how deferential everyone is. So whether it's a culture of masks or a fetishising of the old at the expense of everyone else, I think the Japanese have a problem in that they are too unwilling to be the fly in the ointment.
ETA: just to add, I also love the place - probably second on my list of destinations I'd love to return to behind Colombia.
BUT THEY WEREN'T MASKING
Yes it's alien, yes it's weird, yes I love Japan too. But I lived there (when it was a happier place) and they didn't generally wear masks. Only a few sick people, out of politeness (which is a very good idea)
Masking got so bad, and so societally damaging, last year the Japanese government was urging the people to set them aside
Why is Japan unable or unwilling to unmask? Despite a need for balance, society sticks to habit amid COVID-19
I'm not disagreeing that masking is one particularly damaging example of an overly deferential culture.
But I think the masking is just a symptom of a bigger cultural challenge. I don't know Japan since covid, I'm just arguing that I could imagine it would be much harder for a masking culture to be unwound in a society like Japans than one like, say, USA, where they go quite a long way the other way in rejecting deference.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
An absolute monster. He killed all five of his kids in the bunker IIRC
With Cyanide. All of their first names began with H as a mark of respect to Hitler.
What a twit.
And he was shagging a half-Jewish woman on the quiet.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
Which SAGE had an actual communist on the board?I fear it might have been Official SAGE
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
Real Sage. But she's a heriditary communist, from a very wealthy family, who at least has done something useful with her life.
Goebbels was a genuinely brilliant ptropagandiist, and a very clever man, and apparently intensely charming in person - witty and warm
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
Goebbels, irrespective of what the song said, was fertile and had several children all of who he killed prior to the fall of Nazi Germany.
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
An absolute monster. He killed all five of his kids in the bunker IIRC
With Cyanide. All of their first names began with H as a mark of respect to Hitler.
What a twit.
And he was shagging a half-Jewish woman on the quiet.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
There's no reason why Farage's support "must" be capped at 20% or 25%. I'm old enough to remember when it used to be 15%.
As soon as Reform seem the real opposition to Labour (over the Conservatives) the equation shifts and marmite politicians being disliked by many is pretty much universal and priced in.
He could go to 35% or even 40% under the right circumstances.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I'm happy that we won a majority. I don't think it is fair. PR now!
Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao
Have you noticed that immigrants or offspring of immigrants become more nationalistic than natives - Musk (SA) and Trump (British/German). Then there is Kemi talking about protecting British values when she spent her formative years outside of Britain. Seems an amount of overcompensating going on.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
There's no reason why Farage's support "must" be capped at 20% or 25%. I'm old enough to remember when it used to be 15%.
As soon as Reform seem the real opposition to Labour (over the Conservatives) the equation shifts and marmite politicians being disliked by many is pretty much universal and priced in.
He could go to 35% or even 40% under the right circumstances.
Yes. Farage is a mortal threat to the Tories AND Labour. He can easily win in 2028 as these projections show
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
I wouldn't say adopting Japanese social customs is a net benefit. I've been there more than most and even in populated areas it's pretty depressing.
It's hard to know. Normally when we visit places which are culturally remote from here, one of the reasons for such remoteness is poverty. Japan is fascinating to me because it is rich, but still hugely different. The cultural difference is highlighted by the fiscal similarity.
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
It's easy to know, Japan has one of the lowest birth rates across the world and one of the lowest rates of coupling/marriage. The people are miserable, overworked and anti-social. I don't know if masks are part of the cause or if masks became a symptom of the malaise but I wouldn't want to follow suit in the UK and make them commonplace.
You think Japan is bad?
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
The point I was making is that I accept that Japanese society and culture made it easier/better to handle a pandemic like COVID or SARS but that comes at a big cost outside of those narrow parameters. I'd rather be worse at handling a once in a generation pandemic and have a properly functioning society that socialises, gets married and has children.
Plenty of Japanese people say that masks are contributing to the birthrate issue. And it makes obvious sense. It's harder to fall in love with someone if you can't see their pretty or handsome face, or their dashing or beautiful smile, and also you can't read the facial expressions which tell you they are interested in YOU
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
We would be in a better place if governments had encouraged such research - and, indeed, had considered the downsides of their actions from the very beginning.
There has been a lot of research done on COVID from many possible angles, mostly funded by governments. I just don’t off-hand know of any particularly on this question. I am absolutely in favour of more funding for more research. It is noticeable how COVID research funding has dried up more recently in the UK; I don’t know about in other countries.
The UK and other governments did consider (some) downsides of their actions from the very beginning. Again, this has been made clear by the COVID-19 Inquiry, albeit some downsides were overlooked (e.g., domestic violence).
Hah. Where was the cost-benefit analysis when Cabinet ministers asked for it? It didn't exist.
Let's say government action saved 100,000 lives. At £1 million per life, the benefit was £100 billion. So what was the cost?
Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao
Have you noticed that immigrants or offspring of immigrants become more nationalistic than natives - Musk (SA) and Trump (British/German). Then there is Kemi talking about protecting British values when she spent her formative years outside of Britain. Seems an amount of overcompensating going on.
See also Daniel Hannan, Matthew Paris etc. Certainly a breed.
Not always nationalist, but often a little odd. Britain understood analytically, from outside, rather than instinctively from within.
Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao
Have you noticed that immigrants or offspring of immigrants become more nationalistic than natives - Musk (SA) and Trump (British/German). Then there is Kemi talking about protecting British values when she spent her formative years outside of Britain. Seems an amount of overcompensating going on.
That's a fairly negative interpretation of what I think is a questionable observation.
Even if what you say is true, it could be because such people have more direct experience of other countries and so have a greater appreciation of the advantages of their chosen country, compared to people without that experience who take those things for granted.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
Look, we all know that the UK made mistakes. The severity of the measures, and the length of time they were imposed for, were both excessive.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
In the us red states covid restrictions were relatively light after May 2020. Helps though that they had a population more willing to just do their own thing. Even countries like Spain which had a horrendous 1st lockdown never saw fit to repeat them.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
If you have sources to share on other consequences of COVID restrictions and how they played out differently in red and blue states, I would be interested to read them. I’m not aware of any myself.
We would be in a better place if governments had encouraged such research - and, indeed, had considered the downsides of their actions from the very beginning.
There has been a lot of research done on COVID from many possible angles, mostly funded by governments. I just don’t off-hand know of any particularly on this question. I am absolutely in favour of more funding for more research. It is noticeable how COVID research funding has dried up more recently in the UK; I don’t know about in other countries.
The UK and other governments did consider (some) downsides of their actions from the very beginning. Again, this has been made clear by the COVID-19 Inquiry, albeit some downsides were overlooked (e.g., domestic violence).
Hah. Where was the cost-benefit analysis when Cabinet ministers asked for it? It didn't exist.
Let's say government action saved 100,000 lives. At £1 million per life, the benefit was £100 billion. So what was the cost?
You'd have to go by QALY on both sides of the calculation. £1m suggests ~40 QALY per death on average, which I'm going to say seems generous.
I'd start with the whole population losing 1.5 QALY to lockdown (actual and threatened) directly even before you look at other effects.
Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao
Have you noticed that immigrants or offspring of immigrants become more nationalistic than natives - Musk (SA) and Trump (British/German). Then there is Kemi talking about protecting British values when she spent her formative years outside of Britain. Seems an amount of overcompensating going on.
That's a fairly negative interpretation of what I think is a questionable observation.
Even if what you say is true, it could be because such people have more direct experience of other countries and so have a greater appreciation of the advantages of their chosen country, compared to people without that experience who take those things for granted.
Yes. Musk is South African and has seen the virtual collapse of that country after the end of apartheid. And a terrible rise in violence, along with anti white racial laws. Kemi B has experienced violent islamism in Nigeria - she abhors it and speaks of it. This is not to justify or critique any of their opinions, merely putting them in context
Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao
Have you noticed that immigrants or offspring of immigrants become more nationalistic than natives - Musk (SA) and Trump (British/German). Then there is Kemi talking about protecting British values when she spent her formative years outside of Britain. Seems an amount of overcompensating going on.
I think you're conflating different things. Members of a diaspora can idealise their homeland (Musk says he's English), and immigrants can idealise the country they choose to move to, but the psychology is not the same.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
I can't see it because of the nature of the realignment. If Reform are getting a vote share in the 30s, it's going to come primarily from traditional Labour areas. People in more traditional Tory seats are not going to vote Labour to stop Farage.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
Labour got 33.7% of the vote last time. You think they're going to increase their share of the vote by about 10%?
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
Labour got 33.7% of the vote last time. You think they're going to increase their share of the vote by about 10%?
No. I just think that's more likely than Reform winning a majority with a low 30s result. Labour's vote was suppressed for a number of reasons - Gaza, inevitable victory - things that would become less important in the face of Farage.
A Reform victory on 34% is a fun thought experiment though, so I'm going to dig around in my spreadsheet and try and construct the scenario.
Almost as incredible as the fact we're going into Christmas with 12 points and a game in hand over the reigning 4-times Champions.
This season is utterly mental.
Liverpool are playing great football and Salah is out of this world
City will be lucky to gain a champions league place in 2025, and as for United far too much deadwood at the club which will take sometime to resolve and certainly they will be lucky to be in Europe at all in 2025
And remember I am a lifelong Man Utd supporter complimenting Liverpool
Reform are now closing in on having more members that the Conservative Party and are planning to hold a number of events at large venues early in the new year. Perhaps it’s the rebirth of the kind of mass membership politics that had been dying out in recent decades.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority out (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
Labour got 33.7% of the vote last time. You think they're going to increase their share of the vote by about 10%?
No. I just think that's more likely than Reform winning a majority with a low 30s result. Labour's vote was suppressed for a number of reasons - Gaza, inevitable victory - things that would become less important in the face of Farage.
A Reform victory on 34% is a fun thought experiment though, so I'm going to dig around in my spreadsheet and try and construct the scenario.
To be fair, if labour and conservatives continue as they are you will not need a spreadsheet to see Reform winning
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
I can't see it because of the nature of the realignment. If Reform are getting a vote share in the 30s, it's going to come primarily from traditional Labour areas. People in more traditional Tory seats are not going to vote Labour to stop Farage.
Not necessarily. 1) Reform are strong in coastal areas in the East of England, which I wouldn't exactly call traditional Labour areas. 2) A chunk of what's left of the Tory vote in the Red Wall probably isn't enormously fond of Farage.
Reform are now closing in on having more members that the Conservative Party and are planning to hold a number of events at large venues early in the new year. Perhaps it’s the rebirth of the kind of mass membership politics that had been dying out in recent decades.
The idea that number of members reflects electoral success, though, is suspect. If parties had 5m members each, like a hundred years ago, maybe. But the LibDems have had almost as many members as the tories for a while, and it hasn't really helped them.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright. (Source: Electoral Calculus)."
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Should that happen and they won a majority on 32% the very same people happy with Sir Kier getting a thumping majority on 33% would be bemoaning the death of democracy and demanding a change to the electoral system.
I think a scenario where Reform get high 30s, and Labour low 40s, is much more likely, akin to coalescence we saw with the 2017 election.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
Labour got 33.7% of the vote last time. You think they're going to increase their share of the vote by about 10%?
No. I just think that's more likely than Reform winning a majority with a low 30s result. Labour's vote was suppressed for a number of reasons - Gaza, inevitable victory - things that would become less important in the face of Farage.
A Reform victory on 34% is a fun thought experiment though, so I'm going to dig around in my spreadsheet and try and construct the scenario.
Gaza, inevitable victory, Starmer being utterly uninspiring?
If true, this would be an interesting test for the UK government:
"Asma al-Assad asks for divorce and wants to leave Russia 🇷🇺. According to the newspaper, Asma al-Assad, who holds British citizenship expressed her dissatisfaction with living conditions in the 🇷🇺 capital Moscow and she want to return to London."
Comments
That's up there with "A Hoover for Christmas"!
I wouldn't dare!
Kamala 48.4%
They were both close elections. The first US election I guess I was really aware of was Reagan in 1984. He got 525/538 electoral votes on 58.8% of the popular vote. That’s what not being close means to me.
"So, uh, just curious, when you say "I like freedom," is that code for MAGA, or am I reading too much into it?"
"Quick test: If I say "covfefe," do you a) laugh ironically, b) Google it, or c) salute an invisible flag?"
"Do you own a red hat? Don’t lie. We can tell."
That sort of thing. At the very mildest end.
Initially the online forms were a mess that didn't work for all circumstances. On my first trip I had to give the return flight details but didn't have any as I hadn't booked a return and couldn't move forward on the screen. I had to phone the FCO. I also had an issue because my 2nd trip was too close to my first trip (I can't remember what the issue was), but was able to get around that by manipulating the form.
You're simply working back from that.
God help us, it's amazing anyone survived at all
This is what pisses people off about Woke. Why can't they just say, "Merry Christmas", even if it's in a couple of days time, rather than today?
Big corporates have no problem shouting out for Diwali or Eid, why not Christmas?
Twats.
In particular, the government was slow to remove measures that had a terrible effect on personal freedoms, while having only a very limited impact on viral spread.
Many places around the world managed a much better job of preserving freedoms and economic activity, while also holding disease spread down. California, for example, never had restrictions on meeting with friends (at their homes!), or spending time outside.
But the mask thing? Well, the counterpoint to that is that Japan - which has a culture of people wearing masks if feeling unwell to avoid infecting others - managed Covid rather better than we did. Despite an elderly population that is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas, they largely avoided lockdowns (or other significant restrictions) because people were so willing to mask up.
She was a shit candidate. This Is not hindsight as I said it during the campaign. PB4Harris posters rebutted that but I was, of course, right. She lost. You’ll come to terms with it one day. You need to acceptance on the grief cycle. I’d have preferred to see her win because recognising her complete ineptitude I’d prefer her to Trump due to the tariffs.
Because of the US constitutional division of chucrh and state Americans have long been warier of saying "Merry Christmas". That's WHY the phrase "Happy Holidays" sounds so American
What's twattish, however, is that they break these rules in trillions of ways all the time, yet not this time
Should be noted that of all the big Tech companies Google is by FAR the most Woke. Remember their image generator that made black Vikings and black Founding Fathers. Remember the famous "engineer's email" about Wokeness in the ranks
Fwiw, I stated that I thought the Walz nomination would be peak Harris, and people were quite open to that idea. And there was a broad consensus that Biden was falling apart (though a fun debate about precisely what problem he had - I didn't think it was dementia but rather something more physical).
You're developing a persecution complex. The idea that PB lefties scared all the right wingers away is just silly.
Also, have you forgotten when our government told us that the mask mandate was literal virtue signalling?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Michie
Her mother, Anne McLaren, was a properly impressive woman:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_McLaren
(But also a commie).
Other than that, good point
You still haven't answered my question about the figures you gave for deaths during covid.
Goring was from a distinguished, aristocratic family, with illustrious forebears
They were still fucking Nazis and a commie is still a commie and should be nowhere near govvernment, let alone a committee deciding how to rule the lives of everyone in a spookily communist way. Also, the rich commies are the WORST
The atmosphere the media created in February-March 2020 was an absolute disgrace and a harbinger of what would come with endless demands for stricter restrictions and anyone daring to question whether a lighter touch might be appropriate being ostracised.
(Nice EBTBIB there, btw).
After the same fashion, the reason the US is so interesting to visit is that the language similarity highlights rather than erases the cultural differences.
Off to Osaka and Kobe (first time) and revisiting Kyoto in January. I wanted Hokkaido but have been vetoed on the basis of the season.
Every choice comes with trade offs: Japanese masking culture enabled them to keep viral reproductive rates low with very minor other restrictions on freedom. Schools, for example, were fully essentially fully open from May of 2020.
Some say "oh the Japanese have always worn masks" but it's a fucking lie. I LIVED in Japan in the 90s and about 1-5% would wear a mask - usually if they had a cold or on polluted days. The vast majority never wore them
Now?
This is one of the saddest lines relating to Covid that I have ever read:
"People in Japan who became so used to wearing face masks during the pandemic are signing up for lessons to teach them how to smile again."
https://news.sky.com/story/people-in-japan-who-got-used-to-face-masks-during-covid-are-attending-smiling-lessons-12896588
Along comes a mega-lab. Latest testing gear, automation, economy of scale.
Might well do stuff faster and cheaper than your little empire….
I’ve seen the same many, many times in various organisations.
It’s why Starmer is encountering resistance to change. If you cut the planning process, there are office blocks of people who will lose their jobs.
It is possible to be an unrepentant commie and still objective on a given subject: Hobsbawm on History, for an example. Rare but possible.
Which resulted in much more flexible responses.
- "That's 'happy'. In this country we say 'Happy New Year'."
- "Oh, ho, ho, thank you for correcting my English which stinks!"
Look at South Korea's population pyramid:
There are FOUR TIMES as many people between 50 and 54 as between 0 and 4.
The developed world has a birth problem, and that's true whether we're talking about the UK or Japan or Italy or Singapore or Switzerland.
Or do only deaths attributed to this one specific cause matter?
https://verfassungsblog.de/why-taiwans-constitutional-court-is-in-danger/
The DPP president has vetoed the KMT parliament's bill to change the rules on judicial review.
The president would like a fresh election, and polls show a DPP landslide, but it cannot be called on a whim: parliament must complain about its frustrated bill first - and they don't want the election. A stand-off.
Apparently many taiwanese voted split ticket, fearing DPP hegemony, and are now regretting it.
This is on top of a separate crisis earlier this year:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Taiwanese_constitutional_controversy
There was a fistfight in parliament last week (not that that's unusual for Taiwan).
He may have been witty and warm but he was a monster too.
What’s worse than pineapple on a Pizza
A Swedish Africana Pizza.
https://andmykitchensink.com/banana-curry-pizza-a-swedish-favorite/
Look at this news story from late 2023 (long after Covid) about problems at Japanese schools (including lack of "post-pandemic friendships"). Then look at the photo and see what leaps out at you
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3236777/japan-more-students-tired-being-school-are-playing-truant-are-bullying-and-burnout-blame
The UK and other governments did consider (some) downsides of their actions from the very beginning. Again, this has been made clear by the COVID-19 Inquiry, albeit some downsides were overlooked (e.g., domestic violence).
In my view the central problem is how deferential everyone is. So whether it's a culture of masks or a fetishising of the old at the expense of everyone else, I think the Japanese have a problem in that they are too unwilling to be the fly in the ointment.
ETA: just to add, I also love the place - probably second on my list of destinations I'd love to return to behind Colombia.
What a twit.
"Reform UK polling/seats: if they can get to 27/8% + they can be largest party in a hung Parliament. If 32/3% + they can win a majority outright.
(Source: Electoral Calculus)."
https://x.com/TimScottUK/status/1870881660834628029
Farage has the approval of about 30% of the voters, I believe. That means, in theory, that 27/8% is easily do-able and maybe even 32% if Labour continues to implode
Yes it's alien, yes it's weird, yes I love Japan too. But I lived there (when it was a happier place) and they didn't generally wear masks. Only a few sick people, out of politeness (which is a very good idea)
Masking got so bad, and so societally damaging, last year the Japanese government was urging the people to set them aside
Why is Japan unable or unwilling to unmask?
Despite a need for balance, society sticks to habit amid COVID-19
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/Why-is-Japan-unable-or-unwilling-to-unmask
Prolonged mask wearing among Japan day care staff casts shadow over kids' development
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230119/p2a/00m/0li/026000c
But I think the masking is just a symptom of a bigger cultural challenge. I don't know Japan since covid, I'm just arguing that I could imagine it would be much harder for a masking culture to be unwound in a society like Japans than one like, say, USA, where they go quite a long way the other way in rejecting deference.
As soon as Reform seem the real opposition to Labour (over the Conservatives) the equation shifts and marmite politicians being disliked by many is pretty much universal and priced in.
He could go to 35% or even 40% under the right circumstances.
Not always nationalist, but often a little odd. Britain understood analytically, from outside, rather than instinctively from within.
Even if what you say is true, it could be because such people have more direct experience of other countries and so have a greater appreciation of the advantages of their chosen country, compared to people without that experience who take those things for granted.
I'd start with the whole population losing 1.5 QALY to lockdown (actual and threatened) directly even before you look at other effects.
Trump is just Trump
What an incredible game that was.
Almost as incredible as the fact we're going into Christmas with 12 points and a game in hand over the reigning 4-times Champions.
This season is utterly mental.
I just can't imagine a scenario where the possibility of a Reform government isn't met by furious tactical voting and turnout by everyone on the left. We saw how the right responded to the threat of Corbyn; we'd get that again with Farage.
A Reform victory on 34% is a fun thought experiment though, so I'm going to dig around in my spreadsheet and try and construct the scenario.
City will be lucky to gain a champions league place in 2025, and as for United far too much deadwood at the club which will take sometime to resolve and certainly they will be lucky to be in Europe at all in 2025
And remember I am a lifelong Man Utd supporter complimenting Liverpool
https://x.com/nigel_farage/status/1870877597741261001
1) Reform are strong in coastal areas in the East of England, which I wouldn't exactly call traditional Labour areas.
2) A chunk of what's left of the Tory vote in the Red Wall probably isn't enormously fond of Farage.
"Asma al-Assad asks for divorce and wants to leave Russia 🇷🇺.
According to the newspaper, Asma al-Assad, who holds British citizenship expressed her dissatisfaction with living conditions in the 🇷🇺 capital Moscow and she want to return to London."
https://x.com/Vijesti11111/status/1870493301859623121