Mr. Above, true, but we must remember the PM is an idiotic, vacillating coward who trembles at the thought of not being liked.
Thinking back to early January, the PM wasn't liked and his party was starting to fall behind in the polls. The vaccine rollout, and vaccine wars, came just in time for him.
Thought experiment: What if the US vaccine rollout had happened just before their election, rather than just after? Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Because Trump was negative on Covid as a whole it wouldn't have helped him.
He was positive for it at least once
See you later.
It is one of the great political puzzles of my time. Why on earth did Trump choose to deny the virus?
It was impossible for a start, but if he had led his people in the campaign to restrict its damage he would have been lauded as the saviour of the country. He would have won a landslide last November.
Trump knew that he was on course to win the election due to the economy. He saw the virus as threatening the stock market and the economy before it became clear to him (if it ever did) of the seriousness to health that Covid posed. I don`t think it was any more than that.
Trump is now on the record as privately telling people it was deadly in February before the first US covid death. It was very clear to him all along, but he didnt want to be the bearer of bad news.
Yes but he may have underestimated the extent of the spread. But in any case he saw this as no reason to derail his narrative around the economy.
If he had accepted the need to be the bearer of bad news he would now still be President.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
I don't think so. Everyone I speak to has found the lockdown since Christmas the hardest to date. I feel the same. Its been tough. The one thing we hold on to is that this is it. No more lockdowns. Normality or something close. Risking that for a haircut or a trip to the pub a couple of weeks earlier seems a poor exchange.
Most people seem to be getting their hair cut, though.
You are right in that this lockdown feels the worst. Online socialising has lost its lustre and I just want to be out and about doing normal things. That pub table has been booked for a month's time...
January and February are pretty miserable in a normal year. Add in a lockdown makes it much worse.
The snug indoors socialising that makes winter bearable is forbidden. The walks in the park that made Lockdown One bearable aren't much fun. And whilst Zoom school has been the right thing to do, it has been really draining.
And some (probably quite a lot) of this this could have been avoided by taking more cautious decisions in November and December.
Just had a text from the NHS telling me that I am, after all, in group 6 and eligible for the vaccine.
Dilemma: I could book a vaccination for tomorrow through the website, but it would be in the mass centre which is quite a long way from me. No car. Would either need to risk a taxi both ways, or risk taking my mobility scooter and it running out of juice on the way home (it would be at the extreme limit of its range). Alternative is to try to book through my GP (who should have already offered me a slot but didn't) at their local centre which is just up the road from me. But they are closed so I have to wait until Monday even to find out if they have slots.
Any suggestions? Part of me just wants to get this done but I'll kick myself if I either pick up COVID in a taxi or get stranded halfway home.
--AS
Your call but, good grief, I`d get a taxi! I wouldn't`t think twice.
Definitely not the mobility scooter with risk of running out of juice. Going by taxi sounds pretty safe to me, but so does simply staying completely at home for 2 days, calling the GP Monday and if they don't offer something soon, then taking the taxi. Good luck whichever you choose.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Just had a text from the NHS telling me that I am, after all, in group 6 and eligible for the vaccine.
Dilemma: I could book a vaccination for tomorrow through the website, but it would be in the mass centre which is quite a long way from me. No car. Would either need to risk a taxi both ways, or risk taking my mobility scooter and it running out of juice on the way home (it would be at the extreme limit of its range). Alternative is to try to book through my GP (who should have already offered me a slot but didn't) at their local centre which is just up the road from me. But they are closed so I have to wait until Monday even to find out if they have slots.
Any suggestions? Part of me just wants to get this done but I'll kick myself if I either pick up COVID in a taxi or get stranded halfway home.
--AS
I would wait until Monday.
There have been rather too many cases within a week or so of the first vaccination, and I suspect these are caught on the journey etc, often by people who have isolated well.
If you do travel, then perhaps find a vaccinated friend to do the driving, rather than a commercial taxi.
Mr. Above, true, but we must remember the PM is an idiotic, vacillating coward who trembles at the thought of not being liked.
Thinking back to early January, the PM wasn't liked and his party was starting to fall behind in the polls. The vaccine rollout, and vaccine wars, came just in time for him.
Thought experiment: What if the US vaccine rollout had happened just before their election, rather than just after? Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Because Trump was negative on Covid as a whole it wouldn't have helped him.
He was positive for it at least once
See you later.
It is one of the great political puzzles of my time. Why on earth did Trump choose to deny the virus?
It was impossible for a start, but if he had led his people in the campaign to restrict its damage he would have been lauded as the saviour of the country. He would have won a landslide last November.
Trump knew that he was on course to win the election due to the economy. He saw the virus as threatening the stock market and the economy before it became clear to him (if it ever did) of the seriousness to health that Covid posed. I don`t think it was any more than that.
Trump is now on the record as privately telling people it was deadly in February before the first US covid death. It was very clear to him all along, but he didnt want to be the bearer of bad news.
Yes but he may have underestimated the extent of the spread. But in any case he saw this as no reason to derail his narrative around the economy.
If he had accepted the need to be the bearer of bad news he would now still be President.
I disagree but we've had a to-and-fro on this forum already around this a number of times so let's not revisit. What cost Trump was the proliferation of postal voting. This was a by-product of Covid, of course, but Covid itself wasn't the reason.
Just had a text from the NHS telling me that I am, after all, in group 6 and eligible for the vaccine.
Dilemma: I could book a vaccination for tomorrow through the website, but it would be in the mass centre which is quite a long way from me. No car. Would either need to risk a taxi both ways, or risk taking my mobility scooter and it running out of juice on the way home (it would be at the extreme limit of its range). Alternative is to try to book through my GP (who should have already offered me a slot but didn't) at their local centre which is just up the road from me. But they are closed so I have to wait until Monday even to find out if they have slots.
Any suggestions? Part of me just wants to get this done but I'll kick myself if I either pick up COVID in a taxi or get stranded halfway home.
--AS
Your call but, good grief, I`d get a taxi! I wouldn't`t think twice.
Definitely not the mobility scooter with risk of running out of juice. Going by taxi sounds pretty safe to me, but so does simply staying completely at home for 2 days, calling the GP Monday and if they don't offer something soon, then taking the taxi. Good luck whichever you choose.
Round here, with no means of getting to our designated centre other than private transport we've Covid-secure car-driver volunteers taking people like AS. If there's anything locally, the GP surgery should know. Or the local Facebook page.
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
It's much in the Conservative Party's interests that the government has us stick to the timetable. But then one would think they should be doing a lot more to remind people of current regulations, and saying how one should proceed post vaccination. When I walk in the park, it's evident that many of the people who've got together are on the wrong side of the rules. When I hear what's said by newly vaccinated people, I find they think they've immediately been set free.
They could send a daily text countdown to each vaccine recipient:
Day after vaccine - 21 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection Then the next morning - 20 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection
Would cost virtually nothing to do but have an impact on behaviour, if a little annoying.
The alternative is to ease restrictions for those who have been vaccinated. Why not let vaccinated people visit (also vaccinated) care homes, or meet inside?
It would incentivise uptake among sceptic groups by offering a quid pro quo, and it is happening anyway. HMG should get ahead of the game and have a controlled reopening rather than an uncontrolled one. Not to mention electoral credit with the locals imminent!
This has been discussed before. It's a very bad idea. Already the pandemic has effectively seen the livelihoods, freedoms and opportunities of the young tossed on the bonfire to save the lives of the old. I know that's a crude characterization - the collapse of the healthcare system would've been disastrous for everybody - but there's more than an element of truth to it nonetheless. And don't even get me started on the wider generational inequity argument...
The thing is, set against that background, one of the worst possible things one could do is to let old people out to enjoy playtime whilst keeping the young imprisoned. A more effective driver of resentment can barely be imagined, and that's why it's not being attempted.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
On topic. I think David is being too cautious. Lockdowns have a terrible, terrible cost (one that governments refuse to quantify or do cost-benefit on funnily). Their use should be dire emergency only. The emergency is ending.
Sources have told Telegraph that supplies could be double the rate in coming weeks. Could hit 1m a day vaccinations.
However, even if the government agrees with you (which they do) there is every reason to set long goals, that change be brought forward, than short ones that then have to be lengthened.
That’s the error they made over schools, where a barrage of leaks from the DfE meant it had to be announced they were all reopening on the 8th March even though this was (a) not true and (b) a significant gamble given the enormous problems involved and the major risks of confining millions of people in poorly ventilated rooms for long stretches.
As it turns out it’s one I’m now hopeful we’ll get away with, but it could easily have gone very wrong if large numbers of cases had been found.
So if they were wrong you would have blamed them, but because they were right they were merely lucky?
That doesn’t seem very balanced
No Charles. I am saying they made the wrong decision, announced in the wrong way, and without being honest about what they were announcing.
What I am also saying is I am now hopeful that their dishonesty, incompetence and panic isn’t going to lead to multiple deaths and possible further lockdowns.
But that isn’t the same as saying they were right to do what they did. It was a gamble that has a higher chance than it did a week ago of coming off.
In PB terms, the fact that a poor-value bet comes off from time to time and a good-value bet might lose doesn't mean that seeking out value isn't the way to win in the long term.
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
The Stockholm syndrome/ authoritarianism-readily-accepted aspect of all this will prove fertile ground for academic study for many years.
The metrics to keep a watch on, I suggest, are case rates and hospitalisations, in particular ICU.
Only ease off restrictions as long as case rates don't rise. I think case rates are low enough now to ease off the restrictions, but you want to do it slowly.
Hospitalisations are still too high. They need to fall further. In particular the ICU requirement needs to fall.
France is an interesting case study. They didn't fully lockdown in the new year - schools were kept open throughout. Case rates are medium overall but with a number of hotspots. But it is putting pressure on hospitals, in particular ICU. France has a policy of distributing patients across the country rather than stressing hospitals in hotspots, on the basis that properly resourced ICU saves lives. Thread on this, in French:
England has been doing this too. The patients in ICU that I was involved with were only about 50% from Leics. The other 50% were a mixture of clinical transfers for ECMO and non clinical for capacity.
Thanks. What's the ICU situation like now in your hospital?
I think we have about 25 in covid ICU, 4 on ECMO. That is much less than the January peak, when there were 60 something.
Rates are dropping here, but still above much of the country.
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
Yes, an uncharacteristically poor argument from David. Sadly, many will feel similarly and we’ll hear the siren calls for a slower timetable as soon as positive tests start rising, which could be as early as next week, thanks to the massive increase in the testing rate.
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
I hate to say it, but I think David isn’t pleased with how well things are going.
Just had a text from the NHS telling me that I am, after all, in group 6 and eligible for the vaccine.
Dilemma: I could book a vaccination for tomorrow through the website, but it would be in the mass centre which is quite a long way from me. No car. Would either need to risk a taxi both ways, or risk taking my mobility scooter and it running out of juice on the way home (it would be at the extreme limit of its range). Alternative is to try to book through my GP (who should have already offered me a slot but didn't) at their local centre which is just up the road from me. But they are closed so I have to wait until Monday even to find out if they have slots.
Any suggestions? Part of me just wants to get this done but I'll kick myself if I either pick up COVID in a taxi or get stranded halfway home.
--AS
Take a taxi. Put a mask on, sit in the back on the left hand side, open the windows.
Hide under the table till Monday then phone your GP.
It's much in the Conservative Party's interests that the government has us stick to the timetable. But then one would think they should be doing a lot more to remind people of current regulations, and saying how one should proceed post vaccination. When I walk in the park, it's evident that many of the people who've got together are on the wrong side of the rules. When I hear what's said by newly vaccinated people, I find they think they've immediately been set free.
They could send a daily text countdown to each vaccine recipient:
Day after vaccine - 21 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection Then the next morning - 20 days for your vaccine to give good but not full protection
Would cost virtually nothing to do but have an impact on behaviour, if a little annoying.
The alternative is to ease restrictions for those who have been vaccinated. Why not let vaccinated people visit (also vaccinated) care homes, or meet inside?
It would incentivise uptake among sceptic groups by offering a quid pro quo, and it is happening anyway. HMG should get ahead of the game and have a controlled reopening rather than an uncontrolled one. Not to mention electoral credit with the locals imminent!
This has been discussed before. It's a very bad idea. Already the pandemic has effectively seen the livelihoods, freedoms and opportunities of the young tossed on the bonfire to save the lives of the old. I know that's a crude characterization - the collapse of the healthcare system would've been disastrous for everybody - but there's more than an element of truth to it nonetheless. And don't even get me started on the wider generational inequity argument...
The thing is, set against that background, one of the worst possible things one could do is to let old people out to enjoy playtime whilst keeping the young imprisoned. A more effective driver of resentment can barely be imagined, and that's why it's not being attempted.
The very same people who tossed the risk segmentation model out of hand when it was being proposed are now proposing vaccine segmentation. Funny old world!
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
I hate to say it, but I think David isn’t pleased with how well things are going.
I don't think that's fair, there is some of that coming from some on the left to be sure but I don't think David fits that mould.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
They are being cautious now! I’m not sure who you meet/talk to, but pretty everyone I speak is taking the timetable very seriously indeed. Booking domestic holidays, arranging visits and weekends with friends. I often think that many on here live in a different world.
Completely disagree with this, David. You've bought into the "zero COVID" arguments without realising it.
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
I hate to say it, but I think David isn’t pleased with how well things are going.
It does feel that way but I'd hope not. He's has always had an ability to be objective regardless of who is in charge.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020 people were saying that there is now a new normal, which implies a permanent change. The old normal involved pubs, restaurants, universities, and concert halls being open, with no movement restrictions, and without people having a fear of death from infectious diseases.
We could reopen concert halls tomorrow, but it is the fear of death that will stay with us. This is the permanent change that is now the new normal. Normal patterns of social activity will slowly return. People will get used to being vaccinated regularly (with temporary side effects), and to getting a mild case of COVID from time to time (reduced in severity by the vaccines). The deaths will continue but will be contained by mass vaccination, and by herd immunity. Life will be a little bit shorter, so people will try to pack more into it. They will want to get out more. Unfortunately, this is a painful transition.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Yes Jacienda has dropped Zero Covid. There are a few hold-outs, but they are largely regarded as cranks by the medical profession.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020 people were saying that there is now a new normal, which implies a permanent change. The old normal involved pubs, restaurants, universities, and concert halls being open, with no movement restrictions, and without people having a fear of death from infectious diseases.
We could reopen concert halls tomorrow, but it is the fear of death that will stay with us. This is the permanent change that is now the new normal. Normal patterns of social activity will slowly return. People will get used to being vaccinated regularly (with temporary side effects), and to getting a mild case of COVID from time to time (reduced in severity by the vaccines). The deaths will continue but will be contained by mass vaccination, and by herd immunity. Life will be a little bit shorter, so people will try to pack more into it. They will want to get out more. Unfortunately, this is a painful transition.
“Life will be a little shorter.” Unlikely.
Most likely life expectancy will continue to rise.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
The number of people who err on the optimistic side increases with every vaccination that happens. Again anecdotally every single person I have met who has been vaccinated is now less cautious - dangerously so given many only had it done within the last week.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
They are being cautious now! I’m not sure who you meet/talk to, but pretty everyone I speak is taking the timetable very seriously indeed. Booking domestic holidays, arranging visits and weekends with friends. I often think that many on here live in a different world.
Yup, I honestly don't know a single person who hasn't got some socialising arranged for after the 12th or a haircut booked and so on.
There's definitely a weird PB caricature of the wider public that has them 100% masked up all the time, even alone in their own homes squirting hand sanitizer at passing yobs and doffing their caps at passing people who are also permanently wearing masks.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Absolutely, although my understanding of the New Zealand approach is that it was never the intention that the disease be kept out forever. How could it be? No sensible government could propose such a thing. Given that there's no significant probability of Covid being wiped out globally like smallpox, the only way to maintain Covid-free status forever would be permanent national quarantine, accompanied by extremely heavy-handed lockdown measures. Basically it would mean both turning New Zealand into a massive open prison, and putting part or all of the country under house arrest for one or two weeks every time a Covid infection got out of one of the quarantine centres and into the community. You could try those sorts of tactics in a system like North Korea's but they're intolerable as a long-term approach anywhere else.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
They are being cautious now! I’m not sure who you meet/talk to, but pretty everyone I speak is taking the timetable very seriously indeed. Booking domestic holidays, arranging visits and weekends with friends. I often think that many on here live in a different world.
Yup, I honestly don't know a single person who hasn't got some socialising arranged for after the 12th or a haircut booked and so on.
There's definitely a weird PB caricature of the wider public that has them 100% masked up all the time, even alone in their own homes squirting hand sanitizer at passing yobs and doffing their caps at passing people who are also permanently wearing masks.
Indeed. PB is a very odd place at times. In that sense, David’s irritating column suits its audience. I’m sure the likes of Nick, Sandy and Gideon will lap it up.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Absolutely, although my understanding of the New Zealand approach is that it was never the intention that the disease be kept out forever. How could it be? No sensible government could propose such a thing. Given that there's no significant probability of Covid being wiped out globally like smallpox, the only way to maintain Covid-free status forever would be permanent national quarantine, accompanied by extremely heavy-handed lockdown measures. Basically it would mean both turning New Zealand into a massive open prison, and putting part or all of the country under house arrest for one or two weeks every time a Covid infection got out of one of the quarantine centres and into the community. You could try those sorts of tactics in a system like North Korea's but they're intolerable as a long-term approach anywhere else.
New Zealand has been held up by the Zero Coviders as being the poster child for the elimination strategy. Given the paucity of ICU beds that was absolutely correct but longer term it’s unsustainable. All of NZ is gripped by the Americas Cup in Auckland today. They cannot square elimination with any future hosting (or even participation in) such events.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
Mr. Above, true, but we must remember the PM is an idiotic, vacillating coward who trembles at the thought of not being liked.
Thinking back to early January, the PM wasn't liked and his party was starting to fall behind in the polls. The vaccine rollout, and vaccine wars, came just in time for him.
Thought experiment: What if the US vaccine rollout had happened just before their election, rather than just after? Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Because Trump was negative on Covid as a whole it wouldn't have helped him.
He was positive for it at least once
See you later.
It is one of the great political puzzles of my time. Why on earth did Trump choose to deny the virus?
It was impossible for a start, but if he had led his people in the campaign to restrict its damage he would have been lauded as the saviour of the country. He would have won a landslide last November.
Trump knew that he was on course to win the election due to the economy. He saw the virus as threatening the stock market and the economy before it became clear to him (if it ever did) of the seriousness to health that Covid posed. I don`t think it was any more than that.
Trump is now on the record as privately telling people it was deadly in February before the first US covid death. It was very clear to him all along, but he didnt want to be the bearer of bad news.
Yes but he may have underestimated the extent of the spread. But in any case he saw this as no reason to derail his narrative around the economy.
If he had accepted the need to be the bearer of bad news he would now still be President.
I disagree but we've had a to-and-fro on this forum already around this a number of times so let's not revisit. What cost Trump was the proliferation of postal voting. This was a by-product of Covid, of course, but Covid itself wasn't the reason.
He was unlucky (or Biden was lucky, if you like).
What cost Trump was that too many people hated him and when you hate someone that much you turn out to vote. Covid schmovid, he had few chances of winning in 2020 from a long way out, short of the Democrats picking an obvious leftist.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020 people were saying that there is now a new normal, which implies a permanent change. The old normal involved pubs, restaurants, universities, and concert halls being open, with no movement restrictions, and without people having a fear of death from infectious diseases.
We could reopen concert halls tomorrow, but it is the fear of death that will stay with us. This is the permanent change that is now the new normal. Normal patterns of social activity will slowly return. People will get used to being vaccinated regularly (with temporary side effects), and to getting a mild case of COVID from time to time (reduced in severity by the vaccines). The deaths will continue but will be contained by mass vaccination, and by herd immunity. Life will be a little bit shorter, so people will try to pack more into it. They will want to get out more. Unfortunately, this is a painful transition.
Life expectancy will show a small dip but will soon resume its relentless upward trend.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
I’d tend to agree, but just to say that Mrs Anabobazina will be hitting the shops as soon as they reopen — although she wants them to confirm she can try clothes on.
We are going to have to learn to live with occasional flare-ups. In Devon, Covid has been largely obliterated apart from a very few hot-spots - and even they are lukewarm-spots in all honesty. Large swathes by area have the disease suppressed. But we've still had a very nasty outbreak this week at a care home in Sidmouth where all the patients and all bar one of the staff had been vaccinated. 3 dead. This follows on from a home for dementia sufferers in Exmouth where 9 patients have died with two more very ill, again after the residents were all given the jab.
People will wrongly think they have immunity before they do. People will get very confused and angry when the jab doesn't work for them. But unless the schools lead to a major spike, the plan looks sensible and has generally got our buy-in.
No-one has offered a better one that survives contact with the enemy.
The outbreak in the residential home near Sidmouth is being investigated by the police, along with CQC and other agencies. They are waiting for the results of post mortem on the three people who died.
So it doesn't look exactly like just another outbreak. Yesterday's Western Morning News said second jabs were due this weekend.
God morning, everyone.
Second jabs due indicates first jabs were done quite a few weeks back. That does raise the question of whether something went very wrong on the first jabs. Storage issue, maybe?
On topic. I think David is being too cautious. Lockdowns have a terrible, terrible cost (one that governments refuse to quantify or do cost-benefit on funnily). Their use should be dire emergency only. The emergency is ending.
Sources have told Telegraph that supplies could be double the rate in coming weeks. Could hit 1m a day vaccinations.
Anecdotally, one thing the lockdown does seem to have done is get the infection rate in schoolchildren back under tight control. Which is plausible, when you think about it (I confess I didn’t very clearly) as they were probably not mixing indoors with anyone except family for all that time.
So whereas before the infection rate was 4.2% (I know at one stage before Christmas the ONS said it was 0.2% but that appears to have been a typing error) I’m not hearing of many positives among children at all despite these millions of tests.
This may of course be because they are as useless as a chocolate kettle, but let’s be optimistic here and assume it’s because there isn’t much to find.
In which case, it seems unlikely there will be a major school driven spike for at least 2-3 weeks, by which time we have the Easter holidays (April 1st or earlier) and another two weeks’ respite.
So if my experience is typical there is reason to hope schools will not cause problems this side of May, by which time vaccines should be sufficiently advanced to do the heavy lifting on protection.
I think the LFTs are fairly effective in detecting infectious individuals, and will probably help to prevent any school reopening spike. Quite a large number of businesses will also be using them for the next two or three months.
The other point with the is that whatever their precise sensitivity, their mass use will pick up any significant increase in infection several days before the symptom based testing - and isolate significant numbers of infected before they get a chance to pass it on.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
I don't even enjoy going out for a laugh and getting pissed and even I want to do that.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Mothering Sunday tomorrow...
For obvious reasons no one has made this point in the media, but Sarah Everard was on her way home from a friend’s house. I suspect there has been a general relaxing of behaviour over the last couple of weeks.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Mothering Sunday tomorrow...
For obvious reasons no one has made this point in the media, but Sarah Everard was on her way home from a friend’s house. I suspect there has been a general relaxing of behaviour over the last couple of weeks.
The coming and goings of family/friends has been going on in our street for at least a couple of weeks I would say. I get the impression that two months (jan/feb) was quite enough for a lot of people.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
I should add that if you go for the "live with the virus" approach, you will never eliminate the possibility of further lockdowns. You will be adjusting your non-medical interventions to keep within R=1. We're hoping vaccinations takes the full burden so non-medical interventions are never needed, but is that the case?
You don't need general lockdown with Zero-Covid because infections are at or near zero and any interventions are highly targeted.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society. At its worst, Covid has been such a threat. It posed the very real risk of collapsing our state religion, the NHS. You don't have to imagine people dying on hospital trollies in corridors. It was happening in Italy. It may still be happening in Brazil, in Mexico, in other countries that are not being honest with their citizens.
Government has worked the vaccines remarkably well. But only government could take that risk, of committing to buy a vast number of jabs that might not have worked. They believed the science. Some might say they got lucky. That would be an unfair reading, IMHO
Our hope is that government can have an ever reducing role in Covid control. It won't go away entirely. The level of exposure you are prepared to endure - and the consequences of that - should very soon be down to the individual. The baton of risk can be passed to the individual - because with Government controls, we have moved to that point where it is the individual that suffers the consequences, not society.
We are going to have to learn to live with occasional flare-ups. In Devon, Covid has been largely obliterated apart from a very few hot-spots - and even they are lukewarm-spots in all honesty. Large swathes by area have the disease suppressed. But we've still had a very nasty outbreak this week at a care home in Sidmouth where all the patients and all bar one of the staff had been vaccinated. 3 dead. This follows on from a home for dementia sufferers in Exmouth where 9 patients have died with two more very ill, again after the residents were all given the jab.
People will wrongly think they have immunity before they do. People will get very confused and angry when the jab doesn't work for them. But unless the schools lead to a major spike, the plan looks sensible and has generally got our buy-in.
No-one has offered a better one that survives contact with the enemy.
The outbreak in the residential home near Sidmouth is being investigated by the police, along with CQC and other agencies. They are waiting for the results of post mortem on the three people who died.
So it doesn't look exactly like just another outbreak. Yesterday's Western Morning News said second jabs were due this weekend.
God morning, everyone.
Second jabs due indicates first jabs were done quite a few weeks back. That does raise the question of whether something went very wrong on the first jabs. Storage issue, maybe?
Or alternatively, nothing has gone wrong at all. I've read that BBC report. To quote,
The care home group said of the residents and staff who had tested positive "the majority have shown either no symptoms, or mild symptoms only".
Sounds like the jab may well have done its job in this case. Consider:
1. Elderly care home residents are the most vulnerable group in society to this disease. It's why they were priority cohort 1 in the rollout. 2. Covid outbreaks pre-vaccine ripped through care homes with impunity, and caused very large numbers of deaths. We already know it's almost impossible to stop the disease spreading like this once it gets into a care home. So a large fraction of the residents and staff will likely have caught it in this instance as well, even allowing for some reduction in transmissibility caused by inoculation. 3. However, despite widespread transmission only three deaths have been reported. Because we don't know how many moderate or asymptomatic cases were also detected we're deprived of the ability to do the maths here, but in crude terms if 30 residents in total were infected, and we assume that 20 of those would have become severely ill and probably died before vaccines came to the rescue then, given that recent studies suggest vaccines cut the death rate by about 85%, the number of deaths we would now expect to see in a similar outbreak would be not 20, but 3.
Again, as I said earlier, if vaccines weren't doing their job then we'd be getting reports of a lot of care home massacres continuing to occur all over the country, and the death rate amongst the very elderly would not have dropped like a stone (and, indeed, be continuing to fall.) These deaths are three individual tragedies for the people who bought it and their families; they're most unlikely to be cause for wider concern.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
As has previously been mentioned, they have a four-tier system of regional restrictions which is collapsing rapidly backwards into another nationwide lockdown. It's remarkably similar to our experience before Christmas.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
South Korea and Taiwan both have very low obesity levels.
“What might the end of the pandemic look like? There are two main possibilities. The first, and most likely, is that Sars-CoV-2 becomes an endemic coronavirus that gives rise to large numbers of infections in winter. Vaccinated or previously infected people may get infected again, but because they have some measure of immunity their infections will be mild, much as with the four seasonal coronaviruses we have lived with for decades. Unvaccinated people and an unlucky few whose immunity isn’t protective may become seriously ill. Elderly people, those with certain underlying conditions and healthcare workers will need a booster every now and then. Seasonal coronaviruses tend to rise in two-yearly cycles, so it could be that a booster is needed every other year.
The second, more desirable outcome is that we treat Sars-CoV-2 a bit like measles, and try to stamp it out as completely as we can. I’ve seen erroneous commentary that this isn’t possible because measles doesn’t mutate as fast as Sars-CoV-2. In fact, measles intrinsically mutates faster; it just makes more errors as it replicates because, unlike coronavirus, it doesn’t bother with proofreading. The real reason for the near elimination of measles is that its equivalent of Spike is more constrained by the structures it must form and by the multiple different types of neutralising antibodies induced by the vaccine. Near elimination of Sars-CoV-2 could be equally possible if updated, highly effective vaccines prevent the virus and any evolving variants from spreading. With better vaccine technology we might be able to direct a very strong antibody response to the bits of Spike that the virus can’t do without; alternatively, there might be a vaccine that covers a wide range of different Spike variants – so wide that there is no way for the virus to evolve to escape them all.”
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
The UK is an island too. I don't think the UK is inherently incapable of following the South Korean and Taiwanese successes, which are genuine ones. (Reminder that England has the second worst cumulative death toll of anywhere in the world - FT tracker)
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
Both the prompt boosters (at least for the vulnerable, ideally for everyone) and the jabs for older kids (once the necessary safety and efficacy studies have been completed) sound like excellent ideas. We have created this huge development and manufacturing capacity for vaccines; given the potential cost in blood and treasure of a resurgence in Winter and even a partial return of restrictions as a consequence, there is zero excuse not to use it.
The u3a, who's membership is by definition almost exclusively over 55, and in practice 65+ seems to be expecting that 'real' meetings and social events will be taking place in June. There's a National Day planned for June 2nd and while some events are on-line others are face to face.
I'm booked at attend a Zoom session on the matter on Monday.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
South Korea and Taiwan both have very low obesity levels.
True, but if anything that's an argument for Zero-Covid. Try to eliminate infections so those obese people don't catch the disease and die.
I still can't find when the Pfizer trial in the US for secondary school age (12+) is supposed to report. Given it started in January... must be done by the end of the year.
UK cohort sizes -
Age Number 12 793,405 13 777,849 14 748,569 15 736,855 16 717,056 17 708,482
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
The UK is an island too. I don't think the UK is inherently incapable of following the South Korean and Taiwanese successes, which are genuine ones. (Reminder that England has the second worst cumulative death toll of anywhere in the world - FT tracker)
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
For the purposes of disease control, Great Britain isn't an island. We won't count as an island again, unless or until the flow of people to and fro across the Channel can be completely stopped in an emergency.
That means getting rid of our reliance on the passage of truck drivers on ferries and through the Chunnel for trade in goods, or at least all essential imports like food. Longer term I think we should actively explore moving as much of the movement of goods as possible to container traffic, as an insurance against having to go through something like coronavirus again, but right now we have to deal with the world as we find it.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
As has previously been mentioned, they have a four-tier system of regional restrictions which is collapsing rapidly backwards into another nationwide lockdown. It's remarkably similar to our experience before Christmas.
Yet those who were loudest to berate our Government for the failures that got us to that point seem mute about blaming the EU for not learning lessons - lessons paid for our by our dead and our seriously ill.
We at least have the vaccine cavalry coming to our aid. Many European countries are still weeks behind us. They were put in that position because the EU demanded it be the central co-ordination point. A role in which it failed, badly.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
I think Mark was referring to risk to society not risk to individuals?
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
I think Mark was referring to risk to society not risk to individuals?
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
The UK is an island too. I don't think the UK is inherently incapable of following the South Korean and Taiwanese successes, which are genuine ones. (Reminder that England has the second worst cumulative death toll of anywhere in the world - FT tracker)
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
The U.K. is an island connected to a mainland through a heavily used tunnel plus part of another island where there is a treaty enshrined open border.
Ultimately this is a global problem and only global solutions will suffice. No country can cut itself off. There are 30,000 US servicemen and servicewomen in South Korea protecting it from the North. They will have to live with that as their writ only partially extends to those people. Similarly Taiwan if it wants protection from the PRC.
Thank you all, for your thoughts. It helped me realize that I'm very well isolated at the moment and it won't make any difference to my risk if I wait a few days (or indeed a couple of weeks) -- I have one trip to the dentist which will be in the at-risk window in any case, and nothing else until well into April. So I can phone my GP on Monday morning and revert to the mass vax centre if the GP is unable to offer me a slot at the local place.
In that case using a taxi with the windows down sounds pretty safe and it also allows me to bring the wheelchair in case I have to wait in line. (I haven't used a taxi for a year, and had got into the habit of taking extreme measures to avoid doing so: for example hitching a trailer to my mobility scooter in order to get my wheelchair to a bike shop for repairs.)
@Stocky, bless you for the kind offer but I will be okay. What's left of my family is also in the Midlands as it happens, but they are caring for the wife of my relative whose ventilator, sadly, was turned off on Tuesday.
The u3a, who's membership is by definition almost exclusively over 55, and in practice 65+ seems to be expecting that 'real' meetings and social events will be taking place in June. There's a National Day planned for June 2nd and while some events are on-line others are face to face.
I'm booked at attend a Zoom session on the matter on Monday.
I’m a member of a fusty old members club in Mayfair where the membership age averages in its 60s and the enthusiasm to get back is palpable.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
"Unreasonably authoritarian" is a bit rich to be honest. I don't want authoritarianism. What I'm concerned about is being chided by the risk-averse and the virtue-signallers for not wearing a mask when legal restrictions are lifted. The balance must sway back to normality. Not a new normal.
"Wales would consider introducing curfews for men to help women feel safer in the event of a ‘crisis’, First Minister Mark Drakeford has said.
The politician said the action would not be ‘top of the list’ and would only ever be temporary – but refused to rule it out if ‘dramatic action’ was called for. It comes after Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulescoomb suggested a 6pm curfew for men after women were told to change their behaviour following Sarah Everard’s disappearance.
Mr Drakeford was asked by the BBC about the idea of introducing curfews on men in areas where there were concerns of women being assaulted."
“the great majority of that work – as in Spring last year – has been done by the national lockdown/s”
At the risk of being shouted down, I haven’t seen any evidence that unequivocally shows that government imposed lockdowns have done the majority of the work in curbing infections. There are too many cases where infections have peaked and declined in advance of lockdown or have done so with no or minimal restrictions.
Mr. Above, true, but we must remember the PM is an idiotic, vacillating coward who trembles at the thought of not being liked.
Thinking back to early January, the PM wasn't liked and his party was starting to fall behind in the polls. The vaccine rollout, and vaccine wars, came just in time for him.
Thought experiment: What if the US vaccine rollout had happened just before their election, rather than just after? Don't have nightmares, everyone.
Because Trump was negative on Covid as a whole it wouldn't have helped him.
He was positive for it at least once
See you later.
It is one of the great political puzzles of my time. Why on earth did Trump choose to deny the virus?
It was impossible for a start, but if he had led his people in the campaign to restrict its damage he would have been lauded as the saviour of the country. He would have won a landslide last November.
Wasn’t it just part of his ‘concentrate on the base’ strategy, a good chunk of his base bring Covid, lockdown and mask deniers? I agree it was extremely dumb to think calling Covid the China Virus and Wuhan Flu would somehow make folk feel fine about losing hundreds of thousands of their loved ones.
The u3a, who's membership is by definition almost exclusively over 55, and in practice 65+ seems to be expecting that 'real' meetings and social events will be taking place in June. There's a National Day planned for June 2nd and while some events are on-line others are face to face.
I'm booked at attend a Zoom session on the matter on Monday.
I’m a member of a fusty old members club in Mayfair where the membership age averages in its 60s and the enthusiasm to get back is palpable.
I can believe that, and I too want to get back to social meetings; my concern is the wisdom of so doing.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
The UK is an island too. I don't think the UK is inherently incapable of following the South Korean and Taiwanese successes, which are genuine ones. (Reminder that England has the second worst cumulative death toll of anywhere in the world - FT tracker)
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
The U.K. is an island connected to a mainland through a heavily used tunnel plus part of another island where there is a treaty enshrined open border.
Ultimately this is a global problem and only global solutions will suffice. No country can cut itself off. There are 30,000 US servicemen and servicewomen in South Korea protecting it from the North. They will have to live with that as their writ only partially extends to those people. Similarly Taiwan if it wants protection from the PRC.
I agree it's a global problem. We owe it to the world to effectively eliminate this disease if we can, like we did with smallpox. Not least because it's the poorest that suffer the most.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
So you want to live in a society where Government shrugs its shoulders over eliminating societal risk? Just to "manage" it. That is 180 degrees different from your position a couple of days ago. Where you were demanding something be done to protect women from the risk of violence from men. To ensure women can rise to fulfill their full potential as equals of men. A change which clearly men were unable to effect themselves. Those of us who said we were already living our lives by the standards you want were not doing enough to address the broader problem within society. We were "whingers".
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
In re masks - the dilemma there is that although they are a necessary public health measure it’s easy to forget that not so many months ago they were primarily frowned upon as an aid to crime.
Masks can’t work in nightclubs so the compulsion will have to go but the reverse, making people do so, is counterproductive. Keep them on the Tube at the very least.
David H. writes: "Easing restrictions remains a gamble for all the UK governments"
I think this is not right. There is little risk, because the Governments will have data on what happens.
In practice, modelling or personal experience counts for little in this matter. What trumps everything is real data on the same practical epidemiological experiment.
Lockdown has ended in Israel & Israelis are heading out to party (with the exception of their Nick Palmers, natch).
So, we will have the data we need from Israel before we begin to party. Our Governments will have very relevant information on what actually happens as lockdown is eased in a partially vaccinated population.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
So you want to live in a society where Government shrugs its shoulders over eliminating societal risk? Just to "manage" it. That is 180 degrees different from your position a couple of days ago. Where you were demanding something be done to protect women from the risk of violence from men. To ensure women can rise to fulfill their full potential as equals of men. A change which clearly men were unable to effect themselves. Those of us who said we were already living our lives by the standards you want were not doing enough to address the broader problem within society. We were "whingers".
Hypocrisy on stilts.
No, it's just your language. You can't eliminate risk. You can manage it at acceptable levels. For example, you can reduce road deaths but not eliminate them.
I still can't find when the Pfizer trial in the US for secondary school age (12+) is supposed to report. Given it started in January... must be done by the end of the year.
UK cohort sizes -
Age Number 12 793,405 13 777,849 14 748,569 15 736,855 16 717,056 17 708,482
AZ are doing 5+ and I expect that's what we'd use because it's easier to distribute in schools and we expect to have 40-50m doses leftover from our order.
The u3a, who's membership is by definition almost exclusively over 55, and in practice 65+ seems to be expecting that 'real' meetings and social events will be taking place in June. There's a National Day planned for June 2nd and while some events are on-line others are face to face.
I'm booked at attend a Zoom session on the matter on Monday.
I’m a member of a fusty old members club in Mayfair where the membership age averages in its 60s and the enthusiasm to get back is palpable.
I can believe that, and I too want to get back to social meetings; my concern is the wisdom of so doing.
The mood now and in June may be very different - in either direction
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
Why ? Mask wearing on public transport - particularly in the winter - is quite sensible from an individual point of view. Why should it ever be socially unacceptable to wish to avoid a cold ?
David H. writes: "Easing restrictions remains a gamble for all the UK governments"
I think this is not right. There is little risk, because the Governments will have data on what happens.
In practice, modelling or personal experience counts for little in this matter. What trumps everything is real data on the same practical epidemiological experiment.
Lockdown has ended in Israel & Israelis are heading out to party (with the exception of their Nick Palmers, natch).
So, we will have the data we need from Israel before we begin to party. Our Governments will have very relevant information on what actually happens as lockdown is eased in a partially vaccinated population.
We can -- if need be -- postpone the rave.
By the time restrictions are due to be lifted completely, every adult will have had at least one dose, according to this morning’s papers. So rave on, I’d suggest.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
The idea is that we get back to government not telling you what to do. I don't like much of the imposition at the moment either but I get why (some of it anyway) is done. I had to drop into the city centre this morning and I resented the emptiness of it.
After this gets to a better place if people want to wear masks, whether seasonally or all year, if private enterprise wants to manage its own mitigation rules on how they operate, then its up to them. Those who were most vulnerable or think they are, may seek to voluntarily continue some of the measures imposed. They should neither think they are somehow better citizens for doing it, nor demand others comply. Nor should anyone else think they are loons.
It should not be the role of government to eliminate risk. And as others have pointed out, they haven’t even bothered to provide a cost benefit analysis of their measures a whole, yet alone a targeted analysis of each individual measure.
I don’t mean to sound blunt but who cares if our excess death goes up by a few hundred a day in the winter months. Its debatable whether taken over the period 2020-2025 you’ll even notice it. It’s time to announce job done and let the rest of get on with staving off personal bankruptcy and mental breakdowns in our families.
It's the role of government to eliminate risk to society.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense on stilts.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
So you want to live in a society where Government shrugs its shoulders over eliminating societal risk? Just to "manage" it. That is 180 degrees different from your position a couple of days ago. Where you were demanding something be done to protect women from the risk of violence from men. To ensure women can rise to fulfill their full potential as equals of men. A change which clearly men were unable to effect themselves. Those of us who said we were already living our lives by the standards you want were not doing enough to address the broader problem within society. We were "whingers".
Hypocrisy on stilts.
@Cyclefree is correct. In most instances it is neither possible nor desirable to completely eliminate risk. If we wished, for example, to eliminate the risk to children of being run over and killed by cars then the only effective means to do that would be to imprison children in their homes from birth to the age of 18 or to get rid of cars. Elimination is not practical or desirable in this case so we try to manage the risk by having minimum driver education and competency requirements, repeating road safety messages to children ad nauseam, and through low mandatory speed limits in residential areas.
The Government is in the business of risk management. We're all in the business of risk management. Life is, in large part, about risk management.
Header. Not sure. David says "Yet the political pressure, and direction, is unsurprisingly all in favour of loosening things up." Is this true?
Pretty much, yes. Now that the olds have been vaccinated the motivation for perma-lockdown through fear has gone. We all just want this to be over.
The remaining advocates for sitting on our arses for the rest of the year are now the Zero Covid screwballs, with a little assistance from the devolved administrations which don't have the responsibility for paying for all of this.
Thankfully it looks like Whitty and Valence are not getting sucked into the zero-covid mind zap and are telling Johnson he needs to accept that we learn to live with endemic covid each autumn/winter.
Whitty was actually quite scathing about Zero Covid in his evidence. He said that they needed to put a number on it as no one, not even themselves, thinks complete elimination possible. Even Jacinda Aderne appears to be tentatively moving from elimination to suppression in NZ at some point after they have completed their vaccination programme.
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
Zero-Covid is about whether you always aim for the lowest possible level of infections, or whether you get the infection rate to a certain level and accept you will be treating people and people will die, in commensurate numbers. Zero-Covid isn't about achieving actual elimination but it is about whack-a-mole on any outbreaks that occur.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
“Zero Covid” suffers from the same problem as “Defund the Police”. It doesn’t actually propose what it says on the tin, both are more nuanced, but the implications of both scare the hell out of a lot of people.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
The UK is an island too. I don't think the UK is inherently incapable of following the South Korean and Taiwanese successes, which are genuine ones. (Reminder that England has the second worst cumulative death toll of anywhere in the world - FT tracker)
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
For the purposes of disease control, Great Britain isn't an island. We won't count as an island again, unless or until the flow of people to and fro across the Channel can be completely stopped in an emergency.
That means getting rid of our reliance on the passage of truck drivers on ferries and through the Chunnel for trade in goods, or at least all essential imports like food. Longer term I think we should actively explore moving as much of the movement of goods as possible to container traffic, as an insurance against having to go through something like coronavirus again, but right now we have to deal with the world as we find it.
Somehow greater reliance on freight trains should be sought.
Really good, fair analysis by David. The pressure to be optimistic is not coming from most of the population, who in poll after poll lean on the cautious side, but from some backbenchers. Johnson is easily strong enough to ignore them if he can repress his own bias to cheery optimism. The population has been very tolerant so far but if he relaxes too early and then needs a new lockdown in early summer, I can see a real backlash.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
Our experience too. We don't go to the big supermarket at all click and collect if we have too. Even with two jabs I will still wear a mask...
My experience is that the "cautious" stuff from the general population is a mile wide and a inch thick.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Quite. And the notion that, if masking mandates are dumped on June 21st, more than a tiny minority of hardcore germophobes will keep using them, is for the birds. Masks are horrible.
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
To accompany the government's plan for legal limits on social contact to be lifted by 21 June, I'd like to see the government issue clear and strong guidance (not laws) for all screens to be removed and masks not to be worn. We should make it socially unacceptable to continue with these practices.
Why ? Mask wearing on public transport - particularly in the winter - is quite sensible from an individual point of view. Why should it ever be socially unacceptable to wish to avoid a cold ?
Masks do little to stop you catching respiratory infections, so they are really there to protect your fellow travellers. As I am surprised you haven't picked up over the last year. But hopefully we have also learnt not to go to work when we are ill.
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
In re masks - the dilemma there is that although they are a necessary public health measure it’s easy to forget that not so many months ago they were primarily frowned upon as an aid to crime.
Masks can’t work in nightclubs so the compulsion will have to go but the reverse, making people do so, is counterproductive. Keep them on the Tube at the very least.
I wouldn't have it mandated though. If people want to wear them then that's up to them. I personally can't wait to get rid of it and the one way system, screens and everything else that has become commonplace over the last year. There really isn't a single thing I'd like to keep from the lockdown year.
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
In re masks - the dilemma there is that although they are a necessary public health measure it’s easy to forget that not so many months ago they were primarily frowned upon as an aid to crime.
Masks can’t work in nightclubs so the compulsion will have to go but the reverse, making people do so, is counterproductive. Keep them on the Tube at the very least.
I wouldn't have it mandated though. If people want to wear them then that's up to them. I personally can't wait to get rid of it and the one way system, screens and everything else that has become commonplace over the last year. There really isn't a single thing I'd like to keep from the lockdown year.
Just had an email advertising a Gin Night, with several small Essex distilleries talking about their gins on Zoom. Attenders can buy a pack with samples of the gins, plus mixers and what are described as 'other exciting bits', although the packs aren't compulsory. Interesting idea. Might well give it a go!
"Wales would consider introducing curfews for men to help women feel safer in the event of a ‘crisis’, First Minister Mark Drakeford has said.
The politician said the action would not be ‘top of the list’ and would only ever be temporary – but refused to rule it out if ‘dramatic action’ was called for. It comes after Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulescoomb suggested a 6pm curfew for men after women were told to change their behaviour following Sarah Everard’s disappearance.
Mr Drakeford was asked by the BBC about the idea of introducing curfews on men in areas where there were concerns of women being assaulted."
Mark Drakeford was making a spur-of-the-moment response to a question. Whether this is an idiocy that he already regrets or reveals a worrying streak of extreme authoritarianism is unclear. Given that the remark came from a Labour leftist you could advance either argument.
Jenny Jones, on the other hand, wasn't being entirely serious with her original remark but was seeking to make a point. Feminists have been proposing male curfews in response to horrors like the Sarah Everard murder for decades. The point, of course, is not to achieve a male curfew but to highlight that a de facto female curfew exists and is profoundly wrong.
Just had an email advertising a Gin Night, with several small Essex distilleries talking about their gins on Zoom. Attenders can buy a pack with samples of the gins, plus mixers and what are described as 'other exciting bits', although the packs aren't compulsory. Interesting idea. Might well give it a go!
Too much generalising from our personal experience and preferences in this. Once lockdown eases I think the pressure to wear masks will ease, but it's unreasonably authoritarian to pressure people to remove them if they don't want to - it really goes from one extreme to the other. Frankly I'll wear a mask in close company with strangers for the forseeable future, and if you don't like it you can socialise with someone else. I'm no libertarian, but really, what business is it of the Government to tell me what to wear if I'm not actually causing a hazard?
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
In re masks - the dilemma there is that although they are a necessary public health measure it’s easy to forget that not so many months ago they were primarily frowned upon as an aid to crime.
Masks can’t work in nightclubs so the compulsion will have to go but the reverse, making people do so, is counterproductive. Keep them on the Tube at the very least.
I wouldn't have it mandated though. If people want to wear them then that's up to them. I personally can't wait to get rid of it and the one way system, screens and everything else that has become commonplace over the last year. There really isn't a single thing I'd like to keep from the lockdown year.
Amen. I even miss my commute.
Yes, thinking back on the commute it was about 30 minutes of downtime for me twice a day where I could shut everything out and just put my headphones on and read a book.
"Wales would consider introducing curfews for men to help women feel safer in the event of a ‘crisis’, First Minister Mark Drakeford has said.
The politician said the action would not be ‘top of the list’ and would only ever be temporary – but refused to rule it out if ‘dramatic action’ was called for. It comes after Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulescoomb suggested a 6pm curfew for men after women were told to change their behaviour following Sarah Everard’s disappearance.
Mr Drakeford was asked by the BBC about the idea of introducing curfews on men in areas where there were concerns of women being assaulted."
Mark Drakeford was making a spur-of-the-moment response to a question. Whether this is an idiocy that he already regrets or reveals a worrying streak of extreme authoritarianism is unclear. Given that the remark came from a Labour leftist you could advance either argument.
Jenny Jones, on the other hand, wasn't being entirely serious with her original remark but was seeking to make a point. Feminists have been proposing male curfews in response to horrors like the Sarah Everard murder for decades. The point, of course, is not to achieve a male curfew but to highlight that a de facto female curfew exists and is profoundly wrong.
Entirely consistent with his views and the disaster he is for those of us living in Wales
He is seeking an elimination covid policy while getting Westminster to pay for it
Comments
The snug indoors socialising that makes winter bearable is forbidden. The walks in the park that made Lockdown One bearable aren't much fun. And whilst Zoom school has been the right thing to do, it has been really draining.
And some (probably quite a lot) of this this could have been avoided by taking more cautious decisions in November and December.
There have been rather too many cases within a week or so of the first vaccination, and I suspect these are caught on the journey etc, often by people who have isolated well.
If you do travel, then perhaps find a vaccinated friend to do the driving, rather than a commercial taxi.
He was unlucky (or Biden was lucky, if you like).
Firstly - one dose of AZ (the backbone of our programme) provides incredible immunity against severe symptoms and hospitalisation, better than the FDA approved J&J vaccine.
Secondly - case R has decoupled from the hospitalisation rate, does it matter if 20k people get it asymptomatically or only get mild symptoms?
Thirdly - your fully immunised figure is way out of date. The first proper unlockdown step is all the way on 19th May, counting two weeks before that takes us to 5th May. That takes us to 17m fully immunised people with both doses that are at the end of their two week waiting period. This is groups 1-5.
Fourth - in April we're expecting a huge uptick in vaccine deliveries from Moderna, Novavax and J&J. There's some talk that the government may dump the 12 week waiting policy for under 50s and bring it down to 6 weeks for Novavax and Moderna. Given the supply situation there's a very, very good chance that every single adult will have received their first dose by the 19th May and will get their second in advance of 21st June.
The critical part of this is giving the majority of under 50s the new vaccines which don't require a 12 week waiting time like AZ. From April we will have two new ones available that give >95% protection against symptoms and 100% protection against severe symptoms, that's a game changer.
You've got Stockholm syndrome wrt lockdown, it's time to let it go.
The thing is, set against that background, one of the worst possible things one could do is to let old people out to enjoy playtime whilst keeping the young imprisoned. A more effective driver of resentment can barely be imagined, and that's why it's not being attempted.
My workplace (100 staff) is shut till September, and most of us think it'll be spring 2022 before it partially reopens. I don't know anyone who's had a haircut this year, apart from some home efforts. People round here are still being very careful - many wearing masks on walks, steering long circles around each other (with friendly nods of appreciation), hurrying through supermarkets if they go at all.
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/covid-19-when-elimination-ends
Jacinda Ardern seems to agree with Hill, telling her caucus in January that, "Our goal has to be to get the management of Covid-19 to a similar place as we do seasonally with the flu. It won't be a disease that we see simply disappear after one round of vaccinations across the population."
We could reopen concert halls tomorrow, but it is the fear of death that will stay with us. This is the permanent change that is now the new normal. Normal patterns of social activity will slowly return. People will get used to being vaccinated regularly (with temporary side effects), and to getting a mild case of COVID from time to time (reduced in severity by the vaccines). The deaths will continue but will be contained by mass vaccination, and by herd immunity. Life will be a little bit shorter, so people will try to pack more into it. They will want to get out more. Unfortunately, this is a painful transition.
Most likely life expectancy will continue to rise.
There's definitely a weird PB caricature of the wider public that has them 100% masked up all the time, even alone in their own homes squirting hand sanitizer at passing yobs and doffing their caps at passing people who are also permanently wearing masks.
Lots of people going on about how terrible it is. Followed by "Do you want to come round for a drink? We could sit in the garden"...
Above all, I think what people most want is a resumption of social interaction that's not mediated through a bloody screen. If and when step 2 arrives in England - with outdoor catering and non-food retail due to come back at the same time - I reckon that the shops will be largely deserted but any pubs and restaurants that find it economic to reopen will do a brisk trade. We've been able to buy yet more tat through home delivery throughout all of this; what folk really want is to have a laugh and get pissed together.
It isn't an obviously stupid strategy. It is the strategy followed by South Korea and Taiwan, without the help of vaccines, with far less death and economic damage and much greater success than anywhere in the West.
Zero-Covid does however rely on a very high level of vigilance and compliance, if it's going to work.
Quite a large number of businesses will also be using them for the next two or three months.
The other point with the is that whatever their precise sensitivity, their mass use will pick up any significant increase in infection several days before the symptom based testing - and isolate significant numbers of infected before they get a chance to pass it on.
For obvious reasons no one has made this point in the media, but Sarah Everard was on her way home from a friend’s house. I suspect there has been a general relaxing of behaviour over the last couple of weeks.
South Korea and Taiwan invested heavily in public health after SARS and I support that wholeheartedly. But they are both, in effect, islands only accessible by plane and the massive US military presence in both means that their approaches are going to have to be in sync with the US longer term.
You don't need general lockdown with Zero-Covid because infections are at or near zero and any interventions are highly targeted.
Government has worked the vaccines remarkably well. But only government could take that risk, of committing to buy a vast number of jabs that might not have worked. They believed the science. Some might say they got lucky. That would be an unfair reading, IMHO
Our hope is that government can have an ever reducing role in Covid control. It won't go away entirely. The level of exposure you are prepared to endure - and the consequences of that - should very soon be down to the individual. The baton of risk can be passed to the individual - because with Government controls, we have moved to that point where it is the individual that suffers the consequences, not society.
https://twitter.com/ThatRyanChap/status/1370687858378424324
The care home group said of the residents and staff who had tested positive "the majority have shown either no symptoms, or mild symptoms only".
Sounds like the jab may well have done its job in this case. Consider:
1. Elderly care home residents are the most vulnerable group in society to this disease. It's why they were priority cohort 1 in the rollout.
2. Covid outbreaks pre-vaccine ripped through care homes with impunity, and caused very large numbers of deaths. We already know it's almost impossible to stop the disease spreading like this once it gets into a care home. So a large fraction of the residents and staff will likely have caught it in this instance as well, even allowing for some reduction in transmissibility caused by inoculation.
3. However, despite widespread transmission only three deaths have been reported. Because we don't know how many moderate or asymptomatic cases were also detected we're deprived of the ability to do the maths here, but in crude terms if 30 residents in total were infected, and we assume that 20 of those would have become severely ill and probably died before vaccines came to the rescue then, given that recent studies suggest vaccines cut the death rate by about 85%, the number of deaths we would now expect to see in a similar outbreak would be not 20, but 3.
Again, as I said earlier, if vaccines weren't doing their job then we'd be getting reports of a lot of care home massacres continuing to occur all over the country, and the death rate amongst the very elderly would not have dropped like a stone (and, indeed, be continuing to fall.) These deaths are three individual tragedies for the people who bought it and their families; they're most unlikely to be cause for wider concern.
The second, more desirable outcome is that we treat Sars-CoV-2 a bit like measles, and try to stamp it out as completely as we can. I’ve seen erroneous commentary that this isn’t possible because measles doesn’t mutate as fast as Sars-CoV-2. In fact, measles intrinsically mutates faster; it just makes more errors as it replicates because, unlike coronavirus, it doesn’t bother with proofreading. The real reason for the near elimination of measles is that its equivalent of Spike is more constrained by the structures it must form and by the multiple different types of neutralising antibodies induced by the vaccine. Near elimination of Sars-CoV-2 could be equally possible if updated, highly effective vaccines prevent the virus and any evolving variants from spreading. With better vaccine technology we might be able to direct a very strong antibody response to the bits of Spike that the virus can’t do without; alternatively, there might be a vaccine that covers a wide range of different Spike variants – so wide that there is no way for the virus to evolve to escape them all.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/rupert-beale/eeek
We make decisions that have consequences. We will go for the "live with the virus" approach, rightly or wrongly.
I'm booked at attend a Zoom session on the matter on Monday.
I was a bit disappointed by his last effort though (Can't Get You Out of My Head). Did you feel the same?
The Trap is my favorite.
UK cohort sizes -
Age Number
12 793,405
13 777,849
14 748,569
15 736,855
16 717,056
17 708,482
That means getting rid of our reliance on the passage of truck drivers on ferries and through the Chunnel for trade in goods, or at least all essential imports like food. Longer term I think we should actively explore moving as much of the movement of goods as possible to container traffic, as an insurance against having to go through something like coronavirus again, but right now we have to deal with the world as we find it.
This is not the role of government and, in any case, you can never eliminate risk. All you can ever do is manage it. The aim should be to keep it as low as is possible given a society's risk appetite and the other demands a free society has.
But risk always has or always will be with us.
We at least have the vaccine cavalry coming to our aid. Many European countries are still weeks behind us. They were put in that position because the EU demanded it be the central co-ordination point. A role in which it failed, badly.
I can see some potential for real friction in this, with people shouting at each other in pubs etc. I'm the most equable bloke you're ever likely to meet, but I'm really quite annoyed at the suggestion.
Ultimately this is a global problem and only global solutions will suffice. No country can cut itself off. There are 30,000 US servicemen and servicewomen in South Korea protecting it from the North. They will have to live with that as their writ only partially extends to those people. Similarly Taiwan if it wants protection from the PRC.
In that case using a taxi with the windows down sounds pretty safe and it also allows me to bring the wheelchair in case I have to wait in line. (I haven't used a taxi for a year, and had got into the habit of taking extreme measures to avoid doing so: for example hitching a trailer to my mobility scooter in order to get my wheelchair to a bike shop for repairs.)
@Stocky, bless you for the kind offer but I will be okay. What's left of my family is also in the Midlands as it happens, but they are caring for the wife of my relative whose ventilator, sadly, was turned off on Tuesday.
--AS
The politician said the action would not be ‘top of the list’ and would only ever be temporary – but refused to rule it out if ‘dramatic action’ was called for. It comes after Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulescoomb suggested a 6pm curfew for men after women were told to change their behaviour following Sarah Everard’s disappearance.
Mr Drakeford was asked by the BBC about the idea of introducing curfews on men in areas where there were concerns of women being assaulted."
https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/12/wales-would-consider-curfews-for-men-to-help-women-feel-safer-in-a-crisis-14231747
At the risk of being shouted down, I haven’t seen any evidence that unequivocally shows that government imposed lockdowns have done the majority of the work in curbing infections. There are too many cases where infections have peaked and declined in advance of lockdown or have done so with no or minimal restrictions.
Abolish the Police!*
*actually don't abolish them at all, just re-train, re-allocate, and trim budgets.
Zero Covid!*
*not actually, zero covid, but minimal covid.
Abolish means abolish. Zero means zero.
Hypocrisy on stilts.
Masks can’t work in nightclubs so the compulsion will have to go but the reverse, making people do so, is counterproductive. Keep them on the Tube at the very least.
I think this is not right. There is little risk, because the Governments will have data on what happens.
In practice, modelling or personal experience counts for little in this matter. What trumps everything is real data on the same practical epidemiological experiment.
Lockdown has ended in Israel & Israelis are heading out to party (with the exception of their Nick Palmers, natch).
So, we will have the data we need from Israel before we begin to party. Our Governments will have very relevant information on what actually happens as lockdown is eased in a partially vaccinated population.
We can -- if need be -- postpone the rave.
Mask wearing on public transport - particularly in the winter - is quite sensible from an individual point of view. Why should it ever be socially unacceptable to wish to avoid a cold ?
https://twitter.com/westminsterwag/status/1370464865882673155?s=21
After this gets to a better place if people want to wear masks, whether seasonally or all year, if private enterprise wants to manage its own mitigation rules on how they operate, then its up to them. Those who were most vulnerable or think they are, may seek to voluntarily continue some of the measures imposed. They should neither think they are somehow better citizens for doing it, nor demand others comply. Nor should anyone else think they are loons.
The Government is in the business of risk management. We're all in the business of risk management. Life is, in large part, about risk management.
https://twitter.com/JamesAALongman/status/1370692818289577986?s=20
Guernsey CMO "Zero Covid is epidemiologically illiterate"
Interesting idea. Might well give it a go!
Jenny Jones, on the other hand, wasn't being entirely serious with her original remark but was seeking to make a point. Feminists have been proposing male curfews in response to horrors like the Sarah Everard murder for decades. The point, of course, is not to achieve a male curfew but to highlight that a de facto female curfew exists and is profoundly wrong.
He is seeking an elimination covid policy while getting Westminster to pay for it