Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
1. These things are relative. "Not as bad as Nazi Germany" is a pretty low bar to be setting. And in some respects Covid is worse than the War. How people in 1940 would have coped if most of them were made to sit uselessly at home most of the time and were forbidden physical contact with all their friends and family can only be guessed at, but it's likely not to have turned out very well.
2. They probably aren't but at this stage in the game it can't be helped if the dismal thought lurks in the back of one's mind. The mood music emanating from Government is that ministers are scared witless (one of them has been forced today to admit that yet more lockdowns might still happen,) and we know that SAGE represents a range of opinion that encompasses sensible, Whitty-like figures who know this crap can't go on and on and on, but also zero Covid types and some who have already publicly expressed the opinion that we may need to put up with masks and a degree of social distancing quite literally forever. If sensible caution gives way to total paranoia then God alone knows when the nightmare will finally end.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
I don't think it needs to be an intentional evil plan.
But I can all too easily see a very slow opening up due to "an abundance of caution", maybe being able to do a few limited things mostly outside in July and August, and then before you know it them tightening things up again in September out of either a new abundance of caution about winter and/or panic about whatever the latest variants are.
Probably I'll be wrong, but we're in a situation now where they seem to be of the opinion that because we've been generally so obedient about being cooped up all this time that actually you can get away with extending it a good bit yet just to make sure.
All sense of "not one second longer than necessary" has melted away to "well probably just keep doing something like that for a while becuase it'll help".
It's a delicate balance, possibly impossible to judge perfectly. Three times so far (February 2020, September, and December) HMG has erred on the side of laxity with disasterous results. It would not be a surprise if they erred on the side of caution now.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is not an evil time to be alive - as long as you are not working for the NHS or in an essential customer facing job. Otherwise you have a choice whether you protect yourself and stay alive. The examples above shown that not everyone had that choice.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Though on the other hand, aerosols deliver the virus to the lungs while droplets are filtered out in nose and upper respiratory tract.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is not an evil time to be alive - as long as you are not working for the NHS or in an essential customer facing job. Otherwise you have a choice whether you protect yourself and stay alive. The examples above shown that not everyone had that choice.
Of course it's fucking evil. Billions of people are denied the basic solace of being touched by another human. Families are riven. Economies are stricken. Millions have died.
Just "staying alive" is not life. If mere existence is your definition of a reasonable life then I can only pity you
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
I don't think it needs to be an intentional evil plan.
But I can all too easily see a very slow opening up due to "an abundance of caution", maybe being able to do a few limited things mostly outside in July and August, and then before you know it them tightening things up again in September out of either a new abundance of caution about winter and/or panic about whatever the latest variants are.
Probably I'll be wrong, but we're in a situation now where they seem to be of the opinion that because we've been generally so obedient about being cooped up all this time that actually you can get away with extending it a good bit yet just to make sure.
All sense of "not one second longer than necessary" has melted away to "well probably just keep doing something like that for a while becuase it'll help".
It's a delicate balance, possibly impossible to judge perfectly. Three times so far (February 2020, September, and December) HMG has erred on the side of laxity with disasterous results. It would not be a surprise if they erred on the side of caution now.
It's not an unfair point.
All I can speak of is my own frustration. Especially when the line at this stage tends to become "the numbers are going the right which which makes it more important than ever that you 'stick with the rules'"
Which again may well be a reasonable position, but there's not much to grind the gears more than this attitude of increasingly pushing the rules front and centre the closer we get to nominally relaxing them.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
That makes sense, but the evidence is largely indirect. The challenge tests might give us some hard evidence on all of that.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
Boris was.
Eton doesn’t really count, though. I was thinking more of the ones which were good preparation for surviving a stretch in prison.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
Boris was.
Eton doesn’t really count, though. I was thinking more of the ones which were good preparation for surviving a stretch in prison.
Though no doubt Boris would thrive there, too.
I've done prison time. This is much, much worse. Seriously
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
I don't think it needs to be an intentional evil plan.
But I can all too easily see a very slow opening up due to "an abundance of caution", maybe being able to do a few limited things mostly outside in July and August, and then before you know it them tightening things up again in September out of either a new abundance of caution about winter and/or panic about whatever the latest variants are.
Probably I'll be wrong, but we're in a situation now where they seem to be of the opinion that because we've been generally so obedient about being cooped up all this time that actually you can get away with extending it a good bit yet just to make sure.
All sense of "not one second longer than necessary" has melted away to "well probably just keep doing something like that for a while becuase it'll help".
It's a delicate balance, possibly impossible to judge perfectly. Three times so far (February 2020, September, and December) HMG has erred on the side of laxity with disasterous results. It would not be a surprise if they erred on the side of caution now.
It's not an unfair point.
All I can speak of is my own frustration. Especially when the line at this stage tends to become "the numbers are going the right which which makes it more important than ever that you 'stick with the rules'"
Which again may well be a reasonable position, but there's not much to grind the gears more than this attitude of increasingly pushing the rules front and centre the closer we get to nominally relaxing them.
The feeling becomes of a no-way-to-win situation.
It hardly helps that as soon as it looks like the death and hospitalisation counts are going to crater, the emphasis magically shifts to cases. It makes one suspect that, if deaths are driven right back down to tiny numbers, possibly lower even than they were in August, the scientists will then simply say "the disease will take off and there'll be another massacre if cases go above X-per-day" (with value X being some ridiculously low number that's either practically unachievable in the first place, or takes months to reach and then starts going up again the second the prison doors are unlocked.)
It's therefore no wonder poor @solarflare is so worried about what happens in the Autumn. Even if we've finally been permitted to enjoy something a bit less like house arrest by September then, at the first sign of a resurgence of winter illnesses, there is a non-negligible possibility that SAGE will throw a gargantuan strop and force the Prime Minister to start mothballing everything again. And if the Government is frightened back into lockdown then everyone will draw the conclusion (correctly) that this is probably going to go on for many years if not forever.
If the terror of Covid overwhelms society to the extent that no level of infection is acceptable, then everything else other than suppressing it will stop mattering and a worthwhile life will cease to be possible. At that juncture we might as well all just give up.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Though on the other hand, aerosols deliver the virus to the lungs while droplets are filtered out in nose and upper respiratory tract.
Yes. Transmissibility is very complex, and probabilistic. It is not simply that 'droplets are better modes of transmission than aerosols' or vice versa, but that there are multiple factors involved that affect each mode of transmission differently.
For example, I saw a recent paper on the impact of UV-A and UV-B levels on outdoor transmission. Higher levels of UV radiation were more effective at inactivating the virus than lower levels which goes a long way to explaining seasonality and why higher latitudes in both hemispheres are associated with higher levels of infection (and which, given cloud cover and high northern latitude, might be a factor in the UK's high numbers of infections). You'd expect UV to be more effective at viral inactivation in aerosols than in droplets and another reason why fewer transmissions occur outdoors.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
Boris was.
Eton doesn’t really count, though. I was thinking more of the ones which were good preparation for surviving a stretch in prison.
Though no doubt Boris would thrive there, too.
I've done prison time. This is much, much worse. Seriously
Just thinking about the solace of being touched by another human in the jail.
Has anyone else been watching It's a Sin which finished tonight? Emotional and devastating TV. Should definitely win at the BAFTAs
Is it on iPlayer?
I have escaped London for some Essential Flintwork on the Essex Coast. I need something to divert from the constant desire to Knap
It will be on the Channel 4 one. There is a little bit of gay sex in episode 1 that may put some people off but as a whole the series is incredibly well written and acted.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
You've got to wonder what the real figures are like, though. We know that they've been underreporting in India to a big degree - has that changed in degree at all? Or has something else changed? Would be very interesting to know for sure.
Leaving aside reliability of stats, the USA has a higher % of people in high risk groups - eg 16% over 65 vs 6% for India.
On topic, I presume a concern could be groups of volunteers meeting up to unbox and share out leaflets indoors, and the general office administration of delivery, rather than one person shoving a leaflet through a door.
I must say, I find that rather unconvincing. Lots of other delivery firms and warehouses manage this. You could simply have the printer deliver and then timed pick up of boxes from a constitutency office by different volunteers, but with no interaction or socialising and social distancing maintained.
I hope the rules are clarified, even though the Lib Dem leaflets will still go straight in the bin in the Casino household.
I wonder what the reaction would be if a large corporate entity ran a training course that had slides where one could possibly infer that it would be desirable to be less black, Asian, Muslim, Jewish?
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
But surely wokeness is just a culture war fiction invented by the right, or something?
Quite, it's a figment of the Daily Heil's fervent imagination.... except it isn't. It's real, and it is here, and it is ghastly.
If anyone tried to teach this shit to my white daughters: feeling guilty for your skin colour, just for being born that way? Jeez. How is that any better than white supremacism directed at others?
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
And a hell of a lot nicer than LA....only an idiot would choose to live in LA....I don't know anybody who does ;-)
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is not an evil time to be alive - as long as you are not working for the NHS or in an essential customer facing job. Otherwise you have a choice whether you protect yourself and stay alive. The examples above shown that not everyone had that choice.
Of course it's fucking evil. Billions of people are denied the basic solace of being touched by another human. Families are riven. Economies are stricken. Millions have died.
Just "staying alive" is not life. If mere existence is your definition of a reasonable life then I can only pity you
What I'm finding is that it's incredibly disempowering. I want to be able to do something to help, to go to other people and do things for them - but if I do that I put them at risk.
In order to help all I can do is stay home and do nothing. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel part of a collective struggle where I'm contributing my bit.
Whatever political tribe you support (or none) that is dreadfully bad and unfunny. The Left is congenitally unable to laugh at itself. It is a real problem
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Hospitality businesses are on their knees now. If they are kept shut until the summer or the autumn, they won't reopen.
The hospitality sector will be added to the list of industries killed or severely wounded by this government's deliberate policies.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is not an evil time to be alive - as long as you are not working for the NHS or in an essential customer facing job. Otherwise you have a choice whether you protect yourself and stay alive. The examples above shown that not everyone had that choice.
Of course it's fucking evil. Billions of people are denied the basic solace of being touched by another human. Families are riven. Economies are stricken. Millions have died.
Just "staying alive" is not life. If mere existence is your definition of a reasonable life then I can only pity you
What I'm finding is that it's incredibly disempowering. I want to be able to do something to help, to go to other people and do things for them - but if I do that I put them at risk.
In order to help all I can do is stay home and do nothing. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel part of a collective struggle where I'm contributing my bit.
Yes, that's it exactly. The best you can do.... is hide away at home meeting as few people as possible. That's it. That's your "war effort".
"What did you do in the Plague, Daddy?"
"Well I mainly hid away and thought about sourdough starters".
Of such things heroes are not made. There is no heroism.
I've had friends who have volunteered to "help in the community" and mainly it means dropping unwanted crap food outside the homes of old people who don't care... and so they've given up
Conversely, I think people in the NHS have it - in some ways - easier. They have a dramatic new prominence and a vital new role - saving the nation. eg I know several people on the NHS frontline who say they are, weirdly, much happier now. Wildly stressed, but happier: they have a heroic part to play - much more like a war - and they are stepping up to do it (and all good luck to them, and many many thanks)
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
(Pedant Mode) By my rubbish calculations I'd make it more like Birmingham to London
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
And a hell of a lot nicer than LA....only an idiot would choose to live in LA....I don't know anybody who does ;-)
If I were to live in California, is would be Santa Barbara. It is the one place that has a walkable, European Mediterranean vibe. It also has a microclimate which is benign even by Golden State standards
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
But in the USA that's basically next door, isn't it?
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
(Pedant Mode) By my rubbish calculations I'd make it more like Birmingham to London
It does rather depend where in LA you start*... so it's somewhere between 90 and 200 miles to Santa Barbara. So, shall we compromise and say London top Bristol>
Am I the only one who hates other people and is dreading having to "socialise" again?
I don't enjoy the anticipation of socialising, I get quite anxious about it and avoid it more than I should even as I enjoy it fine in the moment. But even I am sick of its lack, particularly the sort of casual, unspoken rule based socialisation that awkward people like myself are much more comfortable with, eg in the work setting.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
And a hell of a lot nicer than LA....only an idiot would choose to live in LA....I don't know anybody who does ;-)
If I were to live in California, is would be Santa Barbara. It is the one place that has a walkable, European Mediterranean vibe. It also has a microclimate which is benign even by Golden State standards
My wife and I went up to the Santa Ynez valley last weekend and attempted to recreate Sideways. On the way back, we stopped in Santa Barbara, and it was - as you say - very nice.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
And a hell of a lot nicer than LA....only an idiot would choose to live in LA....I don't know anybody who does ;-)
LA has plenty of lovely parts, and plenty of utterly shit parts.
But surely wokeness is just a culture war fiction invented by the right, or something?
Some of it is. But there's not nothing there, and defensively denying that some of this stuff has gone way too far does not help. Little things can quickly become big things.
Given how often people use the emperor's new clothes analogy, they should feel more comfortable calling out the loonier side of things, so the focus remains on the non-loony stuff.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
You clearly weren’t at boarding school in the 70s....
Boris was.
Eton doesn’t really count, though. I was thinking more of the ones which were good preparation for surviving a stretch in prison.
Though no doubt Boris would thrive there, too.
I've done prison time. This is much, much worse. Seriously
Just thinking about the solace of being touched by another human in the jail.
Nah, yer alright.
I've seen Porridge, prison looks like a right lark.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Though on the other hand, aerosols deliver the virus to the lungs while droplets are filtered out in nose and upper respiratory tract.
Yes. Transmissibility is very complex, and probabilistic. It is not simply that 'droplets are better modes of transmission than aerosols' or vice versa, but that there are multiple factors involved that affect each mode of transmission differently.
For example, I saw a recent paper on the impact of UV-A and UV-B levels on outdoor transmission. Higher levels of UV radiation were more effective at inactivating the virus than lower levels which goes a long way to explaining seasonality and why higher latitudes in both hemispheres are associated with higher levels of infection (and which, given cloud cover and high northern latitude, might be a factor in the UK's high numbers of infections). You'd expect UV to be more effective at viral inactivation in aerosols than in droplets and another reason why fewer transmissions occur outdoors.
I still don't think there's much evidence been proffered for substantial outdoor transmission, even in winter. Yes, temperature is a strong factor in how long COVID survives, but almost certainly less strong than dissipation in outdoor air, and slightly stronger than relative humidity (which improves COVID survival at both the top and bottom end.
Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't chew the fat with a friend for 20 minutes in the still of a Po Valley pea souper, I mean you wouldn't tend to anyway, but even then I may well stand a better chance than the same 20 minutes in my living room.
I still ascribe strongly to seasonality, but it is complex mix of what various outdoor weathers do to behaviour and the indoor climate and simply cold=COVID is clearly untrue at a global level.
In a Northern winter I think a mix of 4 factors are in play indoors:
1. More closed windows. 2. Slightly more time spent indoors (it only needs to be slightly, an average of 5 people rather than 4 inside a house increases the different possible transmissions from 12 to 20, reduces the distances between people and increases dwell times in which the virus can build - it's not just the Brussel sprouts that make the farts linger longer at Christmas, but how we live - btw imagining all the people you meet are flatulent and minimising waft intensity is a great way to think about COVID). 3. The temperature range in the house: in summer this will sit somewhere above your thermostat setting, in winter typically below. 4. More than temperature, in summer your house has natural air at ambient temperature and mid humidity, in winter you warm cold air which lowers relative humidity and improves COVID survival (yes, it can feel 'damp' but all that damn water is on your window panes and on the ground, not in the air).
I think you can start to weave a complex behavioural, social and climatic story from the mix of factors story for lots of different geographies as well, why some places do badly and others not and when that occurs for each place - Pacific South American plain - cool for the latitude, bone dry; Manaus, too damn humid, cram inside when the rainstorm comes; Cape Town, bad variant but up to 24° and lovely mid humidity; Arizona, recycling Aircon etc. etc.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Jarritos....now that is a soft drink widely sold in the US that definitely isn't short of real sugar !!!!
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Jarritos....now that is a soft drink widely sold in the US that definitely isn't short of real sugar !!!!
Diabetes in a bottle, but so good.
Here's some figures - Pepsi and Coke not actually at the top...
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
Or maybe they found North Saanich as mind destroyingly tedious as I did?
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Jarritos....now that is a soft drink widely sold in the US that definitely isn't short of real sugar !!!!
Diabetes in a bottle, but so good.
Here's some figures - Pepsi and Coke not actually at the top...
Never heard of the top 4, though. Has anyone here tried them?
Mountain Dew. Insipid. Very big in N. America. Me not like. Old Jamaica ginger beer the opposite. Too much. Fentiman's is a local Tyne Valley small business. So go for it.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
Or maybe they found North Saanich as mind destroyingly tedious as I did?
I love that part of the world....did you not enjoy the massive range of outdoor activities? I can't think of much better than kayaking out there or the San Juan Islands (in Northern Washington State).
It's surprisingly hard to get a decent dose of proper sugar in soft drinks these days. Mexican coke is a niche product in the US because it actually has proper sugar. UK original Pepsi has a decent amount too. Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Jarritos....now that is a soft drink widely sold in the US that definitely isn't short of real sugar !!!!
Diabetes in a bottle, but so good.
Here's some figures - Pepsi and Coke not actually at the top...
Never heard of the top 4, though. Has anyone here tried them?
Mountain Dew. Insipid. Very big in N. America. Me not like. Old Jamaica ginger beer the opposite. Too much. Fentiman's is a local Tyne Valley small business. So go for it.
Mountain Dew in the US is different to here...it still looks and tastes like toxic waste, but is like rocket fuel.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
Or maybe they found North Saanich as mind destroyingly tedious as I did?
I love that part of the world....did you not enjoy the massive range of outdoor activities? I can't think of much better than kayaking out there or the San Juan Islands (in Northern Washington State).
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
The Sussexes don't live in Los Angeles.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
Yes, but clearly they've moved there to be close to the media centre of LA - I'm sure they haven't moved to the USA due to a hankering for high fructose corn syrup and trans fats.
Or maybe they found North Saanich as mind destroyingly tedious as I did?
I love that part of the world....did you not enjoy the massive range of outdoor activities? I can't think of much better than kayaking out there or the San Juan Islands (in Northern Washington State).
No. I'm being a former South Saanich resident snob. We were essentially Victoria. A city dweller with all the other benefits Though we definitely lived in Saanich...by about 100 metres.
China releases footage of 'medieval' fight to the death with Indian troops in the Himalaya after four of its soldiers were killed in brutal fighting with fists, stones and sticks
Newsnight reporting massive differences in vaccinations rates across different areas of cities e.g. Birmingham overall 86% of all the over 80s, but in one ward with 80% BAME it is just 57% compared to predominantly white wards it is over 90%.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Agreed. I was making the point that the principal form of transmission causing the bulk of cases seems to be droplet-related, not that aerosols were not an issue.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Though on the other hand, aerosols deliver the virus to the lungs while droplets are filtered out in nose and upper respiratory tract.
Yes. Transmissibility is very complex, and probabilistic. It is not simply that 'droplets are better modes of transmission than aerosols' or vice versa, but that there are multiple factors involved that affect each mode of transmission differently.
For example, I saw a recent paper on the impact of UV-A and UV-B levels on outdoor transmission. Higher levels of UV radiation were more effective at inactivating the virus than lower levels which goes a long way to explaining seasonality and why higher latitudes in both hemispheres are associated with higher levels of infection (and which, given cloud cover and high northern latitude, might be a factor in the UK's high numbers of infections). You'd expect UV to be more effective at viral inactivation in aerosols than in droplets and another reason why fewer transmissions occur outdoors.
I still don't think there's much evidence been proffered for substantial outdoor transmission, even in winter. Yes, temperature is a strong factor in how long COVID survives, but almost certainly less strong than dissipation in outdoor air, and slightly stronger than relative humidity (which improves COVID survival at both the top and bottom end.
Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't chew the fat with a friend for 20 minutes in the still of a Po Valley pea souper, I mean you wouldn't tend to anyway, but even then I may well stand a better chance than the same 20 minutes in my living room.
I still ascribe strongly to seasonality, but it is complex mix of what various outdoor weathers do to behaviour and the indoor climate and simply cold=COVID is clearly untrue at a global level.
In a Northern winter I think a mix of 4 factors are in play indoors:
1. More closed windows. 2. Slightly more time spent indoors (it only needs to be slightly, an average of 5 people rather than 4 inside a house increases the different possible transmissions from 12 to 20, reduces the distances between people and increases dwell times in which the virus can build - it's not just the Brussel sprouts that make the farts linger longer at Christmas, but how we live - btw imagining all the people you meet are flatulent and minimising waft intensity is a great way to think about COVID). 3. The temperature range in the house: in summer this will sit somewhere above your thermostat setting, in winter typically below. 4. More than temperature, in summer your house has natural air at ambient temperature and mid humidity, in winter you warm cold air which lowers relative humidity and improves COVID survival (yes, it can feel 'damp' but all that damn water is on your window panes and on the ground, not in the air).
I think you can start to weave a complex behavioural, social and climatic story from the mix of factors story for lots of different geographies as well, why some places do badly and others not and when that occurs for each place - Pacific South American plain - cool for the latitude, bone dry; Manaus, too damn humid, cram inside when the rainstorm comes; Cape Town, bad variant but up to 24° and lovely mid humidity; Arizona, recycling Aircon etc. etc.
Remember also that a lot of hot climates have a lot of air conditioning, and since most transmission takes place indoors, climatic temperature won’t make any difference if indoor spaces are air conditioned. The relative lack of air conditioning might be India’s secret.
Comments
2. They probably aren't but at this stage in the game it can't be helped if the dismal thought lurks in the back of one's mind. The mood music emanating from Government is that ministers are scared witless (one of them has been forced today to admit that yet more lockdowns might still happen,) and we know that SAGE represents a range of opinion that encompasses sensible, Whitty-like figures who know this crap can't go on and on and on, but also zero Covid types and some who have already publicly expressed the opinion that we may need to put up with masks and a degree of social distancing quite literally forever. If sensible caution gives way to total paranoia then God alone knows when the nightmare will finally end.
My suspicion is that this has to do with initial viral dose.
My working theory is that aerosols deliver smaller doses but over prolonged periods, and so will be a bigger factor for those with less effective immune systems (because a smaller initial dose can progress to severe illness when it would not in those with a healthier immune system) or those working for longer hours in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation who end up receiving a larger cumulative dose; whereas droplets can deliver large viral doses in a single encounter, increasing both the number of infections they can cause and the percentage of them that will progress to severe illness, even in those with healthier immune systems.
Just "staying alive" is not life. If mere existence is your definition of a reasonable life then I can only pity you
All I can speak of is my own frustration. Especially when the line at this stage tends to become "the numbers are going the right which which makes it more important than ever that you 'stick with the rules'"
Which again may well be a reasonable position, but there's not much to grind the gears more than this attitude of increasingly pushing the rules front and centre the closer we get to nominally relaxing them.
The feeling becomes of a no-way-to-win situation.
The challenge tests might give us some hard evidence on all of that.
I was thinking more of the ones which were good preparation for surviving a stretch in prison.
Though no doubt Boris would thrive there, too.
They know you need 2 doses and a booster.
This is to be expected. We will hear much more tomorrow night in the tradition of 'super polling Saturday' the weekend before a GE.
I have escaped London for some Essential Flintwork on the Essex Coast. I need something to divert from the constant desire to Knap
It's therefore no wonder poor @solarflare is so worried about what happens in the Autumn. Even if we've finally been permitted to enjoy something a bit less like house arrest by September then, at the first sign of a resurgence of winter illnesses, there is a non-negligible possibility that SAGE will throw a gargantuan strop and force the Prime Minister to start mothballing everything again. And if the Government is frightened back into lockdown then everyone will draw the conclusion (correctly) that this is probably going to go on for many years if not forever.
If the terror of Covid overwhelms society to the extent that no level of infection is acceptable, then everything else other than suppressing it will stop mattering and a worthwhile life will cease to be possible. At that juncture we might as well all just give up.
For example, I saw a recent paper on the impact of UV-A and UV-B levels on outdoor transmission. Higher levels of UV radiation were more effective at inactivating the virus than lower levels which goes a long way to explaining seasonality and why higher latitudes in both hemispheres are associated with higher levels of infection (and which, given cloud cover and high northern latitude, might be a factor in the UK's high numbers of infections). You'd expect UV to be more effective at viral inactivation in aerosols than in droplets and another reason why fewer transmissions occur outdoors.
Nah, yer alright.
In the early nineties I was doing an AIDS clinic, and it was so sad.
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1362832185154281475?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Wm_bEDu9c
I must say, I find that rather unconvincing. Lots of other delivery firms and warehouses manage this. You could simply have the printer deliver and then timed pick up of boxes from a constitutency office by different volunteers, but with no interaction or socialising and social distancing maintained.
I hope the rules are clarified, even though the Lib Dem leaflets will still go straight in the bin in the Casino household.
Thankfully, that level of madness hasn't made it over here yet. But I wouldn't bet the house that it never will.
It's almost like there are some people trying to make a career out of this.
They live in Santa Barbara, which is about as near to LA as Liverpool is to London.
If anyone tried to teach this shit to my white daughters: feeling guilty for your skin colour, just for being born that way? Jeez. How is that any better than white supremacism directed at others?
Vile. And it is, it seems, real
https://twitter.com/DrKarlynB/status/1362848041779232771?s=20
To be less Coke means ...
In order to help all I can do is stay home and do nothing. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel part of a collective struggle where I'm contributing my bit.
The hospitality sector will be added to the list of industries killed or severely wounded by this government's deliberate policies.
"What did you do in the Plague, Daddy?"
"Well I mainly hid away and thought about sourdough starters".
Of such things heroes are not made. There is no heroism.
I've had friends who have volunteered to "help in the community" and mainly it means dropping unwanted crap food outside the homes of old people who don't care... and so they've given up
Conversely, I think people in the NHS have it - in some ways - easier. They have a dramatic new prominence and a vital new role - saving the nation. eg I know several people on the NHS frontline who say they are, weirdly, much happier now. Wildly stressed, but happier: they have a heroic part to play - much more like a war - and they are stepping up to do it (and all good luck to them, and many many thanks)
An odd paradox
* And LA is a *big* place
Given how often people use the emperor's new clothes analogy, they should feel more comfortable calling out the loonier side of things, so the focus remains on the non-loony stuff.
Oz was another story though.
Don't get me wrong, I still wouldn't chew the fat with a friend for 20 minutes in the still of a Po Valley pea souper, I mean you wouldn't tend to anyway, but even then I may well stand a better chance than the same 20 minutes in my living room.
I still ascribe strongly to seasonality, but it is complex mix of what various outdoor weathers do to behaviour and the indoor climate and simply cold=COVID is clearly untrue at a global level.
In a Northern winter I think a mix of 4 factors are in play indoors:
1. More closed windows.
2. Slightly more time spent indoors (it only needs to be slightly, an average of 5 people rather than 4 inside a house increases the different possible transmissions from 12 to 20, reduces the distances between people and increases dwell times in which the virus can build - it's not just the Brussel sprouts that make the farts linger longer at Christmas, but how we live - btw imagining all the people you meet are flatulent and minimising waft intensity is a great way to think about COVID).
3. The temperature range in the house: in summer this will sit somewhere above your thermostat setting, in winter typically below.
4. More than temperature, in summer your house has natural air at ambient temperature and mid humidity, in winter you warm cold air which lowers relative humidity and improves COVID survival (yes, it can feel 'damp' but all that damn water is on your window panes and on the ground, not in the air).
I think you can start to weave a complex behavioural, social and climatic story from the mix of factors story for lots of different geographies as well, why some places do badly and others not and when that occurs for each place - Pacific South American plain - cool for the latitude, bone dry; Manaus, too damn humid, cram inside when the rainstorm comes; Cape Town, bad variant but up to 24° and lovely mid humidity; Arizona, recycling Aircon etc. etc.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9278627/Florida-women-aged-34-44-dress-grandmothers-COVID-vaccine-early.html
If you're under 50, you're not coming in
Most drinks are either aspartimine (UK/Diet) or Corn Syrup (USA) as you point out.
Diabetes in a bottle, but so good.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35831125
Never heard of the top 4, though. Has anyone here tried them?
Old Jamaica ginger beer the opposite. Too much.
Fentiman's is a local Tyne Valley small business. So go for it.
Fentimans is great as a treat.
Though we definitely lived in Saanich...by about 100 metres.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9277927/China-admits-four-soldiers-killed-bloody-border-clash-Indian-troops.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56135817
Its like an episode of Silicon Valley tv show.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/19/politics/democrats-joe-biden-covid-relief-package/index.html