When will this shit end?

[dingbat2]

I think we need to start looking at deaths and hospitalisations as a whole, and not just look at Covid on its own. When you look at deaths from flu and pneumonia (as mentioned a few pages back) they are significantly higher deaths from these than what is currently being seen from covid, yet we are only talking about restrictions due to covid. Maybe its time to consider what we should be doing to reduce the number of deaths from other air borne transmission causes. Also I think it puts more context as to the 'bigger picture' when looking at covid, serious illnesses and death from covid are a relatively small number compared with other causes, now the people at most risk have been double jabbed, and it doesn't look like there will be a massive spike in deaths even if cases continue to increase. Deaths will still be a lot lower than other causes we largely seem to accept. Perhaps we should looking at more measures to protect the vulnerable during flu season rather than measures to protect the less vulnerable from covid now?

 

[Matt42]

Awful lot of comparing masks to seatbelts here which is very annoying.

I usually agree with James O Brien a lot, but I’m disagreeing with him hard today.

[BobWillis2]

Has there ever been any sort of conclusive study into how many lives mask wearing has saved in the UK? 

[mcshed]

1 hour ago, fraybentos1 said:

I don’t mind wearing one on trains etc up to a point. Going to London end of august which is like 5 hours on the train and no way a mask would be staying on that whole time anyway, I just don’t see it as realistic.

Shops it might be up to them to make their own guidance I don’t really care much it is not a big imposition to pop it on for ten mins. 
 

I will look forward to masks going at times when I think it makes no sense like when being shown to your table at an outdoor beer garden, things like that 

Just back from a week in London and the 4.5 hour train journey from to and from Edinburgh was pretty easy. Mask on when not eating or drinking for us, some other people seeming to be mask wearing for getting on and off the train/using the toilets but not in their seats.

[fraybentos1]

2 minutes ago, mcshed said:

Just back from a week in London and the 4.5 hour train journey from to and from Edinburgh was pretty easy. Mask on when not eating or drinking for us, some other people seeming to be mask wearing for getting on and off the train/using the toilets but not in their seats.

When I was last up I was coming after the football and didn’t see one single person in the carriage wearing one so at that point I’m kinda like aw what’s the point. 
 

It defo is a psychological thing tho where people will follow the crowd and have more confidence to not wear one if others aren’t imo 

[Fuzzy Afro]

13 minutes ago, dingbat2 said:

I think we need to start looking at deaths and hospitalisations as a whole, and not just look at Covid on its own. When you look at deaths from flu and pneumonia (as mentioned a few pages back) they are significantly higher deaths from these than what is currently being seen from covid, yet we are only talking about restrictions due to covid. Maybe its time to consider what we should be doing to reduce the number of deaths from other air borne transmission causes. Also I think it puts more context as to the 'bigger picture' when looking at covid, serious illnesses and death from covid are a relatively small number compared with other causes, now the people at most risk have been double jabbed, and it doesn't look like there will be a massive spike in deaths even if cases continue to increase. Deaths will still be a lot lower than other causes we largely seem to accept. Perhaps we should looking at more measures to protect the vulnerable during flu season rather than measures to protect the less vulnerable from covid now?

 

Do you know what airborne actually means?

[Nobody Interesting]

5 minutes ago, BobWillis2 said:

Has there ever been any sort of conclusive study into how many lives mask wearing has saved in the UK? 

No, cos it would be totally impossible to know 

[andyrhodes24]

23 minutes 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…

Twitter was a glorious place last night with all the stuff about the German football GoFundMe until someone started retweeting countless anti-unlocking/Fake Sage posts onto my timeline. It put a right downer on proceedings!

[TGCarr]

Hmmmmmmmm 

 

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1411976324407758848?s=19

[Matt42]

4 minutes ago, TGCarr said:

Hmmmmmmmm 

 

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1411976324407758848?s=19

Nah that sent me into anti-vax Twitter so I exited immediately.

[efcfanwirral]

4 minutes ago, TGCarr said:

Hmmmmmmmm 

 

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1411976324407758848?s=19

Makes sense - original estimates were all done in lockdowns/heavy restrictions, and as we're seeing, as it spreads more then more vaccinated people are catching it. The real numbers are catching up to the original estimates/hopes for a vaccine 

[efcfanwirral]

3 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

Nah that sent me into anti-vax Twitter so I exited immediately.

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

 

Edited July 5, 2021 by efcfanwirral

[efcfanwirral]

46 minutes 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. 

 

43 minutes ago, Nobody Interesting said:

It was from research done by the Oxford vaccine team and what you said it pretty much what they said.

There is an article, I think, on the Twitter of one of the lead Oxford folks.

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

[MrHew]

We've talked to our people to ask how much time people would like to spend in the office. Most people were either 2 or 3 days a week so we're planning around that. We've got a few who want 100% office so we're letting them do that. Most of those folk have been in for the duration. 

[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!