When will this shit end?

[zero000]

3 hours ago, Quark said:

That's unusual; normally "not being rude but" is followed by someone being an absolute shitbag

I guess mine is more that they are explicitly telling people that's the case, and getting in touch with those that aren't and talking to them about why they are. It's the extra step to follow up rather than a one-off statement or implied but not stated understanding.

You nailed it  

That's fair enough. Sounds like you're fortunate to work for a good company!

[Ayrshire Chris]

17500 tests in Scotland on school pupils since the schools went back a few weeks ago. Only 49 positive tests and most of them were associated with two cluster outbreaks. So looks good for lack of transmission within the school environment .  Seems parents are taking kids for tests if they have a runny nose or just unwell. Advice now is only take kids for tests if it’s the new persistent dry cough , high temp or loss of taste and smell. 

[zahidf]

Oof

 

[zahidf]

 

[Toilet Duck]

1 hour ago, parsonjack said:

Paging @Toilet Duck.....any creedence to theories that the 'rona is losing its legs?

No evidence that the virus is weakening I'm afraid (not impossible, just no evidence for it!...if it hangs around for ever, it will most likely drift to a more benign form, but it would be pretty unprecedented for it to happen this quickly). However, something is behind the drop off in hospitalisations and fatalities. Different demographic getting infected could be part of it (though we weren't testing asymptomatic people earlier in spring, so they were probably getting infected then as well)...how much underlying immunity to coronaviruses in general there is in the population at large remains the big question. It's been partially answered by a few studies that estimate t-cell based immunity to range from about 30% all the way up to 80% of individuals (and in between). If it really was 80%, then those may well be the undetected mild/asymptomatic cases from spring and the 20% who are completely susceptible make up the rest (the key feature of this is the suggestion that the t-cell immunity doesn't stop you from catching it and spreading it, but those t-cells kick in and stop the infection in its tracks before you get too sick...so, we don't have sterilising herd immunity and without a vaccine may never (and may never even with a vaccine!)). It's as plausible an explanation as I've seen so far, but we still lack key evidence to prove it completely. There has always been the possibility of some random biological quirk changing the course of this pandemic. For swine flu, it was prior exposure of the most at risk population to a similar flu strain when they were younger. For SARS-CoV-2, t-cell based cross-immunity may be it...but it would be risky to assume this is the case without firm evidence (it's getting stronger all the time though). The trigger for lockdown is ICU admissions, if they stay low, then I'd expect things to cautiously open up even more. If that leads to another spike in hospital/ICU admissions, then it'll shut down again (in a more nuanced way than total lockdown)...but at the moment we really can't accurately estimate how big the susceptible and at risk populations are (seroprevalence studies are not a lot of use, they tell us who may have had it in the last few months, but nothing about what their underlying immunity to CoVs is like...and then, among the susceptible population, who exactly is at high risk? Age and obesity are two key risk factors at the moment, but there are undoubtedly others...asthma, hypertension, diabetes and a whole host more have been suggested, though the data on risk in these individuals hasn't been published yet)...for the moment, we have to assume the susceptible population is somewhere between 20% and 70% of the population, minus those who have already caught this one, and the at risk population is very difficult to define at the moment outside of those of advanced age. That uncertainty makes just flinging open the doors and saying "we're all done, have at it" a pretty risky proposition at the moment, hence the prudent approach is to take it slow. 
 

edit: I should also point out that changes in how we test skew how prevalent we think the disease is, so the much larger numbers of asymptomatic cases being picked up now can’t really be compared to the mostly symptomatic cases we were picking up in the spring. It’s entirely possible that the hospitalisation rate now is similar to back in April/May as a proportion of infections, we just find more now. Treatment advances impact the fatality rate, but not the hospitalisation rate, so the decrease is probably a combination of better testing, maybe the above, the social distancing and mask-wearing measures that have been introduced  and also a bunch of other things. I don’t think there’s a single simple explanation for it basically!

Edited August 27, 2020 by Toilet Duck

[FestivalJamie]

1 hour ago, crazyfool1 said:

how was the holiday ? without the cv19 bits ... did you get a chance to relax ?  I went to the pub last night and it was great to forget ( carefully ) what was going on for a bit ...

It was really good thanks. It was great to chill out and relax for a few days, and apart from some horrific weather on Tuesday morning we got really lucky with the weather!

The trip started off a bit rocky as the first hotel we stayed in couldn’t find my reservation, but then they found it under the wrong name(!?) so it was all ok. But then we went out for dinner(Indian) and they hadn’t made a note of my booking and refused to let us dine... which I got very angry about as I booked a week in advance, eventually they let us dine with them and the food took 2 hours 30 to come to our table! So not the best customer service... once the food finally arrived they asked us if we could hurry up and leave as they had people waiting for the table, so had to wolf down the food, safe to say we didn’t leave them a tip!

As much as we tried to keep ourselves safe I would definitely say I’ve been in some risky environments the last couple of days. Last night the restaurant we ate in had no safety precautions and there were people constantly bumping into the chair my friend was sitting at, I don’t get why they couldn’t walk away from our table, they had to walk right next to it. The staff were rushing around without masks on and one almost fell on top of us. This was actually in the hotel restaurant and safe to say that this emulated across the rest of the hotel with there being no safety precautions... and it was a best western, so I expected better from them! We also stopped in a services on the way home and no one was sticking to masks or social distancing which put me on edge and someone sat right behind me in the seating area, so that was uncomfortable. But we dined in a couple of other places which felt safer and also our trip to the supermarkets and shops and sea life centre in Great Yarmouth all felt very safe so it’s been a bit of a mixed bag in those regards really. One of the safest places we went to was actually a pub!

But yeah, was great to get away, most of the time was lovely weather and was able to relax a lot of it despite being reminded about corona left right and centre of course! Thanks so much for asking- I hope you’re also able to find a balance for your mental health too!

[Fuzzy Afro]

2 hours ago, March Hare said:

Eid gatherings were, in effect, cancelled for significant numbers in the north with 24 hours notice. If there is a spike leading up to Christmas you might be eating that turkey alone.  If the pubs are open and parties are a happening...

 

Wont happen. Boris and Dom are obsessed with polling numbers, and the local lockdown before eid is the sort of thing that polls well with red wall voters. If Boris can be easily painted as the grinch who stole Christmas by Starmer and the media, Labour will be 5-6 points ahead in the polls by the time Auld Lang Syne is being sung.

 

Rightly or wrongly, there’s a major difference in this country between clamping down on Eid and clamping down on Christmas. 

[Crazyfool01]

13 minutes ago, FestivalJamie said:

yeah, was great to get away, most of the time was lovely weather and was able to relax a lot of it despite being reminded about corona left right and centre of course! Thanks so much for asking- I hope you’re also able to find a balance for your mental health too!

Getting there ... trying to do stuff that takes a bit of focus off the virus ... and let’s me regain control of life somewhat whilst remaining as safe as possible ... it’s never going to be possible to be entirely safe ... unless you stay in ... so striking the balance that I need slowly 

[FestivalJamie]

I’ve also got to say, I’ve seen an increasing amount of people who have forgotten their masks and are holding their t shirts over their face in stores! Seen 5 people doing it in the last 4 days, surprised more stores aren’t selling masks at the entrance given people seem to be forgetting!

At least people are trying by holding their jumpers over their mouth and nose I guess 😂

[Crazyfool01]

25 minutes ago, FestivalJamie said:

I’ve also got to say, I’ve seen an increasing amount of people who have forgotten their masks and are holding their t shirts over their face in stores! Seen 5 people doing it in the last 4 days, surprised more stores aren’t selling masks at the entrance given people seem to be forgetting!

At least people are trying by holding their jumpers over their mouth and nose I guess 😂

You get to see some very interesting attempts working in a supermarket ...  so many people removing them to have chats !! the best one so far being someone walking about with one in the palm of their hand held up in the rough vicinity of their face  

Edited August 27, 2020 by crazyfool1

[gizmoman]

2 hours ago, Mark E. Spliff said:

If you trawled back through to my last political appearance within this very thread, I was arguing a very unpopular position which was in opposition to all the mainstream media and political parties.  I won't regurgitate it and thereby derail this discussion  - the only point I'm making is simply: no, hidden agendas and misinformation ought to be challenged regardless of which part of the media or political spectrum they're from.

...

Who's Piers Corbyn?  What relevance to this discussion is it what I think of him?

...

I made a point of using the phrase 'post truth society' in my last reply to you.  That was deliberate.  In a world where doubt is being cast on 'experts,' conspiracy theorists can run riot, and covid is rapidly descending into a fact-free swamp.  It just so happens that most of the conspiracy theorists are extreme right-wing, in that they fear big government is using fear to take away our freedoms and impose some kind of authoritarian state.  The reverse is, of course, true - national Governments have lost any real power to regulate corporations due to the rise of global capitalism and the removal of financial regulation.  I see the rise of conspiracy theorists (or to put it another way: the loss of faith in facts and experts) as the most dangerous trend in the age of social media.  Whether I see conspiracy theorists as 'ordinary' or 'normal' isn't important - they're peddling lies and there's a real danger a flood of scientifically-illiterate fact-avoiders are going to do massive harm to the world.

There was an excellent radio series recently explaining how corporations learned how to sow the seeds of doubt in order to create crackpot conspiracy theories in the face of all the scientific evidence to avoid regulation.  The right wing tend to mistrust the BBC, but they've made sure they've quoted their sources, so feel free to check them out:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000l7q0

So you are quite open to the belief that oil and tobacco companies have in the past lied and manipulated public opinion for their own ends (knowing full well they were killing people), but you think that any suggestion that big pharma and the telecoms companies may be doing it now deserves to be dismissed as conspiracy theory? It just doesn't make sense, either these big corporations are amoral and only care about profit or they are not. As you say it is difficult to regulate them as they have powerful lobbyists and tend to get their own way. It's not really a question of losing faith in experts but of choosing which experts to believe, there are some well qualified people arguing against 5G and vaccines for example, the majority aren't so we have a science "democracy" where the majority view is accepted, but it's not always the case that the majority are right.

From the BMJ

"Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s, even if consumption rates decline in the interim. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US$10 000."

So 66% of american doctors were wrong, a strong majority, so it's dangerous to accept any currently held scientific fact as absolute truth, things change and the story with coronavirus is changing daily.

[steviewevie]

2 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

So you are quite open to the belief that oil and tobacco companies have in the past lied and manipulated public opinion for their own ends (knowing full well they were killing people), but you think that any suggestion that big pharma and the telecoms companies may be doing it now deserves to be dismissed as conspiracy theory? It just doesn't make sense, either these big corporations are amoral and only care about profit or they are not. As you say it is difficult to regulate them as they have powerful lobbyists and tend to get their own way. It's not really a question of losing faith in experts but of choosing which experts to believe, there are some well qualified people arguing against 5G and vaccines for example, the majority aren't so we have a science "democracy" where the majority view is accepted, but it's not always the case that the majority are right.

From the BMJ

"Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit, however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s, with the confluence of studies from epidemiology, animal experiments, cellular pathology and chemical analytics. Cigarette manufacturers disputed this evidence, as part of an orchestrated conspiracy to salvage cigarette sales. Propagandising the public proved successful, judging from secret tobacco industry measurements of the impact of denialist propaganda. As late as 1960 only one-third of all US doctors believed that the case against cigarettes had been established. The cigarette is the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes cause about 1 lung cancer death per 3 or 4 million smoked, which explains why the scale of the epidemic is so large today. Cigarettes cause about 1.5 million deaths from lung cancer per year, a number that will rise to nearly 2 million per year by the 2020s or 2030s, even if consumption rates decline in the interim. Part of the ease of cigarette manufacturing stems from the ubiquity of high-speed cigarette making machines, which crank out 20 000 cigarettes per min. Cigarette makers make about a penny in profit for every cigarette sold, which means that the value of a life to a cigarette maker is about US$10 000."

So 66% of american doctors were wrong, a strong majority, so it's dangerous to accept any currently held scientific fact as absolute truth, things change and the story with coronavirus is changing daily.

you two want to get a room?

[steviewevie]

6111 new cases in France. Blimey.

[FestivalJamie]

26 minutes ago, crazyfool1 said:

You get to see some very interesting attempts working in a supermarket ...  so many people removing them to have chats !! the best one so far being someone walking about with one in the palm of their hand held up in the rough vicinity of their face  

Oh deary me!! Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend how idiotic people can be until you see it!

[FestivalJamie]

15 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

6111 new cases in France. Blimey.

Don’t worry, France are quarantining the UK now 🤣

[gizmoman]

18 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

you two want to get a room?

Ha! Sorry have spent a bit longer on here today than is healthy, away for the weekend tomorrow so you won't have to put up with any more of this nonsense!

[steviewevie]

Tour De France looking doubtful now.

[steviewevie]

 

[Crazyfool01]

4 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

Tour De France looking doubtful now.

have you seen that somewhere ? or just a guess based on numbers ? 

[steviewevie]

7 minutes ago, crazyfool1 said:

have you seen that somewhere ? or just a guess based on numbers ? 

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/27/tour-de-france-in-doubt-after-covid-red-alert-issued-before-grand-depart-in-nice

[Matt42]

9 minutes ago, crazyfool1 said:

have you seen that somewhere ? or just a guess based on numbers ? 

I’d be surprised if any event goes ahead this year.

Getting a tad bit worried about Christmas now.

[Crazyfool01]

2 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/27/tour-de-france-in-doubt-after-covid-red-alert-issued-before-grand-depart-in-nice

they cycle bloody fast hopefully they can outrun it ... 

[Crazyfool01]

54 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

6111 new cases in France. Blimey.

numbers are nearly as high as the peak now .... interesting again that isn't representative in the numbers of deaths yet ..... I guess in a few weeks we will start to see .... 

[shoptildrop]

another outbreak in a factory - Greggs Depot in Bramley Leeds!!! Think of the sausage rolls 

https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/coronavirus-outbreak-confirmed-at-greggs-distribution-centre-in-leeds/

[Crazyfool01]

4 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

I’d be surprised if any event goes ahead this year.

Getting a tad bit worried about Christmas now.

writing off the year is  the way ive gone ... personally Im not the biggest fan of xmas so that doesnt bother me ....   but yes I know its a lot more important to others ..... might have to have xmas dinner in my car !!!