When will this shit end?

[Homer]

2 hours ago, crazyfool1 said:

I’m isolating because I have a cough that’s got slightly worse ... and my blood sugars are slightly raised ... often the sign of an infection ... test booked in today ... along with someone I work with testing positive... think it’s very sensible to be cautious on this .... 

Fingers crossed - hope you're okay mate! x

[RobertProsineckisLighter]

17 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

borrow and pay later.

 

24 minutes ago, st dan said:

I find the argument that people want the  restrictions lifting to ‘go the pub’ very tedious at this stage. It’s clearly much more than that. Does anybody even really care about that anymore?
People want to be able to see their friends and family whenever they want, they want their jobs/business back, they want to be able to take their children swimming and to soft play centres etc. 

Yes, the restrictions are still clearly needed and I think the majority agree with them being in place as the virus continues to spread - but it’s very difficult for many to just see the positives of restrictions when it is clearly impacting people in so many other negative ways.

I just hope there is enough of a country afterwards to make it all worth it...

[Crazyfool01]

1 minute ago, Homer said:

Fingers crossed - hope you're okay mate! x

Thanks 🙏 

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, RobertProsineckisLighter said:

 

I just hope there is enough of a country afterwards to make it all worth it...

hopefully the economy will rebound quickly once we come out of this...it did last summer, so hopefully will again...but even more so as there will definitely be a lot of people who have saved money and are desperate to go out and spend and have some fun. So, in meantime need to protect people and businesses who need help just to survive during all this.

[Mr.Tease]

1 hour ago, zahidf said:

This is good on why lockdowns are a bad thing

 

Overwhelmed NHS and mass death is worse.

[Homer]

2 minutes ago, Mr.Tease said:

Overwhelmed NHS and mass death is worse.

Simon Evans is one of the few Tory comedians funnily enough.

[DeanoL]

1 hour ago, stuartbert two hats said:

No it's not. It's about not providing enough economic support during a pandemic.

Yup, coming from someone who identifies as a right wing comic. We only have to make this stark choice between economic damage and death because people like him fight against any sort of economic safety net for just this sort of thing.

32 minutes ago, RobertProsineckisLighter said:

And how do you pay for it? 

I don't disagree but it's a balancing act... 

In answer to my own question it will be cuts to public services and the NHS.

Well if it’s done well, you protect the economy and so have an economic advantage over those who did less well, and can leverage that into increased profitability and pay off those debts more quickly.

Remember, despite a decade of austerity we are still running a budget deficit - even in a normal year we spend more than we make, and the national debt goes up. One particularly bad year where we spend loads, but then don’t need to spend that money the following year, doesn’t make a huge amount of difference. And it has to be weighed against how much our income will drop if we don’t do these things - as because we are in a deficit, every pound of lost tax revenue is a another pound on the national debt.

[steviewevie]

Another thread from everyone's favourite fake sager

 

[Guest]

54 minutes ago, RobertProsineckisLighter said:

And how do you pay for it? 

I don't disagree but it's a balancing act... 

In answer to my own question it will be cuts to public services and the NHS.

There’s plenty of other ways to pay for it rather than more austerity. I frankly find it amazing that someone would even suggest after a pandemic the answer would be to cut health services, have we learned nothing from all this?

We don’t have to cut public services, if anything when we are in an economic downturn we need to INVEST more in public services to drive up consumer confidence. We could look at raising taxes whether that’s on the wealthy or small increases for the whole population. It’s also different when we own our own currency which we are borrowing from the publicly owned BoE at historically low interest rates which won’t need to be repaid for a very long time. As we essentially owe the money to ourselves there is also an argument that we never need to pay it back and it can be written off to give the economy room to breathe.

There’s also other ways to pay for the pandemic (green investment etc) but cuts to public services isn’t the answer. This pandemic has shown if we run with an under-funded health service then we run the risk of it not being able to be fully there for us when we need it most. 

[zahidf]

1 hour ago, st dan said:

I find the argument that people want the  restrictions lifting to ‘go the pub’ very tedious at this stage. It’s clearly much more than that. Does anybody even really care about that anymore?
People want to be able to see their friends and family whenever they want, they want their jobs/business back, they want to be able to take their children swimming and to soft play centres etc. 

Yes, the restrictions are still clearly needed and I think the majority agree with them being in place as the virus continues to spread - but it’s very difficult for many to just see the positives of restrictions when it is clearly impacting people in so many other negative ways.

Yup. There does seem a fetishism towards lockdowns. People upset about lockdowns coming into place are having a perfectly reasonable reaction to that. Restrictions should not be in place one second more than absolutely necessary to stop massive deaths/hospitalisations. 

[zahidf]

Also why are SAGE briefing to the journalists now before policy is made? Feels like they are trying to influence political decisions now

[Guest]

I don’t know how many times this needs to be said. No one WANTS a lockdown, the people who advocate for them realise that we NEED them to stem the curb of the virus. 

[Crazyfool01]

1 minute ago, zahidf said:

Yup. There does seem a fetishism towards lockdowns. People upset about lockdowns coming into place are having a perfectly reasonable reaction to that. Restrictions should not be in place one second more than absolutely necessary to stop massive deaths/hospitalisations. 

Yep I agree ... but what we don’t want to do is open up everything have everyone that hasn’t had the jab get it over a very short period of time ... at the moment although anecdotal and hopefully someone will say I’m wrong there do seem to be increasing youngsters getting it and becoming ill so we need to be very wary of just letting it run rampant 

[stuartbert two hats]

11 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

Another thread from everyone's favourite fake sager

 

Really quite encouraging graphs on the surface. Makes it look a lot like whilst the massive growth in the SE was correlated with the new variant, it wasn't because of the new variant. I agree that we need to see newer data - is it the driver of the recent growth in the NW? If not, then there's some hope that the recent rise in R is down to pre-Christmas behaviour and the weather.  Both of which suggest that we should see the virus become easier control on top of the vaccination effect.

[fatyeti24]

If a lockdown were to come with financial assistance from the government, then purely from a professional perspective it is preferable to me than the tier 2 purgatory we're currently in where we incur the costs of opening our business, but nobody is able to come to us as all around is in tier 3 or 4 or Scotland.

[stuartbert two hats]

4 minutes ago, zahidf said:

Also why are SAGE briefing to the journalists now before policy is made? Feels like they are trying to influence political decisions now

You're not talking about that Twitter thread from independent SAGE are you? Or is there some briefing from official SAGE I've missed?

[Ryan1984]

45 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

hopefully the economy will rebound quickly once we come out of this...it did last summer, so hopefully will again...but even more so as there will definitely be a lot of people who have saved money and are desperate to go out and spend and have some fun. So, in meantime need to protect people and businesses who need help just to survive during all this.

Since Christmas Day, there seems to have been an advertising push on the TV to get people to book summer holidays (led by Iggy Pop?!) - definitely going to be a lot of people planning to make up for this year. I even had a sponsored Facebook ad saying ‘Vaccines are coming. Book your summer break’.

[zahidf]

8 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

I don’t know how many times this needs to be said. No one WANTS a lockdown, the people who advocate for them realise that we NEED them to stem the curb of the virus. 

But then you had a crack about people only not wanting a lockdown because they want to go to the pub. 

[MEGABOWL]

1 minute ago, Ryan1984 said:

Since Christmas Day, there seems to have been an advertising push on the TV to get people to book summer holidays (led by Iggy Pop?!) - definitely going to be a lot of people planning to make up for this year. I even had a sponsored Facebook ad saying ‘Vaccines are coming. Book your summer break’.

It’s going to be nice for those who’ve been Furloughed/WFH and who’s job is safe. Many aren’t in that position and aren’t going to be spending anything for a while. 

[zahidf]

6 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

You're not talking about that Twitter thread from independent SAGE are you? Or is there some briefing from official SAGE I've missed?

No proper SAGE, not Fake SAGE. this is from a SAGE, Cummings style briefing.

 

[zahidf]

10 minutes ago, stuartbert two hats said:

Really quite encouraging graphs on the surface. Makes it look a lot like whilst the massive growth in the SE was correlated with the new variant, it wasn't because of the new variant. I agree that we need to see newer data - is it the driver of the recent growth in the NW? If not, then there's some hope that the recent rise in R is down to pre-Christmas behaviour and the weather.  Both of which suggest that we should see the virus become easier control on top of the vaccination effect.

Seems like London was going down a bit with tier 2

 

[mikegday]

Does anyone know why the cases by specimen date has stopped at 22Dec? The notes about the holidays says England will be updated daily. 

[stuartbert two hats]

4 minutes ago, zahidf said:

No proper SAGE, not Fake SAGE. this is from a SAGE, Cummings style briefing.

 

Thanks for that, I'll take a look.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Ozanne said:

We can hold off going to the pub for a little bit longer.

 

7 minutes ago, zahidf said:

But then you had a crack about people only not wanting a lockdown because they want to go to the pub. 

That’s not what I said, as above I said we (all of us) can hold off going to the pub for a bit longer. You’ve miss-quoted what I’ve said. 

[zahidf]

Just now, Ozanne said:

 

That’s not what I said, as above I said we (all of us) can hold off going to the pub for a bit longer. You’ve miss-quoted what I’ve said. 

Not really. You seem to be implying that lockdowns only effect people who want to go to the pub.  Lot more to it than that. Not sure why you even bought it up in that context!