When will this shit end?

[DeanoL]

On 7/4/2021 at 10:28 AM, Matt42 said:

Look - I was probably too harsh a few weeks ago, what I sympathise with is that some people will have reopening anxiety because (a) they’ve probably been very good during the pandemic and actually stayed at home for most of it, (b) they don’t trust the government (which is understandable but you know), and (c) some people… have probably enjoyed lockdown. It’s crazy to think but if you are someone like her who spends most of her time with her head in books and not likely to go to mass events like festivals, then lockdown was probably quite nice. You probably don’t want the ‘norm’ to change.

But this is unsustainable. What angers me is she completely ignores the counter arguments about mental health or loneliness, probably because she doesn’t sympathise with them at all and enjoys living in lockdown.

Ahh, this week Pagel is an introvert who loves lockdown and has anxiety about being in public so is pushing an agenda of having lockdown continue so it helps with her own anxiety.

As opposed to last week, when Pagel was a desperate media whore, who wanted this to continue so she could remain relevant and keep getting slots on TV news shows.

22 hours ago, Matt42 said:

At every turn people like pagel have got everything they want - they put enough pressure to delay 21 June, they are doing the same thing now for July 19. Maybe they won’t be successful - but here you’re deliberately ignoring what’s going on here to make people critical about indie sage doubt what they feel.

My left frigging arm for a country where Pagel got everything she wanted. Like when she wanted us to stop inbound flights from China in February 2020, or not do Eat Out To Help out in Summer 2020, or not drop restrictions for Christmas.Thing is, I think she's wrong this time around. I do. I agree with the overwhelming sentiment of what others are saying on here. But it does also worry me that I'm disagreeing with the scientist who got it so spot on every other time up until the start of this year. That's just being gracious, in my book. She's been right so many times she's clearly not some fruitcake making things up. Had she led the pandemic response we'd be in a hell of a better place right now. 100,000s of lives would have been saved. So even if I think she's wrong this time (and I do) I struggle with just dismissing her out of hand.

[Toilet Duck]

2 hours ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

Agreed. I think this kind of started with Brexit didn't it? Or at least that's when the polarisig thing became really noticeable for me. The Trump influence didn't help.

Unrelated and maybe one for @Toilet Duck: I'm kind of surprised by the amount of people I've seen both on here and Twitter etc who are still having symptomatic Covid despite being double jabbed. I know the vaccines don't stop you getting it or passing it on but I thought they were found to reduce symptoms too? Or did I get that wrong? Was it just hospitalisation and death really that it prevented in the trials? 

Howdy, I guess “symptomatic” is quite a spectrum. Feeling a bit rough for a day or two is symptomatic, but it’s not going to do you much harm. There’s substantial variation in the magnitude of individual immune responses, so plenty of people will need a couple of days for it to ramp up and rid them of the infection (and have some symptoms in that time). I’ve said it before, but I have a feeling we are over-estimating how well the vaccines work in terms of stopping transmission, mainly as we’ve only seen how they work in a world that has other mitigating measures in place. But, in most cases, converting a potentially fatal infection into one that keeps you on the couch for a day or two is a win in my book and they do that extremely well.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if vaccines alone can virtually eliminate the virus, but if they all but eliminate severe disease and death, then I can live with that. Yes, the trials looked a bit better in terms reduction of symptomatic Covid, but there’s different variants around now, different behaviour and environmental conditions (things are much more open now with far greater opportunity for infection), different levels of virus circulating, different mixes of vaccines with different administration regimens compared to very tightly controlled trials, so this is what effectiveness looks like in real world use with the sands shifting under our feet. They still do the main things we need them to do and that’s really the bottom line. If they keep our hospitals and morgues mostly empty, then they are successful. 

[andyrhodes24]

1 hour ago, Radiochicken said:

Twitter is an absolute burning pile of excrement today, like back to the bad old days of Remain vs Leave. Going to ignore it for the rest of the day. I’d recommend others do the same…

Just logged in and didn't have to scroll very far to find this spectacularly bad take

[Matt42]

20 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

Is this more of an "acceptable" source, an actual Israeli newspaper? Even though the other one sourced this as the story...

 

I meant the replies 

[Memory Man]

15 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

 

Haven't got time to look down their timeline but I think the mac n chise account said something about this?

Found it, cheers! 

[swede]

1 hour ago, Radiochicken said:

Twitter is an absolute burning pile of excrement today, like back to the bad old days of Remain vs Leave. Going to ignore it for the rest of the day. I’d recommend others do the same…

I filled my twitter covid bingo card pretty quick this morning, just needed "hide behind your settee in fear" for a full house, got it by 8am 

[DeanoL]

 

23 hours ago, Matt42 said:

How on earth do we ever move out of lockdown if people who are double jabbed will be going in and out of self isolation. Literally apply this to reality. It won’t work.

We need to move to a point where we are only isolating confirmed cases. We can’t isolate exposures anymore. What’s the point in getting the vaccine? Think hard about this.

I kind of agree with your conclusion, but equally once you do that you're accepting it'll spread regardless, at which point, why even isolate the confirmed cases? There's only really any point to track and trace if you have low cases numbers and want to keep them low. Which is the opposite of government policy at the moment. 

I might not personally agree with that policy, but if you drop restrictions on July 19 then I really don't understand the point of containing to have any form of track, trace and isolate system. It's just pointless.

2 hours ago, Matt42 said:

That anyone who stops wearing one in places after July 19 doesn’t care about other people. It’s a huge sweeping statement on moral superiority. What about people who will stop wearing one because they trust the efficacy of the vaccine?

Mainly to protect others, but I will probably reduce wearing one to help with getting back to normal, and also because I trust the vaccine.

The thing is, people you are in contact with in the first month or so of re-opening won't necessarily have had the chance to be fully vaccinated. I think once everyone has, your argument is right, but up to that point you can't really depend on the vaccine as masks protect others and others may not have had it.

The caring about other people thing isn't binary either. It doesn't mean you don't care about other people because you don't wear a mask. But equally wearing one isn't "virtue-signalling". It's actually being virtuous! It's something you can do to help protect other people. You don't have to, but if you want to go the extra mile, you can.

Plenty of people regularly donate to charity. Plenty of people don't. Some people give homeless folk on the street money, some don't. Some let shorter people at gigs stand in front of them, some don't. We're all some fucked-up mix of virtue and selfishness, we're vegans with iPhones, we buy fair trade coffee but do dodgy coke. 

Mask wearing is just another part of that. It is a good thing to do. It has *some* impact, it might be incredibly minor, it might be significant. But if we all spent our lives doing every good thing we could possibly do we'd have no time or money left to do anything else. 

Someone wearing a mask is not a better person than someone not wearing a mask. But the one wearing a mask has earned a tally mark on the right side of any such judgement. 

[steviewevie]

so...it's all good news but still so much to groan about.

[fraybentos1]

4 minutes ago, andyrhodes24 said:

Just logged in and didn't have to scroll very far to find this spectacularly bad take

Dumbest thing I've ever fucking read. We DO live with car crashes fs but people still drive we just put mitigations in place to make it as safe as possible while still being practical. Vaccines are the mitigation with covid and they work very well.

[Havors]

4 minutes ago, andyrhodes24 said:

Just logged in and didn't have to scroll very far to find this spectacularly bad take

I love David Schneider, very funny. But that is an absolutely ridiculous analogy... 

[efcfanwirral]

6 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

I meant the replies 

Ah fair enough! I didn't even scroll down! 

[st dan]

Just now, Havors said:

I love David Schneider, very funny. But that is an absolutely ridiculous analogy... 

Yep, and people like him don’t realise they are being as outrageous and the people they are criticising, just on the other side of the fence. 

[Zoo Music Girl]

17 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

Howdy, I guess “symptomatic” is quite a spectrum. Feeling a bit rough for a day or two is symptomatic, but it’s not going to do you much harm. There’s substantial variation in the magnitude of individual immune responses, so plenty of people will need a couple of days for it to ramp up and rid them of the infection (and have some symptoms in that time). I’ve said it before, but I have a feeling we are over-estimating how well the vaccines work in terms of stopping transmission, mainly as we’ve only seen how they work in a world that has other mitigating measures in place. But, in most cases, converting a potentially fatal infection into one that keeps you on the couch for a day or two is a win in my book and they do that extremely well.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if vaccines alone can virtually eliminate the virus, but if they all but eliminate severe disease and death, then I can live with that. Yes, the trials looked a bit better in terms reduction of symptomatic Covid, but there’s different variants around now, different behaviour and environmental conditions (things are much more open now with far greater opportunity for infection), different levels of virus circulating, different mixes of vaccines with different administration regimens compared to very tightly controlled trials, so this is what effectiveness looks like in real world use with the sands shifting under our feet. They still do the main things we need them to do and that’s really the bottom line. If they keep our hospitals and morgues mostly empty, then they are successful. 

Thanks, great detailed answer as ever!

[MEGABOWL]

1 hour ago, Radiochicken said:

Twitter is an absolute burning pile of excrement today, like back to the bad old days of Remain vs Leave. Going to ignore it for the rest of the day. I’d recommend others do the same…

The worst thing is I feel like it’s ‘my’ side trying to turn it into some sort of culture war. All these people I followed because they were smart, forceful Remainers now talking absolute bilge. Sigh.

[Toilet Duck]

1 hour ago, Memory Man said:

Agreed. 
 

trying to find something someone posted on here about any mutation that was enough to avoid the vaccines completely would also render the virus unharmful to humans but cant find it. 

the number of people on twitter that seem to think a vaccine resistant strain is inevitable is alarming. 

So, the simplest explanation of how our immune systems work goes something like this…There’s two broad arms to our immune systems…innate and adaptive. Innate is non-specific and targets any kind of infection and parts of the innate system teach the adaptive part how to specifically recognise a given infection.

Within our adaptive immune response we have 2 main types of immune cells (really there’s loads more to this, but I’m simplifying it!)…T cells and B cells. T cells do lots of things, but for our purposes here, the two important things are (1) they teach B cells how to make antibodies that target the virus (these are called helper T cells, and they are the guys that HIV infects, hence the immunosuppression associated with HIV infection) and (2) they also destroy cells that are infected with the virus (these are called cytotoxic T cells). When the virus infects our cells, the spike gets chopped up inside our cells and displayed on the surface of the infected cell for our immune system to recognise and the cytotoxic T cells see it and kill the infected cell. The key thing here is that there are currently about 90 different parts of the spike that our T cells can recognise in order to kill infected cells, so that’s an awful lot of changes required to completely evade that part of our immune system.

Once the helper T cells teach B cells how to make antibodies, the B cells churn them out. There’s different types of antibody made (1) Neutralising antibodies that interact with the part of the spike that facilitates entry into our cells (so when the antibody is bound to these parts of the spike it blocks viral entry and without entry, the virus can’t replicate) and (2) binding antibodies that interact with other parts of the spike. They don’t stop the virus from binding to our cells, but virus coated with binding antibodies is snaffled up by the non-specific parts of our immune system and again, the virus is killed.

What we have seen so far in terms of antigenic drift (changes in the spike) are mutations that interfere with how well neutralising antibodies can bind (from the perspective of the virus, this is where the greatest pressure is, evade that and you can replicate…making people sick is not required for this virus as it can spread via speech, laughter etc from the upper airways, it doesn’t need a cough to get back out of the lower respiratory tract)…but changes that impact on binding antibodies are not so common. The other changes we are seeing in the variants are alterations that get the virus into our cells more efficiently…so it’s optimising itself to get past the neutralising antibodies, get into our cells, replicate and get back out quickly. In order to completely evade the immune response generated by the vaccines, it would need to change about 90 different parts of the spike and in all likelihood, if it did that, the spike would be unlikely to still bind ACE2 and the virus would function completely differently. It’s not impossible, but it’s highly unlikely. 

[Radiochicken]

27 minutes ago, andyrhodes24 said:

Just logged in and didn't have to scroll very far to find this spectacularly bad take

They should use that as a case study for System 1 and System 2 thinking. Literally if those 10.9k who’ve liked that engaged a single neuron before liking…

[andyrhodes24]

32 minutes ago, fraybentos1 said:

Dumbest thing I've ever fucking read. We DO live with car crashes fs but people still drive we just put mitigations in place to make it as safe as possible while still being practical. Vaccines are the mitigation with covid and they work very well.

It's an utterly stupid comparison and one which touches a nerve with me for different reasons. To emphasise your point, one of my best mates was killed on the roads a few years back. He was following the traffic light signals, the road markings, the speed limit and was wearing his seat belt. He was hit by a speeding drunk driver on the wrong side of the road.

Point is he put the mitigations in place to protect himself and others. By getting vaccinated and wearing masks up until 19 July we've done the same, sooner or later people like Schneider have to accept that we've done all we can and balance the risk with the need for a fully open society

[DeanoL]

The Schneider analogy makes sense, it just ignores that the vaccine is also a mitigation. And if we wanted to introduce further restrictions on roads, we could reduce car crashes even more. Lower speed limits would mean less fatalities, but it's a balance between what prevents most deaths and our need to get on with our lives. 

I disagree with the message behind what he's pushing and I think he's ignoring certain parts of the analogy to fit his narrative, but I don't see that the analogy itself is flawed, it's just selective.

I don't get where the "this is completely different" folk are coming from either.

[steviewevie]

19 minutes ago, andyrhodes24 said:

It's an utterly stupid comparison and one which touches a nerve with me for different reasons. To emphasise your point, one of my best mates was killed on the roads a few years back. He was following the traffic light signals, the road markings, the speed limit and was wearing his seat belt. He was hit by a speeding drunk driver on the wrong side of the road.

Point is he put the mitigations in place to protect himself and others. By getting vaccinated and wearing masks up until 19 July we've done the same, sooner or later people like Schneider have to accept that we've done all we can and balance the risk with the need for a fully open society

I mean...it's different interpretations of what should be used for mitigations, right? So, at this point should it be vaccines alone, or should it be also masks and distancing in high risk places until everyone is vaccinated?

[Chapple12345]

1 hour ago, st dan said:

Yep, and people like him don’t realise they are being as outrageous and the people they are criticising, just on the other side of the fence. 

You've put all my thoughts into words, it's just another thing to be polarised about - for example I imagine half the people who attended last summers BLM marches (I completely stand with the cause) would criticise the anti-lockdown marches of the last few weeks. A global health issue has been politicised beyond words and the next few weeks are gonna be horrific. The message should be you can do these things freely,  but only do what makes you feel comfortable

[steviewevie]

NE England seems to be the new hotspot.

[DeanoL]

6 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

I mean...it's different interpretations of what should be used for mitigations, right? So, at this point should it be vaccines alone, or should it be also masks and distancing in high risk places until everyone is vaccinated?

Yeah, I don't agree with what he's saying, but it clearly makes sense. It's logical. It's the polarisation thing again - he gives an over-the-top analogy and people respond with "that doesn't even make any sense".

When surely the reality is "well yeah, I see what you're saying but you're ignoring X, Y and Z"

[andyrhodes24]

2 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

The Schneider analogy makes sense, it just ignores that the vaccine is also a mitigation. And if we wanted to introduce further restrictions on roads, we could reduce car crashes even more. Lower speed limits would mean less fatalities, but it's a balance between what prevents most deaths and our need to get on with our lives. 

I disagree with the message behind what he's pushing and I think he's ignoring certain parts of the analogy to fit his narrative, but I don't see that the analogy itself is flawed, it's just selective.

I don't get where the "this is completely different" folk are coming from either.

I definitely see what he's getting at, he's just been clever and left out certain points to fit his narrative as you say. We do unfortunately live with car crashes, just like we live with the flu. They're both a part of our lives we just protect ourselves as much as we can.

2 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

I mean...it's different interpretations of what should be used for mitigations, right? So, at this point should it be vaccines alone, or should it be also masks and distancing in high risk places until everyone is vaccinated?

If the Government and the health experts are comfortable with Ministers etc saying to live with Covid and making the mitigating requirement of mask wearing discretionary then they must be confident that the mitigations so far have been largely effective. Obviously there's the pressure being put on Boris from his business pals but there has to be a compromise between the current mitigations and fewer restrictions

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

I mean...it's different interpretations of what should be used for mitigations, right? So, at this point should it be vaccines alone, or should it be also masks and distancing in high risk places until everyone is vaccinated?

I think masks inside is probably a good idea for a bit whilst we get more fully vaccinated and understand how the vaccines work with a fully open society. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really cost anything to do and could get keep prevalence of the virus down slightly. 

[steviewevie]

3 minutes ago, andyrhodes24 said:

 

If the Government and the health experts are comfortable with Ministers etc saying to live with Covid and making the mitigating requirement of mask wearing discretionary then they must be confident that the mitigations so far have been largely effective. Obviously there's the pressure being put on Boris from his business pals but there has to be a compromise between the current mitigations and fewer restrictions

pressure on Johnson from his own ministers and backbench MPs too.

Anyway, it's all a bit of a gamble, just have to see how it goes over the next few months.