(As an aside I think it’s poor that the British media focus so much on domestic trivia and, if they do international, just touch upon Brussels and Beijing in so far as it affects us, but get massively obsessed by America. There’s a whole world out there.)
If you think our media doesn't do much international news try US media outside CNN
Sure, the US is worse but that's no excuse.
I stopped buying The Economist because I got tired of their BS but at least they tried to report on everywhere.
They don't just try - they do to an extent unmatched by any other newspaper or magazine. No-one else even comes close. And, as a friend of mine who worked there said, the result is a lot of unread articles. But it's why I still bother with it, despite the woke demonizing.
I find to read the Economist from cover to cover ,I have to be abroad on holiday . The combination of time to do it and the international setting I am in seems to match the content. usually in a happy mood on holiday as well which generally matches the Economist's optimism . I think they could expand their arts section a little and have a section on sport (no write ups as such but maybe results and not football centric)
It used to be my cover to cover reading for airports and flights when travelling with business. I miss it - like you, I would never think of picking it up from the local newsagent in normal times. Have to be travelling.
On sports: I used to watch Trans World Sport on Ch4 (usually early on Sunday mornings). It was a great way to keep up with what was happening in sports around the world, including sections on really obscure sports and up-and-coming sports people. Each section short enough to allow me to zone out if it's uninteresting to me.
Sadly, if its still broadcast then I neve seem to catch it ...
A program called Trans World Sport these days might have a slightly different focus....
The honest conversation the government needs to have is realistically pretty much all of us are going to contract covid at some point, if the scientists talk of it being about for years to come.
I think that is right - either we all have regular seasonal booster shots, or we all get some variant of it at some point in the future (or both). The key is to have a level of natural and vaccine protection that makes COVID no worse than a seasonal cold.
Curiously, I was debating this at lunch with a pal today. Starmer is intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest (for a politician), decent and has a strong background of public service. What is it that makes him so unattractive as a potential PM? He really should be much better thought of than he is.
I think the answer is that he does not have a distinctive voice. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how he wants to change this country (other than making himself PM). What does he care about? What needs fixed? He really needs to tell us. Its possible more might agree with him than he apparently fears.
He has less charisma than John Major. Might be one of the problems.
If you look at PMs and their successors there is a reasonable pattern of opposites being successful. Perhaps when "Boris" becomes unpopular, a lack of charisma will be viewed as a positive trait, albeit described as serious or safe rather than lack of charisma.
Curiously, I was debating this at lunch with a pal today. Starmer is intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest (for a politician), decent and has a strong background of public service. What is it that makes him so unattractive as a potential PM? He really should be much better thought of than he is.
I think the answer is that he does not have a distinctive voice. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how he wants to change this country (other than making himself PM). What does he care about? What needs fixed? He really needs to tell us. Its possible more might agree with him than he apparently fears.
Absolutely, in conjunction with @LostPassword's great post.
He needs to convince me to vote for him and I have no idea what he stands for. Fairness, equality, blah, blah but what exactly?
He also, and I only say this every time I post on SKS, needs to start opposing. Why vote for someone who has voted for the govt at every available opportunity to date?
I have great sympathy for him, and would trust him to do the right thing for the country. Sadly, for me, his party has too many that I wouldn't trust, and he has an Augean stable of clearing to do to return the main party to a more central position in politics. He also doesn't contrast well against Johnson for those that are not political obsessives on a political betting site. This place is not the country, just as twitter is not the country. I want him to succeed. We need a better alternative the Conservatives, who once again are coming to believe they can get away with anything, because you know eleven years in, and majority of 80, and the election still years away. We need a party that doesn't have its leading member calling 'tories' and by implication the voters it needs to get into power - 'scum'.
7. Even if Starmer passes all those hurdles, and we do end up with a hung Parliament, unless Labour are the largest party, he may find it hard to convince the SNP and Lib Dems to actively vote with him to evict Johnson from Number Ten. They may both prefer to abstain.
Starmer would have to offer them both a carrot of course ie indyref2 and devomax for the SNP and closer alignment to the single market and customs union for the LDs
PR
For the LDs maybe, PR would not benefit the SNP at Westminster but it would the LDs who would become near permanent kingmakers
Nah. In no country where they have changed to PR has the previous party setup remained unchanged. The FDP were supposed to be permanent kingmakers in Germany, for example; that's rather changed. PR changes the way people consider casting their votes and makes parties more vulnerable to being overtaken and replaced. Which is for the better; why should political parties be immune to the forces of creative destruction? Let them worry about real competition.
It also tends towards fragmenting the coalitions that various parties represent.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that Scotland will move to level 0 of her government’s five-tier system of Covid controls on 19 July, but with continued restrictions around physical distancing and numbers meeting both indoors and outdoors, and the wearing of face masks remaining mandatory “for some time to come”.
(As an aside I think it’s poor that the British media focus so much on domestic trivia and, if they do international, just touch upon Brussels and Beijing in so far as it affects us, but get massively obsessed by America. There’s a whole world out there.)
If you think our media doesn't do much international news try US media outside CNN
Sure, the US is worse but that's no excuse.
I stopped buying The Economist because I got tired of their BS but at least they tried to report on everywhere.
They don't just try - they do to an extent unmatched by any other newspaper or magazine. No-one else even comes close. And, as a friend of mine who worked there said, the result is a lot of unread articles. But it's why I still bother with it, despite the woke demonizing.
I find to read the Economist from cover to cover ,I have to be abroad on holiday . The combination of time to do it and the international setting I am in seems to match the content. usually in a happy mood on holiday as well which generally matches the Economist's optimism . I think they could expand their arts section a little and have a section on sport (no write ups as such but maybe results and not football centric)
It used to be my cover to cover reading for airports and flights when travelling with business. I miss it - like you, I would never think of picking it up from the local newsagent in normal times. Have to be travelling.
On sports: I used to watch Trans World Sport on Ch4 (usually early on Sunday mornings). It was a great way to keep up with what was happening in sports around the world, including sections on really obscure sports and up-and-coming sports people. Each section short enough to allow me to zone out if it's uninteresting to me.
Sadly, if its still broadcast then I neve seem to catch it ...
A program called Trans World Sport these days might have a slightly different focus....
Would make more sense than having biological males compete in women's sport.
The block isn't so much SKS as Labour as a whole. A big demonstrable shift in reality and perception needed to make winning the next election likely. Tories messing up so badly that victory falls into Labour's lap is always possible but as pointed out by many contributions on here, the Tories are adept at moving to plan B or even plan C as needed.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
This is interesting. I tend to believe that we are not all as connected as is sometimes made out. I think Covid runs through chains of people and then runs out of new hosts in that chain. Unless it leaps to another chain it stops. Certainly living in my small town and working at my uni where the UG students are away, I don't come across that many folk in day to day.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that Scotland will move to level 0 of her government’s five-tier system of Covid controls on 19 July, but with continued restrictions around physical distancing and numbers meeting both indoors and outdoors, and the wearing of face masks remaining mandatory “for some time to come”.
Curiously, I was debating this at lunch with a pal today. Starmer is intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest (for a politician), decent and has a strong background of public service. What is it that makes him so unattractive as a potential PM? He really should be much better thought of than he is.
I think the answer is that he does not have a distinctive voice. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how he wants to change this country (other than making himself PM). What does he care about? What needs fixed? He really needs to tell us. Its possible more might agree with him than he apparently fears.
Starmer stands for government that is honest, competent and decent.
For his manifesto to get the traction that it isn't getting at the moment, the public have to believe:
Johnson's government is dishonest, incompetent and lacking moral purpose
Honesty, competence and decency actually matter
Starmer is in fact honest, competent and decent
I think enough of the public fall out over points 1 and 2 and never get to the consideration of whether Starmer is better in these respects. Or to put it another way either Starmer is a poor salesman for honest, competent and decent governmen, or the public don't care - where it essentially comes to the same thing.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that Scotland will move to level 0 of her government’s five-tier system of Covid controls on 19 July, but with continued restrictions around physical distancing and numbers meeting both indoors and outdoors, and the wearing of face masks remaining mandatory “for some time to come”.
Sounds more like Level 0.5....
Level 0 - ha! And they say that the England rules were too complicated. Level 0 isn't even no restrictions, so what is that, level -1?
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
Where, in such a situation, has covid not returned?
I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
(As an aside I think it’s poor that the British media focus so much on domestic trivia and, if they do international, just touch upon Brussels and Beijing in so far as it affects us, but get massively obsessed by America. There’s a whole world out there.)
If you think our media doesn't do much international news try US media outside CNN
Sure, the US is worse but that's no excuse.
I stopped buying The Economist because I got tired of their BS but at least they tried to report on everywhere.
The Economist is not full of "bullshit" it simply has a different world-view to yours and is generally highly respected.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that Scotland will move to level 0 of her government’s five-tier system of Covid controls on 19 July, but with continued restrictions around physical distancing and numbers meeting both indoors and outdoors, and the wearing of face masks remaining mandatory “for some time to come”.
Curiously, I was debating this at lunch with a pal today. Starmer is intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest (for a politician), decent and has a strong background of public service. What is it that makes him so unattractive as a potential PM? He really should be much better thought of than he is.
I think the answer is that he does not have a distinctive voice. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how he wants to change this country (other than making himself PM). What does he care about? What needs fixed? He really needs to tell us. Its possible more might agree with him than he apparently fears.
Starmer stands for government that is honest, competent and decent.
For his manifesto to get the traction that it isn't getting at the moment, the public have to believe:
Johnson's government is dishonest, incompetent and lacking moral purpose
Honesty, competence and decency actually matter
Starmer is in fact honest, competent and decent
I think enough of the public fall out over points 1 and 2 and never get to the consideration of whether Starmer is better in these respects. Or to put it another way either Starmer is a poor salesman for honest, competent and decent governmen, or the public don't care - where it essentially comes to the same thing.
He also stands for Labour governing but with what sort of programme and what sort of cabinet? Unless the answers to those questions are attractive to centrists then Labour has an uphill struggle.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
(As an aside I think it’s poor that the British media focus so much on domestic trivia and, if they do international, just touch upon Brussels and Beijing in so far as it affects us, but get massively obsessed by America. There’s a whole world out there.)
If you think our media doesn't do much international news try US media outside CNN
Sure, the US is worse but that's no excuse.
I stopped buying The Economist because I got tired of their BS but at least they tried to report on everywhere.
They don't just try - they do to an extent unmatched by any other newspaper or magazine. No-one else even comes close. And, as a friend of mine who worked there said, the result is a lot of unread articles. But it's why I still bother with it, despite the woke demonizing.
I find to read the Economist from cover to cover ,I have to be abroad on holiday . The combination of time to do it and the international setting I am in seems to match the content. usually in a happy mood on holiday as well which generally matches the Economist's optimism . I think they could expand their arts section a little and have a section on sport (no write ups as such but maybe results and not football centric)
It used to be my cover to cover reading for airports and flights when travelling with business. I miss it - like you, I would never think of picking it up from the local newsagent in normal times. Have to be travelling.
On sports: I used to watch Trans World Sport on Ch4 (usually early on Sunday mornings). It was a great way to keep up with what was happening in sports around the world, including sections on really obscure sports and up-and-coming sports people. Each section short enough to allow me to zone out if it's uninteresting to me.
Sadly, if its still broadcast then I neve seem to catch it ...
I'm sure if Trans World Sport was revived or moved to a more prominent slot there would be a large and diverse number of expectations as to what would be covered.
Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed that Scotland will move to level 0 of her government’s five-tier system of Covid controls on 19 July, but with continued restrictions around physical distancing and numbers meeting both indoors and outdoors, and the wearing of face masks remaining mandatory “for some time to come”.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
You see it all the time. Also, poor quality masks, don't fit people properly, they spend half their time with them fallen down, fiddling to try and move them back up...and loads of people just have them covering their mouth, not their nose.
And of course....
"This ties into a sort of familiarity bias where the perceived risk of transmission from strangers is greater than that from people you know, when really it's the complete opposite: you're much more likely to get infected by a friend at home than by someone on the bus."
Curiously, I was debating this at lunch with a pal today. Starmer is intelligent, articulate, reasonable, honest (for a politician), decent and has a strong background of public service. What is it that makes him so unattractive as a potential PM? He really should be much better thought of than he is.
I think the answer is that he does not have a distinctive voice. I don't know what he thinks. I don't know how he wants to change this country (other than making himself PM). What does he care about? What needs fixed? He really needs to tell us. Its possible more might agree with him than he apparently fears.
Starmer stands for government that is honest, competent and decent.
For his manifesto to get the traction that it isn't getting at the moment, the public have to believe:
Johnson's government is dishonest, incompetent and lacking moral purpose
Honesty, competence and decency actually matter
Starmer is in fact honest, competent and decent
I think enough of the public fall out over points 1 and 2 and never get to the consideration of whether Starmer is better in these respects. Or to put it another way either Starmer is a poor salesman for honest, competent and decent governmen, or the public don't care - where it essentially comes to the same thing.
He also stands for Labour governing but with what sort of programme and what sort of cabinet? Unless the answers to those questions are attractive to centrists then Labour has an uphill struggle.
In the run up to 1997 Blair had set out, in considerable detail what Blairism was going to do. He created a product and sold it.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
Where, in such a situation, has covid not returned?
I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
In other words, ordinary people are much better at assessing their own risk and responding than governments are....??? And lockdowns are one of the biggest policy errors ever made by a British government in peacetime?
You can see now, that many in the conservative government are finally discovering the truth. All that stuff about 'personal reponsibility' replacing diktat.
Some are trying to tiptoe back to conservatism, hoping that their supporters will not notice the devastation their fling with socialism has caused.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
You see it all the time. Poor quality masks, don't fit people properly, they spend half their time with them fallen down, fiddling to try and move them back up...and loads of people just have them covering their mouth, not their nose.
Its completely meaningless theatre and I shall have no qualms not engaging with it from next week.
The kids school have requested we continue to wear them on school premises until the school breaks up, since they don't want to relax any restrictions in final days and then have families 'pinged' affecting holidays, so will respect that and continue to wear it there until they break up since they've asked us to.
But other than that, no, masks can metaphorically get in the bin.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
Where, in such a situation, has covid not returned?
I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
I meant it doesn't return immediately that people return to normal(ish) behaviour.
There is something here that we don't quite understand. Your theory (and RCS) is attractive, but it's finding the evidence that seems to be an issue.
The modelling of the human interaction side of this epidemic... I can't find any really good stuff that has been published. And I think without that behavioural stuff at the micro and macro levels, all the COVID modelling can do is create near-ridiculous worst cases.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Making it voluntary is acceptance that there are significant downsides to masks that, now we have a vaccine wall, far outweigh any limited upsides they ever had.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
This is interesting. I tend to believe that we are not all as connected as is sometimes made out. I think Covid runs through chains of people and then runs out of new hosts in that chain. Unless it leaps to another chain it stops. Certainly living in my small town and working at my uni where the UG students are away, I don't come across that many folk in day to day.
I think there is something to that - we socialise in bubbles, with connections between bubbles, possibly?
Each culture would be different. Hmmm, so a model based on bubble size, "intensity" for how much you stay in that bubble, a coefficient of how likely you are to be in multiple bubbles, the connections between the bubbles.....
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
That's almost certainly correct about the masks. If we really wanted to wear them to reduce transmission we would always wear them when indoors with people from outside our household, and for any period of time. But the law/rules are that for 5 minutes in a shop you are required to wear a mask, but if a someone comes to dinner you can be maskless with them for hours.
That's not to say that wearing masks is pointless, but we clearly aren't using them in some of the scenarios that have the highest risk of transmission.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Surely, now we are long past our most vulnerable, it is time to share 50/50 and simultaneously vaccinate the most vulnerable in Africa. Are they not our brothers and sisters too? What actually is our benefit not sharing 50/50 from this point? Surely we must share 50/50 with Africa if we move to doing our 12 to 17s?
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
I think government public information on masks has been poor. I understand initially they didn't want people raiding the PPE supply line (although I managed to get a proper FFP3 mask from a H&S contractor with little issue last summer).
But now...I don't think people have any idea the difference between some homemade cloth thing, a paper one or when you then get to N95, FFP2 and FFP3.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and the law should back that up.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
Does the human immune system work?
After all, large numbers of people got covid before vaccines came into being, lockdowns or no lockdowns. 99% plus of them survived.
I know of at least one person who has definitely never had a vaccine but has antibodies (its not me).
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
This is interesting. I tend to believe that we are not all as connected as is sometimes made out. I think Covid runs through chains of people and then runs out of new hosts in that chain. Unless it leaps to another chain it stops. Certainly living in my small town and working at my uni where the UG students are away, I don't come across that many folk in day to day.
I think there is something to that - we socialise in bubbles, with connections between bubbles, possibly?
Each culture would be different. Hmmm, so a model based on bubble size, "intensity" for how much you stay in that bubble, a coefficient of how likely you are to be in multiple bubbles, the connections between the bubbles.....
Yep - in summer I have a bubble at work, and very limited bubble at home, and a bubble at cricket (which I am assured is covid safe because we wipe our hands every 6 overs...). Of course there is overlap - the wife has her work bubble etc etc. But I do wonder if we are less connected than some think, at least in terms of passing on a virus.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
Does the human immune system work?
After all, large numbers of people got covid before vaccines came into being, lockdowns or no lockdowns. 99% plus of them survived.
I know of at least one person who has definitely never had a vaccine but has antibodies (its not me).
Surely, now we are long past our most vulnerable, it is time to share 50/50 and simultaneously vaccinate the most vulnerable in Africa. Are they not our brothers and sisters too? What actually is our benefit not sharing 50/50 from this point? Surely we must share 50/50 with Africa if we move to doing our 12 to 17s?
If we are moving to vaccinate the 12-17, why should we be sending vaccines abroad?
I think I mentioned, a while back, a discussion I took part in, in which the internationalists took the view that the government didn't have any especial reason to prioritise it's own citizens.
The army officer present said he was quite keen on this idea of a variable social contract and was wondering whose orders he would feel like taking.
Strangely, the internationalists didn't like his view of their view....
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
As are no doubt thousands of motorists on the nations motorways right now. Its a bad law as it is not being enforced. Plus by announcing its end for next monday, its already a lame duck law,
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
As are no doubt thousands of motorists on the nations motorways right now. Its a bad law as it is not being enforced. Plus by announcing its end for next monday, its already a lame duck law,
Quite so. The government's messaging on this has been little short of catastrophic.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
This is interesting. I tend to believe that we are not all as connected as is sometimes made out. I think Covid runs through chains of people and then runs out of new hosts in that chain. Unless it leaps to another chain it stops. Certainly living in my small town and working at my uni where the UG students are away, I don't come across that many folk in day to day.
I think there is something to that - we socialise in bubbles, with connections between bubbles, possibly?
Each culture would be different. Hmmm, so a model based on bubble size, "intensity" for how much you stay in that bubble, a coefficient of how likely you are to be in multiple bubbles, the connections between the bubbles.....
Yep - in summer I have a bubble at work, and very limited bubble at home, and a bubble at cricket (which I am assured is covid safe because we wipe our hands every 6 overs...). Of course there is overlap - the wife has her work bubble etc etc. But I do wonder if we are less connected than some think, at least in terms of passing on a virus.
Yes. Funny - I was just about to mention a cricket club as an example of a bubble.
The question is then, what inter-connections between your bubbles and others? Are those inter-connection more likely to get COVID? Does this then "choke" the spread of infection more or less than they "spread" COVID from one bubble to the next?
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Dripping with judgement there Richard. That 20 year old (and millions like him) has lost significant time, and perhaps income, over the last year, in conditions not far from house arrest, to keep the your generation 'safe' - and then to top it all off was only offered a vaccine weeks and months after your generation had been protected by that vaccine.
The random judgement of others has been a most unedifying aspect of the past year, IMO.
JCVI resisting cutting the gap to 3/4 weeks. Think the government should overrule them and do it anyway. If it means under 40s need a third dose in November we can deal with it then. Making people wait until September to be fully immunised when they can do it now is, IMO, negligent.
We are going to see a huge stockpile of Pfizer doses in the next few weeks because of this decision. Hopefully Javid has the balls to ignore them and go for a 3/4 week gap for Pfizer and Moderna.
The JCVI resisting letting children be vaccinated when it is increasingly clear that unvaccinated children will be treated, in much of the world, as third class people who are little more than mobile disease vectors is disappointing.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
But Philip_Thompson doesn't want to wear a mask so he won't even if it's obvious that the person sat opposite him cannot wear one (as I discovered earlier today).
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
Where, in such a situation, has covid not returned?
I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
I meant it doesn't return immediately that people return to normal(ish) behaviour.
There is something here that we don't quite understand. Your theory (and RCS) is attractive, but it's finding the evidence that seems to be an issue.
The modelling of the human interaction side of this epidemic... I can't find any really good stuff that has been published. And I think without that behavioural stuff at the micro and macro levels, all the COVID modelling can do is create near-ridiculous worst cases.
I agree. What I wrote is, of course, just speculation.
To really understand this, we need very well worked out complete chains of infection, which is very hard (and expensive) to do - see track and trace, which isn't even trying to do exactly what is required. Ideally it would need full testing of everyone in an area, combined with intrusive tracking (via compulsory use of NHS app-type things).
Some idea could be gathered from transit data in e.g. Sweden in relation to local infection rates, but that's probably not at a fine enough scale.
The next best will be models that manage to match what we've seen, but as we have seen those are few and far between. What I haven't seen is whether there are any groups attempting to do forecasting, as opposed to projections (the former attempting to get the model assumptions as close as likely to reality with a likelihood of being wrong in either direction - businesses must have been doing this a bit, I should think; the projections being based on projecting specified scenarios and assumptions, which have tended to be quite conservative,* to see whether it is 'safe' to take certain steps).
I do expect we'll see work in this area that takes into account human behaviour and tries to model changes in human behaviour in response to infections that are more sophisticated than following, to a certain extent, whatever regulations are in place.
* too conservative, often, as discussed at length here.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Dripping with judgement there Richard. That 20 year old (and millions like him) has lost significant time, and perhaps income, over the last year, in conditions not far from house arrest, to keep the your generation 'safe' - and then to top it all off was only offered a vaccine weeks and months after your generation had been protected by that vaccine.
The random judgement of others has been a most unedifying aspect of the past year, IMO.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
...and for parents in private school, they simply tell the school that a friend came down with COVID, they are self isolating for 10 days and the schooling happens online. So they are awesome parents. Or something.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
The fetishisation of covid - egged on by the media and the SPI-B committee who wanted to terrify people - really has turned large parts of society into worry-warts. And what is worse, many have seen to moralise and judge throughout. We've seen that in curtain twitching and far too much desire for prohibitions, banning, and rules imposed on others. Not pleasant.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
The fetishisation of covid - egged on by the media and the SPI-B committee who wanted to terrify people - really has turned large parts of society into worry-warts. And what is worse, many have seen to moralise and judge throughout. We've seen that in curtain twitching and far too much desire for prohibitions, banning, and rules imposed on others. Not pleasant.
It will take time for people to settle down. There has been much hyperbole and it is difficult for everyone to see through it.
On the BBC today they were all but playing funereal music as they announced that restrictions would be lifted and masks wouldn't be mandatory from July 19th.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
He's only breaking the law if he's not exempt. How do you know he's not exempt? Do you have access to his personal medical history or did you just make a crass assumption about someone else? 🤔
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
That a substantial number of people aren't following what you interpret the law to be either means that exemptions are wide open to make the law meaningless, or the public's desire to follow the law is so low as to make it meaningless. Either way wear a damned FFP3 mask or stop whinging.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
Nah, they've palmed the kids off at their grandparents and they're playing footie all day. Not learning.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
What an altruistic fellow you are. Labelling others selfish and unthinking. But not for you. You are fine. For the not-yet fully vaccinated. Perhaps there were none of those on your ram-packed train?
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
You see it all the time. Also, poor quality masks, don't fit people properly, they spend half their time with them fallen down, fiddling to try and move them back up...and loads of people just have them covering their mouth, not their nose.
And of course....
"This ties into a sort of familiarity bias where the perceived risk of transmission from strangers is greater than that from people you know, when really it's the complete opposite: you're much more likely to get infected by a friend at home than by someone on the bus."
Yes, but the thought process is that you’re only in breathing range of strangers for relatively short periods of time, for which a mask might be of some benefi, whereas if your family member catches it, it’s probably near impossible to avoid and therefore wearing a mask is a waste of time.
Regarding the point made above about a lame duck law. This is a good point.
Are pubs and restaurants really going to enforce the mask rule this weekend? People having their Sunday lunch will be just ten hours away from the rule change.
This could be the first sign we've reached herd immunity.
It could.
Or being somewhere close to herd immunity with the rise in cases nudging people to be a bit more circumspect, just enough to take R under 1.
Or just a bit of random noise.
We'll know we're at herd immunity when all restrictions are lifted, working patterns have got back to normal (whatever 'normal' will be, post pandemic, if there are long term changes in working patterns) and people seem to be behaving as they did before Covid and numbers of new infections are still falling.
The other interesting point is that in every situation where COVID has been allowed to increase, without lockdown, it dies away again. Long, long before everyone has antibodies.
Why this is, we don't know. RCS, of this parish, suggests that it is a kind of voluntary lockdown. At a certain case level everyone hides.
Yet, in such places, when the cases fall, activity rapidly returns to normal(ish). But COVID doesn't return.
Where, in such a situation, has covid not returned?
I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
In other words, ordinary people are much better at assessing their own risk and responding than governments are....??? And lockdowns are one of the biggest policy errors ever made by a British government in peacetime?
You can see now, that many in the conservative government are finally discovering the truth. All that stuff about 'personal reponsibility' replacing diktat.
Some are trying to tiptoe back to conservatism, hoping that their supporters will not notice the devastation their fling with socialism has caused.
I think there's a lag. People change their behaviour when they know of a lot of cases near them or personal contacts who have been infected. At that point it's a bit late (there's a fair chance of exposure). Governments can impose lockdowns when the infection data say the risk is/is soon going to be high. So a competent government should be able to act faster than people will act by themselves.
But it's a philosophical issue, isn't it? People will act by themselves in the absence of official guidance when the danger is clear. People can be forced to act sooner than that. People can also be asked/advised to act sooner than that. Which is best (if you accept the premise that optimally people can act quicker than they would if not guided) comes down to relative values of freedom of individuals and lives of individuals and how much personal liberty people think it is right to trade to save x lives.
The few places where governments have taken a light touch have tended to have more deaths than comparable countries with lockdowns, but that doesn't mean they got it wrong, they just made a different choice.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
Nah, they've palmed the kids off at their grandparents and they're playing footie all day. Not learning.
Well not ideal. But they'll be able to go on holiday next week. I'd say given the year they've had when every extra-curricular activity has been off limits to them, missing a few days of school is an acceptable price to pay for that. Let the kids have some pleasure in their lives beyond looking at a screen.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
He's only breaking the law if he's not exempt. How do you know he's not exempt? Do you have access to his personal medical history or did you just make a crass assumption about someone else? 🤔
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
C'mon, I'm not a complete fool. Yes, I am quite certain that the vast majority of those not wearing their masks on this crowded train are not exempt. Quite apart from anything else, many of them had masks round their necks or round their chins.
Is it possible that one or two were exempt? Yes, of course. Is it possible that more than that, mostly healthy youngsters, were? No of course it's not. You're not normally this naive, are you?
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
They were a sensible precaution pre-vaccines and when FFP3 masks were unavailable as they were required for medical professionals.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
The NFV know the risks and they can now make informed choices.
Many of them are young people, who are much less affected by covid than 83 year olds with co-morbidities.
You want to deny them the rites of passage, the joys of youth and the uninterrupted education you enjoyed as a young person.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
...and for parents in private school, they simply tell the school that a friend came down with COVID, they are self isolating for 10 days and the schooling happens online. So they are awesome parents. Or something.
I mean those parents in Wales could, if they had wanted, taken the entire class out for the last ten days by spuriously reporting a positive test. This is at least more honest and less selfish.
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
...and for parents in private school, they simply tell the school that a friend came down with COVID, they are self isolating for 10 days and the schooling happens online. So they are awesome parents. Or something.
I'm not sure how that works with boarding schools. In fact, I wonder how boarding schools have coped with this mess?
Yes, I'm being judgemental about these parents, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I missed loads of school when I was a kid because of health issues and being in hospital, and whilst I am awesome (*), I missed out on a lot - especially socialising. I concentrated on the core subjects, and even then did not do as well as I hoped, or predicted.
I'd like to think I did a good job with home schooling during Covid - but there were loads of gaps I couldn't fill, even for a year-2.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
He's only breaking the law if he's not exempt. How do you know he's not exempt? Do you have access to his personal medical history or did you just make a crass assumption about someone else? 🤔
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
C'mon, I'm not a complete fool. Yes, I am quite certain that the vast majority of those not wearing their masks on this crowded train are not exempt. Quite apart from anything else, many of them had masks round their necks or round their chins.
Is it possible that one or two were exempt? Yes, of course. Is it possible that more than that, mostly healthy youngsters, were? No of course it's not. You're not normally this naive, are you?
So you're just making crass assumptions about others.
I'm extremely glad that the law is being changed from Monday to take away the supposed moral authority from meddlers like you wanting to curtain twitch on other people. It should have happened a month ago.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
He's only breaking the law if he's not exempt. How do you know he's not exempt? Do you have access to his personal medical history or did you just make a crass assumption about someone else? 🤔
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
C'mon, I'm not a complete fool. Yes, I am quite certain that the vast majority of those not wearing their masks on this crowded train are not exempt. Quite apart from anything else, many of them had masks round their necks or round their chins.
Is it possible that one or two were exempt? Yes, of course. Is it possible that more than that, mostly healthy youngsters, were? No of course it's not. You're not normally this naive, are you?
YOung people have made the calculation that the unpleasantness and alienation of mask wearing are not worth doing considering covid doesn't affect them that much.
For the Netherlands-watchers: 7821 positives reported today, as against 2209 a week ago - just under a fourfold increase. Which is a lot but rather less than the six-fold we have been seeing recently.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Cloth masks = gaiters. And not only that, but even these show some (albeit relatively weak) efficacy.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
In all honesty, I have every sympathy with the parents in that case.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know. Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all. I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
Nah, they've palmed the kids off at their grandparents and they're playing footie all day. Not learning.
Well not ideal. But they'll be able to go on holiday next week. I'd say given the year they've had when every extra-curricular activity has been off limits to them, missing a few days of school is an acceptable price to pay for that. Let the kids have some pleasure in their lives beyond looking at a screen.
And when they get sod-all qualifications because their parents let them play football around their grandparents rather than work towards qualifications, they'll be able to have permanent holidays! Ker-ching!
Edit: in some ways it is easy for me to say: we're not the sorts to do 'usual' holidays, and if we were, we'd be able to afford the massive prices you get during holiday weeks. If they'd said the kids were being home-schooled by their grandparents, I'd be a bit more forgiving. But they're just taking the p*ss. Then again, I get my son to do an hour of work out of school each day. I'm evil like that ...
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
What an altruistic fellow you are. Labelling others selfish and unthinking. But not for you. You are fine. For the not-yet fully vaccinated. Perhaps there were none of those on your ram-packed train?
#Istandwiththenotyetfullyvaccinated.
Well, there's a risk to me as well, of course. (and in this case, more worryingly, to an older member of my family who was travelling with us). As you should know, but most people seem to have forgotten, the vaccines give very good protection, but not complete protection. I'm quite happy to take my reasonable chance on that, because I recognise that we're never going to be 100% safe. So we have to accept some risk, or else we lock ourselves away for ever. The sensible thing is to take those risks combined with reasonable mitigating precautions, most especially those, like compulsory masks on public transport and some other crowded places for the next couple of months or so (until full vaccination protection is near complete), where the cost is very low, the economic impact zero, and no-one's freedom to do whatever activities they want to do is affected. It's frankly a no-brainer.
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
The other trouble (as I noticed last night on what would normally have been a near-empty train but which was rammed full because the flash floods in London has caused a lot of other trains to be cancelled) is that the people who don't wear masks, even when they are compulsory, are precisely those who absolutely should be wearing them because they are the most likely to be infectious.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
Alternatively you should get your vaccine.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
Got my vaccine.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
Thankfully we don't live in a totalitarian state and I hope we never do.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and should back that up.
Err, he and a substantial number of others on what I suspect will be a super-spreader crowded train journey were breaking the law.
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
He's only breaking the law if he's not exempt. How do you know he's not exempt? Do you have access to his personal medical history or did you just make a crass assumption about someone else? 🤔
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
C'mon, I'm not a complete fool. Yes, I am quite certain that the vast majority of those not wearing their masks on this crowded train are not exempt. Quite apart from anything else, many of them had masks round their necks or round their chins.
Is it possible that one or two were exempt? Yes, of course. Is it possible that more than that, mostly healthy youngsters, were? No of course it's not. You're not normally this naive, are you?
YOung people have made the calculation that the unpleasantness and alienation of mask wearing are not worth doing considering covid doesn't affect them that much.
And they are correct in that calculation.
If putting a mask on causes them distress then they are exempt and there is no need in the law to show meddling curtain twitching busybodies like Mr Nabavi that.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Cloth masks = gaiters. And not only that, but even these show some (albeit relatively weak) efficacy.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
Anti-maskers cite the Denmark research from last year that suggested that ordinary non-fitted/specialist masks have little efficacy one way or the other.
7. Even if Starmer passes all those hurdles, and we do end up with a hung Parliament, unless Labour are the largest party, he may find it hard to convince the SNP and Lib Dems to actively vote with him to evict Johnson from Number Ten. They may both prefer to abstain.
Starmer would have to offer them both a carrot of course ie indyref2 and devomax for the SNP and closer alignment to the single market and customs union for the LDs
PR
For the LDs maybe, PR would not benefit the SNP at Westminster but it would the LDs who would become near permanent kingmakers
Nah. In no country where they have changed to PR has the previous party setup remained unchanged. The FDP were supposed to be permanent kingmakers in Germany, for example; that's rather changed. PR changes the way people consider casting their votes and makes parties more vulnerable to being overtaken and replaced. Which is for the better; why should political parties be immune to the forces of creative destruction? Let them worry about real competition.
Why speculate? NZ moved from FTPT to PR 25 years ago.
As a result, 2 major parties and one minor party (roughly speaking) moved to 2 major parties and 3 minor parties (roughly speaking).
But there was a little bit of turbulence to get there.
We can already see (in England) the likely result of PR. It would facilitate the entry and/or growth of “Reform” and the Greens.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Cloth masks = gaiters. And not only that, but even these show some (albeit relatively weak) efficacy.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
They don't work remotely as well as vaccines or FFP3 masks do though.
They've served their purpose and their time has long since passed.
7. Even if Starmer passes all those hurdles, and we do end up with a hung Parliament, unless Labour are the largest party, he may find it hard to convince the SNP and Lib Dems to actively vote with him to evict Johnson from Number Ten. They may both prefer to abstain.
Starmer would have to offer them both a carrot of course ie indyref2 and devomax for the SNP and closer alignment to the single market and customs union for the LDs
PR
For the LDs maybe, PR would not benefit the SNP at Westminster but it would the LDs who would become near permanent kingmakers
Nah. In no country where they have changed to PR has the previous party setup remained unchanged. The FDP were supposed to be permanent kingmakers in Germany, for example; that's rather changed. PR changes the way people consider casting their votes and makes parties more vulnerable to being overtaken and replaced. Which is for the better; why should political parties be immune to the forces of creative destruction? Let them worry about real competition.
Why speculate? NZ moved from FTPT to PR 25 years ago.
As a result, 2 major parties and one minor party (roughly speaking) moved to 2 major parties and 3 minor parties (roughly speaking).
But there was a little bit of turbulence to get there.
We can already see (in England) the likely result of PR. It would facilitate the entry and/or growth of “Reform” and the Greens.
NZ is the only country I can think of where a party got elected under FPTP, then actually decided to implement PR anyway.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
The NFV know the risks and they can now make informed choices.
Many of them are young people, who are much less affected by covid than 83 year olds with co-morbidities.
You want to deny them the rites of passage, the joys of youth and the uninterrupted education you enjoyed as a young person.
Eh? How in the name of heaven did you come up with that utterly bonkers last sentence?
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Give it a rest. You come here posting the same crap over and over again. You keep coming here with stats that you don't understand and with no understanding of the maths behind them and misrepresent at will, as you have done with Philip's post. I don't think you will find that Philip was against these masks pre the mass vaccination unlike you.
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
What an altruistic fellow you are. Labelling others selfish and unthinking. But not for you. You are fine. For the not-yet fully vaccinated. Perhaps there were none of those on your ram-packed train?
#Istandwiththenotyetfullyvaccinated.
Well, there's a risk to me as well, of course. (and in this case, more worryingly, to an older member of my family who was travelling with us). As you should know, but most people seem to have forgotten, the vaccines give very good protection, but not complete protection. I'm quite happy to take my reasonable chance on that, because I recognise that we're never going to be 100% safe. So we have to accept some risk, or else we lock ourselves away for ever. The sensible thing is to take those risks combined with reasonable mitigating precautions, most especially those, like compulsory masks on public transport and some other crowded places for the next couple of months or so (until full vaccination protection is near complete), where the cost is very low, the economic impact zero, and no-one's freedom to do whatever activities they want to do is affected. It's frankly a no-brainer.
No I am sorry but you are wrong. The restrictions are causing economic damage. Our economy is still well below full speed and our debt mounting alarmingly
In order for us to generate the wealth that we need to look after the vulnerable, the healthy have to be allowed to go about their business. It's that simple.
7. Even if Starmer passes all those hurdles, and we do end up with a hung Parliament, unless Labour are the largest party, he may find it hard to convince the SNP and Lib Dems to actively vote with him to evict Johnson from Number Ten. They may both prefer to abstain.
Starmer would have to offer them both a carrot of course ie indyref2 and devomax for the SNP and closer alignment to the single market and customs union for the LDs
PR
For the LDs maybe, PR would not benefit the SNP at Westminster but it would the LDs who would become near permanent kingmakers
Nah. In no country where they have changed to PR has the previous party setup remained unchanged. The FDP were supposed to be permanent kingmakers in Germany, for example; that's rather changed. PR changes the way people consider casting their votes and makes parties more vulnerable to being overtaken and replaced. Which is for the better; why should political parties be immune to the forces of creative destruction? Let them worry about real competition.
Why speculate? NZ moved from FTPT to PR 25 years ago.
As a result, 2 major parties and one minor party (roughly speaking) moved to 2 major parties and 3 minor parties (roughly speaking).
But there was a little bit of turbulence to get there.
We can already see (in England) the likely result of PR. It would facilitate the entry and/or growth of “Reform” and the Greens.
NZ is the only country I can think of where a party got elected under FPTP, then actually decided to implement PR anyway.
Was a promise made - allegedly off the cuff - by an incoming PM - to hold a referendum.
Referendum took place among widespread disaffection from both left and right parties as a result of privatisation > austerity programme.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Cloth masks = gaiters. And not only that, but even these show some (albeit relatively weak) efficacy.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
They don't work remotely as well as vaccines or FFP3 masks do though.
They've served their purpose and their time has long since passed.
Brave Sir Boris ran away. Bravely ran away away. When footballer players took the knee, He bravely chose to turn and flee. Yes, brave Sir Boris turned about And gallantly he chickened out. Swiftly taking to his feet, He beat a very brave retreat. Bravest of the brave, Sir Boris! https://twitter.com/breeallegretti/status/1414916497143705605
If you have had the vaccine Richard then the risk to you is similar to a bad case of the flu, isn't it? Or chicken pox, or one of several communicable diseases, none of which we mandate special behaviour for on public transport.
It's not the risk to me particularly; most of the bad effects of the coming, unnecessarily bad, third wave are going to be amongst the not-yet fully vaccinated, which is around 15 million people.
What an altruistic fellow you are. Labelling others selfish and unthinking. But not for you. You are fine. For the not-yet fully vaccinated. Perhaps there were none of those on your ram-packed train?
#Istandwiththenotyetfullyvaccinated.
Well, there's a risk to me as well, of course. (and in this case, more worryingly, to an older member of my family who was travelling with us). As you should know, but most people seem to have forgotten, the vaccines give very good protection, but not complete protection. I'm quite happy to take my reasonable chance on that, because I recognise that we're never going to be 100% safe. So we have to accept some risk, or else we lock ourselves away for ever. The sensible thing is to take those risks combined with reasonable mitigating precautions, most especially those, like compulsory masks on public transport and some other crowded places for the next couple of months or so (until full vaccination protection is near complete), where the cost is very low, the economic impact zero, and no-one's freedom to do whatever activities they want to do is affected. It's frankly a no-brainer.
No I am sorry but you are wrong. The restrictions are causing economic damage. Our economy is still well below full speed and our debt mounting alarmingly
In order for us to generate the wealth that we need to look after the vulnerable, the healthy have to be allowed to go about their business. It's that simple.
Yes, exactly. Of course the restrictions are doing damage. That's exactly why I want to lift them. Masks are one way of doing so more quickly for a given level of risk, with only trivial downside.
Cloth masks around people's necks don't work. If they did the pandemic would have been over before the second wave began.
Vaccines work. Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
At last a post that accepts that cloth masks have not worked, if they did work our case numbers would not be anything like they are.
Cloth masks = gaiters. And not only that, but even these show some (albeit relatively weak) efficacy.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
They don't work remotely as well as vaccines or FFP3 masks do though.
They've served their purpose and their time has long since passed.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/jul/08/uk-covid-news-travel-test-trace-boris-johnson-coronavirus-latest-updates?page=with:block-60e71cdb8f08fa158fe1d89d#block-60e71cdb8f08fa158fe1d89d
I want him to succeed. We need a better alternative the Conservatives, who once again are coming to believe they can get away with anything, because you know eleven years in, and majority of 80, and the election still years away. We need a party that doesn't have its leading member calling 'tories' and by implication the voters it needs to get into power - 'scum'.
Sounds more like Level 0.5....
EVEL seems too wishy-washy, but if they don't replace it that just seems stupid.
Physical distancing
Mandatory masks.
Sounds more like Level 1. Or English Step 3.
For his manifesto to get the traction that it isn't getting at the moment, the public have to believe:
- Johnson's government is dishonest, incompetent and lacking moral purpose
- Honesty, competence and decency actually matter
- Starmer is in fact honest, competent and decent
I think enough of the public fall out over points 1 and 2 and never get to the consideration of whether Starmer is better in these respects. Or to put it another way either Starmer is a poor salesman for honest, competent and decent governmen, or the public don't care - where it essentially comes to the same thing.I agree with RCS on this. It gets bad, people are very careful, it goes away, people get less careful, it comes back. There is a bit of a quiet period in between, often quite long, but that makes sense too - when people are very careful, the spread is likely mostly within households, so cases continue after community spread is all but stopped. Those most recently infected/close to someone infected (e.g. household) are likely to be careful for longer. So the last few infections spread to very few other people, the community incidence is very low at that point (and those closest to those infected at the end of a wave are more likely to have been infected themselves). It takes time before the small trickle of remaining infections makes a jump (through chance, public transport, a visit to family further away) to a pool of people who were largely not infected last time and to be able to spread again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57809611
The trouble with masks is that they're rarely worn where they would have the most impact: when indoors in close proximity to others for an extended duration, i.e, at home or in a pub/restaurant with friends and family. Instead, this is where we feel safe enough to take them off.
https://twitter.com/BQuilty/status/1412005377231572996?s=20
The relative trajectories of the pandemics in England & Scotland will be interesting....
Still another week of schooling here.
And of course....
"This ties into a sort of familiarity bias where the perceived risk of transmission from strangers is greater than that from people you know, when really it's the complete opposite: you're much more likely to get infected by a friend at home than by someone on the bus."
Starmer has yet to do that.
You can see now, that many in the conservative government are finally discovering the truth. All that stuff about 'personal reponsibility' replacing diktat.
Some are trying to tiptoe back to conservatism, hoping that their supporters will not notice the devastation their fling with socialism has caused.
Making it voluntary in such circumstances is raving bonkers. On the contrary, we should be enforcing it more stringently.
The kids school have requested we continue to wear them on school premises until the school breaks up, since they don't want to relax any restrictions in final days and then have families 'pinged' affecting holidays, so will respect that and continue to wear it there until they break up since they've asked us to.
But other than that, no, masks can metaphorically get in the bin.
Or an FFP3 mask.
Don't put your faith in strangers to do your job for you.
There is something here that we don't quite understand. Your theory (and RCS) is attractive, but it's finding the evidence that seems to be an issue.
The modelling of the human interaction side of this epidemic... I can't find any really good stuff that has been published. And I think without that behavioural stuff at the micro and macro levels, all the COVID modelling can do is create near-ridiculous worst cases.
3.4m new doses available in the UK.
We're administering 1.7m a week right now.
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1414937811506053120?s=20
Each culture would be different. Hmmm, so a model based on bubble size, "intensity" for how much you stay in that bubble, a coefficient of how likely you are to be in multiple bubbles, the connections between the bubbles.....
Vaccines work.
Properly fitted FFP3 masks work.
The vaccines are available and there's no shortage of PPE available to buy to protect yourself if you're bothered beyond that. Its time we stop putting faith in cloth masks that are uncomfortable and not working.
In fact, I'll go further, these are good parents making the right decisions for their kids in a bad situation.
Parenting at the moment is bloody horrible. The contant uncertainty of knowing bubbles could pop at any time. The inability to plan anything, to look forward to anything. I have had one child or another at home due to a positive test in their class for 22 days out of the last 25. That's not just missing school; it's missing every activity they enjoy outside the house, again and again and again. Summer holidays is the one thing many families have to look forward to in this never-ending shitfest. What do I dread more? Not being able to go, or telling my kids we're not going to be able to go because one of their classmates tested positive? I honestly don't know.
Fortunately, we're planning our holiday more than ten days after the end of term. But I would be doing exactly the same in their shoes. I am switching my phone off ten days before we go to be on the safe side. At the moment education is taking a back seat to getting any sort of normality in their childhoods at all.
I know several people at my kids' school who are doing something similar - some to protect them for holidays, some to enable the parents to keep working (it's ok for those of us working from home, but not everyone is so lucky, particularly the self-employed), some for entirely mysterious reasons.
That's not to say that wearing masks is pointless, but we clearly aren't using them in some of the scenarios that have the highest risk of transmission.
Have got FFP3 masks, but was not expecting to need one on this train.
But you are absolutely right. I don't put my faith in all strangers to be responsible. That's exactly why it should be compulsory, not up to random, arrogant, irresponsible 20-year old who is not yet vaccinated, thinks he's invulnerable, and who has been out boozing with his mates so is disproportionately likely to be a danger to others.
But now...I don't think people have any idea the difference between some homemade cloth thing, a paper one or when you then get to N95, FFP2 and FFP3.
Which is exactly why if you were bothered you should have been carrying an FFP3 mask. The 20 year old is doing nothing wrong and the law should back that up.
After all, large numbers of people got covid before vaccines came into being, lockdowns or no lockdowns. 99% plus of them survived.
I know of at least one person who has definitely never had a vaccine but has antibodies (its not me).
And mandating sensible, low-impact precautions to protect lives and reduce the impact a very nasty disease during the worst pandemic in at least 100 years is hardly 'totalitarian'. Don't be daft. It's actually just common sense.
Which is why vaccines are a good idea.
I think I mentioned, a while back, a discussion I took part in, in which the internationalists took the view that the government didn't have any especial reason to prioritise it's own citizens.
The army officer present said he was quite keen on this idea of a variable social contract and was wondering whose orders he would feel like taking.
Strangely, the internationalists didn't like his view of their view....
The question is then, what inter-connections between your bubbles and others? Are those inter-connection more likely to get COVID? Does this then "choke" the spread of infection more or less than they "spread" COVID from one bubble to the next?
The random judgement of others has been a most unedifying aspect of the past year, IMO.
To really understand this, we need very well worked out complete chains of infection, which is very hard (and expensive) to do - see track and trace, which isn't even trying to do exactly what is required. Ideally it would need full testing of everyone in an area, combined with intrusive tracking (via compulsory use of NHS app-type things).
Some idea could be gathered from transit data in e.g. Sweden in relation to local infection rates, but that's probably not at a fine enough scale.
The next best will be models that manage to match what we've seen, but as we have seen those are few and far between. What I haven't seen is whether there are any groups attempting to do forecasting, as opposed to projections (the former attempting to get the model assumptions as close as likely to reality with a likelihood of being wrong in either direction - businesses must have been doing this a bit, I should think; the projections being based on projecting specified scenarios and assumptions, which have tended to be quite conservative,* to see whether it is 'safe' to take certain steps).
I do expect we'll see work in this area that takes into account human behaviour and tries to model changes in human behaviour in response to infections that are more sophisticated than following, to a certain extent, whatever regulations are in place.
* too conservative, often, as discussed at length here.
On the BBC today they were all but playing funereal music as they announced that restrictions would be lifted and masks wouldn't be mandatory from July 19th.
Mask mandates at force of law, where zealots like yourself feel that it should be compelled by force on people who don't want to wear one, who just assume that others aren't medically exempt without knowing anything about other people is not a "sensible, low-impact precaution" it is a high impact one. And the only way to get the law enforced, if people don't want to voluntarily follow the rules, is to be increasingly draconian. And/or to get rid of all the very many exemptions that apply.
That a substantial number of people aren't following what you interpret the law to be either means that exemptions are wide open to make the law meaningless, or the public's desire to follow the law is so low as to make it meaningless. Either way wear a damned FFP3 mask or stop whinging.
#Istandwiththenotyetfullyvaccinated.
Are pubs and restaurants really going to enforce the mask rule this weekend? People having their Sunday lunch will be just ten hours away from the rule change.
But it's a philosophical issue, isn't it? People will act by themselves in the absence of official guidance when the danger is clear. People can be forced to act sooner than that. People can also be asked/advised to act sooner than that. Which is best (if you accept the premise that optimally people can act quicker than they would if not guided) comes down to relative values of freedom of individuals and lives of individuals and how much personal liberty people think it is right to trade to save x lives.
The few places where governments have taken a light touch have tended to have more deaths than comparable countries with lockdowns, but that doesn't mean they got it wrong, they just made a different choice.
Is it possible that one or two were exempt? Yes, of course. Is it possible that more than that, mostly healthy youngsters, were? No of course it's not. You're not normally this naive, are you?
They're not anymore.
When the facts change, I change my mind.
Many of them are young people, who are much less affected by covid than 83 year olds with co-morbidities.
You want to deny them the rites of passage, the joys of youth and the uninterrupted education you enjoyed as a young person.
Yes, I'm being judgemental about these parents, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But I missed loads of school when I was a kid because of health issues and being in hospital, and whilst I am awesome (*), I missed out on a lot - especially socialising. I concentrated on the core subjects, and even then did not do as well as I hoped, or predicted.
I'd like to think I did a good job with home schooling during Covid - but there were loads of gaps I couldn't fill, even for a year-2.
Schooling matters.
(*) Or awful, I always get the aw's mixed up ...
I'm extremely glad that the law is being changed from Monday to take away the supposed moral authority from meddlers like you wanting to curtain twitch on other people. It should have happened a month ago.
And they are correct in that calculation.
There has been an enormous amount of academic work produced during this pandemic on the efficacy of masks. Literally, dozens of paper, looking at the effects of transmission.
ALL OF THEM SHOW THAT MASKS ACHIEVE THEIR PRIMARY PURPOSE - I.E. THEY PREVENT SOMEONE WITH COVID PASSING IT ON.
Why don't you see if you can find a single study, that proves the opposite. And when you've done you can post it here.
You demonstrate some kind of extraordinary wilful ignorance. Is it a gift?
Edit: in some ways it is easy for me to say: we're not the sorts to do 'usual' holidays, and if we were, we'd be able to afford the massive prices you get during holiday weeks. If they'd said the kids were being home-schooled by their grandparents, I'd be a bit more forgiving. But they're just taking the p*ss. Then again, I get my son to do an hour of work out of school each day. I'm evil like that ...
Are they lying or misinterpreting that survey?
NZ moved from FTPT to PR 25 years ago.
As a result, 2 major parties and one minor party (roughly speaking) moved to 2 major parties and 3 minor parties (roughly speaking).
But there was a little bit of turbulence to get there.
We can already see (in England) the likely result of PR. It would facilitate the entry and/or growth of “Reform” and the Greens.
They've served their purpose and their time has long since passed.
https://twitter.com/axios/status/1414920040521023489?s=21
In order for us to generate the wealth that we need to look after the vulnerable, the healthy have to be allowed to go about their business. It's that simple.
Referendum took place among widespread disaffection from both left and right parties as a result of privatisation > austerity programme.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57636360
This shows that as an Item of PPE it leaves the user 47 times more likely to catch Covid than someone not in that position.
In every other aspect of H & S, something as uselss as that type of mask would never be accepted as PPE.
What this study also shows is that a FFP3 mask works great and they offered the user full protection i.e an excellent form of PPE .
Now I believe I said this well over a year ago to much derision.
Bravely ran away away.
When footballer players took the knee,
He bravely chose to turn and flee.
Yes, brave Sir Boris turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Swiftly taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the brave, Sir Boris!
https://twitter.com/breeallegretti/status/1414916497143705605
https://twitter.com/Simon_Nixon/status/1414924630159151119
https://twitter.com/hugorifkind/status/1414923990183907329
Someone in the building trade wearing appropriate PPE is far more than 47x more likely to die from a fall than someone sitting at a desk.
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1401927434333835266?s=19