'The business secretary has confirmed his department is reviewing how EU employment rights protections could be changed after Brexit, while insisting they will not be watered down.'
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I don't think the US was a land of milk and honey before but Trump as President had a job to do in at least trying to unite the country after his victory. He made no effort to do this at all. Indeed he went out of his way to try and antagonise and attack anyone, even the most reasonable, who opposed him and his policies. He could have achieved much that he set out to do - perhaps even more than he did - if he had not been such an egotistical bastard who saw every criticism whether directed at him or his policies as being a personal affront. I can't think of any candidate in living memory who was less suited to being President.
Yes, I agree. What marked Trump out as different is that he didn't even try to pretend to unite the country.
In democracies, when X wins following a divisive election campaign, they always follow their victory by saying things like: "now is the time to unite the nation. I will govern for everybody, both those who voted for me, and those who didn't." But not Trump. Those who didn't vote for him could f*** right off.
He spent day 1 in a furious lying tetch about the size of his inauguration crowd. That was as good as it got. And I personally don't have the remotest interest in hearing about Donald Trump being "correct in his analysis" of various things plaguing the American worker such as globalization. Reason I'm not interested is that neither was he. Trump gave zero shits about anything but Trump. He was all bad. Completely and utterly and on every level. There are no redeeming aspects or features. If you go for "balance" on this one you end up writing drivel.
I'm waiting to see Trump announce that his inauguration crowd was so much bigger than Biden's (as it will be due to Covid and the lockdown that Trump has forced in Washington making attending it virtually impossible).
Without a doubt. Poor Joe, he will not be getting much of a Big Day. His speech will be interesting though. He's not a top class orator but he did make some good ones during the campaign. Perhaps he'll be a tempted by some Gerald Ford, seek to turn the page using elevated healing rhetoric.
"Our long national nightmare is over. The fat orange fucker has gone."
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
It's a single day's numbers, I wouldn't be worrying too much. Yet.
It's two days on the bounce with shite returns.
Isn't this weekend reporting though (Saturday's figures on Monday, today we get Sunday's).
Quite possibly - the release says up to the 18th (yesterday). This might well mean data from the day before (17th), given data delays.
Even so it's a bit worrying, especially given that it is two days in a row. We should be ramping up at a sufficiently fast rate to swamp any day-of-the-week effect.
We are using GPs to do a lot of the vaccinations. Many of them do not work on weekends. For example.
The figure for England reported today (170,400) is actually less than that reported on Tuesday last week (174K).
There may be a non-worrying explanation, but for now I think I'll do a bit of worrying all the same.
Indeed. I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about these. 174k is a dire return for any day of the week given we need to be averaging almost 400k/day.
It's rather like limited overs cricket, every day the return falls below, the required rate goes up.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
You're incredibly simplistic, aren't you?
The indyref2 issue is much more complex than your Playschool approach. You 'may' prove correct in the end about your assertion but it is not the only logic and it's not the only approach under consideration.
You are, I am afraid to say, beginning to drag down this site. I used to like coming on here but you're one of the main reasons I don't hang around. It's not your politics, about which I couldn't care. It's your combination of being simplistic with being intransigent.
HYUFD is a bog standard third rate politician, answering the question he wants to answer rather than the one people ask. It's the mark of a coward.
Nope it is the mark of someone being prepared to take on and fight leftwingers like you.
Politically you are the enemy of a Conservative like myself, so don't expect me to give any concessions to you.
You need a better reason and argument to stop Scottish independence than the phrase "You can't leave"
He hasn't got one.
I respect Conservative Unionists on here like @DavidL and @Casino_Royale and @Big_G_NorthWales (and others sorry for not including everyone) who are passionate unionists who will take the arguments out there to defend the union and want it to continue democratically. I disagree on this one issue with them respectfully, but I 100% respect their passion and integrity.
HYUFD seems to want to throw a temper tantrum and say "it doesn't matter how you voted, I'm holding my breath and saying no". That's not democracy, its not legitimate and it doesn't work.
No, that is the position of the party leader and UK PM Boris Johnson who on Marr only this month said no indyref2 effectively until 2055 as long as he remained PM.
If you disagree so strongly with our party leader on this it is just further confirmation you are not a Conservative
That's not what he said. What he said is that he does not think there "should" be one, not that there will not be one. Those are different things.
The Scottish Conservatives can go into this year's Holyrood election saying they don't think there should be one, vote for them and if they win the election (or deny the separatists a majority) that is it democratically sorted.
It is entirely possible to reconcile right now saying you do not think there should be one, but after the election saying you respect the Scottish election results so will campaign for No.
In democracy you respect votes you lose, not just those you win.
Some people were told they would get their second dose 3 weeks after their first.
And then they were told it would be 12 weeks.
And some died.
I realise that is complex logic for a Brexiteer but try harder.
There is a cure for covid but perhaps not a cure for your madness. Perhaps you'd like to move to France where you can enjoy your 1st and 2nd jab within weeks of each other at some point in the year 2024.
Given how anti-vax the French are, you probably stand a decent chance of getting vaccinated earlier there than in the UK.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I don't think the US was a land of milk and honey before but Trump as President had a job to do in at least trying to unite the country after his victory. He made no effort to do this at all. Indeed he went out of his way to try and antagonise and attack anyone, even the most reasonable, who opposed him and his policies. He could have achieved much that he set out to do - perhaps even more than he did - if he had not been such an egotistical bastard who saw every criticism whether directed at him or his policies as being a personal affront. I can't think of any candidate in living memory who was less suited to being President.
Yes, I agree. What marked Trump out as different is that he didn't even try to pretend to unite the country.
In democracies, when X wins following a divisive election campaign, they always follow their victory by saying things like: "now is the time to unite the nation. I will govern for everybody, both those who voted for me, and those who didn't." But not Trump. Those who didn't vote for him could f*** right off.
He spent day 1 in a furious lying tetch about the size of his inauguration crowd. That was as good as it got. And I personally don't have the remotest interest in hearing about Donald Trump being "correct in his analysis" of various things plaguing the American worker such as globalization. Reason I'm not interested is that neither was he. Trump gave zero shits about anything but Trump. He was all bad. Completely and utterly and on every level. There are no redeeming aspects or features. If you go for "balance" on this one you end up writing drivel.
I'm waiting to see Trump announce that his inauguration crowd was so much bigger than Biden's (as it will be due to Covid and the lockdown that Trump has forced in Washington making attending it virtually impossible).
Without a doubt. Poor Joe, he will not be getting much of a Big Day. His speech will be interesting though. He's not a top class orator but he did make some good ones during the campaign. Perhaps he'll be a tempted by some Gerald Ford, seek to turn the page using elevated healing rhetoric.
"Our long national nightmare is over. The fat orange fucker has gone."
So you don't think they will make "Trump 2: This Time It's Personal...."
We don't want to be too rigid about achieving the perfect order of vaccination. The end state is the same - vaccinating everyone - and it's not important to do it quickly than in the right order.
So the vaccination program needs to balance injecting people in priority order with using doses as soon as they are available.
Agree - "Missed" people in various groups can be backfilled into the next cohort.
Spot on. The government needs to get in front of this whining. You can only vaccinate what's put in front of you. The idea that nurses should just sit on their hands until a suitably aged client knocks on their door is for the birds.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
There is however another issue that is causing problems. The surgeries invite people to have the jab but they are getting a small but notable number of people not turning up. This was easily solvable in the early stages as they could jab their own staff etc rather than having the vaccine go to waste. That option is not always now available. So they are starting in some cases to overbook appointments so that vaccine is not wasted, just like airlines sometimes do with seats. This then means that if everyone does turn up they don't always have the vaccine to jab them.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
Serious question. Does anybody have a theory as to why Boris Johnson is so popular with the Far Right? I find this odd. Even odder than us still having colonial territories in far flung places. Johnson's style is not Far Right. His rhetoric isn't Far Right. His policies aren't Far Right. And yet the Far Right rather like him. It's nothing to do with him being the Tory leader. For example, they hated Theresa May. But they are into him. Why?
Insofar as a far right even exists in Britain, they seem to hate Boris for making them wear face nappies, protecting them from a fake virus, and forcing them to be injected with Bill Gates' semen. That's when they aren't calling him a traitor for signing a deal with the EU or acknowledging the communist Biden as the rightful President of the United States.
It does exist. Most certainly it does. And they had a soft spot for "Boris". He got a Tommy Robinson endorsement no less. You're saying they've gone off him now because of how he's prioritized the NHS over the right of an Englishman to live strong & free? I hope you're right. Because the matter was bugging me. The Far Right ought to be hating whoever is our PM. If they aren't, something is going wrong.
Have a look at where Boris stands in the ConHome rankings, or what the top Daily Mail comments on articles about his major policies say, or what Delingpole is Tweeting about him - it's as good a proxy for that strand of opinion as anything else.
Perhaps in this sense he has been saved by the pandemic. It's forced him to jettison the support he had from unsavouries. I'm not a believer in having as wide a voting coalition as possible. I think a mandate is polluted if the wrong sorts are on board.
I've never been into ConHome. It's a far right grouping, then, is it?
I agree with you about the voting coalition - policy must be grounded in ideology for me.
How are the midget gems working out for you?
I'm still off the fags - thanks for asking - but I'm using not just midgets but also nicotine patches. So the bigger test lies ahead. Let's see. It's the first time I've truly wanted to kick it so although I'm not confident I'm not gloomily fatalistic about it either.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
We don't want to be too rigid about achieving the perfect order of vaccination. The end state is the same - vaccinating everyone - and it's not important to do it quickly than in the right order.
So the vaccination program needs to balance injecting people in priority order with using doses as soon as they are available.
Agree - "Missed" people in various groups can be backfilled into the next cohort.
Spot on. The government needs to get in front of this whining. You can only vaccinate what's put in front of you. The idea that nurses should just sit on their hands until a suitably aged client knocks on their door is for the birds.
I think they already are given that over 70s are being booked in even though over 80s are at 60-70% nationally. If anything the learning from this is to start even earlier. When the over 70s reach 40-50% it's time to start inviting the over 65s and so on.
Serious question. Does anybody have a theory as to why Boris Johnson is so popular with the Far Right? I find this odd. Even odder than us still having colonial territories in far flung places. Johnson's style is not Far Right. His rhetoric isn't Far Right. His policies aren't Far Right. And yet the Far Right rather like him. It's nothing to do with him being the Tory leader. For example, they hated Theresa May. But they are into him. Why?
Insofar as a far right even exists in Britain, they seem to hate Boris for making them wear face nappies, protecting them from a fake virus, and forcing them to be injected with Bill Gates' semen. That's when they aren't calling him a traitor for signing a deal with the EU or acknowledging the communist Biden as the rightful President of the United States.
It does exist. Most certainly it does. And they had a soft spot for "Boris". He got a Tommy Robinson endorsement no less. You're saying they've gone off him now because of how he's prioritized the NHS over the right of an Englishman to live strong & free? I hope you're right. Because the matter was bugging me. The Far Right ought to be hating whoever is our PM. If they aren't, something is going wrong.
Have a look at where Boris stands in the ConHome rankings, or what the top Daily Mail comments on articles about his major policies say, or what Delingpole is Tweeting about him - it's as good a proxy for that strand of opinion as anything else.
Perhaps in this sense he has been saved by the pandemic. It's forced him to jettison the support he had from unsavouries. I'm not a believer in having as wide a voting coalition as possible. I think a mandate is polluted if the wrong sorts are on board.
I've never been into ConHome. It's a far right grouping, then, is it?
Why do you think people get banished there for misbehaving on PB?
Let's just say it's rather more FarageDelingpoleRobinsonHome than anything else.
As for mandates being polluted, that rather ignores the messiness of democratic politics. An election-winning Corbyn government would inevitably have drawn part of its support from antisemites and all sorts of extremists of the left, but repulsive though that is it would still have had a democratic mandate.
Really? ConHome is a cesspit then? I honestly did not know that and I'm a bit shocked. As for mandates, I want Labour to win one in 24, of course I do, but it's important in my mind that people who vote Labour in that election are doing so for the right reasons. If they're not - e.g. if they're voting Labour mainly because whenever Starmer comes on TV, you can hardly see him for flags - I'll feel uneasy about what the mandate actually is and what can realistically be done with it. For me, politics is NOT all about power in Westminster. I find that a bit blinkered and at the same time unambitious. It's better to win later for real than earlier on an extremely impure platform. But rider: You can't keep losing elections the whole time. You do need to win one eventually. So that's my view on this. Very balanced as you can see.
ContinuityIDS has always been a cesspit. It is for blue Corbynites.
Mr Epping Forest would feel at home, not many of the rest of us.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
"Vaccinated people mistakenly believe they are “good to go” and socialise with other people despite a continuing threat of the coronavirus, the head of the government’s behavioural unit said on Tuesday."
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
Have to admit I cannot see Euro 2020 taking in its current form.
I think the organisers should turn it into England/Wales 2021, we're going to be the only country where crowds will be able to fully attend matches this summer in Europe.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
I shall dig on local social media to find out if the hibernating GP (Next practice over) has woken up again. He did the other day, to complain that the vaccination thing was very tricky.
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
Have to admit I cannot see Euro 2020 taking in its current form.
I think the organisers should turn it into England/Wales 2021, we're going to be the only country where crowds will be able to fully attend matches this summer in Europe.
I think that is what will happen. A bit of a hopecast, but I think it's a fair bet.
And there was me thinking that Trump was supposed to be a Populist.
Many populists are not that popular.
Itd almost be funny if Trump was a really good president - people have listed some actions which are not necessarily terrible - but hes such a rude, petty man than no one noticed.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
If by end of the week we aren't seeing ~500k / day, I think that will be disappointing.
I really hope we will. But I have a horrible suspicion that "people booking and turning up" are going to be the bottleneck, however impossible-to-believe-it that may be.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
Have to admit I cannot see Euro 2020 taking in its current form.
I think the organisers should turn it into England/Wales 2021, we're going to be the only country where crowds will be able to fully attend matches this summer in Europe.
With the current format I feel quite sorry for Wales fans. I've got tickets for the England matches at Wembley so still have some reason for optimism. Given 2 of the Wales games are in Azerbaijan I think it's unlikely they'll be able to watch their country in the stadium.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
By Easter the pubs will be open, maybe with some restrictions at first but increasingly reduced. I would expect pubs to be largely back to normal (barring areas of special concern) by May.
Though I disagree with 21 June being the start of summer. Meteorologically (which is what matters) all of June is summer.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
The identification of HYUFD with Rod Stewart is just the sort of offbeat entertainment anyone might ask for on a drab weekday afternoon.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
By Easter the pubs will be open, maybe with some restrictions at first but increasingly reduced. I would expect pubs to be largely back to normal (barring areas of special concern) by May.
Though I disagree with 21 June being the start of summer. Meteorologically (which is what matters) all of June is summer.
Indeed/ Full opening of ALL of the UK's pubs, restaurants and clubs with no restrictions? not before July I reckon. If then. If ever TBH.
Lets see what Anabozina's prediction is, if that person has actually got the nads to actually make one. Which I doubt.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
The South African coronavirus variant may slip past parts of the immune system in as many as half of people infected with different versions in the past, scientists fear.
Researchers say that a mutation on a specific part of the virus's outer spike protein appears to make it able to 'escape' antibodies. Antibodies are substances made by the immune system that are key to destroying viruses or marking them for destruction by white blood cells.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
Have to admit I cannot see Euro 2020 taking in its current form.
I think the organisers should turn it into England/Wales 2021, we're going to be the only country where crowds will be able to fully attend matches this summer in Europe.
I think that is what will happen. A bit of a hopecast, but I think it's a fair bet.
We have the stadiums ready to go.
Yeah and we haven't had a major football tournament since 1996, it's about time for us to have one.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
Maggie may be the greatest politician to have ever lived, with BJ a close second.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
I shall dig on local social media to find out if the hibernating GP (Next practice over) has woken up again. He did the other day, to complain that the vaccination thing was very tricky.
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
One Surgery near me has actually got retired doctors coming in to help with their vaccination clinics. They have 6 vaccinators at once with a steady stream of people walking through. The neighbouring surgery has barely started and keeps putting posts on Facebook pleading with people to stop phoning them. The discrepancy in surgery's performance will continue to grow.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A yob who held an illegal street party during the first national lockdown that descended into a riot which saw 22 police officers injured has been spared jail.
Ronaldo Scott, 18, and his pals threw a party in Brixton which spilled out onto the streets on June 25 last year. When police tried to break up the rave they were pelted with bottles and attacked with planks of wood, a court heard.
A total of 22 officers were injured, with two being taken to hospital, in scenes described as 'utterly vile' by Home Secretary Priti Patel at the time.
Scott filmed himself on social media as revellers damaged police cars and threatened police on the Angell Town Estate, Inner London Crown Court heard.
The teenager, who carried a stun gun and extendable baton on the day, 'threatened officers with violence' in the chaotic standoff and acted like a 'cheerleader' to the frenzied crowd.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
I shall dig on local social media to find out if the hibernating GP (Next practice over) has woken up again. He did the other day, to complain that the vaccination thing was very tricky.
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
One Surgery near me has actually got retired doctors coming in to help with their vaccination clinics. They have 6 vaccinators at once with a steady stream of people walking through. The neighbouring surgery has barely started and keeps putting posts on Facebook pleading with people to stop phoning them. The discrepancy in surgery's performance will continue to grow.
Seems like the perfect opportunity to consolidate GP surgeries across the nation, see which ones work and expand those and close the ones which are clearly just there for the payday.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
Do we think China might have a problem? They are off building stuff at warp speed again...
More than 1,000 quarantine rooms built in four days in China’s Shijiazhuang
Over the last couple of weeks, cases of Covid-19 have been rising in the northeast of China, particularly in the city of Shijiazhuang.
And so, on 13 January, work began in the city to construct 3,000 prefabricated rooms to accommodate the growing numbers of people who need to quarantine. China says that a third of these 18 sq metre rooms – a full 1,008 of them - have now been completed and will soon be in use.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
I shall dig on local social media to find out if the hibernating GP (Next practice over) has woken up again. He did the other day, to complain that the vaccination thing was very tricky.
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
One Surgery near me has actually got retired doctors coming in to help with their vaccination clinics. They have 6 vaccinators at once with a steady stream of people walking through. The neighbouring surgery has barely started and keeps putting posts on Facebook pleading with people to stop phoning them. The discrepancy in surgery's performance will continue to grow.
Its almost as if giving patients the right to choose, and having the money follow them, might help.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
But, you could simply request people who have had COVID not to come to the front of the queue.
I think a substantial number (~60 per cent) would understand and this would help get everyone some protection quickly.
If indeed one in eight have had COVID, & 60 per cent behave in a public-spirited manner, then that is 5 million people.
Obviously, the sharp elbowed (like General Topping and all his aunties and uncles) would ignore it, but there are a substantial number of people who are public-spirited & do not have rapier-like elbows.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
From either an individual medical point of view, or a wider public health one, is there any benefit to being vaccinated after having contracted the disease?
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
But the vaccination doesn't stop in May, we're going to continue to get through 3-4m people with second doses per week until we reach 50m or so having 95% immunity by the end of the summer. Every week in May an additional 3m people will reach near full immunity, so even as we begin to unlock the economy and nation from this nightmare the increase in the R is nullified by the vaccination programme continuing.
Right now the concentration is on reducing the hospitalisation rate because the NHS is days away from falling over, in 4-6 weeks it will be getting the death rate down and in 10-12 weeks it will be getting the infection rate down.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
The identification of HYUFD with Rod Stewart is just the sort of offbeat entertainment anyone might ask for on a drab weekday afternoon.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I think, for me, it`s primarily a matter of suitability for the office. The fact that he was unqualified and supremely unsuitable was obvious before he became president. And he hasn`t disappointed. He`s trashed the country`s reputation abroad - which it will take quite a while to recover from - partly because he is an easy subject to ridicule because he is inherently ridiculous.
Did you listen to James Comey on Sophie Ridge on Sunday?
The Trump Presidency
It's a cake made of awful policies, awful implementation of the awful policies and an icing made out of incompetent corruption in awful implantation of the awful policies. With layers of supporters who are substantially fascist and racist. The whole doused in insurrectionist and violent rhetoric, provoking and encouraging repeated criminality.
The cherry on the cake is the stupid Twitter addiction.
That's a good one, Malmesbury. Like that a lot. And it's as close to 100% objective as anything can ever be. Important not to go looking for "balance" on Trump. There isn't any.
Surely awful policies awfully implemented is better than awful policies efficiently implemented ?
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A rapidly brewing problem is the socialising that will take place by those who are vaccinated (not in closed pubs obviously - but at people's houses).
A yob who held an illegal street party during the first national lockdown that descended into a riot which saw 22 police officers injured has been spared jail.
Ronaldo Scott, 18, and his pals threw a party in Brixton which spilled out onto the streets on June 25 last year. When police tried to break up the rave they were pelted with bottles and attacked with planks of wood, a court heard.
A total of 22 officers were injured, with two being taken to hospital, in scenes described as 'utterly vile' by Home Secretary Priti Patel at the time.
Scott filmed himself on social media as revellers damaged police cars and threatened police on the Angell Town Estate, Inner London Crown Court heard.
The teenager, who carried a stun gun and extendable baton on the day, 'threatened officers with violence' in the chaotic standoff and acted like a 'cheerleader' to the frenzied crowd.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
From either an individual medical point of view, or a wider public health one, is there any benefit to being vaccinated after having contracted the disease?
Yes, the immune response produced by the vaccine is significantly stronger after the second dose than what we see post infection, plus the vaccines may protect us against viral mutations better than prior infection. When you add in all of the paperwork it doesn't seem worth it for what is essentially 3-4m people who have previously tested positive across loads of different age groups/cohorts.
The South African coronavirus variant may slip past parts of the immune system in as many as half of people infected with different versions in the past, scientists fear.
Researchers say that a mutation on a specific part of the virus's outer spike protein appears to make it able to 'escape' antibodies. Antibodies are substances made by the immune system that are key to destroying viruses or marking them for destruction by white blood cells.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
I agree. Only way we could get to something resembling a sustainable normal by then would be to keep the lockdown going until the virus is suppressed everywhere, keep the borders closed(ish), and then test+trace+isolate the hell out of any outbreaks.
In reality though we'll start to partially reopen as soon as there's spare hospital capacity.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
But, you could simply request people who have had COVID not to come to the front of the queue.
I think a substantial number (~60 per cent) would understand and this would help get everyone some protection quickly.
If indeed one in eight have had COVID, & 60 per cent behave in a public-spirited manner, then that is 5 million people.
Obviously, the sharp elbowed (like General Topping and all his aunties and uncles) would ignore it, but there are a substantial number of people who are public-spirited & do not have rapier-like elbows.
This is people who have tested positive which is ~3.4m, people who haven't tested positive would have no way of knowing whether they had it, an isolation order isn't enough to say for certain a person has had it.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
From either an individual medical point of view, or a wider public health one, is there any benefit to being vaccinated after having contracted the disease?
I asked that a couple of months ago - response was probably no benefit but too complicated to separate them out.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
From either an individual medical point of view, or a wider public health one, is there any benefit to being vaccinated after having contracted the disease?
Yes, the immune response produced by the vaccine is significantly stronger after the second dose than what we see post infection, plus the vaccines may protect us against viral mutations better than prior infection. When you add in all of the paperwork it doesn't seem worth it for what is essentially 3-4m people who have previously tested positive across loads of different age groups/cohorts.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I don't think the US was a land of milk and honey before but Trump as President had a job to do in at least trying to unite the country after his victory. He made no effort to do this at all. Indeed he went out of his way to try and antagonise and attack anyone, even the most reasonable, who opposed him and his policies. He could have achieved much that he set out to do - perhaps even more than he did - if he had not been such an egotistical bastard who saw every criticism whether directed at him or his policies as being a personal affront. I can't think of any candidate in living memory who was less suited to being President.
Yes, I agree. What marked Trump out as different is that he didn't even try to pretend to unite the country.
In democracies, when X wins following a divisive election campaign, they always follow their victory by saying things like: "now is the time to unite the nation. I will govern for everybody, both those who voted for me, and those who didn't." But not Trump. Those who didn't vote for him could f*** right off.
He spent day 1 in a furious lying tetch about the size of his inauguration crowd. That was as good as it got. And I personally don't have the remotest interest in hearing about Donald Trump being "correct in his analysis" of various things plaguing the American worker such as globalization. Reason I'm not interested is that neither was he. Trump gave zero shits about anything but Trump. He was all bad. Completely and utterly and on every level. There are no redeeming aspects or features. If you go for "balance" on this one you end up writing drivel.
I'm waiting to see Trump announce that his inauguration crowd was so much bigger than Biden's (as it will be due to Covid and the lockdown that Trump has forced in Washington making attending it virtually impossible).
Without a doubt. Poor Joe, he will not be getting much of a Big Day. His speech will be interesting though. He's not a top class orator but he did make some good ones during the campaign. Perhaps he'll be tempted by some Gerald Ford, seek to turn the page using elevated healing rhetoric.
"Our long national nightmare is over. The fat orange fucker has gone."
I think that the best speech I have heard from him was on 6th January. More of that would not go amiss.
I liked that one he did at Gettysburg. Things were still in the balance then, so I was feeling anxious and tender, prone to ups and downs of emotion, just basically feeling like a girl much of the time, and listening to that speech, plus with booze on the go, led to a choking up. Very glad nobody was filming me.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A rapidly brewing problem is the socialising that will take place by those who are vaccinated (not in closed pubs obviously - but at people's houses).
As Chris Snowdon pointed out, stopping people who have had the vaccine from going back to normal life indicates you do not have confidence in the solution you are offering.
Unless its not a solution and you are fibbing. Or it is a solution and you have another agenda.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I think, for me, it`s primarily a matter of suitability for the office. The fact that he was unqualified and supremely unsuitable was obvious before he became president. And he hasn`t disappointed. He`s trashed the country`s reputation abroad - which it will take quite a while to recover from - partly because he is an easy subject to ridicule because he is inherently ridiculous.
Did you listen to James Comey on Sophie Ridge on Sunday?
The Trump Presidency
It's a cake made of awful policies, awful implementation of the awful policies and an icing made out of incompetent corruption in awful implantation of the awful policies. With layers of supporters who are substantially fascist and racist. The whole doused in insurrectionist and violent rhetoric, provoking and encouraging repeated criminality.
The cherry on the cake is the stupid Twitter addiction.
That's a good one, Malmesbury. Like that a lot. And it's as close to 100% objective as anything can ever be. Important not to go looking for "balance" on Trump. There isn't any.
Surely awful policies awfully implemented is better than awful policies efficiently implemented ?
Consider the immigrant child separations.... they not merely separated the children from their parents. They managed to lose children.....
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
By Easter the pubs will be open, maybe with some restrictions at first but increasingly reduced. I would expect pubs to be largely back to normal (barring areas of special concern) by May.
Though I disagree with 21 June being the start of summer. Meteorologically (which is what matters) all of June is summer.
Indeed/ Full opening of ALL of the UK's pubs, restaurants and clubs with no restrictions? not before July I reckon. If then. If ever TBH.
Lets see what Anabozina's prediction is, if that person has actually got the nads to actually make one. Which I doubt.
Easter sounds about right to me, not without restrictions, but open. And hopefully in good weather so we can enjoy beer gardens without too many annoying rules.
I think your forecast of 21 June for any pub opening will be out by a fair way.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
From either an individual medical point of view, or a wider public health one, is there any benefit to being vaccinated after having contracted the disease?
Yes, the immune response produced by the vaccine is significantly stronger after the second dose than what we see post infection, plus the vaccines may protect us against viral mutations better than prior infection. When you add in all of the paperwork it doesn't seem worth it for what is essentially 3-4m people who have previously tested positive across loads of different age groups/cohorts.
Fine, I'm convinced. Thanks.
I'm told that if you have had COVID recently there is a 6 week deferral period, but I believe other than that they are vaccinating those who have already had it.
So, the government now admits that it deliberately and for purely abstract reasons decided to severely damage the UK music and culture industry, a big sector for the UK and important to our tourist industry. Here's the 'Culture Minister' (by which they seem to mean the 'Wrecking Culture Minister') explaining why:
They are literally insane, aren't they? Was there a single referendum voter in the entire UK who objected to UK and EU musicians being able to put on concert tours in each other's countries without a load of ludicrous paperwork and expensive carnets?
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Huh. I hadn't thought of that aspect. Should people who've had Covid be deprioritised? My gut instinct says yes, but do we have some science to say whether that's right or wrong?
Maybe, but in practical terms it would need a lot of bureaucratic stuff to figure that out so it's easier to not bother and just ramp up to 4-5m per week and not need to worry about it. The last thing we need with this is to add barriers and paperwork, keeping it simple is the best way forwards, even these age bands are unnecessary, just do everyone over 50 and keep the centres running at 100% capacity all day everyday.
But, you could simply request people who have had COVID not to come to the front of the queue.
I think a substantial number (~60 per cent) would understand and this would help get everyone some protection quickly.
If indeed one in eight have had COVID, & 60 per cent behave in a public-spirited manner, then that is 5 million people.
Obviously, the sharp elbowed (like General Topping and all his aunties and uncles) would ignore it, but there are a substantial number of people who are public-spirited & do not have rapier-like elbows.
I think that would be taking the "the law-abiding lose out" approach too far. It's bad enough with the lockdown.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
By Easter the pubs will be open, maybe with some restrictions at first but increasingly reduced. I would expect pubs to be largely back to normal (barring areas of special concern) by May.
Though I disagree with 21 June being the start of summer. Meteorologically (which is what matters) all of June is summer.
Indeed/ Full opening of ALL of the UK's pubs, restaurants and clubs with no restrictions? not before July I reckon. If then. If ever TBH.
Lets see what Anabozina's prediction is, if that person has actually got the nads to actually make one. Which I doubt.
Easter sounds about right to me, not without restrictions, but open. And hopefully in good weather so we can enjoy beer gardens without too many annoying rules.
I think your forecast of 21 June for any pub opening will be out by a fair way.
Maybe for the type of opening you refer to. With restrictions. But for all UK opening with no restrictions anywhere, I reckon 21 June is conservative, to be honest.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
I agree. Only way we could get to something resembling a sustainable normal by then would be to keep the lockdown going until the virus is suppressed everywhere, keep the borders closed(ish), and then test+trace+isolate the hell out of any outbreaks.
In reality though we'll start to partially reopen as soon as there's spare hospital capacity.
I think the borders need to stay fully closed for the who year, and I say that as someone who really, really wants to get to a nice Puglian beach this summer. We should selectively reopen the border as other countries reach herd immunity and keep mutations locked down.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A rapidly brewing problem is the socialising that will take place by those who are vaccinated (not in closed pubs obviously - but at people's houses).
As Chris Snowdon pointed out, stopping people who have had the vaccine from going back to normal life indicates you do not have confidence in the solution you are offering.
Unless its not a solution and you are fibbing. Or it is a solution and you have another agenda.
It is a solution once sufficient people have been effectively vaccinated. 2 shots and X percent of the population.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A rapidly brewing problem is the socialising that will take place by those who are vaccinated (not in closed pubs obviously - but at people's houses).
As Chris Snowdon pointed out, stopping people who have had the vaccine from going back to normal life indicates you do not have confidence in the solution you are offering.
Unless its not a solution and you are fibbing. Or it is a solution and you have another agenda.
We don't know if a vaccinated person who has caught covid is contagious or not.
That is essential information as to when you can open things up.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
Key factor is once the most vulnerable are immunized the death rate drops of a cliff, and once the over 45's are done, so does hospitalization. That will drive the restriction lifting.
Vaccination anecdote from on-the-ground observations. I live adjacent to an NHS building that is being used for vaccinations - all very well organised. For the last 3 weeks (until last Friday), there have been long, winding queues of people - from their ages, they must be mainly NHS staff. Last Friday, the queues ended, and though it is still set up for vaccinations there are no queues, just occasional people going in. I wondered if it was, therefore, a supply issue. If all the NHS staff had been jabbed, if they had the supplies surely they'd continue rolling it out to other groups? So it is still being used, but very lightly.
Not good numbers on vaccination front...England only 171k yesterday (I wonder if like deaths, we are seeing a weekend effect in reporting, but still, not enough).
Absolutely dire numbers. What has gone wrong?
If the numbers seem weird it's probably something to do with the way they're being reported.
Is it possible that demand under 80 is not as overwhelming as the government thought?
Which leaves Johnson with a bit of a problem....
What when letters for under 80s only went out yesterday.....
I guess there could be a gap between the 80s being done and the new cohort being invited. A sort of invite-lag?
You may be right, but I hope not. That would not be good planning.
It doesn't really matter that much anyway. Read the news. The schools are not going back this side of Easter. The pubs won't be opening until the summer at the earliest.
You are not getting your freedoms back for another five months at least. And even then we're talking Tier 2.
For a while.
***PREDICTION POST*** No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Interesting when do you think,
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
No chance of pubs before May bank holiday (which off top my head is 5th May). Might even be the next bank holiday at end of May.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Quite. Of course there's going to be an almighty argument about this in the tory parliamentary party in the spring. A massive argument.
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A rapidly brewing problem is the socialising that will take place by those who are vaccinated (not in closed pubs obviously - but at people's houses).
As Chris Snowdon pointed out, stopping people who have had the vaccine from going back to normal life indicates you do not have confidence in the solution you are offering.
Unless its not a solution and you are fibbing. Or it is a solution and you have another agenda.
I think the answer is that there is a great deal of hope that it is the solution and some trial data that indicates it probably will be but still plenty of unknowns.
The over-70s face uncertainty over vaccination appointments as GPs who are ready to offer the jabs complain that supplies are being diverted.
Elderly people are also being given appointments at mass vaccination centres a long way from home and overlapping with slots allocated by their local GPs.
As ministers announced new mass vaccination centres and an extension of the programme a patchwork picture emerged with some family doctors yet to reach all their over-80s and others desperate for further doses to give.
The announcement that vaccines were to be made available to the over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable caught many practices by surprise yesterday morning. Doctors and practice managers expressed anger that news of the extension was released to the media first.
The Institute of General Practice Management said GPs’ phones across the country were “jammed with patients in the extended cohorts asking us how and when they can book their vaccinations”.
In a letter to Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of the NHS, the practice managers warned that the situation was “stopping those in need of care getting through and leaving our teams answering questions that we could have been better prepared for”.
I know of many surgeries who are already well into vaccinating the over 70s, I know others who are still hiding away. You will find that those surgeries who were proactive and open over the past 10 months are the ones doing best. The ones that put more locks on the door than Fort Knox are the ones vaccinating the least
Yes, that wouldn't surprise me at all. In my family chat there's unsurprisingly a lot of doctors and they have similar stories of GP surgeries struggling to wake up from not having seen any patients for months and idiotic receptionists bitching about having to actually work for a living again.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
I shall dig on local social media to find out if the hibernating GP (Next practice over) has woken up again. He did the other day, to complain that the vaccination thing was very tricky.
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
One Surgery near me has actually got retired doctors coming in to help with their vaccination clinics. They have 6 vaccinators at once with a steady stream of people walking through. The neighbouring surgery has barely started and keeps putting posts on Facebook pleading with people to stop phoning them. The discrepancy in surgery's performance will continue to grow.
Its almost as if giving patients the right to choose, and having the money follow them, might help.
Given that most GP practices are full - it's way harder to change GP then you seem to think it is.
So, the government now admits that it deliberately and for purely abstract reasons decided to severely damage the UK music and culture industry, a big sector for the UK and important to our tourist industry. Here's the 'Culture Minister' (by which they seem to mean the 'Wrecking Culture Minister') explaining why:
They are literally insane, aren't they? Was there a single referendum voter in the entire UK who objected to UK and EU musicians being able to put on concert tours in each other's countries without a load of ludicrous paperwork and expensive carnets?
There was a good article about this from Tour Managers who suggested that nothing would change, not sure quite what the big issue is as no one has really pointed it out
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I think, for me, it`s primarily a matter of suitability for the office. The fact that he was unqualified and supremely unsuitable was obvious before he became president. And he hasn`t disappointed. He`s trashed the country`s reputation abroad - which it will take quite a while to recover from - partly because he is an easy subject to ridicule because he is inherently ridiculous.
Did you listen to James Comey on Sophie Ridge on Sunday?
The Trump Presidency
It's a cake made of awful policies, awful implementation of the awful policies and an icing made out of incompetent corruption in awful implantation of the awful policies. With layers of supporters who are substantially fascist and racist. The whole doused in insurrectionist and violent rhetoric, provoking and encouraging repeated criminality.
The cherry on the cake is the stupid Twitter addiction.
That's a good one, Malmesbury. Like that a lot. And it's as close to 100% objective as anything can ever be. Important not to go looking for "balance" on Trump. There isn't any.
Surely awful policies awfully implemented is better than awful policies efficiently implemented ?
Consider the immigrant child separations.... they not merely separated the children from their parents. They managed to lose children.....
I'm sure the QAnonists will be right on top of that one, what with their deep concern about kids' welfare...
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I don't think the US was a land of milk and honey before but Trump as President had a job to do in at least trying to unite the country after his victory. He made no effort to do this at all. Indeed he went out of his way to try and antagonise and attack anyone, even the most reasonable, who opposed him and his policies. He could have achieved much that he set out to do - perhaps even more than he did - if he had not been such an egotistical bastard who saw every criticism whether directed at him or his policies as being a personal affront. I can't think of any candidate in living memory who was less suited to being President.
Yes, I agree. What marked Trump out as different is that he didn't even try to pretend to unite the country.
In democracies, when X wins following a divisive election campaign, they always follow their victory by saying things like: "now is the time to unite the nation. I will govern for everybody, both those who voted for me, and those who didn't." But not Trump. Those who didn't vote for him could f*** right off.
He spent day 1 in a furious lying tetch about the size of his inauguration crowd. That was as good as it got. And I personally don't have the remotest interest in hearing about Donald Trump being "correct in his analysis" of various things plaguing the American worker such as globalization. Reason I'm not interested is that neither was he. Trump gave zero shits about anything but Trump. He was all bad. Completely and utterly and on every level. There are no redeeming aspects or features. If you go for "balance" on this one you end up writing drivel.
I'm waiting to see Trump announce that his inauguration crowd was so much bigger than Biden's (as it will be due to Covid and the lockdown that Trump has forced in Washington making attending it virtually impossible).
Without a doubt. Poor Joe, he will not be getting much of a Big Day. His speech will be interesting though. He's not a top class orator but he did make some good ones during the campaign. Perhaps he'll be a tempted by some Gerald Ford, seek to turn the page using elevated healing rhetoric.
"Our long national nightmare is over. The fat orange fucker has gone."
Bet he uses the word 'marlaky' though.
I'd actually be a seller of that one. Think it might be deemed too folksy for such a formal occasion. Hope we do get a "bingo" spread market to play. "Sell the lot" is always my start point with those.
But Anna Durbin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was less confident about the levels of protection. In particular, she was skeptical a one-dose vaccine would be enough for older adults, who don’t always mount as strong an immune response as younger people.
“I think it was a bit of a gamble to go with the single dose, and I think it was very responsible of the company to look at a two-dose regimen and a one-dose regimen,” said Durbin, an investigator in trials of the Pfizer vaccine and another testing a vaccine made by AstraZeneca.
Please for the love of God let vulnerable people receive 2 doses of vaccine, 1 dose will probably suffice for fit under 50s that don't work amongst the covid +ve
They will eventually - the issue is as I described last week is vaccinate 10 people twice and 9 have immunity, vaccinate 20 people once and 12 have immunity.
Faced with that equation and a limited supply of vaccine what do you do short term?
There's also the question of transmission. If the vaccine *does not* prevent transmission, everyone has to comply with the precautions, vaccination or no (and that is fine).
If the vaccine *does* prevent transmission, then in the former case we have 2 people out of every 20 who can still spread the thing unknowingly. In the latter case, that rises to 8 people. This is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases.
How is that any risk at the moment given that the advice is "Stay At Home".
It isn't. The caveat was "this is a significant additional risk, if the pressure to let "vaccinated" people "do things" increases". And through May, June, July, August, September that pressure *will* increase.
Yes, it will and by then we will have achieved a pretty good level of herd immunity. By May symptomatic COVID should be down to triple figures.
I'm not quite sure I understand what "a pretty good level of herd immunity" means. I understood that we need to get to about 70%+ for herd immunity to be effective (i.e. the likelihood of transmission drops well below 1), or it still rips through the remaining population. By May we will have administered 40m doses which is about 35% of the population having had their 2-dose vaccination (or, say, about 20% having had 2 doses and 30% one dose and still in the 12 week window, but almost half of those will not be immune). That's nothing like enough for a herd immunity effect, is it?
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
By May we will be closes to 60m doses administered, not 40m. In addition currently 1 in 8 people are testing positive for antibodies.
OK, so you're assuming we'll have ramped up to an average of ~3m doses/week over the whole period? Fair enough.
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
Key factor is once the most vulnerable are immunized the death rate drops of a cliff, and once the over 45's are done, so does hospitalization. That will drive the restriction lifting.
Yes, and by May we should be almost all of the way through the second jabs for the 15m in the current target which is where the deaths and half of the hospitalisations come from.
So, the government now admits that it deliberately and for purely abstract reasons decided to severely damage the UK music and culture industry, a big sector for the UK and important to our tourist industry. Here's the 'Culture Minister' (by which they seem to mean the 'Wrecking Culture Minister') explaining why:
They are literally insane, aren't they? Was there a single referendum voter in the entire UK who objected to UK and EU musicians being able to put on concert tours in each other's countries without a load of ludicrous paperwork and expensive carnets?
Wasn't entirely happy about freedom of movement for André Rieu tbh
Vaccination anecdote from on-the-ground observations. I live adjacent to an NHS building that is being used for vaccinations - all very well organised. For the last 3 weeks (until last Friday), there have been long, winding queues of people - from their ages, they must be mainly NHS staff. Last Friday, the queues ended, and though it is still set up for vaccinations there are no queues, just occasional people going in. I wondered if it was, therefore, a supply issue. If all the NHS staff had been jabbed, if they had the supplies surely they'd continue rolling it out to other groups? So it is still being used, but very lightly.
See above - I suspect they have run out of arms, hence the new call for the over 70's.
Local authority level data will be tricky as it is being rolled out by the NHS which has different boundaries. Publishing it by CCG or PCN (or indeed the level above CCG which I'm not sure of the name of) would be easier. The fact that the data has not been published does not mean it does not exist.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I think, for me, it`s primarily a matter of suitability for the office. The fact that he was unqualified and supremely unsuitable was obvious before he became president. And he hasn`t disappointed. He`s trashed the country`s reputation abroad - which it will take quite a while to recover from - partly because he is an easy subject to ridicule because he is inherently ridiculous.
Did you listen to James Comey on Sophie Ridge on Sunday?
The Trump Presidency
It's a cake made of awful policies, awful implementation of the awful policies and an icing made out of incompetent corruption in awful implantation of the awful policies. With layers of supporters who are substantially fascist and racist. The whole doused in insurrectionist and violent rhetoric, provoking and encouraging repeated criminality.
The cherry on the cake is the stupid Twitter addiction.
That's a good one, Malmesbury. Like that a lot. And it's as close to 100% objective as anything can ever be. Important not to go looking for "balance" on Trump. There isn't any.
Surely awful policies awfully implemented is better than awful policies efficiently implemented ?
Consider the immigrant child separations.... they not merely separated the children from their parents. They managed to lose children.....
I'm sure the QAnonists will be right on top of that one, what with their deep concern about kids' welfare...
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I don't think the US was a land of milk and honey before but Trump as President had a job to do in at least trying to unite the country after his victory. He made no effort to do this at all. Indeed he went out of his way to try and antagonise and attack anyone, even the most reasonable, who opposed him and his policies. He could have achieved much that he set out to do - perhaps even more than he did - if he had not been such an egotistical bastard who saw every criticism whether directed at him or his policies as being a personal affront. I can't think of any candidate in living memory who was less suited to being President.
Yes, I agree. What marked Trump out as different is that he didn't even try to pretend to unite the country.
In democracies, when X wins following a divisive election campaign, they always follow their victory by saying things like: "now is the time to unite the nation. I will govern for everybody, both those who voted for me, and those who didn't." But not Trump. Those who didn't vote for him could f*** right off.
He spent day 1 in a furious lying tetch about the size of his inauguration crowd. That was as good as it got. And I personally don't have the remotest interest in hearing about Donald Trump being "correct in his analysis" of various things plaguing the American worker such as globalization. Reason I'm not interested is that neither was he. Trump gave zero shits about anything but Trump. He was all bad. Completely and utterly and on every level. There are no redeeming aspects or features. If you go for "balance" on this one you end up writing drivel.
I'm waiting to see Trump announce that his inauguration crowd was so much bigger than Biden's (as it will be due to Covid and the lockdown that Trump has forced in Washington making attending it virtually impossible).
Without a doubt. Poor Joe, he will not be getting much of a Big Day. His speech will be interesting though. He's not a top class orator but he did make some good ones during the campaign. Perhaps he'll be a tempted by some Gerald Ford, seek to turn the page using elevated healing rhetoric.
"Our long national nightmare is over. The fat orange fucker has gone."
So you don't think they will make "Trump 2: This Time It's Personal...."
If that stars the eponymous I really hope not. I'm hoping he's going to find that having made one enormous flop he's cold as cold can be.
Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024.
So most Scots would therefore be fine with Boris refusing an indyref for the rest of this Parliament (though that poll is a Comres poll not the Survation poll from today).
On today's Yougov poll Starmer would then become PM with SNP support and he can give the SNP their indyref along with devomax, it would no longer be Boris' problem.
'within' does not necessarily mean they will be happy with after 2024 at all. You have jumped to a conclusion there.
43% of Scots do not even want another indy referendum for at least another 10 years, it would only take about 20% of that 57% to be happy for no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024 for a majority of Scots to support no indyref until after the next UK general election in 2024.
Regardless, the decision is one for Boris as UK PM, he has ruled one out so there will not be one until 2024 at the earliest if Starmer becomes PM.
See my other reply that deals with the logic of your post.
The logic is our constitution is based on the sovereignty of Crown in Parliament so even if 99% of Scots wanted one by 2024 Boris with a UK majority of 80 at Westminster can refuse.
The polling is just a matter of how easy it will be to refuse, Boris will still refuse it regardless as long as he is PM whatever happens at Holyrood in May
You are not getting this are you. There is nothing wrong in what you say here, but you made a statement earlier as a fact. It was not a fact it was an opinion. It was a perfectly reasonable opinion, but an opinion nevertheless.
I was pointing out why it was an opinion and not a fact by applying logic to it to demonstrate why.
We have been here before. You seem to think that logic is some esoterical topic restricted to mathematicians. It isn't. They may be better at it, but it applies to everyday life as well.
The only logic that matters under our constitution is the supremacy of Crown in Parliament. Boris has a majority in Parliament of 80 so what Boris says goes, there will be no indyref2 while he remains UK PM with an overall Tory majority.
What the polling shows is only relevant to how much resistance he will face when he refuses to grant the SNP any indyref2 as he will, 43% of Scots not wanting an indyref2 for at least 10 years and 57% only wanting one within 5 years ie after the next general election shows Boris can easily get away with refusing one until 2024 as he will with little resistance bar the SNP hardcore.
HYUFD sigh:
Let's breakdown your post:
1st sentence - why you use the word logic here I don't know as there is no logical construct there whatsoever (not that it is needed). It looks like a statement of fact (I assume it is correct as I don't know have that knowledge)
2nd sentence - is a fact followed by an opinion.
2nd para - is an opinion
Do you know what logic is? Even if not trained in it most people grasp the basics as a matter of routine eg:
A implies B does not mean B implies A, etc.
I am not interested in replying to yet another of your extremely tedious and boring logic posts.
As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway
But HYUFD you make some brilliant posts, you are full of facts that many do not know and repost some excellent twitter post, particularly on opinion polls.
Yet you don't seem to get why some of your post drive us up the wall and it is not because of differences in political opinion. So for instance I don't actually disagree with you on your recent post; to be honest I don't have an opinion, so I am not arguing with you on your opinion.
I think you opinion is a perfectly valid one and one that I don't disagree with you on.
Has it never crossed you mind why people do get annoyed then with some of your posts? It is because you state opinion as fact, then when it is demonstrated that the fact is an opinion, you give another unrelated opinion to the one in question.
Even your last post does it:
'As I said without the approval of the UK PM logically there can be no legal indyref2 anyway'.
a) It has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue I raised initially b) I agree with the point you are making in this sentence.
I did not say '57% of Scots as a matter of fact are happy with no indyref2 until after 2024.'
I said 'Even if 57% want a say in the next 5 years that means by 2026 ie after the next UK general election in 2024' which is a correct factual conclusion from the poll answers given.
It does not bother me what anyone thinks of my posts, if they dislike them so intently move on and respond to someone else's
You are the most talked about poster - a celeb in other words - and I'm betting that's fine by you. You like being a celeb. You like not being able to do normal posts like normal people without being noticed and bothered and pestered. You remind me of Rod Stewart in this regard.
Maggie may be the greatest politician to have ever lived, with BJ a close second.
Trump bears probably 70-80% of the responsibility for the divisions in America. I would agree he is without doubt the worst President in history.
But the Democrats and their supporters also bear at least some responsibility. Although they were no where near as blatant as Trump, never the less they refused to accept that he had won fairly and used every possible tactic to try and undermine his Presidency. In this they were particularly stupid. They should have realised they would not get rid of him before 2020 but in being so partisan and refusing to accept his victory was valid they sowed the seeds for the divisions which, I personally believe, are now insurmountable.
Quick question for you Richard and you are one of the few posters on here that recognise that the Democrats bear a lot of the responsibility for the division in the US. Why exactly is he the worst President? Do you think the US was a land of milk and honey before, and everyone was happy? My view has always been that Trump is a symptom, not a cause.
I'm not having a go and it's maybe unfair to ask you specifically but people hear the word "Trump" and automatically say "he's so bad". But why exactly is he so bad? What has he done exactly that was so uniquely awful in the annals of US history?
I think, for me, it`s primarily a matter of suitability for the office. The fact that he was unqualified and supremely unsuitable was obvious before he became president. And he hasn`t disappointed. He`s trashed the country`s reputation abroad - which it will take quite a while to recover from - partly because he is an easy subject to ridicule because he is inherently ridiculous.
Did you listen to James Comey on Sophie Ridge on Sunday?
The Trump Presidency
It's a cake made of awful policies, awful implementation of the awful policies and an icing made out of incompetent corruption in awful implantation of the awful policies. With layers of supporters who are substantially fascist and racist. The whole doused in insurrectionist and violent rhetoric, provoking and encouraging repeated criminality.
The cherry on the cake is the stupid Twitter addiction.
That's a good one, Malmesbury. Like that a lot. And it's as close to 100% objective as anything can ever be. Important not to go looking for "balance" on Trump. There isn't any.
Surely awful policies awfully implemented is better than awful policies efficiently implemented ?
Consider the immigrant child separations.... they not merely separated the children from their parents. They managed to lose children.....
I'm sure the QAnonists will be right on top of that one, what with their deep concern about kids' welfare...
Surprised they don't link the two.
The more despairing part of me knows that somewhere on the internet someone in a red MAGA cap is putting 2 and 2 together and getting 666.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/19/business-secretary-confirms-post-brexit-review-uk-workers-rights
I'd love to believe Mr Kwarteng. But the cynic in me suspects that is precisely what his department will do. I hope I am wrong.
It's rather like limited overs cricket, every day the return falls below, the required rate goes up.
The Scottish Conservatives can go into this year's Holyrood election saying they don't think there should be one, vote for them and if they win the election (or deny the separatists a majority) that is it democratically sorted.
It is entirely possible to reconcile right now saying you do not think there should be one, but after the election saying you respect the Scottish election results so will campaign for No.
In democracy you respect votes you lose, not just those you win.
Spot on. The government needs to get in front of this whining. You can only vaccinate what's put in front of you. The idea that nurses should just sit on their hands until a suitably aged client knocks on their door is for the birds.
The former chief executive of the London 2012 Olympics says it is "unlikely" that the Tokyo Games will take place this summer due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills told the BBC that organisers should now be "making plans for a cancellation".
Tokyo is currently in a state of emergency after a surge of coronavirus cases in the Japanese capital.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55722542
Have to admit I cannot see Euro 2020 taking place in its current form.
Once again, it makes me wonder why we bother with GP surgeries at all.
No UK pubs will open before 21 June, says Contrarian.
I suspect this post won't age well.
Only 28 - I assume its because of his underlying health issues
Incidentally he has already had Covid
Mr Epping Forest would feel at home, not many of the rest of us.
I'm not arguing against the strategy (or suggesting that you are wrong!), BTW; I just see all sorts of assertions in isolation that don't seem to add up.
"Vaccinated people mistakenly believe they are “good to go” and socialise with other people despite a continuing threat of the coronavirus, the head of the government’s behavioural unit said on Tuesday."
The schools will be open in the UK full time and
The pubs will revert to normal licensing hours everywhere in the UK with no restrictions.
Lets see who is nearest the effing bull
If he doesn't do something soon, the pile of mail inside his door* may make it un-openable.
*His practise has a glass door. Someone put up a pic of the snow drift of mail.
We have the stadiums ready to go.
Itd almost be funny if Trump was a really good president - people have listed some actions which are not necessarily terrible - but hes such a rude, petty man than no one noticed.
We're hosting the final and semi-final already anyway aren't we?
Plus by the summer the vaccine rollout should be nearly complete and we should be the safest country in Europe for being relatively pox-free.
Cut away all the unnecessary travel. Make 2024 or 2028 a Europe-wide one if they want, but at least this way the competition still goes again.
I think you are more likely to be right with late June than any predictions before May.
Though I disagree with 21 June being the start of summer. Meteorologically (which is what matters) all of June is summer.
Read the comments ......
Lets see what Anabozina's prediction is, if that person has actually got the nads to actually make one. Which I doubt.
Researchers say that a mutation on a specific part of the virus's outer spike protein appears to make it able to 'escape' antibodies. Antibodies are substances made by the immune system that are key to destroying viruses or marking them for destruction by white blood cells.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9162593/Up-HALF-Covid-survivors-vulnerable-South-African-variant.html
Because the government has said the vaccines are the answer.
If the vaccines are the answer then we don;t need lockdown when they are rolled out,
And if we still have lockdown when they are rolled out then the government must be fibbing.
A yob who held an illegal street party during the first national lockdown that descended into a riot which saw 22 police officers injured has been spared jail.
Ronaldo Scott, 18, and his pals threw a party in Brixton which spilled out onto the streets on June 25 last year. When police tried to break up the rave they were pelted with bottles and attacked with planks of wood, a court heard.
A total of 22 officers were injured, with two being taken to hospital, in scenes described as 'utterly vile' by Home Secretary Priti Patel at the time.
Scott filmed himself on social media as revellers damaged police cars and threatened police on the Angell Town Estate, Inner London Crown Court heard.
The teenager, who carried a stun gun and extendable baton on the day, 'threatened officers with violence' in the chaotic standoff and acted like a 'cheerleader' to the frenzied crowd.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9163243/Yob-held-illegal-lockdown-street-party-Brixton-descended-riot-spared-jail.html
And the fact that 1/8 are testing +ve for antibodies (which may or may not confer immunity or reduced impact for a period) boosts the effective starting position, but not the slope. So that still gets us to, say a 50% *actually* immune population by May which is still some way short of reducing R significantly below 1, as I understand it.
This is what I don't understand - the risk is substantially reduced *once R is significantly below 1*, and the estimates for that are between 70-90% immunity in the population. Otherwise we are back in the "oh everything is fine" situation we had last summer and it just rips back through the population again. That is my concern with setting expectations that it will be "basically fine" come May. It might superficially look that way, but it won't be.
More than 1,000 quarantine rooms built in four days in China’s Shijiazhuang
Over the last couple of weeks, cases of Covid-19 have been rising in the northeast of China, particularly in the city of Shijiazhuang.
And so, on 13 January, work began in the city to construct 3,000 prefabricated rooms to accommodate the growing numbers of people who need to quarantine. China says that a third of these 18 sq metre rooms – a full 1,008 of them - have now been completed and will soon be in use.
I think a substantial number (~60 per cent) would understand and this would help get everyone some protection quickly.
If indeed one in eight have had COVID, & 60 per cent behave in a public-spirited manner, then that is 5 million people.
Obviously, the sharp elbowed (like General Topping and all his aunties and uncles) would ignore it, but there are a substantial number of people who are public-spirited & do not have rapier-like elbows.
Right now the concentration is on reducing the hospitalisation rate because the NHS is days away from falling over, in 4-6 weeks it will be getting the death rate down and in 10-12 weeks it will be getting the infection rate down.
Just rejoice at that news...
In reality though we'll start to partially reopen as soon as there's spare hospital capacity.
Unless its not a solution and you are fibbing. Or it is a solution and you have another agenda.
I think your forecast of 21 June for any pub opening will be out by a fair way.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1351513796213399553
They are literally insane, aren't they? Was there a single referendum voter in the entire UK who objected to UK and EU musicians being able to put on concert tours in each other's countries without a load of ludicrous paperwork and expensive carnets?
Herd immunity and all that.
That is essential information as to when you can open things up.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/musicians-wont-need-visas-tours-post-brexit-storm-backstage/
You meant the read the ones on this PB thread, right?
Hmmmmm polling quality value in order (higher number equals less value)
1) ICM
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1,678,564,435) Daily Mail Online Poll
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1,678,564,442) ConHome Online Poll
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(NUMBER_OUT_OF_RANGE_ERROR) Twitter Polls
Bafflingly silly story about bj holding snap election.