FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
May I add my best wishes and props to @Casino_Royale whose original post I have just seen. That must have taken some big cojones to write. And, yes, that sounds like depression to me. From experience, not from any qualification to diagnose. Step 1 is always recognising there is an issue. Much sympathy. Take care. Look after yourself.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
Are the figures from India reliable? Collecting data in such a vast country with such a large population must be challenging.
Probably not very reliable. Also the 65+ population of India is only bit bigger than that of the US, so the 4x population comparison isn't really valid for deaths at least.
The different graph shapes might also have a little to do with the different seasons, but the sharp recent drops in India are interesting, seem to imply some kind of herd immunity has been reached?
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
Correct but 0.08% is not the actual false positive rate. It is the absolute ceiling on false positives.
Tbh, it's not false positives that are the problem. It's asymptomatic and mild cases among people who have been vaccinated. There is almost guaranteed to be more tha 1k per day in that category with the amount of testing we're doing. That's why it feels like a really dishonest moving of the goal posts.
It's a problem to have 10k per day getting infected when 1k of those end up in hospital, it's not a problem to have 10x as many per day getting infected when only 10 of them end up in hospital. The people who are proposing moving to cases know this as well but they really do seem fixated on keeping people locked up forever. It's up to the politicians to be brave and open up against that advice because lockdown forever isn't a solution to any problem.
I don't see why it's inevitable to be 1k?
Last May to August we got numbers down to the hundreds per day. With vaccines suppressing R, plus natural immunity, I'd expect us to be back to that level relatively soon even without dragging out restrictions absurdly.
You defending the 1K cases bar for serious unwinding of lockdown?
Best of luck with that, my old china.
No I'm not. The opposite, I'm saying I expect us to reach 1000 before too long even with unlocking occuring.
I don't see how that's possible, even among the vaccinated there is ~85% immunity from symptoms. So for the 15m who are immunised we could expect 15% to develop mild symptoms and ~30-40% to be infected.
I'd actually suggest that with the amount of testing going on we're going to struggle to get below 5-7k cases per day for the rest of the year because of mild and asymptomatic spread among the immunised.
Isn't it currently at ~10k and coming down by 30% per week (and accelerating).
At that rate it will be below 5k within a fortnight surely? I see absolutely no reason for it to still be above 5k by the eight of March. I'd be surprised if it's above 2k by the end of March.
I don't see how it will be above 1k by end of April unless the fall is completely arrested.
According to PB today, cases are now rising again. Very depressing news (not that I think it should be the key metric – it shouldn't – but people are obsessed with case numbers over hospitalisations).
Some areas but I'd be careful to see if it's more than just statistical noise at this stage. Especially since Scotland has had a high positivity rate for weeks, they seem like an odd exception already.
With three weeks to go until schools reopen, probably six weeks to go until other things open (and schools reclose) and about 9 weeks to go until we have both schools and other things open simultaneously I see little reason for us to be anywhere close to 5k daily cases by then.
The difference in positivity is due to lateral flow tests being included in the test numbers for England. PCR test positivity is in the same ballpark, currently around 6%.
I don't know whether Scotland as well as Wales and NI aren't doing lateral flow tests in numbers, or just not doing statistics on them. Probably the former, as the lateral flow tests were a Cummings initiative, right?
England's cases are still falling at a sustained 25..30% rate per week, and could undertake Scotland within a week.
Indeed that's my point. Some people seem convinced case falls are suddenly going to halt here but I see no logic behind that. At least until 8 March the falls should continue surely?
Who knows. If the fall in Scotland has stopped (or at least slowed down) because the virus has died out among those who can and do stay at home, while still circulating among those who can't or won't, the same could happen elsewhere. On the other hand, that pattern didn't seem to happen in the first lockdown, or at least only at a much lower level.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
Odd definition. Typically 1 June or 21 June is the argument, I'd say 1 June since weather is more important than stars and that's the Met's definition.
Somehow managed to get 94% in my Litigation module. Ridiculous.
Litigation usually is.
Gallowgate will know how to serve a writ of mort d'ancestor for a claim on a subinfeudated tenant at will in the Court of Common Pleas before the passing of the Statute of Quia Emptores.
Yeah mate, that sounds like clinical depression. I've been there and worse, as I have discussed on here. The social phobia is a classic symptom: you just want to hide away, under the duvet. Millions of people are suffering some form of it, right now. A friend of mine (usually chirpy) realised he had it when, every morning, when he woke up, his first thought at realising he was conscious was "Oh no".
Advice? You could try pills, if it gets really bad. They do help, but they have side effects and you don't want to get dependant. But clearly if it deteriorates (esp if you think about self harm) you should consider them.
Other advice? Stephen Fry (who suffers from it badly) puts it quite well: depression is just like the rain, there's nothing you can do, you just wait for it to stop. But it WILL stop, as the rain always stops, in the end.
Interim: force yourself to go outside and exercise in fresh air. Force yourself to phone a friend, see a friend on a walk. Even if it is just 5 minutes, it will help. TELL people you are depressed, admit it, confess it, sometimes just sharing is truly helpful. Unburden yourself.
And maybe try some really tough exercise, like HIIT (you can do it at home). This is so vigorous you get an endorphine boost and a testosterone surge whatever your mood. Do it daily, if possible.
Don't drink TOO much, but don't abstain either, if you find it helps.
Eat really delicious food. Meditate a bit. Listen to music you haven't tried before. Your anhedonia will prevent you from enjoying much of this - life is so beige during depression - but it all helps to move your mind onwards.
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Vaccine anecdote. Colleague who had Covid last feb/march (positive for antibodies in June), had AZ last week. Next day sore arm and aching all over, just like when he had Covid. Just one day of it though. Supports the idea that those who have had it (a) are still probably showing good protection a year later and (b) might only need one jab, not two.
Had my AZ jab nearly a week ago. Side effects set in after about 16 hours, high temp for about 18 hours, still under the weather now.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
Starts 1st June. Ends August 31st. No other definition should be used. Ignore idiots who claim its linked to the equinoxes...
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
Correct but 0.08% is not the actual false positive rate. It is the absolute ceiling on false positives.
Tbh, it's not false positives that are the problem. It's asymptomatic and mild cases among people who have been vaccinated. There is almost guaranteed to be more tha 1k per day in that category with the amount of testing we're doing. That's why it feels like a really dishonest moving of the goal posts.
It's a problem to have 10k per day getting infected when 1k of those end up in hospital, it's not a problem to have 10x as many per day getting infected when only 10 of them end up in hospital. The people who are proposing moving to cases know this as well but they really do seem fixated on keeping people locked up forever. It's up to the politicians to be brave and open up against that advice because lockdown forever isn't a solution to any problem.
Yep, 'true-but-irrelevant' positives could be an issue with the mainstream testing (or at least, comparing numbers now to numbers last summer for example). Shouldn't be for the ONS surveillance studies though.
'Irrelevant' of course depending on the context - they're relevant to telling whether someone is infected, but not - hopefully, any more - so relevant as a leading indicator of hospitalisations and deaths and the need to lock down.
Yeah and this is why it's so alarming to have scientists and other public health people try to link lockdown easing to case numbers. It feels completely dishonest and I don't blame the Chancellor for blowing up at them recently if this is the reason.
Surely the ONS study will suffer from it too unless they're asking people to list any symptoms they have when filling in the survey. If they are then it actually could be a treasure trove of data for the whole world.
Finally you realise. Finally.
There are people out there, powerful people, who will link the easing of lockdown to anything whatever that keeps us in lockdown.
Why would they do that?
Ooh me sir me sir.
Here's a couple off the top of my head.
1. NHS bods dictating policy atm want $$$ for the NHS. Historically no one has given them this (or enough of this). NHS bods dictating policy link ending lockdown to the receipt of $$$ for the NHS. How much $$$? Sky's the limit.
2. Tough lockdown strategy popular in the polls. "Following the science" popular in the polls. Boris continuing lockdown and "following the science" = Boris riding high in the polls.
The medical profession has been trying to control us for decades. All those surveys on what you should or shouldn't eat/do etc. which were patently ignored by ordinary people,.
Finally, finally, they have traction. They have leverage. They have power.
It's a testament to your commitment to your username that, on the first day in ages when you long-expressed views sort of make sense at last, that you have upped the ante to this level in a desperate bid to ensure that nobody can possibly agree with you on it.
Quite why the medical profession should be so invested in making sure that, for example, your meals are bland and unenjoyable, is completely beyond me.
$$$
I don't think they want to control our minds. But they sure as hell want more money.
Well, more charitably I would say that fewer clinically obese patients suffering from heart conditions means more NHS funds available to treat other conditions (in simple terms, so ignoring the short term vs long term cost benefit analysis).
But all that does is raise the question of how they expect to continue receiving more and more money if they won't allow the economy that pays their wages to open up again?
Well money hasn't been a problem to date. And you answer the question yourself re fatties. And they brought down the official "safe" drinking limit recently.
CMO: "The only way we are going to be able to function is if we have an increase in $$$ so that we can handle new variants/new diseases/the backlog in "normal" cases/fatties/adventure sportsmen/mountaineers/rock climbers/steeplechase jockeys/rally drivers/@Dura_Ace /circus highwire performers/etc. Until we get that money, sadly we won't be able to agree to open up society."
Is not out of the question.
Sure, that makes some sense as a position. I'm not concerned about it, because it's a terrible argument to put to the cabinet without a whole lot more leverage than they actually have. The response is obvious: we can't give you the money unless we open up society, so you'll have to pick your poison.
Oh and by the way we're going to ignore you either way because it's become politically unviable to keep society locked up any longer.
PS I do find it amusing that you chose to tag (rather than just reference) Dura_Ace in a post that has literally nothing to do with him.
Yebbut is it? Look at the polls, as are frequently quoted on here. Public hugely in favour of lockdown. So take away their furlough - can you see BoJo doing that? Not a chance.
And as for your PS I don't see a difference in tagging or referring. What is the difference/amusing bit? Does he get a credit?
1) Those polls are going to change, drastically, once the death rate drops down into double digit per day levels and stays there.
2) He gets a message via Vanilla if you tag him. Not a huge deal, but amused me. If you click your name on one of your posts you get taken to your "homepage" which shows you your system messages (among other things).
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Vaccine anecdote. Colleague who had Covid last feb/march (positive for antibodies in June), had AZ last week. Next day sore arm and aching all over, just like when he had Covid. Just one day of it though. Supports the idea that those who have had it (a) are still probably showing good protection a year later and (b) might only need one jab, not two.
Had my AZ jab nearly a week ago. Side effects set in after about 16 hours, high temp for about 18 hours, still under the weather now.
You sure that's just the jab? Sounds quite extreme if so. Worth a test?
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
Starts 1st June. Ends August 31st. No other definition should be used. Ignore idiots who claim its linked to the equinoxes...
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
Sure. June. July. In the context of the pandemic this for me is detail. Sustainable normality (or close) by the time the proper sun is out, I will take that.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
Correct but 0.08% is not the actual false positive rate. It is the absolute ceiling on false positives.
Tbh, it's not false positives that are the problem. It's asymptomatic and mild cases among people who have been vaccinated. There is almost guaranteed to be more tha 1k per day in that category with the amount of testing we're doing. That's why it feels like a really dishonest moving of the goal posts.
It's a problem to have 10k per day getting infected when 1k of those end up in hospital, it's not a problem to have 10x as many per day getting infected when only 10 of them end up in hospital. The people who are proposing moving to cases know this as well but they really do seem fixated on keeping people locked up forever. It's up to the politicians to be brave and open up against that advice because lockdown forever isn't a solution to any problem.
Yep, 'true-but-irrelevant' positives could be an issue with the mainstream testing (or at least, comparing numbers now to numbers last summer for example). Shouldn't be for the ONS surveillance studies though.
'Irrelevant' of course depending on the context - they're relevant to telling whether someone is infected, but not - hopefully, any more - so relevant as a leading indicator of hospitalisations and deaths and the need to lock down.
Yeah and this is why it's so alarming to have scientists and other public health people try to link lockdown easing to case numbers. It feels completely dishonest and I don't blame the Chancellor for blowing up at them recently if this is the reason.
Surely the ONS study will suffer from it too unless they're asking people to list any symptoms they have when filling in the survey. If they are then it actually could be a treasure trove of data for the whole world.
Finally you realise. Finally.
There are people out there, powerful people, who will link the easing of lockdown to anything whatever that keeps us in lockdown.
Why would they do that?
NHS bods dictating policy atm want $$$ for the NHS.
Surely they want £££? I hear changing large amounts of currency is a real pain
Or is this the long-awaited sell-out of the NHS to US private insurance companies?
Would make a good Bond film, perhaps. NHS bods hold the country to ransom - if you want out of lockdown, you have to pay up. Our man James cruises in and shoots a few epidemiologists before going syringe-to-syringe with Jon Van-Tam, while JVT explains in a direct to camera monologue that this is all a bit like what happens when coronavirus is trying to infect your cells and your immune system is having none of it. Flunky enters with Pfizer vaccine in cold storage and Bond says "I have a licence to chill".
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
Sure. June. July. In the context of the pandemic this for me is detail. Sustainable normality (or close) by the time the proper sun is out, I will take that.
We have been over this. For old blokes, very comfortably off, retired perhaps, big houses, nice areas, all this is so much detail.
For the majority of the rest of the population this stuff matters.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
I don't think there is a convincing case for that yet.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
Established pastureland is an effective carbon sink but only remains so from regular grazing and fertilisation from grazers. Sure, we could requisition all pasture land and stick some wild bison on it but it’s unclear why this would be superior to letting “pasture for life” cattle graze it instead, which can be slaughtered and sold, so the proceeds can be used to pay for the management of the land.
Gates has long had no clue on global warming. I get the sense he’s trying his best to learn but has a long way to go.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
Correct but 0.08% is not the actual false positive rate. It is the absolute ceiling on false positives.
Tbh, it's not false positives that are the problem. It's asymptomatic and mild cases among people who have been vaccinated. There is almost guaranteed to be more tha 1k per day in that category with the amount of testing we're doing. That's why it feels like a really dishonest moving of the goal posts.
It's a problem to have 10k per day getting infected when 1k of those end up in hospital, it's not a problem to have 10x as many per day getting infected when only 10 of them end up in hospital. The people who are proposing moving to cases know this as well but they really do seem fixated on keeping people locked up forever. It's up to the politicians to be brave and open up against that advice because lockdown forever isn't a solution to any problem.
Yep, 'true-but-irrelevant' positives could be an issue with the mainstream testing (or at least, comparing numbers now to numbers last summer for example). Shouldn't be for the ONS surveillance studies though.
'Irrelevant' of course depending on the context - they're relevant to telling whether someone is infected, but not - hopefully, any more - so relevant as a leading indicator of hospitalisations and deaths and the need to lock down.
Yeah and this is why it's so alarming to have scientists and other public health people try to link lockdown easing to case numbers. It feels completely dishonest and I don't blame the Chancellor for blowing up at them recently if this is the reason.
Surely the ONS study will suffer from it too unless they're asking people to list any symptoms they have when filling in the survey. If they are then it actually could be a treasure trove of data for the whole world.
Finally you realise. Finally.
There are people out there, powerful people, who will link the easing of lockdown to anything whatever that keeps us in lockdown.
Why would they do that?
NHS bods dictating policy atm want $$$ for the NHS.
Surely they want £££? I hear changing large amounts of currency is a real pain
Or is this the long-awaited sell-out of the NHS to US private insurance companies?
Would make a good Bond film, perhaps. NHS bods hold the country to ransom - if you want out of lockdown, you have to pay up. Our man James cruises in and shoots a few epidemiologists before going syringe-to-syringe with Jon Van-Tam, while JVT explains in a direct to camera monologue that this is all a bit like what happens when coronavirus is trying to infect your cells and your immune system is having none of it. Flunky enters with Pfizer vaccine in cold storage and Bond says "I have a licence to chill".
For sure they wouldn't have wanted $$$ over the past few weeks.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
Starts 1st June. Ends August 31st. No other definition should be used. Ignore idiots who claim its linked to the equinoxes...
Thread?
Summer starts on June 24 and ends on September 29.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
Sure. June. July. In the context of the pandemic this for me is detail. Sustainable normality (or close) by the time the proper sun is out, I will take that.
We have been over this. For old blokes, very comfortably off, retired perhaps, big houses, nice areas, all this is so much detail.
For the majority of the rest of the population this stuff matters.
Kinabalu’s comment is the height of crassness in light of casino’s post.
Personally, I don't think that every season needs to be of exactly equal length. Spring and Autumn always feel more like shorter transitional seasons to me. 4,2,4,2 might work out just as well.
Spring: mid-March to mid-May Summer: mid-May to mid-September Autumn: mid-September to mid-November Winter: mid-November to mid-March
Just how it tends to feel to me, but probably varies depending on where you live and what the climate's like, anyway.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
Sure. June. July. In the context of the pandemic this for me is detail. Sustainable normality (or close) by the time the proper sun is out, I will take that.
We have been over this. For old blokes, very comfortably off, retired perhaps, big houses, nice areas, all this is so much detail.
For the majority of the rest of the population this stuff matters.
Yes of course. Everyone has their own perspective but I can only give mine. Which is that if we are out of this - and for good - by June/July time I will consider it a result.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
I don't think there is a convincing case for that yet.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
Established pastureland is an effective carbon sink but only remains so from regular grazing and fertilisation from grazers. Sure, we could requisition all pasture land and stick some wild bison on it but it’s unclear why this would be superior to letting “pasture for life” cattle graze it instead, which can be slaughtered and sold, so the proceeds can be used to pay for the management of the land.
Gates has long had no clue on global warming. I get the sense he’s trying his best to learn but has a long way to go.
He needs to get back in his box. Stick to selling overpriced operating systems - his dietary musings are neither practical nor helpful.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
Sure. June. July. In the context of the pandemic this for me is detail. Sustainable normality (or close) by the time the proper sun is out, I will take that.
We have been over this. For old blokes, very comfortably off, retired perhaps, big houses, nice areas, all this is so much detail.
For the majority of the rest of the population this stuff matters.
Kinabalu’s comment is the height of crassness in light of casino’s post.
You misread me. I wish everyone the best in these difficult times. Including you. And if getting in touch with your inner sanctimonious wally helps you cope, that is absolutely fine.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
What is causing so much psychological damage for me, is frustrated hope.
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
What is causing so much psychological damage for me, is frustrated hope.
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
I don't think there is a convincing case for that yet.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
Animals are not meant to fart and burp all the time - no animal is evolved not to be able to digest their food properly. It's because the cows are being fed a cheap grain based feed, not pasture raised. Then they tell us we need to eliminate it entirely because of environmental damage?
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
What is causing so much psychological damage for me, is frustrated hope.
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
It is absolutely brutal. could it be deliberate?
Even the dimmest on here will start to realize you're a zero value troll if you're not careful.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
I don't think there is a convincing case for that yet.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
Established pastureland is an effective carbon sink but only remains so from regular grazing and fertilisation from grazers. Sure, we could requisition all pasture land and stick some wild bison on it but it’s unclear why this would be superior to letting “pasture for life” cattle graze it instead, which can be slaughtered and sold, so the proceeds can be used to pay for the management of the land.
Gates has long had no clue on global warming. I get the sense he’s trying his best to learn but has a long way to go.
With respect, he probably knows a great deal more than you do.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
What is causing so much psychological damage for me, is frustrated hope.
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
It is absolutely brutal. could it be deliberate?
So they enjoy inflicting pain as well as a having a desire for power?
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Vaccine anecdote. Colleague who had Covid last feb/march (positive for antibodies in June), had AZ last week. Next day sore arm and aching all over, just like when he had Covid. Just one day of it though. Supports the idea that those who have had it (a) are still probably showing good protection a year later and (b) might only need one jab, not two.
Had my AZ jab nearly a week ago. Side effects set in after about 16 hours, high temp for about 18 hours, still under the weather now.
You sure that's just the jab? Sounds quite extreme if so. Worth a test?
It's all in the data sheet. Apparently experienced by about 1 in 10 people. Also, I spoke to GP about nausea (also in data sheet) yesterday because I'd have liked some anti-nausea medication. We went through everything and GP has no worries.
"Bill Gates has called on the U.S. and other wealthy countries to give up eating beef entirely and switch to synthetic alternatives due to climate change.
'I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,' Gates the MIT Technology Review in an interview on Monday.
'You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the people or use regulation to totally shift the demand,' Gates mused."
I don't think there is a convincing case for that yet.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
Established pastureland is an effective carbon sink but only remains so from regular grazing and fertilisation from grazers. Sure, we could requisition all pasture land and stick some wild bison on it but it’s unclear why this would be superior to letting “pasture for life” cattle graze it instead, which can be slaughtered and sold, so the proceeds can be used to pay for the management of the land.
Gates has long had no clue on global warming. I get the sense he’s trying his best to learn but has a long way to go.
With respect, he probably knows a great deal more than you do.
He clearly knows next to nothing about human nutrition, which is slightly more to the point.
The only way our future is lockdown forever is if the pandemic keeps going with vaccine resistant, spreadable beyond vaccine efficacy and reinfection able Covid keeps mutating merrily along constantly one step ahead of the scientists. With mRNA vaccines in particular that's unlikely. Right now we're nowhere near herd immunity, it's a marginal downward pressure on the virus. Little by little, jab by jab it'll creep up - perhaps even more so with Autumn boosters if needed. This phase doesn't last forever. Once we're all vaccinated we'll be able to live with Covid as we do with the flu.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
It's grim out there.
Same.
Which is why I think talk of London and other big cities being a thing of the past and working from home being the new normal after Covid are a huge red herring.
People are absolutely sick of being stuck at home and many of us now feel like we are living at work, rather than working from home.
I just don't see how a lockdown is enforceable once the weather becomes nice again, being cooped up is driving most of my friends nuts.
Like Casino, I've been struggling with serious depression. I can't sleep at night any more without a sleeping tablet. And all my days blur into one.
Worst of all is the anger. It's sudden and comes out of nowhere.
Most if not all of my friends and colleagues have similar stories.
I've no idea what the mental health consequences of lockdown are but I suspect they are huge, incalculably so.
This simply can't carry on. Not forever, not until July. Get the most at risk vaccinated and let the rest of us go, before we go mad.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
It's grim out there.
Sounds similar to my impressions. Lockdown 1.0 of course was accompanied by endless days of unexpected spring sunshine. And there was the novelty factor. If you had a garden, were still being paid and had someone else around like close family then it was a bit of holiday frankly.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
Casino, thanks for sharing. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone, by far. Everything you describe, with the exception of the aggressive and frustrated paragraph, describes my current state of mind to a tee, including avoiding or simply not attending work Zooms, and having to make Herculean efforts just to even sit down to work. It does not help that I love the face to face interaction of the training room, and hate the black screens with avatar names only in the Zoom sessions. No feedback, no repartee. Hate it.
What is causing so much psychological damage for me, is frustrated hope.
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
It is absolutely brutal. could it be deliberate?
So they enjoy inflicting pain as well as a having a desire for power?
The effects of their handiwork are now in plain sight, on this website and many others today. Whether they meant to cause suffering or not, they undoubtedly have and in spades.
I have experience of it myself with one young person who works with me, but I can't break confidences.
Underneath this lockdown there is an iceberg of suffering. An iceberg caused not by covid, but by lockdown.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
It's grim out there.
Same.
Which is why I think talk of London and other big cities being a thing of the past and working from home being the new normal after Covid are a huge red herring.
People are absolutely sick of being stuck at home and many of us now feel like we are living at work, rather than working from home.
I just don't see how a lockdown is enforceable once the weather becomes nice again, being cooped up is driving most of my friends nuts.
Like Casino, I've been struggling with serious depression. I can't sleep at night any more without a sleeping tablet. And all my days blur into one.
Worst of all is the anger. It's sudden and comes out of nowhere.
Most if not all of my friends and colleagues have similar stories.
I've no idea what the mental health consequences of lockdown are but I suspect they are huge, incalculably so.
This simply can't carry on. Not forever, not until July. Get the most at risk vaccinated and let the rest of us go, before we go mad.
Stay with it! Come on to PB and vent god knows we are all used to it from people in normal times.
No idea of your circumstances and being very wary of trite "just do this"-isms, I would repeat my exercise advice. Try to do some. Of course if you feel like doing nothing you're not going to feel like getting into your leotard and leg-warmers but try to enlist people to help you.
Like us!!
I personally am great at telling people from a sedentary position how to exert themselves.
Does anyone know why golf courses and outdoor swimming pools are closed?
Any sort of pool could be a vector perhaps ? How many outdoor pools are there here really ? Golf as singles or within your bubble (My Mum and Dad play together) no idea.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
That's great to hear. Horses for courses. It's great that you feel as you do. Don't fgs feel guilty about it. Use your strength to help others.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
So worried about catching covid you took a flight abroad....and then stayed for 2 months. And AFAIK those shielding weren't permitted to go on holiday in December.
"Reporter offered vaccine because NHS thought he was 6cm tall
If you can, try to picture someone who is 6cm tall and weighs 17.5 stone. It may be an odd image, but apparently it is the measurements the NHS mistakenly had for Liverpool Echo political editor Liam Thorp.
The reporter was baffled when he was offered his first dose of the vaccine for next week so decided to investigate with his GP. As it turned out, he had been classified as morbidly obese because his height had somehow been listed as 6.2cm - giving him a BMI of 28,000 and putting him in a high-risk group for becoming seriously ill with coronavirus. "I mean I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown but not that many," he joked."
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
That's great to hear. Horses for courses. It's great that you feel as you do. Don't fgs feel guilty about it. Use your strength to help others.
Yes, that's right. I feel as Bournville does, for all the reasons he cites, bur it's horribly depressing for loads of people and Government policy needs to takes account of them. There was a tendency in Lockdown 1 for people to divide into rival camps and deride each other, but the reality is that, like the disease itself, it's affecting people differently and overall it's grim.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
"Reporter offered vaccine because NHS thought he was 6cm tall
If you can, try to picture someone who is 6cm tall and weighs 17.5 stone. It may be an odd image, but apparently it is the measurements the NHS mistakenly had for Liverpool Echo political editor Liam Thorp.
The reporter was baffled when he was offered his first dose of the vaccine for next week so decided to investigate with his GP. As it turned out, he had been classified as morbidly obese because his height had somehow been listed as 6.2cm - giving him a BMI of 28,000 and putting him in a high-risk group for becoming seriously ill with coronavirus. "I mean I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown but not that many," he joked."
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
Apropos of the conversation on here I was just sent a YouGov survey regarding my colleagues mental health. I don't think I am breaching any confidences by saying I was not positive.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
That's great to hear. Horses for courses. It's great that you feel as you do. Don't fgs feel guilty about it. Use your strength to help others.
Yes, that's right. I feel as Bournville does, for all the reasons he cites, bur it's horribly depressing for loads of people and Government policy needs to takes account of them. There was a tendency in Lockdown 1 for people to divide into rival camps and deride each other, but the reality is that, like the disease itself, it's affecting people differently and overall it's grim.
Indeed.
And opening up doesn't actually make it harder for the more cautious to stay indoors....
"Reporter offered vaccine because NHS thought he was 6cm tall
If you can, try to picture someone who is 6cm tall and weighs 17.5 stone. It may be an odd image, but apparently it is the measurements the NHS mistakenly had for Liverpool Echo political editor Liam Thorp.
The reporter was baffled when he was offered his first dose of the vaccine for next week so decided to investigate with his GP. As it turned out, he had been classified as morbidly obese because his height had somehow been listed as 6.2cm - giving him a BMI of 28,000 and putting him in a high-risk group for becoming seriously ill with coronavirus. "I mean I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown but not that many," he joked."
Had my AZ jab nearly a week ago. Side effects set in after about 16 hours, high temp for about 18 hours, still under the weather now.
You sure that's just the jab? Sounds quite extreme if so. Worth a test?
It's all in the data sheet. Apparently experienced by about 1 in 10 people. Also, I spoke to GP about nausea (also in data sheet) yesterday because I'd have liked some anti-nausea medication. We went through everything and GP has no worries.
But thanks anyway.
Earlier on this thread, someone commented that anecdotally, younger people seem to be getting stronger reactions. That sounds good to me; I'm early 70s!
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
That's great to hear. Horses for courses. It's great that you feel as you do. Don't fgs feel guilty about it. Use your strength to help others.
Yes, that's right. I feel as Bournville does, for all the reasons he cites, bur it's horribly depressing for loads of people and Government policy needs to takes account of them. There was a tendency in Lockdown 1 for people to divide into rival camps and deride each other, but the reality is that, like the disease itself, it's affecting people differently and overall it's grim.
I think today has been a real eye-opener on here.
Well done to @Casino_Royale because his post has allowed or encouraged others to follow suit.
I haven't crunched the numbers but a very non-trivial proportion of regular PB contributors seem to be thus affected.
If we are, and we are supposed to be a thinking, analytic, data-driven, intellectual bunch then what on earth is it like "out there"?
The astronomical definition of summer is June 21 to September 20.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Google says 1st June - 22nd September.
Then Google is wrong on all counts.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
Aargh sorry yes 21 June to 22 Sep.
So what's all this 1st June to 31 August nonsense?
The Met Office uses that definition (in this country), for statistical convenience (it's three clear months) so some people insist it's set in stone.
However, the seasons are set by the cosmos, not civil servants, so Google is right on this one, in terms of the astronomical summer.
It might be better, as @Gaussian says, to agree on a definition of 11th - 10th for the seasons, as these would match the actual thermal seasons, and would be a perfect compromise. But that would have the dual effect of angering both government meteorologists and astronomers, ergo will never happen.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
It's grim out there.
Same.
Which is why I think talk of London and other big cities being a thing of the past and working from home being the new normal after Covid are a huge red herring.
People are absolutely sick of being stuck at home and many of us now feel like we are living at work, rather than working from home.
I just don't see how a lockdown is enforceable once the weather becomes nice again, being cooped up is driving most of my friends nuts.
Like Casino, I've been struggling with serious depression. I can't sleep at night any more without a sleeping tablet. And all my days blur into one.
Worst of all is the anger. It's sudden and comes out of nowhere.
Most if not all of my friends and colleagues have similar stories.
I've no idea what the mental health consequences of lockdown are but I suspect they are huge, incalculably so.
This simply can't carry on. Not forever, not until July. Get the most at risk vaccinated and let the rest of us go, before we go mad.
Just to point out. If the roadmap is as expected it's normality by July. This is different to lockdown until July. The current "stay at home" and "nothing open" and "no meeting up" phase will be over well before then. And there'll be a period where hospitality will be open but with distancing also well before then. The worst is nearly over barring unpleasant surprises from the virus itself.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
That's great to hear. Horses for courses. It's great that you feel as you do. Don't fgs feel guilty about it. Use your strength to help others.
Yes, that's right. I feel as Bournville does, for all the reasons he cites, bur it's horribly depressing for loads of people and Government policy needs to takes account of them. There was a tendency in Lockdown 1 for people to divide into rival camps and deride each other, but the reality is that, like the disease itself, it's affecting people differently and overall it's grim.
I think today has been a real eye-opener on here.
Well done to @Casino_Royale because his post has allowed or encouraged others to follow suit.
I haven't crunched the numbers but a very non-trivial proportion of regular PB contributors seem to be thus affected.
If we are, and we are supposed to be a thinking, analytic, data-driven, intellectual bunch then what on earth is it like "out there"?
I think everyone's in the same boat. Its shit and its winter.
I really hope we get a decent spring and summer and can enjoy it. Only thing getting me through this winter is hoping for better to be not too far away.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
Thomas, 68, is undergoing treatment for stage four incurable cancer, so had been shielding since the start of the pandemic. He flew out to the Portuguese archipelago for a family holiday in December, but said he has been advised by his GP and oncologist that it would be dangerous for him to return and stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days, leaving him effectively stranded
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
So worried about catching covid you took a flight abroad...
Mate. Stop your curtain twitching.
The bloke is about to die let him do what he wants. People make stupid (according to?!) choices every day.
Archipelagos and extant islands have to be included as part of host countries because they'll be classified as domestic travel for said country. (Papeete/France). Sympathy is due but if you allow one exception, you start to allow others and then the whole system begins to collapse. A strict ankle tagging system is an alternative to hotel quarantine I've thought of and could be appropriate here where it is inadvisable for said passenger to stay in a hotel. I can understand why the Gov't doesn't want to go for it with optics, also it wouldn't be free to monitor but it could be an alternative...
"Reporter offered vaccine because NHS thought he was 6cm tall
If you can, try to picture someone who is 6cm tall and weighs 17.5 stone. It may be an odd image, but apparently it is the measurements the NHS mistakenly had for Liverpool Echo political editor Liam Thorp.
The reporter was baffled when he was offered his first dose of the vaccine for next week so decided to investigate with his GP. As it turned out, he had been classified as morbidly obese because his height had somehow been listed as 6.2cm - giving him a BMI of 28,000 and putting him in a high-risk group for becoming seriously ill with coronavirus. "I mean I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown but not that many," he joked."
Yeah mate, that sounds like clinical depression. I've been there and worse, as I have discussed on here. The social phobia is a classic symptom: you just want to hide away, under the duvet. Millions of people are suffering some form of it, right now. A friend of mine (usually chirpy) realised he had it when, every morning, when he woke up, his first thought at realising he was conscious was "Oh no".
Advice? You could try pills, if it gets really bad. They do help, but they have side effects and you don't want to get dependant. But clearly if it deteriorates (esp if you think about self harm) you should consider them.
Other advice? Stephen Fry (who suffers from it badly) puts it quite well: depression is just like the rain, there's nothing you can do, you just wait for it to stop. But it WILL stop, as the rain always stops, in the end.
Interim: force yourself to go outside and exercise in fresh air. Force yourself to phone a friend, see a friend on a walk. Even if it is just 5 minutes, it will help. TELL people you are depressed, admit it, confess it, sometimes just sharing is truly helpful. Unburden yourself.
And maybe try some really tough exercise, like HIIT (you can do it at home). This is so vigorous you get an endorphine boost and a testosterone surge whatever your mood. Do it daily, if possible.
Don't drink TOO much, but don't abstain either, if you find it helps.
Eat really delicious food. Meditate a bit. Listen to music you haven't tried before. Your anhedonia will prevent you from enjoying much of this - life is so beige during depression - but it all helps to move your mind onwards.
Good luck.
I can certainly relate to the waking up with 'Oh No!' in the mornings at the moment. The days are unrelentingly grey and long as so many of us are finding at the moment. I've suffered full blown 'darkness at noon' depression several times over the years and I'm pretty borderline with it at the moment. Just about keeping above the sinkhole.
My lockdown travails are compounded by next door having a major extension built, so am lockdowned to the sound of constant hammering and cement mixing. Joy.
All the best to @Casino_Royale and all other PBers suffering at the moment. At least sharing on here helps a little.
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
I'm a teacher, so I tend to think of the start of the summer term as the start of summer. That said the coldest I've ever felt was umpiring a cricket match in April...
On a personal note, though it will be relevant to many, I have had an email today telling me to continue to shield until the end of March, so it looks like I won't be going back to school this term. If secondary school pupils are back in before that it is going to be a right pain for me, though I expect they would rather be back than at home.
I like the implication that all the publicity about Trump's attempts to damage the postal service led to lots of voters posting early, or using drop boxes, which was part of the reason the absentee ballot rejection rate was relatively low (the top reason for rejection being ballots arriving too late).
Does anyone know why golf courses and outdoor swimming pools are closed?
Any sort of pool could be a vector perhaps ? How many outdoor pools are there here really ? Golf as singles or within your bubble (My Mum and Dad play together) no idea.
For pools it would more likely be the changing areas.
I think that wild swimming is still open, with appropriate distancing. Presumably it qualifies as "exercise".
The astronomical definition of summer is June 21 to September 20.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Google says 1st June - 22nd September.
Then Google is wrong on all counts.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
Aargh sorry yes 21 June to 22 Sep.
So what's all this 1st June to 31 August nonsense?
The Met Office uses that definition (in this country), for statistical convenience (it's three clear months) so some people insist it's set in stone.
However, the seasons are set by the cosmos, not civil servants, so Google is right on this one, in terms of the astronomical summer.
It might be better, as @Gaussian says, to agree on a definition of 11th - 10th for the seasons, as these would match the actual thermal seasons, and would be a perfect compromise. But that would have the dual effect of angering both government meteorologists and astronomers, ergo will never happen.
The astronomical definition of summer is June 21 to September 20.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Google says 1st June - 22nd September.
Then Google is wrong on all counts.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
Aargh sorry yes 21 June to 22 Sep.
So what's all this 1st June to 31 August nonsense?
You can't start summer on midsummer day.
Clue is in the name!
June-August is simpler for meteorological accounting purposes, but meteorologists have always had lots of fun devising different definitions of the seasons for different purposes.
Astronomical summer makes absolutely no sense. Same amount of sunshine in spring and summer in that definition. Obvious nonsense.
The astronomical definition of summer is June 21 to September 20.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Google says 1st June - 22nd September.
Then Google is wrong on all counts.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
Aargh sorry yes 21 June to 22 Sep.
So what's all this 1st June to 31 August nonsense?
The Met Office uses that definition (in this country), for statistical convenience (it's three clear months) so some people insist it's set in stone.
However, the seasons are set by the cosmos, not civil servants, so Google is right on this one, in terms of the astronomical summer.
It might be better, as @Gaussian says, to agree on a definition of 11th - 10th for the seasons, as these would match the actual thermal seasons, and would be a perfect compromise. But that would have the dual effect of angering both government meteorologists and astronomers, ergo will never happen.
It is the day length and precipitation that matters to me. I don't really care about the temperature as you can always put more clothes on.
So late May seems much more like summer than late August.
I suppose that makes summer Beltane to Lughnasadh...
Does anyone know why golf courses and outdoor swimming pools are closed?
There seems to be almost no rational basis for golf courses (assuming the club house is closed) other than fears of "It's alright for them privileged fuckers to knock a ball about, but when me and my 28 mates want to hang around in the park...it's the police for us. One law for the rich, innit?"
Apropos of the conversation on here I was just sent a YouGov survey regarding my colleagues mental health. I don't think I am breaching any confidences by saying I was not positive.
I am on a(n Imperial College?) weekly questionnaire. It asks various questions relating either to a piece of recent news (eg vaccines) and/or just a standard set of questions.
It always has a "How is your mood today" question with nos 1-10 as options. Although I am very lucky because I don't feel depressed and haven't suffered as it appears many have and are, I always respond "1" = worst. Because I want the stats to record how badly so many people feel.
The astronomical definition of summer is June 21 to September 20.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Google says 1st June - 22nd September.
Then Google is wrong on all counts.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
No no no. 1st June to 31st August. These are the summer months. Why should waiting for the daylight hours equal the night hours be the start of summer? Madness.
None of it really matters. A glorious April day can be far nicer than one at the height of summer. For me the summer comes to an end when the light in the evenings ends. Endless evenings at the cricket club in June and July, chilly nights closing in by September.
Does anyone know why golf courses and outdoor swimming pools are closed?
There seems to be almost no rational basis for golf courses (assuming the club house is closed) other than fears of "It's alright for them privileged fuckers to knock a ball about, but when me and my 28 mates want to hang around in the park...it's the police for us. One law for the rich, innit?"
The odd thing is the Gov't immediately brought in golf with another person. Golf alone or in your own household could be a suitable intermediate step. It'd bring it into line with running, cycling and open water swimming. Maybe Boris wants a nation of triathletes :?
FFS how many more times. They like the vast unaccountable power Johnson has handed them to control the lives of the people of Britain. They do not want it to end.
So people, scientists, medics, and the like, go to college, medical school, with a view to curing people, and suddenly find that once they have power to make people miserable that's all they want to do? They just enjoy controlling people's lives, nothing else? They don't enjoy all the things that we enjoy? They have no children who want to play with their friends, see their families? They never take holidays or want to again? They don't like doing anything else except exercising power? Is that what you are saying? That power to keep people is the only think that motivates medics and scientists? That they enjoy prolonging misery?
Because that is the logical outcome of what you are suggesting.
FFS Doug Harold Shipman was a doctor. And a well respected one at that. Mengele was a doctor. Being a scientist does not confer any kind of morality whatsoever. Einstein gave the go ahead to hiroshima.
Ditto the other professions. When the final solution was decided at the Wannsee many in the room were qualified lawyers.
In the right circumstances power can and does corrupt anybody.
I wouldn't go that far, I just think the policy tool of lockdown is something the public health people won't want to give up easily which is why they are moving the goal posts from hospitals to cases.
But they're going to announce a roadmap to 'normal by July'. Ok, we can quibble on the margins of that - argue for a few weeks earlier - but what is feeding your fear that SAGE intends to cling to Lockdown in the longer term? I don't see much evidence for this.
This morning they are trying to link lockdown to getting cases under 1k per day. With the amount of testing we're doing that feels like a statistical impossibility when taking into account asymptomatic and very mild cases among the vaccinated population.
It's a shifting of the goal posts that I think Rishi was very aware of last week and he's got my full backing to completely blast anyone who is trying to link this to cases rather than ensuring the NHS is kept running properly.
No doubt there's a debate - which is healthy - but let's see what Johnson lays out as the plan. I'll be surprised if it links the end of Lockdown to cases of under 1k a day. My central expectation is a phased return to normality by mid-summer and I'm not as yet seeing much reason to doubt this.
If all 9 priority groups are vaccinated by end April I don't see why we can't have a phased return to normality by start of summer.
I don't want to start an almighty PB ding dong but how are we all defining summer?
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
I'm a teacher, so I tend to think of the start of the summer term as the start of summer. That said the coldest I've ever felt was umpiring a cricket match in April...
On a personal note, though it will be relevant to many, I have had an email today telling me to continue to shield until the end of March, so it looks like I won't be going back to school this term. If secondary school pupils are back in before that it is going to be a right pain for me, though I expect they would rather be back than at home.
Interesting to hear - I'm sure you will do your absolute best to help your pupils if you are allowed remotely.
Demographically I'm probably supposed to be one of the people most affected by lockdown (young, insecure work, living in a box room in London) but I've actually not found it too bad. I like having the freedom to space my work throughout the day. I'm saving a lot of money because I don't have to commute, get my suit dry cleaned, or eat meals at work. Pre pandemic my job also involved a lot of after-work socialising at pubs, which in hindsight was pretty unhealthy; staying at home means I don't get pressured into drinking, and gives me a lot more freedom to cook cheap and healthy meals whenever I want. Obviously this is not typical and I completely understand how difficult lockdown has been for lots of people, but wanted to share my experience.
Not typical but neither untypical. It's a mosaic. Like in my world, my wife likes lockdown, I've been fine but it is now getting to me a bit. My son has found it tedious but no biggie. Ditto his girlfriend. My dad has got depressed. My mum the opposite - she's been energized oddly. My mates have been ok. My siblings all work at the sharp end of health and education and so have been mega pressurized but have got a kick from the challenge and sense of doing something important. My goldfish seems utterly unaffected. It's as if it doesn't even know there's a pandemic on.
Comments
I would say mid-May for me as the beginning.
That must have taken some big cojones to write.
And, yes, that sounds like depression to me. From experience, not from any qualification to diagnose.
Step 1 is always recognising there is an issue.
Much sympathy. Take care. Look after yourself.
The different graph shapes might also have a little to do with the different seasons, but the sharp recent drops in India are interesting, seem to imply some kind of herd immunity has been reached?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpDF3Py7r8
Yeah mate, that sounds like clinical depression. I've been there and worse, as I have discussed on here. The social phobia is a classic symptom: you just want to hide away, under the duvet. Millions of people are suffering some form of it, right now. A friend of mine (usually chirpy) realised he had it when, every morning, when he woke up, his first thought at realising he was conscious was "Oh no".
Advice? You could try pills, if it gets really bad. They do help, but they have side effects and you don't want to get dependant. But clearly if it deteriorates (esp if you think about self harm) you should consider them.
Other advice? Stephen Fry (who suffers from it badly) puts it quite well: depression is just like the rain, there's nothing you can do, you just wait for it to stop. But it WILL stop, as the rain always stops, in the end.
Interim: force yourself to go outside and exercise in fresh air. Force yourself to phone a friend, see a friend on a walk. Even if it is just 5 minutes, it will help. TELL people you are depressed, admit it, confess it, sometimes just sharing is truly helpful. Unburden yourself.
And maybe try some really tough exercise, like HIIT (you can do it at home). This is so vigorous you get an endorphine boost and a testosterone surge whatever your mood. Do it daily, if possible.
Don't drink TOO much, but don't abstain either, if you find it helps.
Eat really delicious food. Meditate a bit. Listen to music you haven't tried before. Your anhedonia will prevent you from enjoying much of this - life is so beige during depression - but it all helps to move your mind onwards.
Good luck.
There are variations in C02 production by beef systems of several times, so clearly a lot of optimisation is possible.
eg Carbon Footprint of UK Beef is far less than half of the global average.
2) He gets a message via Vanilla if you tag him. Not a huge deal, but amused me. If you click your name on one of your posts you get taken to your "homepage" which shows you your system messages (among other things).
Or is this the long-awaited sell-out of the NHS to US private insurance companies?
Would make a good Bond film, perhaps. NHS bods hold the country to ransom - if you want out of lockdown, you have to pay up. Our man James cruises in and shoots a few epidemiologists before going syringe-to-syringe with Jon Van-Tam, while JVT explains in a direct to camera monologue that this is all a bit like what happens when coronavirus is trying to infect your cells and your immune system is having none of it. Flunky enters with Pfizer vaccine in cold storage and Bond says "I have a licence to chill".
For the majority of the rest of the population this stuff matters.
Gates has long had no clue on global warming. I get the sense he’s trying his best to learn but has a long way to go.
The Met Office uses 1 June to 31 August for statistical convenience.
The thermal summer (i.e. the warmest three months of the year) is approx 10 June to 10 September.
Spring: mid-March to mid-May
Summer: mid-May to mid-September
Autumn: mid-September to mid-November
Winter: mid-November to mid-March
Just how it tends to feel to me, but probably varies depending on where you live and what the climate's like, anyway.
I'm in a couple of large-ish Whatsapp Groups, one is friends, the other is family, relatives and assorted others.
In lockdown 1 quite a few of these people actively said they were enjoying themselves: the extra sleep, more time with family, the relaxation, the sun and the sourdoughs.
I asked both groups recently if anyone was *enjoying* this lockdown. AKA Lockdown 3. Not one said Yes. Words like "dismal" and "relentless" were used. I know personally that several of them are having a horrible time.
It's grim out there.
Winter: July- May
Summer: June
People might actually find this easier to cope with if the government came out and said that lockdown was our future. Don;t bother to hope for the return of normality.
The way the government feeds hope without ever pinning it to any kind of schedule or criteria, always reserving the right to pull it away at their discretion is, I think what is destroying so many people mentally.
It is absolutely brutal. could it be deliberate?
Winter: June x+1 - June x-1
Summer: 2 random hours on the Xth June
Blink and you've missed it
*No money back, no guarantee
March to May are the driest months in the west, I think. By mid June the monsoon kicks in, along with the m*dg*s.
Pillock.
But thanks anyway.
They always say that Summer is 'the second Tuesday of July, between 2-4pm'.
https://twitter.com/HuffPostUK/status/1362035319923568644
Right now we're nowhere near herd immunity, it's a marginal downward pressure on the virus. Little by little, jab by jab it'll creep up - perhaps even more so with Autumn boosters if needed. This phase doesn't last forever. Once we're all vaccinated we'll be able to live with Covid as we do with the flu.
Which is why I think talk of London and other big cities being a thing of the past and working from home being the new normal after Covid are a huge red herring.
People are absolutely sick of being stuck at home and many of us now feel like we are living at work, rather than working from home.
I just don't see how a lockdown is enforceable once the weather becomes nice again, being cooped up is driving most of my friends nuts.
Like Casino, I've been struggling with serious depression. I can't sleep at night any more without a sleeping tablet. And all my days blur into one.
Worst of all is the anger. It's sudden and comes out of nowhere.
Most if not all of my friends and colleagues have similar stories.
I've no idea what the mental health consequences of lockdown are but I suspect they are huge, incalculably so.
This simply can't carry on. Not forever, not until July. Get the most at risk vaccinated and let the rest of us go, before we go mad.
That meets no known definition of the season.
Edit: My Google says 21 June to 22 Sep (which is correct)
I have experience of it myself with one young person who works with me, but I can't break confidences.
Underneath this lockdown there is an iceberg of suffering. An iceberg caused not by covid, but by lockdown.
No idea of your circumstances and being very wary of trite "just do this"-isms, I would repeat my exercise advice. Try to do some. Of course if you feel like doing nothing you're not going to feel like getting into your leotard and leg-warmers but try to enlist people to help you.
Like us!!
I personally am great at telling people from a sedentary position how to exert themselves.
Golf as singles or within your bubble (My Mum and Dad play together) no idea.
Thomas requires a special diet, access to medical supplies and support, and also fears he could contract coronavirus from another guest or member of staff, which he describes as “a death sentence for people like me”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/17/uk-quarantine-hotels-a-death-sentence-for-at-risk-britons-says-cancer-patient
So worried about catching covid you took a flight abroad....and then stayed for 2 months. And AFAIK those shielding weren't permitted to go on holiday in December.
"Reporter offered vaccine because NHS thought he was 6cm tall
If you can, try to picture someone who is 6cm tall and weighs 17.5 stone. It may be an odd image, but apparently it is the measurements the NHS mistakenly had for Liverpool Echo political editor Liam Thorp.
The reporter was baffled when he was offered his first dose of the vaccine for next week so decided to investigate with his GP. As it turned out, he had been classified as morbidly obese because his height had somehow been listed as 6.2cm - giving him a BMI of 28,000 and putting him in a high-risk group for becoming seriously ill with coronavirus. "I mean I’ve put on a few pounds in lockdown but not that many," he joked."
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-covid-news-live-latest-updates-as-ministers-review-coronavirus-lockdown-12220472
The bloke is about to die let him do what he wants. People make stupid (according to?!) choices every day.
If you want to travel during a global pandemic you can do so domestically. Or you can take your chances and own any consequences of your own actions.
So what's all this 1st June to 31 August nonsense?
Astronomically it is 21 June to 21 September.
Since summer to me matters more for weather than for astrological star signs I'll go with the Met Office.
And opening up doesn't actually make it harder for the more cautious to stay indoors....
Well done to @Casino_Royale because his post has allowed or encouraged others to follow suit.
I haven't crunched the numbers but a very non-trivial proportion of regular PB contributors seem to be thus affected.
If we are, and we are supposed to be a thinking, analytic, data-driven, intellectual bunch then what on earth is it like "out there"?
However, the seasons are set by the cosmos, not civil servants, so Google is right on this one, in terms of the astronomical summer.
It might be better, as @Gaussian says, to agree on a definition of 11th - 10th for the seasons, as these would match the actual thermal seasons, and would be a perfect compromise. But that would have the dual effect of angering both government meteorologists and astronomers, ergo will never happen.
I really hope we get a decent spring and summer and can enjoy it. Only thing getting me through this winter is hoping for better to be not too far away.
And yes perhaps not sympathy although the bloke is in a pretty poor place and sounds like he's not blessed with a huge degree of analytical prowess.
Sympathy is due but if you allow one exception, you start to allow others and then the whole system begins to collapse.
A strict ankle tagging system is an alternative to hotel quarantine I've thought of and could be appropriate here where it is inadvisable for said passenger to stay in a hotel. I can understand why the Gov't doesn't want to go for it with optics, also it wouldn't be free to monitor but it could be an alternative...
My lockdown travails are compounded by next door having a major extension built, so am lockdowned to the sound of constant hammering and cement mixing. Joy.
All the best to @Casino_Royale and all other PBers suffering at the moment. At least sharing on here helps a little.
On a personal note, though it will be relevant to many, I have had an email today telling me to continue to shield until the end of March, so it looks like I won't be going back to school this term. If secondary school pupils are back in before that it is going to be a right pain for me, though I expect they would rather be back than at home.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-few-absentee-ballots-were-rejected-in-2020/
I like the implication that all the publicity about Trump's attempts to damage the postal service led to lots of voters posting early, or using drop boxes, which was part of the reason the absentee ballot rejection rate was relatively low (the top reason for rejection being ballots arriving too late).
I think that wild swimming is still open, with appropriate distancing. Presumably it qualifies as "exercise".
Clue is in the name!
June-August is simpler for meteorological accounting purposes, but meteorologists have always had lots of fun devising different definitions of the seasons for different purposes.
Astronomical summer makes absolutely no sense. Same amount of sunshine in spring and summer in that definition. Obvious nonsense.
So late May seems much more like summer than late August.
I suppose that makes summer Beltane to Lughnasadh...
It always has a "How is your mood today" question with nos 1-10 as options. Although I am very lucky because I don't feel depressed and haven't suffered as it appears many have and are, I always respond "1" = worst. Because I want the stats to record how badly so many people feel.
None of it really matters. A glorious April day can be far nicer than one at the height of summer. For me the summer comes to an end when the light in the evenings ends. Endless evenings at the cricket club in June and July, chilly nights closing in by September.
Maybe Boris wants a nation of triathletes :?
(We'll gloss over Igor Stravinsky, letting the side down....)
It is both colder and shorter days in September than June. How is that more summer?
That's the architect of the Texas Electricity generation market there saying everything is going grand.