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New betting market – A CON vote lead before Jan 31st? – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited January 2022 in General
imageNew betting market – A CON vote lead before Jan 31st? – politicalbetting.com

This is the latest market from Smarkets and is almost directly in line with the “LAB poll lead in 2021” that was launched by the firm in July. That one proved a winner and one that contributed to making 2021 my most profitable ever.

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • Given the political volatility over the past two years, I'm not confident of anything. On balance probably a value bet as it's hard to see how January will be much worse than December for the Tories.
  • I am going to say yes
  • QuincelQuincel Posts: 3,949
    Given the size of the Labour leads we are well outside the territory that a simple outlier for the Tories would give them the lead. It would need a genuine shift back in public opinion. That's perfectly possible, but I think the odds are about right on it happening in the next 5 weeks.
  • Given the political volatility over the past two years, I'm not confident of anything. On balance probably a value bet as it's hard to see how January will be much worse than December for the Tories.

    Well, January might see more restrictions as they've only been ruled out till the end of the year which is only a couple of days away now. There may also be a return to wallpapergate (with some even speculating that if Boris is suspended from Parliament, he might also be forced to resign as Prime Minister: no wonder he wanted to use the Owen Paterson affair to neuter the system).

    There are events which should boost the national mood but mainly from summer onwards, starting with the Platinum Jubilee and ending with England winning the World Cup in December.
  • CorrectHorseBatteryCorrectHorseBattery Posts: 21,436
    edited December 2021

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
  • pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    pigeon said:

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    I did no such thing. I merely pointed out that the relative trajectories of the French and British pandemics implied that the additional restrictions in force in France may no longer be adequate to contain the virus.

    Ishmael appears to have flown off the handle because he's currently in the scared witless camp. My flippant response probably hasn't helped, but equally neither does the torrent of screaming abuse.
    You really could sck cck for your county. Here's how scaredness-prone I am: I'm 60, and I regularly jump horses over things which are taller and wider than Becher's Brook. Photos, videos and 4 figure bets available on request. What I am not, is droolingly stupid. You OTOH...
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    Given the political volatility over the past two years, I'm not confident of anything. On balance probably a value bet as it's hard to see how January will be much worse than December for the Tories.

    Well, January might see more restrictions as they've only been ruled out till the end of the year which is only a couple of days away now. There may also be a return to wallpapergate (with some even speculating that if Boris is suspended from Parliament, he might also be forced to resign as Prime Minister: no wonder he wanted to use the Owen Paterson affair to neuter the system).

    There are events which should boost the national mood but mainly from summer onwards, starting with the Platinum Jubilee and ending with England winning the World Cup in December.
    About those events...
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087
    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    I did no such thing. I merely pointed out that the relative trajectories of the French and British pandemics implied that the additional restrictions in force in France may no longer be adequate to contain the virus.

    Ishmael appears to have flown off the handle because he's currently in the scared witless camp. My flippant response probably hasn't helped, but equally neither does the torrent of screaming abuse.
    You really could sck cck for your county. Here's how scaredness-prone I am: I'm 60, and I regularly jump horses over things which are taller and wider than Becher's Brook. Photos, videos and 4 figure bets available on request. What I am not, is droolingly stupid. You OTOH...
    You're not a very nice person.

    And you're mouth-foaming. It really doesn't help.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
    If you struggle to comprehend that "the virus" has been more than one thing in the past, and will be in the future, I wouldn't employ you to clean my outdoor privies.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
    Maybe it's just that every single post you make about the "continent" shows zero genuine interest, knowledge or insight into the many countries in Europe, which instead just seem to be a prop for your fanatical views?
  • kamski said:

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
    Maybe it's just that every single post you make about the "continent" shows zero genuine interest, knowledge or insight into the many countries in Europe, which instead just seem to be a prop for your fanatical views?
    They said Johnson did a fantastic job of managing us out of the pandemic. I think anyone with a tiny bit of impartiality would say that at best, we are middling. At best.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    I did no such thing. I merely pointed out that the relative trajectories of the French and British pandemics implied that the additional restrictions in force in France may no longer be adequate to contain the virus.

    Ishmael appears to have flown off the handle because he's currently in the scared witless camp. My flippant response probably hasn't helped, but equally neither does the torrent of screaming abuse.
    You really could sck cck for your county. Here's how scaredness-prone I am: I'm 60, and I regularly jump horses over things which are taller and wider than Becher's Brook. Photos, videos and 4 figure bets available on request. What I am not, is droolingly stupid. You OTOH...
    You're not a very nice person.

    And you're mouth-foaming. It really doesn't help.
    Killer response.

    Back to DLU. It is better than the reviews suggest.
  • pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
    "People die, so what?" has been your approach throughout. That you wanted to remove your name from such opinions isn't a surprise.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited December 2021
    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?
  • @IshmaelZ is on fire! :)
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    Is that the suggestion? No country has ‘got everything right’. I think on balance I’d rather have been in Germany for 2020 than most other Western European nations. I’d rather have been in England since July 2021. I think it’s possible that our open policy has been beneficial in the long term, as the unvaccinated have had their shot via the virus, not the needle, and other nations who succeeded in keeping the lid on Covid may pay a price now. It’s also possible that omicron may get them out of jail.
    Lots of unknowns.
    I don’t think anyone is giving Johnson 10 out of 10. But it’s reasonable to be in favour of the current stance against those who would bring in restrictions.
  • dixiedean said:

    I notice out Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    An interesting point, what if the only substantial wave NZ sees is a mild one and they're by then, vaccinated? Very few deaths overall and they'll open up quickly.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
  • IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    pigeon said:

    Taz said:
    Grimly satisfying. Each blow struck against the arguments of the lockdown ultras is one tiny step closer to the end of this nightmare.
    You really are a complete, entire and utter fing cckskr. It isn't about what hebephrenic dweebs like you think is going to happen, it is about what actually happens, and we don't know what will happen, until it does. How hard is it to understand that if a future narrative is simple enough for someone as stupid as you to understand, it is almost certainly also too simple to be true? The nightmare is not about "lockdown ultras", it is about the wholly unpredictable evolution of a virus.

    I am now going to watch the second half of Don't Look Up. I am worried that if I stayed on PB I might find myself being ruder to you than is strictly necessary.
    Calm down dear.
    You did basically say that people dying in France would be a good thing if it validated your view to stop lockdowns
    More people are going to die this winter across the continent because countries didn't learn to live with the virus in the summer. Its what was grimly forecast for many months here while idiots were banging on about "plague island" but that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing.

    In an ideal world Omicron will mitigate much of the worst damage of what could have been under a Delta winter wave instead.
    What a grim undertone in this post. Shameful
    This is a grim situation and not learning to live with the virus is shameful indeed. The summer and autumn were the time to do so and now there's going to be a crash course of having to do so in the winter which was entirely avoidable and forecast.

    You're right its grim, but the only people who should feel ashamed are the Zero Covidiots like Pagel and co and the continental leaders who so badly mismanaged the pandemic and refused to learn how to live with the virus during the summer.
    Bart is delighted at people dying if it validates his POV. Shameful
    What part of "that doesn't mean anyone draws any satisfaction from it or views it as being a good thing" are you struggling to comprehend?
    If you struggle to comprehend that "the virus" has been more than one thing in the past, and will be in the future, I wouldn't employ you to clean my outdoor privies.
    No shit Sherlock that the virus will be different in the past and in the future.

    But the thing that matters more to me than the virus is the vaccine. There's a reason fewer people died from Delta at its peak in this country than from Alpha at its peak despite Delta being a much worse variant than Alpha. Because when Alpha reached its peak we were pre-vaccines, but when Delta arrived we were post them and vaccines are more significant than the virus itself.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
  • I would have liked to have been NZ or Taiwan, to be honest
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874
    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874

    I would have liked to have been NZ or Taiwan, to be honest

    There are reasons why that wasn’t possible for the U.K., as we discussed yesterday. But yes, an alternative set of decisions that saved U.K. lives, most would think that a good thing. I’d only ask that decisions are appraised in light of what was known at the time of the decision. That’s the huge issue right now. No one knows who is calling omicron ‘right’, if that’s even a thing. I’m encouraged by the data day by day, but I get why others look at huge case numbers and scream for something, anything, to be done.
  • Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
  • I would have liked to have been NZ or Taiwan, to be honest

    There are reasons why that wasn’t possible for the U.K., as we discussed yesterday. But yes, an alternative set of decisions that saved U.K. lives, most would think that a good thing. I’d only ask that decisions are appraised in light of what was known at the time of the decision. That’s the huge issue right now. No one knows who is calling omicron ‘right’, if that’s even a thing. I’m encouraged by the data day by day, but I get why others look at huge case numbers and scream for something, anything, to be done.
    Not by some, the opinion here now seems to be people should die, doesn't matter.

    I think this is the fundamental difference in opinion, it's those that want to save every life vs those that don't. There are perfectly valid reasons for the latter but I do not subscribe to that POV.
  • darkage said:


    It isn't particularly convincing to attack someone for choosing to post under a anonymous name, when 99% of people on this website are doing the same thing.

    With respect, I do not think that is the issue people have
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874
    kamski said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
    Ive long thought that the plan was to allow spread to catch the unvaccinated, but that could never be admitted. So you have to maintain the illusion that you are trying to keep on top of Covid, when in reality, as long as things don’t go out of control, you let it go.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,458
    edited December 2021

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    I get that. And, in fact I tend to agree.
    The point was that some are now forecasting, with certainty, what will happen next in Europe. And they are the same ones who assured us that we were in an exit wave in the Summer.
    My scenario is as equally plausible.
    Countries which suppressed the virus for long enough that they were finally overwhelmed by a highly transmissible but relatively mild variant, which hit a mostly vaccinated population, could end up looking best.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>
  • darkage said:


    It isn't particularly convincing to attack someone for choosing to post under a anonymous name, when 99% of people on this website are doing the same thing.

    With respect, I do not think that is the issue people have
    Indeed. Your issue is you don't like my views and would rather be personal than debate views on their own merits.

    Playing the man not the ball.
  • darkage said:


    It isn't particularly convincing to attack someone for choosing to post under a anonymous name, when 99% of people on this website are doing the same thing.

    With respect, I do not think that is the issue people have
    Indeed. Your issue is you don't like my views and would rather be personal than debate views on their own merits.

    Playing the man not the ball.
    When have I personally attacked you, please provide an example.

    I happen to think you would choose to let more people die vs restrictions - and that is a POV you hold which is fair enough. I just strongly disagree.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874

    I would have liked to have been NZ or Taiwan, to be honest

    There are reasons why that wasn’t possible for the U.K., as we discussed yesterday. But yes, an alternative set of decisions that saved U.K. lives, most would think that a good thing. I’d only ask that decisions are appraised in light of what was known at the time of the decision. That’s the huge issue right now. No one knows who is calling omicron ‘right’, if that’s even a thing. I’m encouraged by the data day by day, but I get why others look at huge case numbers and scream for something, anything, to be done.
    Not by some, the opinion here now seems to be people should die, doesn't matter.

    I think this is the fundamental difference in opinion, it's those that want to save every life vs those that don't. There are perfectly valid reasons for the latter but I do not subscribe to that POV.
    It’s laudable to want to save everyone from Covid but what if doing so causes harms elsewhere? In a sense it’s ‘easy’ to count deaths, but not the other harms on people’s lives. None of this is easy.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
  • Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    I don't think they're insane, let's not use such language.

    I do think they have a strongly held POV which favours living freely as they see it vs death. And that is a POV I respect them to have - but I do strongly disagree with it.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874
    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    I get that. And, in fact I tend to agree.
    The point was that some are now forecasting, with certainty, what will happen next in Europe. And they are the same ones who assured us that we were in an exit wave in the Summer.
    My scenario is as equally plausible.
    Countries which suppressed the virus for long enough that they were finally overwhelmed by a highly transmissible but relatively mild variant, which hit a mostly vaccinated population, could end up looking best.
    I agree actually, I think omicron will be a blessing in disguise for much of the planet.
  • I would have liked to have been NZ or Taiwan, to be honest

    There are reasons why that wasn’t possible for the U.K., as we discussed yesterday. But yes, an alternative set of decisions that saved U.K. lives, most would think that a good thing. I’d only ask that decisions are appraised in light of what was known at the time of the decision. That’s the huge issue right now. No one knows who is calling omicron ‘right’, if that’s even a thing. I’m encouraged by the data day by day, but I get why others look at huge case numbers and scream for something, anything, to be done.
    Not by some, the opinion here now seems to be people should die, doesn't matter.

    I think this is the fundamental difference in opinion, it's those that want to save every life vs those that don't. There are perfectly valid reasons for the latter but I do not subscribe to that POV.
    It’s laudable to want to save everyone from Covid but what if doing so causes harms elsewhere? In a sense it’s ‘easy’ to count deaths, but not the other harms on people’s lives. None of this is easy.
    My view is that we should try to safe lives wherever possible and I think we should prioritise that where possible.

    I don't think that means we should lockdown now because there's not evidence it will help.
  • Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    I don't think they're insane, let's not use such language.

    I do think they have a strongly held POV which favours living freely as they see it vs death. And that is a POV I respect them to have - but I do strongly disagree with it.
    I do. I mean it. It's a conclusion I've been building to for some time.
    Insane people are excitedly sincere about their wild, raving views too. There are insane people out there. What would look different if Marathon Man was among their number?
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
  • Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    I don't think they're insane, let's not use such language.

    I do think they have a strongly held POV which favours living freely as they see it vs death. And that is a POV I respect them to have - but I do strongly disagree with it.
    I do. I mean it. It's a conclusion I've been building to for some time.
    Insane people are excitedly sincere about their wild, raving views too. There are insane people out there. What would look different if Marathon Man was among their number?
    I think insane is rather unfair, Bart just has a lot of strongly held views and is sometimes incapable of seeing those of others.

    But he is not insane, please let's not use such language.
  • dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    I get that. And, in fact I tend to agree.
    The point was that some are now forecasting, with certainty, what will happen next in Europe. And they are the same ones who assured us that we were in an exit wave in the Summer.
    My scenario is as equally plausible.
    Countries which suppressed the virus for long enough that they were finally overwhelmed by a highly transmissible but relatively mild variant, which hit a mostly vaccinated population, could end up looking best.
    I agree actually, I think omicron will be a blessing in disguise for much of the planet.
    This is where I very much hope you're right. I really do.

    But if you are right, it seems logical that those countries that went zero covid until a milder variant came along, were sensible.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874

    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    I get that. And, in fact I tend to agree.
    The point was that some are now forecasting, with certainty, what will happen next in Europe. And they are the same ones who assured us that we were in an exit wave in the Summer.
    My scenario is as equally plausible.
    Countries which suppressed the virus for long enough that they were finally overwhelmed by a highly transmissible but relatively mild variant, which hit a mostly vaccinated population, could end up looking best.
    I agree actually, I think omicron will be a blessing in disguise for much of the planet.
    This is where I very much hope you're right. I really do.

    But if you are right, it seems logical that those countries that went zero covid until a milder variant came along, were sensible.
    No, I’d say they were lucky, not necessarily sensible. In any case we don’t know yet the full outcomes. We’ve had a heck of a lot of delta infections, and those people will be better placed to recieve omicron than without infection. Much of Europe has had a lot fewer infections, and it’s possible that their omicron wave will give relatively worse outcomes than ours.
    But we don’t know yet.
  • I don't consider lockdowns "evil" fundamentally, I think they protect life and that has been important. Have they had bad impacts, undoubtedly.

    Goodnight.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Of course the deaths are consequential. Firstly because, well, they just are, obviously; secondly because it's apparent that the pandemic in Britain was not particularly well handled during the long phase before the vaccines arrived.

    The present arguments about the trade-offs between harms caused by restrictions, and the comparatively limited number of lives that might be saved by their continuation (especially now Omicron has whacked us) don't apply to the period when the population was almost defenceless, and lack of timely interventions simply led to wholesale massacres. The UK's cumulative per capita death rate is somewhat above the average for the EU states because of past deficiencies. It's a signifier of those failings.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,598
    edited December 2021
    Pulpstar said:

    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>

    But JCVI are using a model that says that nearly no children will get COVID. Why is reality wrong, again?
  • Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited December 2021
    Charles said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
    No country in Europe has now got a gold or even a silver medal for handling COVID. You can look at every major economy and say they are poor on testing or were slow to vaccine or still poor rates in getting the most vulnerable jabbed, too slow on boosters, too slow to lockdown, stupid measures that don't work, not enough measures that do, reseeding it again by allowing unnecessary holidays prior to vaccinations etc etc etc.

    What I do fear is that any inquiries or studies over handling will just become politicised either at a national or pan-European level, all about arse covering by saying well well over there they did this worse than us. Rather than actually investigating seriously all the factors and diverting funding to ensure everybody is better prepared.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,874

    Pulpstar said:

    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>

    But JCVI are using a model that says that nearly no children will get COVID. Why is reality wrong, again?
    I suspect too many on the jcvi are very cautious about causing harm via vaccination, and some are still hung up on getting world vaccination done rather than more in the U.K. This is despite the abundance of vaccines now, so supply is surely not limited.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
  • BigRichBigRich Posts: 3,489
    Pulpstar said:

    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>

    I think that was 512 kids hospitalised with covid in the WEEK leading up to boxing day, not the day itself. and its reasonable to assume a large proportion of them where 'incidental cases'

    But I total agree we should be offering the vaccine to kids who's parents want it.
  • It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
  • dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
    Good if that's their choice, that's their choice! More knowledge and information the better.

    Personally I think the road deaths figure shows just how relatively safe transportation is considering how valuable it is too, but if people want to decide otherwise then more power to them. Lets stop reporting one cause of death to the exclusion of all others.

    Covid has become the pretty white girl of deaths that is crowding out the reporting of all others.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Eabhal said:

    I really wish the gov would segregate deaths/admissions by vaxxed/boosted/unvaxxed on the dashboard, perhaps as a stacked bar chart.

    We keep losing sight of the fact that much of this pain and angst comes from these silly few.

    And, as mentioned above, that graph should be clustered with an "other" deaths column, for perspective.
  • xxxxx5xxxxx5 Posts: 38
    There is a gap for a party to represent those left behind communities who are left wing economically and right wing socially. If Labour was serious about gaining my vote they would appoint a minister to act for the Red Wall communities - someone like Andy Burnham or Lisa Nandy someone who can bang on the table on government. Labour also need to stop taking the lazy option that importing a work force rather than training a work force, a domestic work force. Labour also need to look at its welfare policies. Universal Credit may have had it's problems but the principle behind it is the right one - make work pay - it is a vast improvement on the Tax Credit system which has been nothing short of a disaster. Although originally a Liberal Democrat policy - it as a Tory government taking thousands out of paying income tax - this should have been a policy a Labour government introduced not reintroducing the 10p tax band as Gordon Brown did in his last budget which doubled the income tax of our poorest workers. Labour needs to be on the side of those who toil and aspire for a better life.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087
    Charles said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
    Cumulative per capita Covid deaths per million (source: ourworldindata)

    I've listed a selection. We may anticipate that some states, e.g. the Russians, are under-reporting, but it should be fairly accurate for most developed nations:

    Peru: 6,071
    Hungary: 4,021
    Romania: 3,062
    Brazil: 2,892
    Poland: 2,497
    United States: 2,458
    Belgium: 2,426
    Italy: 2,265
    United Kingdom: 2,172
    Russia: 2,050
    EU average: 2,003
    Spain: 1,907
    France: 1,820
    South Africa: 1,513
    Germany: 1,321
    Netherlands: 1,211
    Canada: 794
    Denmark: 553
    Australia: 85
    New Zealand: 10

    Thus we're doing a little worse than the EU average, a little better than the Americans, Belgians and Italians, a little worse than the French and Spanish, and substantially worse than the Germans, Dutch and Canadians. The UK's performance in terms of Covid deaths might be summarised as fairly poor, but not a huge outlier from its peer group. There are plenty of nations for whom suppression hasn't worked terribly well, through poor application laced with varying degrees of bad luck.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,960
    dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
    Daily road deaths are usually in single digits, and they've halved in the last few decades as safety has improved, so I highly doubt that. The air pollution number can't easily be published because it's rarely possible to directly attribute any particular death to the cause.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087
    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    NZ has done extremely well overall, but arguments about it are ultimately pointless given its unusual situation. It's in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,500 miles from anywhere, and all goods and people that come into and out of the country transit by sea and air. Sealing itself off behind travel bans and quarantine hotels was very painful (ask all the Kiwis exiled overseas about that) but it was also achievable practically. Britain, still less France or Austria or any number of other countries, didn't have that extreme option available.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    pigeon said:

    Charles said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
    Cumulative per capita Covid deaths per million (source: ourworldindata)

    I've listed a selection. We may anticipate that some states, e.g. the Russians, are under-reporting, but it should be fairly accurate for most developed nations:

    Peru: 6,071
    Hungary: 4,021
    Romania: 3,062
    Brazil: 2,892
    Poland: 2,497
    United States: 2,458
    Belgium: 2,426
    Italy: 2,265
    United Kingdom: 2,172
    Russia: 2,050
    EU average: 2,003
    Spain: 1,907
    France: 1,820
    South Africa: 1,513
    Germany: 1,321
    Netherlands: 1,211
    Canada: 794
    Denmark: 553
    Australia: 85
    New Zealand: 10

    Thus we're doing a little worse than the EU average, a little better than the Americans, Belgians and Italians, a little worse than the French and Spanish, and substantially worse than the Germans, Dutch and Canadians. The UK's performance in terms of Covid deaths might be summarised as fairly poor, but not a huge outlier from its peer group. There are plenty of nations for whom suppression hasn't worked terribly well, through poor application laced with varying degrees of bad luck.
    Only fair assessment will be based on excess deaths and take place in about 10 years time. You'll be able to see the increase and then corresponding decrease in the death rate (as Covid will have picked off much of the low hanging fruit early, as it were).

    I think this should be complimented by GDP change (but not per capita, as that correlates with excess death), Education (PISA) and some other stuff.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    kamski said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
    Ive long thought that the plan was to allow spread to catch the unvaccinated, but that could never be admitted. So you have to maintain the illusion that you are trying to keep on top of Covid, when in reality, as long as things don’t go out of control, you let it go.
    That might be right. I just suspect that testing everyone, and telling people to self isolate, does more to stop coronavirus spreading than making masks compulsory when shopping. As well as being more disruptive to people's lives.

    OK it seems that the UK had a lot more cases over the summer than Germany. Maybe that was "worth it" to put the UK in a better place for the winter. But why did the UK have more cases? I live in the most populous state in Germany, and for most of the summer the main practical difference was having to wear masks in shops etc. I'm guessing the main thing slowing down the spread was the testing and contact-tracing. But wasn't that happening in the UK too?

    OK Germany was starting in May from much lower numbers, and Delta took a lot longer to get established. And maybe announcing a "freedom day" changed people's behaviour (though I was in England in October and I was in shops in London, Leicestershire and Merseyside and in all three places most people 70%ish were wearing masks while shopping.)

    So maybe a bunch of reasons, but still a bit of a mystery.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    One of the stories of the pandemic that I found most strange was when the England women's cricket team went on a tour of New Zealand last winter. In an interview a couple of the players talked about how much they were enjoying being able to do normal things without any of the Covid rules back in England, after they'd been through the quarantine period.

    It was very odd to have previously normal things described as unusual treats. We have had a very weird couple of years.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Endillion said:

    dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
    Daily road deaths are usually in single digits, and they've halved in the last few decades as safety has improved, so I highly doubt that. The air pollution number can't easily be published because it's rarely possible to directly attribute any particular death to the cause.
    I reckon road deaths have dropped mainly because it's too expensive for riled up 18 year olds to get insurance/lessons/cars now.

    A hunch only.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    pigeon said:

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    NZ has done extremely well overall, but arguments about it are ultimately pointless given its unusual situation. It's in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,500 miles from anywhere, and all goods and people that come into and out of the country transit by sea and air. Sealing itself off behind travel bans and quarantine hotels was very painful (ask all the Kiwis exiled overseas about that) but it was also achievable practically. Britain, still less France or Austria or any number of other countries, didn't have that extreme option available.
    I understand that. We couldn't have been NZ even if we'd wanted too.
    But the way BR was talking they've been imprisoned unable to see dying relatives for two years continuously.
    They haven't. They've had much longer periods of total internal freedom than we have.
  • pigeon said:

    Charles said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
    Cumulative per capita Covid deaths per million (source: ourworldindata)

    I've listed a selection. We may anticipate that some states, e.g. the Russians, are under-reporting, but it should be fairly accurate for most developed nations:

    Peru: 6,071
    Hungary: 4,021
    Romania: 3,062
    Brazil: 2,892
    Poland: 2,497
    United States: 2,458
    Belgium: 2,426
    Italy: 2,265
    United Kingdom: 2,172
    Russia: 2,050
    EU average: 2,003
    Spain: 1,907
    France: 1,820
    South Africa: 1,513
    Germany: 1,321
    Netherlands: 1,211
    Canada: 794
    Denmark: 553
    Australia: 85
    New Zealand: 10

    Thus we're doing a little worse than the EU average, a little better than the Americans, Belgians and Italians, a little worse than the French and Spanish, and substantially worse than the Germans, Dutch and Canadians. The UK's performance in terms of Covid deaths might be summarised as fairly poor, but not a huge outlier from its peer group. There are plenty of nations for whom suppression hasn't worked terribly well, through poor application laced with varying degrees of bad luck.
    That is not a reliable list. Russia doing slightly better than the UK? I don't think so.

    The Economist's excess deaths table is much more meaningful, I suspect.

    https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
    Wow around April or so when I last regularly looked at this chart the UK and USA were about the same in excess deaths (about 200).

    Since then the UK hasn't really changed but the USA has gone up by a further 50% and has now surpassed a million excess deaths.

    Just goes to show what a difference having antivaxxers there has made. In a close race this seriously could impact the next Presidential election, there's potentially hundreds of thousands of erstwhile Trump voters who've died because they rejected the vaccine.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,960
    Eabhal said:

    Endillion said:

    dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
    Daily road deaths are usually in single digits, and they've halved in the last few decades as safety has improved, so I highly doubt that. The air pollution number can't easily be published because it's rarely possible to directly attribute any particular death to the cause.
    I reckon road deaths have dropped mainly because it's too expensive for riled up 18 year olds to get insurance/lessons/cars now.

    A hunch only.
    I can tell you that it isn't, from experience. The safety features on modern cars are simply incredible. The overall accident rate hasn't moved much, but accidents that used to cause death now often result in serious injury, and things that used to cause serious injury now often result in only minor injuries, etc. Meanwhile, the overall cost of insurance is rising because the new safety features (and also the complex electronics buried inside the bodywork) are much more costly to fix.
  • We seem to be rerunning the same argument that has been had for several days running now.
  • dixiedean said:

    pigeon said:

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    NZ has done extremely well overall, but arguments about it are ultimately pointless given its unusual situation. It's in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,500 miles from anywhere, and all goods and people that come into and out of the country transit by sea and air. Sealing itself off behind travel bans and quarantine hotels was very painful (ask all the Kiwis exiled overseas about that) but it was also achievable practically. Britain, still less France or Austria or any number of other countries, didn't have that extreme option available.
    I understand that. We couldn't have been NZ even if we'd wanted too.
    But the way BR was talking they've been imprisoned unable to see dying relatives for two years continuously.
    They haven't. They've had much longer periods of total internal freedom than we have.
    Last year especially yes, and I've condemned our own lockdowns as wrong in hindsight.

    But they've been cut off from the world. There are many people in this country with relatives in NZ and vice-versa and due to the travel restrictions they've been unable to see each other in person for two years as a result.

    Those approximately seventy thousand dead people won't regain the time that was lost, won't be able to see loved ones who can travel to see them once the restrictions are lifted. They're already dead unfortunately. That's a tragedy, yet if you see "death" figures for New Zealand it will say something ridiculous like 50 not 70,000.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Endillion said:

    Eabhal said:

    Endillion said:

    dixiedean said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    Farooq said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Why does "died" get scare quotes? Do you think they're faking it?
    No, I think they're not the deaths. People say "deaths" or how many "died" but they block out the hundreds of thousands of people who are dying from natural causes. There are people who haven't been able to see their loved ones for two years because of pandemic restrictions and many people's loved ones will have died from natural causes in that time but they don't appear in the dodgy statistics of how many people have "died".

    If someone dies from natural causes with their final months stolen from them by lockdown restrictions meaning they die without dignity or love in their lives, without seeing their families, then why shouldn't they be included in the statistics of how many people have died?

    If you're so twisted and delusional that you don't realise close to a million people have died in the past two years all up then you've lost all context.

    If you tell people they can't have visitors to their home and then they die in their beds without their loved ones nearby them do you think they're faking it? Or are they deaths that have occured?
    You managed to get right to the heart of the matter there, kudos. I only asked a simple question about your weird scare quotes, and you managed to accurately divine that it's actually ME who thinks everybody who's died in the last two years has faked it.

    No, wait, you're literally insane.
    Which should be counted in "death" statistics:
    1. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
    2. An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
    3. Both of these people.
    If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.
    All deaths matter
    Get that on a banner and fly it over a Premier League match. Fantastic banter. Good night.
    No banter.

    For the past two years certain people have only been bothered by Covid deaths, like US politicians and media in the past being only bothered if a white person is killed.

    Too often in the past its been a case of pretty white girl gets murdered, front page news but young black man gets murdered, not reported. Now we're having the same thing COVID deaths front page news, non-COVID deaths not reported.

    That people are compiling and sharing dodgy "death" stats that literally exclude most deaths needs to be called out as being as dodgy as only reporting the news if the person affected is pretty and white.
    Come off it.
    If we published the daily figures for road deaths and air pollution, folk might be tempted to do something about your two car family ideal.
    Daily road deaths are usually in single digits, and they've halved in the last few decades as safety has improved, so I highly doubt that. The air pollution number can't easily be published because it's rarely possible to directly attribute any particular death to the cause.
    I reckon road deaths have dropped mainly because it's too expensive for riled up 18 year olds to get insurance/lessons/cars now.

    A hunch only.
    I can tell you that it isn't, from experience. The safety features on modern cars are simply incredible. The overall accident rate hasn't moved much, but accidents that used to cause death now often result in serious injury, and things that used to cause serious injury now often result in only minor injuries, etc. Meanwhile, the overall cost of insurance is rising because the new safety features (and also the complex electronics buried inside the bodywork) are much more costly to fix.
    Fair enough. I'll settle for a contributing factor ;)
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    One of the stories of the pandemic that I found most strange was when the England women's cricket team went on a tour of New Zealand last winter. In an interview a couple of the players talked about how much they were enjoying being able to do normal things without any of the Covid rules back in England, after they'd been through the quarantine period.

    It was very odd to have previously normal things described as unusual treats. We have had a very weird couple of years.
    Yes. I recall watching weekly Rugby games from NZ and Oz played to packed stadiums when we didn't even have any sport at all.
    The idea they've simply locked everyone up is bizarre and false. They've taken quarantine Uber seriously, and traced and not been afraid to lockdown severely to stamp out tiny, by our standards, outbreaks.
    The rest of the time they've had full freedom to do whatever.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,960
    pigeon said:

    Charles said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    The Uk is somewhere in the middle
    Cumulative per capita Covid deaths per million (source: ourworldindata)

    I've listed a selection. We may anticipate that some states, e.g. the Russians, are under-reporting, but it should be fairly accurate for most developed nations:

    Peru: 6,071
    Hungary: 4,021
    Romania: 3,062
    Brazil: 2,892
    Poland: 2,497
    United States: 2,458
    Belgium: 2,426
    Italy: 2,265
    United Kingdom: 2,172
    Russia: 2,050
    EU average: 2,003
    Spain: 1,907
    France: 1,820
    South Africa: 1,513
    Germany: 1,321
    Netherlands: 1,211
    Canada: 794
    Denmark: 553
    Australia: 85
    New Zealand: 10

    Thus we're doing a little worse than the EU average, a little better than the Americans, Belgians and Italians, a little worse than the French and Spanish, and substantially worse than the Germans, Dutch and Canadians. The UK's performance in terms of Covid deaths might be summarised as fairly poor, but not a huge outlier from its peer group. There are plenty of nations for whom suppression hasn't worked terribly well, through poor application laced with varying degrees of bad luck.
    We'll probably end up better than the EU average once the Omicron wave is all done. France and Spain are likely to overtake us, as they have similar 1st and 2nd dose vaccination rates, are quite a way behind on boosters, and have less natural immunity from infections. We might already be ahead of the EU average, if you adjusted for demographics and co-morbidities.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited December 2021
    dixiedean said:

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    One of the stories of the pandemic that I found most strange was when the England women's cricket team went on a tour of New Zealand last winter. In an interview a couple of the players talked about how much they were enjoying being able to do normal things without any of the Covid rules back in England, after they'd been through the quarantine period.

    It was very odd to have previously normal things described as unusual treats. We have had a very weird couple of years.
    Yes. I recall watching weekly Rugby games from NZ and Oz played to packed stadiums when we didn't even have any sport at all.
    The idea they've simply locked everyone up is bizarre and false. They've taken quarantine Uber seriously, and traced and not been afraid to lockdown severely to stamp out tiny, by our standards, outbreaks.
    The rest of the time they've had full freedom to do whatever.
    It is fair to say they had long periods in very strict lockdown e.g.

    New Zealand’s biggest city ends its 107-day lockdown.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/world/asia/new-zealand-auckland-lockdown.html
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,052
    edited December 2021

    Pulpstar said:

    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>

    But JCVI are using a model that says that nearly no children will get COVID. Why is reality wrong, again?
    I suspect too many on the jcvi are very cautious about causing harm via vaccination, and some are still hung up on getting world vaccination done rather than more in the U.K. This is despite the abundance of vaccines now, so supply is surely not limited.
    One interesting thing is that vaccinated people also are not dying so fast of non-covid disease. Take that antivaxxers!

    https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1475827926235062277?t=aBlC3Rbe_QiXyoOR3vbFzQ&s=19

    I think that I have said all along that European countries will be much of a muchness in terms of total outcomes once this is all over.

  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
    Ive long thought that the plan was to allow spread to catch the unvaccinated, but that could never be admitted. So you have to maintain the illusion that you are trying to keep on top of Covid, when in reality, as long as things don’t go out of control, you let it go.
    That might be right. I just suspect that testing everyone, and telling people to self isolate, does more to stop coronavirus spreading than making masks compulsory when shopping. As well as being more disruptive to people's lives.

    OK it seems that the UK had a lot more cases over the summer than Germany. Maybe that was "worth it" to put the UK in a better place for the winter. But why did the UK have more cases? I live in the most populous state in Germany, and for most of the summer the main practical difference was having to wear masks in shops etc. I'm guessing the main thing slowing down the spread was the testing and contact-tracing. But wasn't that happening in the UK too?

    OK Germany was starting in May from much lower numbers, and Delta took a lot longer to get established. And maybe announcing a "freedom day" changed people's behaviour (though I was in England in October and I was in shops in London, Leicestershire and Merseyside and in all three places most people 70%ish were wearing masks while shopping.)

    So maybe a bunch of reasons, but still a bit of a mystery.
    England's run in the Euros, no vaccine passports, no masks, no restrictions of any kind. People lived as normal for months and most I know didn't bother isolating if they didn't have symptoms. I think that's where we're heading for after Easter. No mandatory isolation unless there's symptoms.

    It resulted in ca. 8-10m cases in the summer and autumn among the unvaccinated, we know that from UKHSA studies into antibody presence. Those cases we had over the summer resulted in a lot of deaths among vaccine refusers but it was spread over a long enough time for COVID to be background noise. What's happening in lots of European countries is those same cases that the UK had in the summer and autumn just in one go in the winter which is causing death rates to increase substantially and run at a higher rate than over here requiring lockdowns to control.

    The confounding factor might be Omicron presenting milder symptoms in the unvaccinated. It's an odd one as it may cause a healthcare collapse which will result in a very big disaster but on an individual level it will be better to get Omicron than Delta for sure. Getting 8-10m vaccine refusers into the immunity funnel was the correct decision, t-cell immunity is barely diluted and we know immunity from infection gives excellent t-cell based immunity.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087

    dixiedean said:

    pigeon said:

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    NZ has done extremely well overall, but arguments about it are ultimately pointless given its unusual situation. It's in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,500 miles from anywhere, and all goods and people that come into and out of the country transit by sea and air. Sealing itself off behind travel bans and quarantine hotels was very painful (ask all the Kiwis exiled overseas about that) but it was also achievable practically. Britain, still less France or Austria or any number of other countries, didn't have that extreme option available.
    I understand that. We couldn't have been NZ even if we'd wanted too.
    But the way BR was talking they've been imprisoned unable to see dying relatives for two years continuously.
    They haven't. They've had much longer periods of total internal freedom than we have.
    Last year especially yes, and I've condemned our own lockdowns as wrong in hindsight.

    But they've been cut off from the world. There are many people in this country with relatives in NZ and vice-versa and due to the travel restrictions they've been unable to see each other in person for two years as a result.

    Those approximately seventy thousand dead people won't regain the time that was lost, won't be able to see loved ones who can travel to see them once the restrictions are lifted. They're already dead unfortunately. That's a tragedy, yet if you see "death" figures for New Zealand it will say something ridiculous like 50 not 70,000.
    None of the available approaches to the pandemic was perfect but I think New Zealand did almost as well as they could've done given their particular unique set of (admittedly rather fortunate) circumstances.

    The failure of the government there to make a better fist of getting all their stranded people home was shameful, and they copped some brickbats for being a bit slow with their vaccination rollout as well. But in the round they appear to have been remarkably successful.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    pigeon said:

    dixiedean said:

    It is astonishing to see somebody accusing Europe of mismanaging the pandemic and yet giving Johnson a 10/10 for it here.

    Let's check how many people died buddy

    There's much, much more to the pandemic than how many people "died" and Johnson definitely doesn't deserve a 10/10, he's been far too lockdown heavy and lifted lockdown restrictions too late in the summer.

    Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
    Johnson isn't better than others. At best we are middling. The idea we are the best, or better than anyone else is absurd and you look ridiculous for such a POV
    First in the world for vaccines being rolled out.
    First in the world of major nations for vaccines being rolled out.
    One of the only developed nations to lift all restrictions in the summer.

    How the fuck is first "middling"? Don't be ridiculous, there is nothing "middling" about first. 🙄
    We are decidedly middling, at best, in respect of the death rate from Covid, however one chooses to measure it. Arguably, for an advanced country such as ours the death rate is disappointing. For many, this is a more important metric than those you cite. Of course, the death rate is provisional - as is all the other data.
    I have no idea why anyone would prioritise the death rate from Covid as a more important metric than the speed of rolling out vaccines.

    Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
    Well that's your POV and that's how you differ from some of us. I think it's a moral disgrace how many people have died unnecessarily during COVID, much of that due to our inaction here in this country. NZ have done a much better job at preventing death, as have many others.

    You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
    You have your priorities, I have mine.

    In hindsight I think we'd have been better doing the Swedish model and having no restrictions even pre-vaccines. I accepted lockdown as a necessary evil pre-vaccines and in hindsight I think I was wrong to do so.

    NZ have had people unable to travel for years. There will be plenty who've died in NZ from natural causes having been cut off from their family for their final two years of their lives.

    Are their deaths less "worthy" than Covid deaths to be counted?
    If you can provide evidence more people have died in NZ due to lack of travel than have been prevented by this policy, I would like to see it. I don't know what a good number would be - but many thousands would have needed to die for the policy not to be worth it.

    I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
    I didn't say that more people died due to lack of travel, I said more people lost their final years of lives due to the restrictions. The two points are very different.

    About 35k people die naturally in NZ annually anyway. So about 70k have died in 2 years having lost their final years cut off from family and loved ones. Those 70k who've died naturally aren't going to be brought back to life to see their loved ones again when the restrictions are lifted.

    Yet if you check the "death" charts shared by Covid obsessives then 50 people have died in New Zealand apparently.

    50 really? What happened to the other approximately 69,950 that have either been buried or cremated?
    In what way have people in NZ been "cut off"?
    Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
    They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
    NZ has done extremely well overall, but arguments about it are ultimately pointless given its unusual situation. It's in the middle of a vast ocean, 1,500 miles from anywhere, and all goods and people that come into and out of the country transit by sea and air. Sealing itself off behind travel bans and quarantine hotels was very painful (ask all the Kiwis exiled overseas about that) but it was also achievable practically. Britain, still less France or Austria or any number of other countries, didn't have that extreme option available.
    I understand that. We couldn't have been NZ even if we'd wanted too.
    But the way BR was talking they've been imprisoned unable to see dying relatives for two years continuously.
    They haven't. They've had much longer periods of total internal freedom than we have.
    Last year especially yes, and I've condemned our own lockdowns as wrong in hindsight.

    But they've been cut off from the world. There are many people in this country with relatives in NZ and vice-versa and due to the travel restrictions they've been unable to see each other in person for two years as a result.

    Those approximately seventy thousand dead people won't regain the time that was lost, won't be able to see loved ones who can travel to see them once the restrictions are lifted. They're already dead unfortunately. That's a tragedy, yet if you see "death" figures for New Zealand it will say something ridiculous like 50 not 70,000.
    Yeah. And plenty had the same experience here too.
    But without the COVID deaths on top.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    MaxPB said:

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
    Ive long thought that the plan was to allow spread to catch the unvaccinated, but that could never be admitted. So you have to maintain the illusion that you are trying to keep on top of Covid, when in reality, as long as things don’t go out of control, you let it go.
    That might be right. I just suspect that testing everyone, and telling people to self isolate, does more to stop coronavirus spreading than making masks compulsory when shopping. As well as being more disruptive to people's lives.

    OK it seems that the UK had a lot more cases over the summer than Germany. Maybe that was "worth it" to put the UK in a better place for the winter. But why did the UK have more cases? I live in the most populous state in Germany, and for most of the summer the main practical difference was having to wear masks in shops etc. I'm guessing the main thing slowing down the spread was the testing and contact-tracing. But wasn't that happening in the UK too?

    OK Germany was starting in May from much lower numbers, and Delta took a lot longer to get established. And maybe announcing a "freedom day" changed people's behaviour (though I was in England in October and I was in shops in London, Leicestershire and Merseyside and in all three places most people 70%ish were wearing masks while shopping.)

    So maybe a bunch of reasons, but still a bit of a mystery.
    England's run in the Euros, no vaccine passports, no masks, no restrictions of any kind. People lived as normal for months and most I know didn't bother isolating if they didn't have symptoms. I think that's where we're heading for after Easter. No mandatory isolation unless there's symptoms.

    It resulted in ca. 8-10m cases in the summer and autumn among the unvaccinated, we know that from UKHSA studies into antibody presence. Those cases we had over the summer resulted in a lot of deaths among vaccine refusers but it was spread over a long enough time for COVID to be background noise. What's happening in lots of European countries is those same cases that the UK had in the summer and autumn just in one go in the winter which is causing death rates to increase substantially and run at a higher rate than over here requiring lockdowns to control.

    The confounding factor might be Omicron presenting milder symptoms in the unvaccinated. It's an odd one as it may cause a healthcare collapse which will result in a very big disaster but on an individual level it will be better to get Omicron than Delta for sure. Getting 8-10m vaccine refusers into the immunity funnel was the correct decision, t-cell immunity is barely diluted and we know immunity from infection gives excellent t-cell based immunity.
    I would question some of that. For example: 8-10 million vaccine refusers? How many of those cases were children?
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,392

    We seem to be rerunning the same argument that has been had for several days running now.

    The on line equivalent of left over turkey.

    Good evening and good night.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    In that vein today on a radio prog they were talking to two people one a pub landlord saying they for NYE they had laid on some entertainment including a band singing and dancing and the other person asked "is singing legal".

    Jesus fucking Christ this is where we are in the UK today.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited December 2021
    Foxy said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Omicron looks safeish with vaccination. 512 kids hospitalised on boxing day isn't great though, the JCVI should approve for all 5-11 >.>

    But JCVI are using a model that says that nearly no children will get COVID. Why is reality wrong, again?
    I suspect too many on the jcvi are very cautious about causing harm via vaccination, and some are still hung up on getting world vaccination done rather than more in the U.K. This is despite the abundance of vaccines now, so supply is surely not limited.
    One interesting thing is that vaccinated people also are not dying so fast of non-covid disease. Take that antivaxxers!

    https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1475827926235062277?t=aBlC3Rbe_QiXyoOR3vbFzQ&s=19

    I think that I have said all along that European countries will be much of a muchness in terms of total outcomes once this is all over.

    I think there will be some variation, but you then have to start accounting for so many differing factors. Germany has done better, but certainly difficult to now call it a success.

    The real important questions are not really did this country do slightly better than another, its what worked and what didn't. Why did Germany do better than the UK for instance, we have some ideas in terms of how hospitals function / capacity, but were there other things? And what didn't work. And most importantly how to prepare best for the future.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    edited December 2021
    kamski said:

    MaxPB said:

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    dixiedean said:

    I notice our Summer was now "learning to live with it."
    Rather than the "exit wave" which was widely trumpeted.
    So. Suppose omicron is substantially milder. And everyone in Europe gets it in the next few months. Not to mention Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand, etc. And with widely vaccinated populations, suffer relatively few deaths and long-term issues.
    Will we still have been right to "live with it", or would they have been?

    Quite possibly the price we paid since July 2021 will turn out to have been needless, if we’d only known omicron was coming. But we didn’t, and it’s not just some on here who thought it better to open up in summer. Pretty sure either Whitty or Valance have said the same.
    Though I don't understand if the idea was to let it spread over the summer why so much time and money and disruption was spent on all the testing and isolation?
    Ive long thought that the plan was to allow spread to catch the unvaccinated, but that could never be admitted. So you have to maintain the illusion that you are trying to keep on top of Covid, when in reality, as long as things don’t go out of control, you let it go.
    That might be right. I just suspect that testing everyone, and telling people to self isolate, does more to stop coronavirus spreading than making masks compulsory when shopping. As well as being more disruptive to people's lives.

    OK it seems that the UK had a lot more cases over the summer than Germany. Maybe that was "worth it" to put the UK in a better place for the winter. But why did the UK have more cases? I live in the most populous state in Germany, and for most of the summer the main practical difference was having to wear masks in shops etc. I'm guessing the main thing slowing down the spread was the testing and contact-tracing. But wasn't that happening in the UK too?

    OK Germany was starting in May from much lower numbers, and Delta took a lot longer to get established. And maybe announcing a "freedom day" changed people's behaviour (though I was in England in October and I was in shops in London, Leicestershire and Merseyside and in all three places most people 70%ish were wearing masks while shopping.)

    So maybe a bunch of reasons, but still a bit of a mystery.
    England's run in the Euros, no vaccine passports, no masks, no restrictions of any kind. People lived as normal for months and most I know didn't bother isolating if they didn't have symptoms. I think that's where we're heading for after Easter. No mandatory isolation unless there's symptoms.

    It resulted in ca. 8-10m cases in the summer and autumn among the unvaccinated, we know that from UKHSA studies into antibody presence. Those cases we had over the summer resulted in a lot of deaths among vaccine refusers but it was spread over a long enough time for COVID to be background noise. What's happening in lots of European countries is those same cases that the UK had in the summer and autumn just in one go in the winter which is causing death rates to increase substantially and run at a higher rate than over here requiring lockdowns to control.

    The confounding factor might be Omicron presenting milder symptoms in the unvaccinated. It's an odd one as it may cause a healthcare collapse which will result in a very big disaster but on an individual level it will be better to get Omicron than Delta for sure. Getting 8-10m vaccine refusers into the immunity funnel was the correct decision, t-cell immunity is barely diluted and we know immunity from infection gives excellent t-cell based immunity.
    I would question some of that. For example: 8-10 million vaccine refusers? How many of those cases were children?
    A big proportion for sure. Maybe unvaccinated rather than vaccine refusers would be a better term. However we've got something like 10% of UK over 12s covered by infection based immunity alone which was mostly built up over the summer and autumn.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,052
    Great win for the Foxes, 🤣🤣🤣

    We kept a clean sheet, 3rd one of the season without a recognised Centre Back.

    Luke Thomas kept Salah in his pocket. Not bad for an academy local kid.

  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Thing is. BR with his outrageous claims is making me defend NZ.
    I'm not hyper critical of the government on COVID policy. But every bollocks statement he makes makes me more so.
    We weren't the worst, we weren't the best. What's more we're probably only in the third quarter.
    But BR has already awarded the trophy to Boris and is sitting in the dressing room with a cigar and some champagne while the match continues.
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