New betting market – A CON vote lead before Jan 31st? – politicalbetting.com
New 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.
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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.
Quebec’s health minister Christian Dubé has announced some health care workers who have tested positive for Covid-19 will continue working.
The second most populous Canadian province has “no choice” but to allow some Covid infected essential workers to continue working to prevent staff shortages from impeding its healthcare services, Dubé told reporters at a briefing today.
“Omicron’s contagion is so exponential, that a huge number of personnel have to be withdrawn – and that poses a risk to the network capacity to treat Quebecers,” he said.
“We made the decision that under a certain condition positive staff will be able to continue working according to a list of priority and risk management,” he said, adding that more information would be provided in the coming days.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/dec/28/covid-live-news-travel-chaos-as-3500-more-flights-suspended-fresh-curbs-in-france
They're unlikely to be the last to buckle, alas. Enough self-isolations impacting any critical sector at once and derogation will become necessary. It might happen here, depending on how things go.
And you're mouth-foaming. It really doesn't help.
Let's check how many people died buddy
Back to DLU. It is better than the reviews suggest.
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?
Being better than others, doesn't mean you're perfect by any means.
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.
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.
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. 🙄
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 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 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.
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.
Playing the man not the ball.
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.
Deaths are natural, vaccines are human. The latter is far more consequential.
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.
This is helpful in the long run. If masks, social distancing, capacity limits on venues, outright business closures, vaccine passports and various other interventions all appear to be doing at least some good against the coronavirus then governments may be reluctant to let go of them for a long time - and restrictions are, to varying degrees, harmful in and of themselves. However, if and when the virus becomes too transmissible to be effectively suppressed at all, or only by very Draconian measures, then the endgame is upon us. Our society will have to put up with it, and move on - and getting to the end of the pandemic is a desirable outcome.
Ultimately, we've got to the point in this disaster where the marginal gains from keeping hold of restrictions are getting progressively smaller. Most people now have the protection of multiple vaccinations and an entire range of treatments that did not exist at the start of all of this. Those who don't have very good protection are those who do not want to be helped (vaccine refusers) and those who cannot be further protected (the poor sods who can't accept vaccines, or for whom they haven't worked very well.) The end of restrictions is going to impact upon these groups; to be frank, for those of us impacted directly or by close association, it is a scary roll of the dice. But nor can we have all those restrictions for ever and ever. They need to go at some point, we're not going to get into a substantially better position to let them go than we are now, and we certainly shouldn't be pulling more levers if it can possibly be avoided.
And yes, theoretically, one might postulate that the virus could yet mutate into something with the transmissibility of measles and the virulence of the bubonic plague (albeit that the true probability of something that serious would seem to be effectively zero,) and clearly if that had already happened we would be in a very different place. Just as we would if we were living out the plot of Melancholia and about to be obliterated by a rogue planet. However, neither of those events is likely. It is not unreasonable to assume that the worst of this - not for unlucky individuals, sadly, but for society as a collective - is already over.
Heavy restrictions that impinge upon civil liberties should, in the final analysis, be an emergency measure and not something that becomes a routine imposition every time the hospitals get busy in Winter. That's all I'm saying, really.
I don't think that means we should lockdown now because there's not evidence it will help.
- An elderly resident of a Care Home who is close to death who catches Covid and dies.
- An elderly resident of a Care Home who is denied visitors in their final months and dies.
- Both of these people.
If your "death" figures exclude most deaths, then your figures are dishonest.You don't prioritise that as a mark of success but I do.
But he is not insane, please let's not use such language.
But if you are right, it seems logical that those countries that went zero covid until a milder variant came along, were sensible.
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?
I think the Swedish model was a disaster, with even the architect of it saying it was wrong.
But we don’t know yet.
Goodnight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I total agree we should be offering the vaccine to kids who's parents want it.
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?
We keep losing sight of the fact that much of this pain and angst comes from these silly few.
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.
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.
Most of the time life has gone on there as normal.
They've had a much shorter lockdown period than us.
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.
The Economist's excess deaths table is much more meaningful, I suspect.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
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.
It was very odd to have previously normal things described as unusual treats. We have had a very weird couple of years.
A hunch only.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New Zealand’s biggest city ends its 107-day lockdown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/world/asia/new-zealand-auckland-lockdown.html
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.
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.
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.
But without the COVID deaths on top.
Good evening and good night.
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.
Jesus fucking Christ this is where we are in the UK today.
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.
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.
Incidentally, I walked home from the match past the LRI casualty. 25 Ambulances on the forecourt with lights on. This means they are unable to unload. Looks like it will be very busy when I go back tomorrow.