The general standard of food in France is in my experience far better than the general standard in Italy. There is a lot of overpriced trash in Italian cities. France is expensive but there are fewer tourist traps blocking up entire streets with rubbish.
I spent a lot of time in Milan at one point and struggled to find good eating experiences. Hampered by not being a big pasta fan.
Milan has WEIRDLY bad food. It’s not even that touristy
Drive an hour out of the city in almost any direction and you’ll get some of the best food in the world
Incidentally that truly sensational meal i had earlier, with endless fine cava and a mind-blowing squid ink pasta with red Soller prawns - with that phenomenal sunset view - cost me £45, including raw tuna taco starter and bread and olives and the works
So about the same as a solo pizza express with salad and a couple of large glasses of red in, say, basingstoke
But without the sheer joie de vivre of Basingstoke.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
One thing I genuinely - and I do mean this genuinely - don’t get is whether the public are oblivious to the fact that daily deaths from covid are very minimal and have been since the early spring. Are people unaware of this?
In my experience no, the media only really reports the bad news so cases are currently getting a lot of play. Percentage increases in hospitalisations and deaths also. Absolute numbers a lot less so.
One thing I genuinely - and I do mean this genuinely - don’t get is whether the public are oblivious to the fact that daily deaths from covid are very minimal and have been since the early spring. Are people unaware of this?
In my experience no, the media only really reports the bad news so cases are currently getting a lot of play. Percentage increases in hospitalisations and deaths also. Absolute numbers a lot less so.
I would be interested to know though, whether improved treatment and the like is potentially stretching the validity of our current "28 day" measure.
I think the other issue is that people have had it so drilled into them that deaths are a "lagging outcome" that they just assume that they will eventually catch up with the rising case numbers.
Focusing purely on this country, what has the opposition actually argued for in the pandemic? Basically all they've done is said they'd have done things "better". They'd have made test and trace better, they'd have had a better vaccine rollout, they'd have had a better furlough scheme, they'd have had better border controls, they'd have made better decisions based on "the science". It's just cheap talk. I'm not sure at any point they've ever really contributed much original to the whole handling of the pandemic, or even explained how those things could actually have been done better, just that they ought to have been.
Hey, maybe they really would have just done everything better, or maybe it'd have just been exactly the same but with different personalities. We'll never know.
The opposition has been consistently shit, and has made essentially no useful contributions at all. I think given the job the opposition would have actually been worse than the Tories, because Boris doesn't do micro-managing or follow any doctrine, so to an extent his lack of principles and laziness has at least enabled competent people to get on with the job without the PM messing them around. I think any opposition government would have interfered quite a bit more.
you, Pirate Britain Libertarian Right Wing Populists. You deserve a proper talking down to on the politics and science of this.
Where the government are this evening is ignorant and wrong. Where Starmer and Labour are this evening is spot on. Clear pandemic water between the two main party’s now. The government are no longer following science at all, this simply about the politics of over promising in the first place and having too many looneys on the back benches.
Here’s scientific fact for you, we need masks and other measures to protect the vaccines, just allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines. That is science fact.
It’s totally irresponsible of government not to lead on mask wearing, and to open up so quickly. They are simply sloping shoulders onto business how to protect employees and customers, not taking the lead. The government are murdering the still much needed test and trace and isolating, and that is disgraceful at this stage.
"allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines"
How does that work?
I think the ideal scenario to create a vaccine resistant virus would be high rates of transmission in a partially immunized population. Which is not totally different from the situation we have now?
That's simply not true, and the problem is that you are thinking of this like a bacterial infection. And it's nothing like that.
The frequency of mutations is a function of the number of human hosts spewing out massive quantities of the virus. Because that's what viruses do: they turn your cells into factories for reproduction.
Mutations occur when your cells chuck out a slightly different version of the virus, and that infects another cell in your body, and then it too is chucking out a different version. If that version is better able to infect and reproduce, then it will gain share.
The more people there are with chronic conditions, the more opportunities for mutation there are. This is fundamentally different to a bacterial infection where you wipe out 99% of bacteria, but leave a pristine situation for the other 1% to thrive.
NEW: Israel reports nearly 500 new coronavirus cases, biggest one-day increase since March
Out of interest, why is the reality of Israeli cases starting to rise again any sort of a story? We know cases of delta will spread rapidly in a highly vaccinated country which has largely or totally opened up. Because, UK.
Is it just because they are entirely Pfizer or something?
Because of the general uselessness of the media in adding 2 + 2 and other advanced mathematics.
Once the Delta variants R number became apparent, it meant 2 things were clear
- The threshold for herd immunity by vaccination had been lifted to a very high level. - This is much higher than Israel (or probably any other country) is likely to achieve through voluntary vaccination.
Therefore Delta will sweep through countries. Even Chinese style lockdowns are unlikely to stop it. The outcome will be a function of the level of vaccination.
Exactly right. With a R of 3, then it's quite easy to get to herd immunity off voluntary vaccine update in adults. But with an R of 6 it is essentially impossible.
So, you need to do one of two things: boost the number vaccinated (by adding children as France and the US, or by adding some degree of compulsion), or accept that Covid will sweep through unvaccinated communities.
And the UK can't really do the first any time soon- we've not got enough mRNA vaccines coming before the autumn. So we either keep the social distancing going (school summer holidays should help from late July to the end of August), or...
(Yes, there's enough vaccine to do nearly all adults, and we're close to that on first doses. But that's a finish line that we've put in place, when it seemed likely to be enough to make any future flare-ups self-limiting. If delta Coivd has moved the goalposts, there's no point whinging about it.)
Focusing purely on this country, what has the opposition actually argued for in the pandemic? Basically all they've done is said they'd have done things "better". They'd have made test and trace better, they'd have had a better vaccine rollout, they'd have had a better furlough scheme, they'd have had better border controls, they'd have made better decisions based on "the science". It's just cheap talk. I'm not sure at any point they've ever really contributed much original to the whole handling of the pandemic, or even explained how those things could actually have been done better, just that they ought to have been.
Hey, maybe they really would have just done everything better, or maybe it'd have just been exactly the same but with different personalities. We'll never know.
The opposition has been consistently shit, and has made essentially no useful contributions at all. I think given the job the opposition would have actually been worse than the Tories, because Boris doesn't do micro-managing or follow any doctrine, so to an extent his lack of principles and laziness has at least enabled competent people to get on with the job without the PM messing them around. I think any opposition government would have interfered quite a bit more.
you, Pirate Britain Libertarian Right Wing Populists. You deserve a proper talking down to on the politics and science of this.
Where the government are this evening is ignorant and wrong. Where Starmer and Labour are this evening is spot on. Clear pandemic water between the two main party’s now. The government are no longer following science at all, this simply about the politics of over promising in the first place and having too many looneys on the back benches.
Here’s scientific fact for you, we need masks and other measures to protect the vaccines, just allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines. That is science fact.
It’s totally irresponsible of government not to lead on mask wearing, and to open up so quickly. They are simply sloping shoulders onto business how to protect employees and customers, not taking the lead. The government are murdering the still much needed test and trace and isolating, and that is disgraceful at this stage.
"allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines"
How does that work?
I think the ideal scenario to create a vaccine resistant virus would be high rates of transmission in a partially immunized population. Which is not totally different from the situation we have now?
NEW: Israel reports nearly 500 new coronavirus cases, biggest one-day increase since March
Out of interest, why is the reality of Israeli cases starting to rise again any sort of a story? We know cases of delta will spread rapidly in a highly vaccinated country which has largely or totally opened up. Because, UK.
Is it just because they are entirely Pfizer or something?
Because of the general uselessness of the media in adding 2 + 2 and other advanced mathematics.
Once the Delta variants R number became apparent, it meant 2 things were clear
- The threshold for herd immunity by vaccination had been lifted to a very high level. - This is much higher than Israel (or probably any other country) is likely to achieve through voluntary vaccination.
Therefore Delta will sweep through countries. Even Chinese style lockdowns are unlikely to stop it. The outcome will be a function of the level of vaccination.
Exactly right. With a R of 3, then it's quite easy to get to herd immunity off voluntary vaccine update in adults. But with an R of 6 it is essentially impossible.
So, you need to do one of two things: boost the number vaccinated (by adding children as France and the US, or by adding some degree of compulsion), or accept that Covid will sweep through unvaccinated communities.
I wonder how many extra people will have been / will now get vaccinated because of the extra threat of Delta and the imminent reduction in mask usage.
Let’s be honest - the people moaning about not having our hands held by the state anymore are just Boris haters who want Sir Keir to score a political point. Difficult position for those who hate Boris and dug him out for not reopening earlier
Can we please now call it by its name? A reckless deliberate population infection strategy with unknown consequences not being contemplated by any other country in the world
What does she thinks will happen when places reach their vaccination wall I wonder - lockdown forever?
She and those like her are a gift to the government - it means relevant criticisms get mixed up with the silly ones, and are easier to manage.
But that's what this ultimately boils down to. We're pretty much hitting our vaccine wall now. There's few to no first doses left to do in large parts of the country and where there is some demand anyone can walk in and get one whenever they want.
Anyone arguing against July 19th unlockdown is effectively saying the only other way is to keep it basically forever as we're never really going to vaccinate any more than 89-91% of adults and the JCVI are vacillating over vaccines for kids.
To be fair to the Pagels of this world, they mainly seem to be all arguing for kids to be jabbed.
Goalpost shifting. If the Government elected to vaccinate secondary school kids they'd want primaries done. If the primary kids got it as well they'd want infants to get it. If the whole population were vaccinated they'd then claim it still wasn't safe to open up, because of the anti-vaxxers and those for whom the jabs haven't worked. And then they'd start mithering on about the NHS Winter Crisis and what about novel variants? Nothing that is done to combat this disease will ever be sufficient for some of these people.
NEW: Israel reports nearly 500 new coronavirus cases, biggest one-day increase since March
Out of interest, why is the reality of Israeli cases starting to rise again any sort of a story? We know cases of delta will spread rapidly in a highly vaccinated country which has largely or totally opened up. Because, UK.
Is it just because they are entirely Pfizer or something?
Because of the general uselessness of the media in adding 2 + 2 and other advanced mathematics.
Once the Delta variants R number became apparent, it meant 2 things were clear
- The threshold for herd immunity by vaccination had been lifted to a very high level. - This is much higher than Israel (or probably any other country) is likely to achieve through voluntary vaccination.
Therefore Delta will sweep through countries. Even Chinese style lockdowns are unlikely to stop it. The outcome will be a function of the level of vaccination.
Exactly right. With a R of 3, then it's quite easy to get to herd immunity off voluntary vaccine update in adults. But with an R of 6 it is essentially impossible.
So, you need to do one of two things: boost the number vaccinated (by adding children as France and the US, or by adding some degree of compulsion), or accept that Covid will sweep through unvaccinated communities.
And the UK can't really do the first any time soon- we've not got enough mRNA vaccines coming before the autumn. So we either keep the social distancing going (school summer holidays should help from late July to the end of August), or...
(Yes, there's enough vaccine to do nearly all adults, and we're close to that on first doses. But that's a finish line that we've put in place, when it seemed likely to be enough to make any future flare-ups self-limiting. If delta Coivd has moved the goalposts, there's no point whinging about it.)
We have though. The new Pfizer order has commenced deliveries, that's 2.3m per week from July onwards. That will filter into the front line at the end next week just as the first dose programme completes at about 47m people.
Twitter is full of tales of major outbreaks at UK's universities. Oxford, Leeds, Durham, Kent, Reading etc etc.
Most of them have broken up for summer now so presumably whatever university epidemics there are must be fizzling out (and/or seeding the parents' home towns).
Perhaps many/most of the students have had quite enough of living at their parent's houses and, provided they've got the accommodation to live in, are perfectly happy carrying on where they are. And it's not as if universities have got anything else to use the accommodation for at the moment. No conferences etc which are normally the mainstay of out-of-term income.
Usual to have term only rents, or ones that end in June. Allows for refurb over summer then new tenants.
That's very variable, and I think much less common.
Focusing purely on this country, what has the opposition actually argued for in the pandemic? Basically all they've done is said they'd have done things "better". They'd have made test and trace better, they'd have had a better vaccine rollout, they'd have had a better furlough scheme, they'd have had better border controls, they'd have made better decisions based on "the science". It's just cheap talk. I'm not sure at any point they've ever really contributed much original to the whole handling of the pandemic, or even explained how those things could actually have been done better, just that they ought to have been.
Hey, maybe they really would have just done everything better, or maybe it'd have just been exactly the same but with different personalities. We'll never know.
The opposition has been consistently shit, and has made essentially no useful contributions at all. I think given the job the opposition would have actually been worse than the Tories, because Boris doesn't do micro-managing or follow any doctrine, so to an extent his lack of principles and laziness has at least enabled competent people to get on with the job without the PM messing them around. I think any opposition government would have interfered quite a bit more.
you, Pirate Britain Libertarian Right Wing Populists. You deserve a proper talking down to on the politics and science of this.
Where the government are this evening is ignorant and wrong. Where Starmer and Labour are this evening is spot on. Clear pandemic water between the two main party’s now. The government are no longer following science at all, this simply about the politics of over promising in the first place and having too many looneys on the back benches.
Here’s scientific fact for you, we need masks and other measures to protect the vaccines, just allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines. That is science fact.
It’s totally irresponsible of government not to lead on mask wearing, and to open up so quickly. They are simply sloping shoulders onto business how to protect employees and customers, not taking the lead. The government are murdering the still much needed test and trace and isolating, and that is disgraceful at this stage.
Here’s scientific fact for you, we need masks and other measures to protect the vaccines, just allowing infections to rip in a mostly doubled jabbed population erodes the efficacy of the vaccines. That is science fact.
That's one of the more bizarre things I've read recently.
But not surprising from someone who thought the UK should stop vaccinating at Easter and donate any remaining doses to the third world.
You are wrong. I said when we get to less at risk groups, share some vaccines simultaneously, not in place of. I still think that ethically right and politically sensible, and too late to do it retrospectively. It is now too late. In the history books as having done it this way. It was also medically sensible to share where we share land border, but the government undermined that thinking by just leaving airports wide open to 20K delta carriers from India.
It might even be revealed, the months I was abused on PB for making this argument, the government was sharing in secret.
Whatever you do at the moment - don’t mention masks on Twitter. There’s a weird debate going on as everyone’s now turned into public health experts.
Thank goodness there’s none of that sort of thing on PB.
One of the long term effects of COVID is that epidemiology has joined the ranks of teaching, running trains and urban planning in being a profession that the entire public think they are experts on.
Some of us have better reason than others to think we are experts at one of those...
Americans often underestimate their English ancestry, as English-Americans are the only group that don't really organise. I've seen estimates that about a third of America's gene pool is English.
Let’s be honest - the people moaning about not having our hands held by the state anymore are just Boris haters who want Sir Keir to score a political point. Difficult position for those who hate Boris and dug him out for not reopening earlier
Can we please now call it by its name? A reckless deliberate population infection strategy with unknown consequences not being contemplated by any other country in the world
She’s insane. Every country will be going for herd immunity, preferably via vaccination. Including those nations who tried to keep it out such as Australia and NZ.
You'd need more context to see what she meant by herd immunity (ie with or without vaccination) but life's too short.
Given that the UK is vaccinating, vaccination surely plays a part in the herd immunity strategy?
Yes but the original herd immunity proposals were pre-vaccine, so we now have the same term being used to mean two quite different things (arguably three but let's not go there). So it might be that Carole C is mixing them up, or not. But I can't be bothered to track down the right twitter threads to work it all out.
Let’s be honest - the people moaning about not having our hands held by the state anymore are just Boris haters who want Sir Keir to score a political point. Difficult position for those who hate Boris and dug him out for not reopening earlier
Can we please now call it by its name? A reckless deliberate population infection strategy with unknown consequences not being contemplated by any other country in the world
What does she thinks will happen when places reach their vaccination wall I wonder - lockdown forever?
She and those like her are a gift to the government - it means relevant criticisms get mixed up with the silly ones, and are easier to manage.
But that's what this ultimately boils down to. We're pretty much hitting our vaccine wall now. There's few to no first doses left to do in large parts of the country and where there is some demand anyone can walk in and get one whenever they want.
Anyone arguing against July 19th unlockdown is effectively saying the only other way is to keep it basically forever as we're never really going to vaccinate any more than 89-91% of adults and the JCVI are vacillating over vaccines for kids.
To be fair to the Pagels of this world, they mainly seem to be all arguing for kids to be jabbed.
Goalpost shifting. If the Government elected to vaccinate secondary school kids they'd want primaries done. If the primary kids got it as well they'd want infants to get it. If the whole population were vaccinated they'd then claim it still wasn't safe to open up, because of the anti-vaxxers and those for whom the jabs haven't worked. And then they'd start mithering on about the NHS Winter Crisis and what about novel variants? Nothing that is done to combat this disease will ever be sufficient for some of these people.
I fear that is true. The obvious next step would be international: we need to vaccinate all seven billion human beings and eradicate covid a la smallpox. The extremists on both sides: the zerocovidians and the antivax conspiracy theorists have stifled rational debate among the 80% of people who sensibly moderate and balanced.
Comments
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I think the other issue is that people have had it so drilled into them that deaths are a "lagging outcome" that they just assume that they will eventually catch up with the rising case numbers.
The frequency of mutations is a function of the number of human hosts spewing out massive quantities of the virus. Because that's what viruses do: they turn your cells into factories for reproduction.
Mutations occur when your cells chuck out a slightly different version of the virus, and that infects another cell in your body, and then it too is chucking out a different version. If that version is better able to infect and reproduce, then it will gain share.
The more people there are with chronic conditions, the more opportunities for mutation there are. This is fundamentally different to a bacterial infection where you wipe out 99% of bacteria, but leave a pristine situation for the other 1% to thrive.
(Yes, there's enough vaccine to do nearly all adults, and we're close to that on first doses. But that's a finish line that we've put in place, when it seemed likely to be enough to make any future flare-ups self-limiting. If delta Coivd has moved the goalposts, there's no point whinging about it.)
We should show respect by in turn protecting our vaccines.
The masks and distancing SHOULD be kept longer, to reduce transmission and protect the vaccines. Scientific fact.
It might even be revealed, the months I was abused on PB for making this argument, the government was sharing in secret.
You won!!!
Suck it up...