I agree with this assessment in its nuances. Boris surprised me yesterday. I didn't think his contrition was an act. He looked and sounded genuinely sorry. He also looks worn and possibly still unwell.
It's a wretched business. I woke at 3.30 am from a covid dream and that was that. Awake now.
Agreed.
The PM has made plenty of mistakes. Though on vaccines the British government and the NHS have done well. I have no doubt he is genuinely sorry. How could anyone not be.
I would like to see China's leader apologise to the world for the actions they took and failed to take which unleashed this pandemic on the world. China's mistakes at the start of this made this pandemic a whole lot worse than it might have been. China should not be allowed to forget its responsibility for this pandemic and all the deaths and suffering that have ensued.
Do you think that a government which is conducting an ongoing genocide against part of its population is likely to apologise ? They are far more likely to point to the success of their lockdown policy and say that the world ought to have followed their example. And alongside that conduct targeted vaccine diplomacy (something they've already started to do).
Autocrats like Xi don't do apologies.
Of course not. I'm not daft.
But it doesn't stop me wanting it. Or speaking up about the revolting nature of China's regime and the wicked things they are doing.
On topic, on the raw politics, were it not for the vaccine this tragic milestone might be a real problem for the Government.
As it happens the excellent progress it's making on the vaccine (particularly compared to others) will probably save it.
It might also do other things too, like improve the right/wrong scores on Brexit - and even help the Union a bit - if the UK escapes major constraints earlier than the EU and its economy starts recovering sooner.
Boris may well prove to be a lucky general again.
Good management rather than good luck with the vaccines, even his harshest critics should acknowledge that given they signed the vaccine deals first in the world three months before Europe - which is what the CEO of Astrazeneca is putting behind why the British operation is better, they've had three more months to perfect the process.
The EU have made things far worse for themselves by their strop, which has simply drawn attention to their own failings.
They'd have been far better advised to have gritted their teeth about it and simply redoubled their efforts on rollout. As it happens they've made themselves look petulant, fragile and insecure.
That very public lack of confidence in themselves, and how much they dislike being shown up, won't go unnoticed.
Absolutely agreed.
The stupid thing is they tried to play it off and blame AZN for their own failings - as if AZN were a punching bag who would just sit there and take it. They're doing this not for profit for heaven't sake, not as if they're making billions of profit and a skyrocketing share price thanks to this.
So it makes perfect sense for AZN to calmly and rationally point out the cause for delays, which are of the EU's making as it turns out, rather than simply allow their reputation to be trashed because some politicians can't accept anything is their fault.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
I haven't been into a shop since this lockdown began so can't comment on shelves (either had deliveries or our local supermarket does click & collect now) - but we've had no substitutions of fresh food since lockdown began. Only the usual sort of substitutions you often see with online ordering.
This morning I replicated an order from earlier this month as my next online order, and what was £88 is now £92.
As a pb "influencer" I'd be happy to take a flight out to the Cayman Islands, and then write a thread header for OGH on the 2021 elections. Essential work, which might necessitate essential local refreshment.
I couldn't promise you a revealing mankini, however.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
R4 More or Less suggesting compliance with even the existing travel/quarantine rules is only around 11%
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Except that all the mood music on the news last night and this morning is that it's only going to be applied to arrivals from a list of high risk countries. That'll make some small contribution to reducing the risk, but you can imagine that anyone coming back to Britain from Portugal, for example, will just drive to Spain and fly back from there to get around the rules.
Yet more half-arsed measures, which may have to be paid for in huge amounts of blood, treasure and misery a few months down the line. Why do they always have to do this?
Because 20 million people, accounting for 95% of deaths, are going to be vaccinated by the end of February?
The vaccine is the get out of jail free card but we still don't know if those vaccinated can be carriers, we still don't know how many will get ill anyway (the trials give some indication but this is enormously scaled up and affect hundreds of thousands with various underlying and complicating conditions that will not have been mirrored in the tests) and we still don't know how many sufferers of long covid are going to be filling our hospitals for the next year.
I think we made a terrible mistake in not having mandatory quarantine for all visitors last February. I very much doubt our deaths would have been half of what they are if we had and it is possible that the lockdowns would have worked to bear down on the disease before the new virulent strain took hold. Is it worth doing, even now? I would say yes because I want life to get back to something like normal in this country as fast as possible and it reduces the risk factors but the opportunity for a massive upside in saved lives is probably gone.
I am cautious. We are a long way from the final chapter of this story. Vaccines will help with mortality and admissions, but until everyone over 18 has been vaccinated, there will be significant pockets of disease. We need real world data on our population to see how effective disease suppression is. Even when it becomes a less severe illness, requiring a couple of weeks off work in most, it is going to have ongoing impact.
Then there is the lost year of schooling, non-covid healthcare and economic impact on various sectors.
The recovery plans need to start now. For example we are likely to need more inpatient beds for both medical and surgical care in order to catch up. My guess would be a 30% increase in capacity as a minimum, and a strong emphasis on supporting junior medical and nursing staff. They are getting burnt out.
Indeed. Your specifically medical points are part of a wider picture where the considerable burden and handicap from having to 'catch up' or restore activity in almost every field are not currently being appreciated. Right now people are just looking forward to being able to go out for eating, drinking and entertainment once again.
On this subject, I am starting to see some financial commentators float the possibility that the real financial crash will happen later this year, for the same reason.
I think that the economic challenge is the transition from the wall of money that has been thrown at this to something approaching reality and sustainability. As the support is withdrawn, as furlough ends, as domestic pent up demand falters and as Sunak contemplates the ruin that is the public finances there is a real risk of a further lurch downwards in GDP and employment. Many, maybe most people in this country have been getting full wages for part time work. That has kept demand higher than it can realistically be. There is an article in the Times today about how Banks are noting how poor productivity has been this time around. This cannot go on and when it stops it will be bumpy.
My example was medical, because that is what I do, but medical productivity is markedly down at present for understandable reasons.
Which is reflected by the ONS in UK GDP figures - but not in many of our European peers who simply measure "medical salaries" as a proxy - so their "productivity" has held up, or improved and hence their GDP.
On topic, on the raw politics, were it not for the vaccine this tragic milestone might be a real problem for the Government.
As it happens the excellent progress it's making on the vaccine (particularly compared to others) will probably save it.
It might also do other things too, like improve the right/wrong scores on Brexit - and even help the Union a bit - if the UK escapes major constraints earlier than the EU and its economy starts recovering sooner.
Boris may well prove to be a lucky general again.
Good management rather than good luck with the vaccines, even his harshest critics should acknowledge that given they signed the vaccine deals first in the world three months before Europe - which is what the CEO of Astrazeneca is putting behind why the British operation is better, they've had three more months to perfect the process.
Can't be great for the EU that, in the first big test of Governments' competence post-Brexit, the UK is doing demonstrably better. No riots in the streets either.
On topic, on the raw politics, were it not for the vaccine this tragic milestone might be a real problem for the Government.
As it happens the excellent progress it's making on the vaccine (particularly compared to others) will probably save it.
It might also do other things too, like improve the right/wrong scores on Brexit - and even help the Union a bit - if the UK escapes major constraints earlier than the EU and its economy starts recovering sooner.
Boris may well prove to be a lucky general again.
Good management rather than good luck with the vaccines, even his harshest critics should acknowledge that given they signed the vaccine deals first in the world three months before Europe - which is what the CEO of Astrazeneca is putting behind why the British operation is better, they've had three more months to perfect the process.
The EU have made things far worse for themselves by their strop, which has simply drawn attention to their own failings.
They'd have been far better advised to have gritted their teeth about it and simply redoubled their efforts on rollout. As it happens they've made themselves look petulant, fragile and insecure.
That very public lack of confidence in themselves, and how much they dislike being shown up, won't go unnoticed.
Absolutely agreed.
The stupid thing is they tried to play it off and blame AZN for their own failings - as if AZN were a punching bag who would just sit there and take it. They're doing this not for profit for heaven't sake, not as if they're making billions of profit and a skyrocketing share price thanks to this.
So it makes perfect sense for AZN to calmly and rationally point out the cause for delays, which are of the EU's making as it turns out, rather than simply allow their reputation to be trashed because some politicians can't accept anything is their fault.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
It's a shame AZ didn't actually push the point.
So you aren't happy - we have taken it as a cancellation request and will start to supply xyz countries (Brazil and South Africa say) earlier.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much. ttps://twitter.com/thismorning/status/1354014175215955969?s=09
Don’t start me!
Guess when the British tourists started arriving?
Our next door neighbour's daughter went to Dubai with a group of friends to party over the New Year. Caught it and gave it to her Mum. All ok now.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
R4 More or Less suggesting compliance with even the existing travel/quarantine rules is only around 11%
Compliance is only going to work if its hard to avoid. And it's hard to avoid sitting in a hotel room for 14 days if you are expected to be sat in it with checks x times a day as food is delivered.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
I haven't been into a shop since this lockdown began so can't comment on shelves (either had deliveries or our local supermarket does click & collect now) - but we've had no substitutions of fresh food since lockdown began. Only the usual sort of substitutions you often see with online ordering.
This morning I replicated an order from earlier this month as my next online order, and what was £88 is now £92.
If you replicated an order that's entirely to be expected.
It is how supermarkets in the past used to all "guarantee" your basket of goods is cheaper there than other supermarkets. When you build your original basket you're naturally and subconsciously drawn to offers and discounted products which apply in your original basket price.
When you replicate an order it doesn't flag up the promotional items whose promotion has expired - nor the alternative goods that are now on promotion you might have bought instead if building the basket from scratch this time.
Similarly with the old "guarantee" on your basket of goods - your basket of goods that you bought will be cheaper as it will include promotions that others may not have. While shoppers elsewhere get a cheaper basket as they've included promotions that you aren't seeing and haven't picked up.
".... but his delay in taking action last March could be a big negative."
I think it is very clear why he delayed ... the scientific modelling in March indicated that was the correct course of action.
This is very clear from the documents released by SAGE. The modellers in SAGE initially thought the spread of the disease would be slower and the peak of the first wave much later than actually occurred.
It is hard to know who to blame. The modellers, acting with incomplete information on an unknown disease, suggested a course of action that led to many deaths.
The modellers were in a difficult position -- they had to suggest a strategy for a very complicated problem with very little information. The politicians were pretty much bound to follow the advise, as they lacked the expertise to challenge the scientists.
Note --because I like to compare the Forgotten Country (certainly by Labour activists) with England -- Drakeford actually delayed longer than Johnson.
FWIW, I don't think Johnson, Drakeford or Sturgeon are to blame. I am sure all three will be wracked with grief & despair at what has happened.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
R4 More or Less suggesting compliance with even the existing travel/quarantine rules is only around 11%
Hence why it should be mandatory hotel quarantine, given we have mandatory school closures.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It may be a specifically Sainsbury's issue. When we went to the one in Leamington on Saturday the fresh fruit and veg shelves were noticeably empty. There were also shortages of many other things.
More generally, have lamb prices come down yet? They don't seem to have.
As a pb "influencer" I'd be happy to take a flight out to the Cayman Islands, and then write a thread header for OGH on the 2021 elections. Essential work, which might necessitate essential local refreshment.
I couldn't promise you a revealing mankini, however.
Boris may have been sincere in his apology for such a horrific performance as leader during these trying times. I hope so. Yet it doesn't seem like it to me, someone who really is sorry would look at their mistakes over the past year and make sure to never repeat them, yet here we are with the same failed airbridge system replicated for quarantine. That system and its obvious shortcomings is why we had a second wave, we finally got thing under control here and then imported thousands of seed cases from Spain just before school started.
We must close the border to all incoming travellers ASAP or we will import a vaccine resistant variant and it won't matter that we've immunised 6m or 60m, the whole thing starts again.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
R4 More or Less suggesting compliance with even the existing travel/quarantine rules is only around 11%
Let me guess, there’s a massive overlap between people who think it’s okay to go on holiday right now, and those who think they don’t need to quarantine if they’re not sick or they’re due back at work?
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
I think one problem is what people do when on holiday. We were only allowed to travel to countries with low prevalence over the summer, yet people seem to have brought back the virus. I think I'm a fairly sensible holidaymaker, but thinking about it I will visit 3-4 bars and restaurant every day, plus museums etc and the hotel breakfast room, whereas at home I might go out a couple of times a week. Maybe travel needs to be banned to and from places with open hospitality sectors.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
The second is not wrong. Through the summer the entire thing from the media was whinging about travel restrictions, insisting people needed a summer holiday for their "mental health", travel companies warning about the damage to their sector etc, etc, etc - and there's no counterpoint made because people think the worst is behind them and they could really do with a break now.
EOTHO wasn't daft when many towns and cities were showing zero covid cases. Malmesbury's excellent breakdown of cases originally had just 5 authorities showing in red. The cases weren't spread by EOTHO they were imported from overseas.
The time for restrictions is now, while we are locked down you lock down everything. The time for lifting restrictions is in the future and travel should be the last restriction to be lifted not the first.
What possible reason do you have to lock down schools now but not Piers Morons foreign holiday? When my daughters are crying because they're going stir crazy at home, miss their friends and want to go to school - why is Piers overseas more important than that?
Children's education is so important to the rest of their lives. It should be the last thing locked down and the first thing lifted. Yet the border controls are for "later on". Why?
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It may be a specifically Sainsbury's issue. When we went to the one in Leamington on Saturday the fresh fruit and veg shelves were noticeably empty. There were also shortages of many other things.
More generally, have lamb prices come down yet? They don't seem to have.
What is Sainsbury's for, exactly, now?
They seem a mid-range bleurgh type of shop.
I believe they are for keeping the scum out of Waitrose (Joke btw, and not mine!)
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
It would be a lot easier if you could list those ok and not ok occupations.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Australia introduced its quarantine policy on 15 March when it was recording around 100 new Covid cases per day, illustrating the point I am making. These policies are effective if you introduce them before the virus has taken hold domestically. Otherwise they are marginal. (And Australia did have a second wave anyway, during July-September, with far more cases and deaths than in April).
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
All of Europe had the borders open over summer, the error was assuming that travel to a low-prevalence country on holiday was safe.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
R4 More or Less suggesting compliance with even the existing travel/quarantine rules is only around 11%
My daughter spent nearly 3 weeks in France helping refugees this summer. On her return she had to quarantine. Her work had approved this in advance and she worked from home on her laptop. She complied with the requirements and did not leave the house in that time but her partner, whom I rather suspect she gets quite close to on occasions, was in and out of the house every day delivering groceries to people who were sheltering from Covid on behalf of Tesco's.
Nothing seems to have gone wrong. She did not develop the disease and nor did he but as a policy this seemed, with the greatest of respect to HMG, not very joined up. I can sort of see why so many wonder why they are bothering when obvious potential vectors are just ignored or apparently not thought of.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Australia introduced its quarantine policy on 15 March when it was recording around 100 new Covid cases per day, illustrating the point I am making. These policies are effective if you introduce them before the virus has taken hold domestically. Otherwise they are marginal. (And Australia did have a second wave anyway, during July-September, with far more cases and deaths than in April).
But it is always easier to scapegoat diseased foreigners than it is to solve your domestic problems.
And it is always easier to announce new restrictions than to give the restrictions you already have time to work.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Australia introduced its quarantine policy on 15 March when it was recording around 100 new Covid cases per day, illustrating the point I am making. These policies are effective if you introduce them before the virus has taken hold domestically. Otherwise they are marginal. (And Australia did have a second wave anyway, during July-September, with far more cases and deaths than in April).
All marginal matters during lockdown, that's the point of lockdown.
That's the point of schools being shut, that's the point of restaurants being shut, that's the point of masks, that's the point of telling people they can't visit their relatives with dementia in a care home, that's the point of telling people their loved ones are dying in a sterile hospital environment without anyone to hold their hand or say goodbye.
If there's a marginal gain to be had then take it. Every gain helps now. If that means schools can open 1 week sooner, then great reopen schools a week sooner. There is no point in kicking the can unless you're talking about a loss not a gain.
She seems to think that Kent Covid was predictable.
I think that, even without Kent Covid, our response was inadequate. What would have been different without the more transmissible strain?
Lockdown 2 would have reduced numbers by a greater extent, but they would still have been at a high level at the start of December. Since we wouldn't have had as rapid growth in cases in London and the South-East before Christmas, we would have gone ahead with the Christmas relaxation as planned - which would likely have put us into the situation experienced by Ireland.
The details and timing would be different, but fundamentally the outcomes would have been the same. Thousands dead in January.
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It might be a decision by the Supermarket as there are far less people going to Supermarkets at the moment so there is no point fully stocking shelves. The Tescos by me has been very quiet all January
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
The second is not wrong. Through the summer the entire thing from the media was whinging about travel restrictions, insisting people needed a summer holiday for their "mental health", travel companies warning about the damage to their sector etc, etc, etc - and there's no counterpoint made because people think the worst is behind them and they could really do with a break now.
EOTHO wasn't daft when many towns and cities were showing zero covid cases. Malmesbury's excellent breakdown of cases originally had just 5 authorities showing in red. The cases weren't spread by EOTHO they were imported from overseas.
The time for restrictions is now, while we are locked down you lock down everything. The time for lifting restrictions is in the future and travel should be the last restriction to be lifted not the first.
What possible reason do you have to lock down schools now but not Piers Morons foreign holiday? When my daughters are crying because they're going stir crazy at home, miss their friends and want to go to school - why is Piers overseas more important than that?
Children's education is so important to the rest of their lives. It should be the last thing locked down and the first thing lifted. Yet the border controls are for "later on". Why?
Listen I have 3 kids at home right now so I am in the same boat as you. The point is that travel should have been locked down last March. Doing it now is going to be absolutely marginal. Sure do it if it makes everyone feel better, but it's not going to have much effect and comes with some significant costs. Closing schools is unfortunately necessary as I am sure you know. My daughter brought Covid home with her. It's pretty obvious that all this rage at z listers in Dubai is just being whipped up to distract from the fact the government failed to keep a lid on this thing and 100,000 people are dead. Personally I have no intention to go anywhere, certainly not fucking Dubai, so rest assured I am not talking my book here.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
All of Europe had the borders open over summer, the error was assuming that travel to a low-prevalence country on holiday was safe.
And you're suggesting we repeat that mistake by not having a blanket policy.
"I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment"
That was the wrong policy then and it's the wri g policy now. Let people come and go as they please to any country, but they should know that when the arrive in the UK it's going to be 10 days in a quarantine hotel and a negative test. To get into the wider country.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
Correct. Johnson has no credible excuse or explanation. His action - or inaction - has led directly to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. He is personally responsible.
R4 "More or less" debunking the "Scottish drug deaths are not comparable with other countries" myth - while there are minor differences, the big picture is they're much worse, and attempts to play them down are typically found from proponents of independence.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Australia introduced its quarantine policy on 15 March when it was recording around 100 new Covid cases per day, illustrating the point I am making. These policies are effective if you introduce them before the virus has taken hold domestically. Otherwise they are marginal. (And Australia did have a second wave anyway, during July-September, with far more cases and deaths than in April).
All marginal matters during lockdown, that's the point of lockdown.
That's the point of schools being shut, that's the point of restaurants being shut, that's the point of masks, that's the point of telling people they can't visit their relatives with dementia in a care home, that's the point of telling people their loved ones are dying in a sterile hospital environment without anyone to hold their hand or say goodbye.
If there's a marginal gain to be had then take it. Every gain helps now. If that means schools can open 1 week sooner, then great reopen schools a week sooner. There is no point in kicking the can unless you're talking about a loss not a gain.
It's the same, under the government's lockdown policy, when the following happens:
Retail Outlet A: "retail outlet As only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections" Barberhsop: "barbershops only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections" Gyms: "gyms only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections"
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
All of Europe had the borders open over summer, the error was assuming that travel to a low-prevalence country on holiday was safe.
And you're suggesting we repeat that mistake by not having a blanket policy.
"I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment"
That was the wrong policy then and it's the wri g policy now. Let people come and go as they please to any country, but they should know that when the arrive in the UK it's going to be 10 days in a quarantine hotel and a negative test. To get into the wider country.
Well, you miss where I suggest people need to get an exit visa to reduce travel to the purely essential
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
Australia introduced its quarantine policy on 15 March when it was recording around 100 new Covid cases per day, illustrating the point I am making. These policies are effective if you introduce them before the virus has taken hold domestically. Otherwise they are marginal. (And Australia did have a second wave anyway, during July-September, with far more cases and deaths than in April).
Their second wave was a few hundred deaths and a few thousand cases. Ours is 2m cases and 60,000 deaths (and counting).
A system put in place today isn't about today, it's about ensuring it's in pave for the third wave of vaccine resistant variants. The only way to do that is to close the border, ideally a two island approach with Ireland as was being suggested by them yesterday.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
The second is not wrong. Through the summer the entire thing from the media was whinging about travel restrictions, insisting people needed a summer holiday for their "mental health", travel companies warning about the damage to their sector etc, etc, etc - and there's no counterpoint made because people think the worst is behind them and they could really do with a break now.
EOTHO wasn't daft when many towns and cities were showing zero covid cases. Malmesbury's excellent breakdown of cases originally had just 5 authorities showing in red. The cases weren't spread by EOTHO they were imported from overseas.
The time for restrictions is now, while we are locked down you lock down everything. The time for lifting restrictions is in the future and travel should be the last restriction to be lifted not the first.
What possible reason do you have to lock down schools now but not Piers Morons foreign holiday? When my daughters are crying because they're going stir crazy at home, miss their friends and want to go to school - why is Piers overseas more important than that?
Children's education is so important to the rest of their lives. It should be the last thing locked down and the first thing lifted. Yet the border controls are for "later on". Why?
Listen I have 3 kids at home right now so I am in the same boat as you. The point is that travel should have been locked down last March. Doing it now is going to be absolutely marginal. Sure do it if it makes everyone feel better, but it's not going to have much effect and comes with some significant costs. Closing schools is unfortunately necessary as I am sure you know. My daughter brought Covid home with her. It's pretty obvious that all this rage at z listers in Dubai is just being whipped up to distract from the fact the government failed to keep a lid on this thing and 100,000 people are dead. Personally I have no intention to go anywhere, certainly not fucking Dubai, so rest assured I am not talking my book here.
Locking down travel last March would have been purely marginal. The time to do it would have been before February half term.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
Bollocks.
When we have high transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is here. When we have low transmission figures people say "there's no point" in having quarantine because the virus is under control, and we deserve a holiday.
The point of lockdown is to cut out everything unnecessary and to stop travel. If that includes children going to school right now it damn well should include people travelling unnecessarily between countries.
Is a child's education worth less than holidays?
The difference is that your first statement of things people say is correct but the second is wrong. When cases are low is precisely when controls on travel need to be introduced. This policy was needed in early March 2020 or could have been introduced in the summer. Why wasn't it? When Covid is rampant everywhere in the UK preventing people from going to places where it is much less prevalent isn't going to do very much to prevent it. The problem is that every time cases fall the government encourages everyone to go crazy. Taxpayers were actually subsidising people to go out to eat, FFS, and all the usual cheerleaders on here were lauding it as the most brilliant economic policy ever created. Personally I always thought it was daft and made no use of the EOTHO scheme.
The second is not wrong. Through the summer the entire thing from the media was whinging about travel restrictions, insisting people needed a summer holiday for their "mental health", travel companies warning about the damage to their sector etc, etc, etc - and there's no counterpoint made because people think the worst is behind them and they could really do with a break now.
EOTHO wasn't daft when many towns and cities were showing zero covid cases. Malmesbury's excellent breakdown of cases originally had just 5 authorities showing in red. The cases weren't spread by EOTHO they were imported from overseas.
The time for restrictions is now, while we are locked down you lock down everything. The time for lifting restrictions is in the future and travel should be the last restriction to be lifted not the first.
What possible reason do you have to lock down schools now but not Piers Morons foreign holiday? When my daughters are crying because they're going stir crazy at home, miss their friends and want to go to school - why is Piers overseas more important than that?
Children's education is so important to the rest of their lives. It should be the last thing locked down and the first thing lifted. Yet the border controls are for "later on". Why?
Listen I have 3 kids at home right now so I am in the same boat as you. The point is that travel should have been locked down last March. Doing it now is going to be absolutely marginal. Sure do it if it makes everyone feel better, but it's not going to have much effect and comes with some significant costs. Closing schools is unfortunately necessary as I am sure you know. My daughter brought Covid home with her. It's pretty obvious that all this rage at z listers in Dubai is just being whipped up to distract from the fact the government failed to keep a lid on this thing and 100,000 people are dead. Personally I have no intention to go anywhere, certainly not fucking Dubai, so rest assured I am not talking my book here.
Perhaps it should have been done last March. It wasn't here, or in any other European nation, or in the USA and we don't have a Tardis. Perhaps it should have been done last May. It wasn't here, or in any other European nation, or in the USA and we don't have a Tardis.
We can't turn back time, we can only learn the lessons, deal with the present and the future.
The costs are not that significant. Not compared to the costs of having another lockdown again. If a new variant comes in that is more transmissable and vaccine-resistant then we're going to be going into September with exponential cases once more.
Restrictions need to be put in place now while we're locked down. If they're not put in place now then they're never going to be put in place. By the summer it will be a case of people saying "well that was horrid, I'm off for a well deserved week in the sun" and damn the consequences. It is now or never - and doing it now lets people plan for the future. Doing it now lets people plan what they're going to do, domestically, in the summer. Or lets them plan to ensure they can meet the quarantine rules for work.
There is no possible justification to kick the can on this, unless you don't want this ever to be done.
She seems to think that Kent Covid was predictable.
I think that, even without Kent Covid, our response was inadequate. What would have been different without the more transmissible strain?
Lockdown 2 would have reduced numbers by a greater extent, but they would still have been at a high level at the start of December. Since we wouldn't have had as rapid growth in cases in London and the South-East before Christmas, we would have gone ahead with the Christmas relaxation as planned - which would likely have put us into the situation experienced by Ireland.
The details and timing would be different, but fundamentally the outcomes would have been the same. Thousands dead in January.
Ireland's situation was at least partly caused by Kent Covid though
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It might be a decision by the Supermarket as there are far less people going to Supermarkets at the moment so there is no point fully stocking shelves. The Tescos by me has been very quiet all January
I've never encountered a supermarket that voluntarily left empty shelves.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
It would be a lot easier if you could list those ok and not ok occupations.
No.
I have no respect for "celebrity culture". I am not going to pretend to respect something which is vacuous, deeply narcissistic, unmoored from any real or long-lasting achievement and a cruel deception for our young. No doubt you will accuse me of being a raging snob and/or old fogey and/or out of touch with today's society. But I don't care. There are things of value in this world and things which are not - poncing about in a hotel taking photos of yourself, sending them to your "followers" like some sort of consumerist Messiah is laughable nonsense. Whining about restrictions on this to protect lives/health is not of value, not now in the middle of a pandemic. It's deeply selfish and really very unappealing, to put it mildly, when one considers the hard work that doctors and nurses and many others are doing to help those put at risk and in harm's way by the selfish behaviour of others.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
All of Europe had the borders open over summer, the error was assuming that travel to a low-prevalence country on holiday was safe.
And you're suggesting we repeat that mistake by not having a blanket policy.
"I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment"
That was the wrong policy then and it's the wri g policy now. Let people come and go as they please to any country, but they should know that when the arrive in the UK it's going to be 10 days in a quarantine hotel and a negative test. To get into the wider country.
Well, you miss where I suggest people need to get an exit visa to reduce travel to the purely essential
That seems unnecessarily bureaucratic and easy to game. This is fullproof, everyone who arrives does their 10 days and gets a negative test to leave. We can, once we've got virus levels down to almost nothing, speak to countries with similarly tough border policies about easier travel such as only needing a negative test on both sides or a reduced quarantine period to just a few days. We should not have an open border for any country, regardless of what the personal reasons are.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million of the UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
Wait, countries with larger populations than us have higher death figures.
This is why the excess figures and deaths per millions figure are better pointers.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
She's getting paid to enjoy herself. Good for her, she's a great example of what to be in life.
I don't blame her, but it is a profoundly depressing comment on the superficiality of the influencer lifestyle. Not least is the lack of transparency of how her adverts are disguised as social media posts for the gullible.
I suppose there will always be feckless youths, and it is just my inner Puritan showing.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
It would be a lot easier if you could list those ok and not ok occupations.
No.
I have no respect for "celebrity culture". I am not going to pretend to respect something which is vacuous, deeply narcissistic, unmoored from any real or long-lasting achievement and a cruel deception for our young. No doubt you will accuse me of being a raging snob and/or old fogey and/or out of touch with today's society. But I don't care. There are things of value in this world and things which are not - poncing about in a hotel taking photos of yourself, sending them to your "followers" like some sort of consumerist Messiah is laughable nonsense. Whining about restrictions on this to protect lives/health is not of value, not now in the middle of a pandemic. It's deeply selfish and really very unappealing, to put it mildly, when one considers the hard work that doctors and nurses and many others are doing to help those put at risk and in harm's way by the selfish behaviour of others.
Celebrity culture is only a thing because people want to consume it.
The Chelsea Flower Show, Youtube influencers, the Sistine Chapel.
All because people like those things.
You are perfectly entitled to opine on any or all of them. Or respect none of them. But ascribing motivations and psychological states to their practitioners or fans is just, er, vacuous and deeply narcissistic.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
All countries in first para have bigger populations that UK.
R4 "More or less" debunking the "Scottish drug deaths are not comparable with other countries" myth - while there are minor differences, the big picture is they're much worse, and attempts to play them down are typically found from proponents of independence.
The obvious comparator is England. They have the same legal structure in the Misuse of Drugs Act, the same sort of reporting structures and a very similar population. Why are we so different?
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It may be a specifically Sainsbury's issue. When we went to the one in Leamington on Saturday the fresh fruit and veg shelves were noticeably empty. There were also shortages of many other things.
More generally, have lamb prices come down yet? They don't seem to have.
What is Sainsbury's for, exactly, now?
They seem a mid-range bleurgh type of shop.
De gustibus, etc. I have Sainsbury, Tesco and Waitrose locally. The first two offer a good choice at reasonable prices. Waitrose offers the same things for about 15% more, as well as a few things that the others don't. So in normal times I shop at Sainsbury for most things and Waitrose for the occasional exotica. I've tried Aldi and Lidl in the past and wouldn't consider them - just not enough predictable choice. Morrisons and Asda are OK.
Essentially this feels like the browser was that used to rage - Firefox vs Chrome etc. The key point was that they are all essentially the same.
Having our weekly delivery from Sainsbury's later on today, only have a few substitutions (Cod fillets instead of cod loins, different type of yoghurt from what was ordered,)
The issue is not being able to order things in the first place, no courgettes, avocado, and aubergines, that sort of thing.
I doubt even contrarian advocates for the current situation of open borders and closed schools and businesses ...
My point is that he might say, and I might have some sympathy if he were to do so, that your point "There is no possible justification to kick the can on this, unless you don't want this ever to be done." has resonance.
These are precious freedoms that have been taken away for every good reason as we all know. But the unquestioning acceptance of this is very worrying. You seem now to have reached a point whereby you are asking important questions that, for example, Steve Baker god help us all has also been asking.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
This is a good example of how Johnson supporters try to minimise the disaster that he has visited on us. "Oh well, lots of other places have had deaths and anyway it's only a small percentage of the population." That is an insult to the dead and an insult to the intelligence of those who mourn.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
It would be a lot easier if you could list those ok and not ok occupations.
No.
I have no respect for "celebrity culture". I am not going to pretend to respect something which is vacuous, deeply narcissistic, unmoored from any real or long-lasting achievement and a cruel deception for our young. No doubt you will accuse me of being a raging snob and/or old fogey and/or out of touch with today's society. But I don't care. There are things of value in this world and things which are not - poncing about in a hotel taking photos of yourself, sending them to your "followers" like some sort of consumerist Messiah is laughable nonsense. Whining about restrictions on this to protect lives/health is not of value, not now in the middle of a pandemic. It's deeply selfish and really very unappealing, to put it mildly, when one considers the hard work that doctors and nurses and many others are doing to help those put at risk and in harm's way by the selfish behaviour of others.
People have a right to be selfish and unappealling.
Others have a right to call out selfish and unappealling behaviour.
A horribly difficult time for those in charge anywhere, knowing that literally thousands of lives rest on every decision that’s made.
Blair and Cameron both said in their memoirs, that the most difficult thing they ever did was having to make the final call on military operations abroad, knowing that both service and civilian lives were on the line. This past year will have have been constantly like that, in slow motion as every call played out over a period of weeks.
The next big call is on hotel quarantines. I say do it with no exceptions, until everyone has been vaccinated. No-one *needs* a summer holiday abroad, and those business travellers who really need to go sign that big deal will happily pay the hotel bill. There needs to be a sense of being all in this together, not of a two-tier ‘lockdown’ where making a social media fitness video from a foreign beach counts as ‘work’.
Hotel quarantine for all incoming travellers is only a worthwhile policy if we have suppressed the rate of infection to close to zero. In that sense it is a complement to, not a substitute for, continued lockdown measures. I would support it if it were implemented when we had suppressed domestic transmission, but not as a psychological displacement activity aimed at focusing people's ire on z-list celebs rather than government failures.
So explain why Australia had no second wave while we had a horrible one, worse than the first wave. The best time to start is tomorrow.
They had suppressed the virus almost to zero I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment. Maybe what we should do is restrict travel further. Hardly anyone should need to travel for business and I don't believe that adults need to see other adult family members, unless they are about to die. You should have to apply for a visa to enter or leave the country, and provide evidence.
Had we started a hotel quarantine scheme in April or May in lockdown 1 it would have been in place for the start of the second wave across Europe. I can forgive being caught our by the first wave, a pandemic isn't something we're particularly geared up for, our health service runs on a marginal capacity basis and we're a huge commerce and travel hub. It was natural that the first wave would hit us very badly, regardless of who was in power.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
All of Europe had the borders open over summer, the error was assuming that travel to a low-prevalence country on holiday was safe.
And you're suggesting we repeat that mistake by not having a blanket policy.
"I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment"
That was the wrong policy then and it's the wri g policy now. Let people come and go as they please to any country, but they should know that when the arrive in the UK it's going to be 10 days in a quarantine hotel and a negative test. To get into the wider country.
Well, you miss where I suggest people need to get an exit visa to reduce travel to the purely essential
That seems unnecessarily bureaucratic and easy to game. This is fullproof, everyone who arrives does their 10 days and gets a negative test to leave. We can, once we've got virus levels down to almost nothing, speak to countries with similarly tough border policies about easier travel such as only needing a negative test on both sides or a reduced quarantine period to just a few days. We should not have an open border for any country, regardless of what the personal reasons are.
Well, in the end it's not going to bother me, much as I like to travel I am assuming I shouldn't do it at the moment, and if I did, it wouldn't be much fun anyway as most places are locked down to a greater or lesser extent. While I could self-isolate on my return, as I am working from home, I'm not going to try. Although I am perhaps sceptical about how "leaky" hotel quarantine might turn out in practice, and it is likely to be those who have engaged in the riskiest practices while abroad who are most likely to try to escape hotel arrest
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It might be a decision by the Supermarket as there are far less people going to Supermarkets at the moment so there is no point fully stocking shelves. The Tescos by me has been very quiet all January
I've never encountered a supermarket that voluntarily left empty shelves.
Well - speaking from knowledge of our local supermarket - shelves have pre pandemic not been full (at times) as they felt they needed to reduce staff spend temporarily due to budget constraints so had less staff in to stack shelves.
I was in the same supermarket this weekend and there were gaps on shelves - I asked an employee who I know was this a Brexit thing - they said no, in their case it was due to sheer numbers of staff out either infected or isolating in realtion to COVID.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
She's getting paid to enjoy herself. Good for her, she's a great example of what to be in life.
I don't blame her, but it is a profoundly depressing comment on the superficiality of the influencer lifestyle. Not least is the lack of transparency of how her adverts are disguised as social media posts for the gullible.
I suppose there will always be feckless youths, and it is just my inner Puritan showing.
Cue quotes from the 16/17th Century about the debauched masses enjoying "William Shakespeare".
She seems to think that Kent Covid was predictable.
That much was, maybe not Kent specifically but somewhere. Viruses do mutate.
All the talk last year was of mutations tending to be less deadly as the virus adapts to its host.
Not more transmissable and more deadly.
Deadliness is irrelevant (to virus success) unless it interferes with transmission. Killing too quickly is bad for a virus as it reduces transmission, but what happens to the host after transmission to others is irrelevant. Viruses can be extremely deadly and very successful - take HIV for example, before modern therapies.
It's a balance too - even killing quickly and reducing transmission time by 1/3 will be selected by evolutionary pressure if the same mutation set makes doubles transmission per unit time - the mutated virus will have an R0 4/3 times (2*2/3) the R0 of the original strain.
I guess there is also another, quite new, evolutionary pressure in that being more deadly means that humans will take greater steps to develop vaccines, therapies and interrupt transmission - if SARS-CoV-2 wasn't deadly for anyone then we'd be doing very little/nothing to combat it and it would be more successful!
Final thought before I start an epic video conference.
I did speak to a couple of pollsters who run focus groups on this, there's a few things the voters associate Boris Johnson and the pandemic with, something he cannot shake off.
1) Dominic Cummings (and he was a good parent because he broke quarantine, whilst everyone else who stayed at home were bad parents) but we've discussed that to tedium in the way we discuss AV and Scottish independence.
2) The outbreak in Number 10 right at the start of the pandemic, the government was telling us to do x to avoid Covid-19, it fitted this meme that the rules were for little people.
3) The sheer number of Covid-19 related contracts going to Tory donors and friends, the voters could live with that if they were qualified, but awarding them to egregious unqualified companies and people is something the voters do remember.
As I said 1-3 have been consistently raised in the polls and focus groups.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
Anecdata: Sainsnbury's shelves were pretty empty yesterday. Whether due to Brexit or Covid interfering with delivery, I could not say.
It may be a specifically Sainsbury's issue. When we went to the one in Leamington on Saturday the fresh fruit and veg shelves were noticeably empty. There were also shortages of many other things.
More generally, have lamb prices come down yet? They don't seem to have.
What is Sainsbury's for, exactly, now?
They seem a mid-range bleurgh type of shop.
What's wrong with mid-range? That's exactly what I want from a supermarket.
Having our weekly delivery from Sainsbury's later on today, only have a few substitutions (Cod fillets instead of cod loins, different type of yoghurt from what was ordered,)
The issue is not being able to order things in the first place, no courgettes, avocado, and aubergines, that sort of thing.
Prices have gone up quite a few things.
You need to shop at a more competent supermarket, avocados are in plentiful supply at Waitrose and I am sure courgettes and aubergines were on the shelves. The avocado I'm having for lunch comes from Colombia so presumably unaffected by Brexit
I doubt even contrarian advocates for the current situation of open borders and closed schools and businesses ...
My point is that he might say, and I might have some sympathy if he were to do so, that your point "There is no possible justification to kick the can on this, unless you don't want this ever to be done." has resonance.
These are precious freedoms that have been taken away for every good reason as we all know. But the unquestioning acceptance of this is very worrying. You seem now to have reached a point whereby you are asking important questions that, for example, Steve Baker god help us all has also been asking.
Indeed. And in case you missed it I was on the side of Steve Baker (urgh) last year during the rebellion on giving the executive untrammelled powers to pass new laws without a vote in Parliament. These issues should be discussed and debated.
Sadly for the past 12 months genuine scrutiny (as opposed to bandwagon jumping) has come primarily from the likes of Baker rather than the opposition benches.
Maybe with more Parliamentary scrutiny some of these issues might be getting discussed and debated. Instead we've got everything being nodded through without a second though, then Captain Hindsight popping up at midday on Wednesdays to jump on the latest bandwagon that's already been identified and is already getting dealt with.
On the previous topic, I am really not sure the Democrats should have pushed for impeachment and said so all the way on here. They should have let it go. Trump is, for now, yesterday's man and it's for the Republicans to deal with him.
No no no. Whether it succeeds or not if he did something that serious the attempt should be made. There will be arguments around not being convicted, but 'it's too much hassle' is not one of them, nor that the Republicans and courts might deal with him.
The constitution provided it as an option presumably as sometimes leaving it to others was not considered appropriate.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
If you want to be precise 100,000 deaths is 0.15% of the UK population, a tragedy but has to be seen in context. The high rate of UK vaccinations is also encouraging and should improve our relative performance over the next few months.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
This is a good example of how Johnson supporters try to minimise the disaster that he has visited on us. "Oh well, lots of other places have had deaths and anyway it's only a small percentage of the population." That is an insult to the dead and an insult to the intelligence of those who mourn.
We should compare excess deaths per head of population once the pandemic is over.
This calculation cannot be done right now because excess deaths (the true measure of all the deaths caused by COVID) are not available right now.
However, the outline is pretty clear. Boris (& Nicola & Mark) have not performed very differently from comparable countries in Europe,
I would not be too surprised if all of Europe (except Norway and Finland) are pretty much in the same place at the end of all this.
No one has done very well in Europe. Germany a bit better than the UK & France & Italy, but not so much any more.
Now, of course, you can compare with NZ or Japan or Taiwan, but the truth is all of Western Europe has done badly.
Tbh, it is not a great advert for Europe.
It is not a great advert for Boris, but nor is it great for Mark, Nicola, Emmanuel, Giuseppe and Angela.
Much discussion here and elsewhere on the figure for Covid deaths in the UK, which is indeed horrendous.
However, I'd be a bit wary of premature international comparisons; our final ranking in the grim league table is not known yet. We can point to what were clearly, at least with hindsight, big errors by the government, but there were also lots of factors outside the control of the government, and none of this is easy.
To make one obvious point, the awful UK figures of the past few weeks are no doubt partly due to the 'British' variant being so infectious. That effect happens to have hit us first, but this virus doesn't respect borders and it may simply be a timing difference, with other countries lagging behind us on the increased fatalities caused by the variant.
Having our weekly delivery from Sainsbury's later on today, only have a few substitutions (Cod fillets instead of cod loins, different type of yoghurt from what was ordered,)
The issue is not being able to order things in the first place, no courgettes, avocado, and aubergines, that sort of thing.
Prices have gone up quite a few things.
You need to shop at a more competent supermarket, avocados are in plentiful supply at Waitrose and I am sure courgettes and aubergines were on the shelves. The avocado I'm having for lunch comes from Colombia so presumably unaffected by Brexit
We ordered a supplementary shop from Waitrose a fortnight ago, no courgettes, aubergines, or avocados arrived.
Sainsbury's has gone downhill in the last 20 years. It used to be an affordable M&S sort of standard, or just beneath it, but it's gone from middle middle-class to lower middle-class as it has ASDA'ed and ARGOS'ed itself.
I think it's barely above Tesco now and Morrisons is better.
Not being on Instagram or interested in celebrity influences, I had missed out on Sheridan. Watching her in Dubai is profoundly depressing. The arrogant disrespect for local culture in the pouting selfie on a camel is just too much.
The only "influence" people like Sheridan should be having is as an example of what not to be in life.
Would you prefer it if she was picking fruit and veg?
I'd prefer her not to be a vacuous ninny. Being a gardener - learning to grow, pick and cook fruit and vegetables - is infinitely more useful than what she - and many like her - are doing.
It would be a lot easier if you could list those ok and not ok occupations.
No.
I have no respect for "celebrity culture". I am not going to pretend to respect something which is vacuous, deeply narcissistic, unmoored from any real or long-lasting achievement and a cruel deception for our young. No doubt you will accuse me of being a raging snob and/or old fogey and/or out of touch with today's society. But I don't care. There are things of value in this world and things which are not - poncing about in a hotel taking photos of yourself, sending them to your "followers" like some sort of consumerist Messiah is laughable nonsense. Whining about restrictions on this to protect lives/health is not of value, not now in the middle of a pandemic. It's deeply selfish and really very unappealing, to put it mildly, when one considers the hard work that doctors and nurses and many others are doing to help those put at risk and in harm's way by the selfish behaviour of others.
Celebrity culture is only a thing because people want to consume it.
The Chelsea Flower Show, Youtube influencers, the Sistine Chapel.
All because people like those things.
You are perfectly entitled to opine on any or all of them. Or respect none of them. But ascribing motivations and psychological states to their practitioners or fans is just, er, vacuous and deeply narcissistic.
Judging others is what adults do. Judgment is an essential quality of being an adult. Or ought to be. You are free to disagree with my judgments, of course. Disagreeing or commenting on others' judgments is pretty much the point of this forum But the idea that being judgmental is a bad thing and that being non-judgmental is a good thing (which seems to me to be a relatively recent development) is IMO a development for the worse.
The 100,000 figure obviously is sad news for the families involved but it should be remembered that the US, India, Mexico and Brazil passed that milestone before the UK. While the pandemic is also leading to the most excess deaths here since WW2 100,000 deaths is still less than 0.5% of the 66 million UK population if we look at it in context.
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
Sainsbury's has gone downhill in the last 20 years. It used to be an affordable M&S sort of standard, or just beneath it, but it's gone from middle middle-class to lower middle-class as it has ASDA'ed and ARGOS'ed itself.
I think it's barely above Tesco now and Morrisons is better.
Ironically plenty of Sainsbury's now have an Argos in them.
Much discussion here and elsewhere on the figure for Covid deaths in the UK, which is indeed horrendous.
However, I'd be a bit wary of premature international comparisons; our final ranking in the grim league table is not known yet. We can point to what were clearly, at least with hindsight, big errors by the government, but there were also lots of factors outside the control of the government, and none of this is easy.
To make one obvious point, the awful UK figures of the past few weeks are no doubt partly due to the 'British' variant being so infectious. That effect happens to have hit us first, but this virus doesn't respect borders and it may simply be a timing difference, with other countries lagging behind us on the increased fatalities caused by the variant.
In one sense the world is extremely lucky that the variant arose in Britain, given we were the only major country in the world to be monitoring strains like we are.
Had this been a Lyon variant or a Koln variant etc then it would have been around spread far more around the continent and the globe before anyone was aware what was going on, or what it meant.
Der Spiegel (pretty mainstream magazine though with a bias to being anti whoever is in power) reporting the "maybe only give AZ to younger people" speculation too now - I don't think there's much doubt that it's under consideration, though it'll be Friday (EMA decision) and Saturday (German discussion with states) that will decide it.
I may be wrong, but the clear impression that I'm getting from the partial leaks is that the issue is that the clinical trials showed generally good effectiveness for AZ but the sample size for over-65s was small enough to produce a large margin of error for that group - very much like our often-discussed Scottish subsamples, which occasionally produce very odd results. Possibly the 95% certainty range does extend down to 8% as reported at the extreme low end.
You can look at that data in two ways. Either you say "The pattern for the elderly seems similar to everyone else, maybe a bit lower but not dramatically, so let's push ahead, as otherwise we'll be short of vaccine to supply." That's the British position as I understand it - if we had an infinite supply of 95% effective Pfizer, tested extensively on the elderly, we'd only use that - but we don't. Or you say "The elderly are especially vulnerable to Covid so we need to get this right. Let's delay giving them the AZ vaccine until we have reliable AZ results for the elderly, even if that slows rollout." That seems to be what the Germans are considering (and it would also explain why they'rre being so hardline about Pfizer's supply, as it's the main available alternative).
I don't think either position is incomprehensible or stupid, or a reason to panic (or to slag off Handelsblatt for reporting what they're told). The vaccine probably works well for all age groups, and it's just a question of whether to be super-cautious because the elderly sample is still small.
Having our weekly delivery from Sainsbury's later on today, only have a few substitutions (Cod fillets instead of cod loins, different type of yoghurt from what was ordered,)
The issue is not being able to order things in the first place, no courgettes, avocado, and aubergines, that sort of thing.
Prices have gone up quite a few things.
You need to shop at a more competent supermarket, avocados are in plentiful supply at Waitrose and I am sure courgettes and aubergines were on the shelves. The avocado I'm having for lunch comes from Colombia so presumably unaffected by Brexit
We ordered a supplementary shop from Waitrose a fortnight ago, no courgettes, aubergines, or avocados arrived.
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “‘The horror! The horror!”
Much discussion here and elsewhere on the figure for Covid deaths in the UK, which is indeed horrendous.
However, I'd be a bit wary of premature international comparisons; our final ranking in the grim league table is not known yet. We can point to what were clearly, at least with hindsight, big errors by the government, but there were also lots of factors outside the control of the government, and none of this is easy.
To make one obvious point, the awful UK figures of the past few weeks are no doubt partly due to the 'British' variant being so infectious. That effect happens to have hit us first, but this virus doesn't respect borders and it may simply be a timing difference, with other countries lagging behind us on the increased fatalities caused by the variant.
It's not about the international comparison or league tables for me. It's that we knew exactly how to avoid a second wave (tough border controls) and did nothing instead. The 60,000 people who died in the second wave did so because Boris didn't close the borders, it's on him. Now we're repeating the same mistake, how many more have to die for Boris to close the borders?
She seems to think that Kent Covid was predictable.
That much was, maybe not Kent specifically but somewhere. Viruses do mutate.
All the talk last year was of mutations tending to be less deadly as the virus adapts to its host.
Not more transmissable and more deadly.
That was always contrarian anti-lockdown wishful thinking. "Oh, viruses always go away in the end, so why should I do anything that interferes with my personal freedoms?" is the core thought process. Anything that supports the premise is boosted, anything that doesn’t is quietly ignored.
There are a bunch of journalists out there that have made their living churning out this stuff to a willing readership that laps it up because they don’t want to actually think hard about anything in their lives, nor take responsibility for the outcomes of their choices. They weren’t about to stop writing contrarian nonsense just because there was a pandemic on. We saw exactly the same pattern back in the 1918 flu pandemic too - you can go read the newspapers of the time about the anti-mask leagues and all the rest. People don’t change.
Comments
But it doesn't stop me wanting it. Or speaking up about the revolting nature of China's regime and the wicked things they are doing.
Is there any reason we can't compare the UK to Japan?
https://twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1354355187423567872?s=20
The stupid thing is they tried to play it off and blame AZN for their own failings - as if AZN were a punching bag who would just sit there and take it. They're doing this not for profit for heaven't sake, not as if they're making billions of profit and a skyrocketing share price thanks to this.
So it makes perfect sense for AZN to calmly and rationally point out the cause for delays, which are of the EU's making as it turns out, rather than simply allow their reputation to be trashed because some politicians can't accept anything is their fault.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
I couldn't promise you a revealing mankini, however.
So you aren't happy - we have taken it as a cancellation request and will start to supply xyz countries (Brazil and South Africa say) earlier.
It is how supermarkets in the past used to all "guarantee" your basket of goods is cheaper there than other supermarkets. When you build your original basket you're naturally and subconsciously drawn to offers and discounted products which apply in your original basket price.
When you replicate an order it doesn't flag up the promotional items whose promotion has expired - nor the alternative goods that are now on promotion you might have bought instead if building the basket from scratch this time.
Similarly with the old "guarantee" on your basket of goods - your basket of goods that you bought will be cheaper as it will include promotions that others may not have. While shoppers elsewhere get a cheaper basket as they've included promotions that you aren't seeing and haven't picked up.
See this article from nearly a decade ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16002303
"Replication" of orders is fantastic news for supermarkets as you now pay full price for your basket.
".... but his delay in taking action last March could be a big negative."
I think it is very clear why he delayed ... the scientific modelling in March indicated that was the correct course of action.
This is very clear from the documents released by SAGE. The modellers in SAGE initially thought the spread of the disease would be slower and the peak of the first wave much later than actually occurred.
It is hard to know who to blame. The modellers, acting with incomplete information on an unknown disease, suggested a course of action that led to many deaths.
The modellers were in a difficult position -- they had to suggest a strategy for a very complicated problem with very little information. The politicians were pretty much bound to follow the advise, as they lacked the expertise to challenge the scientists.
Note --because I like to compare the Forgotten Country (certainly by Labour activists) with England -- Drakeford actually delayed longer than Johnson.
FWIW, I don't think Johnson, Drakeford or Sturgeon are to blame. I am sure all three will be wracked with grief & despair at what has happened.
They seem a mid-range bleurgh type of shop.
There's also the 'normal by Christmas' front pages from last summer as well.
We must close the border to all incoming travellers ASAP or we will import a vaccine resistant variant and it won't matter that we've immunised 6m or 60m, the whole thing starts again.
1 - Emma Kennedy needs a therapist.
2 - The Minister needs an Interior Designer.
EOTHO wasn't daft when many towns and cities were showing zero covid cases. Malmesbury's excellent breakdown of cases originally had just 5 authorities showing in red. The cases weren't spread by EOTHO they were imported from overseas.
The time for restrictions is now, while we are locked down you lock down everything. The time for lifting restrictions is in the future and travel should be the last restriction to be lifted not the first.
What possible reason do you have to lock down schools now but not Piers Morons foreign holiday? When my daughters are crying because they're going stir crazy at home, miss their friends and want to go to school - why is Piers overseas more important than that?
Children's education is so important to the rest of their lives. It should be the last thing locked down and the first thing lifted. Yet the border controls are for "later on". Why?
Now having a go at Siobhan McDonagh MP for asserting untrue claims that supermarkets are known to be a major vector of COVID infection.
And debunking criticism of Scottish Drug Death stats. Courtesy of the Ferret.
The second wave was entirely avoidable and, IMO, unforgivable. All of our politicians flunked it. Where was Labour opposition to keeping the border open? Where was Priti's resignation over this issue? She'd literally be sitting in pole position right now had she forced the issue because Boris owns the policy of keeping the border open and the whole second wave.
He can say "I'm sorry" as much as he wants but actions speak louder than words, we're repeating all of the same errors as after lockdown 1. He's learned absolutely nothing from 100,000 needless deaths, of which 60,000 were in a totally avoidable second wave.
Nothing seems to have gone wrong. She did not develop the disease and nor did he but as a policy this seemed, with the greatest of respect to HMG, not very joined up. I can sort of see why so many wonder why they are bothering when obvious potential vectors are just ignored or apparently not thought of.
And it is always easier to announce new restrictions than to give the restrictions you already have time to work.
That's the point of schools being shut, that's the point of restaurants being shut, that's the point of masks, that's the point of telling people they can't visit their relatives with dementia in a care home, that's the point of telling people their loved ones are dying in a sterile hospital environment without anyone to hold their hand or say goodbye.
If there's a marginal gain to be had then take it. Every gain helps now. If that means schools can open 1 week sooner, then great reopen schools a week sooner. There is no point in kicking the can unless you're talking about a loss not a gain.
Lockdown 2 would have reduced numbers by a greater extent, but they would still have been at a high level at the start of December. Since we wouldn't have had as rapid growth in cases in London and the South-East before Christmas, we would have gone ahead with the Christmas relaxation as planned - which would likely have put us into the situation experienced by Ireland.
The details and timing would be different, but fundamentally the outcomes would have been the same. Thousands dead in January.
It's pretty obvious that all this rage at z listers in Dubai is just being whipped up to distract from the fact the government failed to keep a lid on this thing and 100,000 people are dead. Personally I have no intention to go anywhere, certainly not fucking Dubai, so rest assured I am not talking my book here.
"I can see the point at the moment of hotel quarantine from areas that might import virus from areas where new variants are prevalent, but in general most of the world has less than us at the moment"
That was the wrong policy then and it's the wri g policy now. Let people come and go as they please to any country, but they should know that when the arrive in the UK it's going to be 10 days in a quarantine hotel and a negative test. To get into the wider country.
Retail Outlet A: "retail outlet As only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections"
Barberhsop: "barbershops only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections"
Gyms: "gyms only contribute 1.5% to Covid infections"
etc
A system put in place today isn't about today, it's about ensuring it's in pave for the third wave of vaccine resistant variants. The only way to do that is to close the border, ideally a two island approach with Ireland as was being suggested by them yesterday.
Perhaps it should have been done last May. It wasn't here, or in any other European nation, or in the USA and we don't have a Tardis.
We can't turn back time, we can only learn the lessons, deal with the present and the future.
The costs are not that significant. Not compared to the costs of having another lockdown again. If a new variant comes in that is more transmissable and vaccine-resistant then we're going to be going into September with exponential cases once more.
Restrictions need to be put in place now while we're locked down. If they're not put in place now then they're never going to be put in place. By the summer it will be a case of people saying "well that was horrid, I'm off for a well deserved week in the sun" and damn the consequences. It is now or never - and doing it now lets people plan for the future. Doing it now lets people plan what they're going to do, domestically, in the summer. Or lets them plan to ensure they can meet the quarantine rules for work.
There is no possible justification to kick the can on this, unless you don't want this ever to be done.
Not more transmissable and more deadly.
I have no respect for "celebrity culture". I am not going to pretend to respect something which is vacuous, deeply narcissistic, unmoored from any real or long-lasting achievement and a cruel deception for our young. No doubt you will accuse me of being a raging snob and/or old fogey and/or out of touch with today's society. But I don't care. There are things of value in this world and things which are not - poncing about in a hotel taking photos of yourself, sending them to your "followers" like some sort of consumerist Messiah is laughable nonsense. Whining about restrictions on this to protect lives/health is not of value, not now in the middle of a pandemic. It's deeply selfish and really very unappealing, to put it mildly, when one considers the hard work that doctors and nurses and many others are doing to help those put at risk and in harm's way by the selfish behaviour of others.
And I'm not even joking...
Italy with 86,422 deaths and France with 74,106 deaths are also likely to join the list in due course unfortunately
This is why the excess figures and deaths per millions figure are better pointers.
I suppose there will always be feckless youths, and it is just my inner Puritan showing.
The Chelsea Flower Show, Youtube influencers, the Sistine Chapel.
All because people like those things.
You are perfectly entitled to opine on any or all of them. Or respect none of them. But ascribing motivations and psychological states to their practitioners or fans is just, er, vacuous and deeply narcissistic.
Essentially this feels like the browser was that used to rage - Firefox vs Chrome etc. The key point was that they are all essentially the same.
The issue is not being able to order things in the first place, no courgettes, avocado, and aubergines, that sort of thing.
Prices have gone up quite a few things.
These are precious freedoms that have been taken away for every good reason as we all know. But the unquestioning acceptance of this is very worrying. You seem now to have reached a point whereby you are asking important questions that, for example, Steve Baker god help us all has also been asking.
Others have a right to call out selfish and unappealling behaviour.
Now, let’s move onto dildo..
I was in the same supermarket this weekend and there were gaps on shelves - I asked an employee who I know was this a Brexit thing - they said no, in their case it was due to sheer numbers of staff out either infected or isolating in realtion to COVID.
https://twitter.com/sparkyhamill/status/1354363945319100416?s=21
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1354366660988313602?s=20
It's a balance too - even killing quickly and reducing transmission time by 1/3 will be selected by evolutionary pressure if the same mutation set makes doubles transmission per unit time - the mutated virus will have an R0 4/3 times (2*2/3) the R0 of the original strain.
I guess there is also another, quite new, evolutionary pressure in that being more deadly means that humans will take greater steps to develop vaccines, therapies and interrupt transmission - if SARS-CoV-2 wasn't deadly for anyone then we'd be doing very little/nothing to combat it and it would be more successful!
I did speak to a couple of pollsters who run focus groups on this, there's a few things the voters associate Boris Johnson and the pandemic with, something he cannot shake off.
1) Dominic Cummings (and he was a good parent because he broke quarantine, whilst everyone else who stayed at home were bad parents) but we've discussed that to tedium in the way we discuss AV and Scottish independence.
2) The outbreak in Number 10 right at the start of the pandemic, the government was telling us to do x to avoid Covid-19, it fitted this meme that the rules were for little people.
3) The sheer number of Covid-19 related contracts going to Tory donors and friends, the voters could live with that if they were qualified, but awarding them to egregious unqualified companies and people is something the voters do remember.
As I said 1-3 have been consistently raised in the polls and focus groups.
Sadly for the past 12 months genuine scrutiny (as opposed to bandwagon jumping) has come primarily from the likes of Baker rather than the opposition benches.
Maybe with more Parliamentary scrutiny some of these issues might be getting discussed and debated. Instead we've got everything being nodded through without a second though, then Captain Hindsight popping up at midday on Wednesdays to jump on the latest bandwagon that's already been identified and is already getting dealt with.
The constitution provided it as an option presumably as sometimes leaving it to others was not considered appropriate.
This calculation cannot be done right now because excess deaths (the true measure of all the deaths caused by COVID) are not available right now.
However, the outline is pretty clear. Boris (& Nicola & Mark) have not performed very differently from comparable countries in Europe,
I would not be too surprised if all of Europe (except Norway and Finland) are pretty much in the same place at the end of all this.
No one has done very well in Europe. Germany a bit better than the UK & France & Italy, but not so much any more.
Now, of course, you can compare with NZ or Japan or Taiwan, but the truth is all of Western Europe has done badly.
Tbh, it is not a great advert for Europe.
It is not a great advert for Boris, but nor is it great for Mark, Nicola, Emmanuel, Giuseppe and Angela.
However, I'd be a bit wary of premature international comparisons; our final ranking in the grim league table is not known yet. We can point to what were clearly, at least with hindsight, big errors by the government, but there were also lots of factors outside the control of the government, and none of this is easy.
To make one obvious point, the awful UK figures of the past few weeks are no doubt partly due to the 'British' variant being so infectious. That effect happens to have hit us first, but this virus doesn't respect borders and it may simply be a timing difference, with other countries lagging behind us on the increased fatalities caused by the variant.
I think it's barely above Tesco now and Morrisons is better.
Had this been a Lyon variant or a Koln variant etc then it would have been around spread far more around the continent and the globe before anyone was aware what was going on, or what it meant.
I may be wrong, but the clear impression that I'm getting from the partial leaks is that the issue is that the clinical trials showed generally good effectiveness for AZ but the sample size for over-65s was small enough to produce a large margin of error for that group - very much like our often-discussed Scottish subsamples, which occasionally produce very odd results. Possibly the 95% certainty range does extend down to 8% as reported at the extreme low end.
You can look at that data in two ways. Either you say "The pattern for the elderly seems similar to everyone else, maybe a bit lower but not dramatically, so let's push ahead, as otherwise we'll be short of vaccine to supply." That's the British position as I understand it - if we had an infinite supply of 95% effective Pfizer, tested extensively on the elderly, we'd only use that - but we don't. Or you say "The elderly are especially vulnerable to Covid so we need to get this right. Let's delay giving them the AZ vaccine until we have reliable AZ results for the elderly, even if that slows rollout." That seems to be what the Germans are considering (and it would also explain why they'rre being so hardline about Pfizer's supply, as it's the main available alternative).
I don't think either position is incomprehensible or stupid, or a reason to panic (or to slag off Handelsblatt for reporting what they're told). The vaccine probably works well for all age groups, and it's just a question of whether to be super-cautious because the elderly sample is still small.
There are a bunch of journalists out there that have made their living churning out this stuff to a willing readership that laps it up because they don’t want to actually think hard about anything in their lives, nor take responsibility for the outcomes of their choices. They weren’t about to stop writing contrarian nonsense just because there was a pandemic on. We saw exactly the same pattern back in the 1918 flu pandemic too - you can go read the newspapers of the time about the anti-mask leagues and all the rest. People don’t change.