Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
OT. Damn. I've completely ballsed up betting on SPotY (as well as Strictly).
What have you done now?
Bet on Lewis taking the Strictly globe ?
After weeks ago putting forward Hollie Doyle (jockey and only woman nominated) to be placed in SPotY, I missed the big prices when the "without Lewis Hamilton" market opened, where she is now 7/4 from 8/1, and 4/6 for top 3. I did take 8/1 Ronnie but his price has not moved. On Strictly, Bill Bailey opened up 33/1 or bigger as this year's joke candidate but of course as a musician he does have a sense of rhythm so has been odds-on for the past few weeks.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Strange, I think most people are having it in the arm.
Try not to project your personal fetishes onto others.
Rather a strong response to a gently ribald comment but OK.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Is my fear.
They are in a place *now* when it will be very difficult to accept any COVID deaths but they will not, indeed cannot, be in that place forever. Nothing lasts forever. If the rest of the world is opening up, or even large parts of it, it will be impossible for us not to follow suit sooner or later. Anyway, in July and August daily deaths in the UK reached the low single figures at one point (only 5 on 2nd August, down from over 1100 a day barely three months before) and with a vaccine, better treatment and better weather there’s no reason why we can’t reach zero, at least for a while, this summer.
Neither parliament has any say in the negotiation. It's a yes/no.
Scrutiny - by whom?
Lots of scrutiny by the negotiating teams.
But it is fantastic politics though. It might have more holes and flaws than May’s deal, but there is a “are you going to be the one responsible for no deal” gun put to every parliamentarians head before they register their support for it. Beautiful political bounce. I’ll go as far as too say it’s not going to happen this week on the basis the bounce won’t be beautiful enough, to be truly perfect stitch up it will have to be announced noon on 24th with parliament opening to endorse it ASAP 28th.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
Well, you'd want some sort of overlap, presumably.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Spanish flu? But compared to the Black Death, they had a utter walk in the park.....
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Spanish flu? But compared to the Black Death, they had a utter walk in the park.....
* * Rolls eyes * *
Black Death? Luxury. Should have been around when the asteroid hit.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Spanish flu? But compared to the Black Death, they had a utter walk in the park.....
* * Rolls eyes * *
Black Death? Luxury. Should have been around when the asteroid hit.
It was terrible. Nothing left but Jeremy Corbyn, Len McCluskey and Derek Hatton.
There's a certain quality where you can tell if a thing will get enough genuine outrage to spark an outraged counter reaction, and I can't see it happening here.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I have a natural disdain for Johnson. However many of the Conservative MPs of whom you speak have a personal debt to Johnson for their very existence as MPs. Indeed many of the remaining duplicitous bunch would only be too happy to stab Johnson in the back in order to climb the greasy pole, much as he did to Mrs May and Mr Cameron.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I note with interest that you couldn't countenance my Boris ia a national treasure comment, and felt compelled to discard it like kerbside trash.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Spanish flu? But compared to the Black Death, they had a utter walk in the park.....
* * Rolls eyes * *
Black Death? Luxury. Should have been around when the asteroid hit.
Yes, there's an element of going Four Yorkshireman in this, but context is not entirely inappropriate.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I have a natural disdain for Johnson. However many of the Conservative MPs of whom you speak have a personal debt to Johnson for their very existence as MPs. Indeed many of the remaining duplicitous bunch would only be too happy to stab Johnson in the back in order to climb the greasy pole, much as he did to Mrs May and Mr Cameron.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I note with interest that you couldn't countenance my Boris ia a national treasure comment, and felt compelled to discard it like kerbside trash.
Yebbut... "Boris is a national treasure" = Kerbside trash!!
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Is my fear.
They are in a place *now* when it will be very difficult to accept any COVID deaths but they will not, indeed cannot, be in that place forever. Nothing lasts forever. If the rest of the world is opening up, or even large parts of it, it will be impossible for us not to follow suit sooner or later. Anyway, in July and August daily deaths in the UK reached the low single figures at one point (only 5 on 2nd August, down from over 1100 a day barely three months before) and with a vaccine, better treatment and better weather there’s no reason why we can’t reach zero, at least for a while, this summer.
And, as the current NHS ad says, even with a flu vaccine there are still 11,000 flu deaths a year (I think the stat was?), so I think we have to accept that covid deaths will just be a thing anyway.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
The Zulu kingdom was, of course, nothing but sweetness and roses. Don't mention the Mfecane.
Not really the point. Whether or not the Zulu kingdom a “good thing” is neither here nor there. The soldiers at Rorke’s Drift were heroically defending their position in southern AfrIca, rather than drilling on a parade ground in Wales, because they’d been sent there to build and maintain an empire - ergo (whatever their personal views) they were fighting for an imperialist cause. Same with General Custer and any number of other similar historical examples from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest onwards. It’s not exactly a controversial proposition.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
I have a natural disdain for Johnson. However many of the Conservative MPs of whom you speak have a personal debt to Johnson for their very existence as MPs. Indeed many of the remaining duplicitous bunch would only be too happy to stab Johnson in the back in order to climb the greasy pole, much as he did to Mrs May and Mr Cameron.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
I note with interest that you couldn't countenance my Boris ia a national treasure comment, and felt compelled to discard it like kerbside trash.
I was concerned you might think I was claiming you were imitating him, given that you are of course a PB treasure
The Zulu kingdom was, of course, nothing but sweetness and roses. Don't mention the Mfecane.
Not really the point. Whether or not the Zulu kingdom a “good thing” is neither here nor there. The soldiers at Rorke’s Drift were heroically defending their position in southern AfrIca, rather than drilling on a parade ground in Wales, because they’d been sent there to build and maintain an empire - ergo (whatever their personal views) they were fighting for an imperialist cause. Same with General Custer and any number of other similar historical examples from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest onwards. It’s not exactly a controversial proposition.
It was a joke. Of course the British forces were imperialist in that battle, no one serious can get outraged about that being the case, or be outraged at others being outraged about it. The Zulu Kingdom not being a bunch of saints is simply an interesting side note.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
We can’t expand the NHS by 10% overnight. Who is going to staff the Nightingale Hospitals. It’s not the physical infrastructure that’s under pressure it’s the staff.
I’d be interested to see your source for the assertion that bed occupancies are lower than this time last year.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
Had my annual medical today - GP hinting that I'd likely get the Oxford/Astra jab when they start mass vaccination in the sports hall.....
Strange, I think most people are having it in the arm.
Try not to project your personal fetishes onto others.
Could have been worse. At least it wasn't the Khaiba Pass.
The Zulu kingdom was, of course, nothing but sweetness and roses. Don't mention the Mfecane.
Not really the point. Whether or not the Zulu kingdom a “good thing” is neither here nor there. The soldiers at Rorke’s Drift were heroically defending their position in southern AfrIca, rather than drilling on a parade ground in Wales, because they’d been sent there to build and maintain an empire - ergo (whatever their personal views) they were fighting for an imperialist cause. Same with General Custer and any number of other similar historical examples from the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest onwards. It’s not exactly a controversial proposition.
It was a joke. Of course the British forces were imperialist in that battle, no one serious can get outraged about that being the case, or be outraged at others being outraged about it. The Zulu Kingdom not being a bunch of saints is simply an interesting side note.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Excuse me, Stanley Baker was in command!
Actually the Assistant Commissar was in command, although in the movie he was only shown at the end taking his hat off.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Is my fear.
They are in a place *now* when it will be very difficult to accept any COVID deaths but they will not, indeed cannot, be in that place forever. Nothing lasts forever. If the rest of the world is opening up, or even large parts of it, it will be impossible for us not to follow suit sooner or later. Anyway, in July and August daily deaths in the UK reached the low single figures at one point (only 5 on 2nd August, down from over 1100 a day barely three months before) and with a vaccine, better treatment and better weather there’s no reason why we can’t reach zero, at least for a while, this summer.
And, as the current NHS ad says, even with a flu vaccine there are still 11,000 flu deaths a year (I think the stat was?), so I think we have to accept that covid deaths will just be a thing anyway.
True. But it will be a big row back from the govt's and the nation's mindset now.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Is my fear.
They are in a place *now* when it will be very difficult to accept any COVID deaths but they will not, indeed cannot, be in that place forever. Nothing lasts forever. If the rest of the world is opening up, or even large parts of it, it will be impossible for us not to follow suit sooner or later. Anyway, in July and August daily deaths in the UK reached the low single figures at one point (only 5 on 2nd August, down from over 1100 a day barely three months before) and with a vaccine, better treatment and better weather there’s no reason why we can’t reach zero, at least for a while, this summer.
And, as the current NHS ad says, even with a flu vaccine there are still 11,000 flu deaths a year (I think the stat was?), so I think we have to accept that covid deaths will just be a thing anyway.
If society is not prepared to accept some level of covid death then we will be in lockdown every autumn/winter for years to come.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
I didn't even need an appointment. I went for a Quit Smoking session and my opportunistic counselor surprised me by whipping it out and doing me before we even got started on the main event. Never had it before.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Excuse me, Stanley Baker was in command!
Actually the Assistant Commissar was in command, although in the movie he was only shown at the end taking his hat off.
Yeah, but commissars don't make good leads in movies. They did make sure to say he got a VC though.
Worth remembering that the flu vaccine was adminstered pretty efficiently this year in the UK in the middle of a pandemic.
Yeah I had mine done through the window of my car. Really efficient system and they asked me to wait for fifteen minutes afterwards in a car parking space with a nurse on hand nearby so clearly someone anticipated that requirement. If they do that again then they'll blow through vaccinations.
I didn't even need an appointment. I went for a Quit Smoking session and my opportunistic counselor surprised me by whipping it out and doing me before we even got started on the main event. Never had it before.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
I bloody well hope not. If they're going for elimination then we'll be locked up until the end of time, to no useful effect. Might as well skip the rest of the nonsense and move directly to the bottle of whisky and sleeping pills.
Is my fear.
They are in a place *now* when it will be very difficult to accept any COVID deaths but they will not, indeed cannot, be in that place forever. Nothing lasts forever. If the rest of the world is opening up, or even large parts of it, it will be impossible for us not to follow suit sooner or later. Anyway, in July and August daily deaths in the UK reached the low single figures at one point (only 5 on 2nd August, down from over 1100 a day barely three months before) and with a vaccine, better treatment and better weather there’s no reason why we can’t reach zero, at least for a while, this summer.
And, as the current NHS ad says, even with a flu vaccine there are still 11,000 flu deaths a year (I think the stat was?), so I think we have to accept that covid deaths will just be a thing anyway.
If society is not prepared to accept some level of covid death then we will be in lockdown every autumn/winter for years to come.
Society is now prepared, I think. It is the government, and perhaps more importantly the NHS it worships, that isn't.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
"In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed"
That's true in aggregate, but it's also true that the Italian health system (as a whole) had plenty of beds, but that didn't really help if you were in Milan.
The other big problems is that by the time someone arrives at the hospital, it's probably two or three weeks since infection - so you're basing policy on where you think you will be in three weeks time.
Is that a debate people really have? Who are these people who would toast only one side?
Sting, in 'An Englishman in New York'. I don't know why; it's not something I've ever associated with being English.
I asked this question on Facebook, and apparently it's a reference to Quentin Crisp and apparently in boarding school you toast bread on forks over an open fire, and hence they are only done on one side.
If society is not prepared to accept some level of covid death then we will be in lockdown every autumn/winter for years to come.
What would be more positive is for the public health lessons of all this to be learned and re-enforced. Reducing days lost through sickness and therefore improving the economy for us all is entirely laudable. "Fogging" transport carriages seems something that should be continued - washing hands and improved personal and public hygiene all seem positive outcomes.
Mask wearing - not all the time but on public transport and in other crowded places to prevent or slow down the spread of disease (including colds and non-covid influenza) seems incredibly sensible as well.
What will happen is any positives will be lost in the desperate desire, pandered to by Government and the media, to get "back to normal".
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Doesn’t spring start on the 1 April anyway so they are just having a little overlap
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
When we lockdown again the wise people of PB will once again be allowed to say that if the Government had followed our advice we would not be in this mess.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Doesn’t spring start on the 1 April anyway so they are just having a little overlap
The govt has done a good job in scaring people and the virus and also in making everyone focus on daily deaths.
Look at the machinations about this Christmas for an individually quite small risk. It will imo likewise be difficult to inure the public to regular Covid death stats.
Is that a debate people really have? Who are these people who would toast only one side?
Sting, in 'An Englishman in New York'. I don't know why; it's not something I've ever associated with being English.
I asked this question on Facebook, and apparently it's a reference to Quentin Crisp and apparently in boarding school you toast bread on forks over an open fire, and hence they are only done on one side.
You also did that in my grandfather's house when I was a kid. Somehow, toast has never tasted as good.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
"In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed"
That's true in aggregate, but it's also true that the Italian health system (as a whole) had plenty of beds, but that didn't really help if you were in Milan.
The other big problems is that by the time someone arrives at the hospital, it's probably two or three weeks since infection - so you're basing policy on where you think you will be in three weeks time.
What they need to get better at is ability to move patients to where there is capacity. That means really good mobile ventilators in ambulances; something they have in other countries but not the ("world class?!) NHS.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Doesn’t spring start on the 1 April anyway so they are just having a little overlap
The govt has done a good job in scaring people and the virus and also in making everyone focus on daily deaths.
Look at the machinations about this Christmas for an individually quite small risk. It will imo likewise be difficult to inure the public to regular Covid death stats.
Charles is right. I do think you are reading a heck of a lot into this furlough announcement that simply isn’t there. The reason for it is that the last extension was announced so late that redundancies had already been made. Furlough anticipates that jobs will be there to come back to. The Tory Backbenches gave Johnson his biggest rebellion only two weeks ago over the reintroduction of the Tier system. If deaths come down significantly again by the spring or summer and the Govt refuses to budge then that will happen again. If you are asking people to focus on 5 daily deaths, as we had on 2 August, people will say “so what”?
When we lockdown again the wise people of PB will once again be allowed to say that if the Government had followed our advice we would not be in this mess.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
"In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed"
That's true in aggregate, but it's also true that the Italian health system (as a whole) had plenty of beds, but that didn't really help if you were in Milan.
The other big problems is that by the time someone arrives at the hospital, it's probably two or three weeks since infection - so you're basing policy on where you think you will be in three weeks time.
The Royal Free got pretty close to it at one point but that was when North London was at the eye of the storm.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Suggests there might be some flying phonecalls tomorrow. Seriously, if this crashes over fucking fish I'd be entirely happy to have both sides thrown in the Thames/Brussels Canal.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Best check his reported age, to make sure that you don't have a tragic time travel incident coming up that will place you in 19th century africa.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Best check his reported age, to make sure that you don't have a tragic time travel incident coming up that will place you in 19th century africa.
Unless time travel takes a few decades off my age, I am in the clear...
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Best check his reported age, to make sure that you don't have a tragic time travel incident coming up that will place you in 19th century africa.
Unless time travel takes a few decades off my age, I am in the clear...
As a healthy citizen of the 21st century you might have passed for younger in those days. Be careful.
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Doesn’t spring start on the 1 April anyway so they are just having a little overlap
The govt has done a good job in scaring people and the virus and also in making everyone focus on daily deaths.
Look at the machinations about this Christmas for an individually quite small risk. It will imo likewise be difficult to inure the public to regular Covid death stats.
Charles is right. I do think you are reading a heck of a lot into this furlough announcement that simply isn’t there. The reason for it is that the last extension was announced so late that redundancies had already been made. Furlough anticipates that jobs will be there to come back to. The Tory Backbenches gave Johnson his biggest rebellion only two weeks ago over the reintroduction of the Tier system. If deaths come down significantly again by the spring or summer and the Govt refuses to budge then that will happen again. If you are asking people to focus on 5 daily deaths, as we had on 2 August, people will say “so what”?
Nothing to do with the furlough. Just that the country's mindset is in a place which will be difficult to shift.
As I said, look at people's attitude to this Christmas. Individually a very small risk but many are foregoing it and others are deeply nervous.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Best check his reported age, to make sure that you don't have a tragic time travel incident coming up that will place you in 19th century africa.
Unless time travel takes a few decades off my age, I am in the clear...
You could be like my great-great-uncle who claimed he was definitely 40 in 1914. Definitely. Despite his service record saying he'd marched to relieve General Gordon in the Egypt campaign.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
You are Hampshire though in all but name Geographically so it makes sense.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
I do hope so. Nothing is ever perfect but for me the flu vaccine rollout has prepared us very well for this campaign. Like I said, I think a lot of places were treating that as a dry run. Fingers crossed and all that.
Suggests there might be some flying phonecalls tomorrow. Seriously, if this crashes over fucking fish I'd be entirely happy to have both sides thrown in the Thames/Brussels Canal.
We must be near the end of this whole thing now. Totally agree with the fish comment. Would be ridiculous
Penny for the thoughts of conservative MPs everywhere.
They believed the government's spin about flexible tiering, freedom for rural areas, sunlit uplands, mightily prosperous 2021.
Result?
Ongoing rule by SAGE. Massive penalties for 5-day Christmas break. Hotel California Tier III for all. Untold small businesses smashed to pieces for ever.
As far as the eye can see.
Until the Summer.
Probably.
It's not rule by SAGE. Boris and the Cabinet are in charge day to day, no level of deference to advisers (and it is possible to have too much) changes who is in charge.
I imagine there are Tory MPs openly seething. I’m not sure why they should be surprised. The government completely takes them for granted.
It will be interesting to see what it is that does for Johnson. Is Brexit and a successful ramp of the vaccine all they are waiting for before they make their move in the spring? Or conversely does the successful delivery of those two things make him bullet proof for the rest of the parliament (and quite probably beyond, given the limited polling inroads Labour are making).
Not something I’d like to place money on but I know some do.
The government says freedom by the spring, and then extends the furlough period to the end of April??
Something doesn't add up.
They are in a place now where I think it will be very difficult for them to accept any Covid deaths.
Doesn’t spring start on the 1 April anyway so they are just having a little overlap
The govt has done a good job in scaring people and the virus and also in making everyone focus on daily deaths.
Look at the machinations about this Christmas for an individually quite small risk. It will imo likewise be difficult to inure the public to regular Covid death stats.
Charles is right. I do think you are reading a heck of a lot into this furlough announcement that simply isn’t there. The reason for it is that the last extension was announced so late that redundancies had already been made. Furlough anticipates that jobs will be there to come back to. The Tory Backbenches gave Johnson his biggest rebellion only two weeks ago over the reintroduction of the Tier system. If deaths come down significantly again by the spring or summer and the Govt refuses to budge then that will happen again. If you are asking people to focus on 5 daily deaths, as we had on 2 August, people will say “so what”?
Nothing to do with the furlough. Just that the country's mindset is in a place which will be difficult to shift.
As I said, look at people's attitude to this Christmas. Individually a very small risk but many are foregoing it and others are deeply nervous.
Attitudes don’t shift overnight but they do shift. Sometimes very rapidly. Ask Theresa May. Or anyone in the fashion industry.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Does the flu vaccination have to be administered to each patient twice, in the middle of a pandemic where the medical profession are spinning round in ever decreasing circles trying to deal with tsunami waves of the dead and dying at the same time, and with all the wretched social distancing requirements, and with each recipient having to be monitored after the jab to make sure they don't turn red, blow up like a balloon and start gasping like a fish out of water because of an ultra-rare allergic reaction?
That + lack of supply + cold chain storage issues + tendency of everything this Government touches to turn to shit = slow, slow, slow. I mean, I'll be absolutely delighted to be proven wrong and be able to burn my horrible mask by mid-March, but the whole 2020 experience teaches one to always, ALWAYS expect everything to turn out badly. Because the development of the vaccines would appear to be just about the only thing that's gone well.
So, getting a completely novel form of treatment invented, tested on tens of thousands of people, approved and with manufacturing already ramped up to millions of doses a month is 'turned out badly'.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines weren't developed.
Turning out badly would be if the vaccines didn't work.
Turning out badly would be if manufacturing wasn't being successfully ramped.
Turning out badly would be if we were looking at CV19 and there was no end in sight.
It's about ten months since CV19 arrived in force in the Western World. Since then at least two successful vaccines have been developed, and probably a third. Johnson & Johnson is likely to announce successful results of its vaccine in January (and the UK has 30 million doses of that due in the first half of next year and it only requires a single dose).
If the vaccines are available, they will be stuck into peoples' arms. It doesn't matter if the doses are seven weeks apart or three. It doesn't matter if one-in-three people never bother getting the secnd dose. If they are available, then they won't be sticking around gathering dust, they will be injected into people. And the more people that get it, the fewer deaths there will be, and the lower R will be, and the fewer restrictions will be needed.
Human kind will have had a bad 15 months. But compared to the Spanish flu, or the world wars, we've had a utter walk in the park.
Except economically. And in a mental health sense.
My point is that we will have had a pretty bad 15 months. There are lots of people who will have lost jobs, or businesses. There will be a lot of people suffering negative ill effects from enforced isolation.
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
What worries me is the government's rhetoric on the NHS being overwhelmed
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
1 - Overwhelming the NHS would cause deaths from all avoidable sources to skyrocket, not just covid. Even without quite saturating, the death rate, at it’s peak, was more than double normal levels.
This is not difficult to understand.
2 - Yes, we did come very close to saturation. Definitely one more doubling in April would have more than overwhelmed it.
3 - You understand incorrectly (or you are believing misinformation from the usual sources). ICU levels in November were far above any November in the previous five years.
And if we let it spike much higher, this would be far worse. Again, not difficult to understand.
And
4 - It takes quite some time to train up doctors and nurses. Definitely longer than a few months.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
From what I experienced the system being used is very sophisticated. Appointments were appearing and being snapped up or released in real time. As I was speaking to one of the people there she said what about this Sunday and then as she was speaking she said oh it's gone. I then booked the appointment and said I would like to be on the list of cancellations and two minutes later someone phoned me to offer me an earlier slot where the person had cancelled.
Suggests there might be some flying phonecalls tomorrow. Seriously, if this crashes over fucking fish I'd be entirely happy to have both sides thrown in the Thames/Brussels Canal.
We must be near the end of this whole thing now. Totally agree with the fish comment. Would be ridiculous
I wouldn't like to see the Farmers vs Fisherman fight that would break out if that happened. Then again the idea of 40 tonnes of manure being poured down the loading hatch of a boat in Grimsby by an irate local sheep farmer...
The Times has the details about this but basically it's all blocked on fish and the EU are trying to argue that they should be able to retaliate on UK financial services over fish even though financial services aren't part of the Deal!
This is so transparently unreasonable that I can only imagine it's a strawman to get the UK to move on quotas:
"Talks are blocked on the EU demand for the right to suspend areas of trade, such as financial services, or to introduce tariffs on industrial goods, in line with any future British reductions to fishing quotas for European fishermen after a transition."
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Excuse me, Stanley Baker was in command!
If Caine's there he's in command. Everyone knows that.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
You are Hampshire though in all but name Geographically so it makes sense.
Not having that said about Michael Caine and his men. They were all DEfence. They stood alone against the dark hordes and fought to the very last to hold them at bay.
'Wokes, Sir. Thousands of them.'
Woke's Drift?
The spookiest thing I found in the Zulu battlefields (Well worth a visit if in that part of RSA) was finding a grave with my own full name on it, a Trooper with the Natal contingent, killed at Isandlwana.
Best check his reported age, to make sure that you don't have a tragic time travel incident coming up that will place you in 19th century africa.
Unless time travel takes a few decades off my age, I am in the clear...
As a healthy citizen of the 21st century you might have passed for younger in those days. Be careful.
I suspect that if I were to time travel to the Zulu wars, you wouldn't find me at Isandlwana!
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Vaccination rates of at risk populations for flu are far higher in the UK than comparable countries. One thing a centralised socialist medical system does well compared to decentralised private systems is public health.
The Times has the details about this but basically it's all blocked on fish and the EU are trying to argue that they should be able to retaliate on UK financial services over fish even though financial services aren't part of the Deal!
This is so transparently unreasonable that I can only imagine it's a strawman to get the UK to move on quotas:
"Talks are blocked on the EU demand for the right to suspend areas of trade, such as financial services, or to introduce tariffs on industrial goods, in line with any future British reductions to fishing quotas for European fishermen after a transition."
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
You are Hampshire though in all but name Geographically so it makes sense.
Wash your mouth out with soap.
He's in Surrey. Not the strong county of Hants.
Hmm, I'm from Surrey but I worked for Hampshire County Council for nearly a decade. Does that make me a carpetbagger or something?
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Again, some numbers to help focus minds. To vaccinate everyone over 80, 6.8 million shots - for everyone over 65, 24 million shots, for everyone over 50 50 million shots assuming full take up.
That's big numbers however you dress it up. Are we really going to be administering 1 million shots per week every week from now on? If we do, that means a year to get to everyone over 50 so all the talk about getting "herd immunity" by March/April suggests a significant increase in vaccinations.
I remain to be convinced - anyone can crunch numbers (I just have) and perhaps the Test & Trace experience has left me sceptical of the ability to do "mass" anything quickly in this country but we'll see.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
You are Hampshire though in all but name Geographically so it makes sense.
Booked my mother in for a vaccination Dec 29th. Super efficient system could have done it a week earlier. Spaces are being booked up super quickly but that comes with plenty of cancellations so there are plenty of options. Done at the local hospital because the village GP isn't up to it.
That's great news. Glad to hear the system is efficient, I'm hopeful that we'll get the majority of over 80s vaccinated with their first jab before the end of the year.
Patchy locally - very smooth in the hospitals, long waits (up to 2 hours) in in first custom vaccination centre. But anecdotal reports of people being done are multiplying fast.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Vaccination rates of at risk populations for flu are far higher in the UK than comparable countries. One thing a centralised socialist medical system does well compared to decentralised private systems is public health.
Eh? UK public health is a local government responsibility.
The Times has the details about this but basically it's all blocked on fish and the EU are trying to argue that they should be able to retaliate on UK financial services over fish even though financial services aren't part of the Deal!
This is so transparently unreasonable that I can only imagine it's a strawman to get the UK to move on quotas:
"Talks are blocked on the EU demand for the right to suspend areas of trade, such as financial services, or to introduce tariffs on industrial goods, in line with any future British reductions to fishing quotas for European fishermen after a transition."
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Again, some numbers to help focus minds. To vaccinate everyone over 80, 6.8 million shots - for everyone over 65, 24 million shots, for everyone over 50 50 million shots assuming full take up.
That's big numbers however you dress it up. Are we really going to be administering 1 million shots per week every week from now on? If we do, that means a year to get to everyone over 50 so all the talk about getting "herd immunity" by March/April suggests a significant increase in vaccinations.
I remain to be convinced - anyone can crunch numbers (I just have) and perhaps the Test & Trace experience has left me sceptical of the ability to do "mass" anything quickly in this country but we'll see.
You think that’s bad? Wait until this mass testing gimmick kicks off in school.
I think by Christmas day we should be up to 1m having received their first jab and by the end of the year 1.5m and appointments being booked for second jabs in the first week of January.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
Again, some numbers to help focus minds. To vaccinate everyone over 80, 6.8 million shots - for everyone over 65, 24 million shots, for everyone over 50 50 million shots assuming full take up.
That's big numbers however you dress it up. Are we really going to be administering 1 million shots per week every week from now on? If we do, that means a year to get to everyone over 50 so all the talk about getting "herd immunity" by March/April suggests a significant increase in vaccinations.
I remain to be convinced - anyone can crunch numbers (I just have) and perhaps the Test & Trace experience has left me sceptical of the ability to do "mass" anything quickly in this country but we'll see.
I think we're going to be doing 3-4m shots per week by the end of January if there is enough supply. Once the AZ vaccine gets approval it's going to completely change the difficulty. Suddenly you can train up the army to do the jab and give it out in church halls with ordinary refrigeration. Even if it doesn't get approval for over 55s you could conceivably have under 55s simply queuing up to get their jab and booking an appointment for the second jab, that will have a huge downwards effect on the R as the number of potential hosts goes down very fast among likely super spreaders.
Comments
None of these are good.
But we less than 10 months after the whole of Europe was locked down, and people were being welded inside their homes in China, and people were fearful that repeated reinfection was possible and a vaccine unlikely within five years, and 300,000 dead being mooted for the first two waves by some Newt Painter.
Less than ten months after this, we have an economy that has been markedly less impacted than by the Global Financial Crisis, we have a vaccine, and the end is in sight.
Now, we can argue if normality will be achieved in April or August or 2022. But we should soon be on a loosening path of restrictions as more and more people get the vaccine. And if we're lucky and J&J works as well as Moderna and Pfizer, then it's just a single shot and we'll have enough doses to get everyone vaccinated in 2021. (And the most third of society by May-time.)
That's a pretty shitty 15 months. But it's also far from the end of the world as portrayed by some posters.
https://labourlist.org/2020/12/labour-left-figures-tell-party-leadership-to-end-the-attacks-on-party-democracy/
👀
https://twitter.com/twlldun/status/1339637286670114819?s=19
This catch all reason could be used to justify all sorts of restrictions and activities beyond COVID, is unanswerable and incontestable and adhered to like some kind of religion.
It is as if a temporary saturation of medical services were some kind of nuclear war that simply couldn;t be countenanced under any circumstances, and anything and everything must be sacrificed before it.
In truth, the NHS has never got close to being overwhelmed, and as I understand it bed occupancies are lower than at this time last year and the year before. Even so, Hancock used the excuse the NHS was 'under pressure' in the North West for keeping draconian restrictions on businesses there. Businesses that fund the NHS.
One way to relieve pressure on the NHS might be to make it bigger and give it more money, but this for some reason this appears to be impossible. The NHS MUST stay the same size as it is, Nightingale hospitals MUST stay closed, and the country must cut its cloth to suit the NHS.
So rather than expand the NHS 10%, we are more or less permanently cutting the economy 10% to fit the NHS.....
* * Rolls eyes * *
[Edit: On reflection "Boris" = kerbside trash
I’d be interested to see your source for the assertion that bed occupancies are lower than this time last year.
That's true in aggregate, but it's also true that the Italian health system (as a whole) had plenty of beds, but that didn't really help if you were in Milan.
The other big problems is that by the time someone arrives at the hospital, it's probably two or three weeks since infection - so you're basing policy on where you think you will be in three weeks time.
Mask wearing - not all the time but on public transport and in other crowded places to prevent or slow down the spread of disease (including colds and non-covid influenza) seems incredibly sensible as well.
What will happen is any positives will be lost in the desperate desire, pandered to by Government and the media, to get "back to normal".
Look at the machinations about this Christmas for an individually quite small risk. It will imo likewise be difficult to inure the public to regular Covid death stats.
Meanwhile states are saying their allocation has been cut.
We successfully persuaded the Government to keep us in Tier 2, unlike the rest of Surrey. Whether that was a good idea we're not entirely sure, as we'd not expected to be the lone exception, and there's a risk that people will pour in for meals from all points of the compass. But it does reflect the stats showing our rate the lowest in the County.
But it looks like after the initial delight it would land me in a hell of a mess and fearful complications.
As I said, look at people's attitude to this Christmas. Individually a very small risk but many are foregoing it and others are deeply nervous.
For all the cynicism on government logistics so far it does seem like we've avoided any major disasters and while there is always going to be room for improvement it does signal that with the Pfizer vaccine and AZ we could be in a situation where 3-4m jabs per week are being given out. I do think that vaccination is one area where the NHS has got a world class operation and people across the world are going to be surprised when the UK achieves herd immunity in the middle of May because of the vaccination programme. It will be the opposite of testing and first world countries everywhere will be asking how the NHS did it.
This is not difficult to understand.
2 - Yes, we did come very close to saturation. Definitely one more doubling in April would have more than overwhelmed it.
3 - You understand incorrectly (or you are believing misinformation from the usual sources). ICU levels in November were far above any November in the previous five years.
And if we let it spike much higher, this would be far worse. Again, not difficult to understand.
And
4 - It takes quite some time to train up doctors and nurses. Definitely longer than a few months.
Pretty impressive.
This is so transparently unreasonable that I can only imagine it's a strawman to get the UK to move on quotas:
"Talks are blocked on the EU demand for the right to suspend areas of trade, such as financial services, or to introduce tariffs on industrial goods, in line with any future British reductions to fishing quotas for European fishermen after a transition."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/brexit-deal-possible-by-tomorrow-suggests-eus-michel-barnier-ks2wksr07
He's in Surrey. Not the strong county of Hants.
https://twitter.com/kayleighmcenany/status/1339659100330864641?s=21
As for the word itself, they’re currently led by a man who admitted to sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter.
That's big numbers however you dress it up. Are we really going to be administering 1 million shots per week every week from now on? If we do, that means a year to get to everyone over 50 so all the talk about getting "herd immunity" by March/April suggests a significant increase in vaccinations.
I remain to be convinced - anyone can crunch numbers (I just have) and perhaps the Test & Trace experience has left me sceptical of the ability to do "mass" anything quickly in this country but we'll see.
Estimated personnel needed - 100,000
Number provided - half a dozen soldiers.
Not that I don't prefer people try to be civil, but there are times it can be justified to be otherwise.
So that would be...the Tories then? Margaret Thatcher, famously woke.